A Small Hotel

by Robert Olen Butler

  Her father says, “If I was more of a hunter, I might have tried that. But I’m a terrible shot. And I couldn’t figure out how to do enough damage with a trout fly.”

  The two men laugh again, though quietly this time. Kelly stands up and walks away, toward the parlor. If she is to be in the company of those who wish to kill themselves, she prefers them to be strangers. And it took him fifteen years to eventually get the job done. And then all of them are standing beside her father’s grave. Train tracks and water nearby. Escambia Bay. Mama and Katie with their arms around each other, Mama crying quietly, Katie hardly at all. Kelly and Michael are next to each other, not quite touching. Samantha a little apart. Sam with her father’s eyes. Twenty now, and how can that be? Ready to go away to try to become somebody famous. Everyone else is off getting into cars. The last few moments for the family before the hole seals up.

  And Sam says, “You think the Catholics are right?”

  Nobody answers.

  “Is Grandpa damned now?” Sam asks.

  “No,” Kelly says.

  “Not for this,” Mama says.

  And that night. The night of the day of her father’s funeral, Kelly lies next to Michael in their bed in their house on the Bayou Texar, their bodies not touching, him reading papers from the office. Finishing that, from the sound of it, the rustling of the papers, the stretching of his body to put them somewhere. Her eyes are closed.

  His voice. “Are you ready to sleep?”

  “No,” she says.

  She can feel him waiting for words from her. He’d rather not, of course. About things that matter, he’d rather silence, always. She gives him silence.

  “I had to finish,” he says.

  He thinks she’s pissed that he was doing work in bed on this night.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he says. “I really liked the man.”

  He waits for her again.

  She’s prepared simply to say good-night. Michael’s trying here. But he is Michael. She’ll thank him and she will sleep. And now something unexpected wells up in her. “Do you think he loved me?” she says.

  “He was your father,” Michael says.

  “Do you think that’s an answer?” Kelly says this quietly.

  He does not reply.

  “You were around us both,” she says. “You’re a father. Do you think my father loved me?”

  “He did what a father has to do,” Michael says.

  Kelly hears herself. She has been in this life a long time, long enough, plenty long enough to see the irony of asking these questions of her husband, and she knows she’s talking to both these men, and she knows she better shut up, she’s known for a long while to shut up in these situations and she better shut up now, because she doesn’t want to ask questions when she’s afraid of the real answers. So she says nothing more. And she expects Michael to be true to himself and let it drop.

  But he says, trying to explain, trying to be helpful, “He had his own burdens. Serious ones, obviously. In spite of all that, he did what he had to do.”

  And she cannot help herself. “So are you saying he loved me?”

  “Yes,” Michael says.

  She takes this in.

  And then Michael says, “Whatever that word means.”

  And Kelly hears one beat of her heart and another, as if they are filling the room, and another, and Michael says, trying to be helpful, “It’s just a word.”

  Her head is cacophonous with the beating of her heart now, and, rather like a deaf person, shaping words she cannot hear, Kelly says, “You can turn off the light.”

  Michael does.

  And in the dark Kelly finds herself at the very edge of the water, with New Orleans vanished behind her like the setting moon. She has come down some wooden steps flanked by mooring bollards. She has stopped on the last dry step, though they continue into the dark water and she imagines she could simply descend to the bottom of the river as she would descend the staircase into the reception hall of her house, as casually as she entered the Alabama River on another afternoon, when she was sixteen, drawn to the river’s edge very near the place where her father lifted her and would not put her down. There are half a dozen picnic blankets scattered on the grass behind her this time and they are filled with her yammering friends and Kelly is in a summer dress and her hair is a careful, feathered shag and she has gone off alone to the water’s edge and has crouched beside it and the river is blue on this day and it races past, knowing where it is bound, to a conclusion somewhere, to a distant sea, and she rises and she steps into the water and she stretches forward and simply lies down and she is sweeping onward in the Alabama River but she does lift her face and she does now open her arms and roll onto her back and look upward into the empty bright sky and she does move her arms now and she does move her legs—though she knows she need not do these things, she knows she can choose to do these things or not do these things—and later she is on the shore and there are people around her and she realizes her Farah Fawcett hair, which took forever to do, is ruined. And now Kelly crouches flat-footed before the Mississippi and she puts her arms on her knees and rests her head on her palms and she cannot see the water moving before her in the dark but she knows it is rushing onward to the Gulf, which is very very near.

  ∼

  Michael listens to Kelly’s cell phone ringing, trying to run some choices through his head of where she might be. With her mother. With her sister. With a man. Alone in a jazz bar on Bourbon Street with a key to Room 303 in her purse is as far from the list as the dark side of the moon. As the phone rings, he prepares—just in case—to keep his voice calm, to put on the tone he would take with a crucial, frightened, reluctant witness. It is now that Kelly turns off her phone in the bar on Bourbon Street, but Michael, of course, simply hears the phone ringing yet again and again, and then her answering-service message begins. Kelly’s voice. “I’m not available …” And he’s still not ready to say anything to her this way. Not on this day. Tomorrow maybe, if he hasn’t gotten through to her. He hangs up. He holsters his phone.

