One thing Alexis knew. Her dad had not been white. While her mother was pale, Alexis’s skin was latte creamy in tone. She may have been half black, half Asian, or half Nicaraguan, for all she knew. Not that it mattered on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Everyone was some shade of coffee or another.
LJ hobbled down the steps, Habib flapping his wings and cawing, and helped her pick up the spilled laundry. “I always got your back, little one,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”
After school, Alexis ran in through the back door into the kitchen, slung her book bag onto the table, and started to get out things for tea. Her mother’s good silver tea set. Platters for the politically correct Fig Newmans (Paul Newman’s alternative to Newtons) and granola bars all the residents preferred over cookies Alexis loved, like Oreos and Chips Ahoy.
She poured her mother’s Fino sherry into the leaded-crystal decanter. Edith had taken it medicinally, every day at four p.m. and many of the residents had taken up the habit, some drinking it clear through to bedtime.
Alexis carried the heavy tray into the parlor, where old Ursula had already parked her knitting bag and peg leg—her choice over a more conventional prosthetic after losing her leg to diabetes. In her glory days, Ursula had been a Seafair Pirate, one of the theatrical eccentrics who dresses up in pirate garb and scares children during the city’s Seafair festivities each summer. Though long retired, she still preferred to speak in pirate parlance. “Argh,” she said to Alexis. “Yer two minutes late.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Alexis busied herself setting out cups and saucers, teaspoons, sugar, and real cream in a cracked pitcher they’d used to replace the missing silver creamer.
“My pipes arrrgh all broke up in my room,” Ursula growled. “I don’t suppose yer mother’ll call a plumber.”
“I can take care of it,” Alexis said. “Is water leaking? Do I need to do it now?”
“Yes, there’s water leaking! And even though I’m an amphibian of sorts, living my life on the sea”—Alexis rolled her eyes—“I still don’t like getting me boot wet.” Luckily for the old pirate, her peg leg had a rubber bottom.
The other residents had started to filter in, and everything was set, so Alexis ran up the stairs to 307, Ursula’s apartment, and let herself in with the passkey she kept on a chain around her neck. Indeed, there was water all over the floor, and from the smell of it, Alexis suspected this little plumbing thing hadn’t just happened that day.
“Jesus H. Christ in a box,” she said, trying to trace the water flow to its source. It seemed to be coming from the bathroom, not the kitchen. Alexis sighed, then went in and kneeled in the muck to peer under the sink, pulling aside the skull-and-crossbones flag that obscured the pipes. Sure enough, water spurted from the hot-water supply. She reached up, pinched the bolt, and tried twisting it tighter, but water gushed out more fervently, soaking her plaid miniskirt and the vintage sweater her friend Linda had stolen for her from Value Village.
It was hard not to be pissed off at her mother, whose responsibility all this was, and who never would have let it get this far. She’d had a way of ferreting out trouble before it started, knowing when something was amiss before it got too bad.
“LJ!” Alexis yelled, hoping he would hear her, but knowing him, he’d already started hitting the sherry.“Oh, for God’s sake, old man!” she yelled, jumping to her feet, charging down the stairs. At the bottom, she stopped and tried to calm herself. Her mother always said “These people are our family, Alexis. Treat them with all the love and respect you do me.”
And Alexis had, her entire life. She went now to the parlor, skirt stuck to her thighs, water dribbling down her shins, and saw the old friends gathered together, arguing about the two-state solution, the situation in Latin America, the tanked economy, the battle to legalize marijuana, all of them animated and excited as if they were still twenty years old and in the thick of the fight.
She wrapped her arms around her ribs, feeling lucky to have so many people in her family, in her home. If only she could get rid of the crow.
“Um, LJ?” she said sweetly. “Could you come upstairs and help me with something?”
He looked up from his conversation with Deaf Donald, the former Greenpeace warrior who’d lost his hearing in an action that required deep-sea diving in the waters off Japan.
“Yes, ma’am?” LJ winked at her with watery blue eyes.
