Hotel Angeline

by Kathleen Alcalá

  Her fate was easy to see: He’d bring the information back to the detectives; they’d send it off to the feds, and that would be that. They’d get the kid put in one of the locked sections of the building and she’d scream and holler for a few days until she gave up and they could locate an adult who might take her on.

  Foster care—you could call it that. But you’d be wrong. That’s what the man knew as he looked at Alexis.

  For the girl, what seemed simple had become a word game. It was like reaching for one of the orange crackers, only she had no arms and she wasn’t hungry.

  Nothing came in order. The man made it sound like an ordered thing, but it wasn’t. But she pretended it was.

  “Linda,” she said. “Let me call my friend.”

  “OK, let’s play a game. You get to call Linda after you tell me what happened to your mother, the laptop, and what went down at the Fremont explosion.”

  And so she did. From the glimpse she got of the keys popping off of the keyboard as the computer seethed and sank into the kiln, from the basement of the warehouse along the canal where the final call from LJ came in, from the sight of her mother as the casket lid slowly narrowed shut—she told the man. And she told him again. She could feel the language draining from her, verb by verb, scrunched under his heel.

  “Well,” he said. “Not so simple.”

  But for Alexis, the telling wasn’t simple but what happened was. It was clear inside her and she tried to empty it out of her until he could see it.

  Adults, she knew, had more and more questions. They wanted you to keep giving details until it felt like you were ornamenting a drawing that was already OK as a sketch. Coloring it in. Coloring it in more.

  But if you kept at it, the descriptions would start to make the original statements seem murky.

  Simple, Alexis thought, simple. She would call Linda and Linda would figure something out and Alexis would be back home, flopping down on the mattress and looking at the latest installments of Ranma or Inuyasha. She’d look up when Ursula clicked down the hall or when Otto gave her the all-clear sign from the doorway.

  But the here-to-there of it looked murky. She needed other people who knew more to tell her what would happen in between

  “One call,” she said. “Like in the movies. I’ve seen it in the movies.”

  “OK,” he said. “You can use my cell phone.”

  Was that what triggered her crying? The man leaning over to her, putting the Samsung in the air between them?

  Or was it the way that the word “Linda” and the smell of Linda’s clothes were tied together? The way that the request was granted too simply? A few feet closer to the doors, she thought.

  And so she dialed the number. She did not know how this would save her, this reaching out. She did not see, yet, how Linda would tell her stepfather, how Linda’s stepfather would take the rectangle of his iPhone and poke numbers at it. Alexis couldn’t see all this, and the folks at “Intake” wouldn’t know how their processes would be derailed by a man in a suit more expensive than the whole prison’s monthly meal budget. They couldn’t see. Alexis couldn’t see. She could simply take the phone, her only detonator for now.

  CHAPTER 27

  ERICA BAUERMEISTER

  ALEXIS SAT IN THE HOLDING cell, waiting like she was told.

  Linda’s voice on the phone had been ragged, scared. “Where are you? What’s going on? I heard something on the news about a meltdown at the Museum of Glass? Jesus, Al, what did you do?”

  “I don’t have time to go into it. I’m in juvie. Can you come get me?”

  There was a pause. Alexis had sat in the room with the not-cop, or whatever the hell he was. The guy who wanted everything simple. Ha. She had waited on the phone, listening to Linda breathing.

  “Look,” said Linda finally, “I’m going to do something. I don’t know what. Just wait for me.”

  Like I’m going anywhere, Alexis thought.

  The not-cop had taken her out of the intake room and down a hall. Cold. Gray. Didn’t anybody study psychology around here? Didn’t they know the effect of color on the psyche? Even Alexis had heard about it in middle school. Or maybe the juvie people did know. Maybe they were trying to freak the poor delinquents out. Make them depressed, ready to give up information. It was working.

