Hotel Angeline

by Garth Stein et al.

  CHAPTER 34

  ELIZABETH GEORGE

  THE DAY HAD BEEN ONE long series of firsts for Alexis, and they just kept piling up. First there was the first of saying good-bye to her mother . . . really saying good-bye this time in ways that no fourteen-year-old girl should ever have to experience. The second first was having to say good-bye to the person she had begun to figure was her first true love, more or less. The third first was being in an airplane. But the biggest first was being in a private jet. No matter that the jet was chartered, it was still P-R-I-V-A-T-E, and that said things about Uncle Burr’s “cash position,” as LJ would have said in the most derisive tone possible, that nothing else ever would.

  Alexis spent a lot of the time on the flight in awe, and she didn’t much care for this feeling. Awe meant difference. Awe meant entering into a whole new world. Awe meant, more than anything, the unexpected, and she’d had so much of the unexpected lately that she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to cope with any more of it. She knew that she should be grateful that she even had an uncle who’d walked into her life and had taken care of many of its problems. And while she wanted to feel grateful, part of the problem was what came after being grateful. She knew enough about life to know that what came after generally was someone having an expectation. Like “I’m really grateful,” which was answered by “So what’re you going to do to show it?” And that was a problem for Alexis. The way she saw it, it would probably be a problem for anyone.

  Aside from talking about the Suquamish tribe on the flight, Uncle Burr was pretty much quiet. After they’d had their meal, after they’d chatted about the Suquamish Indians, he’d taken out of a briefcase the tiniest laptop computer that Alexis had ever seen and he’d started to write. She read over his shoulder for a second—just wondering what it was he was writing and more or less figuring it was about her and what the heck he was going to do with her now. She figured it was a letter to his attorney or something, maybe passing her off to someone else. But it turned out to be part of his next novel. Or at least, that’s how it seemed, since he began with chapter 134 and the sentence was “The corpse was starting to smell.” No shit, Alexis thought when she read that. After 133 chapters, there was very little doubt the corpse would be ripe.

  She dozed for a while then. She figured Uncle Burr knew what he was doing. Maybe it took him 133 chapters to clear his throat artistically or something. Since he was a jillionaire because of his writing, he didn’t need any advice from her.

  It was the captain’s voice coming over the loudspeaker that awakened her from an uneven slumber. She saw that her uncle had put his laptop away and he was fastening his seat belt as the plane banked to the left. She looked out of the window. What she saw was a real eye-blinker for her.

  Alexis had never been out of Washington state. She’d never been south of Olympia, even, so to find herself suddenly in the environment of Arizona was nothing short of astonishing.

  They were descending into a vast valley. On either side of it towered huge, flat-topped bluffs. The word for these came to her as the plane evened out from its bank: mesas. She was looking at mesas. They represented enormous tabletop plains surmounting tall cliffs and the cliffs themselves were red. Beneath these cliffs the valley spread out, pimpled with shrubbery but bare of trees.

  Another first. To be in a place where there were no trees. How was it going to feel? She didn’t know, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  In the distance, a bridge sketched a silver arc across a wide gulley. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Deception Pass Bridge on Whidbey Island, but here again, the difference was what it spanned, going from mesa to mesa where cactus grew, sage green under a true-blue sky that was cloudless but beginning to mark the day with the colors of sunset.

  As the plane approached the ground, towering shapes came into view. These were the red of the cliff sides, but they looked carved by someone into fantastic forms. It was, Alexis thought, like being on another planet—one designed by a god who saw colors in a different way, that was for sure. It was big and bold, but seeing it made Alexis wonder if she was big enough and bold enough to be part of it.

  The plane landed. One bump and that was it. Uncle Burr unfastened his seat belt and smiled at her. “Ready for it?” he asked, and it was as if he’d been reading her mind all along. He added, “Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore,” and for a moment she hoped that he wasn’t giving her some loopy nickname. But then she remembered The Wizard of Oz. She said, “Oh, right. That’s for sure.”

