No Vacancy

by Tziporah Cohen

  “It’s like constellations,” I say. “How about over there?” I point to an area in the middle. “It kind of looks like a face.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there. See where that oval rust stain is? Right underneath. It looks like a woman with long hair.”

  “I see it,” says Kate. “The rust stain gives her a halo.”

  “So she must be an angel,” I say.

  “Or the Virgin Mary,” says Kate.

  “The Virgin Mary?”

  “Yeah, you know, the mother of Jesus. You know who Jesus is, right?”

  “Of course I know who Jesus is.”

  “Well, how do I know? You’re Jewish, right?”

  “I read an article about the Virgin Mary in one of the old magazines in Reception,” I tell her. “Some people in Europe somewhere said they saw her on a hill. Near some tiny town that no one knew about. Now thousands of people go there every year. They even had to build a hotel for all the people to stay in.”

  I close my eyes and let the warmth from the ground seep into my sore muscles.

  Kate clears her throat. I open my eyes and she’s staring at me.

  “Did you hear what you just said?”

  I close my eyes again. “Just because I’m Jewish doesn’t mean I can’t read ten-year-old magazine articles about the Virgin Mary.”

  “What. You. Just. Said.”

  I sit up.

  “That I’m Jewish or that I read magazines?” Seriously, what is her problem?

  “Thousands of people. Hotel.”

  “What are you talking about?” She’s starting to tick me off.

  “You said thousands of people came and they had to build a hotel,” she shouts, throwing her arms out.

  Oh. My. God.

  We race back home, drop the bikes behind the diner, grab the magazine I was reading and run to Room 109. We fill the ice bucket to the top and gulp down cold water and figure out a plan.

  Uncle Mordy said that if hard work didn’t save the motel, we’d need a miracle.

  Kate and I are going to make one.

  9

  ——

  When I wake up the next morning there’s a note under the door. I’m sure it’s from Kate but when I open it, I read:

  Meet me at the pool at 10:00.

  Swimming lessons start today!

  Love,

  Your Favorite Uncle

  Ha! Uncle Mordy is my only uncle. And if he thinks he’s going to give me swimming lessons, he’s no longer my favorite.

  When I was six, I fell out of a rowboat into Turtle Lake when we were on vacation. I was wearing a life jacket but I totally panicked. My hair was plastered over my face and I couldn’t see anything and seaweed got tangled around my ankle and I was sure a turtle or an eel was about to bite me.

  Dad scooped me right out of the water and back into the boat, but I couldn’t stop crying, and then I threw up. Now, whenever I get near a lake or a pool, my heart starts to beat out of my chest and I can’t catch my breath. I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it. Even the word swimming makes my stomach ache. Mom wants to take me to therapy to help me get over it but Dad says I just need time. I’m happy to let them argue about it while I avoid water in anything but a bathtub or a cup.

  “No swimming lessons,” I tell Uncle Mordy at breakfast. There are so few guests that he has time to sit and eat with me. “I’m not feeling well. And besides, didn’t you and Dad say you were meeting with that lawyer today in Spartanburg?”

  If the plan Kate and I came up with works, they won’t need to meet with any lawyer to try and get money back from the motel’s old owner, but I can’t tell him that.

  “I will not be distracted, Miriam Brockman,” he says, pointing a finger at me like I’m one of his fifth graders at school. “You have a bathing suit here, right?”

  Maria pops her head into the room. “Buenos días! Anyone know where the extra light bulbs went? They used to be in the storeroom but now they’re gone.” She smiles at Uncle Mordy, then waves at me. “Light bulbs. Bombillas.”

  “Bombillas,” I repeat. “Cool word.”

  “Cool as a girl in a pool at the Jewel,” Uncle Mordy sings.

  Maria laughs even though Uncle Mordy is acting like a little kid.

  “I used the last one yesterday,” he says, smiling back at her. “I’ll get some more this afternoon in town.”

  For a guy who said he will not be distracted, Uncle Mordy’s looking pretty distracted to me.

