Travelers Rest (7 page)

S
he dreamed that she was walking past storefronts swaddled in snow. The snow was everywhere, so thick it formed a screen between her and the tangible world, and yet it fell so lightly that it registered as nothing more than a slight coldness on her face and hands. The brick facades of the buildings were perfectly new, the masonry perfectly intact, and the painted signs in the windows and on the storefronts were sharp and colorful—Jameson's Hardware, Good Night General Store, J & F Grocers, Tolley's Haberdashery. But there were no people in the stores and there was no merchandise in the windows. She was all alone.

She moved through the world of snow and shimmering glass and up ahead, far away, a faint patch of color loomed in a window. She drew closer and found that it was a single page of yellowed paper, taped to the glass from inside, covered with elaborate script. It was a letter, and the salutation read,
To Julia
.

The letter said,
Passing the storefronts in the snow, gliding by in the middle of a dream, you have the advantage of solitude, of time for contemplation. You have perhaps been waiting for an opportunity just like this one. You have not been able, really, ever (wouldn't you agree?) to come to grips with the final questions, the last extensions of the half-thought thoughts, the half-remembered memories, the things you have half known in
secret all your life.

These whole truths, these entire revelations are available now to you, here on the street, here in your little room, here in the dream from which you either cannot or will not wake yourself. Wake yourself! Come to the threshold of the door that leads to the knowledge of your life, use the key you have obtained, the one in the pocket of your dress, the dress you wear in this dream of old times and places. Use the key! Use the key to cross worlds, cross dreams, cross lives, to arrive at the moment of decision. Use this time only for yourself, for only in this solitude and this great sleep and this abiding hunger will you be able to approach the moment for which you have prepared yourself, the one to which all things come, again and again and again, the one you have kept hidden close to your heart—now is the time for unlocking.

When she had finished reading the letter, she found herself still in the dream, if it really was a dream, which she was beginning to doubt, as the cold on her hands and her face felt real, more piercing now, approaching numbness. It was hard to move her lips, and her stomach gnawed at her in a way it never had before in dreams. Across the street, the glow of a lamp in an upstairs window caught her attention. She saw a woman approach a door, stand motionless for a moment, then reach into her dress and produce a key. In the air somewhere above her head (whose head? The woman in the window? The woman on the street?), the steady sound of footsteps could be heard.

N
ear as Dewey could figure, he had just woken up in the early hours of his second morning alone in the strange hotel. There was really nothing to tell time by other than his understanding of the earth's passage through the solar system. He was old enough and wise enough to know that the earth went around the sun, that it spun on its axis while it did so, and that a complete spin took twenty-four hours, which was a day, and he was even smart enough to know that in the winter the earth was tilted away from the sun, which meant the days were shorter, that the sun went down earlier in the evening and came up later in the morning, so that in a winter month like this one less than half the day was spent in daylight, and believe it or not (this was the kind of thing adults always doubted until his dad got him to answer questions or make some demonstration), he even knew that being farther north, as in, say, the northern part of Idaho rather than South Carolina, added to the reduced sunlight effect because…because why? Because of the increased angle of the tilt away from the sun if you were farther from the equator, that was it, all of which actually meant that, right now, it could possibly be as late as, say, 6 a.m. And 6 a.m. was one hour before the diner opened across the street. The Dooze Man had really come to count on that diner, he wouldn't hesitate to tell you.

It wasn't much to brag about, the diner. It was basically a big rectangle with booths up front against the window, the kitchen off to one side, and small tables stretching to the back where the restrooms were. The “decor,” as his mother would call it, was pretty much nonexistent, just some crookedly hung pictures of the town, old brownish-tinted photographs of buildings (but not the hotel, he noticed) and men on horses and women in long dresses standing on a balcony and canvas tents pitched along a river and a couple of Indians holding rifles and some miners leaving a pit, looking like they'd had a hard day. But the place was warm and Dewey felt comfortable there. First, you had the fact that there were actual people at the diner, specifically Hugh and Lorraine, who were very nice and seemed quite concerned about his welfare and showed it in ways Dewey could appreciate, such as extra French fries and free dessert and quarters for the highly entertaining gumball machine. Some of the other people who went to the diner—and there didn't seem to be very many of them—were kind of creepy, like the men were big and hairy and quiet, and the women were either really fat or really skinny with tons of lines on their faces and dirty hair that wasn't a real color you'd find anywhere on earth. And they never talked to you or acted like you were smart or cute, the way people did back home in South Carolina, and they mostly looked at you out of the corners of their eyes as if either you or they were doing something wrong. In short, none of the citizens of Good Night seemed to want him to have a good anything. Even so, they weren't as scary, all things considered, as being alone at the hotel.

Then there was the matter of food, which the diner had in abundance, whereas the amount of food available in the hotel was, Dewey had determined, zero. Zero food. Zero tasty beverages, not even running water. This was strange. Dewey was sure that on the first night they came to the hotel he had brushed his teeth at the sink. He was thoroughly exhausted, but his mother had insisted on it, and he could remember quite clearly watching himself in the oval mirror while he scrubbed back and forth enough times to satisfy her, and although he couldn't actually remember the running water or putting any on his toothbrush, if there hadn't been water, that was something he would definitely remember, wouldn't he? And yet after that first night there had been no more running water. Or maybe once, the next morning, he couldn't exactly recall. But there was no water now. And no Coke machines. And no snack machines. He had scoured the place yesterday, so he knew. It was a spooky journey, one that he had been willing to make only during daylight hours, because at night the hotel, other than his room, where the streetlight shined, was pretty dark, only a sliver of light illuminating the corridor and the stairs.

