Molly’s afraid they’ll be gone by the time she gets back, but they’re still waiting. Reasonably enough, for the Flamingo is the only accommodations they’ve probably seen in who-knows-how-long, and they won’t see another. The woman is leaning on a suitcase and flipping through a magazine, the man studying the painting hanging on the wall.
“You like that painting?” Molly says, screwing her hands into fists, trying to get up the determination to tell the couple that they can’t stay.
“The colors are masterful,” the man says distractedly. “I feel I’m looking into the very heart of darkness. Don’t you think so, Janine?”
“Hmm,” the woman replies. “Got the key, Scott?“
“This nice lady’s going to get it for us,” the man says. “That enough to buy us a week, Miss, or do you need more? Didn’t see the cost posted.”
“A week?” Molly says, startled. No one stays at the Flamingo more than a night, besides the couple of long-term tenants that have barricaded their rooms like bomb shelters, slinking out only for continental breakfasts and early suppers; these ageless, seemingly nameless occupants do not pay, is the understanding, because they protect the Flamingo from things worse than them. This was the deal that Mother struck, and that Molly upholds by tending the Flamingo’s restaurant. The other guests are one-night-stay guests; they do not stick around long enough to eat anything. This couple, Molly feels with a strong insistent wariness, would do well not to stay that long. But when she opens her mouth to say that they should go, she feels crushed by the idea that they might disappear back into the marshes and never look into her face with their own mirror-like faces again. She hands them the key to 7A, the room across from her own. “Please,” she says, gathering up the wrinkled paper money, “stay as long as you’d like.”
◊
Once, when Molly was small, she looked out into the marshes from Mother’s window and squinted until the whole landscape blurred, trying to see where the marshes ended and something else began. “Where’s the marshes end and the outside start?” she said to Mother, who had a plastic champagne flute filled with bone marrow in her left hand.
“Nowhere,” Mother said, sloshing her drink around so it lapped the sides. “What do you see that makes you think there is outside?”
Molly can’t remember, now, why she thought the wilderness did end, besides maybe that they were getting guests then that they didn’t get now, pleasant-looking people on their way somewhere. She can remember none of them in particular, only as a group: the faint scent of suntan lotion and the wild sounds they made in the middle of the night before she had to go and scrub down their rooms. She didn’t tend the desk then; it was someone else. She thinks his name might have been Samir. She sensed she and Samir were the same in a way that Mother was not, but she didn’t have the words then to say what she can think—but not say—easily now: this world is Mother’s world, not hers, not Samir’s. There must be some other world that belongs to them, where Mother would be a stranger. In the romance novels, everyone is wide-eyed and shivering deliciously, sensitive as you cannot be at the Flamingo. Molly studies herself in the full-length mirror in her room sometimes, practices the poses on the covers: mouth dropped open, breasts pushed out. She hears Mother, who is not there, saying: “What do you think you are, the old world come back to life? That’s dead, girly, and if you hadn’t had such a good goddamn stroke of luck, you’d be dead too. You wanna live? Well, you live here now.”
Molly put curtains on her window so she wouldn’t have to see the here of the marsh spilling out across the horizon like half-dried paint, streaking and globbing messily on a canvas of silty, foul-smelling dark water. Tonight she pushes the curtain aside and watches the candlelight flicker in the windows of 7A, imagining the little intimate movements that the man and woman must make as they get ready for bed together. She still stocks the rooms with wash basins and towels even though so many of the guests don’t use them. She bets these people will, scrubbing the dirt of the day from their faces and hands before getting into clean, lightweight bedclothes and getting between the sheets of the king bed. When the candle goes out, Molly slides down onto her own bed, folding, crumpling, into anguish and jealousy.
◊
The couple startles Molly by coming into the restaurant long past sunup, when the regulars are lapping up the dregs of their breakfasts. The regulars’ heads swivel at their entrance. Molly hears a low growl from one of them, she doesn’t know which. Feeling protective of the new guests, Molly herds them back into the lobby. “Are you hungry?” she says. “What can I get ya? We got eggs, alligator and pheasant. Wild blackberry preserves and bread. Not fresh, bagged, but it’s not bad with the fresh jam on it.”
