Travelers Rest (25 page)

It had been quiet for a long time. “There
is
a phone at the diner,” Hugh said at last. “I don't use it, but you can if you think you have to.”

“If I
think
I have to?” Robbie asked him. “What do
you
think? My brother's gone, my sister-in-law…Now you tell me that my nephew went in that…that fucking
nightmare
of a hotel last night and hasn't come back out and you
heard
something…” He tried hard to stop himself, to corral his anger. He stood there at the window and put his hands behind his back and tried to stay calm and watch the snow. Across the backyard there was a half-caved-in shed, and a magpie sat on the ridge of the tin roof where some of the snow had slid off. It was the first bird he could remember seeing since he'd been here.

“Yes,” he said after a minute, and turned to Hugh. “I would like to use your phone, thank you.”

Hugh's big hands were spread out on his legs. He was sweating a lot, it seemed to Robbie. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to make Hugh angry, but he'd made a lot of people angry that it wasn't a good idea to make angry, and there wasn't any good reason to change course now. “The reason we don't use phones,” Hugh said, “is that phones don't work the way they're supposed to here.”

Robbie looked at Stephanie. “Meaning…?”

“Meaning with phones,” she said, “satellite things, stuff with batteries, radio waves, computers…anything more than a simple electrical current—”

“How many cars do you see around here?” Hugh interjected.

“Can you let me talk?” Stephanie said. Hugh shrugged. “Basically, you use them, you don't always know what you'll get.”

“Would you like to go back in the hotel?” Hugh said.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I don't feel very good about my experiences so far in the hotel.”

“Then I don't think you'll like using the phone, either.”

So that was that. If there was one thing he knew he didn't want, it was something that was anything like the hotel. But there was Dewey. He had to get Dewey out of there. Suddenly he and Hugh were both watching Stephanie.

She frowned and shook her head and then closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “I'll go in there and try to find him.”

“Thank you,” Robbie said. “Seriously, I mean thank you. I'm being an asshole to both of you, I know.”

“You are,” Stephanie said.

“Yep,” Hugh said.

“I don't mean it,” Robbie said. He tried to catch Stephanie's eye, so he could express some kind of proper feeling, if only with a glance, but she wasn't having any of it. “I just…got into a little more than I was thinking at first.”

“I tried to tell you,” Stephanie said.

“Yeah,” he said, and then she looked up at him and he could tell everything was all right. It was funny how he seemed to know her that way.

“But Robbie,” she said, “I don't want you to get your hopes up.”

Hugh fidgeted in his seat. He probably hadn't changed much, Robbie thought, since he first came to this town when he was ten. He could see how Hugh and the Dooze Man would get along, although he guessed Hugh had some work to do to keep up.

“I don't think anything happened to him,” Hugh said. “I think he's all right. He just got scared by something and didn't want to leave. That noise could have been anything.”

“All right,” Stephanie said, “but you know as well as I do that I've been in that hotel more than anybody in this town, and I've never found one person who vanished and then came back.”

“You said you saw your mother,” Robbie said.

“I
see
her,” Stephanie said. “That doesn't mean she's there.”

He thought of Julia. “Can you touch her?” he asked.

Stephanie eyed him suspiciously. “No,” she said. “I've tried to. The air gets really cold and I can't see anything and then she's…just not there.”

“When I was in the hotel,” Robbie said, “right? In the dream or whatever it was. I told you I thought I saw my sister-in-law, but I didn't tell you this.” He looked out the window. The magpie was gone. Maybe it had never been there at all. He could feel Stephanie examining him. “She grabbed me and pulled me right through a doorway.”

“See?” Hugh said, almost lurching out of his chair. “They're still there.”

“I guess you kind of skipped over that part, huh?” Stephanie said. Robbie didn't turn from the window. “Hey, I want to believe this as much as you two do. And maybe there
is
some way you can say that people go on”—she paused, and Robbie turned to see her wave her arm in a circle—“
living.
Some way that you could say they're alive in some sense. But they're not
here.
They're not here in
this
world.”

Hugh was absorbed in the picture on the table. He held it down with his thumbs on either side, lost in this image of him and his sister on the sofa all those years ago.

“We have to try,” Robbie said. “Or
I
have to.” He walked over to Stephanie and put his arm on her shoulder, not, he hoped, in a way that suggested he was trying to seduce her into doing something dangerous. “You'll go in there and look for him?” he asked her, and she nodded. “And then if you don't find anything, I'm going to have to try calling the police.”

