The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  No one was on the line.

  After her husband died, she had dreams where he was ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night, and then once it actually happened, also around two in the morning: she was awake and the doorbell was ringing for real. She ran downstairs and flung the door open, even though any Final Girl would know opening up your house in the middle of the night was an invitation to be murdered—but nothing, so far as she could tell, was out there.

  * * *

  She wondered what she would dream about after her father was gone.

  * * *

  By the time Clare found her way back to the Cure Hotel, the afternoon sun shone down on the mountains and her clothes had hardened into an exoskeleton. Patients in their beige tracksuits still populated the lawn. One woman raised her hand in greeting.

  Clare walked straight through the lobby and to the terrace, where the bar had been overtaken by a group of birders. There was an older couple in sunbonnets; two women, newlyweds; adult twin sisters, American; and a man who appeared to be unaccompanied. They were all recounting the glory of having seen the bee hummingbird, a species exclusive to Cuba, smaller than a bumblebee and thus very difficult to spot.

  The woman in the sunbonnet asked Clare if she had come from the trails, and for a moment her heart surged, thinking this woman might be about to tell her that they had found a man roaming the forest, sopping and barefoot and looking for a person who fit her description.

  We heard the most terrible screaming, the woman said, her voice alight with excitement. I thought we were going to find a dead body out there, like in a Nelson DeMille novel.

  Nelson DeMille has never set a novel in Cuba, said her husband.

  Well, the woman said, I think he should.

  The birders collected a round of magenta daiquiris, and the pairs drifted over to round tables stationed under green umbrellas, leaving the unaccompanied man adrift on the terrace. Before joining the others, one of the newlyweds put her hand on Clare’s shoulder and asked, gently, if she was aware that she was bleeding from her forehead.

  Clare took a seat and ordered a straight vodka from a bartender in a maroon vest and heavy eyeliner. She soaked a paper napkin in water and pressed it to the short, bloodied crown at her hairline.

  After she swam to the pool’s limestone edge and heaved her body onto dry land, she had found herself on yet another winding trail. She had looked back at the falls and seen that she had not dropped very far at all. The greatest danger would have been bashing her head on a rock.

  Wet footprints stamped across the brown dirt. Ahead she had glimpsed Richard moving through the trees.

  She’d imagined scurrying back up the riverbank and gathering his shoes, his socks. She’d imagined stuffing his socks in her pockets and wearing his shoes on her hands, marching through the forest and clapping the soles together, flushing him out.

  On the trail, the falls churning behind her, she had clutched her sopping backpack to her chest and remembered the white box, the reel of film. She clawed through her pack; the wet cardboard fell apart in her hands. She pinched a thin plastic tab between her thumb and forefinger, pulled out a few frames, all dewed with river. She mopped them dry on her shirt.

  She had looked again toward the forest. Richard was still visible. Even without her binoculars she could see him stepping through the trees.

  She had raised the reel to the sky.

  I lost it in a shark attack, a voice said.

  The unaccompanied man appeared next to her. He opened his mouth wide, baring his teeth.

  Lost what?

  She finished her vodka and asked for another. Language felt soft on her tongue. A poster from Paradiso Cuba was tacked to the wall behind the bar, an empty blue lounge chair on a white beach, shaded by a thatched umbrella. She wondered why the chair was empty. Perhaps so that the viewer could visualize themselves sitting there and looking out, with their secret subjective eye.

  My left ear, the man said. His collarbone was a ridge across his chest. His cheeks were padded with dove-gray stubble.

  She squinted at the side of his head. If her vision could be trusted, his left ear was exactly where it should be.

  But I can see your ear right there. She pointed at his temple.

  Don’t be fooled! It’s a fake.

  He detached his left ear in one swift movement, like twisting open a bottle. He tossed the fake ear around in his hands. He placed it on the table. He started telling Clare to touch it, go ahead and touch it, and when she did she was repulsed by the way it felt just like a real ear: the warm squish of skin, the firm line of cartilage.

  The bartender sighed and turned away from this spectacle, annoyed yet unsurprised, as though this man had been removing his ear on this terrace every night for years.

  A tiny green frog hopped across the bar, heart wild under the skin.

  A hot wind raked the treetops.

  On the trail, she had squinted at one of the frames and was able to make out a figure—a woman, a sight. She was standing at a kitchen sink, head bowed, as though she was staring at something in the basin, as though a whole world might be contained in there. Clare brought the frame closer and realized she was looking at herself, in her parents’ kitchen in Florida. She was being viewed from a strange angle, perhaps through a window. She had not felt the weight of the camera, had not felt the weight of her husband’s eye behind the lens, and she had felt shamed by her blindness, a hot clench in her heart.

  I prefer the mountains to the beaches, the man told her, a lit cigarette drooping between his fingers. The beaches are infested with crabs. Last winter, I stayed at a seaside resort with salsa classes on the beach and before long everyone was running away from the crabs.

  What are you even doing here? she asked him.

  I am escaping the Canadian winter. He exhaled through his teeth. I live in the town of Regina. Do you know how cold it gets in the town of Regina?