  He stands up and points again. “Pool. Ten o’clock.” He grabs his plate and heads to the kitchen. I can hear him whistling as he loads the dishwasher.

  I get to the pool a few minutes early. My heart is beating faster just being in a room with a pool, and I need to pee even though I just went before I changed into my suit. I’m starting to feel sick for real now and I’m even more sure that swimming lessons are a really bad idea.

  I grab my towel and start to leave when Uncle Mordy walks in.

  “No way, kid. Your mom promised me half an hour with no interruptions. Today’s goal: in up to your knees.”

  Half an hour? Going in up to my knees couldn’t take more than five minutes. I can do that.

  Uncle Mordy leads me over to the side of the pool near the steps.

  “No splashing,” I say.

  “No splashing.”

  “No water above the knees.”

  “No water above the knees.” He holds my hand and I step down onto the top step. The water laps at my ankles. I try to pretend I’ve stepped into the bathtub and not a pool, but the water is cooler and the chlorine stinks and makes my eyes sting. I hold onto the metal handrail for dear life.

  Uncle Mordy makes googly eyes at me. I can’t help laughing and as I do, he takes my other hand and before I can do anything about it, I’m on the second step. The water tickles at my calves. I close my eyes and pretend that I’m in a sandbox and my feet are buried in warm sand instead of water.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” I say, opening my eyes. This isn’t so bad.

  “So, I hear you’re learning a little Spanish.”

  “Yeah. I’ve filled a couple of pages in my notebook already. Pool is piscina.” I tell him the other words I remember.

  It turns out that Uncle Mordy took Spanish in high school. I wonder if Maria knows that.

  “One more step?” Uncle Mordy asks. “Half hour’s almost up.”

  Really? We just started. I look up at the clock on the far wall and see that he’s right.

  I take a deep breath, close my eyes again and squeeze Uncle Mordy’s hand like I’m trying to get toothpaste out of an empty tube. I step down to the next step.

  “Hey, you did it, Mir!”

  I open my eyes to check, even though I can feel the water tickling behind my knees. My toes look bigger under water. Uncle Mordy lets go of my hands and I’m standing on the third step all by myself, up to my knees, and it’s all okay. Great, even.

  The door opens and a guest walks in. He drops his towel onto one of the pool chairs and dives into the deep end. He’s not close enough to splash me but the water surges up past my knees. I’m sure I’m going to slip beneath the water and drown. My heart pounds. I race up the steps. My legs are wobbly. I grab my towel and stand a few feet away from the side of the pool and take big deep breaths.

  Uncle Mordy is there in a second. He puts his hand on my shoulder while I catch my breath.

  “You did it!” He’s grinning like I just won the Olympics or something. “Up to your knees!”

  I look down at the water dripping off my legs. I did do it! If I were home, I’d call Dahlia and Lekha but they probably wouldn’t believe me. As long as they’ve known me, I don’t do pools.

  “Next time we’ll go down one more step,
” Uncle Mordy says.

  Next time?

  “Let’s go get you a Ring Pop to celebrate. There was a blue raspberry one in front when I walked by this morning.”

  It’s not watermelon, but it will do.

  Mom’s on the phone at Reception with Sammy at her feet. She gives me a thumbs up when she sees me. We pass Dad on our way to the vending machine and I tell him about my big accomplishment.

  “Strong work, Miriam!” he says, high-fiving me.

  Uncle Mordy gets a Ring Pop for Sammy too. We head back to Reception, where Mom’s struggling to unjam the printer. She hands Sammy over to me and doesn’t even protest when Uncle Mordy gives him the candy, even though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to eat a Ring Pop until I was in third grade.

  “How a printer can jam printing out all of three receipts in a week is beyond me,” I hear her say as I head over to the swings.

  I don’t even mind babysitting because after camp today Kate is meeting me at the diner to discuss our plan.

  “So, this is what I figured out last night,” says Kate.

  We’re at her table in the corner of the diner looking through some stuff she printed out from the internet.

