The Hotel

by Peter Gifford

They decided it would be best to lock Hugo up for the night. Of course by then it was really early morning, sometime just after midnight she supposed. So strictly speaking there was not much night left, not much time to huddle together in the hotel room, keeping the light off, and talk in whispers about what they would do when the sun rose.

She looked at the two people she used to call friends. Aaron's normally parchment skin was a garish red, then grey, then red again, reflecting the hotel's neon sign that flickered regularly outside. What was the name of the hotel? — that's right, the ‘Holiday Haven’. The man at the counter hadn’t said a word as the four of them checked in; assumed they'd stopped to get out of the snow she guessed, and wasn’t interested in conversation as long as they paid the seventy-five bucks they owed upfront. She noticed he spared a lingering look for Heather, though not at her face.

She fumbled with the keys and opened the door to the first room. Aaron staggered a little under Hugo’s weight and half-threw him onto the bed while Heather looked on, her hand over her mouth. Hugo lay face down and still.

There was a restaurant next to the hotel, catering for truck drivers and local farmers. When they came back out she looked at a table of people inside, lingering over drinks, while Aaron turned the key in the lock. The click made her shudder slightly, but she didn't look away from the lit windows.

Aaron and Heather opened the door to the other room and went in while she lit a cigarette. The snow had stopped falling. When she exhaled the smoke mixed with her condensed breath to form a long plume of white. No cars had gone by since they’d driven up. She took deep pulls on the cigarette and tried to think, but all she could do was look at the hotel’s neon sign, then the moon, and back again.

The moon was full. Figures. Strange things always happened when the moon was full.

Aaron had his head outside the partially closed door, looking at her. She threw the cigarette stub into a snowdrift and walked back to him. Inside, the two of them sat on the bed; she glanced about the room and noticed that it made no impression on her whatsoever.

The three of them talked softly together for maybe fifteen minutes, going over scenarios and solutions, laying blame, getting more and more defensive. Heather insisted on going straight to the police. Aaron wanted to call a friend of his who he said could fix things. The fact that this friend was probably four hours away by car didn’t stop him from insisting upon it. She watched the light flicker regularly upon his face and searched for some remnants of the excitement she used to feel when he was around, but found nothing. He was sitting across from her on the bed, back against the headboard, legs crossed. Heather was curled up on her side. Their knees almost touched.

When the knocking began on the door Aaron and Heather almost had heart attacks, but she felt strangely calm, getting up and opening the door as though she was at home and her mother had visited her bedroom. The hotel manager stood there. He had a short grey beard and a long lined face under a baseball cap, and he looked tired and bored. It was something about their car, they were parked in the wrong spot. Aaron left to move the car, while the manager stood in the door frame, a dark sillouette gainst the neon light, looking at the bed and Heather. He didn’t seem ready to leave.

She was standing next to him, holding the door, not looking at his face but past his shoulder at the restaurant. The dinner party had left and the windows were black. She hadn't heard a car leave. She hadn’t heard a car since they drove up to this place, and suddenly she remembered the way that even then Aaron had been careful enough to put the carlock on the wheel. He was nervous, but always methodical. She moved her eyes and saw the manager’s face, still looking into the room. He looked thin and old. He looked as though he didn't have a friend in the world, living there in his little house attached to the drive-in hotel, out here in the middle of nowhere. No one cared about him. No one would ask about him. She asked him in.

When the three of them left she threw both sets of keys out of the car window.