Hell's Hotel

by Lesley Choyce

  Up until this part of her life, Tara had always felt that she understood the world. Things had made sense. Now nothing made sense. Her friend Emma was gone forever — dead. Josh, who considered himself one of the biggest rebels in the school, was running for president of the student council. Her parents, her own predictable, dependable parents, had decided to separate and live thousands of miles apart. And now her friend Jenn, her very best friend in the world, was starting to avoid her for no clear reason. Sometimes she acted as if she didn’t even want to talk to Tara.

  Jenn was throwing away school. One day she was there, the next day she was absent. Her grades were in the basement. There was a good chance she wouldn’t pass the year. And now Jenn was having an on-again, off-again friendship with Tara. They were drifting apart, and Tara didn’t understand why.

  Finally, when she saw Jenn trying to avoid her in the school hallway, she said, “Tell me what’s wrong.” She had asked the question before. This time Jenn gave in.

  “That day after you stayed out all night.”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I saw you come out of the restaurant, the Chinese place. At lunch.”

  “I tried to find you. I was going to invite you, too.”

  “I wasn’t hiding. You knew which class I had before lunch. You could have found me if you wanted to.”

  It was true, Tara knew it. She had not tried very hard to find Jenn. “I’m sorry. I tried. I didn’t know it was such a big deal, okay?” she snapped. But she knew it was a big deal. After a day on the street, she knew what food was all about; she knew what being hungry was all about. And she had decided to eat alone anyway, to pig-out. She had decided not to share her twenty bucks with her friend, who would have to fend for herself. This, after Jenn had scrounged breakfast for them both. She silently cursed herself. “Let me buy you lunch today. I’ll make it up to you.” Tara opened her purse, pulled out some bills.

  “No, that’s okay. I think I can cover my own lunch today. Thanks anyway,” Jenn said nonchalantly.

  There was something else going on here.

  “You got a job?” Tara said.

  “No.”

  “You got money panhandling?”

  “No. Rob gives me lunch money.”

  “What? You’re back with him? Jenn, you’re crazy. That guy wants to run your life. He wants to control you. Don’t be stupid.”

  Jenn was angry, really angry. She didn’t like to be insulted. “You think I want to have to sleep in some abandoned building every night? You think I like begging creeps for change? Well, Rob is not the greatest, but he is dependable. He takes care of me and I’ve got a place to stay. Who cares what you think?”

  After that Tara didn’t see Jenn in school for a couple of days. She tracked down Craig to see if he knew what was going on.

  “I’ve seen a lot better guys than Rob, but I’ve seen a lot worse,” Craig said. “I don’t know what’s good or bad for Jenn. I have a hard enough time figuring that out for myself. I never liked Rob. But I try not to judge people. I mean, he comes from somewhere else. Who knows what he did there?”

  Tara hadn’t thought about Rob’s unknown history. What had he done in Toronto? Why had he come to Halifax?

  Tara got his last name from Craig. Rob Sellars. He wasn’t in the phone book, but Information had an R. Sellars on Portland Street in Dartmouth. When Tara dialed the number from a pay phone, Jenn answered.

  “Jenn, it’s me. Can we talk?”

  She heard Rob in the background asking, “Who is it?”

  “It’s nobody,” Jenn said, away from the phone.

  “You make me feel like nobody,” Tara said. “Jenn, you know how I feel about you living with him. But we still need to talk.”

  There as a brief silence, then, “Rob doesn’t want me to talk to you.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  But Jenn was gone. Rob was on the line. “Take a hint, okay,” was all he said. And then he slammed down the phone.

  There was dead air. Nothing. “You can’t do this,” Tara said into the phone. But there was no one on the line to hear.

  Minus a Mother

  Dead air. Dead space. That’s what her life had become. Tara and her father took Tara’s mother to the airport to see her mother off. They helped carry her luggage to the airline counter, said goodbye, and hugged just before she went through the security check. And then she was gone.

  Tara could have gone to Vancouver with her mother. That might have been new and exciting. But it wasn’t what she wanted. She wasn’t sure she could handle her “new mom” in another city. She didn’t want any more changes. She desperately wished things could go back to the way they had been. But it was too late for that. So she stayed where she was, living with her father.

  He was trying very hard to be nice to Tara. He took her out to dinner, took her shopping for clothes, bought a TV for her room. But none of it made her feel any better. Her family was minus a mother. “Try not to worry about it,” her father said. “You and I can spend more time together. I want us to be good friends.”

  Working at the nursing home had never been the same after Emma was gone. It was so strange to go into Emma’s old room and see someone else there. Tara made a special effort to get to know the new patient, eighty-nine-year-old Carrie Brooks. But Carrie wasn’t like Emma. She was certainly happy enough. She had a wild imagination and talked non-stop about all sorts of crazy things. Carrie saw things that weren’t there and continued conversations even if no one was in the room. Every once in a while she would talk to Tara directly, always calling her Sara, and she would describe what she was seeing.