  Mrs. Whitley comes over with a couple of Cokes, and Kate slams the papers upside down.

  Mrs. Whitley looks at us sideways, then shakes her head. “I’m sure I don’t want to know. Just promise me it doesn’t involve fire.”

  “I promise,” Kate tells her. “No fire.”

  “Fire?” I ask as her grandmother walks off. “For real?”

  “Jeez, I was only eight and it wasn’t on purpose. And no one got hurt.”

  We finish reading and Kate grabs her backpack and one of the small cans of paint and we jump on the bikes and go back out to the drive-in.

  It only takes a second to find the face, now that we know where to look.

  “We should put the cross there, right under the face,” Kate says, pointing.

  It sounded like a good plan when we were back in the diner, but now the screen just looks huge and super high up, sitting on a metal frame.

  We stand at the bottom and look up. From this angle you can’t see the screen anymore. We walk around to the back. There’s a ladder on the side and scaffolding all the way up the back.

  “We could climb up the ladder,” Kate says.

  “Are you kidding me? That’s like a hundred feet up or something. And then what? We’ll be at the back. How would you get to the front to paint it?”

  We stare at the screen until my neck starts to ache.

  “I know,” Kate says. She rummages through her backpack and comes out with a red Swiss Army knife.

  “My brother’s,” she says. “It’ll be perfect.” She shoves it into her jeans pocket.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Just trust me,” she says. “Let’s go. Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”

  I follow her up the zigzagging steps next to the screen. They remind me of the fire escapes on the outside of the buildings back home in Manhattan.

  I’m not afraid of heights, exactly, but climbing up this high outside is way different from being at the top of a skyscraper on the inside.

  At the bottom of the movie screen, a platform leads across to the other end of the screen. The steps continue up to the top of the screen.

  I look at Kate. There’s no way I’m going up any more than this. I follow her a couple of feet onto the platform. There’s a railing, which I hold onto tightly.

  We’re behind the screen, and now that we’re up here I realize just how big it is. Even if I stretch my arms up all the way, I probably don’t reach even a tenth of the way to the top.

  Kate pulls the knife out of her pocket. She walks back and forth a few feet.

  “I think it’s probably around here,” she says, pointing to the back of the screen.

  “What is?”

  “The face. I need to put the cross under it, right?”

  I’m having a hard time imagining the screen from the other side, and I’m starting to get a little freaked out. The metal platform shakes a little as Kate walks back and forth, and I grip the railing tighter.

  It’s not as bad as when I’m near a pool, but still, I’m ready to get back to solid earth.

  “Okay,” Kate says. “I’m going to do it here.” She pushes the knife into the back of the screen. She needs to push pretty hard but the knife goes through. She makes a vertical cut about two or three feet long and then another shorter one, horizontally, about a foot from the top, wiggling the knife back and forth as she goes to make the cut jagged.

  “Done. Let’s get down,” she says. She reaches behind her to put the knife in her pocket and loses her balance, grabbing for the railing. The knife drops, clattering against the metal steps as it goes down, down, down.

  “Crap,” says Kate, steadying herself. “My brother’s going to kill me.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll find it. Let’s just get off this thing.”

  Going down is even more freaky than going up. I grip the handrails so hard my fingers start to hurt.

  Just as we reach the bottom, I hear the sound of crunching gravel.

  A police car is pulling into the far end of the lot.

  “Shoot,” says Kate. Her eyes are practically wider than her face. “Police!”

  We barrel down the last few steps and race over to our bikes just as the squad car pulls up.

  An officer gets out of the car. “What are you kids doing out — oh, it’s you, Kate.”

  Kate’s face relaxes. “Oh, hi, Officer Mike.” She gets back off her bike. “This is Miriam. Her parents bought the Jewel Motor Inn.”

  He shakes my hand. “Welcome to Greenvale.”

  She turns to me. “Officer Mike used to work in the diner, before he went to police officer school.”

  Everyone knows everyone in this town.

