Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

We played eight songs before a haggard-looking hotel manager made his way to us. His upside-down name tag read “Efram Dawkins,” and his hair was flat on one side. I wondered where he’d been sleeping.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay, not a problem, we’ll stop.” I raised a hand in appeasement.

“No, it’s not that. I mean, you probably should stop, but not because there’s any problem with the music. I appreciate that you’ve kept people entertained. But—the police aren’t coming. Not before morning.”

I laid my hand across my guitar strings. “False alarm? We can go back in?”

“Well, you see, we can’t let people back in after a bomb threat without the police clearing the hotel, but the police aren’t coming, so we can’t let anyone back in at all.” The manager massaged the back of his neck with his hand. “Company policy.”

A woman who had been dancing with her kid a moment before turned on the guy. “Wait, so you won’t let us go back to our rooms to sleep or to get our keys? What are we supposed to do?”

Dawkins shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what the police said.”

“Fine, then you’re going to give us a ride to another hotel from your chain, and put us up there, right?”

“I’d love to, but…” He paused, glancing around like he hoped someone might bail him out and finish his sentence. Nobody came to his rescue. “I’d love to, but every single hotel in the area received the same threat.”

“Every hotel in the chain?”

“No. Every hotel.”

“Surely not all the threats are credible?”

Dawkins shrugged. “The police seem to think they’re all credible, or they can’t tell which are credible and which aren’t.”

I looked at all the exhausted faces. A minute before they’d been dancing, cheering. Now they looked like two a.m. again.

“This is ridiculous,” said a man in saggy white briefs, clutching an attaché case in front of him. “I wouldn’t travel anymore at all if I didn’t have to. In the last month I’ve been through three airport evacuations and one ‘shelter-in-place’ at a restaurant.”

An elderly woman spoke. “We must be reasonably safe, or they’d have somebody here. A squad car, a fire chief, a dog. Somebody. They must have some kind of triage going to prioritize.”

Dawkins shrugged again.

“Okay, look,” I tried. “What about mitigating the risk? Letting one person in at a time to at least get their keys or wallets?”

“I’d love to, but what if there is a bomb? What if it goes off while even one person is in there? Or what if one of you set it? I can’t let you do that.”

Now my making-the-best-of-it crowd from a few minutes before all eyed each other like there was a killer in our midst. A little boy started crying. “Look,” said a father with a sleeping toddler draped over his shoulder. “We need someplace to go.”

April stood up from the curb. “Um, I have an idea. A place, you know?”

She wasn’t much for public speaking. When the hotel guests all turned her way, she raised her pizza box as a shield. “There’s an unlocked Superwally Daycare down the road.” She pointed. “They were repainting the playroom in the front, but the paint was low-odor and there’s a whole napping room in the back with mats. You have to cross the road, but there aren’t too many cars out anymore, right? It’s walkable.”

April and Hewitt led the group over, while Dawkins made phone calls to the local police to make sure nobody got arrested for trespassing. That left JD and me standing in an empty hotel parking lot.

He sighed. “Wanna play a little more?”

“Might as well.”

I’d quit singing an hour before to save my voice, but JD and I were still playing at four a.m. when April and Hewitt made it back.

“Don’t you two ever get tired?” Hewitt asked, collapsing onto the grass.

I held out my hand. “My calluses have calluses. Anyway, I’m not awake. I’m dreaming this.”

“I’d appreciate if you woke up, then. This is ridiculous.”

I’d been running on adrenaline, but now that everyone was gone, exhaustion washed over me. We unplugged the guitars and dragged ourselves back over to the van. I settled into the crumb-covered middle bench, where I could at least get horizontal even if I couldn’t stretch out.

“So, where to?” JD asked from the driver’s seat.

April, from the bench in front of mine, said, “You’re still too drunk to drive. I think we all are.”

“I know I am.” Hewitt hoisted the gin bottle. “I’ve been topping up.”

“Anyway,” I said. “There’s no place to go. We’ve got a show here tomorrow, which is today, so there’s no point in driving anyplace else.”

“We could go to the next town to sleep.”

Hewitt shook his head. “If they evacuated all the hotels in town, every single person who managed to walk out with a car key in their hand when the alarm went off has been asleep in a hotel room in the next town for an hour now. Every town in every direction.”

“Night in the van it is.” I closed my eyes. “Still more comfortable than my first place in New York. Bigger, too.”

“Whoa,” said April. “Did she just share a personal detail? She has a past?”

My eyes were still closed so I didn’t know if she saw me stick out my tongue at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re not the most forthcoming person. We’ve been in this van for eight months and we barely know anything about you.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s why we’ve invented an origin story for you from the two things we know—three now—you taught yourself to play guitar in high school, and you’re, like, the last person in the world to get a label deal from busking on the street. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got, other than this new tidbit, so we’ve made up the rest. Your parents are werewolves, but you didn’t get the gene.”

The others chimed in, alternating with each other. “You traded your family cow for a magic guitar.” “You sold your soul at a crosswalk for the ability to play.” “You turned down a life of riches for a chance to play in a band.” “You’re from Antarctica, which is why you turn the AC up so high when you’re driving, to feel like home.”

They were joking, but I caught something serious behind it. A challenge to let them in. But what to say? What difference did it make that I’d run away at fifteen rather than tell my frum parents and six siblings I was queer? That I didn’t have that word yet, or any other, only the conviction it wasn’t safe to say the words I didn’t have? Or how just before, little Chava Leah Kanner had wandered into a street fair and heard an electric guitar for the first time? That I’d looked at the guitarist and thought, That’s me , without any road map for the journey, and everything afterward had been an attempt to reconcile who I’d thought I was supposed to be with who I really was? How when I left Brooklyn for my one off-the-path aunt’s apartment in Washington Heights, after months of planning, that first subway ride was a thousand times as long as any drive I’d made since? How I’d only been told of that aunt’s existence by someone from an organization that helped people leave the community, and knew I’d be erased from the family in the same way? I couldn’t articulate any of that to these people, even after eight months in a van together. Maybe someday, when I trusted they wouldn’t joke about it.

“Your version is way more exciting than the truth, I promise. Like I said, there’s nothing to tell.”

“Sure,” April said. “Just because it’s not exciting doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear it.”