by Mimi Vizinau
For the daddies,
The Jad and Amanda Lynn (1993-2011)
The Sunspot Motel sits at the crossroads of tumbleweed and cactus. Just another piece of the desert, as dried up and parched as the sea of sand itself. Back in the ’30s when Granddaddy Beauregard ran the Sunspot, the color of the motel, a bright flamingo pink, was the cat’s meow. The palm tree marquis, the mint green and white striped awning over the walkway, and sparkling sidewalks that lined both sides, were all the rage.
If the Sunspot were in Vegas or Palm Springs or any other hip spot, the Rat Pack, surely would have stopped in to have cocktails in the red velvet lounge. Unfortunately, the Sunspot is fifty miles due south of the middle-of-nowhere, and a hundred miles from where-the-heck-are-we.
The once classy paint job has faded and taken on an orange hue and the proud mint green and white awning is now a sun faded puke green and yellowing grey. Never forgotten, for it was never really remembered, the Sunspot is now in the retirement stage of life.
Still the motel is clean and Mrs. Beauregard makes a mean meatloaf, and since it is the only motel for 200 miles along the grapevine, it still does steady business. Truckers mostly, smelling of cigarettes and caffeine, and families of four headed to Disneyland or Hollywood. In the spring, the college kids come with their bad manners and loose morals. George Beauregard the IV doesn’t care much either way; if they pay, they stay.
The job’s getting harder though. Arthritis is a wishy-washy companion, here some days, gone the next. Beauregard manages, he has to; the Sunspot won’t run itself.
There are 30 rooms total, but since he and mother sleep in Room Number 1, there are only twenty-nine rooms available to the guests. Twenty-eight if you don’t count Room Number 23. Room 23 is for special guests and he never knows who will get the key to that room until he finds himself reaching for it.
Maybe it’s something about the way they say the words, “I need a room,” their tone or inflection. Either way, he hears the words and he just knows, Room 23.
Because it is a special room, for special guests, sometimes the room sits empty for months on end, but every once in awhile, the room will have several guests within a short period of time. One summer, back in ’67, the room had three guests in three days.
But on the day that the girl walked in, the room had not seen a visitor in three months; three months and twelve days to be exact.
The girl was unremarkable in every way but one, back when Beauregard was in the Navy the less classy sailors had a name for her type: fire crotch. She had red corkscrew hair so bright it looked as if it might catch fire when the light hit it.
Her clothes were of hand me down quality; faded denim jacket, brown Mary Janes and a white, full length hippie dress. When she shambled into the Sunspot in late September 1992, the only baggage she had was the denim carrier bag she had slung over her shoulder. When she placed the bag on the counter, the dress pressed up against her body and Beauregard saw that the girl was pregnant, at least five months, maybe even six or seven.
The sun was shining that day, as it does most days in the desert and the girl’s freckled face had just a hint of sunburn across the nose and cheeks.
“I need a room,” she said in a voice two shades above a whisper. It was obvious from the way she avoided eye contact that she wasn’t used to acting on her own behalf. Wherever the girl had come from, there were probably folks waiting for her to get back. But this was of no concern to Beauregard who, as natural as you please, reached back and pulled the golden key marked 23 from the key hook.
“Do you have baggage in your car, miss?” he asked.
Her cheeks blushed a bright red that rivaled her curly sue locks, and she said, “No sir. I got a ride here.”
Hitchhiker, Beauregard thought. Not the smartest thing for a girl, any girl, to do, but especially a girl in her condition. He wondered if she had money to pay. Sometimes folks came in and they didn’t have money for a room. Beauregard would give them a warm meal and a room in exchange for a little help around the place. If the person was not a stranger to hard work, Beauregard was no stranger to kindness. But the girl pulled a small leather coin purse from her bag and paid cash. She pulled the bills carefully from the purse, making sure not to show how much money she had, just like Beauregard’s grandmother used to do.
She signed her name to the ledger, Marissa Lee Rhodes. Beauregard noted how carefully the girl printed the name. It probably wasn’t her real name, but it didn’t matter, guests of Room 23 only stayed for one night anyway.
“The restaurant is open if you want to grab something to eat. Mother made fried chicken today and I tell you, you don’t want to miss mother’s fried chicken.”
The girl chewed at the inside of her mouth. It had been hours since she had eaten anything and her stomach was threatening a revolt.
“I better not,” she said. “I have to make my money last me.”
“No charge for the meal, miss. We give the guests one meal a day on the house. Mother will be happy to have someone enjoy her cooking. Haven’t had many guests lately. Com’n and have some chicken, then I’ll show you to your room.”
