Travelers Rest (4 page)

T
here was a bell on the desk and he held up Dewey by his armpits so he could ding it. No one came. There were no lights on anywhere and no noise of any kind. Outside the bank of windows at the front of the hotel, the snow flew as steadily as it had all night long.

Dewey pulled his bag of jacks out of his pocket and spread them on the floor in the lobby and bounced the red ball up and down.

“Don't do that here, Dooze,” he said.

“Really?” Dewey said. There was no one around, nothing happening.

“No,” he said, “not really. Go ahead.”

“Cool,” Dewey said. He appeared to be on his threes already.

He stood quietly at the desk and listened but he didn't hear anything and he peered through the doors behind the desk area and he walked over and looked into the huge empty room off the lobby. There was no one to be found anywhere. He walked back over to where his son sat on the floor.

“Hey,” he said, “I'm going to walk outside for a second and see if I see anyone. Just stay right there.”

“Okay,” Dewey said.

He walked to the front entrance and turned back around. His son was still sitting there, scooping up the jacks in his small hand. “Just stay there,” he said again.

“Okay,” Dewey said, without glancing up.

He opened the heavy front door and stepped into a swarm of snowflakes and turned to the right and headed up the sidewalk. The snow was two feet deep, easily, maybe more, and there were no prints in it. What the hell went on in this town, anyway? Who exactly lived here? He made it around the corner of the hotel into a narrow street or alleyway, still seeing nothing and nobody. There was only more snow and some wind. Moving up the alley, along the seemingly endless brick wall of the hotel, he spotted far ahead what appeared to be a doorway. The farther he went, the more the wind died down, and the snow fell in slow, lazy spirals, settling on his hair and the back of his neck inside his shirt collar. It seemed to him the alley grew narrower as it went along, the buildings slightly taller on either side, leaning in.

How far did it stretch? It began to seem impossibly long. On the way into town, he hadn't seen a street that this alley could belong to. Worse, he hadn't worn his boots, and his feet were getting cold. He knew from the sign at the city limits that there were close to a thousand residents. Where were they all, and why did they need a street this long anyway? Some distance ahead, dimly visible through the screen of snow, there seemed to be an opening. Was it the doorway he'd seen earlier?

He lowered his head against the falling snow and examined the alley from side to side to find the answer to a question he had in his mind suddenly, which was, he was a little scared to admit,
Why did I come out here?
He honestly couldn't remember. He couldn't say just right this moment. Dewey was on the floor playing jacks, they had been in a hotel lobby, and he had come out here…he had come out here searching for someone or something. What? That was going to take a moment. Meanwhile the snow kept falling. A white blur, the bricks of the buildings obscured on either side, so that the world appeared to be an ice tunnel. And still he found his feet moving him ahead. He wondered how long he'd been outside. He thought,
Hypothermia.
He had on just a thin jacket, and his arms were numb, and he had not worn a hat, and his face was frozen, and he had not worn his boots, so he slipped along ungracefully in his jogging shoes while the snow soaked through his socks.

It occurred to him to return to the hotel. He could see in his mind the hotel facade, as if it were a photograph. There were the marble steps, there the hanging sign above the wide doors: Travelers Rest. It would be right there if he turned around. He stopped and faced in the direction he had come. Looking back, he saw nothing but snow. How to describe this snow? It needed some investigating. He put on his glasses.
Columns
of snow,
pillars
of snow,
infinite rising whirlwinds
of snow that reached all the way to outer space. He'd never seen anything like it. And now he was just standing out here in it, and there had been Dewey…and he had come…he had…it was very cold. Something about the hotel. He knew of a place like this, a lost place, a place of lost time and people. He'd read about it somewhere—a journal article, maybe something a colleague had asked him to proof. A ghost town, a legend, a place of ceaseless snow, searing heat, inundating rains, all manner of extremes. He had laughed at it, the flimsy research, the fairy-tale nature of the whole proposition, like something written by a child. Now he was here in the middle of it, a fantasy, a dream, nothing but the cold wind and the dull clouds and the emptiness.