  “See that over there,” she’d say, pointing to an empty, pale blue wall. “That’s the most beautiful sunset you ever want to see. Look at them colours and the trees all outlined like that. I love to see the sun go down over the water. This is the life. Good thing there are no blackflies out tonight, Sara.” Another time it would be a sailboat at sea or a big cruise ship coming up the harbour.

  Tara would always pretend that she saw whatever Carrie wanted her to see, and so the visits became a sort of game. Carrie never really let Tara talk, though, about herself or her dreams, like Emma had; Carrie never asked for advice or gave any. All she did was invite Tara along for whatever imaginary excursion she was into. The nurses, who had been trying to discourage Carrie from going on about such nonsense, didn’t really appreciate Tara providing encouragement. Tara, on the other hand, couldn’t see what harm it caused.

  Every once in a while, though, Carrie would get a bit too enthusiastic. She’d be shouting about some scene she was watching on the wall and Tara couldn’t get her to calm down. Then the nurse would come in and give Carrie a couple of pills from a small vial. In about twenty minutes she would calm down, her descriptive monologue would peter out and she would just stare out the window looking tired and dreamy, but very happy.

  One Sunday, Tara was feeling sorry for herself and she didn’t feel like doing much of the real work: the dusting and cleaning she had been hired to do. Carrie was asleep, so she wouldn’t even get a free tour of Carrie’s imagination. Tara was bored and restless and was wondering what her mother was up to right at that moment, four time zones away. She found herself staring at the pills on Carrie’s dresser. The nurse must have accidentally left them behind.

  Tara remembered the night she got high with Jenn, the feeling inside Café Chebucto with the dancing and the pulsating room. She wasn’t thinking about what happened later that night. She just knew she wanted to feel differently. She wanted to escape the heaviness and boredom of the job and the depression she felt about family and friends.

  Tara picked up the vial, unscrewed the lid. The contents looked harmless enough. How many did they give Carrie? She thought it was two. How many would Jenn take if she was here?
Tara read the label, but she’d never heard of the drug before. It didn’t matter. She took out three pills, thought twice about it, and put one back. Throwing her head back, she swallowed them, put the rest back on the dresser and went back to work, straightening up Carrie’s room.

  A half hour later, she was cleaning the activities room when she started to giggle. It was something somebody said about a new TV show. Tara laughed and laughed even though she realized what had been said was not very funny. She laughed until her eyes watered, then she tried to get control of herself.

  A frail elderly man with a cane asked her if she knew what time it was. Why did that seem so hilarious? Tara didn’t know. She took a deep breath and tried to steady herself. As she walked down the hall she realized that she was leaning a little bit one way and then the other. She liked the pleasant, swirling feeling in her head. Her feet and hands seemed like they were miles away from her. And she had an uncontrollable desire to giggle. Tara tried to straighten herself and look perfectly normal as she walked past the nurses’ station, but she could tell they were staring at her so she decided to go back to Carrie’s room and take it easy, pretend she was visiting with her for a while.

  Carrie was awake now and already describing a garden of irises and roses that she saw on her wall. Tara sat down and pretended she saw it all. She even threw in some of her own details, which apparently Carrie could see as well. It was a great little game. Until the nurse arrived.

  “I thought you already cleaned in here,” the nurse said sternly, as if she liked to order around the cleaning staff, people lower on the totem pole than her.

  “It’s my break,” Tara said, trying to act normal. “Carrie and I are just taking a walk through her garden. Right Carrie?”

  “That’s right, dear.”

  But the nurse was suspicious. She’d probably seen people high before. Then she spotted the vial left on the dresser. She poured the pills out and counted them, then she checked a booklet that she was carrying with her.

  When she looked up at Tara, with a verdict already in her eyes, she said simply, “Let’s go.”

  “No,” Tara said. “You have no right to tell me what to do.” Her words came out somewhat slurred and sounded as if they were coming from miles away.

  The nurse left the room and a few minutes later, Mrs. Klein arrived. Tara knew that she was in big trouble, but for some reason she didn’t care.

  “I think your career here is over,” Mrs. Klein said flatly.

  “You can’t do that,” Tara said indignantly.

  “I can and I have. Now I’d like you to leave quietly.”

  A minute ago Tara had felt like nothing in the world could change the way she felt — relaxed, carefree, happy. But now this woman was giving her a hard time and she felt outraged. She stood up and walked to Mrs. Klein. “I don’t think you understand, do you?” she said in a loud, aggressive voice.

  “Understand what?”

  “You don’t understand these people, here, in this place. They have feelings, you know. They need to be treated with respect. They need more than just a bed and food. They need friends. They need life!”

  Tara wasn’t sure where the speech came from. Sometimes she felt that way, that the patients weren’t treated with enough respect. She had never really come out and said it before. But now she realized she wasn’t talking about the patients, not really, not now. She was talking about herself. Tara stood very close to Mrs. Klein. She had never liked the woman, and now she seemed particularly cold to Tara, even cruel.

  “You don’t understand anything about it, do you?” she said, right into Mrs. Klein’s face. Tara’s hatred rose and she wanted to hit her.

  In a calm controlled voice Mrs. Klein said, “I understand that I have to fire any of my staff who are caught taking the patients’ medication in order to get high.”