This wasn’t true, the meals were not free and he had plenty of guests over the weekend, but the girl’s eyes lit up when he said fried chicken and Mother always made extras.
“Well, I don’t want to be rude. I better have some, just to be polite. Thank you very much, sir.”
Sir. That was something Beauregard didn’t hear too much of, respect. Someone had raised the girl right. Beauregard smiled and walked her to the restaurant.
“Mother?” He called to his wife from the door of the diner.
Mrs. Beauregard came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and bee-lined over to the girl. She embraced her as if they had been old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. The girl flinched, but then she relaxed and gave into the hug. Mrs. Beauregard had been crowned Ms. Kern County back in 1952 and though she was no longer a size 6, the years had been kind to her. When she smiled, it was impossible not to follow suit. She smiled now and the girl smiled back.
“Mother, Marissa here would like one of your complimentary plates of fried chicken. Is it too late to feed her?”
Mother gave her husband a knowing look, then she sucked air through her teeth. “Hush now. It’s never too late to feed someone. ’Less of course they’re dead. The dead don’t eat.”
Mother laughed at her own joke, the deep laugh of a woman with roomy hips. Beauregard laughed as well, the girl only smiled.
Mother guided the girl to a table near the entrance to the kitchen. Once Beauregard saw that she had been properly seated and was working on a healthy plate of fried chicken, he went back to the front desk and waited for the girl to finish her plate. When the girl was done, she came back to the counter and asked to be shown to her room.
As far as appearances go, Room 23 was no different from any of the other rooms. Deep wine carpets, multi-printed bedspread, pine wood furniture; it was your standard motel décor. But the room was different, you felt it the moment you walked in, like the light current of electricity that brought your hair on end if you rubbed a balloon across your head. You wouldn’t be able to put your finger on what was different about it; it was such a subtle feeling that you might not even give it much thought. But Beauregard felt it each and every time he stepped through the threshold.
“If you need anything, miss, just pick up the phone and I’ll be on the other end.”
Beauregard made as if to leave, but the girl stopped him.
“Wait a moment,” she said. She ran over and kissed Beauregard on the cheek, and then she pressed two crumpled dollar bills into his hand.
“Thank you, very much,” she said. “And please tell your wife I said thanks again for the fried chicken.”
“Will do. Thank you, young lady.”
Beauregard walked back to his post, shaking his head. Such a sweet girl. It was a shame he would never see her again.
~*~
Missy took a shower. The water was almost too hot, but she needed to wash away the last few days and the shower was just the ticket.
After she showered, she put on a fresh pair of underwear and hand washed the white dress. She hung the dress over the heater, then she grabbed her bag and sat down on the edge of the bed. From the bag, she pulled out an old bible. She kissed the bible and ran her fingers along the surface. The bible was a gift from her mother, a blue and gold children’s bible that her grandmother had given to her mother. Tucked into the bible was a post card. She didn’t have to pull it out to know what it said. She had memorized it word for word.
My dearest Missy,
I miss you soooo much. San Francisco is crazy but everyone here is so free. My neighbor downstairs is a drag queen, can you imagine? And the ocean, man I can’t even tell you how amazing the ocean is. Anyway, I almost have enough to send for you. Should only be about another week now. I hope Leon has been leaving you alone, you would tell me if he wasn’t, right? I love you and I can’t wait to see you.
Your big sister,
Kat
That was on the back of the card. The front of the card was a picture of the ocean. The sky was a crisp, starched blue and the sand was a light golden brown. It said Paradise, California across the front in big black letters. The post card was beautiful but it was also a lie. The whole thing was a lie. The ocean wasn’t beautiful, nothing in San Francisco was free and she would never see Kat again, ever.
She felt the tears come. The tears she had kept away since she left San Francisco. She let them come now and they rolled down her cheeks and on to her fat belly. She knew it wasn’t fat, she knew exactly what it was, but it was easier to think about it as fat.
What she really wanted was to not think about it at all, but her mind was a locomotive, carrying her through the horrible memories of the past six months.
The memories always started at the same place, her mother lying in the hospital bed, the cancer invading every inch of her body. In the end, not even her womb was sacred. She could smell the antiseptic and taste the bland off brand jell-o her mother was too sick to eat. She could hear the steady beep of the heart monitor in her head, and then one day it just stopped beeping.
From that memory, her mind would careen into the image of her step father sneaking into her room at night. The first night he cried, and he told her how much he missed her mother. The words floated on the smell of sour beer and cheap cigars. He kept up the ‘miss your mother routine’ for the first few nights, but after a week or so he said nothing at all; he just walked in and got in the bed with her like he belonged there.
