Travelers Rest (32 page)

H
e had fought through the mountainous snowdrifts to the front of the hotel, hoping to find Hugh and Lorraine and the warm light of the diner, but instead there was this cold, crackling feeling inside him, as if he had been frozen all the way through and was on the point of breaking apart, and now there were the smoke and the flames. His mother was in the hotel, he had seen her go in the door, and he would go in after her but he was frozen in place, this was the moment he had been afraid of, when he would drift into one of his states and never come back, where his own mind, the thing that made him who he was, Dewey, would be sucked back into the infinite and the universal, to be found somehow only at the center of the universe, part of the dark mass of the world, billions of years from now, millions of miles away, before everything exploded and died.

In some distant place in his consciousness he knew that the hotel was burning. It was like a movie that you barely paid attention to while you thought of something else, and it was surprising that the heat emanating from the building did nothing to warm him at his core, where he seemed to go on freezing, where his blood slowed and gelled, and if he breathed at all it was the light respiration of a hibernating animal. Even simple dreams of childhood things would not come to him and never would. He was beyond almost everything and the only thing in his mind, at the edge of his awareness, was a picture of Hector Jones as he had lain in the bed asleep, cold and vanishing.

And then, as if a curtain had been pushed aside to reveal a grand prize, or a priceless work of art, or something as simple as sunshine, his mother appeared in front of him, walking calmly from the hotel entrance as the flames roared behind her and the smoke poured into the sky. It was his mother the way he had always known her, not the ghostly presence of the past several days, but his real live mother coming to him, smiling at him in a way that only she could smile at him, in a way that only he could understand, because it was something that they had shared between them always, this special feeling, and he knew she was thinking what a treasure he was to her, how much she loved him, she didn't have to say a word and he would still know it forever. He wanted to go to her but still there was the feeling of ice inside him and cold shards prickled his face and his hands and he felt that he was dying, that he was right now going to disappear, but then his mother reached out to him, and in that same sad way it had happened before, his vision of her grew dim, and as she faded into the air he came back into himself, life returned to him, and he started toward her but she was gone, only those words she spoke to him—
Know I'm here, dream of me
—vibrating, rising into the cold winter sky and the falling snow.

He did not cry. He felt that he was done with crying for good. His mother, who liked to half believe horoscopes and fortunes, signs and projections, once told him that he was an “old soul,” and he thought he knew what that meant now, if not why she had said it about him. He was only ten years old, but it seemed like he had lived a long, long time.

He stood in the snowy street and stared blankly at the space in front of him where his mother had been, and gradually he became aware that someone, in fact the strange woman he had seen earlier in the hotel, walking around and talking childishly and watching TV, was holding on to him tight, with her head pressed against his side, and Hugh and Lorraine were kneeling in front of him in the snow and asking if he was okay. Behind him someone was talking. He turned around and a crowd of people—more people than he'd seen in the town the entire time he'd been here—was standing there staring at him and at the hotel. A woman with a black dog on a leash inspected him with her nose in the air, as if she smelled something funny. An old man wearing some kind of fur cap stood there blinking his eyes and chewing his lower lip. Some younger guys stood close by in what seemed like a threatening way, their arms crossed, one of them with a beer bottle in his hand—strangers, all strangers. Dewey closed his eyes and looked for that last image of his mother behind them, and there she was. It was just him and her and his dad here, he could feel them in the space around him, and the rest didn't matter, these people, this place, let them go ahead and turn him into one of their ridiculous souvenirs, let them go ahead and try.

And then Lorraine started shouting, which scared Dewey more than anything else so far. “Leave us alone!” she yelled. “Get out of here!”

Then the woman who'd come searching for Dewey in the hotel got up off her knees and shoved at the group of younger guys, and one of them grabbed her arm, which was when Dewey felt more than saw Hugh move past him, faster than he would have suspected Hugh could move, and the guy let go of the woman's arm and everyone backed away real quick. Hugh looked like a deranged bear with fur loss. He stood there huffing and puffing, and Dewey wondered how long the display could have its desired effect. The crowd seemed a little bit alarmed, but, Dewey guessed, probably only temporarily. Hugh couldn't manage to be scary for very long.

The street got quiet and he saw that the faces of the people were no longer trained on him but on the hotel behind him. The fire had died completely, the only evidence of the conflagration a light trail of smoke and a pattern of heat waves, and the hotel appeared to be totally intact, as if there had been no fire at all. The front door had opened—that was why the people were looking—but nothing was there. Dewey imagined for a moment that the souls of his mother and father were passing through the entryway, together somehow, waving to him in the street, and then a bedraggled person emerged and staggered out on the steps and sat down and put his head between his knees. The effect of this person's appearance on the crowd was what his father would have called “extraordinary.” Right away, the people backed off farther and began to disperse, their voices drifting away through the cold air.    