  He sang the name Regina. The hot orange tip of his cigarette resembled the fuse on a bomb.

  He winked. On the other hand, the seaside resort was, as they say, an all-inclusive. I got two marriage proposals in a week.

  Don’t worry, he said, winking again. You’re too old for me.

  Sir, she thought. Don’t make me murder you.

  She eyed the fork someone had left on the bar.

  He asked Clare what her story was, in a tone that indicated he had zero interest in her story and was merely trying to keep the conversation afloat, and so she started in on elevators, the one arena in which she still felt a modicum of certainty.

  Hoists appeared in the third century. The first electric elevator was built by the German inventor Werner von Siemens. A single steel elevator cable is strong enough to hold a car. Her favorite elevators in the world? The Hammetschwand in Switzerland and the AquaDom in Germany. The Sky Tower in New Zealand. The Yokohama in Japan.

  She imagined cables snapping, a wild spray of black tentacles. She imagined a car exploding as it struck the bottom of the shaft.

  He looked at her, his head wreathed with smoke. Behind the bar the woman in the maroon vest appeared to be setting something on fire. The man clasped his ear to his heart. Clare recalled the time her mother found a prosthetic finger in a recently vacated room. You’d think someone would come back for that, her father had remarked, but no. They kept it in the reception desk; once a new employee mistook it for a pencil eraser.

  Hey, what’s the matter with you? the man asked as though he was noticing for the first time that something was not quite right with this woman alone at the bar, half-drunk and bleeding.

  As she stared at the image of herself on film, Clare had imagined stepping into the frame and taking that past self, that self who no longer existed, by the hand and walking her straight into her own future.

  When the sun shifted in the sky and the frame went translucent, she had turned to the forest, the strip of film held to her face like a view finder.

  Richard was gone. Nothin
g but sepia air between the trees.

  At Albany Memorial, less than fifty days ago, the surgeon had walked into the waiting room and Clare had felt the room tilt as he took her arm and said nothing of Final Girls. Instead he said, Maybe if we had gotten to him sooner, maybe we could have done more for your husband then, but the way it happened we just ran out of time.

  It’s your face. At the bar, the man from Regina pressed a hand to his stubbled cheek.

  He said, You look like somebody just died.

  Clare returned to Havana alone.

  She hitched a ride with the American twins, who were leaving the Cure Hotel for Cienfuegos. The twins had freckled noses and bright blue eyes. They were tall and tan; when they met Clare in the lobby, the backpacks hitched to their shoulders looked as long and heavy as sleds. One of them had a birthmark in the shape of a butterfly on her bicep. They were traveling on a pair of black motorbikes.

  Americans have to stick together, said one twin.

  Especially women, said the other.

  The twins fist-bumped each other and then Clare.

  Clare went with the woman with the birthmark. She mounted the bike and wrapped her arms around the woman’s firm waist. Her neck smelled floral. It had been a long time since Clare had touched another woman with such intimacy, the motorbike now an interior zone of vulnerability.

  The sisters wore headlamps around their helmets, the beams cutting through the shadows of early evening. The mountain road blazed with light. A rock, the golden eyes of an animal, a quivering plant—the lights seized these fragments, held them for a moment, and then bumped along. The bikes accelerated into a dense wind and then dove downhill, bounding over a large pothole.

  At the bottom of the road, the sea.

  The water was like a chart mapping variations of the color blue: turquoise in the shallows, royal in the depths. Clare saw the white blast of waves striking shore and gulls crossing over, bobbing stiffly in the air, as though they were not real birds but decoys supported by invisible strings. This world of nature that would push on.

  On the bike, Clare sweated, her stomach cramped. She drank down the salted air. She felt like the water was chasing them.

  In the final sliver of daylight, the sisters wanted to stop at a slender beach. A few families were huddled under thatched umbrellas. Two children darted in and out of the tide, shrieking about the temperature. She took out her binoculars and caught whitecaps in the shape of claws.

  The sisters chained their bikes to the wood fence that surrounded a bereft snack bar. They hiked up their pants and ran screaming into the sea.

  They did not come back alone, but in the company of two young men, also looking for a ride to Cienfuegos. The men were muscled and handsome in their sleeveless T-shirts and denim shorts, seawater dripping from their hair. They spoke to the twins in German, a language Clare recognized but could not understand, and the twins spoke to the men in English—yet somehow the four of them were able to make themselves understood.

  Sorry, one twin said to Clare, her feet bright with sea.

  You can find a taxi over there, said the twin with the birthmark. She pointed in the direction of the snack bar.

  She watched the twins unchain the bikes and drag them back toward the road, the two men trotting along in their wake.

