Travelers Rest (31 page)

H
e thought they had come down behind him from the bar, chasing him, and he had lost them or thought he had by going through one of the side doors that led into the basement of another establishment, but there had been, embarrassingly enough, an old man standing in a corner in the dark, talking to an imaginary woman he called Margaret, and he had apologized for intruding on someone else's fantasy, and he had gone back out into the maze to find that no one was there, no one was after him.

There were passages everywhere underground, doors everywhere, doors connecting buildings to other buildings and doors that opened onto empty rooms and doors that opened only onto other doors, and very soon he was lost again, and he began to hear the voices talking to him, a stream of whispers flowing by in the air, the owners of the voices so close it seemed that they might have been behind a curtain, just out of reach.
I'm not happy anymore,
one voice said,
I try to be happy but the day passes by and then it's over and there's not one moment when I was happy
. And another voice spoke over the top of it in the same low whisper:
I'll kill you I swear I will, don't you ever touch her again I'll kill you
and then
Yesterday was sunny isn't it pretty when the sun shines why can't the sun shine you fucking whore my God your heartbeat I can hear your heartbeat no more tomorrow I loved you I always loved you I swear if you say that one more time at night we could see fireflies high in the trees,
the voices merging into a chorus, some plaint etched for eternity in the ether. And then the dreams started to go behind his eyes, the memories
in the dusty light there in the lobby with the gun at his head got to stop it if you want to stop it you have to stop him it's him that causes everything pull the trigger, his hands up in the air with blood on them asking why and listening to a sound outside a room, raising his finger to his lips—Shhh! Goodbye—going silently down a hall and in a chair watching TV but so much pain the roses out the window and the hospital where his wife who looked like Julia just like Julia held a baby in her arms, mother baby both asleep while he stood there breathing watching the baby breathe its hard jerky breaths its tiny red fist on his wife's skin at her throat the narrow pathway down through the sycamores the rainbow in the lane the wet cobblestones the church bells in the late afternoon jumping from the bridge, so high the bridge in the moonlight watching the water come the dark water there in the hotel room with the smoke seeping through the floorboards where the woman slipped off her silver shoe.

When he came around enough to remember who he was, and he found himself lying on the cold ground in a damp place that felt far away from everything, staring up at a network of dripping pipes, it occurred to him that by coming down here he'd done exactly what they wanted him to do—the bartender giving him beers on Stephanie's tab, waiting for those guys to show up so he could lock the door. What a bunch of bullshit. He was lost now for good. He would never get out of here, at least not with his sanity intact.

He rolled over and got to his knees and saw a pair of blue-jeaned legs standing at the bottom of a stairway. He raised himself up to see a dark-skinned kid with dark hair, about Dewey's age, standing there silently with no expression on his face. There was something wrong with him, something other than the vacant look, something Robbie couldn't quite put his finger on until he realized that he could see the stairs behind the kid,
through
the kid, and then the kid turned—was he motioning to Robbie, waving his hand?—and went up the stairs.

Then there was a rush of air like a window suddenly thrown open, followed by a sound so shockingly loud that it filled the air entirely, to the exclusion of everything else, or there was the inverse, all the sound sucked away into a vacuum so that you couldn't hear anything at all. Then everything rumbled around him and the pipes clanked overhead and he moved in the direction the boy had gone, up the stairs.

The air had grown hot and damp and the sweat poured from him almost as if he were in the process of drying out, coming down after a binge, and his hands shook the same way. He found himself climbing a rickety set of steps and he emerged into what appeared to be the hotel kitchen. There was a sharp sulfur smell and the air was filled with smoke.

He would think for a long time afterward of his strange passage from the kitchen to room 306, and though he could never adequately explain it to himself he could never quite dismiss it from his memory either. He made his way through a giant ballroom with floor-to-ceiling windows, the glass still perfectly intact, the floors polished to a high shine, and on to a lobby that was utterly different from the one he had seen before, this one perfectly restored, the huge chandelier throwing spears of light to the far reaches of the room. The smoke grew thicker as he went, a strange yellowish smoke seeping up through the heating ducts and the floorboards, and he heard the sound of fire but could not yet see any flames, though it continued to get hotter. All the while as his heart raced and his hands tingled and he told himself he was an idiot for returning to this place, the parade of dreams or memories continued, though now they were his own memories and not someone else's—the voices of his mother and father, an argument he actually recalled them having when he was little, about a play at the theater, his mother wanted to go but his father refused, and he remembered thinking, at the time, that it was the stupidest argument in the history of the world. Now it was pleasing to hear those familiar voices and remember himself as a child. Middle school basketball practice, field trip to the Space Needle, he and his friends at Volunteer Park throwing pinecones at cars, sneaking shots of bourbon from the bottle his mother kept under the sink, a dirty Pioneer Square bar where he used to hang out, sitting on a barstool with a guy named Corey who would sell him meth and Darvocets—that was how he had spent his time, how he had spent his life.

