Beside the sink: toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, lipstick, etc. On the back of the toilet tank: novel picked up at the airport, one hundred pages remaining. Laurie wanted to find out

how it ended. On the ledge of the tub: shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, pouf on a stick, razor. Closet: purple dress, the one that made her look "junoesque" rather than immense, silver pumps, open suitcase. Dresser: small velvet box with classy silver earrings, keys. The drawers were empty, at least of anything she'd brought with her.

Room: ghosts--rather apparitions. Laurie was honest enough to admit that they hadn't followed her. She'd brought them. First ghost David, second ghost her daughter. Neither was dead, as far as she knew. Her daughter (whose name Laurie had discover but would not say) shifted through time, sometimes young, often old, occaisionally nothing but a warm presence on Laurie's shoulder.

"Momma?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Where are we?"

"Washington state."

J., aged eight, stared at the cover of the phone book. "Why are we in Washingon state?"

Laurie pulled out some tourist brochures and opened the pages for her. "I needed to get away."

"When are we going back?"

"Probably never," Laurie said.

It was a pleasant hotel, the kind of purposeless place where one could do what one chose--have an affair, hide a pregnancy, retreat after discovering a cure for cancer. She could spend a lifetime here, spending residuals and doing nothing, being nothing, feeling nothing, living only to take pleasure in the next meal or the next socially pleasant and spiritually meaningless conversation she happened upon.

She slipped her shoes on. "I'm going to wander around. Would you like to come along?"

"Sure!" J. skipped around the room, then stopped. "Dad's in the bathroom. He doesn't want to go anywhere. Maybe I should stay here, so he doesn't get too lonely."

Laurie rolled her eyes. "David will be just as tetchy after the plane trip whether you sit with him or not. But I suppose you could watch television for a while, if you'd rather."

"Do they have cable?"

Laurie flicked through the channels until she found a cartoon channel.

J. lay on her stomach and propped her chin up on her hands. "It's like Saturday morning all day long!"

---

"Ms. Wonders? Is that you?"

Laurie, lost, turned toward the voice like a beacon in the dark. A young man in khakis, blue dress shirt with a name badge stuck to it, and bare feet stood in what seemed like a door to a supply closet, but instead opened into a hallway.

"Ted?" she read off the name badge. "I'm sorry, I don't remember your last name."

He brightened. "I didn't think you'd remember me at all, Ms. Wonders."

They shook hands.

"Ms. Wonders, you have no idea what your work means to me."

Laurie frowned. "Did you--?"

"My mother," Ted said. "Are you looking for something?"

"There's supposed to be a cafe," she said.

"Follow me. My mother. She's dead now, unfortunately--"

"I'm sorry."

He led her around a curve in the building that overlooked a field of bright corn.

"--but it's almost a justification of her death to know that it's all over. The big C. Never again."

"Mmm," Laurie said. The opposite window showed a pond, shining green, habituated by ducks. "What a strange place."

"Cafe up ahead. But I imagine everyone tells you that."

She wanted to ask him about the bare feet, but there was probably some quotidian explanation, like damp socks. "Not many people know my name."

Ted chuckled. "They will. You'll be famous."

"Oh, I doubt that," Laurie said. "It's not like it was the common cold."

Ted left her at a table on the edge of a balcony overlooking a garden. He told her he hoped to see her again, thanked her again, and left without complaint when she smiled the kind of smile you use to push someone away. She ordered tea and cucumber sandwiches. She'd drunk lab coffee for so long she had nightmares about drinking a glass of water--lab coffee. Milk--lab coffee. Red wine--lab coffee. David's stolen kisses--lab coffee.

The cucumber sandwiches surprised her. They'd been cut in hexagons only as wide as the slice of cucumber inside, with sweet butter inside. The waiter, who wore a black monocle behind which she thought she could see a light shining, also gave her a plate with miniscule slices of comestibles, everything from a chocolate petit-fours to a piece of sushi, brilliant orange eggs that made her feel seasick.

David appeared on the balcony as she tasted a slice of roasted jalapeno stuffed with bread crumbs and cream cheese.

She dabbed at the crumbs and pulled out a chair for him. "Good afternoon, David. Feeling better?"

"Why, Laurie?"

She poked a small, wiggling thing with the tip of her pinkie finger. "Why what? Which all-encompassing 'why' are you after now?"

"Why are we here?"

