Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  “I have an idea,” I say. “You can offer people Hennessy cognac! And it’d be a great idea to dress all in white. Convince everyone else to do the same.”

  I want her to rant and rave and refuse to give in.

  But she’s tired. Everything is slow and sluggish. It’s as if she is wading through water. When she finishes making the bed, she closes her eyes. Keeping them open seems completely beyond her.

  “It’s just a funeral,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She slumps down onto the freshly made bed. Hands on her knees, shoulders hunched, her face turned down toward the rug. Her breathing is suddenly rapid, and her eyes snap open. She can’t get any air, and the room starts to spin all around her. She stares down at the floor as though it’s the only thing keeping her alive while her breathing runs riot.

  I drop to my knees in front of her and place my hands on top of hers, but I can’t push the hair back out of her eyes.

  “Shh,” I say. “It’s going to be fine. You’re not alone anymore. Camila is here.”

  MacKenzie tips backward. Forces herself to hold her arms away from her body. Her cheeks lose some of their unnatural reddish tint, and her blond hair spreads out around her.

  I lie down next to her and look up at the ceiling.

  “It’s all going to be all right,” I say.

  “You don’t have to go through it all alone. Camila is back.”

  MacKenzie’s breathing gradually slows.

  I whisper into her ear: “Camila is here. Camila is here. Camila is here.”

  * * *

  Many hours later, MacKenzie heads down to the check-in desk and hangs up our homemade sign—Back in fifteen minutes, ring the bell. She grabs a couple of beers and fetches two chairs, setting them down outside Camila’s room.

  MacKenzie and I used to sit like that. A six-pack of beer between us, our feet on the metal railing, looking down at our kingdom below. I’m not sure whether the chair is for me or Camila.

  MacKenzie doesn’t knock on her door. She doesn’t say anything. She just sits there in silence. I think she’s sitting guard, but whether it’s over me or Camila is unclear.

  Once, MacKenzie told me that the thing she likes most about motels is that everyone in them is lonely. No one belongs. You both exist and don’t exist. Between realities, she said.

  “And we, Henny, get to live here full time.”

  It was a miracle that never ceased to amaze her.

  I wonder what will happen now that I’m no longer here to help out. Will she be able to manage all of the work on her own? Will she even stay? It’s impossible to imagine MacKenzie anywhere but here. And it’s definitely impossible to imagine the motel without MacKenzie.

  I glance anxiously at her in a way that would drive her crazy if she could see it. Stop mollycoddling me, she would say. But I’m a ghost, and that means I’m allowed to keep an eye on my best friend.

  Camila’s door opens.

  “Beer?” MacKenzie says without turning around.

  “It’s raining.”

  MacKenzie looks up. “We’re under a roof,” she says.

  “It’s late, MacKenzie. Go to bed.”

  But MacKenzie just holds out a bottle of beer in Camila’s direction.

  “I don’t feel like talking,” says Camila.

  “Good.”

  “No conversations.”

  “Suits me just fine,” MacKenzie says firmly.

  I get up from my chair. Camila hesitates, and then sits down on the very edge of it. MacKenzie waits a few seconds, her arm still outstretched, and then puts down the beer beside Camila.

  I jump up onto the railing in front of them, and we sit there in silence, listening to the sound of rain and the moment.

  Camila stretches her long, slim legs and lifts her feet onto the railing. Without seeming to think about it, she picks up the beer and takes a couple of swigs.

  The neon light from the sign is hazy in the rain and barely reaches the trees on the other side of the road. The dark forest is only visible whenever a car passes by.

  “God, I’d almost forgotten it could be beautiful around here,” Camila says.

  MacKenzie almost smiles. “It does happen.”

  “MacKenzie…” Camila sounds hesitant.

  “Mmm?”

  “How could you stay here? After the vote, I mean. In the six months after it, you hated this place even more than I did.”

  “Ah, I just hated the people. The roads and the motel weren’t homophobic.”

