Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

* * *

Aaron was in Gallup buying coffee when the sun rose, approaching Needles, California, when he fell asleep at the wheel, awakening within seconds to the disorienting sight of the grassy median before him. He swerved right, the truck shifting its weight behind him, and found himself on the road again, cars honking all around him, a man in a pickup truck jabbing his middle finger at him and screaming something that he took to be “Asshole!” He was not the sort who came away from close calls energized, nor did he believe in endangering the lives of others. He took the next exit, checked into a motel in Needles, and was soon asleep, the heavy drapes closed tightly against the California sun.

But as he slept, a series of thuds worked their way into his dreams. He awoke suddenly, the room dark and still, and he thought maybe the thudding was nothing more than his own heart. It came again, loud and heavy, something hitting the wall directly behind him. A body, he thought, and then, Not a body. A human being .

He reached out and felt a lamp on the table beside the bed, then fumbled along its base for the switch. From the next room, he heard a keening sound followed by the unmistakable thump of a fist meeting flesh. He slipped on his sneakers. Outside, it was dusk. He ran down a flight of steps and turned left, into the motel lobby. The woman at the desk was the one who had checked him in. He remembered the distrustful way she looked at him when he burst in and declared that he needed a room, so exhausted he could not recall his zip code for the paperwork.

“Call the police,” he said.

She stared at him.

“You need to call the police. A man in the room next to me is beating someone up — a woman, I think, his wife or girlfriend. Someone.” He could see now that beneath her heavy makeup, she was young, maybe twenty, the situation beyond anything for which either her receptionist training or meager years of living had prepared her. “Nine-one-one,” he said slowly, like he was explaining grammar to a student. He reached across the counter, picked up the receiver, and held it out to her. She looked left and right, as if crossing the street. He knew that she was looking for someone besides him.

At last, a switch seemed to flip on inside her. She took a breath and said, “Sir, you’re in room two-fifty-two, correct?” He shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know, but she continued on, his uncertainty fueling her confidence. “It must be two-fifty-three, that couple from Montana. But they had a child with them? Is there a child?” she asked.

“Just call,” he said, and he ran back outside. When he got to room 253, he hesitated, the full weight of his good-fences-make-good-neighbors upbringing bearing down on him. He raised his hand and knocked hard at the door. The room went silent, and he knew that something was very wrong.

“Hello?” he called, making his voice louder because he had learned early on in teaching that volume was the best way to conceal a quaver.

The receptionist came up the steps and stood watching, afraid, he knew, of the responsibility they shared, of the haste with which she had wedded her life to his. “Key?” he mouthed, but she shook her head. He stepped back until he felt the walkway railing behind him and then rushed at the door, doing this again and again until the chain ripped away and he was in.

* * *

The receptionist’s name was Britta. He had heard her spelling it for the policeman who took down their stories as they stood outside the door that Aaron had broken through minutes earlier.

That night she knocked at his room door. “It’s me, Britta,” she called, without adding qualifiers—“the receptionist” or “we saved a boy’s life together this afternoon.”

When he opened the door, she said, “I came to give you an update on Jacob,” but she was carrying a six-pack of beer, which confused him. Still, he invited her in because he could not sleep, could not stop picturing the boy — Jacob — lying on the floor as though he simply preferred it to the bed, as though he had lain down there and gone to sleep. There’d been blood, and the boy’s arm was flung upward and out at an angle that only a broken bone would allow. The mother sat to the side, sobbing about her son from a distance, from the comfort of a chair. She was not smoking but Aaron later thought of her that way, as a woman who sat in a chair and smoked while her husband threw her son against the wall. It was the husband who surprised him most: a small, jovial-looking man with crow’s-feet ( duck feet a student had once called them, mistaking the bird) and a face that seemed suited for laughing.

He and Britta did not drink the beer she had brought, though he could see that she wanted to. “It’s still cold,” she said hopefully as she set it down. She would not go further, would not slip a can from the plastic noose without his prompting. She was an employee after all, used to entering these rooms deferentially. Aaron was relieved. He had left behind everything that was familiar, but at least he recognized himself in this person who would not drink beer with a teenager in a cheap motel room in Needles, California.

The beer sat sweating on the desk between the television and the Gideon Bible. “Were you reading the Bible?” Britta asked, for of course she would know that it was generally kept tucked away in the bottom drawer of the desk. He felt embarrassed by the question, though he could see that she considered Bible-reading a normal activity, one to be expected given what had happened earlier.

“Not really,” he said, which was true. He had spent the last three hours not really doing anything. He had tried, and failed at, a succession of activities: sleeping, reading (both the Gideon Bible and Death Comes for the Archbishop, his least favorite Willa Cather book, though he periodically felt obligated to give it another chance), studying the map of California in an attempt to memorize the final leg of his trip, mending a small tear that had appeared in his shirtsleeve, and watching television. When Britta knocked, he had been sitting on the bed listening, the way he had as a child just after his father died and he lay in bed each night straining to hear whether his mother was crying in her room at the other end of the house. Some nights he heard her (gasping sobs that he would be reminded of as an adult when he overheard people having sex) while other nights there was silence.

“Where are you going?” Britta asked him.

“San Francisco,” he said.

She nodded in a way that meant she had no interest in such things: San Francisco specifically, but really the world outside Needles. He tried to imagine himself as Britta, spending his days interacting with people who were on the move, coming from or going to places that he had never seen, maybe never even heard of. Was it possible that she had not once felt the urge to pack up and follow, to solve the mystery of who Britta would be — would become —in Columbus, Ohio, or Roanoke, Virginia? It seemed inconceivable to him, to have no curiosity about one’s parallel lives, those lives that different places would demand that you live.

They sat in silence, he at the foot of the bed and she in the chair beside the desk. He did not know what to say next. “Do you like working at the motel?” he asked finally.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of boring most of the time, but sometimes it’s interesting.”

“Give me an example of something interesting,” he said, his teacher’s voice never far away. “Other than today, of course.”

“Today wasn’t interesting,” she said. “It was scary. I threw up afterward. Weren’t you scared at all?”

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I was terrified.”