  The hallway was long and led to a series of holding cells. Alexis could hear the kids in the cells as they passed. One of them was crying; one shouted at the not-cop as they passed. So much anger and emotion bouncing off the walls around her. She had thought it was all inside her—maybe she had let it out and it had infected all of them.

  Oh for Christ’s sake, Alexis, she said to herself. Stop being so self-centered.

  And there she was, in this little cell of a room, listening to the people down the hall. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to. No questions to answer.

  She took a breath in, let it out. She leaned her back against the concrete wall and felt its cold filter through the fabric of her sweatshirt. She wanted to sleep—what day was it anyway? Sunday?

  How long had she been going like this? She counted back. Ten, eleven days since her mother had died? Two since they had left her at the crematorium? It was all moving so fast. She felt like she had been dropped into the leading role in Crank 3.

  Except she wasn’t Jason fucking Statham. She was a fourteen-year-old girl and she was tired of acting like everything but her age.

  She remembered when she was younger, her mother always used to bring her books from the library. They would read together, when Alexis was small, and then once Alexis was able to read for herself, her mother would simply leave a stack on her bed and let Alexis find the ones she wanted, or they’d go to the library together.

  One day Alexis had asked her mom why all the young heroes and heroines never seemed to have any parents. She wondered if the book choices were maybe her mother’s way of making her feel better about not having a father, but no, even the books they read in school were that way. The Boxcar Children. The Secret Garden. Harry Potter—of course, Harry Potter. It had turned into a joke after a while, trying to find a book with parents, or at least one.

  “I think it’s so the hero has room to grow,” her mom said. “You know, turn into an adult, take on big responsibilities.”

  They made it look exciting in the books. All that swashbuckling. All those kids being smarter than the villains.

  Well, thought Alexis, it wasn’t exciting. It sucked. And what sucked were the parts they didn’t write about. The stupid, mundane parts of life that grown-ups had to deal with and now she just wished she could give back to her mother. Because these days, as soon as she was sitting still by herself, for just a moment, they all came flooding in. Even now, when she should be worried about whether they were going to put some sick creep in that cell with her, there was a part of her mind that was wondering if anybody had gone to the store and bought more Fig Newmans, or sherry. If Ursula’s peg leg was OK after being stuck in the attic door like that. Because from the moment she closed the lid on her mother’s coffin, it had started, as if her mother had simply handed the to-do list to her daughter with her last breath. And now, the list was there in the back of her mind anytime she slowed down enough to breathe.

  Alexis loved the hotel. She loved the tenants. But sitting there in that holding cell, all she wanted to do was go back to the Angeline, grab a hold of that rotten plumbing and yank it off the wall and send water flooding through the floors, washing it all away.

  She thought about her mom. Lists had ruled her mother’s life. Alexis had always thought her mother was so boring, particularly the past year or so, when hormones had accentuated the crests and troughs of Alexis’s life. Life was out there to be lived, but her mother ran her day one item at a time. Alexis thought her mother had always been like that. So organized. So tired.

  On her mother’s dresser, there was a photo of Edith, taken before Alexis was born. The first time Alexis had seen it, she didn’t even recogniz
e her mother. She looked like a teenager, her eyes open and excited, her grin flying toward the camera. Alexis never knew what to make of the disconnect between the woman in the photo and her mother; it was easier to see them simply as two different people.

  But now Alexis wondered, how had her mother gotten from that girl in the picture to the woman in the coffin the basement? How many to-do lists did it take?

  She retraced the history in her head. Alexis had been born at the Angeline, her mother had grown up there and taken over the place when her parents died; how, Alexis didn’t even know. She’d never thought to ask. Alexis’s father had been gone before her birth. Her dad—the man who would rather blow things up than stick around and be her father, or her mother’s husband. Just like LJ.

  Her mother had always called the Angeline her safe harbor. Maybe it really had been—the place she had gone to when everything else was falling apart. The walls that held her up when family was gone.