She’s talking too fast, she senses, but she doesn’t want the couple thinking that what the regulars eat is what she eats too, what they’d have to eat if they stayed here a while.
“Whatever you recommend,” says the woman sunnily.
“Seat us by that big fellow, eh?” says the man. “I’d like to get to know him some.”
“Maybe not,” Molly says. “He’s, um. Not real friendly.”
“Oh, but this is what we’re here for,” the woman says. “Getting to know the locals. Learning how y’all live here.”
Molly’s stomach twists. “I wouldn’t be too curious, if I was you,” she says. “We’re pretty boring, I can promise ya that.”
“I can’t imagine that,” the woman says. She leans closer to Molly, that dry chemical smell seeping out from her slick cone of hair and making Molly feel lightheaded. The chalkier, floral smell of perfume is there too, and the light salty odor of sweat. This last smell is one they share with Molly, like a branch connecting their disparate family trees; she is them and not Mother, deep down. “Sometime you’ll have to tell us how you ended up here. Must be a fascinating story.”
“Might be,” says Molly, “but I don’t know it.” She leads them slowly, reluctantly back into the dining room and seats them in the middle, feeling their exposure as her own: hairs rising on the back of her neck, the urge to look over her shoulder persisting even when she opens the door with the peeling sign reading EMPLOYEES ONLY and starts preparing breakfast. The regulars only care about protecting the Flamingo and the couple isn’t a threat, at least not to Molly, but what if Mother doesn’t think so? She sees everyone like this: dangerous or edible. Maybe even Molly. Maybe especially Molly.
After breakfast, the couple go out somewhere—she doesn’t know where, she’s a little afraid to think of where—and don’t return until late afternoon. By then Molly is playing solitaire again. These are Samir’s old cards and his grimy thumbprint is still stuck to the four of hearts, the only positive physical proof left that he was ever any more real than those suntan lotion guests who hardly ever checked out of the Flamingo after they checked in. Molly stifles the embarrassed urge to hide the cards when the couple comes in and instead steeples her hands on the desk, says brightly, “How you folks doing this afternoon?”
“Were just out planning our route out of the swamps,” says the woman. Her name is Janine, Molly reminds herself; they’ve been introduced, she’s allowed to use the name.
“Sun is beautiful on those cliffs,” the man says, drifting away from his companion to look again on the painting. “You don’t use those kinds of colors here, although the ones you do use are striking as well.”
“How did you know it was mine?” Molly says, alarmed.
“Just figured: who else? You’re the native alien,” the man says, that distracted tone coming into his voice again. Molly is still embarrassed, but maybe a little flattered too, her cheeks feeling warm in a not unpleasant way. She painted that smudgy vague landscape when she was still a teenager, trying to see past the horizon in her imagination when she couldn’t in real life. But even with a full set of paints, all that came out was a rich deep gemlike green, vines and ferns and Spanish moss dripping into dark still water that also, somehow, had a green cast to it. She’d pain
ted a heron perched on a mossy log then covered it over into an obscure grey smudge, feeling the bird was a dishonest addition to what she really saw: only the green, roiling and without form, thick as mucous and just as full of sickness.
“It’s lovely,” the woman says. “Molly, do you get lonely, living here by yourself?”
“Oh, I’m not,” Molly says uneasily. “Alone, I mean.” She doesn’t know what to say about Mother, because no guest has ever asked before. The regulars know their contract is with the resident of 1B, and the one-night guests don’t care whose name is on the deed hanging in the back office; they only care that they’ve got a key and four walls around them. They don’t think about how someone else might have a key too, that walls don’t mean much. Mother doesn’t know the couple is here; when she asked Molly to rattle off the occupants of all the rooms, Molly left them out. It’s never been like that: that someone knows Mother is here but she doesn’t know about them.