  “Was it because I went away and left you to take care of everything?”

  MacKenzie closes her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault, Camila. It was my decision. I guess I… Who knows what I was thinking? Maybe I was an idiot.”

  Don’t say that, MacKenzie, I think.

  “I didn’t actually hate the town after the vote,” Camila says. “I was probably more thankful than anything, because I’d discovered there were other LGBT people here. I wonder if the Oregon Citizens Alliance knows how many gays and lesbians and trans people they brought together. The problem was that I knew I could never go through my transition here. Everyone would keep seeing me as a man and would keep using my old name and pronoun.”

  “Deliberately, I bet,” MacKenzie says wearily. “Assholes.”

  I make a promise to myself never to use her old name again. But I do have to admit that I’m curious why she chose Camila. It must be so much fun to choose your own name as an adult.

  “Do you know something I learned when I was still a kid?” Camila asks, continuing without waiting for a reply. “I learned that you can never turn back. The only way to survive is to always be willing to pack up your things and leave. That’s where Juan Esteban was wrong. He thought freedom came from owning your own place. Working for yourself, all that crap. But that just traps you.”

  “So you left.”

  “Want to know something funny?”

  “Tell me something funny.”

  “I got fired just before I left LA. The boss wanted someone with more ‘power of persuasion,’ someone who ‘took initiative.’ I spoke to hundreds of agents, begged them to give his manuscripts a chance. But I guess he thought someone else would be able to do more. So, I got the boot. And since I didn’t have a job, I couldn’t pay the rent for my room—I was sharing an apartment with three other women. I moved out before I left.”

  I’m still waiting for the funny part.

  “Don’t you see? I’m just like Juan Esteban. Everything I own is here, at the motel. I’ve got no life, no future. I might talk about leaving as soon as the funeral is over, but I don’t actually have anywhere to go.”

  MacKenzie chuckles quietly. “You and me, Camila. You and me.” Then she stretches with a new sense of determination. “I chose to stay,” she says. “I wanted to. I love this old place. It’s my home. And Henny was my friend. I’m not going to let them win.”

  “Dolores called me Camila.”

  * * *

  MacKenzie rings the bell on Dad’s door. Again. And again. It’s ten o’clock at night, but she doesn’t care. The shrill sound cuts through the quiet street. If the neighbors want to look, let them look. My funeral is tomorrow.

  Eventually—and reluctantly—Dad opens the door. “Come in, then,” he mutters. “Cup of coffee?”

  It’s hardly the right time for coffee, but it’s a purely instinctive offer. I’m sure Dad would offer the grim reaper coffee if he came to visit. He’s actually dressed like he was expecting him; I can barely make him out in the dark hallway.

  “I spoke to Cheryl,” MacKenzie says. “She said you don’t want me at the funeral.”

  Dad refuses to meet her eye.

  “Robert! It’s Henny’s funeral. We’ve been best friends since we were seven. You’ve known me since we were seven. She was m
y best friend.”

  “And she was my daughter! Mine. Not yours!”

  “Uh, no,” says MacKenzie.

  “We were best friends until you came along and stole her from me. After that, Henny was never happy just being with me. I wasn’t exciting enough. Not funny enough either, I suppose, not compared to you and your motel. She should have been living here with me. The house is definitely big enough. I worked hard to be able to keep it when I retired, but Henny moved to the motel the minute she got the chance, with you.”

  MacKenzie is staring at him with a shocked expression, but Dad doesn’t seem to have noticed. It’s like he has been collecting these accusations in his head, all higgledy-piggledy. Junk that has been building up in there for years. Big and small, true and false, it’s all given the light of day. I can’t think of a way to stop him.

  “You said she was christened after a cognac. Henny is a beautiful old Dutch name, and my grandmother was a fantastic woman, and…”

  “That was a joke! I was fifteen!”

