Hotel Angeline

by Kathleen Alcalá

  Another long pause. Then, “I’ll be downstairs at the entrance to our parking garage in three.”

  And Alexis: “I’ll be there in two.”

  She’s got the Bug and is ready to go. Alexis parks the pedicab—ironically, not far from where she’d hijacked it. Return to sender. She gets in the Bug.

  “Where to?” Linda asks.

  “Tacoma,” Alexis replies.

  “Tacoma? Why? Let me guess, you have an old family friend down there who’s a taxidermist and you want to have your mother’s body stuffed so she can forever live in the lobby of the Hotel Angeline.”

  “Um. No. Just Tacoma.”

  “Just Tacoma,” Linda mutters. She gets on I-5 South and they head down.

  A black vintage Bug in the carpool lane is not hard to see. Not from freeway cameras. Helicopters. Cop cars. State patrol. It’s not easy to hide from other drivers who are seeing the Amber Alerts flashing on the overhead signs from Seattle to Tacoma. And it was never hard for the feds and SPD to identify when they saw Linda drive Alexis around in the past couple of days. The days of planting tracking devices in cars is over. The Man is truly everywhere.

  These are the thoughts Alexis has as they drive sixty-eight miles an hour down to Tacoma, well within the “window” of radar guns. Oh, they’re good. They’re careful. But Alexis sees the Man everywhere. In cell phones. In Internet tracking. In digital TV boxes. Freeway cameras. The Man is everywhere.

  Just like LJ said. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

  We all live our lives, giving up our liberties at every possible moment out of convenience, never reading the fine print, never checking our credit card statements for trumped-up charges. The Man isn’t as insidious as LJ thought, but The Man has tentacles. The Man has reach.

  She remembers Habib and his tribe going all The Birds on Linda’s stepdad. That was cool. And she remembers what they went after. The Chihuly vase was their first target.

  Sure, makes sense. Crows. Shiny objects. Sure.

  But don’t take that at face value. Don’t take anything at face value, LJ said. Jam your fingernails into the crevices and pry, even if it hurts. Even if your fingers start to bleed. Rip off that artifice.

  They went after the Chihuly.

  They went after the Man of the art world.

  Think about it. LJ had been so mad when they took away those rides in the Seattle Center. The Fun Forest. “What kind of fun forest is it if there aren’t any rides?” he shouted at the newspaper.

  “Do you see what they’re doing?” he raged at Edith and Alexis. “They’re starting earlier and earlier. They’re trying to crush our spirit when we’re younger and younger. Now little kids? Crush their souls to smithereens? Break their little-kid hearts? Smash their little-kid dreams and desires? What kind of bullshit is this?”

  He was out of breath when he finished, and Edith had tried to calm him, but he was not to be dissuaded.

  “It’s the goddamn Man!” he shouted. “They want us from birth! They want our spirit and creativity and joy. They want to strangle it!”

  Alexis had been on the verge of tears at the table as he went on, as angry as he was at the Seattle Times article that talked about the bad Seattle City Council that was to take away the rides from the poor kids . . .

  “And for what?” LJ demanded. “For a fucking Dale Chihuly museum? You’ve got to be fucking me!”

  “Calm,” Edith said.

  But LJ would not be calmed.

  “It hasn’t even been decided,” Edith had said. “They haven’t even voted.”

  “Oh, it’s been decided,” LJ muttered, exhausted after his rant. “You just haven’t woken up to the truth of it yet.”

  So. Get in a Bug with an angel. Because that’s what Linda has been. There is no control of the past and none of the future. But there is control of the now.

  So get in the Bug and go down to Tacoma and get it done.

  They get off the freeway, do the weird circular thing you have to do to get down to Dock Street and find the Museum of Glass.

  Linda parks in the garage and Alexis gets out with the PCC bag she’s been carrying. Digital camera and laptop and all their soul material in there, too.

  “End of the road, girlfriend,” she says to Linda over the top of the 1969 perfect little Bug that clearly was too perfect for a regular Garfield girl, but Alexis never saw that. A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

  “What are you doing?” Linda asks. “How will you get home?”