Up ahead, a door opened. The only sounds were his own feet squeaking in the snow and that vague hissing, the sound the snow brought down from the far reaches of the universe. A face appeared in the open doorway. Quickly the face was averted from him, and he saw a figure, a woman, wrapped in a long coat and a scarf, her blonde hair pinned up, hunching her shoulders and moving away. A blonde woman in a long, dark coat, rather stunning there in the middle of the snowy street. He remembered the hotel now—Julia, Dewey, Robbie. Back in that direction he could see very faintly, like the barest outline in watercolor, the corner he'd come around from the hotel entrance. He took off his glasses and wiped the wet lenses on his shirt and put the glasses on again.

He followed the woman and caught her by the arm. She turned and he thought at first that he recognized her, that she was someone he knew.

She smiled at him, a little wearily. “I didn't expect to see you here,” she said. Her breath was an icy, crystal swirl, her words almost settling on him physically. He felt heavy, weighed down by something in her face that seemed terribly sad. “I'll go on,” she said, “but I don't think it's any use.”

He wanted to say something to her, to console her, to offer her a smile and perhaps pat her shoulder gently, and at the thought of it something moved deep within him, something he almost couldn't trace, it seemed so many miles away, and he was so
tired
suddenly.

The woman's blue eyes stayed on him as she moved up the alley, so delicate and light that the little silver shoes on her feet sifted through the snow without making any impression. He watched her move away until she dissolved in the thick veil of snow and he turned to go in the door from which she had come. He swept away the snow at its base but then discovered that it opened inward. For a frantic moment, when he first pushed on it, the door appeared to be locked, but when he shoved harder it gave way, and as he stepped forward he felt he was moving into nothing, a vast hollow space both light and dark, like a world of snow that you watched with your eyes closed.

A
s far as she could tell, everything in the room was antique. All the furniture had a heavy, brooding feel. The deep chest of drawers seemed filled with darkness, and there was a label in it that showed it had been made in Philadelphia, Olson Brothers, 1885. The mirror on the dresser was cloudy like mother-of-pearl, the light in the room a hard, waxy yellow. It was a sober and serious room, and sometimes she loved things that were sober and serious, which was probably how she got mixed up with Tonio in the first place. The room was sober and serious like the tree-lined hills out the window in the falling snow and the black mine shafts she knew tunneled down into those hills from a long time ago. If she tried hard she could almost feel herself going down into them, feel herself bottoming out, as if someone had scraped her empty. Some elusive connection to this place, something she couldn't put her finger on just yet. She hoped they would stay a few days, that the heaps of snow in the street would turn truly mountainous, that the wind would blow unceasingly. Who knew? Robbie might even turn up again.

She hung her clothes back in the closet and put Dewey's things in a drawer and left Tonio's clothes for him to put away himself. She lay down on the bed. It had been almost an hour since Tonio and Dewey left for the lobby. For the first half hour she hadn't been concerned at all, probably because they'd mentioned buying a sled, although she hoped Tonio would have enough common sense to come back to the room and put on their boots and warm coats before they went out to find a sledding hill. There was no sound at all, anywhere, except for the creaking of the old hotel. After a while it was too much for her. In what she guessed you'd call the sitting room, there was a TV, an old wooden console, and though she seriously doubted it would work, she turned the knob anyway. And something did come on. It was like the old days with the rabbit ears, like when she was a girl in San Diego, Lompoc, Modesto, Mount Shasta, Eureka, Monterey, Santa Cruz—so many places. The picture was obscured by snow and there was no sound, and whatever was on didn't look like a show from any regular broadcast or station. It consisted primarily of hazy figures moving in vague, languid patterns, as if they were slow dancing, or sleepwalking, she couldn't tell. It occurred to her that it would probably be a good idea to go find Tonio and Dewey.

Something passed by in the hallway and she turned and saw Robbie there—Robbie, plain as day. By the time she got to the doorway she could see only his feet—she felt certain those were his boots—going up the stairs. Without saying anything she followed.

When she reached the third-floor landing Robbie was nowhere in sight. It didn't seem to matter much for some reason. It was just like Robbie to saunter past when everyone was looking for him and then disappear again. The Addisons were a peculiar bunch. Inarguably, being part of the family conferred privileges; when you wanted to buy a car, a house, a small tropical island, maybe, there were the Addisons, checkbook at the ready—any amount of money was fine, just so long as you didn't ask them for an emotional response to anything. But they were definitely eccentric, possibly a little bit insane, and certainly exasperating, every last one of them, Robbie included. She didn't really believe in God, but she did believe in the idea of penance, and she was ready to accept the Addison family as an elaborate form of it, but still—they were getting on her nerves. She'd take one good look around for Robbie, but that was it.