  A vehicle was waiting not far from where the jet taxied to stop. Here another surprise greeted Alexis. For a guy who had a limo deposit him here and there, who chartered airplanes, who felt comfortable enough to write 133 chapters of whatever before anyone figured out why the corpse was a corpse, she’d assumed there’d either be another chauffeur waiting at the airport or one hell of an impressive vehicle like . . .who knew? Maybe a Maserati. Maybe a Hummer. Or maybe a Rolls-Royce. Or whatever. But what she didn’t expect was to see a worn-down pickup truck with two years of red dust obscuring its color and a windshield whose only bow to being able to be seen through was the fan shapes made by windshield wipers.

  But that was their transportation, and after Uncle Burr thanked the captain, the co-captain and the flight attendant, he said to Alexis, “Let’s do it to it,” by which she figured it was time to go. She followed him down the narrow stairway and over to the truck.

  It wasn’t locked. Well, who would want to steal the thing? was what Alexis thought. This thought was reinforced by the fact that the keys were in the ignition as well. Uncle Burr told her to climb aboard and he said they had to “warm this baby up” to get her to run right. He added “Just like a woman” with a wink, but it turned out that the real reason that they had to wait was because her stuff was being unloaded from the plane and a member of the ground crew at the airport was wheeling it over to the truck. A thump indicated it was all in place, at which point Uncle Burr put the truck into gear and off they went.

  Alexis got a clear indication that Sedona was a bit different from the rest of the world the moment they got out onto a highway. A billboard asked her if she wanted to know her life’s purpose, which she could find out by having a spiritual reading at Sedona Spring of Hope (call this number and ask for Annapurna). Shortly thereafter, she discovered that at Sedona Spiritual Vortex she could have a customized spiritual experience within the most powerful of the Sedona Vortexes, which was Completely Unknown to the Public. Or she could enjoy a Mystical Head Massage, a Cleansing Foot Massage, or an extended stay in an Authentic Sweat Lodge. This last was something Alexis was familiar with, and it prompted her to ask her uncle a couple of questions.

  “How’d you end up here?” was the first of them. For she knew that, like her, he’d been born in Seattle, and she couldn’t imagine what had brought him to a place where one could purchase spiritual experiences, customized or otherwise.

  “Started out with early arthritis,” he said. “Ended up with Namche Waterfall.”

  Uncle Burr had said it all as if she already would have known what he was talking about, but she didn’t. The years, the dissension, and the chasm created by both her mom and this man amounted to a void into which mountains of information needed to be poured. Meantime, she was going to have to play this relationship largely by ear.

  “You like it here?” was the second of the questions. She’d counted sixty-seven cacti by that time and one lone sketch of bark and desiccated leaves leaning to the right in an indication of the direction of the wind, when there was wind. “I mean, it must be weird not to have trees . . . I mean, after Washington.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Uncle Burr said. “But there’s Namche Waterfall, which makes up for a lot.”

  “Will I get to see Namche Waterfall?” Alexis asked. To give up trees in exchange for a waterfall might be just fine, if the waterfall was spectacular, she figured.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Sooner than you
think.”

  So he lived at the waterfall, she thought. Cool.

  They drove through town. This wasn’t much, as things turned out. Four lanes of highway and mostly strip malls with lots of advertisements for massages, for spiritual readings, for dawn and sunset hikes into the “spiritual realm of the ancient Anasazi,” who turned out to be the Indians who’d lived six hundred years ago in the area. Native Americans, Alexis reminded herself. She had to work her way some distance from years at LJ’s side, hearing one diatribe after another on the worthlessness of political correctness. Maybe Sedona was a politically correct place. She’d have to be careful about how she talked.

  Through the town, they began to wind along a narrow road flanked by cacti and chaparral. Occasional boulders in the deep red of the distant cliffs broke up the landscape and the minor miracle of a rise in the topography occurred about three miles along. They were well out of town when Uncle Burr made a turn into a gravel driveway. There was no house in sight, and there sure wasn’t a waterfall nearby, but he began to slow down near an impressive formation of rocks and towers of sandstone that, as they approached, morphed unexpectedly and almost miraculously into a house.