“Never mind,” she said. “You just have your . . . tea. I can take care of it.”
“By the way, my bonny Alexis,” Ursula said. “I ain’t gonna be able to get you rent again this month. But my ship’s coming in, any day now.”
Alexis nodded. Her stomach churned. “I’m sure it is,” she said, and went back down to the basement to search for a wrench.
Her mother had been the landlady of all time, über-efficient, unbelievably kind even under pressure. She knew how to unstop sinks and fix electrical sockets, how to calm frightened residents when the police came knocking at the door—almost always just collecting money for the Police Charity Fund. Alexis wasn’t sure she’d inherited the landlady gene from her mom, but, well, she had to be one anyway. There was nothing to be done about it.
Down in the damp dark of the basement, she looked among the old embalming tools and makeup brushes, tubing and trays. “A wrench, a wrench,” she mumbled. “My life for a stupid wrench.”
Squeezing between coffins, she went to look in the long pullout trays, where the newly dead had been stored years ago before being prepped for their final farewells. “Damn,” she said. Where had her mother kept the tools?
“Mom!” she yelled, and then it came to her. In the drawers, sweetheart, beneath the stairs. Alexis walked over and pulled open the top drawer and . . . sure enough, tools of all kinds: hammers, screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, channel-locks, and yes, a small crescent wrench. Just what she was looking for.
She could do it. She could run this place, pay the bills, and do everything else her mother had always done. Alexis was certain of it.
She breathed in the dampness, filled her lungs with the musty remnants of the long, strange history of the Hotel Angeline. She would make peace with LJ’s crow. She would make sure everyone was happy in this place, until nature had its way with each of the residents upon their deaths.
If only she could do the same for her mother.
CHAPTER 2
TERI HEIN
IT WAS PERHAPS SEVEN THOUSAND times a day that Alexis wondered what it would be like to have a slightly different life—you know, one with things more . . . well, routine or normal. Whatever that was—presumably something she would never quite know, not at the rate things were happening these days. There was too much to keep up with to manage normal at the same time. Alexis lived for the little moments she could steal just for herself, between school and duties at the hotel. Moments with Linda, especially.
Alexis glanced at the clock. Linda was late, as Linda always was. Linda, who always assumed forgiveness and Linda, who always got it. She said it was because she was Puerto Rican that she was always late. It was genetic or something. And Alexis said fine, because it meant she got to be with Linda. It was just another thing to get used to. Alexis’s mother’s code was punctuality and she had drilled it into her daughter. Sometimes it could even mean jumping the gun a bit in certain circumstances. Alexis smiled at the irony of this and fingered the bottom button on her blouse. She bit down on her tongue at the feeling that welled up—the feeling that couldn’t be described. It was the thing that reminded her she wasn’t a hundred percent in control, and it was the thing that every now and again made her wonder if she really could pull this whole landlady thing off.
Damn that crow, she thought, letting go of the button.
“Yoo-hoo, señorita,” she heard someone call through the crack of the front door. Linda was there, having shoved the door open to where the floor had warped. Couldn’t her mother have found someone with a planer to shear off the bottom of the door so it could swing open
again freely? Now who was going to be doing that? LJ? Yo lo dudo, as Linda said, her favorite expression: I doubt it. Quite certainly Donald wasn’t going to leap to the cause, and neither would Ursula. And so the door stuck anytime anyone opened it, halfway trapping people in or halfway trapping people out, depending on how you looked at it. Someone of Herculean strength could push it all the way open on the first shove, but Alexis needed a shoulder and a minimum of three pushes.
Linda slid in through the door neatly, knowing better than to put her shoulder to it. Behind her she pulled in the worn backpack she carried everywhere. Alexis’s heart skipped a beat.
Like Alexis, Linda was brown, and like Alexis, she didn’t know her father, although she knew more about him than Alexis knew about hers. How else could they have landed in Seattle if her father hadn’t been chasing his dream of making it big in the music world? He was a big fish/small pond kind of guy who played the trumpet à la King Garcia (or so he thought). And he also thought that in order to get noticed, he should play where they least expected him—not in New Orleans, or in New York but, of all places, Seattle, Washington. Why not? So they left New York behind and ended up living in White Center, south of Seattle. It was a full two years before Linda’s father riffed his way right out of town and Linda and her mother were on their own.