  He turns his face toward the plantation house. Only a perky garble of voices floats this way: the musicians seem to be on a break. He appreciates the relative quiet. He wishes he could be talking this out with Kelly now. And he thinks to call Sam. Perhaps she knows something. Sam. He turns his back on the house and walks further away from the voices and the light. Seeking a still better place to call his daughter, he slips into another undercurrent of the past. He stands at the back railing of the deck of his house, looking across his lawn at the dark water of the bayou. The deck is new, smelling powerfully of teak. The house is done at last. He and Kelly are at last in the place where they expect to grow old together. He hears the soft rustle of her behind him.

  “Sam’s asleep?” he says.

  “She was full of chat,” Kelly says, beside him now.

  “The rigors of first grade,” he says.

  “More pleasures than rigors tonight.”

  “Good.” He turns and, without a word, steps away from her, crosses the deck to a Grundig boombox and starts the cassette he put in late last night. Stephane Grappelli’s sweet, slow, improvised jazz violin version of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  He turns back to Kelly, who has followed him part way and is now settling into a deck chair. “I’m tired,” she says. “I almost finished the last of the boxes today.”

  He moves to the deck chair beside her, but before he can sit, Kelly says, “You should play the Ella version.”

  “No lyrics tonight,” he says.

  She hums an assent, turning the hum into a following of the tune for a few bars.

  “The harpsichord is the genius touch,” Michael says.

  “Dance with me,” Kelly says.

  “I thought you were tired.”

  “Not too tired to dance,” she says.

  Michael offers his hand. She takes it and rises and they hold each
other close and they move a little, slow dancing for a time with small, improvised steps. The harpsichord begins to riff with the bridge and Kelly puts her lips to Michael’s ear and says, “Thank you for all this.”

  He stops their dancing. He pulls away just a little, enough to look her in the eyes and then to kiss her. She returns the kiss and presses it into him, opening their mouths to it for a moment, and then they begin to dance again.

  And a wee, clear voice picks up the lyric on the precisely correct beat and begins to sing, drawing out the words to fit Grappelli’s ornamentations as he glides into the final repeat of the chorus. “Follow my lead, oh how I need …”

  Michael and Kelly turn to Samantha, standing in the doorway in her Little Mermaid pajamas, as she finishes the phrase “… someone to watch over me.”

  Kelly lets go of Michael and pulls away and puts on a large, public voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the famous jazz singer Samantha Hays!” She crosses to her daughter and swoops her up in her arms, saying “That was wonderful, my darling.”

  Michael does not move, happy to watch the two girls in his life from this place apart. He does not examine his comfort with this distance, but it is strong in him. This is his proper place. From here he can provide, protect. Nearer to them, in the sweet smell of them, in the fragile, needy physicality of them, he would only become clumsy, would only feel the demand for words and gestures he could never adequately give.

  He is impressed with his daughter, proud of her. He says, “Hey, Sam. You should be sleeping.”

  Kelly, her back to her husband, holding her daughter close, compensating for him as always, says, “We are both so proud of our baby.”

  Samantha presses her face against the side of her mother’s but focuses on her father. Michael nods at her, nods from this vast, sweet feeling inside him. Kelly cannot see the gesture, and Sam simply understands it to mean it’s time for her to sleep.

  And Michael stops beneath the trees at Oak Alley and his hand goes to his phone once more and he and Sam are at the aft gunwale of his boat, his 33-foot Bertram Sport Fisherman, pristinely new and his at last and just in time, for she is eleven, his daughter, eleven is the perfect age, and this he can do for her, this much he can do, to set her in the fighting chair and crouch beside her and show her how to use the light tackle.

  “Will they be heavy?” she says, and he can hear the faint quaver still in her voice.

  “You’re after bait fish,” he says. “You can do it.”

  “Then you’ll catch the bigger ones?”

  He palms her hand on the reel. She’s going to be okay. “That’s right,” he says. “With the ones you catch. We’re a team.”

  “I’m catching the babies?” The quaver has come back.

  “No,” Michael says firmly. “They’ll be adults, but smaller species.”

  Samantha nods her head once, sharply, and he squeezes her hand in appreciation at her determination, though he does not understand that it is simply to please him.

  She carefully readjusts her hands on the tackle.

  “You okay now?” Michael says.

  “Sure,” Sam says.

  He rises. And Samantha casts her line as he’s taught her.

  He will step away now. She needs to do this on her own. But as he turns, he hears her begin to hum. She quickly finds the tune and then sings, very softly, “Anticipation, anticipation is makin’ me late, is keepin’ me waitin.’”

  He crouches beside his daughter again. This, too, he can do for her. “Don’t spoil it,” he says, firmly. “Be quiet and look around you. You’re alone in the middle of a great sea.”

  Samantha turns her face to him. “You’re here. And mom.”

  Michael says, “Inside your head. You’re alone in there. Take it all in just for yourself. No words now.”

  Samantha shrugs and looks out at the Gulf.