When her belly began to grow, he started hitting her and calling her names, accusing her of being the town harlot. That hurt worse than the abuse itself for she had never even french’d a boy, let alone had sex.
There was one upside to being knocked up, Leon stopped sneaking into her room.
One day, during breakfast, he announced that next week she would be seeing the doctor so that she could take care of the mess she got herself into. He told her that she would have to pay for it out of the baby-sitting money she had been saving for the trip to San Francisco. His exact words were: “And if you think I’m paying to take care of your mistake you’ve got another thing coming Missy. You’re gonna have to cut into that wad of cash of yours. You think I don’t know you keep money in your box of flow stoppers under the sink? Oh yea, Daddy sees everything.”
He got up and walked away from the table, leaving her alone with the dirty dishes. She sat there, too exhausted to cry and too put out to move.
Abortion wasn’t an option. Reverend Morgan was very clear, abortion was spelled M-U-R-D-E-R and that my friends, is a one way ticket to H-E double helix. She couldn’t take the risk of going to hell, even though she thought she would have a pretty good excuse for committing the act. So that left her with only one solution, she would have to leave.
She counted out the money she had, 2 dollars, which was more than enough cash to get to Kat. Kat would know what to do, Kat always knew what to do. So she bought the ticket the very next morning, but when she called Kat to tell her the good news, it wasn’t Kat who answered the phone, it was a Kat’s landlord.
He told Missy that Kat hadn’t come home the previous night. Then he said that there had been a car accident. Then Missy heard the word dead.
Dead. The first time around, with Momma, the word took a long time to sink in. It didn’t hold weight at first. It floated in between, sometimes feeling very real and very heavy, other times it was an unbelievable concept, floating just out of her reach. This time it was a boulder in the pit of her gut, heavy and thick with reality. She knew dead now, was very familiar with its final nature. Dead was irrevocable, and she was alone.
The tears swelled, filling her eyes, but she brushed them back before they could escape. Alone, alone, alone and in one big mess.
She took out the last postcard she received from Kat and ran her fingers along the surface. The ocean seemed so peaceful and there was wisdom in that peace. As if all problems could be solved on its shores. It called to her and she meant to answer the call.
She still had the ticket and there was no reason to stay there and wait for Leon to make her kill the baby. She made up her mind. She would leave in the morning when Leon went to work. She would go see the ocean, and then she would decide what to do.
She slept most of the ride. The gentle rock of the bus accompanied with the knowledge that Leon wasn’t there to wake her up was like a natural sedative, and she slept a deep sleep for the first time since her mother died. She didn’t even know she was in San Francisco until the bus driver woke her and told her it was the end of the line.
The terminal was huge, much larger than the closet that served as the bus depot in American Fork. Standing in the immense station, with rows and rows of bus benches before her, all of her emotions – fear, sadness and even a little excitement – came together in the pit of her stomach, creating a bellyful of butterflies. She was finally here, but here was so big and she was so small. How would she even begin to find the ocean?
Ask directions silly, she said, giving herself some good advice.
She approached the woman who was selling tickets behind the counter.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Can you tell me, how do I get to the ocean?”
“Depends, where exactly do you want to go? There is Aquatic Park down by the wharf and Ocean Beach. That’s further out, but it’s only one bus to get there, unless you wanna take a cab.”
Missy wasn’t sure she could navigate the bus system in such a big city, but she was sure that she needed to be careful about how she spent her money.
“I’ll take the bus to Ocean Beach. Can you write down the directions?”
The woman wrote out the directions for Missy and even told her that if she didn’t want to walk the three blocks to the bus stop she would get her a cab. Missy opted to walk. She was happy to be here, just being here made her feel a little bit closer to Kat and she wanted to see the city up close.
But her first impression of San Francisco was not a good one. The biting wind whipped at her jacket, trying to find entrance to her skin, and the people walking the streets didn’t smile or nod when she walked by. One of them bumped right into her and didn’t even bother to say excuse me.
She didn’t like the buildings either, the way the skyscrapers huddled together, like they were telling secrets about the stupid hick girl from Utah who got herself knocked up.
By the time she reached the bus stop, she had had her fill of the streets of San Francisco.
She spotted the 38 bus coming up the street. She got on and put two dollars into the fair box, then she took a seat in the back and waited for the bus to carry her to the ocean.
The bus drove for nearly an hour before the driver pulled to a stop and announced that it was the end of the road. She got off and knew she was by the ocean. She couldn’t see it, but she could smell the salt in the air and she could hear the waves crashing against the shore. She followed the sounds, first a left, then a right, until she was right across the street from the pounding surf.