There was a loud pop, and he grabbed Stephanie's arm. But her eyes were on Hugh, who had just slapped his palm on the table, apparently.

Hugh pointed vigorously at the picture with his index finger. “You don't know as much as you think you know about all this,” he said, presumably to Stephanie.

“I'm just saying,” Stephanie said. “I've been there, you haven't.”

“You said you found this in a drawer when you went in there to get his clothes.” He was like a detective hot on a lead.

“Yes.”

“And this”—he held up the picture like a piece of evidence—“is the picture Mom took of you and me sitting on the couch on the day she disappeared.”

“Right,” Stephanie said, stepping toward him now to examine the picture herself.

“Mom took the picture with her camera,” Hugh said. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his broad chest triumphantly. “So tell me this,” he said. “Who developed the film?”

O
nce, when he was much younger and much better suited to that sort of endeavor, he had traveled in western Alaska in the spring. There was still a great deal of snow and everything was wintry and wet and there was a musty smell he could still remember of vegetation that was almost constantly covered in water and ice. One day he sat in the cold sun in a hooded parka that offered little warmth or protection from the wind and talked for an hour to a young Inuit man selling trinkets illegally by the side of a mostly deserted road—key rings and bracelets made of polar bear claws, polar bear teeth. The man had gone to college for two years at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and had come home to take care of his mother after his father fell in the Nushagak River and drowned. He was an interesting young man, not much younger than Tonio himself at the time, and he had taken an anthropology class in college. He asked a lot of questions about how he might be able to travel to somewhere warmer and get an education at the same time. Tonio of course asked numerous questions in turn about the habits of the people in the area and how they had changed over time, and he had eventually used some of what the young man said as source material for one of his first published articles, “Conversion and Aversion: Adaptation of Western Alaskan Residents to U.S. Government Encroachment on Traditional Subsistence Zones.”

One story the young man told him was about his grandfather, the tribe's greatest seal hunter. In the winter months, when the bay was so solidly frozen that the ice could not be hacked away, the seal hunters had to find the seals' blowholes in the ice and harpoon them through the narrow openings when the seals surfaced for air. His grandfather's special ability was knowing when the seals would surface at particular holes, but one day he miscalculated and had to sit alert, silent, motionless, by the hole for many hours, long past the time when the sun went down on the brief arctic day, stubborn in his insistence that he would return with a seal. But when he saw, finally, the surface of the seal's head glisten in the moonlight, rising quietly and smoothly above the water for only a moment, he could not move—he was frozen in place, and could not raise the harpoon or straighten to an upright stance. Fortunately, his son found him there soon after and helped him home. The grandfather referred to being frozen as the “cold passage,” combining the Inuit root for “feels cold” (
ikkiertok
) with the root for “passing beyond” (
ingiarsiwok
). What his grandfather meant by that, the young man said, was that he had become so cold that he passed through death to the other side, which was why his son had been able to unfreeze him.

Tonio had written this story into his article, paying close attention to the correct names for things, and he had highlighted it as an example of the Inuits' startling innate capacity for withstanding the elements. Now he found himself trying to use the grandfather's story as inspiration.

He had wanted to upgrade his clothing a little bit in preparation, but the moment of his departure was so sudden that he had not taken the overcoat he stole from Tiffany, for instance, or tied the flour sacks over his shoes as he had planned to do, to give him an additional layer against the wet snow. So it was the running shoes and the Patagonia jacket again, neither of which had been packed at the outset of the trip with the idea that he would be forging his way through several feet of snow in near-zero temperatures.

But he seemed to himself to be particularly lucid this time, which gave him hope. If the Inuit fisherman could go through the process of freezing and thawing, pass through death and beyond it, then he could, too, at least metaphorically.

It was the same as the other times. Once he had left the hotel, nothing looked the same on the outside as it had from the inside, through the windows. No diner, no bar, no cars parked along the street, just the brick walls and the long alleyway. He tucked his chin into the collar of his jacket and headed up it, but now he'd walked a long way without anything changing, except that it kept getting colder. If he could think about things like the story of the Inuit man and forget the actual sensation of freezing that the Inuit man's story was really about, then maybe he could get through this. He had known what to expect—there would be the increasing cold, the feeling of his bones being charred from the inside while his skin went numb, the shortness of breath, the tightness in his chest, the sensation that as he walked up the alley it was only getting longer, that the snow fell harder and harder until it became a screen that altered his vision, skewed his consciousness, induced the panic that would make him forget the things he had to remember in order to save himself, save his family, namely Dewey, and Julia, and Robbie, each of whom he tried to think of in turn as he passed down the increasingly long and narrow alleyway and his breath came out in huge white swirls that drifted back and smothered him.