So much in common: absent fathers, present mothers, and that stupid governing committee they were both put on at John Marshall Alternative School before it was closed down. Their teacher Audra said the two of them could run that school if left to their own devices. The transition back to the “normal” Garfield High had been tough on both of them.
Maybe that was why they gravitated together—because things just didn’t work the same for them as for other kids. Or maybe it was something else.
“Hey,” Alexis said with a little wave, trying to act casual.
“Hey, sorry I’m late.” Linda brushed her hair away from her eyes. “I hope you weren’t waiting.”
“No—”
“You want to head downstairs and fold some laundry? There must be some sheets and towels down there that need a bit of attention, yes?”
Linda’s “fold some laundry” was really a euphemism for something else. Something else was really the thing that in some ways was the most important thing to her these days, the thing that made everything else OK. When they had come upstairs after that first time, they told her mother they were down there folding laundry. Now they folded one, maybe two sheets or towels—almost as foreplay—and would carry them upstairs, part of the ritual. Some might call the coffin thing sick but they called it just fine. And maybe even good clean fun.
But they wouldn’t be going to the basement. That was certain. In spite of how much fun they’d had in the coffins that one time—OK, more than one time—today was not the day for anyone to go down there. Especially not to do that.
“We can’t,” Alexis said, trying to think of an excuse. “My mom’s down there.”
“No problem.” Linda shrugged. “She won’t be down there all day. We can just sit here and wait.” She slumped down on the first step of the staircase and unzipped her backpack, extracting a pack of Marlboros.
“Hey!” Alexis said, almost glad for the distraction. “You can’t smoke in here. You shouldn’t even smoke anyway. It’s disgusting. Nobody will kiss you, you know.”
“Meaning you?” Linda took a smoke from the pack, tapped it on the hard case, stuck it between her lips. It bobbed there, unlit, as she spoke. “You saying you don’t want to kiss me anymore, Alexis? Is that what this is all about? Because, you know, other people think I’m fine.” She stood, shouldered her pack.
“No,” Alexis said, “that’s not what I’m saying, but—”
“But nothing, girlfriend. You don’t want me around. I can take a hint.” When she walked out, she left the door ajar.
Alexis hated it when she and Linda were fighting.
“Linda,” Alexis called after her as she slung on her bag. “Wait up! Maybe we can find some sheets that need folding somewhere else!” She ran out the door and down the steps, then back up to slam the door closed. It took three hard pulls before the latch clicked.
Alexis turned to run after Linda, but there the girl stood at the bottom of the stoop, cigarette now sticking out from behind her ear.
CHAPTER 3
WILLIAM DIETRICH
LJ TOLD ONLY HIS CLOSEST friends that his real name was Lynn, because Lynn didn’t have the manly ring of Dude or Duke or Sly or Rock or some other more heroic moniker that fit his admittedly scrambled image of himself. He did tell almost anyone who would listen that he’d fought through Tet in ’Nam, had partied at Woodstock, had been a bellhop at the Edgewater when the Beatles blew through Seattle, and had caught Cobain down in Aberdeen before anyone had ever heard who that fucked-up genius was. Of course the truth was that LJ had served his year at a supply depot in Da Nang and had never made it to a rock festival farther east than Sky River. He didn’t remember a whole lot of the ’60s besides that, but he had come of age protesting the Man, and now the Man had actually called, right here at the Hotel Angeline, and maybe it was finally all coming down.
So he had to warn Alexis.