  Except that wasn’t completely true, was it? Her mother had owned the Angeline with her brother, Alexis’s uncle. There had been family, somehow. Alexis thought about the man who had sat across the table from her at the Sorrento, who had bought her dinner and given her an envelope for her mother. She had thought he was evil, but Linda’s stepfather said he was trying to help.

  It hadn’t made sense when Linda’s stepdad had told her about the legal documents, that it was her mother who had been trying to sell the hotel. But sitting there, unable to do anything but think, all the pieces that didn’t make sense started to fall into new patterns, new pictures she hadn’t imagined before.

  She saw her mother, that ever-present list in her hand, piles of bills and unfolded towels around her. Grabbing the screwdriver and going up to put a door back on its hinges after Otto had taken it off to use as a barricade. Pulling up the linoleum in Roberta’s bathroom floor after it had gotten flooded from one of Pluto’s baths. It could make you tired, really it could.

  Maybe it had. And maybe, Alexis thought for the first time, that made a kind of sense. People did get tired.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall, feeling the waves of fatigue roll across her, shivering their way down her arms and legs. She could feel her heart beating hard in her chest; it hadn’t really slowed since she had realized her mother was dead, as if it had to beat double-time for the two of them.

  What she wouldn’t give for someone to take care of her—other than a crow, wonderful as Habib had been. What she wanted was human hands, on her shoulders. Human hands taking that list out of her mind.

  When was the last time she had relaxed? And then, oddly, it came to her. The dinner at the Sorrento. The tarte tartin, the slices of apple warm across her tongue, the caramel sauce making her feel both grown up and young at the same time. The way the waiter took care of her, picking up the plate just when she was finished and not a moment before.

  And her uncle, sitting there quietly eating. Not controlling her, she realized now, waiting for her to relax.

  Oh, she really hadn’t had anything right, had she? Her uncle had been trying to save the hotel that night. LJ had been trying to kill things, maybe even people. If he had planted a bomb under the Troll that sat like a great gray blob under the Aurora Bridge, he would have taken out more people than had ever voluntarily jumped off its long expanse. And her mother—well, her mother was human, that was the bitch and the beauty of it, wasn’t it?

  It was more than she wanted to handle. She kept her eyes shut, let sleep come. Her body relaxed, the muscles ceasing their shivering, her heart slowing to a normal beat. Her teeth unclenching, a bit at a time. Like falling into water.

  She dreamed she was at Moonlight Phở. She could feel the red plastic chair beneath her, hear the animated chatter of the women in the kitchen, feel the steam heat come across the room. She could smell the phở, the broth rising up toward her nose, the soothing scent of chicken and cooked onions, the sharp green zing of cilantro, even the Sriracha hot sauce that was her favorite, the way its bright red changed the color of the soup. The dream was astonishingly real.

  “Alexis.” She could hear Linda’s voice. It sounded so near and warm.

  “Alexis, I brought you soup.”

  Alexis opened her eyes to a vision of Linda and a huge Styrofoam container of phở.

  “I thought you might need this.”

  Alexis could only nod and take the spoon. The first slurp went down her throat, soothing, as a hand cradled against her check. She thought she might cry, it tasted so good. She picked up a sprig of cilantro with her fingers and crunched the leaves between her teeth, tasting the flavors—sharp, strong, everything she wasn’t. But might be, maybe, if she kept eating.

  “How did you get here?” she asked Linda.

  “My stepdad brought me. I told him everything.”

  Alexis’s eyes grew large. “Everything? What did he say?”

  Linda smiled. “Well, ever since the crow invasion, he’s been doing this End of Days thing. He’s been talking about locusts and plagues and making donations to Habitat for Humanity all day. Apparently, in comparison to the coming apocalypse, having your stepdaughter come out of the closet is no big deal.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, I’m sure there will be fallout. I’m thinking boarding school. But you never know; he was pretty shook up. We had to take a taxi to get here. When we went down to the garage, he took one look at our shiny black cars and freaked out. He kept muttering about crows.”

  “So, where is he?”