  It was huge. She could see that the place had been constructed to blend into the environment, as if the building were in the Federal Witness Protection Program. He pulled up next to it and said, “Here we are, then,” and she looked around for the waterfall. It was probably behind the house, she figured. Or maybe it was within hiking distance. She was about to ask her uncle this question, when the front door opened and a woman came out.

  “Namche Waterfall,” Uncle Burr said.

  “Huh?”

  “You can call her Aunt Namche.”

  Uncle Burr was married? Uncle Burr was married to someone called Namche Waterfall?

  As if he heard her last question, he said, “Listen, sweetheart. She has a thing for this waterfall in Nepal. Her real name is Sheila Lou Pronsky, but if that was your name . . . You sort of get the idea. Don’t let on that you know.” Aunt Namche came clattering down the path from the front door. She wore what looked like six thousand scarves, and her hair was as red as the sandstone. She had on earrings that dropped below her shoulders and so many necklaces that Alexis wondered how she could even walk with her head held upright.

  “Here you are! Here you are!” Aunt Namche cried. “Burr, hon, I was worried all day. The omens . . . I can’t tell you how bad they were. I cast entrails at five this morning and the way they landed . . . I would have phoned you, but I didn’t want to worry you. And this . . . What a sweetie. Alexis, yes? Well, stupid of me. Who else would you be?”

  Alexis found herself smothered in the embrace of Namche Waterfall, which was not unlike being enveloped by a human-sized marshmallow. Not because Namche Waterfall was fat. Far from it. But she had bazoombas the size of Volkswagen Beetles—the old kind, not the new kind—and they were the real thing, she figured, because they were soft. Alexis wasn’t an expert in this matter, but she remembered LJ going on one time about fake bazoombas. “Ever feel an elbow?” was how he put it. Well, Aunt Namche didn’t feel like an elbow.

  She went on to Uncle Burr next. “Hon, hon, honeybear, lovekins,” she said to him. Uncle Burr blushed, but he allowed himself to be nuzzled thoroughly. He winked at Alexis. He mouthed “Sheila Lou Pronsky” and grinned. And Alexis could understand very well why her uncle had stayed in Sedona, Arizona.

  Inside the house was a place of wonder. Namche Waterfall had definite ideas about interior design, and Uncle Burr had—as he said—“given my baby free rein.” There were pillows everywhere and lots of draperies and low-slung furniture and colorful rugs. There were also lots of pictures because Namche Waterfall was a photographer, it seemed. And she was good as far as Alexis could tell. She might have been given a bit too much to focusing on people’s intimate dental work as her subject, but there was a certain something about the way she went for the cavities that had its own appeal.

  Aunt Namche told her that she hoped she liked the bedroom that would be hers. She said, “Burr and I . . . well, you know we don’t have kids. We were never blessed. But now we have you, and we want you to have the room of your dreams. A very, very special place for a very, very special girl. That’s you,” she added, just in case Alexis might think she was referring to someone else. She said, “It’s just this way. It’s on the other end of the house from me and Burr, because everyone likes privacy and you’re part of everyone so you like it, too.”

  She led the way with a fluttering of scarves and a rattling of necklaces. Uncle Burr went second. Alexis brought up the rear. She wondered—as any girl would—what this very special room was going to be like, and considering Namche Waterfall’s taste in decorating, she didn’t have real high hopes for the place. At the far end of the house, a door stood closed. Namche Waterfall headed straight for it, threw it open, said “Ta-da!” and clasped her hands over her copious bazoombas to wait for Alexis’s response.

  Well, it had to be positive. It absolutely had to be. Alexis began rehearsing adjectives as she approached. Fabulous, wonderful, perfect, delicious, excellent, mind-bending, serene, outstanding, fabulous . . . no she’d used that already.

  There was nothing for it but to walk inside.

  Two steps and she stopped. Two steps and her world altered on its precarious axis. Two steps and her eyes filled with tears. The room was fourteen-year-old-girl-come-home. In its middle stood a four-poster bed. Not a canopy bed, which would have been too dumb for words, but an antique four-poster with a comforter created not to resemble anything remotely Arizona, but to remind her of the Pacific Northwest. It was fashioned to be a quilted landscape, its colors forming trees, water, and sky. A single Orca spyhopped from the water, a single girl stood watching from the shore.

