Travelers Rest (5 page)

He felt so sure suddenly that Uncle Robbie lay at the bottom of this, that it would all be cleared up somehow in a way that left Uncle Robbie in trouble as usual and not anyone else, that he started to feel hungry again. He went into the bathroom and wiped his nose and he went through his mom's big purse and found her small purse there and took twenty dollars without thinking of it as stealing and he grabbed her cell phone, too—it was only 5 p.m., he was relieved to see—and he walked back downstairs into the dark lobby and to the front door and out into the street and the falling snow. He saw that his mother's cell phone was still charged so he started to call someone but then realized that the person he was starting to call was his mother. His father had left his cell phone at home because he didn't want anyone from the college to call him. Dewey didn't know Uncle Robbie's number, or his grandparents', or, frustratingly, anybody's. He thought he could find a number in his mom's contacts, but when he was searching for the right icon the screen suddenly started moving in wavy rainbow colors and then it went black.

The only place he knew where he could find human beings was the diner across the street. What he thought about all of a sudden was a patty melt. He was going to order one at the diner. He'd checked it out when he and his dad were there that morning. He knew for a fact they had it on the menu.

H
e had spent the better part of the day at the house of his new friend, a guy named Ruby, who lived in a ramshackle place boarded up in various spots, one whole side covered in Visqueen. Robbie hadn't worn any of his warm clothes when he left the hotel room, of course, so he'd had to borrow a jacket from said Ruby, who was apparently not the only local resident with the name of a precious stone—Robbie had been told there was also a man named Diamond.

The keg they'd bought around lunchtime was drained now, or maybe it was just the pump had gone bad. Robbie could remember standing out by the back porch in the snow where they'd placed the keg trying to get the beer to flow again, but he couldn't remember the verdict as to why it wouldn't.

It had gotten dark outside and he was in Ruby's house watching the snow—twenty-four hours straight now—the
snow
still coming down outside and he was lying in bed with Stephanie, who had fallen asleep. He was somewhere between the stage of first drunkenness and initial hangover, teetering on the edge of a binge, and theoretically at this point he could still pick up his chips and vacate the table. See you later, nice to meet all of you, let's do it again next time I'm in town. It was the hour of damage assessment. It was the time of leave or stay put. Actually it depended to some extent on which of two courses Tonio had adopted.

Robbie hoped with what was left of his heart that Tonio had packed up and hit the road. It would be easier all around that way, and it would shift the burden of guilt from his own shoulders to Tonio's. Let Tonio explain to Julia, driving along I-90 in the teeth of a raging blizzard, why he had felt it necessary to leave his brother, his
only
brother, behind, particularly when Tonio had to have known from the outset that this wasn't going to be easy, that Robbie wouldn't exactly be in a mood to cooperate with the plan. If Tonio had pulled out of town, Robbie could pretty much go ahead carte blanche and ruin himself to whatever degree he pleased. It would leave him feeling a little bad that he hadn't spent more time with Dewey, the Dooze Man, but hey, the time he
had
spent with him had been quality time, as the good Uncle Robbie, in the role he liked to call Regular Guy…a little manic, maybe, a little bit skating along the edge of physical and psychological neediness, trying to stay on the right side of all the annoyance without even so much as a fucking beer to blunt the edges, but a good time nonetheless, time on best behavior. Regular Guy. And then of course there was the fact that he wouldn't be able to spend more time with Julia, but honestly, when it came right down to it, he didn't want to spend time with Julia, it was just the idea of this imaginary thing he might have with her that was interesting. When he was actually
with
Julia it just felt like an act he was putting on, an act he was
attempting
to put on, since he didn't even feel like he was very good at it.

One of the few times Tonio—who had never been a horrible brother, just a largely indifferent and rather mythical big brother figure who was always
out there,
always somewhere else, even when he was with the family physically, which was mostly for short stints of time during breaks in his academic career—had done something with Robbie alone was once when he came home for Christmas and took Robbie, maybe ten at the time, to the circus. Robbie's impression of the circus had been that there was a lot of frantic and unnecessary business—it had made him tired. There was Tonio, buying Robbie peanuts and a gigantic Coke, sitting there with his gloomy stare and his hunched shoulders and his bony elbows and his pathetic box of popcorn. Jesus.
Tonio,
thinking he could take a kid to the circus. And the performers. What struck him most about the performers—the trapeze artists, the lion tamers, the sword throwers and swallowers, the goddamn midgets on motorcycles—was how, with all the energy they could muster, they accomplished more and more difficult feats until…well, until they didn't. It became clear to Robbie with the juggling clown—there he was, riding his unicycle on a tightrope, juggling balls then bowling pins then flaming batons until there was simply nothing harder he could do. When there were no more balls to be juggled, only two things could happen—he could keep going till he dropped one of them, or he could quit. That was how things felt with Julia, Robbie had decided a long time ago. He was the circus clown who'd already performed his best tricks. And then there was another simple reason he hoped they'd left town without him, which was just that he knew he had nothing to offer any one of them—what good, for instance, could possibly come of his hanging around with Dewey?

