Hell's Hotel

by Lesley Choyce

  “It’s not so bad, really.”

  “We’re going to stay here?”

  “Not here, upstairs.”

  Only there was no obvious way to get upstairs. The stairway in front of them had been torn down, or maybe it had fallen down.

  For no obvious reason, Jenn looked up into the empty space where the stairway had once stood and shouted out, “Knock, knock! Anybody home?”

  Tara couldn’t figure out what she was doing or who she was talking to.

  But then there was an answer. A guy said, “Who is it?”

  “Jenn. And a friend.”

  “Hang on a minute.”

  Tara thought she recognized the voice. Who was it?

  A few seconds later a ladder was lowered. Jenn started to climb up. Tara was still having plenty of doubts, but she realized there was no turning back. She had come this far, so she followed.

  In the floor above, which was a kind of gigantic attic, there were candles burning and kids, fully dressed, lying on mattresses. The welcoming committee consisted of Craig Hollet and a girl he introduced as Charlotte’s Web. “She’s from Charlottetown and she likes spiders,” Craig explained. “What have you guys been up to?”

  “Café Chebucto. Great band. Tara decided she wanted a taste of life outside the comforts of home.”

  Most of the others were asleep. Craig seemed to be pretty casual about things. Tara was just beginning to calm down and feel a little more comfortable when Craig pulled the ladder back up.

  “For safety reasons, you know?”

  “Is this place safe?” Tara asked. It was a pretty lame question, and she felt foolish as she asked it.

  “Depends on what you mean by safe,” Craig replied. “It could be worse.”

  Tara looked at the candles burning, the other kids sleeping on the mattresses. It had seemed like a very warm night, but suddenly she felt a chill run through her. Jenn led her to a couple of empty mattresses near the window by the street. As Tara lay down on one of them, she realized that her head was spinning around. She had to work hard not to throw up. She didn’t know how she had got herself into this. She was scared and she felt awful. After a while, the candles were blown out and everyone went to sleep. She wanted to talk to Jenn about it, but the room was quiet. She was afraid she’d wake someone, and she wasn’t all that anxious to find out who else was sleeping in this house of horrors — Hell’s Hotel. She lay on her mattress feeling cold and sick and wished she could just erase the past week from her life.

  She was awakened once in the middle of the night by noises downstairs. Someone was in the building below — it sounded like a couple of men. They were angry and maybe drunk. One of them yelled: “Anybody up there?” But no one answered.

  In the dim light, she watched as Craig got to his feet and very quietly crawled to the hole in the floor, but just hovered there, silently. They all listened as the two men banged around downstairs, kicking at the walls, cursing, then laughing, then cursing some more. Jenn whispered to her, “It’s okay. They can’t get up here.”

  After a while the two guys went back downstairs and outside. Tara shivered as she lay there wondering how long it would be before morning arrived, wondering if it would ever arrive. Jenn had fallen right back to sleep. But Tara lay there shaking. She didn’t know if it was because she was cold or because she was so awfully scared.

  Hell’s Hotel

  When Tara woke up she didn’t know where she was. As she tried to get her eyes to focus, she wasn’t even sure she knew who she was. Her head hurt and her mouth was dry. Then she remembered last night. She remembered the wild excitement of the music. But there was the rest to think about, too. The drugs, the dark journey up the stairs and up the ladder, the noises in the night. Never before in her life had Tara felt so much fear. She wondered how Jenn had ever adapted to a life like this.

  Tara remembered that, after the intruders downstairs had left, she had tried hard to get to sleep. She had considered praying for herself. It had been a long time since she had prayed for anything, and she had to admit to herself she wasn’t sure she even believed in God. So she had tried something else. In her mind, she tried to recall the image of Emma while she was alive. Emma, who had been so gentle and caring, thoughtful and full of great energy, even when she looked weak and old. So old. Tara had conjured up the picture and then tried to communicate with Emma. She asked her for help. And now Tara remembered. She was certain that she had heard the voice, the voice of Emma, inside her head saying that she would be there watching over her, that everything was going to turn out just fine. And then Tara had fallen asleep.

  The light of the morning sun filtered in through what was left of the window. Tara surveyed her surroundings for the first time. She looked at the bare brick walls, the bare wood rafters and boards of the roof above. Junk was piled in the corners. She saw broken furniture and maybe a dozen mattresses, with kids sleeping in various weird positions — stretched out, curled up, some with jackets over their heads.

  Craig was awake at the far end, still sitting by the hole in the floor. Tara caught his eye, and he smiled. Tara felt embarrassed. Craig understood, said nothing and just looked away. Tara wondered what his story was, what troubles had led him here, and how he had become the self-designated guardian. Had he stayed awake all night guarding the entrance so that no one could come up? If so, when did he sleep? Tara remembered the article in The Rage. Josh had interviewed Craig, but he sure had missed his real story.

  Jenn was awake now. “Hey. We survived,” she said.

  Tara looked puzzled.

  “That was a joke, Tara. A little street humour. How does it feel to be among the scum of the earth?”

