A Small Hotel (12 page)

He does not move.

“Daddy, I want down,” she says.

And he does not move. He does not show a thing in his face.

“Please, Daddy,” she says.

Nothing.

And now her mother’s voice is behind her. “Lenny.” Her father’s name. Invoked by her mother like this only in very bad moments.

And still he looks at Kelly as if he does not even know who she is. She squeezes her eyes shut. And she is moving. Her father is turning again with her still held high. She opens her eyes. Below her is her mother. Her father has put his back to her. Her mother lifts her face to Kelly and the eyes—which are not Kelly’s eyes—she does not have her mother’s eyes—these eyes below are wide and Kelly knows the feeling in them, she is beginning to feel the same thing scrabbling in the center of her chest like a sharp-clawed little animal trapped there.

Her mother lowers her face to her husband’s back. She lifts a hand, but it hesitates. She dares not touch her husband at this moment. And Kelly is suddenly sharply aware of the river behind her. The river is very close behind her, the wide, fast-running river.

“Lenny,” her mother says. “Put Kelly down now.”

He does not. Kelly looks across the slope to where Katie is still standing at the picnic blanket, watching all this but keeping her place, waiting for things to go on in the only way she has decided they can. Kelly closes her eyes and waits too, trying not to move, trying not
to cry out and flail her arms and legs. She must be reconciled to this or she will lose him utterly and that would be worst of all.

And now she is falling. Slowly. She touches the ground, and she opens her eyes and her father’s face descends as well. He crouches before her, looks her in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Kitten,” he says. “I was a million miles away for a minute there.”

Kelly lunges forward and she throws her arms around him and she knows not to say anything and she knows not to expect him to say anything, but she tries very hard to hold him close. And with that embrace of her father, Kelly stops on the Moonwalk beside this other river. The image of the embrace has flashed into her mind as if out of nowhere, for the afternoon by the Alabama River has for all her adult life been merely a few scattered fragments. But the embrace carries with it another memory of her father that comes upon her now in its fullness. Almost twenty years ago. She and Michael stand just inside the open veranda doors of the best facility she and her mother and Katie could find, a good place, a converted, sprawling Queen Anne on wooded acreage on the edge of Montgomery, where the ones with means can come who survived, who didn’t quite mean it, who everyone thinks have a chance to put this all behind them. They all wear jogging suits
in muted colors. They sit in the dim parlor where she and Michael now stand. They walk the grounds. They sit on the veranda. Her father is on the veranda, sitting alone at a table, unaware of his daughter and son-in-law. His jogging suit is the color of rust.

“Go ahead,” Michael says softly. I’ll wait here till you want me.”

“He really likes you,” Kelly says.

“You two need some time alone, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.” The last thing she needs right now is time alone with her father. “Yes,” she says.

Kelly steps through the doors and crosses the veranda. Her father’s face is lowered, as if intently examining the white wrought-iron tabletop. She arrives before him. “Hello, Daddy,” she says.

He looks up. And it is, of course, the same as it ever was, the very same, the eyes upon her and no way in the world to read them.

She sits in a chair opposite him. “Are you doing okay?” she says.

“Sure,” he says.

For a moment she can think of no more to say. His eyes do not move from her. She needs to will this to happen, this conversation, this small talk, this enormous small talk. “Mama misses you,” she says. “We all do.”

“That’s good,” her father says.

She will not even try to figure out what exactly he means when he’s sounding ironic. “How’s the food?”

“Delicious,” he says. “Never better.”

In the brief moment she takes to get past still more irony, her father does another thing as he has ever done: a sudden softening. And because the softening is rare and always abrupt and because it always comes in the context of his impossible impenetrableness, she is, as ever, inordinately grateful for it, even as the softness, as ever, yields nothing but a minor connection. His eyes come alive and his voice goes gentle and he says, “That’s a joke, Kitten.”

“That’s good,” she says. “You’re joking.”

“It was hilarious from the beginning,” he says.

She’s at a loss again.

He reads it. “You know what I’m talking about,” he says.