And then, as happened often in his dreams, he was flying. He was flying up the stairs, knowing where he was going, where the room was, the one where he'd found Julia, weird motes floating in his vision, and from somewhere behind his sight came an exodus of people, the hotel guests, men with bushy beards racing down the stairs in nightshirts, holding the hands of women with braided hair and long white gowns, making frantic gestures, silently fleeing, and then he was up the stairs and rushing down the hallway toward the flames, the smoke almost thick enough to obscure Julia, whose eyes met his in a way that said she knew what he knew, or wondered what he wondered, but the only thing that mattered now was that she believed in him and could rely on him to do what she needed him to do. Then she backed against the wall opposite the room, staring at the door, and he could see right through her, as if she were only a thin transparency. Someone banged on the door from inside the room, coughing and shouting, the voices of a man and a woman, and still somewhere behind it all this memory: five or six years old and amped up for the arrival of his beloved older brother home from college on some holiday, his body almost vibrating with anticipation, so that he could do nothing besides what he always did, run from room to room shouting, to his father's consternation,
Tony, oh Tony, oh Tony, oh Tony, oh Tony.
The name stuck. His brother, Tonio. This was the best memory of all.

I
thought I might find you here,” Miss Blanchard said.

The drawing room had emptied out and he was left alone smoking a cigar and wondering where his wife had gone off to. He had seen her more than an hour earlier walking away with Miss Blanchard, and he had thought of little else since, though a senator from Boise had engaged him in an endless conversation on the question of statehood and the realignment of territorial boundaries.

“Were you looking for me?” he asked her.

“As a matter of fact, I was,” she said, and sat down close to him on the divan. “I have news of your wife.”

“Yes?” he asked, a familiar unease setting in.

Miss Blanchard smiled demurely. “She was feeling faint.” Mr. Addison raised an arm as if this motion somehow implied his intention to stand. He was feeling rather faint and weary himself by now. It had been a long evening. “She is apparently not used to strong drink, even in small amounts.”

“That's probably true,” he said. He couldn't work up much interest in the subject suddenly.

“I put her to bed in my room,” Miss Blanchard said, as if that ended all possible discussion of the matter. “She'll be fine there until morning, but she did ask me to procure certain…
feminine
items from among her toiletries.”

“Tell me what they are, then, and I'll bring them to you.”

Miss Blanchard said nothing but continued to smile politely, perhaps with a trace of mischief, it was hard for Mr. Addison to tell at this advanced stage of the game. He might have been intrigued by Miss Blanchard's attentions earlier, but now he simply wanted to lie down under the fresh linen sheets Tiffany had supplied in all the bedrooms.

“Come with me,” he said. “And thank you for your interest in my wife's welfare.” He thought he saw Miss Blanchard's eyes flash.

Up the green-carpeted stairway they went, Miss Blanchard leading the way. He glanced around the elegant lobby, the chandelier still blazing away even in the absence of guests or staff or owner, throwing its gaudy light into the surrounding darkness, a sign of all the things to come in this rugged place he had made his home. This hotel, this emblem of progress, would still be here in a hundred, in two hundred years. He took a measure of pride in it, as if it were his own accomplishment. He had a vision of himself as a man who inhabited a particular moment, who performed his work, whether big or small, while the world moved on. Local industry was already expanding. Not everything was mining anymore. There were already logging operations tearing down the timber on the hills.

When they reached the door to room 306, he realized that he did not have a key. He had given it to his wife to keep in the pocket of her dress. But the door opened at the light touch of Miss Blanchard's fingers, swinging inward with the slightest creak. She entered the room smoothly in her long gown, pulling up the train behind her with her soft white hand. She was, he realized, the perfect complement to the surroundings—impressive but not quite real. He stepped through the doorway into the room, and Miss Blanchard backed against the door until he heard it shut with a tiny click.

There was no mention of the items they were sent to retrieve. As Miss Blanchard came toward him, he stared into her eyes, those beautiful cold blue eyes that were partly responsible for her stature in the world, haunted now with a kind of solemnity or regret, and he felt a corresponding regret in himself. This was not his wife. And yet she came into his arms in a way that seemed old and familiar, so old that he felt himself sagging on his own frame, a shored up collection of skin and bones and nothing more, and there was nothing to think about and nothing to feel as she kissed him lightly on the lips and they closed their eyes. From somewhere far below, there came a rush of warm air and a distant rumble, but it was not worth mentioning here in this room, here with his old friend Rose, his fellow captive to the same ancient mistake, the one they had made together so long ago. He opened his eyes for a moment and, looking down at the floor, noticed the broken, scattered pieces of the snow globe he'd turned in his hand earlier, just before he saw the boy out the window.