"On a recommendation. Sanchez said I had to take some time off. He recommended this place. Here we are."

"You didn't bring any clothes."

Laurie shrugged. Aspic on a water cracker. Beef. Sherry. Simple, luxurious things.

"Just the dress," David said.

An unspoken arguement flashed by: "I thought you were going to propose."

"Well, I was married," David said. "I'm sorry."

"You're a ghost," she said with her mouth full. "Also, you're not dead yet. I have my doubts."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You didn't want to know," Laurie said. "It was all in the pattern. I knew you weren't going to divorce her--it was in the pattern. I knew I was pregnant--the pattern. The cure--all in the folding, like a genetic version of the back of a Mad Magazine. A pattern. What makes DNA fold? Find the pattern, hiding where everyone else sees dummy information. I didn't tell you about these things because you would have found a way to take them away from me."

"You gave our daughter away."

Laurie looked out into the garden. "I'm no mother." J. was running around the paths and trying to pick flowers. "It's time to let you both go."

"What about Jennifer?"

"What a terrible name," Laurie said. "Anything. Lulubelle. Maxine. Violet. Why Jennifer? Imagine it. Every time I hear that name, I think about how stupid it is to name a child something like that. For the rest of my life I'll be doing it. Like a sore I can't stop picking at. Or a cancer. That's what the two of you are, a fold in my heart that's taken over my life."

"I'm not going to try to talk you out of it," David said.

Laurie signaled the waiter for the check. "It wouldn't do any good."

"It never has," David said.

The plate of nibbles wasn't listed on the check. "Afternoon tea comes with tidbits," the waiter said.

"Especially if the guest is female, alone, fat, and therefore to be pitied?"

"Madame is not alone," the waiter said.

Laurie and David exchanged a look. "Not alone?" Laurie asked.

The waiter nodded toward David's seat.

"Mmm," Laurie said.

---

Laurie found a door that led into the garden and helped J. pick flowers. David followed at a distance, trying to give her time to say goodbye, the fool. Why would she want to say goodbye? Why spoil jer perfect afternoon?

---

After a few hours, J., somewhat older than David, led them through a different set of hallways and common rooms--leather sofas with brass trim, dark tables with burning candles, a room with Christmas decorations behind a carved Oriental screen--back to their room. Laurie announced that she was going to dress for supper, took her dress, and shut the bathroom door behind her.

She picked up the novel and read ten pages before she remembered to flush. She washed her hair, soaped and scrubbed every crevice, shaved her legs, and let it all rinse away. She combed out her hair wet--a bad but practical habit--put it up, spritzed it, and pulled out a single curl to lie on her neck.

A slick of lipstick, a breath of perfume. By then the mirror was clear. Her face sagged as if it were empty, and the routines she went through weren't some kind of magic spell that would fill it up again. She'd changed into someone unfamiliar. There was no pattern. She wanted to die. But she'd never tell David that, not even his ghost.

Time to put on the dress.

---

David escorted her to the formal dining room. J. led them down the hallways, a toddler dressed in a ballerina's tutu she'd seen on TV.

Ted sat alone near the entrance.

The maitre d' asked her if she was joining another party. "I see a friend of mine," Laurie said. "Would you ask him if I could join him?"

"A moment." The maitre d' walked over to Ted and spoke in his ear.

It'd been a long time since she'd seen anyone's face light up to look at her.

The maitre d' led her to Ted's table. Ted stood and sat her in her chair. "Ms. Wonders!"

The chair had been pulled back from the table, and Ted had exchanged a glance with it before he'd nodded to the maitre 'd. He had his own ghosts, and Laurie knew what to look for. Probably his mother.

"Call me Laurie," she said. "Have you ordered?"

"Only just."

A waiter slipped a menu under her elbow. "Anything good?"

He smiled. She had trouble judging what it meant. "Take a look."

It was a strange menu, with entrees scattered among desserts, a group of wines clustered around sole muniere. Lauried turned around to show David, but he was gone. Feelings hurt, no doubt. J. had climbedinto an enormous fish tank and was swimming like an otter.

The waiter coughed. "A suggestion, madame? If madame would put herself in the chef's hands, he will be sure to delight."

"Please."