  Tara knew what she meant. In fact, she really did feel like scum of the earth. And she had invited herself to join. “It doesn’t feel that good.”

  “You look terrible.”

  “You look terrible, too.” But it was a lie. Jenn looked, well, the same. She had slept in her uniform: her black hoodie, baggie pants and running shoes. Maybe that was the secret to successful street living: wearing the right clothes.

  A wave of nausea swept over Tara. “I gotta get out of here,” she said. “Now. I need a washroom and I need some breakfast. I need ... Oh God, I don’t know what else I need.”

  “There’s a bucket in the corner. And we can order room service if you like.”

  Tara was amazed at how cool Jenn was about this whole thing. Their lives were both being flushed down the toilet and she still had a sense of humour. Another lesson of life on the street. But Tara didn’t feel in the mood for humour.

  “Can we just get out of here?”

  Jenn got up and helped Tara to her feet. Other bodies stirred now. Kids peeked out at them with unhappy faces from under coats and long hair. It was only about eight o’clock. Apparently the other campers were used to sleeping in late.

  Craig said nothing at all. He let the ladder down. When they were safely on the floor below, he said “See ya,” and pulled the ladder back up. Tara had been thinking about something: hell. It had been up, not down. And she had survived it, as Jenn had said. Survived it once. “I don’t think I ever want to do that again.”

  “That’s okay. You have a choice. Some of us don’t.”

  “I don’t see how you can say that,” Tara said.

  “You haven’t lived my life.”

  Tara wasn’t in the mood to give Jenn a lecture. She was feeling kind of edgy. Was it something left over from the drug or was she mad at her friend for getting her into last night? “I could really use a coffee and a croissant,” Tara said.

  “Croissant?” Jenn said. “Give me a break. As you might recall, we’re a little short on funds.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But we can always beg.”

  “Right.” Tara said. But
she wasn’t in the mood to stop people and ask for handouts. Last night had been different. She had been high. But now she was straight, very straight, and she looked like something the cat dragged in. “I can’t do it.”

  Jenn gave her a look of disgust, then shrugged, took a deep breath and went over to the first person coming her way, a guy with a briefcase hurrying to his office. “’Scuse me, sir. My friend over there was wondering if you might have some spare change for a croissant.”

  He kept on going. The guy looked at Tara, though, and just shook his head. Jenn tried a second time and then a third. By the fourth try, she got a quarter, then someone offered up a handful of change. Tara just stood there, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

  Finally Jenn spoke to her. “We’ve got enough to split a coffee and a croissant. But you’ll owe me one.”

  “I’ll pay you back with interest.” In truth, Tara had bought Jenn a lot of coffee and food over the years. If she had been counting, Jenn would have run up a pretty healthy tab. But all that was in the past. Jenn had just paid her back double.

  In the washroom at Tim Horton’s, Tara tried to make the damage look minimal. Her hair was a rat’s nest; her face looked pale and sickly. Her clothes looked like she had, well, slept in them. It wasn’t a pretty picture, but she tried to cover the damage with Jenn’s makeup, and she brushed the barbed-wire knots out of her hair.

  When she sat back down she noticed that Jenn had ordered. Tara had her croissant — a whole one sitting on a plate just for her. Jenn was eating toast with marmalade, and she had half a donut in front of her.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The people at the next table over. Real slobs. They left half their food on the plate. I figured it was only going to get chucked, so I saved the waitress some work.” She bit into the donut and wiped the white sugar powder off her lips.

  Tara ate the croissant and thanked her friend again.

  “What would your parents think, Tara, about last night?”

  In truth, Tara kept asking herself the same thing. She was still mad at them but she hoped they weren’t worried to death about her.

  “They’d be totally creeped out,” she told Jenn.

  “All parents deserve to be tortured.”

  “I mean, I feel like my whole life at home, my family — it’s all a big lie.”

  “You don’t have it so bad.”

  “I know, but I just can’t believe they would do this to me.”

  “They didn’t do it to you. They just did it. Go home. Say you’re sorry. Explain that it was the thing with the old lady dying.”

  “I’m not going home,” Tara said. But as soon as she had said it she knew deep down she wouldn’t spend another night at Hell’s Hotel.

  “Then I guess we’re going to school,” Jenn said. “I don’t know about you, but I have some catching up to do in math and English.”

  When they arrived at Citadel High, they walked in through the doors and went their separate ways. Tara was aware that kids were looking at her again. She always wore good clothes. Her mother bought her anything she wanted. She knew she had established a good rep for how she looked. She didn’t like to admit that, because she told herself she wasn’t really concerned about appearances; she was into more important things. But now that she looked like a bag lady from the street, she felt very self-conscious.

  Nothing happened until third period when she was called down to Mr. Henley’s office. When she arrived, Henley appeared at his office door. He gave her one look, ushered her into the office, and then closed the door on her and walked away. Tara saw her parents sitting there.

  “We were worried sick,” her mother said, hugging her until Tara thought she would crack in half.

  “Tara, you should never have done that to us,” her father said. “Whatever is wrong, we want you to know that we’ll work on it.”

