The Sun Down Motel

On the front was a list of the songs in tonight’s performance. On the back was a list of the members of the Plainsview High School Choir. There were fifteen girls.

She folded the page in her pocket and wandered farther down the hall, passing teachers and parents chatting in knots. The school was small, and the crowd was rapidly dispersing. There were other folding tables here, advertising other things: the football team, the science fair. One of the tables had a handmade sign that said ORDER YOUR 1982–83 YEARBOOK NOW! Next to it was a copy of the 1981–82 yearbook on display.

This is so easy, Viv thought as she picked up the yearbook, slid it in her coat, and walked back out the door with the rest of the crowd.

* * *

• • •

Downtown Plainsview was closing, but a hardware store was still open.

Viv went in, thinking of that car driving away tonight. Thinking of Marnie’s advice: At least be ready to defend yourself. And that stupid news item on safety tips for teens: Use a buddy system. Never get into a stranger’s vehicle. Consider carrying a whistle or a flashlight.

Viv walked up one aisle of the small store, then down the other. A whistle was not much use at the Sun Down, where there was no one around for miles. If she ever used it, she’d be whistling into the wind. As for a flashlight, she pictured shining one into the traveling salesman’s face. That wouldn’t do much, either.

“Excuse me, miss?”

Viv turned to see a boy of about eighteen standing at the end of the aisle. He had pimples on his cheeks and a red apron on. He gave her a smile that was friendly and a little embarrassed. “We’re closing now,” he said.

“Oh,” Viv said, looking around. “I was just—”

“Is there something I can help you find?”

“Maybe.” She smiled back at him. “I was just thinking that I should carry something to defend myself. Because I work nights.”

“Jeez, sure,” the guy said. “We don’t carry Mace, though. You’d be surprised how often we get asked for it.”

“Right.” Viv had never actually thought about how to defend herself. Could she punch someone, kick them? Growing up in suburban Grisham, the idea was absurd. Now she glanced at the darkening windows outside and wondered exactly what she would do.

What would you do if you ever saw real trouble? her mother had said.

“There’s a baton thing you can carry,” the hardware guy told her. “It gives a good whack, I think. But it’s big and heavy for carrying around every day.” He turned the corner to the next aisle, and Viv followed him. “Personally, if I were a girl and I wanted to defend myself, I’d carry this.” He reached onto a shelf and put a thick leather holder into her hand.

Viv pulled the handle. It was a knife—not the retractable switchblade kind, but a regular knife with a wooden handle and a wicked silver blade. The blade itself was about three inches long and looked like it could cut glass.

“Wow,” Viv said.

“I told you, we get asked a lot,” the guy replied. “This is a hunting knife, but it works for what you want. Small enough to fit in a purse. Sharp enough that you mean business.” She looked up to see that he was smiling at her. “You can even take it jogging in the park. Some pervert comes up to flash you—boom! At least, if I were a girl, that’s what I would do.”

She blinked up at him, and she smiled at him. She watched him blush.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

Fell, New York

November 2017

CARLY

A few thin flakes of snow swirled in the air, white against the darkness. They flitted in front of the blue and yellow of the motel sign like fireflies, looking almost pretty. Thanksgiving was coming, and I’d had an email from Graham a few hours ago, asking if I wanted to spend the holiday with him and his fiancée back home.

I pictured an awkward dinner at Graham and Hailey’s apartment, football on TV. It was the second Thanksgiving since Mom died, and my brother and I should probably spend it bonding and supporting each other. But we didn’t have particularly warm memories of the holiday—Mom always cooked a big Thanksgiving dinner, but she worked and sweated over it for days, making a meal for the three of us that didn’t matter much in the big scheme of things. By the end of it she was always too exhausted to be much fun, and if Graham and I either offered to help her or told her to keep it simple, she got defensive and angry.

She’d even cooked Thanksgiving dinner for us when she was sick. She was still on her feet then, trying to convince herself that she could do everything she used to do. She’d waved us off, gone shopping for a load of groceries when Graham and I weren’t looking. She’d fallen asleep while the turkey was in the oven. Just thinking about it now made me sad. I had no idea what old idea buried in my mother’s psyche made her crazy at Thanksgiving, and now I would never know.

I loved Graham. He was my big brother, my only sibling, my protector and my torturer for as long as I could remember. The one who didn’t let bullies tease me for being a dorky bookworm, but who also believed that making me watch horror movies at age nine would “toughen me up” and had snuck me my first copy of Pet Sematary. But now he was twenty-three, working in an office, and practically married. While I stood here in the parking lot of the Sun Down at three in the morning, watching the snow, it felt like Graham was on Mars.

I held the photo in my hand out at arm’s length, matching the image to the motel. It was one of Marnie Clark’s stack of photos, taken from the parking lot of the Sun Down in 1982. This shot was taken from near where I was standing, at the edge of the parking lot, facing the motel. I moved the photo until I had it exactly matched—the real motel outside the frame, the 1982 version inside. There was almost no difference at all.

In a weird, scary way, this place was almost magical, stuck in time.

I lowered the photo and picked up the next one from the stack. It was taken from the same angle. There were two cars in the parking lot in the picture, parked in front of rooms 103 and 104. They were boxy, early-1980s cars, ugly and oddly retro-attractive at the same time. A woman was getting out of one of them. She was young and dark-haired and beautiful, sexy and maybe a little mean. Or she just had resting bitch face, perhaps. This was the woman Marnie had been paid to follow and catch cheating. Bannister, Marnie had said the name was. This was Mrs. Bannister, on her way to an assignation at the Sun Down.

I switched to the next photo. My hands were getting cold in my mittens, but I didn’t care. There was no chance that I would be needed inside the Sun Down office anytime soon, because we had no customers, and I liked looking at the photos out here, seeing where Marnie had been when she took them, the real spot where Mrs. Bannister had parked. It was like a door through time.