Their waiter brought them wine, six kinds of wine; a sweet, heavy, sticky bread; pepper steak with mushrooms and garlicky potatoes and mixed steamed vegetables with the carrots picked out; sliced strawberries with hot, sweet biscuits, cream, and drops of deep, sweet, wooded vinagar; cheese in an iron pan jumping with olives and capers and lemon and slices of fried eggplant; shrimp as long as Laurie's hand, fried in crumbs as delicate to the tongue as snowflakes; long, clear soup that came in teacups that seemed to fill themselves until they were no longer wanted; devilied eggs with dill and salmon served in a dimpled dish with a tiny dice of red onion in the center; a dish of brothy, fragile noodles, with slices of cabbage and carrots and pork as fine as the noodles, as smooth and settled as your heart after a good cry; a tiny cup of chocolate that made her tongue burn with chilis; some kind of translucent fish curled at the edges, as if it had been alive when it hit the pan; banana bread with cinnamon apple butter; raspberries on top of a burnt custard, seeds perfect and bitter against the teeth. And so on.

The dishes were endless and a romance to the tongue, but it was an empty seduction. She hadn't been hungry; she didn't feel sated. From the way Ted was eating, neither was he. Eventually they put down their silverware and let their eyes wander around the table.

"This isn't working," Lauried said.

Ted giggled.

"Stop that," Laurie said. "I'm not drunk, and you're not drunk, either. And you sound like a girl."

He laughed harder.

"What's so funny?"

"You sound like my mother," he gasped.

"Oh, the hell with this," Laurie said.

"No, no, I'm sorry--"

"Waiter? Check, please." She wasn't drunk, but she didn't feel sober. Oh, god. She'd left her purse behind. And the waiter wasn't coming. She'd never walked out on a check before, but it seemed like a good idea tonight.

Ted followed her out. "Laurie?"

The maitre d' was nowhere to be seen, and neither were David and J. "I'm going back to my room. Go away."

"You're only a little bit like my mother. I promise."

"I don't care." She was getting lost, and Ted wasn't about to help her, or she wasn't about to let him.

"Please don't leave?"

Laurie spun around. Damn it, she'd forgotten her key, too. "Who are you? Just who are you, Ted? I don't remember you, I just red your name off your nametag. Are you some kind of research spy? Because I'm not working on anything. I didn't bring any notes. No laptop, no books. I don't have anything you could want. And don't say you want me."

"She's always so sarcastic. I wish you could hear her," Ted said. He pulled his key out of his pocket. "This is my room. Please come in and sit down. We're both just in a state, she would say. I'll make you a cup of coffee and walk you home. Can't be screaming in the hallways, can we?"

"No!" Laurie shouted.

"You're lost, aren't you? Whoever it is that you bring along with you isn't there, is he? Or she. I don't know. But you'll never find your way back to your room on your own. It's this place. It'll push you around in circles until it gets what it wants."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Ted's room was lit by what looked like gas lamps with frosted glass sconces. The wallpaper smelled, damn it, smelled like it was a hundred years old. Not moldy or dusty, but like a used book store. Old paper. The four-poster bed had lace drapes.

"That's mother's." Ted pointed to an overstuffed, chintz-covered recliner. "I sleep in the chair."

There wasn't anywhere else to sit, so Laurie tied back the lace curtains and sat on the edge of the bed. Ted puttered around with the coffee pot, a silver percolator with an electric cord running out the back. The scent of the coffee reached her just after the coughing of the pot did.

"Who's your ghost?"

"That's none of your business," Laurie said.

"Yeah, but how often do you meet someone else with their own travelling ghost? Sometimes you have to ask the impertinent questions." Ted sat on the bed next to her, and she shifted away.

"I'd rather you didn't."

"You might as well tell me. Mother said she was leaving with another ghost. I'm sure it was yours. She'll tell me all about it when she comes back."

"You're mad."

Ted got up and brought her some coffe in a china mug with a picture of a dog on it. His was a homely brown mug with grooves on the side, mass-produced to look badly handmade. She sipped her coffee.

Ted took a slurp of his coffe. "Just a little. So are you. Make love to me."

"No," Laurie said. It was hard to make herself jump up and leave the room with a hot mug of coffee in her hands, so she slid further away from him on the bed. "I don't know you. I'd rather not try to force myself through a sexual version of that dinner tonight, all pleasure and no substance. It wouldn't matter who you were. I'd feel just as terrible afterwards as I do now."

"Empty," Ted said. "I'm sorry. You're right. I'd like to see you tomorrow, though."

"You're a little young for me," Laurie said. "What are you, twenty-five?"

