Travelers Rest

The sign on the outside of the old hotel identified it as the Travelers Rest. Julia Addison, advancing carefully in her slick shoes on the snowy sidewalk, holding on to her son Dewey’s hand to keep from falling, paused for a moment and considered—something wasn’t right about the name. As punctuated, it amounted to a bland statement of fact—yes, travelers rested. All people did, eventually. Maybe they had forgotten a comma and exclamation point—it was intended to be a command: Travelers, rest! Or maybe just an apostrophe—Travelers’ Rest—which she decided was the nicest way to think about it: this place belonged to the travelers, and offered them rest.

Dewey pulled on her hand and they went up the marble steps to the hotel entrance and she held open the door for her brother-in-law, Robbie, and her husband, Tonio, who were lugging the suitcases. She was the last to step inside the door and she was busy brushing snow off her coat sleeves and her hair when she heard a voice that brought her up sharply, made her heart beat fast. Maybe she was still out of breath—they’d had to park the car at the bottom of a hill and walk up the town’s main street to the hotel. But she heard the voice again—“Welcome to Travelers Rest”—and again her pulse quickened.

The voice belonged to an odd-looking man with a large nose and a thick mustache who stood behind a desk to the left of the entrance, and she couldn’t figure out why his voice would affect her that way—if anything, his appearance was much more startling. His nose was so large and his mustache was so bushy that he almost had no eyes, no chin, and he wore a dusty black hat with a wide brim that seemed designed to trap the chaotic mass of brown hair curling around his ears and neckline. His clothes—a striped, tight-fitting vest over a heavy shirt worn thin at the elbows, pants of a loose, shiny material with rolled cuffs, boots that appeared to be covered in soot or ash—and his stiff gait as he moved across the room made him look as if he’d been stored in a crate of mothballs and tipped up onto his feet just moments before their arrival. She felt, more than anything, a temptation to sneeze.

While Tonio asked about a room, she got her bearings and surveyed the hotel’s interior. The first impression was one of disorder. In the dim and rather dusty light of the lobby she saw ladders and toolboxes and paint cans and drop cloths and sawhorses—clearly the place was under renovation. Maybe the hotel wasn’t even open, and they wouldn’t be staying here after all. That would be disappointing. Why? She studied the room more closely. An enormous fireplace that, if it had contained a roaring fire, would have dispelled every shred of the hotel’s gloom. Beautiful old gas lamps on the walls, tasteful (although awfully faded) wallpaper, elaborate moldings in the corners of the room, a high ceiling with a breathtaking chandelier that spanned almost half the lobby, a grand wooden staircase ascending to a second-floor landing, solid overstuffed chairs (Dewey was sitting in one of them and wiping dust from the arm), a huge circular ottoman directly beneath the chandelier. It must have been a stunningly opulent place at one time—what could it possibly be doing in this little town? Who would have built a hotel like this here? She hadn’t spent much time in fancy hotels, but she had a sharply tuned aesthetic sense, and that sense told her now that she was in a remarkable place, or at least a place that had once been remarkable.

She stood gazing out the front windows at the snow flying past outside. Tonio was still talking, going on in the slightly nasal voice that he used when he lectured his anthropology students. She didn’t pay any attention to what he was saying. Robbie had discovered, of all things, a monocle lying around somewhere. He placed it over his right eye and marched around the room with a military air, his hands clasped behind his back, a stern expression on his face, as if he were considering weighty matters. He bumped into the furniture, staged pratfalls over the armchairs and end tables. Dewey, of course, found this wildly entertaining. She stood looking out the windows.