  “What are you two doing out here, anyway?”

  She shoots me a look. “I was just taking Miriam around, showing her where stuff is. We stopped here to rest.”

  “At this dump?” Officer Mike laughs. “There must be nicer places in Greenvale to show your friend.”

  “Do you think they’ll ever show movies here again?” Kate asks.

  “Doubt it,” Officer Mike says. “Screen’s a mess.”

  We all stare up at it.

  Kate points at the left corner. “Miriam and I were trying to decide if that looks like a dragon over there. And there’s definitely a lady’s face where that rust stain is. It’s almost like a halo.”

  I look at Kate with a what-the-heck expression, but she gives me a just-shut-up look back.

  “Huh,” he says, staring at it. He walks back a few steps, squints, then moves his head from side to side. He pulls out his phone and takes a picture of the screen.

  He turns back to us. “Okay, you guys. Technically, you’re trespassing, so grab your bikes and let’s get you out of here.”

  We put on our helmets while he stares back up at the screen.

  As we bike off we hear him on his walkie-talkie. “Number 34, this is Number 21. Can you pop over to the drive-in on Birch? Something I want you to see here. Over.”

  Two days later I’m eating breakfast with Sammy when Uncle Mordy comes in holding a copy of the Greenvale Herald.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “In the back room, counting cereal.” It seems like the only thing to do around here these days is count things.

  “Daniel, come take a look at this,” Uncle Mordy calls.

  Dad comes out and drops a box of single-serving sugar cereals on the chair next to me. At home I’m only allowed to eat sugar cereals on Shabbat morning, as a treat. Here, no one notices that I have one every day.

  I read over his shoulder. The headlin
e on the front page reads “Is It Her? Local Officer Discovers Image of Virgin Mary at Drive-In.”

  There’s a photo of the drive-in screen, zoomed in to the area where we saw the face. It’s blurry and in black and white but it’s there. The cross is too, kind of faint, but visible. Officer Mike is quoted in the article: “I pulled into the drive-in as part of my beat — you know, just checking to make sure everything was A-okay — and I looked up and there she was, as clear as day. Just beautiful.”

  I hold my breath as I read, but the article doesn’t mention me or Kate.

  I can’t believe it worked!

  I scan the rest of the article, which talks about another Virgin Mary sighting in upstate New York in 1920, which apparently was declared fake by the Church.

  Uncle Mordy hums as he reads but I’m freaking out.

  The Church investigates Virgin Mary apparitions? Does Kate know this?

  “Things are about to get interesting,” Dad says. “Deborah’s not going to like this.”

  I’m not sure why Mom wouldn’t like this, but I’m caught between hope that people will come to Greenvale to see it and terror that we’ll be found out.

  Interesting doesn’t quite capture it.

  It’s not even eight o’clock the next morning but Uncle Mordy’s already at the Reception desk, the phone tucked under his ear while he scribbles on a pad of paper.

  “Go find your father,” he whispers when I walk in the door, Sammy following behind me, still in his pajamas. “The computer won’t boot and —”

  “Yes, we have rooms available,” Uncle Mordy says into the phone in his normal voice. “How many nights?” He scribbles some more. “How many? Yeah, sure, we can do that.”

  He holds his hand over the mouthpiece and waves at me. “Your father, now.”

  I search for Dad, practicing my Spanish as I go. He isn’t in Room (Habitación) 110 or the dining room (el comedor) or the laundry room (la lavandería) or the pool room (la piscina).

  Sammy starts to whine and lag behind so I give him a piggyback to the upstairs balcony. Maria’s cleaning cart is blocking the door to Room 112, where one of the two guests we had last night was staying. She hasn’t seen Dad either.

  I hurry back to Reception. Uncle Mordy’s still on the phone. He has a calendar in front of him now and is scribbling names into the boxes. He looks up for a second and I shrug and hold my hands up. I lift Sammy onto the counter and Uncle Mordy hands him a pretzel log that he pulls out of somewhere.