  “Home’s done.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Hey,” Alexis said. “You said it yourself: This ain’t no Thelma and Louise. I’m going to do something bad now. You should probably get along. I’ll catch you on the flip side.”

  Linda laughed loudly. “You sound like so many bad quotes from so many bad movies, I don’t know if I’d rather punch you or kiss you.”

  “That’s from a movie, too!” Alexis said.

  “No!”

  “Rocky III. Mr. T and Rocky!”

  “I hate you,” Linda said. “For real. What do you need?”

  “For real,” Alexis said. “You’ve given me everything I could ever deserve. Go home. Come visit me in the pen.”

  Linda reached her hand across the top of the car, and Alexis, a bit shorter, stood up on the rocker panel and touched Linda’s fingers.

  “I’ll get a ride home with the cops. You’d better get out of here,” Alexis said. She closed her car door, turned, and ran off into the garage toward the elevator.

  The Glass Museum has a Hot Shop with two furnaces, both of which run twenty-four hours a day at 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. (If you have the pleasure of using one of their glory holes, you can get it up to three thousand degrees!)

  Every day, all day, glass workers do their thing in the pit, using their long staves and crimper tools and blowing tubes to create works of art, masterpieces—shiny, colorful glass balls that are worth thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

  Glass. Which isn’t even a solid object, LJ had told Alexis once. It’s a liquid. They determined this when studying the famous stained-glass work of fifteenth-century Italy. The glass drips—albeit very slowly—and pools near the bottom of the panes. So if you measure the thickness of the glass near the top of a pane, it is significantly thinner than at the bottom of the pane.

  She sits in the gallery of the Hot Shop and watches them work. And you know, it isn’t all bad. These artists have talent, she knows. But there is still something she has to do.

  Her final homage to LJ.

  He was crazy. He was wacko. But he was her LJ. She owes him one last protest. One last acting out. The one where he ended up with a shard of glass in his throat doesn’t count. He gets credit for that. He gets a redo.

  She hopes it will be a gesture, and nothing more. She hopes it won’t blow anything up or break anything, or make anyone’s life impossible. But she has to do it.

  When the show is over, when the crowds have filed out, she makes her way to the doors that lead to the floor of the Hot Shop. Fortunately for her, the guard they have on duty is a kid only a bit older than she is, swimming in a shirt made for a man.

  “I’m going to meet Dale,” she says to him, pushing for the door.

  “Dale isn’t here,” he says. “That’s Preston.”

  “Preston?” Alexis asks. She looks around and sees a poster on the wall with a notice about Preston Singletary doing his glasswork that day.

  “I’m going to meet Preston, I said,” she said with a nervous laugh. “What did you think?”

  “You know him?”

  She leaned in. “I’m his niece!”

  “Oh!” he recoiled. “He’s a great guy. Nice to meet you. He’s really great. Tell him I said I’m a big fan!”

  Crap, she thought, heading out onto the Hot Shop floor, the thing with boys is they’re so easy to manipulate. It’s almost no fun.

  The heat on the floor is intense. The fires
are raging. Workers are hustling about, this way and that, finishing things, putting away tools, cleaning up after the public display. It’s easy for her to get lost in the bustle. She makes her way to the fiery opening of one of the furnaces. She reaches into her bag.

  “Who are you with?” comes a voice from behind her.

  She turns quickly. A carbuncular young man holding a long pole approaches.

  “Preston,” she says.

  “You know Preston?”

  “Niece.”

  “Ah,” the boy says. “He’s right over there.”

  He points, and a dude looks up from his work, heavy gloves on, safety glasses, gray hair swept back. “Hey!” he says.

  “Hey, Uncle Preston!” Alexis calls out, and when the young man near her turns to look, to see whether or not there is recognition, she snatches the laptop and the camera from the PCC bag and tosses them into the fiery furnace.

