The Sun Down Motel(7)

For some reason, that made her feel a little better. There was obviously someone in this place, even if she couldn’t see them.

“Sure,” she told the woman. “I’ll work the night shift.”

“Good,” the woman said, opening the desk drawer and tossing a key on the desk. “Room one-oh-four is yours. Wash up, have a nap, and come see me at eleven. What’s your name?”

That smell of smoke again, like whoever it was had just taken a drag and exhaled. “Vivian Delaney. Viv.”

“Well, Viv,” the woman said, “I’m Janice. This is the Sun Down. Looks like you’ve found yourself somewhere to stay.”

“Thank you,” Viv said, but Janice had already gone back to Tom Selleck, putting her boots on the desk again.

She picked up the key and her twenty and left, pushing open the office door and stepping onto the walkway. She expected to see the smoker somewhere out here, maybe a guest having a smoke in the evening air, but there was no one. She walked out onto the gravel lot, turned in a circle, looking. In the lowering light of dusk the motel looked shuttered, no light coming from any of the rooms. The trees behind the place made a hushing sound in the wind. There was the soft sound of a shoe scraping on the gravel in the unlit corner of the lot.

“Hello?” Viv called, thinking of the man who’d put his hand on her leg.

Nothing.

She stood in the lowering darkness, listening to the wind and her own breathing.

Then she went to room 104, took a hot shower, and lay on the bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at the blank ceiling, feeling the rough comforter against the skin of her shoulders. She listened for the sounds you usually heard in hotels—footsteps coming and going, strangers’ voices passing outside your door. Human sounds. There were none. There was no sound at all.

What kind of motel was this? If it was this deserted, how did it stay open? And why did they need a night clerk at all? At the movie theater, the manager had sent everyone home at ten because he didn’t want to pay them after that.

She wasn’t getting paid, not exactly. But it would still be easier for Janice to turn the lights out, lock the office door, and go home instead of trying to find someone to sit there all night.

Her feet ached, and her body relaxed slowly into the bed. Lonely or not, this was still better than hitching on that dark highway, hoping for another stranger to pick her up. She started to hope there was a vending machine somewhere in the Sun Down, preferably one with a Snickers bar in it.

The man in the yellow collared shirt had put his hand on her thigh like it belonged, like they had an agreement because she was in his car. He’d curled his fingers gently toward the inside of her thigh before she pulled away. She felt that jolt in her gut again, the fear. She’d never felt fear like that before. Anger, yes. And she’d slept a lot since her parents’ divorce, sometimes until one or two in the afternoon, another thing that made her mother yell at her.

But the fear she’d felt today had been deep and sudden, almost like a numbing blow. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her how erasable she was. How it could all be over in an instant. Vivian Delaney could vanish. She would simply be gone.

I’m afraid, she thought.

Then: This seems like the right place for it.

She was asleep before she could think anything else.





Fell, New York

November 2017





CARLY


Greville Street was barely three blocks long, a street of low-rise apartments ending in a dead end covered by a warped chain-link fence. The buildings looked like they were made from children’s blocks stacked on angles, a boxy style in concrete and vinyl siding that had gone out of favor sometime around 1971. I drove slowly past the short, squat driveways to each building, looking for number twenty-seven.

I parked next to a dusky gray Volvo with a rounded rear and balding tires, feeling a little like a time traveler. I’d come here to see where my aunt had lived, maybe get a glimpse into what her life had been, but I hadn’t expected to stand on a street that looked almost unchanged from 1982. If the address was correct, she’d stood exactly where I did now, looking at the same landscape.

There was no one around except for two kids riding bikes up and down the street, ringing the bells on their handlebars and laughing. I walked to the front door of number twenty-seven and found that it was unlocked, so I went in.

There was a short hallway lined with tenants’ mailboxes and a set of stairs. The mailbox to apartment C said ATKINS, H. I had poked my head around the edge of the stairwell, looking up and wondering how not to look like a stalker, when a girl appeared in the upstairs hallway.

She was about my age, with a slight, firm build and dark blond hair that fell straight to her chin. She had taken the front hank of her hair and pinned it back from her forehead in a single bobby pin, and she looked at me with eyes that were clear and intelligent in an expressive face. She was wearing a large knitted poncho, basically a square placed over her shoulders with a hole for the head.

“Are you here for the ad?” she asked me.

“I—”

“There’s only one person coming,” she said. “The roommate for apartment C.”

That gave me pause. “Apartment C?”

“Sure. Come on up.”

I didn’t even think of turning around.