Purgatory Hotel

by Anne-Marie Ormsby

  The night her parents died in a horrific car accident was the second time Dakota had met Jackson, but after the phone call they did not say a word to each other, even though they sat in an empty waiting room together for hours. Their eyes met once or twice, but she looked away swiftly each time; she did not want him looking at her. Her eyes were red and swollen and her cheeks were stained with tears and all she wanted was to be held. She wanted to be back in her daddy’s arms again, on the rare occasions that he hugged her, safe and warm in the smell of his clean clothes, dozing as he watched the television, his arm around her a comfort to drive away the bad dream she had had, the terrible dream of his death, the cold white hospital corridors that led to the room where he and Mum lay, gone from the earth.

  But she was not going to wake up from this, and Daddy would not be downstairs in the lounge while Mum made cocoa for them both. This was it. They were gone. Lula was talking to the counsellor that Dakota had refused to talk to, and there was no one around to comfort her, except Jackson, the dark stranger.

  After she could take it no longer, she burst into huge body-shaking sobs. Jackson did not move; he just watched her from across the room. Suddenly she was on her feet and running towards him. He simply opened up his coat and wrapped it around her as she fell crying into his arms, curling up on his lap and burying herself in his chest. After a few moments she began to calm, and the tears dissipated. They stayed that way; she lay enfolded in the wings of his coat for another hour before Lula returned, sedated and bleary eyed. Dakota was asleep in his arms by now, and he stood to carry her out to the car. Lula told her later that she thought it looked like one of their mothers’ religious paintings: the angel carrying the sleeping child to safety. She always said she was relieved that Dakota had been comforted by Jackson during the time she had to be calmed by a therapist. She never said a word to Dakota about what their parents had looked like at the end. The sight of their mangled bodies would be her memory alone; she never wanted her little sister to think of them that way, and Dakota had the sense to only ever ask Lula about the identifying process once.

  By the time they got home it was around 3am. Dakota had awoken in the car and heard Lula say that she needed Jackson to stay with them that night. But when they got into the quiet empty house, the two girls went up the stairs hand in hand, to their parents’ bedroom, and lay down on the bed in the darkness. Jackson stayed downstairs in the lounge to practise his own insomnia in front of the TV.

  Lula and Dakota lay side by side recounting memories as they came to them. Mum’s scones, the songs she used to sing at bed-time when they were little.

  “‘Where have all the flowers gone’ was my favourite,” offered Dakota, as a passing car threw a slanting light across the black ceiling. Everything became so precious suddenly, every memory needed to be spoken, given life again, from the time Mum lost her wedding ring in the scone mix to the smell of her father’s Argyll sweater.

  They went on for hours, remembering and crying until, when dawn came, there was nothing left to remember, only to understand.

  As pale morning rode up to the windows of the still house, the two dark-haired sisters looked into each other’s eyes and promised to be strong. Dakota’s eleven years of life had suddenly developed meaning and substance. She was alive because two wonderful people had fallen in love, and even though their hopes of a big family were dashed by death’s dark hands, they had not lost faith that God would give them another child. That morning, through grief and pain, Dakota and Lula vowed that, no matter how low they got, they would never take their own lives. For no matter how difficult it got or how pointless it seemed to go on, their lives were evidence that Hannah and Jack Crow had lived and had been in love.

  TWELVE: Death’s Dark Veil

  In the days that followed, Lula was distraught and depressed, and Dakota stayed home from school to tend to her sister.

  In the evenings, Jackson came over, to cook and take over the watch on Lula. Dakota became peripheral as Lula grew worse, unable to sleep at all anymore; the doctor eventually prescribed new medication, strong sedatives for night-time and anti-depressants for the day time. She worked like clockwork from then on as long as Dakota and Jackson ensured that the correct medication was administered at the right times of day.