This person, this powerful presence who commanded the crowd without having said so much as a word, sat on the front steps of the hotel, slumped in the snow, holding his head in his hands. Then he coughed once, loud and hacking, and spit a black stream into the snowdrift.

“Fuuuuuck,”
he said, and he dragged his hands slowly through his hair until they rested on the back of his head, and then he looked up. Uncle Robbie.

Dewey trudged through the snow—he was relieved, he truly was, but he was also tired beyond belief—and he sat down beside Uncle Robbie, whose face was smeared with dirt and soot, his shoulders heaving up and down, and without saying anything Dewey held his hand. The woman he had seen in the hotel joined them on the steps, and she held Uncle Robbie's other hand. When Uncle Robbie saw that it was Dewey, he tried to say something, maybe that he was sorry, but he couldn't get the words out very well, his voice ragged and his cough thick, and he reached in the pocket of his shirt and brought out something and put it in Dewey's hand—upon inspection, the item turned out to be a warm gumball with the colored coating melted off. Definitely Uncle Robbie, not a dream. Dewey looked out and saw that the crowd had dwindled to almost nothing, shadowy figures turning their backs on the hotel and walking away down the snowy street. Now no one paid any attention at all to the little group on the hotel steps.

Half an hour later he was seated next to Robbie in the diner, both of them wrapped in blankets, sipping hot chocolate. The woman he now knew as Hugh's sister, Stephanie, sat across from them in the booth and Hugh and Lorraine bustled around trying to make everybody comfortable. They were nice people, Hugh and Lorraine, and Dewey was sorry he'd ever doubted them. Uncle Robbie still hadn't really said anything, but it was clear what had happened—he had gone in search of Dewey and gotten caught in the fire, and Dewey suspected he would henceforward be what you called “eternally grateful” to his degenerate uncle. From time to time Dewey glanced out the window at the hotel and the snowy street and the people—what few there were in this town, at least—going about their regular business, as if nothing unusual had happened today. How strange it was, Dewey thought, to be going through, just at the beginning, the same thing Hugh and Stephanie had gone through, this thing that would determine the rest of his life. He would find out what it meant to be called a souvenir—but he thought right that instant that he would never be like Hugh, who reminded him, sadly, finally, of the fat kid at the beach, always on the outside of the circle looking in. Dewey wouldn't live his own life that way. Instead he would do what his father had told him to—remember, remember and believe—and he would take that memory and that belief and march straight ahead, like that special group of people walking out to sea.

Robbie draped his arm over Dewey's shoulder and once again tried to say something but still he couldn't get the words out right. He cleared his throat with a loud cough and Dewey patted him on the back once or twice and finally Robbie made a noise that sounded like words, turning halfway to face Dewey in the booth. “Regular Guy,” he said. He placed his hand on his chest, over his heart. “Regular Guy from now on, Dewey, I swear.”

Dewey nodded and said okay, that was nice, he was a fan of Regular Guy, although he wouldn't want Uncle Robbie to turn
too
regular because that might be a little bit sad. Then he thought about that word,
sad,
and how he knew he would feel sad a lot from now on, although he didn't so much right at this moment, and how people would use the word to describe his story,
sad,
as in isn't it sad what happened to that poor boy, isn't it sad what happened to Dewey, and how his parents would feel that way,
sad,
that they had had to leave him. But he made a promise, and his promise was firm, he knew it was, even if he was only ten years old: he would see his parents again someday.

The morning seemed unusually bright and Dewey stood up after a while and walked out the door and he heard Uncle Robbie come out behind him.

“What do we do now?” he asked Uncle Robbie, without turning around.

For a minute Uncle Robbie didn't say anything and then he sighed and said, “I don't know.” And then after a few more seconds he said, “I wish I knew, but I don't.”

Dewey looked across the street at the sign on the hotel, the one that had become so familiar to him that he never even saw it anymore—Travelers Rest. Then he left the diner behind him and headed up the street, not going any direction in particular—just whatever way felt like it led him home.

It had stopped snowing, and from the sky fell a light rain of ash.

A
ccording to the grandfather clock in the corner of the lobby it was half past two, the sun high in the sky, the time of day when the brooding shadows of the lamps and the chandelier and the ottoman and the high-backed chairs didn't seem so oppressive. They sat and enjoyed the sunlight, Mr. Addison and Tiffany and Rose Blanchard. It had been hot lately, but they rarely noticed the weather, not unless some passerby, some lonely wanderer of the hotel corridors or the street outside, happened to mention it.

This was the time of day when Tiffany liked to have “a little nip,” so he rose from his chair without saying anything and walked behind the desk and bent down out of sight, and Miss Blanchard and Mr. Addison smiled at each other knowingly when they heard the glasses clink.

