Niagara Motel

by Ashley Little

  I was on a main road and a bunch of cars passed me, and I thought about sticking my thumb out and asking for a ride, but I didn’t really want to ride in any of those cars. What I really wanted was a ride in Doc Brown’s DeLorean. Then I could go back in time to before, when Meredith was alive and everything was okay in the world. We never would have come to L.A. We never would have left Niagara Falls. I would still have a best friend, and her baby would still have a mother.

  I realized that it was my fault that Meredith was dead, and a wall of glass broke inside my chest. My throat lumped up, and the edges of everything got blurry.

  Then a black man in a white Ford Bronco cruised up beside me and rolled down his window. “Where’re ya headed, kid?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “I’m going to the airport, if you want a ride,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, tell you what I know,” he said. “Sometimes, you gotta get the hell out of L.A. This is one of those times.”

  I nodded.

  Then the man gave me a little wave and took off. I watched the white Bronco as it headed down the road; it seemed to be going in slow motion. But everything was going in slow motion, so I couldn’t be absolutely 100-percent sure about anything.

  I walked for a long, long time and didn’t think about anything except that I was leaving Los Angeles. I walked toward the bright lights of the planes I could see coming in to land somewhere in the distance. I passed a woman with grey hair leaning in the doorway of a camera store.

  “Hey!” she called out to me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Her face was pinched and tired, and her eyes looked like someone had knocked the light out of them.

  “Not really,” I said. “There’s a riot.” I shrugged and felt the baby jostle against my stomach.

  “It’s those pigs, I’ll bet. The police in this city are goddamned animals.” She spat onto the sidewalk.

  “Do you know which way the airport is?”

  “Sure, yeah,” she said. Her head twitched twice to the side. “Just stay on this street for quite a ways, then you’ll want to take a right onto Century Boulevard. Then you just keep going straight until you get on a plane.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Got any change?”

  I gave her what I had in my pocket, a couple of ones and a few quarters.

  “May God bless you,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and kept walking.

  When I got to the airport, the first thing I did was use the washroom. I hung the baby-backpack on the hook on the back of the door and Angel didn’t cry or fall out or anything. The second thing I did was call Gina. There was no answer in her room but I let it ring about a thousand times anyways. Then I hung up. Then I went looking for money. I carefully took Angel out of Meredith’s backpack so I could have a good look through it. She stayed wrapped inside her sweater-nest on a chair beside me and didn’t even cry. I found $200 safety-pinned inside a secret pocket in the top flap of Meredith’s backpack, plus another $187 in her wallet. And I still had a $130 of my own. I thought that would be enough to buy a plane ticket to Buffalo, and then I could hitchhike the rest of the way back to Niagara Falls. I took off Angel’s paper-towel diaper and wrapped a new one around her, then folded the sweater around her again to keep her warm. I zipped Angel back inside the backpack leaving only a little air hole open and went up to the ticketing counter.

  “That flight doesn’t leave until five a.m. tomorrow,” the man behind the counter said. He was blond and fat and had crumbs stuck in his moustache.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  “It’s sold out,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “The next flight to Buffalo is at eleven-fifty a.m. and it is …” he checked his computer, “also fully booked.”

  “What about Toronto?” I said.

  “Canada?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He clicked some buttons on the keyboard. “The next flight to Toronto leaves at seven thirty-five a.m. Unfortunately, it is fully booked as well. Over-sold, actually.” He gave me a thin smile.

  “I just need to get home,” I said.

  “I can put you on stand-by,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If someone doesn’t show up for their flight, you’ll get their seat.”

  “What if everybody shows up?”

  “Then … you don’t get a seat,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Can I stand up on the plane?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh,” I looked down at my shoes. I didn’t like looking at my shoes though, because they were stained with Meredith’s blood. So I looked back up at him and his stupid, crumby moustache.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Eleven.”

  “And you’re flying alone today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a letter of authorization from your parent or guardian?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll need to see some sort of documentation before—”

  “Look, my mom is in the hospital in Niagara Falls. My best friend just died in the back of a Korean grocery store. I don’t know where my father is, and Los Angeles is on fire. I need to go home now.”

  He looked at me for a few seconds then pressed his lips together. “I see,” he said. He looked at his computer screen and clicked some buttons. Then he sighed. “Well, we can just keep trying to get you on stand-by for the next available flight to Buffalo or Toronto.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I can’t guarantee that you’ll get a seat though.”

  “So, I’ll just have to wait and see?”

  “That’s right,” he said, eyeing the TV screen that hung from the ceiling, showing the zillions of fires burning across L.A.

  “I just want to go home,” I said.