  * * *

  In Cienfuegos, the streets were long and straight, the southern edge kissed by a large bay. When the taxi dropped her at the station, it was late and the next train did not leave until the following afternoon. She spent the night in the station, though she did not sleep, did not so much as close her eyes. She sat upright on a wood bench until it was time to board, and then she rode the French Train through the day and into the night, slumped over like she’d been shot. She thought about things she had not thought about in a very long time, like her first memory of wonder, which had occurred in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at the age of five. She was in the car with her parents. They were winding up a mountainous road, in the early morning. She could not remember their exact destination; she remembered only the smoky fog nestled in the ridges, as though the mountains were being consumed by their own breath, and the voice of her father telling her that God did not live in the cosmos, like many people thought, but inside of things, inside trees and mountains; it was, as Clare had thought, breath. Her mother, who was driving, pointed out that the fog came from the atmosphere, not from the earth, and then Clare’s father rolled down the window and told his daughter to smell the air and she did; she craned her neck and sniffed that thing people called air—something that no one could see but that everyone felt all the time—like an eager dog. She remembered smelling pine and tar and salt and animal, but the pine was the strongest, the scent that overlay the other scents, and for every year after she would not be able to smell pine without thinking, fleetingly, about the breath of God.

  * * *

  By the time her parents retired, Clare had read every single TripAdvisor review of the Seahorse. After the Cat 3 hurricane, two of the evacuated guests gave the inn one star, on account of the storm ruining their vacation. One of these reviewers had spelled “hurricane” with a single r. Clare had logged many complaints about the absence of a swimming pool, even though there was no promise of a swimming pool on the website or anywhere else and the Atlantic Ocean was less than a hundred feet away—the problem was that people tended to equate Florida with swimming pools. The most scathing one-star review was titled “FINE PLACE IF YOU DON’T MIND LOSING YOUR WILL TO LIVE.”

  The root of “tourism” sprang from the Saxon word Torn. Later Torn became Torn-us, “what gives turns,” and Torn-are, “to give turns,” roughly translating into “a departure with the intention of returning.” I could stay here forever was something people felt free to say only when they knew there was no such possibility.

  The night of the hurricane, Clare had been outwardly frightened by the lashing rain and inwardly frightened by the presence of Ellis Martin. In response, her father suspended her usual bedtime. He announced a dinner of chocolate bars and Cokes. By nine the electricity was out. They played charades, taking turns spotlighting each other with a flashlight. Her father performed certain guests—the northerners who had never seen a lizard or a flying cockroach; the rowdy spring breakers. Ellis Martin pretended to be celebrities unknown to Clare, though her father recognized her impressions right away; she was shut out of their language. Clare was a dog running on the beach. She was driving a car. She thought of the boy, visiting from Michigan, that lifeguards had saved from a riptide that summer. She raised her hands straight over her head. She turned in a circle. She was drowning.

  Look at you, her father had said. You’re a ballerina. You’re dancing.

  He had always been a man of imagination.

  When it was time to sleep, her father put sheets on the living room couch, his bed for the night, and showed Ellis Martin into the master bedroom. He left a lantern flashlight in Clare’s room, with an extra set of batteries. He said she could leave it on all night, if she was afraid. He closed her door and for a long while she heard nothing but the besieged apartment, the whistle and creak of it fending off the storm.

  In the middle of the night, she was awoken by the sound of a door opening and closing, two gentle clicks, low laughter through the walls. She turned away from the noise and closed her eyes and reemerged hours later, into the daylit quiet. The storm was over and Ellis Martin was gone. Her father claimed she had found a tow truck that morning, though Clare had already started to suspect the car trouble had been a story, constructed for her benefit.

  That afternoon, she helped her father unboard the windows. After he pulled out the nails, he handed them to her and she returned them to a cardboard container the size of a matchbox. In twenty-four hours, the inn would reopen for business; the owners in Atlanta would be pleased. That Christmas her parents would receive a bonus.

  Did you know, her father said, that when your mother was a child, when she was exactly your age, she fell
into a well and no one found her for two days?

  Clare did not know.

  The well was deep in the woods, he went on. Her parents thought she had been abducted or that she had run away or gotten into an accident. Imagine being down there. Imagine hearing nothing human for miles. Imagine looking up and watching the sky go dark.

  Clare could imagine it, at least a little. During the storm, she had felt like they’d dropped down into another layer; they were no longer on the exterior of the earth but somewhere just below. She had always thought her mother, with her personality of surfaces, and whatever those surfaces were eliding, was the parent who had the capacity to shock Clare, to do something that might one day scare the daylights out of her.

  No one will ever know what passed between them, her father said next. He kneeled in front of a window. He wiped his forehead with his wrist.

  Between who? Clare squeezed her small fist around a nail.

  Your mother and the well.

  Clare never saw Ellis Martin again, and when she’d read her name on the business card her father had mailed her, she’d felt like someone was dropping ice cubes down her shirt. She had no idea they had remained in touch, had maintained a relationship; clearly her father’s own second, secret self had kept busy. She could not even see Ellis Martin’s face clearly, it had been so long. She could not imagine her as an older woman.

  As it happened, Ellis Martin was still a doctor—an anesthesiologist. Her father did not want to go on past a certain point and he wanted his desired course of action to remain a secret; he felt his own wife was not to be trusted with his wishes. His daughter, on the other hand; he knew what she was made of. When the time came, Ellis Martin was the person Clare was to call—what she had agreed to provide would be the sickle, Clare the hand.

  * * *