Presently, Tiffany emerged with the glasses and the brandy, and he poured one out for each of them. “To us,” Tiffany said, and Miss Blanchard and Mr. Addison smiled at each other and sipped from their glasses. Tiffany leaned back, satisfied, in his seat and lit his pipe. He nodded his head up and down and gazed out the window. He said, “Maybe guests will arrive today.”

Mr. Addison thought of a boy he had seen once out the window, a boy with curly, sandy blond hair and a colorful sweater. He had been with his wife, and he had watched the boy cross the street, and at the sight of him his heart had flooded with light. He hoped that boy would come again someday.

They sat quietly in the lobby, hearing the tick of the grandfather clock. They waited.

M
any years later, he was traveling west to Seattle with his family to visit Grampa Robbie and Mamaw Stephanie, as his two girls called them. Always in the past they had gone by plane, but this time they were taking the trip over several days, traveling at a leisurely pace to get a good look at the country. Each day he had watched the map as they came a little bit closer, tracing its red veins with his finger—an inch, another inch, increments that together represented hundreds of miles of mountains and forests and rivers and cornfields and grassy plains—and now he was less than a palm's length away from the place he had told himself he wasn't going.

Last night they had stayed in a small town in eastern Montana just off Interstate 90. In the morning, they woke to an almost limitless horizon. It was summer, and the weather was fair, but on the line of hills to the west storm clouds had begun to simmer, little dark hearts at the edge of the wide blue sky.

After breakfast his wife discovered an antiques store, and he told her they were in no hurry, it would be fine if she looked around. He heard the shop door open, heard the tinkling of a bell, and he stood on the sidewalk with his head tilted back to take in the warmth of the sun, and he thought that he could be anywhere. But it wasn't just anywhere. It was I-90, and he was getting close to Good Night, Idaho.

He had spent years telling himself he wasn't going there. That bright winter day when he and Robbie and Stephanie had pulled out of town receded with the years, and his promise had receded with it. He was no longer determined to go back, but swore to himself, in the dark, cold place that had somehow, on that long-ago morning, burned its way into his center, that he
never
would. During all those years, sealing off the memories with a ruthless attention to the present, to the future, so that his wife and daughters would not have recognized the dazed, dreamy child he was back then, he had told himself that there was no
need
for his return. His parents wouldn't have wanted it. He refused to become a mere souvenir, one of those lost and lonely travelers, beaten, defeated, shuffling slowly up the old street as if wandering homeward, gazing forlornly at the hotel windows, seeking rest. But in planning this trip—innocently enough, as far as his family could tell, talking about educational opportunities for the girls, all the beautiful scenery—he had felt himself becoming someone else, a secret keeper, a wearer of disguises. He didn't like the feeling, though it was one he'd grown accustomed to.

The girls wanted to wait outside the shop, so he offered them a couple of words of caution about staying out of the street, staying out of people's way on the sidewalk, and he followed his wife inside. He meandered through the shop, which was full of bric-a-brac that didn't interest him, old farm tools and rickety furniture and outdated appliances, and he thought about what they would pass by today, before the sun set—Interstate 90, exit 70, a road sign that said Good Night. Had he underestimated it, the pull, the sway?

Even in his mind's eye the road sign made his thoughts blur, and snow seemed to fall at the edges of his vision. Already, in some corner of himself, he was turning into the ten-year-old boy he had tried so hard to leave behind. How strong would the urge be when he actually arrived at Good Night? He tried to steel himself against the way he knew his thoughts would wander, how his mind would begin to whittle down the outside spaces, narrow and tighten them until he knew nothing but the reality of that sign and the desire to put on the blinker.
Let's stay here tonight—might as well be here as anywhere.
Would he do that? Was he the sort of man who put his family in danger? In a near dream, he watched himself drive the car up the dusty main street, pull up at the curb, take out the suitcases, stroll into the lobby as if he hadn't a care in the world. Was that what his own mother had done back then?
He
wouldn't. He had no intention of staying there—all he wanted was a peek.

He took a deep breath, took stock of the situation. There was his wife a couple of aisles over, a pretty woman with long black hair and a degree in economics. She was trying to strike a bargain with the owner on an area rug, something they could put in the living room. Outside the shop windows his two girls, ages eight and five, were playing a game that involved swinging around a lamppost. His older daughter, unfailingly responsible—he had trained her to be that way—kept an eye on her sister, warning her against stepping off the curb. He wanted to tell them both to come inside, but his wife would say he was being overprotective.

He removed his car keys from his pocket and ran his thumb along the old iron key, the one his father had given him. He had kept it on his key chain for years, but his wife, too practical to think of such a thing, had never asked him about it, and he had never told her anything. The true circumstances of his parents' disappearance were embedded deeply in lies—lies he'd told his wife and children, sometimes himself. His wife thought his parents had died in a terrible accident, in the middle of a snowstorm, on the way home after Christmas. In his version of the story, he had been the only survivor, raised by his uncle Robbie and Stephanie.