“Here we are again,” Rose whispered, close to his ear, her voice thick with sorrow but also tenderness, and yes, he told her, they were here, and he loosened the dress from her shoulders, taking up once more the rhythm of this slow, sad dance, the only one he knew.

S
he had been a young wife, vulnerable, prey to so many misunderstandings. Married out of a perceived necessity, and not even her own, separated somewhat cruelly from parents who, perhaps, hadn't loved her as much as she thought they did, she had been whisked out of her old life into a new one far away, a coarser life with coarser people. However accommodating, however friendly, her new surroundings were still much different and less polite than she had supposed they might be. And her husband was a man she barely knew—on some deep level that expressed her resentment or wounded pride, she hadn't wanted to know him, or, more precisely, maybe, to let him know her.

All these things she understood now, standing with her back against the wall across from room 306, listening to the sounds of lovemaking coming through the door (thinking at first that she was listening to herself, then clearly hearing Rose Blanchard's silvery voice), followed by the sounds of her husband's and Rose Blanchard's growing alarm—at the heat, at the smoke, at the flames that curled through the walls now at the far end of the corridor. She understood all these things and much more. She and her family had been blown off course by a snowstorm, seemingly, and they had come to this little out-of-the-way town in a seemingly innocent fashion, but it hadn't been innocent, and it hadn't been any sort of accident. She had, in a sense, she and Tonio, been here the whole time, ever since that bus ride long ago in California, during which they thought—each of them, supposedly alone in their own worlds, unaware, when really their lives were connected from a long, long time before, from the very beginning—that they were strangers, that they were two people who shared a “spark” of some sort, maybe, mistaking their ages-old familiarity for the early seed of a physical attraction. It had been much more than that, she knew now.

And so here she was in the midst of the fire and smoke but not experiencing it at all, not in the way those poor people behind the door were experiencing it—the coughing, the onset of fear, now the first tentative poundings on the door, almost as if their cries for help were a source of embarrassment, or, more likely, given the circumstances, an admission of guilt—removed from this particular moment in time and space and somehow hovering beyond time and space, in some separate realm of consciousness that allowed for the coexistence of direct experience and memory, reality and dream, where everything came together and broke apart, where everything was a thing and its own shadow, passing silently down a hall. Everything came to this point, everyone would—it was just that it was
her
time now, not someone else's.

Mr. Tiffany had told her that she was the one who made decisions. And she could see what her decision entailed, and she thought she knew the terms. She had been a young wife, there had been a party, the opening of the new hotel. She had enjoyed herself, she had made a friend in Miss Blanchard, she had let her habitual defenses down, and she had been betrayed, not so much by Miss Blanchard, who, it turned out, was never really a friend to begin with, but by this new husband of hers, a man whom, if she had not loved him, not yet, she had most certainly trusted. She had been pregnant with his child. She had awoken in a strange place and come back to her room in the hotel, wanting only to go to sleep, maybe wanting, for the first time in her young and awkward marriage, to take some comfort in her husband's company, to trust herself, at the end of this strange evening, to his care, and instead she had found this—her husband and Rose Blanchard. And now, having observed her own story through this lens of lifetimes, of moments that existed simultaneously, she could even understand and forgive his part in it—he was as lonely as she was, as confused, as disappointed in the unfulfilled possibilities of his love and his passion. He was, after all, still a young man.

But the decision—her decision
now,
not the one she had made the first time, back then—had nothing to do with forgiveness or redemption. It had to do with whether she would stay true to the past—even the horrible memories, the awful mistakes, the terribly regrettable decisions—or replace it with a softer version of itself, the smoothed-over past rearranged by hindsight, by what a better version of herself should have done or might have said. She had come all this way in space and time so that she would have the capacity to reverse this moment if she chose, remake the present out of the past or the past out of the present.

Robbie—who seemed magically to have arrived on the scene now, looking at her for a moment with bewilderment and guilt and even a touching measure of trust before he commenced pounding on the door, calling out his brother's name, trying to crack the doorframe or knock down the door with his shoulder, all the while choking with the smoke and the heat and his effort—lacked the one piece of information that would have saved him the trouble of putting himself in peril, that would have let him know that this was
her
decision: in her pocket she had the key.