  Dakota was informed eventually that her parents had died in a car accident out in the country; her father had lost control of the car and ended up in a ditch. But sometimes she heard Lula talking when she thought she wasn’t listening and it seemed her father had had too much to drink at the party and that’s why they crashed. Lula seemed angry with their father, but Dakota couldn’t feel anything but sadness.

  Jackson began to help with the funeral arrangements as the mere mention of them threw Lula into deep dark hours of sobbing. Dakota did her best to help but she was only young and there was only so much she could do.

  The funeral was the same as all funerals, dull and painful. As her grief was pulled out of her, put on display and stretched out endlessly, Dakota tried desperately to cope with it. At the graveside, she looked across at Lula hidden behind the net veil on her black hat, make up streaking down her cheeks as Jackson put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Dakota felt a pang of jealousy; she wanted to be comforted and cuddled, but Lula had been too distraught all day to do any more than hold her hand briefly in the church; she was too lost in her own grief to comfort her baby sister.

  Various people, friends and family, gathered at the house for the wake and spent the afternoon looking mournful and pitying every time Dakota entered their field of vision. She was upset but had no tears left. She did her best to avoid conversation and wandered in an out of rooms full of loud Irish people.

  In the downstairs hallway there was a wall of framed photographs of Hannah and Jack Crow’s journey around America. The largest and most central was a beautiful image of a dry rugged landscape, full of jagged rocks and unforgiving ravines. It was a photo her father had taken of the Dakota Badlands, and her mind pushed forth the memory of talking to her mother about that picture.

  Sunlight slanted across the hall and Dakota asked her mother what that place was called.

  “That’s called the Badlands, and it’s in the state we named you after, Dakota. In fact we named you that because we liked this place so much,” explained Hannah, stroking her tapered fingers across her daughter’s face.

  “It looks so… lonely there,” managed the seven-year-old girl with dark brown plaits in her hair.

  “It is a very empty place. Nobody lives there and all you can hear is the wind.”

  Tears began to roll down Dakota’s cheeks, as her heart filled with loneliness and despair thinking of being alone there, in the dark rippling rocks and canyons, not another soul for miles of dark road and night. Alone with the wild animals and crying winds, calling out over and over that she was lost and alone.

  “What’s wrong, darling? Why are you crying?” asked Hannah desperately, kneeling down beside her quietly weeping daughter.

  “I’d be scared to be there, Mummy, on my own,” replied Dakota sadly, unsure of why the image in the photograph had filled her with such loneliness and fear. Deep in her heart somewhere she feared that one day she would feel that way again, the way that photo had made her feel. She felt that her parents had cursed her somehow by naming her after such a desolate and mournful place.

  And there in the same hallway, Dakota stood and stared at that same photograph and realised she had been right all those years before. Those feelings of loneliness and despair had returned to her again, and she felt her heart may have resembled that sharp rocky terrain, dry and haunted.

  The wake carried on around her. Occasionally she caught sight of Lula, beautiful in her fitted black suit, her hair perfect and her make-up re-applied every half hour when her tears got the better of it. Jackson tried to avoid everyone, responding politely monosyllabic to anyone who tried to engage him in conversation.

  The extended Crow family look
ed vaguely worried by Jackson’s appearance. They muttered to each other, rolling their eyes and pursing their lips. Dakota heard Auntie Kathleen say he looked like a drug addict, while cousin Deirdre pushed red curls from her eyes whispering sentences that contained the words: ‘cult,’ ‘witchcraft’ and ‘devil-worship,’ all the time crossing herself at intermittent bursts of Catholicism.

  Dakota looked at Jackson. He was staring from his glass of whisky to the wall behind Uncle Patrick’s head and back again, as Patrick tried desperately to get Jackson to say more than one word answers. Jackson was very handsome. He looked like a cross between an illustration from an Edgar Allan Poe book and Jack Kerouac. His long hair swept away from his sharp face and down the back of his neck to where it rested behind his shoulders. They still hadn’t really spoken to each other – they just shared the occasional look – but she didn’t feel uncomfortable about him. If anything, she enjoyed the fact that she didn’t feel obliged to speak whenever he was around.