“The owner lives here,” Molly explains, inadequately. “She raised me. This has always been my home.”
“Not always, surely,” the man says. “I’m sure you must have been nearly full-grown when the marshes encroached. How old are you?”
The heat on Molly’s cheeks is anger now, covering humiliation. It has never occurred to her that she looks older than she is, but maybe she has been looking haggard and elderly for years now, ignorant without any mirrors to reflect her. “Let me know if I can make your stay more comfortable,” she says. “Enjoy your evening.”
“Scott, you’ve upset her,” the woman whispers too-loudly, the whites of her eyes rolling at Molly as she grasps him by the elbow. “Come on,” she says. Molly lowers her eyes so she won’t have to watch them go intertwined, the woman’s slender arm wrapped around the man’s bicep, all that skin nearly touching through the light barriers of their clean-looking linen clothes. The dirt on them is superficial; Molly feels her own dirt deep. She swipes at her face and shuffles the solitaire cards. Samir used to do this for hours at this same desk. Someday someone will be looking for traces of Molly in the dog-eared old cards. They will not find her there, but in the romance novels, the folded-over corners of the raciest pages and the smudges where humidity stuck her fingers to the pages.
Before Molly goes to Mother that night, she pulls the painting down from the wall and drowns it in the motel’s pool. The green paint, decades-old, bleeds in feathery tendrils that fan out into blotches of dark color on the pale surface of the water. Molly cleans and maintains the water every day, even though the guests almost never want to go swimming. She used to think about over-chlorinating the water; she used to think about not chlorinating it at all, letting algae bloom on the surface and water moccasins roam the bottom. But she never did either of those things, for the same reason that she lets Mother keep stocking that cooler. If the Flamingo were dead, Molly would really be the only one left living. And then she’d only be a smudge, easily missed in a landscape wanting to swallow up everything, soon digested without the marshlands even chewing.
◊
When Molly goes to her desk in the morning, she finds a note balled up behind the bell that customers are supposed to ring for service. She cautiously opens the piece of paper, smelling the faint chemical odor that emanates from the woman’s hair—beneath that, a faint trace of the sweat that is so like her own. Need help? Those well-formed letters like typeface in a book. Molly looks up like she’s being watched. The lobby is empty, the wall violently naked without the painting hanging up. But everything else is the same: the lumpy old sofas, the coffee table with the ancient peeling magazines stuck to the glass tabletop, the empty flowerpots in the corners that used to hold ferns, or something, but now only hold dirt.
Molly turns the paper over and grabs a pen in her shaking fist. How? she writes, because the answer isn’t really no, but she can’t even imagine what help would mean.
When she returns from the restaurant, she finds another note—longer this time, the handwriting in the self-assured and blocky font of another writer. The man, she thinks. Scott, that syllable so clipped and firm and final.
Ten miles out from here they’ve cleared the marshes and built a town. There’s people living there. Ordinary people, like you and me. You’d be safe there. We can take you with us when we go.
Molly instinctively crumples the paper as if Mother is standing over her shoulder. She has no real idea of what a town would mean. She can define the word, but she can’t fill in the details. She is looking again at the note when one of the regulars passes through the lobby on his way back from breakfast, stepping heavily, his eyes—what she thinks of as his eyes, she’s not really sure—staying, for a while, on her.
Molly rends the note in pieces, then reassembles it and tapes the pieces back together. She hides it between the pages of her least favorite romance novel, the one where a man who is a highlander—what this is exactly, Molly doesn’t know—kidnaps a princess en route to her family’s winter castle and ravishes her in a barn. Molly recognizes that this is supposed to be titillating, but something about the confinement, the darkness, is only frightening to her. There is a sentence about the moonlight coming through the cracks in the ceiling, shadowing the highlander’s face, his eyes in the darkness like glowing cinders. Molly thinks about this sentence whenever she goes in to see Mother at night and the two have become somehow connected in her mind. She hides the note on the page where the hated sentence appears, where she will have to overcome an extra layer of dread to look at it again. This is the safest thing to do.