Obviously the third floor had not been renovated—there were holes in the walls and holes in the planks of the ceiling and in one place she could see all the way up through the fourth floor and the roof. Only one door in the hall stood open, and she found herself in the doorway, room 306. She stood there in the half-light from the window and her hand stretched forward into the space of the open room, as if she were trying to push aside a screen. But there was no screen.

Room 306. A room of light and air, so different from room 202, where they were staying. This room let in the whiteness of the snow through every window; it had a pure, crisp whiteness. Everything smelled of…what…jasmine? Jasmine, with a hint of oil and smoke. The furnishings too were white, like an embodied form of air. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared out at the world of snow and whiteness. She picked up a snow globe from the nightstand. She swirled the fake snow and it came down thick, so thick she could barely make out that in the globe was a hotel, a hotel just like this one. She lay down on the bed and watched the whiteness out the window spread and spread, and she determined she would not go anywhere until she could sleep. As she drifted, she noticed one last thing—the door had shut behind her.

D
ewey sat there on the floor and played more jacks than he would have guessed he'd ever play in a lifetime. He was getting so good at jacks that he wished jacks were an activity he cared about getting good at, like archery.

No one came around. The lobby was pretty dark, even in the daylight with the white snow flying by the windows. There were a lot of windows, and Dewey had a good view of the street, which almost nobody ever came down, and he had a good view of the door his father had gone out and the path he'd taken around the corner, and every minute or so Dewey would look out at the path in hopes of his father's return but his father was never there. It seemed like it might be getting time for lunch, and if they didn't manage to start something soon, it was going to be too late for sledding.

His father had told him to wait in the lobby, but he felt pretty certain he hadn't been expected to wait this long, although it could be one of those deals where he lost track of time again, which he did frequently, and not in the usual sense, but where he would get so absorbed in some line of thought that almost entire days could pass without him recalling them in any way. This had happened once recently when he went to his friend Avery's house for the first time and found out that Avery's dad had a two-hundred-gallon aquarium with some of the most awesome tropical fish Dewey had ever seen, and not only that but all the stuff in the tank, like the coral and rocks and plants, was
real,
Avery's dad had shown him. Dewey loved tropical fish, and the sight of this awe-inspiring tank, so ocean-like in every way, had sent him into a reverie that lasted the entire night he spent at Avery's house, so that when Avery talked at school later about how they'd stayed up until 3 a.m. and played the new Grand Theft Auto and snuck into the TV room and watched movies with actual female nudity, these events were absolutely nowhere in Dewey's memory. He believed Avery that they'd taken place, but he'd been thinking about the fish tank, and he could remember only the things he thought, not the things he did, unless the things he thought and the things he did were the same. It was kind of scary, really, and not something he liked to talk about, or think about for that matter.

But the losing track of time thing, at least up to now, had always worked in the other direction, meaning that the actual amount of time elapsed was always
greater
than it had felt like to Dewey, so that it would be really strange now if the amount of time was  
less,
meaning that Dewey's father hadn't really been gone all that long and that he was still expected to be waiting in the lobby, plus the fact that Dewey hadn't been particularly stimulated by anything that would make him lose time in the usual way.

So after taking one last look around the lobby and one last look out the windows and not noticing anything other than the ladders and buckets of paint and toolboxes and stuff he'd seen already the night before, and of course the snow, which kept on falling just as hard, so that Dewey had to stop and think for just a second, just to make sure he remembered, what it was like when it
didn't
snow, he decided to go upstairs to his mother. He gathered his jacks and put them in the little pouch and put the pouch in his pocket and headed up the stairs.