  As the day wore on and the Crow family got more and more drunk, slipping in and out of arguments and renditions of old Irish songs, Dakota wished they would all go away and let her get on with her life.

  As Jackson made his way out of the room to get away from the noise, he leant down and whispered to Dakota: “Now I understand why they call a group of crows, a murder,” and moved off as she giggled quietly.

  When it was all done, life slipped into a routine again. Dakota returned to school to find she had been put back a year, Lula returned to work and Jackson moved into her parents’ bedroom with Lula, leaving Dakota alone in the room she had shared with her sister her whole life.

  Jackson continued to manage the local library; Dakota cooked her own microwave meals every evening while Lula and Jackson ate in front of the TV when they both got home from work.

  It was another year before Jackson began to communicate with Dakota.

  She loved music and spent most of her time shut away in her bedroom listening to CDs and writing in her diary. All the music she owned was taken from her parents’ room after they died. Her mother was a big fan of Bob Dylan and the Doors; she used to sing along to the songs at the top of her voice, a voice so sweet she should have been a singer herself. So every night when Dakota played the music, her mother came alive again, her voice almost audible behind the melodies. Occasionally Lula would come in on her way to bed and sing along with Dakota to their mother’s old favourites, and for a moment they were both young again and innocent; Mum and Dad were still alive, singing along too, the years rolled away and Dakota was free in her heart, unburdened by the terrible weight her parents’ death had placed on her.

  And when Lula got the sadness in her eyes, the singing stopped and Dakota’s joy dissipated. She knew that Lula would then leave, go and take her medication in her bedroom and slip away into an impenetrable slumber to dream of her Jackson reading Baudelaire and preaching to the dead.

  Now that Lula had to be sedated at night, Jackson was left alone to stay up till 3am, when hours of music, writing in his notebooks and drinking whisky would eventually send him off to sleep. He played his music loud enough for it to seep upstairs and under Dakota’s bedroom door. No noise would wake Lula, and it made Dakota sad; she felt sorry for her poor sister with her mind a mess of death and corpses, years of therapists telling her it would be OK, that the dreams of dead babies would go away if she took her drugs: one to sleep, one to wake up. And in her heart, all she wanted was her dream Prince Jackson to marry her and give her her own baby, another life to make up for those she could not save.

  But at night when Jackson was lonely himself and he needed her most, she was wrapped in a tight cocoon of forced sleep that locked her out of the world she had with Jackson.

  Dakota heard the sounds of sex less often these days as Lula and Jackson slipped into a new routine. She found that if she turned her music up loud around eight o’clock, she could drown out the noise of them in the room down the hall. At least they were still doing it after all this time, she thought, although it wasn’t as often as it once was.

  It was late at night, a week or so after Dakota’s non-existent twelfth birthday, the clock on her wall read 12.10am, and she had just smoked a cigarette she had stolen from Lula’s handbag. The August night was hot and she sat on cushions beside the window that was opened wide onto the night. The distant hum of occasional traffic rose up to meet her as she flicked the butt out onto the back garden. Since her parents had died on her birthday, she had the feeling that she might never celebrate that day again. It seemed wrong somehow.

  Lately she hadn’t been sleeping so well, staying up later and later each night, waiting for sleep to arrive and fall on her eyelids, but it always came so late now. She pondered how odd it felt, sitting alone, knowing that somewhere else in the house, Jackson was alone, too, listening to his music as always.

  A book lay open on the bed. The rest of her books sat worn and over-read on her shelves: one classic after another and a copy of her father’s favourite book, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. She read it over and over, trying to discover her father there in the pages. He was a man she hardly knew and in her mind he was only explained to her by the words in that book. He became one of the characters, telling the story of his life before she or Lula were born.