  “Oh, shit,” the young man with the pole says, seeing what she has done, seeing the fire, the rage of the furnace, the colors, the sparks, the death and consummation of a computerized soul.

  “Fire in the hole!” he shouts, and suddenly levers are pulled, fire alarms go off, and the entire giant auditorium of the Hot Shop is engulfed in a Halon fog—white dust everywhere—and they are lost, so none of them can see each other. None of them can see their own hands.

  Minutes, seconds, how long? How do we measure? But Alexis is running. She is running out of the building and they are chasing. Shouting at her. Boys with long metal spears. Guards with hands at their hips as if they had guns when they really have only pepper spray. They are all chasing her as she bolts out of the museum doors and across the plaza and onto the Bridge of Glass.

  It’s late afternoon and the sun hits the colorful glass just so and the fragments of light dance before her. She sees them like a rainbow. If only to find the end.

  But there is no prize at the end of the rainbow. There never is.

  There is a squad car at the end of the rainbow.

  She stops mid-bridge. Two flashing Pierce County police cars blocking her egress. She looks back and sees them coming. Security guards with their bellies flopping over their belts. Young artists with their spears of glass. Interested onlookers. They are all there. So she stops and waits for them.

  This ain’t no Thelma and Louise, she thinks, looking over the side of yet another bridge and pondering the ramifications of a daring leap. But the bridge is only high enough to break her ankles if she jumped.

  They meet her. Rivers, and Hillary and Lindquist and the other one who kind of scared her. Dalaklis.

  She has nothing more. But LJ’s soul has certainly been released. There is no trace of it now. No one can read the shadows of his life on that hard drive.

  She holds out her hands to Chuck. He smiles and shakes his head sadly.

  “Feisty,” he says, and he cuffs her.

  “You’re a troubled little girl,” someone says behind her.

  She turns and looks. Dale Chihuly? Crazy curly hair and eye patch and all? For real?

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he demands.

  She smiles.

  “Blow me, Dale Chihuly,” she says.

  They lead her to the awaiting squad cars and take her away.

  CHAPTER 26

  FRANCES McCUE

  FROM THE BACK OF THE squad car, Alexis could see the streets blur with rain. She couldn’t move her hands to smudge the mist off of the windows. The handcuffs were plastic and they bent a little when she strained. But they wouldn’t give. Detectives Francolini and Rivers had made sure of that.

  After passing the gates to Seattle U, she glimpsed the pink lift of the lights from the chapel. Down Twelfth, they drove. She knew every part of the street: where the noodle shop had replaced the hipster coffeehouse, where the expansion of the campus had scooped out the old Ethiopian place where they used to give her the leftover injera after the men had finished their lunches.

  Then the place she hadn’t been inside but had always known about: Denny Juvie. The place where the kids went after the police yanked them from Cal Anderson Park. The Hotel Angeline gone wrong.

  They pulled in, past the barbed wire that sat on top of the gates. Funny how the places you see all the time hold the weirdest stuff. There was a play field surrounded by Dumpsters, but no sign of life. Alexis knew that they kept kids here. The narrow windows were the size of baby coffins.

  “Out,” said Francolini. He pulled the car door until it groaned.

  The other cop, Rivers, came up behind him, reached around, and pulled Alexis out by her elbow. She ducked her head as she stood up.

  At the front of the building, the doors buzzed as they slid open. Then, the second set. They clicked shut. Alexis and the two cops stood in a lobby. In front of them was a Plexiglas wall. A woman sat behind it. Far off, doors slammed. No music, no chatter.

  “They’re at dinner,” the woman said through a hive of holes in the glass.

  “Intake room?” said Rivers.

  The woman pointed to a door next to her booth.

  To Alexis, “intake room” sounded like a place set aside for people to breathe. Like a no-smoking room. She could have an intake room at the Hotel Angeline. She’d like to fill it with smoke and watch people breathe it in and out until the air cleared up.

  Rivers, Francolini, and Alexis sat in the room and waited for the juvie people to come. Orange carpet, brown chairs, a whiteboard—it was like a barely furnished, carpeted corner of a parking garage.