  There was a dresser in the room, a rocking chair by a window, a desk on which a laptop computer sat. Next to the desk was a pile of schoolbooks. On top of these was a folder with WELCOME TO RED ROCK HIGH printed on it.

  “Got you all enrolled,” Aunt Namche said. “I figured that would be better than making you sit there and go through it all on your own. Only thing to be added is the electives you want, but we can do that tomorrow. Either Burr or I will take you. Oh, look at this, too.”

  She moved to the closet and pulled open its door. There wasn’t a plethora of clothes hanging there, although for a moment that was halfway what Alexis expected to see. Instead, there were just three articles that Aunt Namche brought out: a purple school sweatshirt, a pair of black jeans, and silver tennies.

  She said, “Looks sort of dumb, but purple, silver, and black are the school colors. Seems dumb to wear them to school, I know, but tomorrow’s a pep rally. You know pep rallies, right? Well, here they always wear the school colors on pep-rally days, so I figured you’d probably want to fit in.”

  Fit in, Alexis thought. Fit in, fit in. When in her life had she ever fit in? And, more important, could she fit in here, could she fit in now? Could she mold her frame and figure into what would work in this time and this place after such a long period of being the one who held the rest of life together for so many people? She wasn’t sure. But she sure as hell wanted to give it a try.

  She realized that Aunt Namche was waiting for her answer and on her face was a look of worry. At her side, Uncle Burr was waiting, too. And he was either worried that she wasn’t happy with what Aunt Namche had done or he was thinking about how to move that corpse from chapter 134 to where it belonged, a heck of a lot earlier in the book.

  Alexis said, “You guys . . .” And then she could hardly say more. Because she felt real tears coming, not tears because she was afraid or she was lonely or she wanted someone to love her and be there for her for the rest of her life, but tears that meant she was filling up . . . and up and up . . . till soon there would be no empty space in her that needed filling anymore.

  * * *

  School was scary. But the first day at a new school was always scary, especially in
a place where most of the kids knew one another and had known one another since they were in kindergarten. But after what Alexis had been through in the previous weeks, being the new girl at school was no big deal. You don’t drive around in an SUV with your mother in a coffin in the back to then be scared because thirty-two kids are staring at you when you walk into geometry. You don’t watch a guy get killed by his own bomb and you don’t end up in a police cell trying to figure out how you got there in the first place, only to worry that someone’s going to think you’re a fatso in PE class. This was nothing compared to what she’d been through. She could, at this point, pretty much survive anything.

  Which was largely why she was able to survive her phone call to Linda. She made it at lunchtime. She found a private place near the gym, under an overhang and out of the sun. She made a note to herself to get used to the sun. It was hot and it blasted down like something being rayed from an alien spacecraft. Linda answered. No voice mail, but that was a good thing because voice mail would have been chicken.

  “Shit in half, Alex,” were Linda’s first words. “Why the hell haven’t you called before now? Didn’t you get my voice mails? Didn’t you get my texts?”

  Truth was, Alexis hadn’t looked. She went with that. “I got caught up in getting organized here,” she told Linda. “I haven’t checked my phone.”

  There was a silence. Well, one thing Linda wasn’t was a dumb-shit. She never had been, which was part of why Alexis loved her. And she did love her. True and through. It was just . . . she wasn’t sure how she loved her.

  That was, essentially, the message for Linda. I’m fourteen years old. I know you knew at fourteen who you were and what you wanted and where you were heading. But here’s the deal: I don’t know yet. I want to know. I would really, really love to know. But I don’t. And I need to figure that out. See, the way I look at it, my life’s been crazy for a long time. I mean, life at the Angeline was pretty weird. There were cool things about it, but there were also . . . I mean, look. How many kids live with a snake lady and a python? How many kids have a pirate lady with a peg leg for a neighbor? And how many kids . . . And here there were tears, for there were going to be tears for some time to come about how her mom had died and what she’d had to do because of that death. But it all boiled down to a single piece of information that she had to give Linda, that she had to make Linda understand.