Dewey Dewey Dewey,
he said to himself, closing his eyes and stumbling blindly against an icy gust of wind.
Dewey Dewey.
He was approaching the moment of all-out panic, and he told himself to resist the whiteness, the passage, maybe the same passage that the Inuit grandfather had named, to resist it and refuse to be whirled into the easy clockwise revolution, like a moon being drawn into the orbit of a planet, or a planet locked onto a star. The entrance of the whiteness would be signaled by the appearance of the door. And there it was. It achieved the shimmering, luminous quality of a mirage—against the relentless cold that pushed beneath his skin, the door appeared like a saving oasis rising above waves of desert heat. But he could not go to the door, because the door was a false promise, not the thing he was being led toward, which, he became more and more certain, was a memory, and had nothing to do with any journal article, which he suspected he had never read at all. He would not go to the door, he would not go to it, he would not go to it, he would march on past. For the first time, he did. The alleyway went on. Tears froze to his eyelashes, and he pried his eyes open with stiff fingers.

While he fought his way along he couldn't help, because it was his nature, thinking in abstract terms. His own struggle was an illustrative example of larger problems—
no creature wanted to die, species exceeded their carrying capacities, humans couldn't rise above their animal tendencies.
He tried hard to shut down that part of his brain. Because what he wanted now was for the struggle to be a small one. He wanted it to be about his own life, his own family. He wished the rest of the world well, but, goddamn it, he wanted his own family to be all right. He wanted only to do what it was in his power to do. Let us go back to what we were. Let us go back there. He had loved that life. He had loved it.

He reached what appeared to be a stairway. There was a metal railing, at least, and a hill of snow that perhaps hid a series of steps. He tried to remind himself of what he was doing, of why he was out here. His failure to do this had been a problem before. He was out here because staying in the hotel, where it was warm and sleepy and comfortable but deadly in a slowly strangling way, would never get him back to the life he'd had before, would never help him find his son or his wife. He could only get back to the life he had before by venturing out, by trying to break the spell that had been placed on him by Tiffany, by this place, by, maybe, in some strange way, intrusions from the past, memories of some former time and place that had begun to encroach upon him.

There was the white space, the white tunnel at the edge of his consciousness, but he had gone into a place where he was able to resist—the cold passage.

Ascend the stairway. Pull yourself up by the metal rail. Take a deep breath. Look around you. Here is someplace new.

He had made mistakes. Above all, there had been some essential disconnection within him. But as Rose had said, you were permitted certain errors as long as you didn't screw up the one or two important things. Had he screwed up the important things thus far? He had loved his son as well as anyone could love a child, and yet maybe he had tried too hard to make Dewey just like him. Maybe he had clung too much, hovered too often, fed his own obsession, not allowed Dewey to grow up in his own way and at his own pace, as Julia often lamented. He had loved his wife but, out of some deeply rooted fear, maybe, he had directed the feelings he should have shared with her toward Dewey instead, and with her he had kept himself detached, unavailable,
safe.
He had, on occasion, ventured to take some responsibility for the guidance of his brother, but he had never done it in the right spirit, had always used it as a kind of weapon, a way to elevate himself in his own estimation, and in Julia's, and it had never worked, not for anyone concerned. It was interesting that, when you were utterly frozen and had made it through the passageway, everything became focused on the internal rather than the external—it was on the internal level that all the difference could be made, where you could accomplish whatever mattered. He had screwed up some things, maybe even some important things—but there was still time to correct past mistakes. He would be different from now on.

In front of him, at the top of the railing, was an iron door. He didn't know why he was here or what he was facing. There was a lock and a keyhole. Magically, it seemed to him, he had a key. Above the iron door was an engraving in the hard granite of the hillside: “All Our Dreams Are True.” He put the key into the keyhole and turned it and the lock gave way. When he shoved the heavy door aside, he was greeted by a rush of warm air from the depths of the earth.