  “Dad!” I say as firmly as I can. “MacKenzie is my friend. She’s always been there for me. I’m sorry if you feel like I abandoned you, but it wasn’t her fault.”

  I feel like shaking him and forcing him to listen. They should be closer than ever now that they’re both grieving for me. If the people I love have to be unhappy, they should at least be unhappy together.

  But Dad’s words keep coming, even faster now. “You made people talk about you. You were always so visible, which meant they talked about Henny, too. Why did the two of you have to live together? It’s not natural. She never would have started working at that motel if it weren’t for you. She never would have moved over there, and she never would have been on that road. What was she doing there?”

  “Uh,” I say. “I don’t think you want any details, but it actually had nothing to do with work.”

  Not that Dad cares about logic or fairness. He has leaped from his perch, and now he’s in free fall.

  Then, all of a sudden, he notices the ground is right beneath him. It comes closer and closer as he falls faster and faster. For a brief second, he seems to regret it. He stares helplessly at MacKenzie as though he’s trying to grasp hold of something in his fury, to stop himself.

  But it’s too late.

  Almost involuntarily, he says, “She wouldn’t have died if it weren’t for you.”

  Everything becomes frighteningly quiet after that.

  MacKenzie, Dad, and I just stand there in the dark hallway. Frozen in shock. His words are too spiteful even to hurt.

  “Well, I’m glad we straightened that out.” MacKenzie’s voice sounds remarkably flat. “For a while, I thought Cheryl was exaggerating.”

  Chapter 16

  Hundreds of Millions of Years Ago

  The clock on the bedside table read 2:03 p.m. I had to be back at check-in by three.

  Our bodies were so close that I no longer knew where my skin ended and his began.

  I pulled away from him so that I could sit up in bed and study him properly. It was the middle of the day, but he was lying on his back, naked and drowsy. I leaned over him and explored the tanned skin on his arms and the pale areas his T-shirts had covered. He reached up to push my hair out of my eyes, but otherwise he lay still and let me touch him however I wanted.

  “You know,” he said. “I never doubted that I really wanted to go for my job. I love being a geologist. I’m happy with my life. But lately…I’ve felt like there’s something missing.”

  I had been missing. I turned away to hide my smile, then returned to his body. I was amazed by how familiar it felt after such a short, eternally long weekend.

  “It was okay while I was still struggling to make it, but the more successful I became, the emptier it felt. Does that sound stupid?”

  I wondered whether he could see how hard my heart was beating. “You’re a bestselling author,” I said.

  “I only wrote that so I had something to do when I wasn’t working. And maybe…I guess the whole time I was thinking that I only talked about rocks with you.”

  “You didn’t even dedicate it to me.”

  I lay down against his shoulder. Closed my eyes. He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me closer.

  “Tell me about rocks,” I said.

  “Once upon a time, long ago,” he began, smiling to himself. “Hundreds of millions of years ago, in fact. There was a fish known as the conodont.”

  I sat up and looked at him in surprise. “A fish?” I said. “You have changed.”

  “Patience. I’ll get to the rocks.”

  I lay back down against his shoulder. His finger traced slow, meaningless patterns on my arm.

  “There’s actually nothing special about the fish itself. It looked like a kind of eel, with a soft, fragile body that hasn’t survived very well. There are actually only two intact specimens in existence. Anyway, this fish had a lot of teeth, and those teeth are still here. When the fish died, they sank to the bottom of the ocean where they gradually disintegrated and disappeared—everything but their teeth. They stayed where they were, on the seabed, until the seabed became mountains and rocks. Fossilized teeth from those fish can now be found in the limestone at Grindstone Creek in the Blue Mountains—the oldest rocks in Oregon.”

  It was almost two thirty.

  “But the most interesting thing is that because the fish lived for hundreds of millions of years and developed over time, we can use their teeth to date the rocks. Aha, their teeth looked like this, which means that the limestone in Grindstone Creek must be 380 million years old. Isn’t that insane, Henny? A long-extinct fish whose teeth can date an immovable rock in an indestructible mountain range.”