  “He’s doing his lawyer magic. Don’t worry, that part of him still works.”

  “Does he think I have a shot at getting out of here? Can I go home?” Even as she said the words, the other part of Alexis, the grown-up Alexis who had spent the past two hours in a holding cell, the one who had put her mother in a coffin and escaped out of windows and melted computers and microwaved CDs and kept the Angeline in cookies and sherry, knew the answer to that one.

  “Never mind,” Alexis said.

  “Linda?” she said after a moment.

  “Yep.” Linda smiled at her, long and slow.

  “Yeah.”

  “Drink your soup.”

  There was movement in the hallway, the sound of heavy feet in heavy shoes. More than one pair. Alexis and Linda looked up and saw the not-cop and Linda’s stepdad. Their faces were serious.

  “Alexis,” the not-cop said, “we’re ready for you.”

  CHAPTER 28

  SEAN BEAUDOIN

  ALEXIS ROSE, THINKING SHE WOULD have to follow Not-Cop to a questioning cell of some kind, but he ducked out of the room instead. After a few minutes he popped his head back in and curled a finger at Linda.

  “I want you out here with your stepfather. Now.”

  Linda looked at Alexis, her geriatric pace a protest all the way out the door.

  “And there’s someone else here to see you.”

  “Johnnie Cochran?”

  Not-Cop gave a not-smile. His not-head disappeared as Uncle Burr walked in. The door slammed. Twice. Uncle Burr’s beard seemed whiter, posture less erect, hair more Unabomber-esque than it had been at the Sorrento.

  “I’m afraid, Alexis, that we left things on a sour note.”

  “Don’t be afraid. I can live with sour.”

  Uncle Burr made a face, a senator refusing to be goaded by the press. “I flew in as quickly as I could. Kenneth and I have somehow managed to work out a deal with the CPS people. If you come with me, right now, there will be no charges filed.”

  “Why would they agree to that?”

  “We’re very persuasive.”

  “No one’s that persuasive.”

  Uncle Burr held out his palms, a card trick with no cards. Alexis looked around the holding cell.

  “So, then you’d be my legal guardian. Or whatever?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’d live where? Your pad above Neumos?”

  Burr cleared his throat. “Sedona, A
rizona.”

  “No freaking way.”

  “Hey, if you’re not interested, there’s always staying here. I understand the cafeteria serves a hearty sloppy joe.”

  Alexis said nothing. There was only one way out she could see, and it wasn’t going to the desert to wear a sun hat and collect wrinkles.

  Uncle Burr sat down at the interrogation table, the spot where Sipowitz usually glowered for a while before he jumped up in his short-sleeve shirt and beat a perp half to death with the Yellow Pages.

  It occurred to Alexis that maybe she’d been watching too much TNT with Mr. Kenji.

  “I imagine you have many questions,” Uncle Burr said.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “So, shoot.”

  Alexis considered, scatological or non sequitur? She went with the red herring.

  “Are you named after Aaron Burr?”

  “No, it was my great-aunt’s first name.”

  “Her name was Burr Burr?”

  “Yes.”

  Alexis wanted to laugh, but didn’t, needing to concentrate. “Well, Aaron Burr is my hero. You know why?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “He shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Like, muskets at twelve paces. Step, step, turn, fire. Ended that Federalist Papers nonsense cold. And he did it in Weehawken. That’s in New Jersey. Which really doesn’t matter much, except it’s a cool name. Don’t you wish you were taking me to a place called Weehawken, instead of Sedona?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Clutch, gas, second gear.

  “Also, though? When Jefferson screwed Burr on his promise to let Burr be vice prez? Because back in those days they let the Senate decide by votes? Well, my man Burr got an army of freaks and perverts and mercenary Hessians and went down to Mexico and declared himself emperor! Isn’t that awesome? How can you not love that guy?”

  Burr stared at his niece. “I don’t really think that’s true. Not to mention completely beside the point.”