Beginnings, sweet and crunchy, like chocolate sprinkles

The problem with chocolate sprinkles, Roland reflected, was that they looked better than they tasted. And the same was almost invariably true of beginnings. So much promise, the corpse of the relationship yet to be picked clean, and yet ten years forward, you find yourselves gnawing each other’s shinbones and wondering why the marrow isn’t as sweet as you imagined. Promises made years before hold weight, though the heat of lust was on you and your better judgment smothered beneath your sweater and your slacks and her slacks, its muffled cries gone unheard beneath loud moans and softer sighs.

At least that’s what he heard from others, although he wished with all of him that he’d been given that opportunity to discover the truth for himself. And that was why he was here, on some quixotic quest for truth, when the universe had already proven to him that bad things happened for no apparent reason to people who didn’t deserve it and you just didn’t get to know why. But he was here, anyway, at Lands’ End. Looking for a miracle.

He hated the uniform, but the pay was actually marginally better than what he’d commanded clearing out people’s attics, if he counted in tips. And it was oddly refreshing to be invisible. He’d discovered the magic of the hat on his first day. Don the hat and suddenly you didn’t exist for people anymore; they held private conversations in elevators, told secrets, whispered their darkest hopes and fears, kissed passionately, and sometimes even fucked, yes, he’d been privy to that as well as a couple rolled around and moaned and groped while waving at him vaguely to ‘put the bags anywhere.’

Within the first couple of days he found her name in the registry. Odd that he still didn’t know her first name, the way she occupied his mind. Mrs. Evan Winters. She’d arrived the same day he cleared out her attic, the same day he’d eaten a muffin in her kitchen, looked into her eyes and known she knew.

By arcane or osmotic means, she’d somehow intuited everything, although she was sweetly vague about it. But she knew about the Rambler and the brakes he hadn’t known how to rebuild himself half as well as he believed, she knew about Madeleine and icy winter roads, and scars that ran deeper than the one that bisected his brow, those that crisscrossed his knee. She knew and still she said, “Whatever it was you did couldn’t have been so bad.”

Except it was and he’d spent eight years in Deerfield as proof. He hadn’t tried to plead out, hadn’t asked for a softer sentence. There was no prison cell that could’ve punished him worse than what he’d done to Madeleine, never mind what he’d done to himself. And it didn’t matter that the bottle of Jim B sat unopened between his knees that night, that it’d shattered in the crash. They’d been in the mood to celebrate, driving too fast, laughing too loud. He’d sold a poem to The Atlantic. First night she wore his ring. Last night he saw her smile.

When they pulled him from the wreckage, wreathed in broken glass and ashes, snow falling on him like frozen tears, like even God wanted to know why, he just closed his eyes and tried to pray; he’d once been a man of middling faith, but that vanished in one wrench of the steering wheel. A wasted life and all that remained to him was time, ominous and terrible, a future that stretched like a Nevada highway before one who didn’t want it, the one who shouldn’t have walked away, even with a broken gait.

And this fey, fragile flower of a woman with springtime eyes and witchcraft in her smile, she was the first…well, anyone who had tugged at him since the state stuck Maddie in the frozen ground and he stared out through prison bars, watching the world bleed gray from the sky down. He didn’t dream in color anymore.

So one evening, off-duty, he donned the hat and decided it was time. And eventually, snooping paid off like a dark horse at the track, long odds, sweet reward. She had stayed in 412 and so he went up, invisible, cloaked in Bellboy magic, borrowed the keys from housekeeping who didn’t notice him either, whispering about the tragedy in room six, and let himself in. The room, oddly, hadn’t been touched, and he saw that she’d been an artist, wherever she had gone from here. Her paintings were eerie, soul-searing, rioting with color, like Dali or Bosch but with a more delicate nuance, a suggestion of a tremor in the brushstrokes that might have been technique or something else entirely. He stared at her body of work as if he were devouring her soul, but she was gone.

No truth, no miracle, just more departure, farewell to things he hadn’t known he wanted or believed in, not for so fucking long, not anymore. With a final click he closed the door behind him and went downstairs. Somehow he wasn’t surprised to find Sarah waiting for him. It seemed as if she always worked, the one staff member who never took a night off. The place might well crumble into dust without her.

“The results of your background check came back,” she said quietly, and he possessed the feeling that she’d known for a while, but there were currents and eddies in her eyes the like of which drowned unwary sailors. And for a moment he wanted to drown in the unremarkable depth, almost colorless but threatening, knowing, in a way they shouldn’t have been. Then she blinked and she was just the girl who worked the front desk again.

“Deerfield,” he returned, steady as an old oak that even lightning can’t bring down, although it certainly leaves scars.

She nodded, seeming grave and regretful. “I have your pay packet…your work’s been very good but if something came up missing, you’d be the first one blamed. The management prefers not to leave such things to chance.” A hesitation, before she asked, “Were you a thief?” as if that were the most objectionable thing she could imagine.

His smile shaped, faded away. “Yes,” he told her, heavy as eternity. “In the worst possible way.”

Taking the envelope, he collected his things. On his way out he passed a young musician with hair the color of autumn leaves, picking melancholy notes across the black and white keys. It rang like a quiet processional for the dead, and Roland paused to glance over his shoulder at the painting above the man’s head. For a moment he thought he saw…something, someone, lost and lonely, a whorl of dark hair, haunted wood nymph eyes. But he had not been that man, that poet, for so many years that he let it go. He pushed through the front doors and went away with a broken gait into winter trees, snow falling upon his dark hair like frozen tears, as if even God wanted to know why.

• Looking for a Miracle
• A Terrible Accident at the Land’s End Hotel and Resort
• Silver Trees with Golden Leaves
• Glass Rose