And then she had a funny feeling. Her mind felt white with snow, cold and pleasantly numb, and something began to form behind her vision—not exactly a memory, not exactly a dream. From somewhere she heard voices and music, lilting strings, a waltz rhythm. She had the feeling that if she turned around she would have already known exactly what was behind her, the ballroom, the dancers, the string quartet, the strange man peering out of his little eyes at the proceedings, twirling the ends of his mustache. The hotel must be hosting some gala event, some elaborate banquet from bygone days, something she never could have expected when she chose to stop here, but which she seemed somehow to have anticipated, and which now she couldn’t wait to see. She could almost feel herself dancing, flowing across some huge open space. She began to say something to Tonio over her shoulder and as she turned…there it was. Through a pair of stately French doors with old, warped glass panes, a massive room with a parquet floor and curtainless floor-to-ceiling windows facing onto a snowy street. It was a ballroom, it had to be. But there were no people, nobody there, as if they’d all vanished in a heartbeat. It must have been a recording, music they played over speakers hidden somewhere, but whatever it was, it had stopped. She stepped lightly toward the doors, imagined them swinging open before her, allowing her entry, and again it was as if she heard something, saw something. Was it some movie she was remembering?

Suddenly Tonio was next to her, ready to make his report. “That’s the owner,” he said. “He’s nuts.”

She glanced over Tonio’s shoulder. There the owner stood, firm and upright, hands behind his back, a welcoming smile creasing his cheeks behind the mustache. His smile seemed intended only for her, as if the two of them understood something no one else could.

“Why?” she said. “Is the room too expensive?”

Tonio grunted. “Too expensive? No, the rate’s plenty cheap. In fact, he seems reluctant to let me pay him at all. He won’t take a credit card.”

“Then what’s the problem?” she said.

“What’s the problem? Look at this place.”

“It’s amazing,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “as, like, an archaeological specimen, maybe. He says the storm knocked out the electricity. He can’t promise there’ll be any heat. The place looks like it was hit by a fucking tornado.”

She walked slowly back across the room, toward Dewey and Robbie at the front entrance. Old photographs lined the walls, one of them an image straight from her thoughts, from the vision in the back of her head—it was the lobby full of people, dressed for the ball, coat and tails, satin dresses, all smiling, all toasting the camera with glasses of champagne. In faded ink, under the photograph, it said “January, 1886, Travelers Rest.” Next to that picture was another one, an exterior shot of the burned-out husk of a hotel, and underneath it had the same caption, “January, 1886, Travelers Rest.” One of them must have been wrong.

“But he’ll let us have a room,” she said.

“He’ll give us a suite,” Tonio said. “But get this—we’re the only guests. It’s pretty weird. Don’t you think Dewey would be happier if we drove on and found—I don’t know—a Comfort Inn? There’s always a Comfort Inn.”

The light in the lobby had grown even fainter. Dewey was quiet, slumped down in one of the oversized chairs. Robbie stood at the window, still wearing the monocle over his right eye. It almost looked like it belonged there.

“You go on to the Comfort Inn if you want to,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

Robbie Addison had been awake for hours, had not gone to sleep the whole time, not at all, that buzzing or crinkling in his fingers, that spot at the base of his spine where it felt like something clutched or clawed, some creature trapped in the mattress…looking up through the gap in the ancient curtains he could see the twirling flakes of snow, dazzling and hypnotic, yet even they could not induce sleep.

There were no clocks in the hotel room, but his internal clock, which was pretty finely tuned to closing time, suggested that it was about 1 a.m. He lay on his back and stared at the snow and concentrated on what he could hear. High in the air there seemed to be a ringing, but it was true that that might have been in his head. There was another sound, like a vacuum, like something taking away sound, sucking sound out of the room, converting it to negative space—that had to be, what, the wind? The heating vents? Did this old barn of a hotel even have central heat? He could hear also, now that he concentrated, the sound of Tonio’s snoring, and he tried hard to tell, straining his senses outward, whether the door to Tonio and Julia’s room was closed. Could you tell, if you tried to picture it hard enough, whether Julia’s eyes were open, whether she too was awake and hearing Tonio snore? No, you couldn’t.