  There. It had been said. Tara felt the anger swell up within her. She saw several of the nurses standing outside the door, watching. Tara turned to look at Carrie, who was strangely silent with a look of confusion on her face.

  “Sara?” she asked.

  Tara didn’t know what to do. She knew she had made a big mistake. Mrs. Klein stood there like a stone wall, waiting.

  Tara made her feet start walking. “I’m out of here,” was all she said, trying to hold onto the edge of defiance that had made her feel strong and righteous.

  As her eyes were confronted by the bright midday sun outside the door of the nursing home, Tara suddenly felt very afraid. She knew that one more thing was screwed up and now she saw her life on a serious downhill slide. She knew that this time it was her fault. She was afraid of the anger she felt, and she realized she had never acted out her anger towards anyone like that before. But she knew that it wasn’t just directed at Mrs. Klein.

  Welcome to the Club

  Tara’s father was clearly upset about Tara losing her job. He wanted to speak to Mrs. Klein, but Tara talked him out of it. She hadn’t told him the real story. If she was lucky, he’d never find out.

  Their time together was often very quiet. He rented several DVDs but, no matter how hard he tried, it was clear that they weren’t interested in the same sorts of films.

  “Whatever happened to Josh?” her father asked one night after a movie, while they were eating ice cream at Dairy Queen.

  “He’s history,” she said. “We ended our relationship so he could go into politics. He’s going to be president of the student council.”

  “Josh?”

  “Yeah, I know. Surprised me too.”

  “How are things going for you in school, anyway?”

  “Fine,” she said automatically.

  It was the familiar little chant. But it wasn’t true anymore. School used to be easy. Now Tara had a hard time concentrating. Her grades were really slipping.

  “No, that’s not true,” she confessed finally. “I’m not doing very well right now. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I think you’re still upset about your mother and me. I feel very bad about that.”

  “I know, I know. You’re still on a guilt trip. Well, it’s done. I can’t change that. So the way I feel is my problem, not yours.”

  “Maybe you should see a counsellor. I know some excellent people on staff.”

  “No, I don’t need that sort of help. Maybe I just need a change, too. Remember I was talking about travelling when I graduated, going to Asia maybe?”

  “Your mother and I certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility. But it would use up all your savings and then some.”

  “What if I wanted to take some time off from school and do it now?”

  Her father now looked very serious. “I think it’s premature. You’re too young.”

  “I could handle it.” Her favourite phrase. She always used to say that she could handle anything. Jenn had believed her. So had Emma. Her parents were usually convinced as well. But now, as she said it, the words sounded less than truthful. It was a dream, a fantasy, this travel thing. She knew that her dream of travelling, of going to exotic locations and learning the language, getting to know the people and living independently was still just that, a dream. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she couldn’t handle doing it alone.

  “I think you should wait.”

  “Guess you’re right,” Tara conceded.

  Her father smiled. He probably figured that for once Tara was actually listening to his advice. But he couldn’t see into her head. He couldn’t see the whole picture.

  Tara wished that she and her father could really talk. He always said they were good friends but it was never like that. There was always a distance between them. She could never really understand what made him tick, why he was so in love with his job. She and her mother had been close until the time her mom took up photography.
Even so, Tara had always relied on friends for the heart-to-heart things: Josh, Jenn, Emma. Each of them had slipped out of her life.

  ***

  The next day, Tara was sitting in math, failing a quiz on quadratic equations. The seat alongside her where Jenn should have been sitting was empty. Tara now felt it was her fault that Jenn had gone back to Rob. On days when Jenn came to school, Rob would be there waiting for her at the end of the day. If Tara tried to call, Rob would always answer and refuse to let Jenn get on the phone.

  Something about failing a math quiz made her feel like she had nothing to lose. After school she walked downtown to the ferry terminal and got on the boat. It was a bright, breezy day on the harbour. She stood on the top deck with only a handful of other passengers. As she looked down into the dark blue, swirling water, Tara tried to convince herself that she had the courage to face up to Rob. She’d demand to see Jenn. Then she would try to convince Jenn to move out and come back to school. The way things were going these days, though, she wondered if she would botch this up, like she had done with everything else.

  Seagulls were gliding along with the ferry like guardian angels. Above them were soft cumulus clouds on a north wind, dancing out towards the sea. She looked way up into the clouds, felt the cool breeze on her face, and then closed her eyes. Emma. There was something about Emma swirling around in her head. Something she couldn’t quite place, but she felt that Emma was there with her. She didn’t know if she even believed in an afterlife. But there was something about this old woman that was still with her, that wouldn’t let go. She opened her eyes.

  Suddenly Tara felt a whole lot better about going to see Jenn, one hundred percent more confident that it was the right thing to do.

  Craig had told her where Jenn was living with Rob. Craig always seemed to know everything about kids from the street. The apartment was upstairs, over a bar that advertised topless dancers. As she walked by, she was afraid to look in. On the street outside, a swarm of motorcycles were parked. Alongside the bar she found a dingy door, unlocked, and beyond it, a narrow stairway. She went up and knocked on the upstairs door. No answer. She knocked again, louder. Still nothing.