Travelers Rest (2 page)

R
obbie 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.

F
or 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.”

And she could go back to that one moment. Until that one moment there really wasn't anything all that unusual. She had looked out the window. She had seen him in his red shirt working on the fence. He had long brown hair then, so thick that it looked like some kind of pelt he had to keep displacing to the side of his head––but it hadn't mattered how he looked. She had been aware of how she looked herself, a tiny thing there in the grass, all of five foot two, weighing in at about a hundred pounds, no breasts no hips no curves to speak of. What she understood then, for maybe the first time, was that it was her
eyes
that held men's attention. She could feel them there in her head, staring out at him, warm and big and brown. Robbie was seventeen then. She was twenty-five.

She had always believed strongly in a spirit world, in the idea that nature was animated in a way she could never quite understand or see, but never very strongly in God, who, if he existed, didn't seem to be much good for anything. And she had always believed in fate, that there was some place she was destined to end up, and from the beginning, she had felt that Robbie had something to do with that place. But why? Because she and Robbie were alike? Her mother had been a late-blooming flower child, and she had raised her daughters around people who claimed to be enlightened, to have tapped into some higher consciousness, but who were really just losers and hypocrites and fools. At times, when things went sour at a moment's notice, they'd had to live in abandoned cabins or tents or vans or even other people's garages—she was used to that. She was used to screwups like Robbie. And there was something she didn't trust about people who did everything right, or something she didn't trust, when in the presence of people who did everything right, about herself.

But if there was such a thing as fate, if there was some place, some moment she was destined to travel toward, she believed strongly that it was her job to get herself there. Robbie could and should take care of himself. A grown man, a thirty-year-old man, who'd never had a steady job, who had dropped out of college
four times.
She had never had the chance to go to college
once.

She could just picture him over there in the bar. He'd be everyone's best friend in about five minutes. Good God, you'd think he'd learn. That's why they were out here, collecting Robbie after yet another stay in rehab with a bunch of other spoiled rich kid degenerates, privileged people who couldn't control the one thing in the world you had the capacity to control—yourself. She'd had a difficult childhood and didn't feel much sympathy.

The thing to do right now was wake up Tonio. He would be over there in no time hustling Robbie back out into the snow, bringing him back to bed, and they could get on the road in the morning. But then he would see that they had power across the street, and she'd never hear the end of it. And also she wanted to believe—against all evidence—that Robbie could manage on his own. Maybe he was over there having a cheeseburger. Maybe he'd have a beer for a nightcap and then she'd see him wander leisurely back across the road.

Everything was dark and quiet behind her in the hotel room—Tonio was done with his snoring, even—and the snow beyond the window fell so steadily that she couldn't imagine it stopping. She tried to think of their house in Mount Pleasant, the row of azaleas to the side of the front door, the oak tree in the yard, Dewey bouncing a basketball in the driveway. She tried to think of the places where she'd spent her childhood, in California, the house with the pool where they'd crashed for a while, the bus she used to take to the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. None of it was there, not anywhere in her head, just this window framing the snow, her place tucked right here inside it, as if she were wound into a snow cocoon. Then something in her loosened, and she felt very sleepy suddenly, and she leaned her head against the cold damp windowpane, and with her ear against the glass she heard the tiny hiss of snow, like faint radio static, sticking to the windowsill.