After a minute he set aside the covers, the heavy quilt, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His arms, propped on the mattress, began to shake. He ran one hand through his unruly hair and he squinted and bared his teeth and very cautiously stood up with no noise but the cracking of one knee, the one with the cartilage damage from his old basketball days. He took two steps across the hardwood floor—gingerly, but he could see right away that it was no use. The floor groaning, creaking—they would hear him or they wouldn’t. He didn’t know much about the sleeping habits of his brother’s family. Was Dewey likely to wake up?

He slipped into his jeans and he felt around on the cold floor until he located his wool socks and he eased back down onto the bed and got the socks pulled on and he grabbed his boots to carry.

He had no idea where to find his coat. Standing in the doorway to his room in the suite, he could make out the entryway that led to the hall and the stairs, but there was a myriad of closet doors and he couldn’t go around opening them all to find his coat. He’d have to make do with the T-shirt and long johns undershirt he’d worn to bed.

He stepped out into the area between his room and Tonio’s, the goddamn floor groaning at every step. If someone—Julia, not Tonio, he could still hear Tonio snoring—called out to him now, said Robbie? He could say he was using the bathroom, but no, he had the boots in his hand. Going outside for a smoke. But his cigarettes were in his coat. He could say he’d thought they were in his pants pocket. So he walked toward the door quickly, no sense in being secretive, and he took in the fact that Dewey was asleep there on the large sofa in the main room, and he was within maybe three steps of the door when he made out in the faint light, on top of a small end table, what appeared to be Tonio’s wallet and keys. He hadn’t thought—really, he would never have suspected—that Tonio could be that dumb.

Certainly, of course, there was a second where  he asked himself, where he talked to himself like this—Now Robbie, Tonio is your brother and he came all the way out here to “help” you, and you like Julia, don’t you, and what about Dewey, great kid, and what about their disappointment, think about Julia and how she’ll have to try to make excuses for you again—but he’d already spent half his life disappointing people so now it didn’t stop him long. He stepped over as lightly as possible and carefully, very carefully separated the wallet from the keys—the keys were of no use to him—and unfolded the wallet and took out a few—no, all—of the bills. Tonio had credit cards. Tonio would be fine.

He walked out of the room and down the creaky stairs and still no one interrupted him. At the bottom of the stairs he paused with his hand on the banister and surveyed the old, ghostly hotel lobby. Ladders, sawhorses, band saws, planks, bags of nails, God knew what all, you couldn’t see it very well in the dark—had to be a violation of every safety code imaginable. But the lobby itself—you could see how this must have been a pretty impressive place back in the day. Not that it interested him much. He exhaled slowly, and he told himself to consider the things they’d talked about in rehab, and he did consider them, but not in the way they would have wanted him to. What he’d heard them say over and over was that an addict could never get better until he wanted to get better, and that to want to get better you had to hit bottom, you had to see yourself as the lowest of the low. That was a comforting thought for Robbie, because he wasn’t anywhere near the bottom yet. There were a whole lot of depths left to sink to.

The heavy front door to the hotel was unlocked, and that was a good thing, he could get back in if he wanted to. But he knew he wouldn’t. He struggled into his boots and went outside and shut the door behind him. The air was sharp, intense, the wind a bit more bracing than he had allowed for. But there across the street was the oasis he’d spotted right from the first, when they were walking up the hill with the suitcases. It was a bar called the Miner’s Hat, lit in the circle of a yellow streetlight, neon signs buzzing in the window, the snow flying round it in waves that accompanied the thump of a bass guitar coming from inside the door.

The street was deserted except for a couple of cars parked near the entrance. Robbie crossed slowly, still aware that Tonio or Julia or Dewey could be watching from the window—wouldn’t do to be in a hurry. The snow in the street was already more than a foot deep. They’d have to call out the plows. Everything was utterly quiet. Pine trees stabbed the white sky on the tightly bunched hills. As he made his way across the street, he heard the click of the town’s one traffic light, and it switched from red to green. Go. There was the oasis, the bar, the bad music, the awful cover band. He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, closed his eyes, tasted the snow on his tongue and felt it on his eyelids. Then he opened his eyes and went across the street and blew on his stinging hands and reached for the door. Inside were the drunks and the losers and the beautiful loud noise—he could find every comfort he wanted here.