The other possibility: for whatever reason, due to whoever's influence, Tonio had decided to stick it out for at least another day, wait out the storm and try to find the wayward brother. In this version of the story—and even thinking about it right at this moment while he checked out the plump upper arm of Stephanie, touched his finger lightly to a dark brown penny-sized birthmark on her bicep, then shifted his gaze to the snow out the window in the back porch light, he disliked this version intensely—all the guilt rested squarely with Robbie and in fact increased with every passing moment. He could picture the family at the crappy little diner across the street from the hotel, Dewey gnawing on a stale French fry, Julia absently running her painted fingernail around the rim of her water glass, Tonio red-faced, steam puffing out of his ears. Then the family back in the hotel room, tiring out Dewey properly with a game of crazy eights, so that they could tuck him into bed and sit up and argue till the wee hours.

This was an awful scenario, and it was one in which Robbie was expected to do something—namely, swallow his pride, go back to the hotel, apologize, man up the best he could to Tonio and try to look Dewey and Julia in the eye, so they could get on out of this town and over to Charleston as planned. At which point there would be, for him, good old Uncle Robbie, a long, dried-out, spectral time of nothingness.

He considered this possibility. What would the spectral time of nothingness actually entail? Doddering strolls around some sun-bleached lane with a name like Sea Oats Drive, populated by Volvos and Volkswagens and one or two palm trees, tossing a plastic football back and forth with Dewey. Hours spent staring at Tonio's bookshelves, trying to find something to read that he could convince himself was more entertaining than getting drunk or high. Awkward silences around the dinner table, staring at plates of grits or chicken livers or whatever they ate in Charleston. Awkward silences especially with Julia, watching her pull dirty clothes from the laundry hamper while Tonio rushed to get ready for work, keeping a nervous and critical eye on the proceedings. Boredom. Boredom more than anything else. Not the DTs or any kind of hallucinations or paranoid fantasies or whatever people like Tonio imagined—boredom was the chief problem with all attempts at sobriety. The physical symptoms of withdrawal one could deal with. Boredom and the prospect of further boredom, boredom forevermore, was the killer.

So, but, say he was ready to give up the cheap keg beer and the bad whiskey and the company of Stephanie and all his new white trash friends, call it quits right now, give himself up peaceably to Tonio and his superior silent anger. Then what? It was all too exhausting to think about. The easy thing would be just to plow ahead on the route he'd chosen. There'd be a good week or two of steady drunkenness before these new friends got sick of him and figured out that he had no more money and no desire to work for it and no real attachment to anyone or anything here. Stephanie would be the last to turn on him. He'd manage to negotiate a bus ticket out of town, either from Stephanie or someone who had an interest in seeing him removed from the situation with Stephanie, or from his mother and father if it came to that. Then he could either go back to Portland or go back to rehab. It was by far the easier and therefore the preferable and therefore the inevitable plan. All this other stuff, this back and forth in his head while he rubbed this sleeping girl's shoulder and sat awake and slightly buzzing in the quiet and watched, as he'd seemingly been watching forever, the snow fall—all of this was just parsing, just sifting, the broken mumbling of the remnants of himself.

He got dressed and went out on the covered porch to smoke a cigarette. He hunched against the cold and blew streams of smoke into the air and hopped up and down in his sock feet. There was hardly any noise from the house. Had they all gone to sleep already? Robbie himself was ready to head out to the bar, although he'd have to put some thought into that, have to figure out a way to avoid Tonio and/or Julia, probably Tonio, who could certainly be out on a scouting mission.

When he thought about it, though, he was nearly as miserable out here on the porch steps as he would be back in the hotel. Could these people really be as tame as they seemed? Weren't the small towns of America supposed to be rife with meth these days? Where was someone to hand him a crack pipe, for Christ's sake, if he was going to be stuck here for a while? So far all he'd seen was flat beer and a little bit of skank weed.

There was a lot of noise and a couple of beefy guys burst out onto the porch. “Let's go,” the one named Ray said.

“Where to?” Robbie asked him.

“‘Where to?' he says. ‘Where to?'” the one who wasn't Ray said.

“Where to?” Robbie asked again.

The one named Ray burped up something under his breath, the last part of which sounded like “key to the city, giving you key to the city.”

“I'm kind of keeping a low profile, guys,” Robbie said. “I don't want to meet the mayor.”

“You already met the mayor,” the one not named Ray said.

Robbie watched them for a second to see if he could locate a joke. “Okay, even so,” he said, “there are certain people in this town with whom I do not want to make visual contact.”

The one named Ray and the one not named Ray nodded to each other and laughed. The one named Ray punched Robbie on the shoulder, almost apologetically, Robbie felt.

S
he liked her new room about as well as she'd ever liked any place. Possibly this was the result of having had a nice nap away from Tonio's snoring. It might have been a
long
nap—she couldn't tell because there were no clocks in the room and no TV and she didn't have her cell phone. It was still light outside, though—it must have been late afternoon.

