by Cesare, Adam
“Well, thank you for saying so. We’ve been in this location for over thirty years, watched the town grow up around us. That’s why we need the extra help over the summer. We get busier than the small year-round staff can handle. Do you have hospitality experience?”
“Um,” Claire said, damning herself for using the ugly placeholder during what was beginning to feel like a job interview. “I have six years of experience in the service industry, as a waitress.”
“Waitressing is tough work. You should be well prepared for what you’d be doing here at the hotel.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is that?”
The woman on the line laughed, at what Claire couldn’t tell, but it didn’t seem to be at her, which was good. “I told Daisy that nobody’d know what the heck ‘guest liaison’ meant. You’d help with the front desk, check in guests and sometimes help out with cleaning the rooms if Daisy should ever get too overwhelmed. Does that sound okay?”
“Sounds great,” Claire said, a little worried about the fact that Brant had casually inserted housekeeping into the list of duties. “Should I send over my resume?”
“I don’t know if that’s necessary. Do you have a college degree?”
“Yes, I have a B.A. in English from Boston University.”
“Wow, I don’t know how competitive our pay is going to be. It’s a sixty-dollar per diem that includes board and meals.”
Not bad, and it’s out of here. She looked up at the red-and-white pennant over the bed. Time to move on.
The woman took advantage of Claire’s silence to add something else. “You sound great, but we’re going to need to see you in person to get a better idea that you’ll fit in here. Are you still in Boston?”
“Yes. Are you located near any lines of the commuter rail?”
“Sadly, we’re not. Would you still be able to make it out?”
“I don’t think it should be a problem. When should I stop in?”
“Would sometime this week be possible?”
Claire thought of Allison’s car, the one that Claire constantly ridiculed her for having in the city.
“That should be no problem.”
“Great. We’ll see you when you get here.”
“Wait,” Claire said, not wanting the woman to hang up on her. “Sorry for not asking earlier, but who am I speaking with?”
The woman on the other end of the line made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. Claire wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a silly-me or a silly-you. “Well my name is Victoria Brant, Ms. Brant, and this is The Brant Hotel. We can’t wait to meet you, Claire.”
Claire smiled at that, realized that she couldn’t be seen and then spoke. “I’ll see you soon.”
But Brant was gone.
Chapter Four
Allison drove a black 2010 Hyundai Elantra, a used car that wasn’t a used car because it had only been driven around on test drives at the dealership. Claire knew this much about the car because she knew this much about virtually all of Allison’s possessions.
Allison told about each one in detail. Same with the netbook that she got with the student discount even though she hadn’t been a student for nearly two years. Same with the bundle of panties that she had gotten after a particularly enticing Groupon from Victoria’s Secret. She’d made Claire get some, too.
The Elantra nosed in and out of traffic like a mouse, Allison’s feet jumpy on the pedals. Just because you own a car in the city doesn’t make you a city driver.
Seldom used, Allison’s car was reserved for the occasional trip to the Natick Mall or weekend jaunts into Brookline to load up on cheap wine and over-priced food at Trader Joe’s. It wasn’t exactly a workhorse. Allison paid their landlord two hundred and twenty-five dollars to park it behind the apartment. It used to be an even two fifty, but she got time off for good behavior.
“Suck my dick, you fucking asshole!” Allison screamed, passing on the left and screaming at a driver who had the gall to honk.
They weren’t even to I-90 and already Claire was regretting so many parts of this plan. Allison had prodded her to pack a small overnight bag, a change of panties, travel deodorant and a fresh T-shirt in a plastic Shaw’s bag.
After the interview they were going to spend the night somewhere in the Berkshires. As inane as they were, sometimes the stories from Allison’s life would pop into Claire’s mind, word-perfect.
“I’ve never been to the boonies,” Allison had said yesterday while packing her own bag. “But I dated a guy sophomore year that took that skiing class, you know, the one that takes bus trips every other week. Yuck. I always thought he was doing it to fill his schedule with empty space, stretch his four years into five. But maybe he actually enjoyed skiing.”
Allison spoke from the driver’s seat, her voice doubling for a moment in Claire’s ears, scaring the piss out of her.
“What?” Claire asked. Allison was always more than happy to repeat herself if you missed anything.
“I asked if you wanted to put on some music.”
She didn’t really, but if she didn’t, then Allison would put on her own. The thought of auto-tuned vocals or faux soft rock country sent shivers up Silverfish’s spine.
Claire picked her butt up off of the Elantra’s passenger seat, getting enough slack in her jeans to fish her iPod out of her front pocket. The iPod was old, a hundred and sixty gigs but only a quarter full because Claire had lost a bunch of her music the last time her computer had crapped out.
On her last computer, Claire had named a playlist Allison and stocked it with music that wouldn’t totally alienate her friend. No deep cuts, but instead the radio-friendly stuff. Nirvana, some Baroness instrumentals, and Ramones tracks that were safe enough for a Kidz Bop cover (although the thought of a choir of children covering “The KKK Took My Baby Away” made her giggle). These songs were comforting, but more importantly they kept the Chris Brown at bay.