  He nodded and checked me through. “You can pay at the gate if you get a seat,” he said.

  When I went through security, I put the baby-backpack on the conveyor belt, and Angel zipped right through the X-ray machine. Nobody said anything about her. Maybe they thought she was a doll. Maybe the person who was supposed to be looking at the X-ray machine was actually watching the TV that hung across the room. Everyone in the airport kept watching the TVs, then looking at each other and shaking their heads.

  I found a quiet corner near my departure gate and leaned against the wall and drank my Coke and ate my Kit Kat. Then I took Angel out of the backpack and gave her some more formula. She gurgled and it gooped down her chin in little white rivers. I wiped her off with a paper towel and tried again until she drank some of it. Then I wrapped her in my hoodie and put her back in the backpack and lay down so that I could see her. She looked at me with her big grey ocean eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She blinked at me a few times and screeched a little bit, but she didn’t cry. After a while she closed her eyes, and so did I. The tears came hot and fast, and I was glad for it.

  Everyone showed up for the five a.m. flight to Buffalo. Everyone showed up for the seven thirty-five a.m. flight to Toronto, plus some extra people who couldn’t get on and were upset about it. Everyone showed up for the eleven-fifty a.m. flight to Buffalo. Everyone showed up for the afternoon flight to Toronto. But I kept trying. I went back and forth between the two departure gates all day. It was a long way to go because one was in the International terminal and one was Domestic. Sometimes I had to run between the two to get there on time. But all of the people with tickets showed up for their flights. I guess everyone thought it was a good time to get the heck out of L.A., just like the guy in the Bronco said. I even asked a few nice-looking people if they would sell me their seats. One guy said he would, except that his mom had just died and he had to go to her funeral. One lady said she would, but her apartment was burned down in the
riot and she had no place to stay so she was going to stay with her cousin in Buffalo. One guy just looked at me and said, “Not hardly, pal.”

  I didn’t eat anything because I was afraid if I spent my money on food I wouldn’t have enough left for the plane ticket. I just drank water and kept feeding formula to Angel every couple of hours. Angel was really good and didn’t cry or fuss at all, she just slept and slept, but I was afraid to go to sleep again in case I missed a flight I could get on. I made sure her paper towel was always dry and that she stayed warm in her little nest. The backpack started to smell like cottage cheese, but she looked happy enough. I tried calling Gina a few more times but there was still no answer. I watched the live news footage of the riots that played on the TVs and saw that it was still going on and getting worse, and when I remembered the things I had seen people doing, I wanted to upchuck all over LAX.

  Most people in the airport seemed pretty worried and upset too. Some people cried and were comforted by others, some people cried alone.

  The sunset was a purple haze. I leaned my head against a glass wall and watched the sun drop toward the ocean like a big red Plinko chip. I waited at gate number forty-seven for the last flight to Buffalo, crossing my fingers on both hands. And my toes. The redheaded airport lady at the gate knew I was trying to get on the plane because I’d been trying to get on it for over twelve hours. I looked away from the window and watched her as she checked her computer and spoke into a walkie-talkie. Then she looked at me and did that thing with her finger that people do when they want you to come over to them.

  I ran over to her.

  “You still want to get on this flight?” she said.

  “Yes!”

  “You’re lucky, someone hasn’t shown up.”

  I hugged her and she laughed. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Get home safe, kiddo,” she said.

  Then I ran over to the window where I’d left Angel in her backpack and strapped the backpack to my chest and paid the money for the ticket and got on the plane.

  30

  As the flight attendants explained how to put on an oxygen mask, I thought of Meredith. Well, Meredith’s body, stuck in the back of the Korean Grocery store. What would happen to her, and who would make sure she had a proper funeral and a proper burial, and who would plant a red fern beside her gravestone? Would she even get a gravestone? I didn’t know the answers to anything, and I didn’t know what I could do about any of it. I watched the pretty flight attendant show us how to click two parts of the seatbelt together and tried not to think about anything.

  I sat between a lady and an old man. The lady got the window seat. She had ginormous breasts and a glass eye. She told me that her name was Linda and she had flown to L.A. to audition for a part in a movie about a weatherman who wakes up and it’s the same day, over and over again.

  “Sounds like kind of a boring movie,” I said. “No offense.”

  She shrugged. “I think it’ll probably be one of those movies that people either really love or really hate. If it ever gets made, that is.”

  “What part would you play? If you get it, I mean.”

  “The love interest,” she nodded and her glass eye bobbed up and down.

  “Do you think you got it?”

  “The audition was cancelled!” she said. “Because of the riots. All of Hollywood’s shut down, if you can believe it.” She blew her nose into a Kleenex. “I’m just glad I made it out of there before the airport closed,” she said. “Did you know we just got on one of the last flights out of L.A.?”