He means the suicide attempt. She stifles the urge simply to stand up now and say good-bye and go. But she plays the role he is so good at maneuvering her into. She cannot banter with him at moments like these. She must be the tight-ass daughter, which will allow him to be disappointed with her.

“Not hilarious, Daddy. Not for us.”

He tilts his head in mock astonishment. “‘The Ride of the Valkyries?’ ‘I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning’?”

She goes utterly blank. She might as well be the one sitting here drugged up in a jogging suit.

“I didn’t actually play the Wagner?” he says.

Somehow this question sounds sincere. “Not that we knew,” Kelly says.

“Sorry,” he says, low, looking away. “Then it was all in my head, the joke. It’s funny in there most of the time.”

They both fall silent. It gives Kelly an opportunity to gather herself for what she has come here to say. “Don’t do this again. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, instantly, quietly.

And this is a thing she has vowed not to press, but she’s suckered yet again by his sudden softness. “I love you, Daddy,” she says.

He says, “Your grandfather didn’t have a sense of humor about it.”

“Daddy. Did you hear me?”

“I did,” he says.

And for a moment she feels a little ripple in her from the acknowledgement. It doesn’t last.

“And I promise,” he says. “Funny’s better.”

He meant he did have a sense of humor about killing himself.

“I can just laugh and leave it at that,” he says.

Kelly can’t do this alone any longer. She looks toward the doors into the parlor. Michael has already taken a step onto the veranda. He stands waiting for her. She loves him very much in this moment, her Michael. She lifts her chin and he instantly starts this way.

“Look,” she says. “Michael’s here.”

Her father turns around and stands up at once, offering his hand, and the two men shake, Michael two-handed, her father putting his other hand on Michael’s elbow.

“Lenny,” Michael says, “what the fuck?”

“I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning,” Kelly’s father says.

Michael laughs loud. Leonard Dillard laughs too, just as loud. They hear themselves and glance at the muted others around them on the veranda and they choke off their laughter, which makes them want to laugh even more. They are now locked in the club room of a private male world. Kelly has vanished. She should be grateful to have this burden taken off her. She should be grateful her father is joking. But she feels tears wanting to form and this is the last thing
in the world she wants from herself now and so she finds—easily finds, though it surprises her—a quick, hot swelling of anger in her at both of them. She lets that take her, and the tears vanish, and she leans back in her chair and folds her hands together in her lap as the two men sit.

Her father says, “If I was more of a hunter, I might have tried that. But I’m a terrible shot. And I couldn’t figure out how to do enough damage with a trout fly.”

The two men laugh again, though quietly this time. Kelly stands up and walks away, toward the parlor. If she is to be in the company of those who wish to kill themselves, she prefers them to be strangers. And it took him fifteen years to eventually get the job done. And then all of them are standing beside her father’s grave. Train tracks and water nearby. Escambia Bay. Mama and Katie with their arms around each other, Mama crying quietly, Katie hardly at all. Kelly and Michael are next to each other, not quite touching. Samantha a little apart. Sam with her father’s eyes. Twenty now, and how can that be? Ready to go away to try to become somebody famous. Everyone else is off getting into cars. The last few moments for the family before the hole seals up.

And Sam says, “You think the Catholics are right?”

Nobody answers.

“Is Grandpa damned now?” Sam asks.

“No,” Kelly says.

“Not for this,” Mama says.

And that night. The night of the day of her father’s funeral, Kelly lies next to Michael in their bed in their house on the Bayou Texar, their bodies not touching, him reading papers from the office. Finishing that, from the sound of it, the rustling of the papers, the stretching of his body to put them somewhere. Her eyes are closed.

His voice. “Are you ready to sleep?”

“No,” she says.

She can feel him waiting for words from her. He’d rather not, of course. About things that matter, he’d rather silence, always. She gives him silence.

“I had to finish,” he says.

He thinks she’s pissed that he was doing work in bed on this night.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he says. “I really liked the man.”

He waits for her again.