So the food and beverage expedition had by necessity taken place during the day, and even then it had been really weird. All traces of life had vanished, except for the room in which Dewey was staying. There was no sign of the hotel owner, the crazy-looking dude who had greeted them. The deserted lobby seemed like it hadn't been touched by anyone in years. The same layer of dust covering everything, spiderwebs up in the corners of the ceiling, basically all the stuff you saw on TV whenever they wanted to get across the idea that someplace was abandoned and scary. But there was something else, too, something you couldn't sense from being shown a place like this on TV, which was the feeling Dewey got when he stood in the middle of the lobby, a feeling of being so completely alone that you were sure there were no other people within a hundred miles and that no one else had been alive on earth for a hundred years. Dewey blinked his eyes against the dust and listened to his own breathing and, after a minute, worked up the courage to venture through the door on the other side of the lobby. There he found a large room with a fireplace and tall thin windows on both sides. It was the kind of room in which you could imagine people waltzing—if not for the dust, the cobwebs, the broken windowpane through which the snow filtered quietly. He imagined a man in a tuxedo rising from a long table and making a toast.

He moved on. At the back of the room he encountered two more doors, and behind them another large room, but one that seemed more promising in terms of food and drink opportunities. This room was obviously a kitchen, or used to be a kitchen. There were massive ovens embedded in the walls and long wooden tables with knife scars and long wooden shelves in something like a closet and another area with a door that swung open to expose hooks hung from the ceiling. A kitchen, no doubt, but no food in it anywhere.

He went back upstairs to the room, empty-handed, and turned on the scary TV, and glanced every once in a while at the ghostly images, the people moving in lines in a dark place, a man walking up some stairs, a woman in a room, lights that danced up and down, smoke pouring into a twilit sky. He finally fell asleep.

And now it was morning but it was still mostly dark. And he was freezing. And then he saw someone walk right by the room, plain as day, nonchalantly as you please. It was his mother.

Oh, the flood of relief. The flood of love, if you wanted to call it by its real name, though Dewey would normally have been uncomfortable calling it that. The flood of love and relief that surged up through him as if he had suddenly come across a warm fire, some life-sustaining place. The flood that pushed him out of the room and out into the hall where he could dimly see his mother's form receding from him, so that his voice rose automatically, shouting the word he had always been able to shout in the past when he wanted to feel safe, to be comforted, to be rescued from boredom or a momentary bout of sadness: “Mom, Mom, Mom!” It was terrifying that his mother didn't seem to hear him, just marched calmly up the stairs. Dewey shot forward in pursuit, up to the third-floor landing and down the hallway, and just as he came close to her his mother paused and turned, standing in the doorway to a room. In the gray early-morning light, snow streamed through a broken window at the end of the passageway. Her eyes seemed to flit over him briefly, like an unconscious acknowledgment of memory, a half recollection of something that had once been known. Then she turned her head and slipped into the room, and Dewey's breath left him at the suddenness of it.

He lurched ahead, yelling again—“Mom Mom Mom, it's me”—afraid that in the next split second she would shut the door and, this time, disappear forever. But she didn't shut the door, merely drifted in, her hand lingering for a moment on the frame. Dewey stopped, started forward again, stopped again, opened his mouth, closed it. He stood there, mere feet from his mother, mere feet from the angled light in the doorway. Everything was quiet. He could not hear any noise from the room his mother had just entered—no rustling of clothes, no creaking of floorboards, no displacement of objects, not a single thing that could normally be associated with the activity of a person, even a sometimes sneakily quiet person such as Dewey's mother, in a room. Or possibly there was a faint kind of shushing sound, like the noise of the ocean in a seashell. But this could be the snow falling outside, or his own breathing, or the blood pumping rapidly through his veins from his racing heart. So he listened as carefully as he could. And then, though it made him afraid for some reason, he moved forward and stood in the doorway.

There on the bed, just as you would logically expect her to be, if the laws of the universe were in fact “immutable,” as his father always explained that they were, sat his mother, her hands folded in her lap, a slight smile playing across her features—Dewey would have described the scene as
peaceful.
There was his mother, normally a bundle of energy, gazing peacefully at her hands. And in the moment before Dewey spoke to her he had time to recognize that the dress she wore—an old-fashioned kind of dress that was wide at the hips and had a high collar and long sleeves, and which came down all the way to her feet—was new, or at least one he'd never seen before, and that, curiously, the decorative wall lamps on either end of the room were now bursting with light, little flames flickering inside their glass domes.

“Mom?” he said, and stepped through the doorway. And stepping through the doorway was like nothing he'd ever done before—it was as if he passed through the thinnest, coldest waterfall, a sheer veil of water and ice that poured slowly over everything, and for a moment he lost all sensation. And then he was in the room, empty and dark. Sagging old bed with a water-stained mattress. Cobwebs and dust bunnies. Chunks of plaster fallen from the ceiling. His mother nowhere to be found.

Then it seemed to Dewey that a long time had passed, as if he were having one of his “episodes,” though he couldn't say for sure because no one was there to tell him all the things he'd done and said and subsequently forgotten. He was very sleepy, and after he guided his feet, in a sort of floating way, back out of the room and into the hall, he turned around to see exactly what he had first seen—there was the bed with the flowered sheets, there was his mother sitting on it, there were the lights in the room. There was an end table and a snow globe and a large chest of drawers and a colorful rug and some wispy curtains and, of course, the snow falling outside. How much it hurt to see his mother sitting there without being able to reach her. He hadn't known it would hurt so much. “Mom?” he said again, though he didn't hold out much hope. And his mother, not answering, went on sitting and smiling and gazing downward.