Claire plugged in the aux jack and the iPod spooled up. She started off slow. Bobby Bare Jr. covering a Pixies song. By the end Allison was tapping her finger in time against the steering wheel.
“Not bad. I like it,” Allison said. It was hard to tell if she was genuine or just being nice. It wasn’t that Allison was a great liar, just that everything she said carried this aura of insincerity that called the veracity of every statement she made into suspicion.
Claire just umm-hmm’d and nodded. She ran her tongue along the inside of her lower lip. You couldn’t tell by looking at her now, but in high school she’d had a piercing there. There was still a tiny dot of callused skin there she could feel. Or at least Claire liked to imagine that’s what she was probing, not just the contours of her flesh.
She still had other piercings and they seemed to glow hot under her clothes as she thought about them.
They passed Exit 13 to Natick. This was the farthest west Claire had ever been on 90, and she’d also bet that it was the farthest that Allison and the Elantra had been too.
“So,” Allison said, starting with one of her most beloved nonwords, “did you look up anything about this place? What are people saying about it on Yelp?”
“I didn’t check,” Claire said. The people on Yelp were no help at all. The biggest bunch of poseur assholes on the internet, in Silverfish’s estimation. That was some kind of achievement when you considered the internet as a whole.
Allison wrote Yelp reviews all the time.
“Their website was nice, if you don’t mind a little clipart,” Claire said. Allison laughed a bit.
“As long as there was a big banner at the bottom of the page asking you to sign their guestbook, or maybe an option for tabs or no tabs, the place sounds like a gem.”
“There was!”
The two girls laughed, Claire sitting a little more forward in her seat, reminded why she’d stuck it out with Allison so long. They were good together.
Who else would have driven her out to the middle of nowhere? Nobody beside
s her mom, and that would have been a road trip with no survivors.
Allison yawned. “I’m beat. Do you want to drive for a bit?”
Claire had gotten her driver’s license late in high school and had less than six months of driving experience before moving up to Boston, where no one in their right mind had a car. Her driving made Allison look like Ryan Gosling in that movie where he kept his shirt on. Allison knew this, liked to play with her about it. It could have been a bitchy power play, could have been big sister needling. Again, it was hard to tell with Allison.
“Yeah.” Claire called her bluff. “Pull in at the next rest stop. You buy me some Roy Rogers, I’ll drive the rest of the way. ”
“Deal. You’re def getting held to that.”
Claire had a theory that the abbreviation of definitely stemmed from everyone’s inability to spell it correctly. It always got spellchecked into defiantly.
*
Allison had picked all the skin off of her chicken.
After Claire ate the skin, they hit the road.
Claire was good at tuning Allison out when she wanted to, which was lucky because Claire needed all of her concentration to keep the Elantra in the middle of the lane. Driving made her anxious. Before college, there were a lot of things that made her anxious: what she was wearing, what people thought of her, how to keep her grades a few points above a C, but these days it was only driving.
Her body and brain associated driving with high school. The self-consciousness of her formative years came rushing back the second she touched the wheel, made her semi-sick, made her feel like a bout of acne was ready to bubble up under her chin.
Listening to Allison’s constant chatter, the concerns of a barely employed college grad, was soothing in the same way that some people put on tapes of whale sounds or lit Yankee Candles.
“Get out your phone and plug in the address. I think we’re getting close.”
Claire chanced a quick glance over at Allison. Her phone was already out.
Dense woods surrounded them and pressed closer as the roads got smaller. Over the last hour traffic slowed to just a couple of cars, all of them speeding past Claire, all of them more confident drivers who knew where they were headed. Claire clicked on her lights. It wasn’t dark yet. She was just anticipating sunset.
“Next exit,” Allison said. It was less an exit, more of a delicate bend off the main road. As they took the turn the world got darker, a combination of taller, closer trees and the coming sunset.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Claire said. She didn’t really mean it, but she needed something to say to keep her hands steady on the wheel and to get Allison talking again. Allison’s drone was white noise that she’d gotten used to while driving to the point where now she needed it.
“It’s okay. It’s not, like, Northern Cali or anything, but it’s pretty. Shit. Did you pack bug spray?”
“No,” Claire said, leaving off the “Why the hell would I pack bug spray?”
Allison shrugged, already on to the next thing. “You know who came from out here?” She didn’t wait for Claire’s answer. “Meghan Laheri. You remember her from Towers?”
Meghan had lived on their floor freshman year. “Yeah. Do you still talk?”
“Hell no. But I see her on Facebook all the time. She’s getting married. Believe it?”
Claire wasn’t friends with Meghan on Facebook, even though she was much closer to her during school than Allison was. Claire had a policy of not friending anyone who didn’t friend her first.
“Isn’t she a little young?” Despite her best efforts, Claire was interested now. She listened to Allison instead of the radio.
“Well, I know lots of girls from school who are getting married. All the religious-types mostly, but some normal ones too.”
Come to think about it, Claire had gotten a few notifications about engagements as well. Were other girls really that much ahead of her in the game of life? Would she have even considered marrying Mickey if he’d asked? Probably not.