  “No.”

  “They’re shutting it down. Who knows for how long.”

  “The whole airport?”

  “That’s right. And the buses too.”

  “To everywhere?”

  “No one comes in, no one leaves. Not until they get a handle on this thing.”

  “How are they going to do that?”

  “What? Get a handle on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ve had to call in the National Guard,” she said.

  “The army?”

  “If you can believe it.”

  Then Angel coughed and spit up a gob of milky white stuff. The old man beside me chuckled and snorted a bit.

  “Is that one of those dolls that wets itself and cries and everything?” Linda said.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “It looks so real,” Linda said, peering into the backpack. “My niece works in a doll factory in New Jersey. They’re making them so life-like now, it’s amazing.”

  The man sitting on my other side said, “That’s no doll, lady. That’s the real thing.”

  Linda looked at me. I nodded. She looked at Angel again. Then back to me. “Just what exactly are you doing with a baby in your backpack, young man?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “Would you mind if I just looked out the window for a while?”

  Linda looked at me for a moment and her real eye got sad and her glass one kind of floated to the side as she nodded. “Sure, sure. That’s fine. You can tell me about it some other time.” Then she turned to look out the window, and I leaned forward so I could see out the window too.

  The trees were green and the land was brown and the ocean was shimmery blue, sparkling in the day’s last light. You would never know that things were such a giant mess in the world from 30,000 feet in the air.

  After a while, I fed Angel some formula and then she fell asleep and so did Linda. Linda snored as she slept but her glass eye didn’t close. It rolled around to the side and stared straight at me. The eye was milky-blue and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I wanted to reach up and pull her eyelid shut over it, but I didn’t. Instead, I stared at the grey seat-back in front of me and wished that Meredith was there.

  The man in the aisle seat next to me said, “That your baby?”

  “It’s my best friend’s baby,” I said. “She died yesterday.”

  The man nodded slowly. “You gonna look out for her now, then?”

  I looked down at Angel, curled up like a bean, sleeping. I nodded.

  “That’s good. That’s good,” he said, nodding. Then the man reached into his bag and slid out a yellow pamphlet and put it in my lap. “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart, son?”

  I looked at the pamphlet then looked at him. “I’m not your son,” I said.

  He stared at me for a second. “Would you like to say the Sinner’s Prayer with me?” he said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’s when you invite Jesus into your heart.”

  “Jesus can come into my heart if he wants to, I guess,” I said. “There’s other people in there too, so I guess one more can’t hurt.”

  The man looked at me and I looked at him. His face was wrinkled like an old paper bag.

  “Okay, then,” he said and bowed his head. He began to pray. I think he wanted me to repeat after him, but I didn’t. I just listened to him. He went on for quite a while and before he was finished, I fell asleep.

  When I got off the plane in Buffalo, I could tell by the cool, fresh air and the quiet shush of traffic that things were okay in the state of New York, and people weren’t rioting or killing each other or wrecking their own city. The sun was rising and hot-pink light shot through the clouds. I walked away from the airport and kept my thumb out and pretty soon a car picked me up. It was a gold Nissan 240SX. A man with icy-blue eyes drove and he told me his name was Paul. His girlfriend was Karla and she sat in the passenger seat and had puffy blonde hair. I asked them where they were headed and they said St. Catherines and they said they could take me to Niagara Falls, no problem, since they had to go through there anyways to get home.

  They asked me all kinds of questions about where I was from and where I was going and they especially wanted to know all about Angel and where her mother was. But I didn’t want to talk about Meredith with them so I just said, “She died in Los Angeles yesterday.” And they said they were sorry
to hear that. Angel woke up and started squirming and making small squeaky noises. Karla turned around and cooed at her and made mushy faces at her. She asked if she could hold her. But Karla had long fake nails that were painted salmon-colour and looked sharp, and I didn’t want her to scratch Angel’s skin with them. I told her that Angel was just born the day before and she was premature so she probably shouldn’t be held by too many people or else she could get sick, which was probably true.

  “Oh,” Karla said, scrunching up her face. “Okay then.” She looked at Paul with a pouty mouth and Paul glanced back at us, then back at her and shrugged.

  Other than her salmon nails, Karla looked pretty normal and so did Paul. But there was something about them that made me feel cold and shivery inside. It was a watery, heavy feeling in my guts. I remembered how Meredith had said that sometimes the most normal looking people can be the weirdest people, and I figured that was probably true about Karla and Paul. We didn’t say too much for the rest of the ride. As we were going across the Rainbow Bridge, it started to rain really hard. It seemed to me like the sky was crying.