"Close," Ted said.

They drank their coffee.

Laurie put her mug on the table next to the ivory and brass telephone. "Good night," Laurie said. "I still don't know who you are."

Ted shrugged. "I don't think I could have done anything on mother's bed, anyway. Let me walk you back to your room."

Laurie smiled and touched his hand. "Thank you, no. I'd rather be lost for a while. I need to think."

"Are you sure?" he asked. When she didn't answer: "Good night, Laurie. I'll be here if you need me."

Laurie closed the door quietly behind her. The hallways seemed dimmer. She'd always hated hotel corridors at night, so brightly lit. After a few steps, she decided that her feet hurt and slipped out of her pumps. She left one of them at Ted's door and chucked the other off a balcony a few turns later. Upstairs, downstairs, not another living soul, and nothing that looked familiar.

Music led her to an empty ballroom with a crackling radio playing waltzes from the next room. At the door, David took her arm.

"I didn't know you could dance," Laurie said.

"Not well," David answered.

He was right. After a couple of songs she became impatient with their missteps--especially frustrating when your partner had a tendency to slide through you--and walked out. David let her go without a word.

She found her room after a few minutes--she followed the curved wall back to the door that looked like a closet and there it was--but the door was still locked. It was too much. She sat on the floor in the purple dress that she'd worn the night David had left her and let the tears run down her face. All she had left were ninety pages of a novel that, to admit the truth, she hadn't really enjoyed in the first place.

It felt like hours had passed when down the hallway came the waiter with the odd monocle. He had a limp. She wouldn't have noticed it but for the irregularity of his footsteps. He was wearing a tuxedo and a top hat. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. She didn't even have a tissue, for goodness's sake.

"Madame?" the man asked.

"I've left my key behind," Laurie said.

The man coughed. "Perhaps the door is not locked."

"Don't be ridiculous," Laurie snapped. "I'm sorry. It's just been--"

The waiter stepped around her and opened the door. She could have sworn she heard the bolt sliding back as he turned the handle. He stepped back. "Good evening, madame. Rest well."

Laurie struggled to her feet. "Good night. Thank you."

"Rest well," the man repeated.

---

Laurie started up a hot bath and dropped the dress on the bed. The purse sat on the dresser, obvious and embarrassed. Laurie pulled her handkerchief out of the purse and blew her nose. She smiled. It was one of those blue, patterned ones that she'd got from her father, not a bit feminine, soft from a hundred washings. What had made her bring it along and tuck it into a sequined clutch, she'd never know. The bath was almost full, so she climbed in and pulled the novel after her. The razor--she'd purchased a box-cutter type when she couldn't find a straight razor at the grocery store--sat next to her feet. She reminded herself not to let the water get cold. All right, it was a terrible novel, but she'd finish it, even through she already knew what the ending would be.

She hooked her elbows on the side of the tub and started reading:

"Renzo flung Sarah away from him. 'It takes more than the soft touch of a woman to make me talk,' he snorted.

"Sarah's blue eyes flashed, and she pulled out a gun. 'I've got a gun,' she said. 'And I'm not afraid to use it.'

"Renzo stood up from the bed and pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the drawer next to the television. 'Me neither,' he said.

"'Where is my sister?' Sarah screamed."

Laurie's head slid down onto her chest. She jerked it back up and tried to read again.

"Renzo poured himself a double in a plastic cup and rummaged around for a piece of ice bigger than a fingernail in the melted ice bucket. 'Keep it down, babe,' he leered. 'People might start coming to the wrong conclusion about me and you. Espcially if you don't use that gun.'

"'Where is my sister?' Sarah asked, quieter this time.

"'She's dead, babe,' Renzo said.

"Sarah wailed and the gun went off..."

A few more nods, and the book dropped onto her wet stomach. J. watched over her and let her sleep.

Laurie woke up shivering, spread the book out on a towel, and crawled into the bed. She dreamed about patterns, about what would happen if she started looking for a way to keep foreign patterns from just waltzing in and writing themselves onto you. In the morning she flipped through her address book, and there he was. Ted Glenzinski, son of Martha Glenzinski, case #73, type of cancer. Telephone number. Street address. City. State.

Laurie groaned and brushed her teeth.

• A Terrible Accident at the Land’s End Hotel and Resort
• The Story of the Black Monocle
• Blue Dolls in Wisconsin, A Renzo Novel

- De Knippling

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