  An hour passed. Maybe more. Alexis couldn’t look at the walls or at her own shoes anymore. She had moved around the room with her eyes, over and over, and finally she looked at the cops. Both of them had lumps and seams under their shirts. Bulletproof vests, Alexis thought. She looked at Francolini’s padding. Where was he underneath that puffy stuff? It reminded her of the explosion. It made her think of the bumps she felt when she stumbled out the window at the Hotel Angeline, and all of the nicks and scrapes of her life over the past weeks. If she could have a vest like that, she’d be bigger than she was. She could take on more. She could have a vest that would melt into her insides and protect her from the image she kept seeing of her mother scraping money together, sitting at a table where the embalming equipment once was. Or in the coffin.

  A vest could make her into an avatar instead of a real girl. She could bounce around and it would be OK. Someone else could move her around and it would be OK, no matter how much she got hit by things.

  While Rivers shuffled a newspaper on the table, a man came into the room. He looked at Alexis. She wished, at that moment, that he would be someone who carried a vest for her. A guy who wouldn’t blow shit up, but who would, instead, bring her something with a little padding to protect her from the fall.

  “You can go,” the man said to the two cops. He didn’t look friendly, but he didn’t look cruel, either. Sometimes Alexis couldn’t tell the difference. But she did know that she never had wanted to get out of somewhere more than she did right then. She needed to slip from that room, out of Denny Juvie. Imagine how her Skechers would flop along the cement halls and how her fingers would flick through combination pads on doors and over buttons that would open gates.

  She had no curiosity left. “What will happen to me?” became “Who will help me now?”

  When you are fourteen, your sense of bureaucracy is pretty clear. People make up papers to get other people to sign. Then, those people take those papers and they make more papers and get new people to sign those and it goes around in a circle until the music stops and there aren’t any chairs left.

  Who would be left standing when her papers were finished and the stamping and notarizing and signatures dried up? It was like craving something and the thing you wanted didn’t exist. It would be like printing money and then you couldn’t spend it because it looked so fake. That’s what procedures felt like to Alexis.

  Someone needed to say something.

  As
if he could read her mind, the man said, “We’re going to talk. I’m going to ask you some things. You are going to answer them and then we are going to give you a medical exam, a psychological exam, and then we are going to make a plan for your stay with us.” He took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it. “Want one?”

  “Uh, OK.”

  “Do you have someone who can be here with you?” the man asked. He was beige. He had no tone.

  “What’s an exam?” Alexis asked. Were her clothes coming off? Was she scratching in bubbles with a pencil?

  “Let’s start with the simple things,” he said.

  She wanted to say the thing that would be the simple thing. Then she wanted to say simple thing after simple thing, beading them together until they were so fucking simple that they were rocks across the stream. They would be the things she would put under her and skip across, out the sliding doors.

  “Do I have to take my clothes off?”

  “No,” the man said. “There will be a woman, later, for the exam.” The slab of gum slithered into his mouth.

  “What simple things?” she asked.

  “Tell us what happened to the laptop. Tell us what happened to your mother. Tell us about the explosion in Fremont.”

  “Tell me about how I get to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “Hotel Angeline.” When she said it, she thought of her mouth shaping the word “angel.” The dim hallways, the nicked-up doors, the thuds that the gutters made in the wind. Her mattress.

  “Look, let’s be clear. Remember, we are going for simple. Simple, Alexis.” The man looked like he was doing math.

  “Simple is I go home. I haven’t done anything.” She tried to imagine the person who would come into the room, tip over the man’s chair, and pull her by the hand, back to the Angeline. All she could see was Linda. Not all of Linda, just Linda’s hand and her face.

  “Tell me about the laptop.”

  “Gone,” said Alexis.

  “Things are never gone. They just move around,” said the man.

  “They are gone when they are burned. And the laptop is burned.”

  Finally, the man had two packages of orange cheese crackers brought in. And a juice box. Kids had to be fed, the man knew. Food got results, and this was tiring.