  I buried my face in his neck and breathed in the scent of him. Memorized the feel of his skin. His rib cage rose and fell beneath my hand as silence spread out between us.

  “Henny?” he said quietly.

  I nodded against his neck.

  “I haven’t changed,” he said.

  Chapter 17

  The Sun Still Rises

  I’ve failed.

  As I work around in the darkness the last night before my funeral, I can’t think of anything else left to do. I tried praying, but after a few hours, I just felt like a nagging child. Please please pretty please. Parents might give in to it; God apparently does not.

  So I walk.

  I walk around the motel, the parking lot, the cabins, Dolores’s small kitchen garden in the back, the river. I peer into every vacant room. I even pause for a few minutes in the dark laundry room, just standing between the washing machines.

  Maybe you don’t get second chances in death. Maybe all I was supposed to do with this extra time was find a way to say goodbye to them. I wish I could be brave about it. Be strong, like Michael and Camila and MacKenzie always were. But it’s hard to be brave when your friends are unhappy, and they are.

  I used to think that I was bound to them by some kind of unbreakable bond. Something like thick, velvet ribbons. Tied loosely between us; a safety net rather than a shackle. But now I’m all caught up in that ribbon. I’ve twisted and turned until it is wound so tightly that I can no longer move, and the more I struggle, the tighter it becomes.

  If only I knew they would be all right without me. I could leave them then, I think.

  I hesitate about going back to Water Street. I can still remember MacKenzie’s harrowingly pale face as she drove away. She wouldn’t have died if it weren’t for you.

  But in the end I decide to go there anyway. He is my father, after all.

  It’s four in the morning, and he is sitting perfectly still in his armchair. Eyes closed. He’s so still that I have to get up close to make sure he’s still breathing. He is. He falls asleep while I’m there. Snoring gently.

  I wonder whether I should say anything. Som
e kind of final message. Stop being an idiot, I could tell him. Apologize to MacKenzie. But his face is thin and furrowed, his skin like parchment, and I decide he has his own cross to bear. I hope his Jesus is watching over him. All I say is “Bye, Dad” before walking away.

  MacKenzie is still awake. She is lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Eyes half-closed. Desperately empty. Bye, MacKenzie.

  I reach Camila’s door next. Bye, Camila.

  I can’t bring myself to say it to Michael. Instead, I curl up next to him for a while, but I’m afraid of wasting more time. Afraid that my thoughts will drift away, and I’ll disappear without having made the most of what little time I have left here.

  I want to be intensely here during my last few hours on earth. My last sunrise. I’ll have to find a good place to watch it from, I think as I resume my walk around the motel. A faint grayness has already started to seep through the darkness. Dawn arrives so slowly that I have to turn between east and west to see the difference. To the west, jet-black night. To the east, a slight, slight hint of gray on the horizon.

  Then I look up.

  The roof.

  It’s not exactly like I can do any more damage to myself, I think as I climb onto the railing. I grab hold of the gutter and haul myself up, swinging my legs until I manage to hook a foot onto the roof and drag myself up.

  To the east: fantastic grayness. The dark outlines of the mountains. To the west: Pine Creek Motel and Cabins. Vacanci s.

  From the roof of the motel, I watch the sun rise for the very last time. A brand-new view for my last morning on earth. The last miracle of my life.

  The way the sky explodes into orange and red behind the mountain is like an omen of what is to come. In just a few short hours, I’ll be eaten up by fire, and then I’ll disappear and that’s it.

  I walk over to the edge of the roof. I feel a sudden jolt of dizziness in my stomach, but I don’t look away. I don’t step back. I enjoy the fear. It’s a sign that something within me is still alive. And when I look out at the bluish-purple mountains with their backdrop of fire, it’s so beautiful that I feel an ache in my chest. The way I used to. A rushing sense of awe. Like feeling dizzy at the world.