The double bed was small, with a cast-iron frame, but it wasn't rickety or clangy. She'd slept deeply, which wasn't usually easy for her, God knows, what with being Tonio's wife, a condition that carried with it a variety of problems of various dimensions, and Dewey's mother, another condition that carried with it a variety of problems of various dimensions, although not the same ones, so that the problems were constantly overlapping one another and becoming new, subtly morphed problems that often kept her awake at night. One was always snoring or needing something and the other was always needing something or wanting to go somewhere…God, how
sleepy
she was right now. She felt like Cleopatra, the family cat back home in Mount Pleasant (must call the graduate student they'd left with the key, make sure he was checking on Cleo regularly).

High ceilings with antique fixtures hanging from them, a beautiful little—what was it, cherrywood?—yes, a cherrywood end table, along with other extravagant furniture arrayed around the room, velvet-upholstered chairs and a delicately carved nightstand and a massive old armoire, stern-looking, positively and properly Victorian in its solidity and breadth and height and weight, its stained and polished enormity, staring at her out of its dual-mirrored face, a face that presented a scene so lifelike, so perfectly real, somehow, exceeding the capacities of mere reflection, that it suggested immense depths beyond the actual measurements of the room. Oak dresser, deep claw-foot bathtub in the bathroom with its black-and-white tile floor.

At some point she was going to have to eat.

There had been a little surprise in that regard, a little potential difficulty. She had tried to open the door, but it was definitely, certainly, beyond a shadow of a doubt locked from the outside. And in case anyone there on the other side of the door was wondering, she
had
looked around for a key, but had so far been unable to find one. There was maybe the chance of sliding a nail file or a bobby pin into the keyhole, but she had neither of those items in her possession, since she'd left her purse downstairs. The purse, or the absence of the purse, would be a problem eventually, if she stayed here long enough. But she wasn't worried yet. She wasn't
worried
yet—how remarkable a thing was that? List the things that didn't worry her: it didn't worry her that she hadn't seen Dewey the entire afternoon, it didn't worry her that she hadn't seen Tonio the entire afternoon, it didn't worry her that she had no idea where they were and that they apparently had no idea where she was either, it didn't worry her that Robbie still might not have reappeared, it didn't worry her that they were not going to get back home when they were supposed to, it didn't worry her that she was, well,
stuck
in this perfectly pleasant room, it didn't worry her that she was so sleepy, that she was beginning to get hungry. She was still prepared to see it as an adventure—remember the time she got locked in that hotel room in that odd little town and
nobody
came looking for her, not
anyone?
She wasn't even worried about how little she was worried about these things. Might as well go ahead and admit to herself that she didn't want anyone to find her. At least not yet, not now. In theory, Tonio and Dewey could be looking for her frantically, but if so they were doing a really pathetic job. Good. Let them have fun with their sledding.

Here was the thing about Tonio and Robbie, now that she had a good chance to sit down and ruminate on the subject: Tonio (he of the drooping shoulders and the dry stare and the monotone speech patterns, the infuriating imaginary superiority and the factual near helplessness) was hard to like in a superficial way, while he was, at the same time, with his steadfastness and his seriousness and his honesty and his intense love for his family, etc., etc., impossible not to love on a deeper level, whereas Robbie was almost universally liked but not really available for or capable of being loved. And yet she always found herself
accepting
Robbie easily, as if the things she saw in him and felt about him were true—with Tonio she always thought there was something she was missing, as if there were another version of Tonio and of her and even of Dewey that didn't live somewhat happily on a quiet street in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and that at any minute it would all just slip down, like a poorly hung stage backdrop, to reveal something else.

If only the room had a vaseful of flowers. There was the smell of jasmine in the air, but no flowers. There was also the issue of food—room service would be welcome. Her stomach, at the moment, was capable of grinding and polishing stones. Aside from that, the possibility of staying in here overnight did not seem distressing at all. There was just this craving for…
pesto tortellini
…a sudden and intense craving for pesto tortellini. Otherwise all was well. Except how would she take off her makeup? When it was bedtime, that is. She didn't wear that much, her skin was naturally olive and quite smooth, but still. There was nothing but a bar of soap in the bathroom. She'd already checked.

From her spot on the bed she watched the snow fall. It was like being inside a snow globe. The room was very quiet, that was one thing you noticed for sure. The room was intensely quiet. You might even go so far as to say the room was very, very intensely and almost
oppressively quiet,
if you were going to comment on the quiet in that room, which she didn't intend to, liking it so much the way she did. But
wow
—talk about quiet. Whew.

The thing about Tonio was. The thing about Tonio.

Hadn't she initially gotten into this mess because she thought she saw Robbie going up the stairs?

She went over to the door and she knocked on it tentatively (strange to be on the inside of the door knocking to see if someone was on the outside) and called out, “Robbie?” Just once. Then she went back and sat on the side of the bed and gazed out the window again.

There was something strange about the snow, about the light outside. It looked brighter. It was getting brighter instead of darker. My God, no wonder she was hungry. She'd slept all night. It was tomorrow.