Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

“I’ve been crying,” Kelly says. “I thought I’d finished. I wasn’t. But I am now. I almost am.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Ramona says.

“I had to finish this first,” Kelly says. “I don’t know why.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I’m going to go to sleep,” Kelly says.

“It was your husband, is why,” Ramona says. “He called.”

“What did you tell him?”

“You’re not here.”

“Good.”

“Have a nice long sleep,” Ramona says.

“I will,” Kelly says, so softly Ramona can barely hear. But then Kelly speaks up, her voice reassuringly firm. “You cry enough,” Kelly says, “it all finally gets clear, you know?”

“Oh I do,” Ramona says.

“I’m feeling calm,” Kelly says.

“Good.”

“Good night,” Kelly says.

“Good night,” Ramona says.

The door closes. Ramona gives the door a little nod and she goes.

∼

Out in the night, Michael is pushing hard, and ahead he can see flashing red lights in the night sky, floating above the horizon, and beyond is a vast yellow glow. The lights are the Gramercy Bridge. The glow is the alumina refinery. He’s still fifty miles from New Orleans. He will speed up, but he slows a little first and he reaches to his phone. He dials Kelly’s cell. It rings and rings again and he does not know that Kelly, returning from the door after speaking with Ramona, stands before the phone as it rings a third time, and he does not know that her tears have ended and that she takes the phone into her hand and steps unsteadily to the French windows and that she throws the phone into the night. And neither of them knows that the phone falls and falls and rings once more as it falls, turning the faces of a naked young couple just in time to see a tiny splash of water at the far end of the pool.

∼

And Michael drives fast and Michael tries not to think, tries just to keep focused on the road, the steering wheel, his lights out before him, and he is crossing the Gramercy Bridge with the bright yellow blare of the refinery beside him and its mountain peaks of alumina red mud and of gypsum waste and he is off the bridge and he slows for a stoplight, checking for traffic and cops, and he accelerates through and he’s racing in the dark and the pine forests scroll past on both sides and she is touching him, she runs her hand down his chest in the dark, his Kelly, and she sighs, and he shakes off this memory and he realizes he has opened by instinct, by his own preemptive preference, to a moment when she was silent, when perhaps she wanted to speak when perhaps she wanted to say these things she needed to say and perhaps she touched his chest instead, having touched him enough already, needing now to add words to the touching, needing this, but with him, married to him, made silent by him, she was able only to touch, and Michael grips the wheel harder and he presses on and the interstate is ahead at last and he follows a sign though it seems as if he’s simply veering into the woods and he follows this narrow way and he follows and he follows and it’s dark and he feels the pulse of his heart in his ears and at last the woods vanish and a bright-lit semi roars past him and Michael slides into the near lane of I-10 and he can make real time and he keeps sliding into the passing lane and he accelerates rushing past the truck and on and on and he has only the flare of his headlights before him and the pulse of the white lines beneath him and he stays mindless now he can stay mindless and the highway rises and the median vanishes and beside him is a dark void beyond a concrete rail he is in cypress treetops and for a time the world becomes for him, below and beyond and far beyond, a time of dark and light — the trees and motels and a Shell gas station casino and the distant orange skyline of a refinery and the tunnel of treetops again — and he feels Kelly out there dying, from pills he assumes, the fading away in a hotel room, the haunting, and he’s too late he’s too late he is driving fast and he is too late and it would be better for him just to turn the wheel just to embrace the silence that he has always kept before his wife just to turn the wheel and fly into these trees and be silent forever but he bursts from the trees now and he races along the causeway the vast void of Lake Pontchartrain to one side and the Gulf to the other both horizons invisible in the far and utter dark, and it is all slow now, it is this encircling dark and the far-ahead razor-slash of the lights of New Orleans, and he feels as if he is not moving at all, though his mind knows he is moving fast, it is as if he were in a craft out in the great emptiness of space hurtling unspeakably fast but without a near point of reference and so seeming not to move at all, and he has no point of reference, he knows she is dying, and he will rush on like this forever rush in solitary trajectory between the stars, rush on without end: for he loves his wife he does love his wife and there is a long long way to go to get her back but he seems not to be moving at all and he wonders if he himself has died, if he is dead already.

∼

And eighteen minutes later, Michael Hays slams to a stop in front of the Olivier House. He is out of his car and across the sidewalk and through the front door and at the far end of the entrance hall a woman rises from behind the desk and he strides toward her and he can see her stiffen and she is steady but for her hands that she struggles to keep from flailing in panic and Michael slides to his left to clearly put her out of his path, to head straight for the doors to the courtyard beyond.

“She’s not here” Ramona says and he slips by.

“I’ll call the police,” she says.

“Do it,” Michael says. “And an ambulance.”

And he’s through the doors and into the loggia and past the empty pool and he’s going up the stairs two at a time pushing through an air thick with the ghosts of Kelly and Michael moving in this very space leaning into each other pausing once yes he held her here on this second floor landing and he kissed her and he turns and he presses hard gasping up one more floor now one more and he leaps these two steps and these two and these two and these two and he breaches breathless onto the third floor and Room 303 is before him and he pulls up and he squares himself and there are two narrow black doors in the frame with their upper panels glass and with the two knobs side by side in the center and he focuses on the spot between and just above the knobs and he lifts his right leg and he kicks and the door quakes but does not yield and he realizes he instinctively held back because of the glass and he is a fool and he senses a terrible silence inside the room and he raises his leg again and he kicks hard and the doors fly open before him and he strides over the shattering glass even as it still scatters and tumbles and the lamps are on and he strides and she is lying on her side at the far edge of the bed twisted there with her back to him and he strides and the room stinks and it is sweet to him it is hope to him she has rolled onto her side and has brought the pills up and he strides but was it enough and he is passing her and he looks down at her legs splayed on the bed and he knows the signs and her legs are white as the light he has pushed through the dark but her feet, her feet are blue, but it is a dusky blue and the paleness of the blue gives him hope and he is beside her and he sits and he turns her and he lifts her and with one hand he cradles her head and her eyes are open ever so slightly and he says “Darling please stay, please stay” and her eyes fall slowly closed and he says “It’s Michael, my darling” and he waits for the eyes to open and they do not and he presses her to him and he is weeping now and he draws her away from him wishing he could show her his tears. But her eyes are closed, and he says “Kelly.” And again he says “Kelly.” And he says, “Kelly, please try to look at me.” And her eyelids stir. And they begin to lift. And very slowly Kelly’s eyes open. They open just a little and they stop, but she has opened her eyes. And Michael says, “I love you. I’m so very sorry, my darling. I love you.”