She’s prepared simply to say good-night. Michael’s trying here. But he is Michael. She’ll thank him and she will sleep. And now something unexpected wells up in her. “Do you think he loved me?” she says.

“He was your father,” Michael says.

“Do you think that’s an answer?” Kelly says this quietly.

He does not reply.

“You were around us both,” she says. “You’re a father. Do you think my father loved me?”

“He did what a father has to do,” Michael says.

Kelly hears herself. She has been in this life a long time, long enough, plenty long enough to see the irony of asking these questions of her husband, and she knows she’s talking to both these men, and she knows she better shut up, she’s known for a long while to shut up in these situations and she better shut up now, because she doesn’t want to ask questions when she’s afraid of the real answers. So she says nothing more. And she expects Michael to be true to himself and let it drop.

But he says, trying to explain, trying to be helpful, “He had his own burdens. Serious ones, obviously. In spite of all that, he did what he had to do.”

And she cannot help herself. “So are you saying he loved me?”

“Yes,” Michael says.

She takes this in.

And then Michael says, “Whatever that word means.”

And Kelly hears one beat of her heart and another,
as if they are filling the room, and another, and Michael says, trying to be helpful, “It’s just a word.”

Her head is cacophonous with the beating of her heart now, and, rather like a deaf person, shaping words she cannot hear, Kelly says, “You can turn off the light.”

Michael does.

And in the dark Kelly finds herself at the very edge of the water, with New Orleans vanished behind her like the setting moon. She has come down some wooden steps flanked by mooring bollards. She has stopped on the last dry step, though they continue into the dark water and she imagines she could simply descend to the bottom of the river as she would descend the staircase into the reception hall of her house, as casually as she entered the Alabama River on another afternoon, when she was sixteen, drawn to the river’s edge very near the place where her father lifted her and would not put her down. There are half a dozen picnic blankets scattered on the grass behind her this time and they are filled with her yammering friends and Kelly is in a summer dress and her hair is a careful, feathered shag and she has gone off alone to the water’s edge and has crouched beside it and the river is blue on this day and it races past, knowing where it is bound, to a conclusion somewhere, to a distant sea, and she rises and she steps into the water and she stretches forward
and simply lies down and she is sweeping onward in the Alabama River but she does lift her face and she does now open her arms and roll onto her back and look upward into the empty bright sky and she does move her arms now and she does move her legs—though she knows she need not do these things, she knows she can choose to do these things or not do these things—and later she is on the shore and there are people around her and she realizes her Farah Fawcett hair, which took forever to do, is ruined. And now Kelly crouches flat-footed before the Mississippi and she puts her arms on her knees and rests her head on her palms and she cannot see the water moving before her in the dark but she knows it is rushing onward to the Gulf, which is very very near.

∼

Michael listens to Kelly’s cell phone ringing, trying to run some choices through his head of where she might be. With her mother. With her sister. With a man. Alone in a jazz bar on Bourbon Street with a key to Room 303 in her purse is as far from the list as the dark side of the moon. As the phone rings, he prepares—just in case—to keep his voice calm, to put on the tone he would take with a crucial, frightened, reluctant witness.
It is now that Kelly turns off her phone in the bar on Bourbon Street, but Michael, of course, simply hears the phone ringing yet again and again, and then her answering-service message begins. Kelly’s voice. “I’m not available …” And he’s still not ready to say anything to her this way. Not on this day. Tomorrow maybe, if he hasn’t gotten through to her. He hangs up. He holsters his phone.

He turns his face toward the plantation house. Only a perky garble of voices floats this way: the musicians seem to be on a break. He appreciates the relative quiet. He wishes he could be talking this out with Kelly now. And he thinks to call Sam. Perhaps she knows something. Sam. He turns his back on the house and walks further away from the voices and the light. Seeking a still better place to call his daughter, he slips into another undercurrent of the past. He stands at the back railing of the deck of his house, looking across his lawn at the dark water of the bayou. The deck is new, smelling powerfully of teak. The house is done at last. He and Kelly are at last in the place where they expect to grow old together. He hears the soft rustle of her behind him.