  “Where were you?” her mother demanded. She still hadn’t let go.

  Tara squeezed back the tears. She wanted to scream at them that they had no right to split up the family. She wanted to tell them that she was never going home again. She wanted to blame them for everything. Even Emma’s death, in some strange way, seemed like their fault. This was illogical, but Tara still felt the worst sort of concoction of hurt and rage that had built up in her as a result of her mother going away and her old friend dying. But she could not bring herself to say any of this. “I stayed at a friend’s house. I was over at Claudia’s. I guess I forgot to call. I’m sorry.”

  Her mother let go of her now. They were both staring at her, at her clothes, at the mess she was in. Tara knew they could see through this blatant lie. Claudia had never been a close friend. And Tara looked awful. There was another story here. Tara wanted them to scream at her, to yell at her and insist that she tell the truth. If her parents really loved her, they would punish her for breaking the rules, for staying away all night and for lying.

  “It’s okay,” her father said, her father the administrator, the mediator. “We know we hurt you. But we’re still a family.”

  “We’ll always be your parents. That can never change.”

  And all at once her parents had changed back into those oh-so-reasonable adults they had been before. Already she was forgiven for her wayward night. She was let off easy. But she also knew that what was being said here was that nothing had changed. Her parents — who would always be her parents — were still going to separate.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” her mom asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she lied.

  “You want to check out of school?” her dad said. “I think that the death of your friend Emma is a legitimate reason for a day off. I can drive you home before I go back to work.” Her father was so good at smoothing everything over and acting as if everything was now fine. He probably thought that they had fixed everything, put it all back to normal. But it wasn’t like that.

  Tara’s mother was looking at her clothes. “Maybe you and I can go shopping at Spring Garden Place.”

  Tara wondered right then if she really knew her parents, and if they knew her at all. She had stopped hating them, stopped blaming them. In a way, she felt sorry for them. Unlike Jenn, whose parents yelled and screamed almost constantly when Jenn was around, Tara had the most civilized parents in the world. They could be generous and they could be nice. But it was funny how that wasn’t enough.

  “I think I’d better stay in school. I don’t want to get behind. You know how easy it is to let your grades slip.”

  There. She sounded like one of them. Reasonable. Thinking about grades, thinking about the end of the year and academics and how she needed good grades if she wanted to get into university and become a psychiatrist. But it all seemed so hollow and unreal.

  She walked her parents down the hall and out of the school.

  “You need any money for lunch?” her father asked. A good administrator always pays attention to all the details, he had once told her.

  “Yeah. I don’t have any.” That was probably the first really truthful thing she had said to them.

  “Here.” Her father handed her a twenty. “Tonight at dinner, we’ll talk. We’ll work on everything. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

  Her mother kissed her on the cheek and squeezed her hand. And then her parents got back into their car and drove off. Tara looked at the money. She thought about giving it to Jenn, telling her to split it with some of the kids who had spent the night at Hell’s Hotel. She thought that would be the right thing to do. But instead, she put the money in her pocket. At lunch she walked over to The King’s Palace restaurant and ordered herself an enormous Chinese lunch.

  Going Back

  Nobody thought to invite Tara to Emma’s funeral. When Tara phoned and asked someone at the nursing home about Emma, she found out that Emma had been
cremated. There had been a little sunrise ceremony as her ashes were spread on the waves at Lawrencetown Beach. Tara was having trouble fixing it in her head: Emma was dead. Her body was gone, carried by the wind out over the water, and she would never see her again. There was a dull pain in Tara’s heart that would not go away. She kept thinking it would diminish, but it lingered. Every once in a while, though, Tara felt that she could hear the faint echo of Emma’s voice, her voice from the night when Tara was scared and she had reached out in her mind for help. Emma had told her everything was going to be all right.

  Her parents were suddenly spending a lot more time at home. Her father was home every night by five-thirty. Her mother was playing housewife — dinner precisely at six, no evening photography classes or trips to the galleries and photo labs. And there was talk. Lots of it. How do you feel about this? How do you feel about that, Tara?

  They were so concerned about her feelings — but they still weren’t willing to change their minds.

  “If it was up to me, I’d keep things as they are,” her father would say, turning to her mother. “Why can’t you become the person you want to be here, instead of in Vancouver?”

  “Because here I’m just playing at photography. I wish I could stay here, but I know this is my first real chance to get serious about something I’m good at. I need this.” Then she would turn to Tara and ask, “You understand, don’t you?”

  If it had been another woman on the face of the earth other than her mother she would have understood perfectly. But no matter how much talking they did, Tara was still mad at them. Mad at her mother for wanting a life somewhere else, and mad at her father for letting it happen. The end of every discussion was the same. Her mother was leaving soon for Vancouver. It was all very reasonable and civilized. It was nothing like separation and divorce on TV. Nobody throwing dishes and knives, no screaming arguments.

  Tara still had a choice. She could stay at home with her father or she could move to Vancouver with her mother. Of course, she’d be able to fly back and forth for visits.