For the longest time after she saw the door across the street shut behind him she sat very still on some cushions in a little bay window, looking out at the snow.

She had never seen it snow so hard in her life. She and Tonio and Dewey lived now in Charleston, South Carolina, or just outside Charleston, South Carolina, in a community called Mount Pleasant, and she had grown up mostly in California, in a succession of sunny beachside towns, so her knowledge and experience of snow were by no means extensive. Still, she had never seen it snow so hard in her life.

The snow fell rapidly, flakes spinning down in the light, and if she stared hard enough she felt as if she were in a boat moving on waves. Down and down it came, more and more, the wind whisking it along in what seemed like prearranged patterns, as if it were a show prepared just for her. In fact it all felt that way, everything, from the time they’d turned off the interstate. The discovery of the quaint hotel, the snow flying down while they trudged up the walk, the sign on the door, the dusty, dim light of the lobby, the strangely arresting voice of the proprietor, the voices and music she had heard and almost felt she remembered—all of it seemed as if it were a story being told to her and her alone, in a high whisper. She loved this old hotel. She wouldn’t mind staying another night, and another, if the storm continued.

It would be better, maybe, if Tonio weren’t here, because Tonio had a way of interfering. But definitely not if Robbie weren’t here, in which case it would feel like nothing important was happening. This was a horrible way to think, a horrible thing to realize, downright awful in a karmic sense, a feeling for which you’d have to do a lot of atoning, but she knew that and was prepared for it. She had a peculiar ability to be honest with herself.

The feeling about Robbie wasn’t sexual, or not so much, or at least it wasn’t the main thing. She wasn’t afraid of it, and she knew that, if it ever surfaced, that feeling, in a sexual way, it wouldn’t necessarily be better than what she had with Tonio, which was at least comfortable and uninhibited. And the sex thing with Robbie didn’t matter because she wouldn’t let it happen anyway.

So it wasn’t that, not really. So what was it? What made her want to defend him?

The first time she met Robbie was after she’d already married Tonio. They’d driven up the coast to visit Tonio’s parents in Seattle. And it wasn’t that Tonio’s parents weren’t nice and gracious and hospitable, etc., because they were, and it wasn’t that Tonio was boring, because he wasn’t, he was one of the smartest people she’d ever known, and she’d known a lot of people, and a whole lot of them thought they were pretty smart. No, it was just the color and movement that caught her eye, there through the window, out past the garden with all the pretty rosebushes.

She had known somehow that he was the brother, even though no one had said a word about him or paid any attention to him out there. She excused herself to go roam around—they were talking about politics, probably, it was an election year, Bush versus Gore. Tonio’s father was an appellate court judge. She walked out past the rosebushes, beyond the unruly dandelions and clover that cropped up by the property’s edge. The Addisons lived in one of the more desirable areas of Madison Park, and off behind the house you could look across Lake Union toward Mount Rainier. Robbie was busy building a fence, carefully hammering one slat at a time, standing and hammering, kneeling and hammering, grab a new slat, stand and hammer, kneel and hammer, the movements rapid and graceful in a way she’d never seen Tonio move, with his dangling arms and hunched shoulders.

“Why would you put a fence here?” she asked. Each new slat further obstructed the view across the water.

He wore a red T-shirt and a pair of long khaki shorts frayed at the ends and he was working barefoot. He stopped and examined her for a second. “Why?” he said. He turned around and swept his hair away from his eyes and looked down the hill and hitched up his shorts. “I guess because they care more about the stray dogs that come in the garden than they do about the view.” He stood there with his mouth open looking at her until she started wondering if he was stupid, if Tonio had gotten whatever brains there were to be had in the gene pool and poor Robbie had just gotten handyman skills. And then she realized what was happening—he had no idea who she was or why she was there in the yard talking to him.

It made her laugh. “I’m your sister-in-law,” she said. “I’m Julia.”