  Bob Dylan sang out of the speakers softly about wanting someone, and Dakota felt that maybe she wanted someone, too, but she was only twelve and she knew it was stupid to even think about such things. She had been reading too much poetry lately. Her heart seemed to be large and empty, populated only by the saddest words that rose out of the pages of her books. She had no friends at school, she did not fit in with anyone and she was lonely. She no longer had her late-night chats with Lula, and she felt as though she had lost her only friend.

  The hours between dusk and dawn stretched out lonely and dark, full of someone else’s words, low music from downstairs and the fear that life would always be this sad.

  Her storm green eyes filled with sadness as they flicked over the images of her parents, and the other images on her wall. A picture of Our Lady of Lourdes with her Heavenward eyes and golden roses on her feet hung opposite Dakota. She always thought that her mother looked like the Virgin Mary; she had that air of unrecognised beauty, a simple woman with flour on her apron and the biggest heart in the world, eyes cast Heavenward for answers.

  Beside the Virgin Mary was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Like the picture of Mary, it was recovered from her parents’ bedroom and seemed a must have in every Irish Catholic home. Lula had abandoned their birth religion – she hated God for taking away so many loved ones – whereas Dakota clung to the iconography of her mother’s religion. A sad-eyed, soft-cheeked man with long hair and a bleeding heart wound round with thorns looked down at Dakota. He was an icon of suffering and sacrifice. She thought of his loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane and wondered how it felt to know you were going to die.

  Her mother’s spirit was in the room. She could feel her, and she was saying the rosary and staring in Jesus’s soft eyes looking for eternity and endless stars.

  Besides all the poetry, Dakota had her mother’s Bible and prayer book on the shelf. She thought that whenever she took it down to read it her mother was happy with her somewhere.

  Crickets sang in the lawn below her window, and in the distance she could hear sirens. The music from Jackson’s midnight world crawled up the stairs, sickly haunting as the vocals kicked in with a sonorous melancholy voice.

  “I found her on a night of fire and noise…”

  She recognised the song. The album it was on was obviously a favourite of Jackson’s as he played it regularly. She reached across and turned her own stereo off so she could hear the song from downstairs properly. She didn’t know who it was but she liked it; something in it reached out to her as it crept under her door, penetrating her private space like an uninvited guest she could not turn away.

  Then there was a light tap on the door.
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  “Lula?” she said to the closed door. But when it opened she was surprised to see Jackson there. The hall light was brighter than her dim candle-lit room and he seemed more silhouette than anything else. Without words he walked in, a glass of whisky in his hand, closing the door behind him. The voice from the stereo downstairs asked feverishly, unsurely: “Do you love me?” over and over.

  Jackson moved across the room towards where she sat by the window, the closer he got the taller he seemed until he was standing over her like a giant. As he sat down on the floor, his back turned to the window, she realised he hadn’t been this close to her in a very long time. There was a mild smell of whisky on his breath and his hair slipped from behind his ears as he leant forward. From his shirt pocket, he took a box of cigarettes and offered Dakota one before taking one for himself. She looked surprised but took it anyway, wondering if he was about to tell her off.

  “You like Baudelaire?” he asked, lighting her cigarette before his own.

  “Yes, but that’s Lula’s book,” she replied, glancing at the book resting open on her bed.

  He nodded and looked at her for a moment, seemingly contemplating her hair. Looking away from her, he peered into the starlit sky and Dakota felt confused but comforted by his silent presence in the room. She smoked her cigarette still wondering if he was working up to lecture her on the dangers of smoking, but instead he just sat, head rested back on the window ledge, picking the details of the room out of the shadows.

  He reached out his glass of whisky to her with the words: “It helps.”

  The music tinkled on downstairs, slow melodic ballads filtering up the stairs past her sleeping sister’s room and under Dakota's door.

  “It helps with what?” she asked, sipping the dark liquid before grimacing at its sharp, hot taste.

  “Loneliness. I know. It doesn’t taste great, but it takes the edge off,” he muttered, taking the glass back from her.