She had always had the key. She had it before, on the night of the hotel's opening, when Tiffany and the Harrington boy (sobbing uncontrollably the whole time) and a few other brave men tried to break down the door to save her husband and Rose Blanchard. She had stood there feeling a burning anger and jealousy, and she had pinched the key so hard in her pocket that it cramped her fingers, but she would not relent, and in the crucial moment when the men's bravery turned to fear, when their thoughts turned to self-preservation, she closed her fist tight around that key and allowed herself to be hurried down the stairs, and she stood outside in the dizzying snow flurries and watched the hotel burn. Many months later she had given birth to her child, but she had lived a solitary and bitter life.

Now she listened to her husband pleading behind that same door, listened to him beg for help, and she loved him, her husband, Anthony, Tonio, the father of Dewey, their child, and she squeezed the key in her hand. There was Robbie trying with all his might to knock down the door, no trace left of the rebellious, cynical younger brother, the wounded act he had put on all these years, and in this moment she saw what it was that she and Robbie had always sensed they shared between them—
he
was the one who would continue, on whom everything would depend from this day forward, and she had somehow known this from the first time she laid eyes on him, there out the window past his mother's rosebushes. He could never have come between her and Tonio, even though she had never quite been able to reach her husband, or to allow him to reach her, despite the love they had shared for their son, for the nucleus of their little family.

She squeezed the key and squeezed it, and at one point, finally, hearing her husband call her name in a thick voice full of emotion, she almost stepped forward—but she couldn't. She could use the key, she could change what had happened, the decision she had made so long ago, but she knew that, then, she would go on living that life, the life she could have lived with Mr. Addison in that far distant past but chose not to. She would be
in
that past with her husband and her unborn child, her life back then fully restored. And then what would happen to the life she carried in her mind now, the one that contained all these memories? What would happen to Tonio and Dewey and their home and their life in another place, so different and so far away in time that she would be incapable of even imagining it, of dreaming it in her sleep? Would Dewey even live if she, in this other time and this other place and this altered past in which she had used the key, opened the door, saved her husband, saved herself, couldn't even conceive of his existence? Could a child live if he had never been a thought, a dream, in his own mother's head? There was the fact of him, Dewey, there was the fact of him in her heart and in her mind, and she would not give up that fact, not for anything. And there was her husband, calling out from behind the door, and she could open the door, she could go to him, she could lead him down the stairs and outside into the snow, and they could see where that future, that long-ago future, might take them. But neither of them would know Dewey, love Dewey,
this
Dewey, the one they had, the one they had made and loved together. She knew her husband in this moment as well as she knew herself, and she knew that he, Tonio, would make the same decision. In this moment when she refused to save him, she was more loyal to his wishes than she ever had been.

She could barely see Robbie now through the smoke, even though he was right in front of her, but she could hear him gasping for breath and talking as best he could to his brother behind the door, telling him it was all right, telling him help was on the way, acknowledging his brother's feeble attempts to pound on the door, telling him, yes, keep trying, and she could hear him trying himself, rattling at the lock, pushing at the doorframe. She stepped forward and put her hand to Robbie's shoulder, but his shoulder wasn't there, or her hand wasn't there, and she sensed that he didn't need her anyway for what he had to do. He turned halfway, sweat dripping from his mop of hair, and he saw her, she knew he did, and she saw that he understood. He returned to his task, renewing his efforts more vigorously, ramming the door with whatever remained of his strength. Flames burst from a doorway farther down the hall, and the floorboards cracked and splintered. As she had done before, except alone this time, she made her way to the stairs and descended them, and as she faced the closed door at the hotel entrance, she knew this would not be the last time, that in some way she and Tonio would always be here, locked in the struggle with this memory.

And then she had opened the door, and after the smoke-filled corridors the snowy early-morning air was brilliantly light. There was a cold, crisp feeling to the world, and she stepped out into it, gingerly, careful of her footing, and when her eyes adjusted to the light she saw a crowd of people gathered round, and there in front, in the center, was Dewey. He was here, he was well, he looked so grown-up standing there in the snow, wearing the sweater she had always tried to get him to wear, and it made her smile to see him that way, the love of her life, her little man. She recognized the same thing she had seen before, the outlines of the man he would become in the features of the boy, the strength of character in the eyes that looked back at her. She had once believed in a kind of world spirit that guided and controlled things, that eventually would guide her path to the place where she was destined to arrive, but now she knew that there was no such thing, that it was only her, that she had always guided herself only by her own desire and that she had arrived here only by her own choices, and she could see in the square set of her son's stance all those future choices, that future life, resting on his shoulders, and she wanted to tell him. She started forward, but at that moment she felt a crushing brittleness inside her, the feel of ice compressing, and she knew what was happening then, with everything so cold, and she reached out her hand toward her son and saw, as she did so, that same hand disappearing, and with the last of her breath, seeing her voice come out in a cloud of white, she said to him even though she knew she shouldn't have, her heart in this last moment not able to let go of him, “You'll know I'm here. You'll dream of me.”