The hotel seemed to be getting colder. He had on a long-sleeve shirt over a T-shirt, so his arms were pretty warm, and his legs were fine, but his hands were cold, and when he blew on them it seemed as though he could almost see his breath. Maybe that's why his father had been gone so long, because he was still trying to find the hotel owner or any of the people who were supposed to be working at the hotel and was going to keep looking until they came, because Dewey was only ten but he knew some things, his test scores were off the charts, and one of the things he knew was that part of what you paid for when you rented a hotel room was heat, and another part of what you paid for was some people there to complain to if you weren't getting any heat.

His mother almost never complained. For instance, if they were at a restaurant and let's say the waiter made a mistake, let's say he brought out a baked potato with Dewey's father's prime rib instead of French fries or mashed potatoes or vegetables—his father hated baked potatoes and would order whatever else was available with his meal, no matter what—his father would stop the waiter in the middle of putting the plates and stuff on the table, and he would say in this complaining tone, “Hold on, I asked for fries and you brought me a baked potato. This is a baked potato.” Whereas his mother would sit there with no expression on her face at all and wait calmly until all the plates of food were out, and everybody's water had been refilled, and then she'd say, “Excuse me, I'm sorry, this looks like an orange–poppy seed dressing and I think I ordered the vinaigrette.” He could remember that sentence so distinctly and his mother's utterance of it so vividly that he said it now under his breath while he walked down the hall: “I ordered the vinaigrette. Excuse me, I ordered the vinaigrette.” And it wasn't a complaint, and the waiter or the waitress always knew the difference, you could tell. “Excuse me,” Dewey said softly, “you brought me a baked potato.”

His father wasn't a mean person, he was really very nice, and he loved Dewey so much that it was sometimes hard for Dewey to understand. His father would say things like, “Dooze Man, if it weren't for you, I don't know what I'd do.” And he would shake his head slowly and study the air, as if everything were so far away that there was nothing to see.

Sometimes Dewey thought his father's problem was just that he got impatient about having to live in a world where almost no one was as smart as him. He liked his father best, most of the time, because they thought the same things were funny (with the exception of Uncle Robbie) and they knew what each other meant without really having to say what they meant or sometimes by saying just the opposite or sometimes by saying nothing at all. But it was his mother he most “respected.” His mother was what they meant when they called somebody “a good person.”

“This looks like a baked potato,” Dewey said aloud, approaching the doorway.

Something didn't feel right. The door was wide open. Dewey stopped in the hall. He was only ten years old, but he sometimes thought pretty complicated things in pretty complicated ways, and what he thought right now was that he could hear himself saying, many years in the future, maybe when he was an adult himself, “I could tell before I walked in the door that something was desperately wrong.”

Something was desperately wrong. An odd, chalky light seeped from the room, and there were whispering sounds, or buzzing sounds, like when you put the edge of a piece of paper in your mouth and blow. From where he stood in the hall he could see through the door and into the room where Uncle Robbie had slept and on past the bed in Uncle Robbie's room he could see the snow in the air at the window, which gave him the peculiar feeling that no one was going to be in the hotel room unless, maybe, it was Uncle Robbie.

But when he entered room 202, he found nobody there, only the television. He checked the bathroom and the room where Robbie had slept and his parents' room but there was no mother and no Robbie.

This was not the time to panic. Actually, he told himself, a typical ten-year-old would probably be oblivious to the situation, to the fact that there was anything a little scary and strange going on. At least for a while. A typical ten-year-old would probably just sit down and watch TV. So that's what he did.

Only the TV wasn't showing anything a typical ten-year-old would want to watch—meaning of course that Dewey was soon fascinated, fascinated by the murky, snowy screen that showed figures drifting back and forth in a slow, silent procession with what looked like lights dancing around their heads, disappearing into or emerging from a mouth.

Dewey discovered a wire that ran from the back of the TV and culminated in what he suspected was an antenna, a little box with two stretchable rods, which he set on top of the TV. The antenna didn't do much except make different images fade in and out, the long lines of men with the lights giving way to someone running endlessly up and down stairs and through passageways, and then to a room in which no one did anything, nothing was even there, it was just a room, and then the image would change to one of a lot of people holding drinks by a fireplace.

Dewey sat in front of the TV deciphering the images as best he could, and he thought about how his mother would watch old movies late at night sitting by herself on the couch, and how he would sometimes, half asleep, sneak into the hallway and watch her there, and he would feel just like this, snowy and dim and sleepy in the same way the images were.