But it wasn’t like the postcard at all. The sky was a mottled grey, dark in some spots, light in others, and the water was a deep green. She walked to the shore, avoiding the bits of broken glass and the jagged sand dollars buried in the sand. A woman with her shoes off and her pants rolled up to her knees walked through the surf with a little dog. She waved at Missy and Missy waved back. She didn’t understand why the woman would want to put her feet in the murky water, anything could be lurking there.
When she was sure the woman could no longer see her face, she plopped down on the beach, buried her head in her arms and cried. She cried until the sun began to make its exit. That was her cue to make hers, so she headed back to the bus stop.
Now a week had passed, and a few cheap motels and five different drivers later she had hitched her way to the Sunspot Motel.
The ocean, San Francisco, Leon, Momma, that all seemed like it happened years ago. The room was warm and the food had been good, things were bad but they could be worse.
With the postcard still in hand, she walked over and pulled the shades open. She could see nothing but desert for miles out. The sun was shining and the desert looked like the beach on the postcard, all that was missing was the ocean.
She could feel the sun through the window warming her skin. She closed her eyes and for a moment she could hear the waves of the ocean, not loud and clashing like the ocean in San Francisco, but smooth and rhythmic, softly washing against the sand. She opened her eyes, and just like that, the sound was gone.
She sat on the carpet, closed her eyes and listened again. After a moment, she heard it in the distance, the sound of the gentle waves lapping across the golden sand. She could smell the beach, cocoa butter, and salt water mixed together. She could even hear children playing.
She lay down and the sun began to do its job. She could feel it browning her skin; she would have a real nice tan in an hour or so.
“You might want to throw some sunscreen on that pale hide of yours. We’re Irish, not Brazilian.”
Missy opened her eyes. Even with her hand shielding her face, she had to squint against the bright sunlight.
Kat stood above her, wearing her favorite rainbow crochet bikini. She had a lime cherry slushy in one hand and the sunscreen in the other. Missy reached out and touched her sister’s leg. She could feel a layer of moisture on the warm flesh.
“Hey, hey, this one’s mine. Mom’s got yours.” Kat turned and pointed at their mother, who was standing at the front of the line of the snack shack. Her mother was at least twenty pounds heavier than the last time she saw her. Even from here, a good fifty feet away, Missy could see that the ghost grey cancer pallor her mother wore like a death shroud the last month of her life was gone. She was pale, but it was the healthy, freckled pale Missy teased her about relentlessly.
Missy stood and wrapped her arms around her sister. She half expected Kat to evaporate into thin air. Not only did she not disappear, but there was nothing between them, no baby bump. Missy’s belly was flat against her sister’s.
Kat pushed her away.
“Eck, it’s hot. What’s gotten into you? I offer you some sunscreen and you go all Hallmark card on me.”
She was laughing, but then she saw the tears in Missy’s eyes. “I’m sorry. You okay? You want some of mine?”
She stopped laughing and held the slushy out to Missy. She was still smiling. It was Kat’s smile. Her sister, not dead but alive, smiling at her on the warm beach of Paradise, California. Behind Kat, Missy could see her mother walking toward them, two slushies in hand. She raised the slushies high for Missy to see. Missy smiled, she had found the ocean, finally, the real ocean.
~*~
Beauregard waited until check out, 11:00 AM, to unlock the door to Room 23. There was no need to wait, but it was hotel procedure. The bed was still made, sometimes it wasn’t, but most of the time it was. He took the dress down off the hanger, folded it, and placed it in Missy’s bag. As he was putting the hanger back into the closet he caught a glimpse of something on the ground by the window out the corner of his eye. He walked over and picked up a postcard. There was a beach on the front. He flipped it over and read the back.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Beauregard,
I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed staying at your hotel. I loved your fried chicken, Mother Beauregard. I told my mom about it and we are going to try to recreate the recipe, but I don’t think anything we do will be as good as yours. If I am ever back that way, I will stop in to say hi, but for some reason I don’t think I will be. I love the ocean and I never want to leave. Maybe one day I will see you guys here.
Much love and a lot of thanks,
Missy
Beauregard tucked the postcard into the pocket of his jacket. He would put it up on the wall of his office and pass the message onto Mother. He put Missy’s bag on his shoulder and smoothed the surface of the bedspread. Then he left Room 23, locking the door behind him.
He put the bag in storage and he put the postcard on the wall. Then he took his place at the front counter of the Sunspot Motel. Sometimes people needed a room, a special room, and he had to be there, waiting, to rent it to them.
© 2011 Mimi Vizinau
Original fiction debuting at Residential Aliens.
Residential Aliens
Will it ever end?