  He knows she can’t truly see what’s before her. She doesn’t get it. He does not think of himself sitting next to his father beside the Blackwater River, looking into the vastness of the sky, but that night animates this present disappointment in his daughter.

  He rises, he turns away from her, he steps to the center of the deck of his new boat, and he takes it all in: the vast, calm Gulf; the vault of the bright sky; Kelly lying on a plank of sunlight beside the cabin door, reading a book, very near but unaware of him; and his daughter, her back to him, quiet at last, her narrow shoulders hunched toward the Gulf in concentration.

  He steps to the port gunwale and leans outward, and all there is now in the world is the water and the sky and him, as if he is alone in the world. This is a good thing. This is why he has bought this boat. He does understand the dark undertow of this kind of solitude. But he is freed from that simply by knowing they are nearby, his wife and his daughter. Nearby but unseen. He will come out here alone, and they will, in their distant existence, make it all be good. And he will at times come out with men, and the unsentimental familiarity of them, their detached maleness, will serve the same function, will let him swim free of the dark depths beneath him, will let him float here in solitude, as he is doing now, and any longing for someone else to be next to him can vanish.

  And Kelly appears beside him at the gunwale, smelling of coconut, her oiled arm touching his. He keeps his face out to the Gulf.

  “Which way’s Florida?” she says.

  “Starboard,” he says.

  She falls silent a few moments and then she says, “Are you thinking of him?”

  Michael made the terrible mistake a few years ago, before he and Kelly were married, of speaking of his father to her, of revealing that his father had an odd fear of the open water. She has referred to this a couple of times since, and Michael has always simply ignored it.

  He should do that now, or he should confront his mistake openly, but he does a silly other thing, trying to act as if he never made the mistake to begin with. “Who?” he says.

  “Your dad.”

  “No,” Michael says.

  He waits for it to pass. But he wants it to pass once and for all. So he says, making his voice go soft, trying not to cause trouble, “You go too far. I should never say a thing.”

  It came out badly. He feels the flinch in her, but she does not reply. She simply moves away.

  He’s glad there won’t be an argument. But he’s not seeing what’s before him now. His wife is stewing, and it’s his fault. His father has slipped onto the boat and is trying to still the trembling in his hand on the reel. And Samantha has begun to sing to herself again.

  Perhaps she is singing tonight, Michael thinks, as he stands beneath the oaks of Oak Alley. Somewhere. He shallows his mind now. He needs to know one thing and he cannot deal with the rest. Sam has understood not to press the subject, and he is grateful to her for that. And it’s why he can turn to her now. He dials his daughter’s cell phone. She answers after the first ring.

  “Daddy? Daddy, I’m about to go on.”

  “Sorry,” Michael says. “It can wait.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s okay. I’ve got a minute.”

  And Michael finds himself without words. He would never understand the irony of this, but his abrupt word-blankness unsettles him. When he has a purpose and the will for speaking, he trusts himself always to know what to say. It’s his job.

  “It’s been a while,” Sam says.

  “Where are you singing?” It’s the best he can do for the moment. He has lost his will to speak of his wife to his daughter.

  “Chicago,” Sam says. “A little club in Chicago.”

  “That’s good,” Michael says. “Chicago’s good.”

  Michael can find no more small talk, and Samantha is still trying to grasp her father suddenly calling.

  They stay silent for what feels to both of them like a long time. Samantha realizes she has to take charge.

  “How are you?” she says.

  “I’m okay,” Michael says.

  “Good.”

 
And now he finds his focused, courtroom voice. “Have you heard from your mother lately?”

  “Yesterday,” Sam says.

  “Was she okay?”

  “This is all hard on her.”

  Michael feels a tight twist of something at this, but he does not let it deflect him from his line of questioning. “Did she say anything about a change of plans?”

  “Plans?”

  “She didn’t show up today to finalize the divorce.”

  “She didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Home, I assume. I don’t know.”

  The burden of talk slides back to Michael, but he goes silent. He has learned what he can—nothing—about what he is focused on at the moment.

  “Look,” Sam says, “she just called basically to say she loved me. She’s sad. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Michael remains silent. He would like to, but he does not know how to change the conversation now.

  “Are you there?” Sam says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry about all this,” she says. “For both of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s hard not hearing from you,” Sam says.

  “I’m sorry,” Michael says.

  “I have to go now. I have to sing.” And sitting in the manager’s office of a dinner club on the North Side of Chicago, waiting to sing, Samantha feels her stubbornness stir in her, and though she has not said it in a few years, having struggled to accept this thing in her father that she tries without success not to accept in the men she falls for, she says, “I love you, Daddy.”

  “Sing your heart out, Sam,” he says.

  “I will,” she says. Easier to accept is her father’s awkwardness at the end of phone conversations, so without a formal exchange of “good-byes”, she hangs up, and at the exact same moment, so does he.

  Michael slowly puts his phone away, trying to be the attorney about this, the engaged but detached attorney with a skitterish client. Kelly will turn up. It’s in her best interest to turn up. And there is a rustling near him and a hand slipping into his arm. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t listening,” Laurie says. “I was lurking from afar.”