Finally he felt hungry and he looked around the room to find that there was still no one there and it was dark outside the windows and the snow still fell. He would not say yet that he was panicked. Panic, as when his mother would tell his father not to panic because he'd misplaced his car keys and claimed he would miss his flight at the airport, involved a lot of frantic running around and cursing, while Dewey was just sitting quietly on the floor in front of the TV. But he was growing concerned, yes he was. This had never happened before. It was dark outside and he was alone.

He began to check the room for clues. The floorboards creaked as he moved around. There was nothing to suggest that his father had been back to the room—his suitcase was sitting right there on the bed where Dewey had seen it earlier. His mother's suitcase, though, which had also been used to pack Dewey's clothes, lay open on a kind of rack in the corner, and the clothes had been taken out except for Dewey's underwear and his socks. In the closet were most of his mother's clothes, it turned out upon inspection, but in one of the dresser drawers he discovered something useful—the thick wool sweater he always refused to wear. He pulled it over his head quickly and almost right away felt not quite as bad. At least he quit shivering.

His mother's purse was on a table next to the bed, and its presence there made Dewey feel even a bit better. He stopped for a second to consider why that was, staring at his own reflection in the window, beyond which he could see the floating snow, so that he himself, Dewey, very much resembled one of the figures on the strange TV screen, obscured by dots and shadows.

The reason the purse made him feel good was that he knew his mother wouldn't go somewhere without it for long. If the purse—a soft, massive purple thing that she insisted on referring to as “lavender”—was still here, then his mother would have to come back soon. She hadn't left him here alone on purpose. Once, Dewey had threatened to run away from home (even though it was really only a joke between him and his father, who responded to Dewey's threat by making him a sandwich and chips and putting them in a handkerchief and tying the handkerchief to an old broomstick and handing the broomstick to Dewey and saying, “Well, son, I reckon this is all the stake we can spot you in this hard world,” after which Dewey went to the other side of the backyard fence and ate the sandwich and chips and watched squirrels run along the telephone lines), and he was relieved now to know that his
mother
had not run away from
him.
And there was no question about his father having run away—this was maybe the first time Dewey had missed his father's odd clinginess.

He did begin to panic now, a little bit, because he was all alone in a cold, dark hotel a gazillion miles from anyplace or anyone he knew, and he didn't understand what had happened to everyone, and this would be enough to make
anyone
panic, Dewey knew, so he didn't feel so bad about panicking just this slight amount. He went back down the stairs into the lobby, which was just like before only totally dark now, and he shouted out, “Hel-
lo!,
” but there was no one, not anyone, there. The snow flew by the windows, leaving the hotel in its wake, and the dark was broken only by the streetlight and the neon sign of the bar across the street and beyond it the yellow windows of the diner his father had taken him to for breakfast.

Dewey yelled as loud as he could a word his father had told him it would not be a good idea to use around his mother and felt pretty confident he could explain his reasons for using it now if he was called upon to do so. He would be more than happy for someone to hear him but no one heard.

He marched glumly back up the stairs, and he thought of the things a normal ten-year-old boy would think of or do in this situation. One of them was cry, and Dewey had not done that and did not intend to, but when he thought about how he was ten years old and his mother and father had disappeared and left him in a
situation,
one in which a normal ten-year-old would no doubt cry, he did begin to cry, just a tiny bit.

He went inside the quiet hotel room and shut the door behind him and he thought of turning on the TV again just to hear some noise but in truth the TV was a little creepy. And it was a little creepy, too, how he was the only person in the hotel, and how you could probably see him from the street, standing alone there at the window thinking about his mom and dad.

He thought about his mom and dad. For the first time he could remember, he thought of them as only themselves, who they actually were, and not as the mother and father of him, Dewey, and how the two of them, each of them separately, had to actually be out there in the world somewhere, out there in a separate place from him doing a separate thing, and thinking of them this way—as living creatures out there somewhere, who could be touched and felt and heard if they could only be gotten to—helped him to calm down and quit sniffling. Because if they were out there and they weren't with him and they weren't dead or severely injured—and he couldn't think they were—then there was only one explanation: it had something to do with Uncle Robbie. As his father would say,
It figures.