He hardly knew why he kept the key. His memories assailed him on occasion, but he had forced them down so successfully and for so long that, even when he tried to recall things exactly as they had occurred, the recollections were suitably weak and hazy, and he could even bring himself to doubt them.

But recently there had been a phone conversation with Robbie (who had had a few beers, a rare occurrence, and so was maybe a bit more responsive to questioning than usual), and Robbie had told him, for the first time, the real story of what had happened in the hotel that early morning, how he had seen Dewey's mother, who was no more than a ghost, how he had tried to save his brother and how he had failed, how there had been no way to open the door, how
there had been no key.
Because he hadn't really wanted to remember, he reassured Robbie (all the while thinking of the picture Robbie and Stephanie kept on their mantel, the one with the boy and the girl sitting on an antique sofa) that it was all right, there was nothing to feel sorry about. He didn't want to remember the key in his pocket, didn't want to remember what his mother had said to him. He had a normal life, a happy one. He had almost forgotten all these things, the awful cold and silence, the snow constantly floating in the air around his head, the moment his father had fallen, his hand releasing the key,
bequeathing
it to him, the feel of the key in his fingers when he clutched it in the snow, the proud, erect bearing of his mother as she came toward him that last time, her calm smile. But on that morning, in the diner with Robbie, he had promised himself that he would see them once again. So he had promised them, too, in a sense, hadn't he? And here he was, only a short distance from the destination. Here he was standing in this shop, a man with a family of his own…and with the key right here in his hand. He had failed his father before—but what door might the key still open?

Maybe he could just swing off at the exit, say he thought he'd run over something and needed to check the tires. Maybe if he could just gaze from the top of the ramp, exit 70, down the road that led to Good Night, he could glimpse the place in the distance, like some shimmering mirage—Travelers Rest—and then get back on the highway and leave it behind forever. Maybe that would be enough for him. But maybe not. Maybe in some small part of his mind he had always been a souvenir. Maybe he belonged back at the diner with Hugh and Lorraine.

While his wife and the owner discussed the merits of the rug—the pattern was worn, the edges were frayed, the owner should lower the price by at least 15 percent—he tried to keep his eye on the girls out the window and give the impression of someone simply toodling around. He ran his hand over a bearskin rug hung on the wall, turned the handle on a flour sifter. Along the far wall on a small wooden table rested an old-fashioned telephone, the kind with a separate mouthpiece and receiver, something he remembered seeing somewhere.
Somewhere
—he knew where; who was he fooling? An old phone in a hallway, fingerprints on a snow globe, a hand that released a key.
You'll know I'm here. You'll dream of me.
How had he ever thought he could be rid of these memories? If he closed his eyes, he could see every flake of snow that fell.

He didn't want to, didn't want to conjure the past and give himself up to remembering, but he knew that somewhere deep down he had always been prey to his moods, his impulses. They were bound to defeat him sometime. And he was tired. It had been his life's work, really, hadn't it? Forgetting that lonely child? Forgetting that cold hotel room that gnawed at his bones, the echo of his boots on the dusty, creaking stairs, the never-ending spirals of snow? Those lonely, empty days. They had followed him all the way here. They were why, sometimes at night—almost not himself, almost in a dream—he would rise quietly from bed, and he would walk to the door of his daughters' room to see them sleeping warm under their blankets, and he would go down the stairs and look out past his driveway to the street, where the streetlight shined, and he would find himself in communion with that ten-year-old boy, whose mother and father had loved him so well. And the lights would glaze over in his eyes, and he would hear the tiny hiss of snowfall, and it would be all he could do not to weep. He was so tired of fighting. Every memory was telling him—right now—what he had to do.

He relented. He moved to the telephone, touched it with trembling fingers. He grasped the base in one hand and with the other held the receiver to his ear. His wife glanced over at him now and he smiled to show her that it was just a joke, a silly whim. From the corner of the room, an old clock clanged out the hour. The shop owner gave a dry little cough. A scuffing sound, the muffled footsteps of someone passing by on the street. Far away, so far away.

To his ear came a faint crackling on the line. The air opened up, he felt it as a presence, as if the space around him were expanding. He held the receiver tight to his ear, trying to calm his breathing. On the other end of the line, he could hear someone else breathe, as if in response. The two of them breathed out and breathed in, at the same time, over the ancient phone, in a strange synchronicity. Outside, the morning sun was strong and bright. His daughters waved at him through the window. But he might as well have had his eyes closed, might as well have been dreaming. He listened hard to the phone line, forming an image in his mind of the one he hoped was there.

“Is it you?” he said.