LJ looked very much like what he was—a badly aged hippie. That glorious lion’s mane of hair that had crowned him in his 1969 protest days, that peacock’s tail of wiry dark plumage, had turned whitish-gray and migrated southward. His pate was bald, the surviving fringe hung to his shoulders, and too many follicles had changed address to his eyebrows and ears and nostrils. The wiry rocker’s body that had once turned women wild—well, a couple chicks anyway—had long-since sagged to middle-age paunch. His complexion was that of a well-fed Keith Richards, and he smoked grass now to ease his complaining joints. But the old fire hadn’t dimmed, and neither had his conviction that reality was out to get him. It was all a massive conspiracy—Bin Laden, Wall Street, Sarah Palin, Hollywood, and the Manhattan publishing industry that had rejected every manifesto he had ever written—and so LJ was like the Thin Blue Line, or the Catcher in the Rye, his purpose to look after overly mature innocents like Alexis and guide her political beliefs toward the orthodoxy of his hometown heroes of 1970: the Seattle Liberation Front, or as locals had called them, the Seattle 7. The fact that LJ’s own life had gone nowhere didn’t deter him from the belief he should direct others. Besides, he liked the girl.
So he caught her outside the old hotel with her lesbo-leaning girlfriend Linda and told her portentously and mysteriously to follow him upstairs. “Girl, there is something serious I’ve got to tell you. We’ve had a phone call.”
Alexis hesitated. He knew she already felt burdened, caring for a bunch of crazy people.
There was Ursula the Seafair pirate, who occasionally sneaked onto Lake Union pleasure boats to loot pieces of self-esteem. She’d give a yacht club pennant or jacket crest or maybe one fine Italian shoe to street people and explain that she was spreading self-satisfaction to the dissatisfied.
There was Deaf Donald, who’d screwed up his hearing saving the world for Greenpeace and drove everyone nuts by trying to hold conversations when he couldn’t hear anything anyone said in return. He tended to follow in Ursula’s shadow, perhaps attracted by the one sound he could hear—the loud rap her peg leg made on the wooden floors.
There was Otto Kenzler, who claimed he was 110 years old and a former OSS agent who’d come within inches of killing Hitler, winning World War II all by himself, even though Edith said he was only eighty-nine, max.
There was Roberta the snake lady, who kept a python under her bed no one was supposed to know about but who explained, just in case, that snakes were lazy if you kept them fed.
LJ felt comfortable in the Angeline because, by these standards, he was a model of sanity, and the only father figure that Alexis really had.
“I’m kinda busy, LJ,” Alexis said. She was wiggly with that adolescent impatience.
“Really busy,” said Linda.
“I’m serious, Alex, we got a phone call,” LJ said. He could almost see the hormones jumping inside the two teens like heated popcorn, but none of that mattered if his interpretation of this new threat was correct. “I think it’s about your mom and the future.”
That stopped her. LJ was the one other person who knew what was really going on in the basement.
“What about Mom?”
“I think we have to find some papers she must have hidden in her room.”
“I could help,” Linda said. She was curious. Nosy, in LJ’s view. He shook his head as a signal to Alexis. Secret, private stuff.
The fourteen-year-old sighed. “We’ll fold laundry later,” she promised her friend. “Hasta luego, right?”
The Puerto Rican shrugged. “Whatever, señorita. Go with old baldy there.” And she skipped away.
Alexis and LJ started up the hotel staircase. “Is this really important?” she asked.
“I think it’s finally going down. I been looking for you since that phone call.”
“What phone call?”
“I’ll tell you upstairs. Don’t want to yell fire, you know?”
Alexis and her mother lived on the top floor of the Angeline, up three flights of dim and creaky stairs, and as far from the caskets as you could get. Alexis had a small bedroom with a single bed, cracked window, and kid stuff that was made more precious by its rarity: one soccer trophy that every kid on the team had gotten, stuffed animals worn bare because she rarely got new ones, pop posters, a pink bedspread, and a shelf of books that ranged from fairy tales to Rules for Radicals, a gift from LJ she’d never read.
There was nothing to remind her of her absent father.
Her mother lived in the adjacent room, which had a kitchenette and a sofa bed. An old business desk took up more than its share of space and was crammed with ledgers, legal papers, and receipts that Alexis was now trying to make sense of.
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