The couple does not try to talk with her anymore, although they persist in bothering the regulars at breakfast. The end date of their stay nears and Molly thinks of the note but does not reread it. When she goes into 7A to change the couple’s sheets and clean their bathroom, she tries not to be fascinated with the souvenirs of the other world that they have brought with them: the silver aerosol bottle that makes the woman’s hair smell like chemicals, the lipsticks in burgundy and rose and peach. The man’s razor lies carelessly beside the sink, inches from two toothbrushes. These are like magic talismans to Molly. She reverently does not touch them. Only once does she let herself try a lipstick, smudging the rose across her mouth and trying the same old romance novel cover pose in the bathroom mirror. She only looks bloodied and unclean; she can see, in the subdued midmorning light, that she does look older than forty-six, much older, decades maybe.
Molly used to get the words ravished and ravaged confused when she started reading romance novels as a child. She imagined the heroines getting gored to death like the Flamingo’s guests did, their skin viciously unzipped, their organs ripped out. She thought that those women, titian-haired and lovely, were also getting fed to someone who was never going to stop being hungry. She felt neither fear nor excitement when she imagined this to be her own eventual future condition: it just seemed true, too inevitable for her to have feelings about.
◊
Mother’s looking sickly when Molly goes into her room. She’s slumped down in the lounger, her stalk-like fingers resting weakly on the closed lid of the cooler. Molly goes into the closet and gets the IV equipment, fingers shaking as if this is the first time. Stupid girl, she thinks, you could do this asleep. Mother shifts drowsily as Molly prepares the bag and the needle. Molly gently lifts Mother’s hand by the shortest of her fingers and sets it in Mother’s lap. She’s reaching for the cooler’s lid when Mother takes a sharp, sudden breath and slaps her hand down across Molly’s. Pain like a bee sting flickers across the back of Molly’s hand, lifting the same blisters that always come from contact with Mother’s humid skin. Despite the pain, Molly holds perfectly still for a second, watching Mother look at her through heavy-lidded eyes.
“Not from there,” Mother mutters.
She wants the couple in 7A, Molly realizes. She knows what’s been denied her and she’s punishing Molly for withholding them. Molly is not supposed to have things for herself; Molly is only supposed to be Mother’s lon
g arm reaching into the lobby and the overgrown parking lot, plucking morsels of food to be devoured by Mother’s hungry dark mouth.
“You can’t have it from them,” Molly says through gritted teeth.
A smile crawls across Mother’s face, landing in the hollows of her right cheek. “Not them,” she rasps, letting her hand fall back. “Or her, I should say. She’s impure. I slum it like that, I might as well have one of our regulars. You think she looks like you, don’t you?”
Molly feels herself nod.
“That’s what her kind does. Like will-o-the-wisps, lead you into the marshes and drown you in the swamp, stuff rotted moss in your mouth so you’re puking black forever like the head of death herself. She invite you out?”
“No,” Molly lies.
“I don’t want anything from her. It’s you. You’re the purest thing in this putrid world, girly. I’m so weak tonight. Pop a vein and fill the bag. Only blood tonight, that’s it. You’ll eat a Twinkie and feel perfect in the morning.”
Molly feels like a thin thread inside of her, floss-thin, spiderweb-thin, is snapping. She looks into Mother’s dark glistening eyes, waiting for—what? Nothing, she thinks, there is nothing to see. She leaps up and tears her hand away from Mother’s and runs to the door. After she slams it shut, she turns the key in the lock. Then, horrifyingly, she throws the key as far as she can, seeing the metal glint as it moves through the air before plunking with finality into the swamp. She can’t come back now. This offense is too unforgivable. If Mother lives, if, Mother won’t take her.
She goes to 7A and knocks heavily on the door. Scott answers, Janine at his shoulder.
“I want to come with you,” Molly says. “And I want to leave now.”
Thin Places Page 6