“I can see that look you’ve got,” Allison said. “Meghan Lahiri is probably only getting married because she got knocked up. She was always such a dunt.”
Claire scrunched up her face, looked over at her friend. “A dunt?”
“Yeah, she was a dumb cun—” Allison couldn’t get the rest of the slur out. “Jesus!”
There were people in the road.
Claire hooked the wheel, the Elantra skidding perpendicular to the double yellow lines, the force of the turn feeling like it was going to flip the car over. Gravel dinged the side of the car and dust blocked out the dusk.
When the car finally stopped, Claire wiped the hair out of her eyes and then turned to check on Allison.
“Little mother fuckers,” Allison whispered, looking out the passenger’s side window.
Claire had to lean forward against the wheel to get a better look at them.
A group of kids, their ages ranging from early high school all the way up to around Claire and Allison’s age. They stood on the side of the road for a minute, staring back at the car.
What were they doing crossing the street in the middle of nowhere? Claire put the car into reverse, backed up into the right lane, and stopped about twenty feet from the kids.
The whirr of power windows sounded.
“What are you assholes doing? We could have killed you!” Allison yelled at the strange kids and then paused, leaning a bit more out the window, waiting for their response. Not a creature of subtlety, Allison never asked rhetorical questions.
The group stood still for a moment. There were eight or nine of them, but it was hard for Claire to get a count because some were standing so far off the road that they were practically in the woods.
Their clothes were plain. Not modern, but not old-timey. They could have been the fresh-faced, costumed ensemble of an off-Broadway play.
The eldest-looking of the boys—not the tallest, but the eldest—stepped forward and raised his hand. “Sorry about that, we didn’t see you coming. Is everyone okay?” he said.
He was handsome and spoke with an unmistakable earnestness. He would have gone far if he’d not stuck around here. Claire was already making up a history for the guy, the way she sometimes did while people watching. Maybe he was a farm boy. She wondered if they had farms in Mission. They’d certainly passed by enough on the way here.
Behind the boy who’d spoken, several of the younger kids smiled. It was impossible to tell if the expressions were meant to be friendly or mischievous. Claire could never tell with teenagers because she had recent first-hand knowledge that ninety-nine percent of the time kids were up to no good.
Allison didn’t roll up the window, but said nothing.
The boy spoke again, “Is the car all right? Do you need a push into town?”
Claire could see that Allison had recovered from the shock of the boy’s civility, was about to unleash on him. Claire stopped her.
“No, we’re fine. Thank you though,” Claire yelled back.
The boy nodded, about-faced to the rest of his group and they disappeared into the woods.
Claire used the master controls on her side of the car to roll Allison’s window back up.
“They almost run us off the road and you end up thanking them? Great job,” Allison said as Claire put the car in drive and continued down the road into Mission.
Chapter Five
Mission wasn’t what she was expecting. Its Main Street was not Main Street U.S.A. but instead a gas station, a small post office, a general store, and The Brant Hotel. That was it.
To the south, beyond this bustling commercial hub, Claire could see houses. Well, she couldn’t see the houses themselves, it was too dark for that, but she could see their lighted windows floating a good half mile away in the dark of the woods. The windows were not only raised because some were on the second story, but because the houses were built on the light incline of a hill.
“Looks happenin’,” All
ison said, breaking the silence.
The hotel itself was more like a large three-story house, situated to the north, opposite both the general store and the gas station. The streetlight outside the hotel, one of the two on the block, bounced off the white façade of the building and made the gold leaf of the sign glitter. The effect was inviting, a beacon in the dark for the weary traveler.
Claire brought the car closer to the hotel and inspected the sign. It was white and green, matching the building. Under the name of the hotel was a carving of a jumping rabbit, painted over in the same gold leaf as the lettering.
“Parking in the rear?” Claire motioned to the long driveway on the side of the building.
“Because I winter here for the skiing?” Allison said. “Like I know.”
Claire didn’t answer. Three hours in a car with Allison and one near miss was enough to piss on anybody’s parade.
Gravel crunched as she pulled the car around the back of The Brant. Claire pulled up the emergency break and shut off the engine. Allison unbuckled her belt and turned around in her seat.
“Creepy,” she said, staring into the woods that backed up to the hotel. The red of the Elantra’s brake lights made the shadows blacker.
Claire wouldn’t have found it “creepy” without Allison’s suggestion—her childhood home had backed up against the woods, but now she couldn’t stop looking.
Allison popped open the passenger side door and got out.
“Hey,” Claire got her attention and tossed her the car keys, then got out on her side.
The small parking lot had five cars, including the Elantra. The Brant was neither deserted nor bustling.
On the other side of the car, Allison stretched. She touched her toes and made a sound halfway between an orgasmic moan and the mew of a kitten. It was obnoxious, but it was why all the boys loved Allison Pomero.
Not that all the boys snubbed Claire, quite the opposite. Claire’s piercings, the wisps of tattoos that you could catch when she wore a tank top, if her tips had been any indication, there were guys who went in for that.