Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

stay.
    “Don’t forget,” I said, “if you have pizza, you have to let his slices cool before you give them to him.”
    Halfway down the stairs, though it was already dark out, I opened the bag and put on Madison’s sunglasses. Then I walked quickly out to the street, stood at the curb, lifted my arm and, when a cab stopped, told him which airport I needed.

CHAPTER 22

    By the time I got to Long Key, the sun was coming up, the Bay of Florida an emerald green, the ocean aqua. I reached into the tote bag, which was on the passenger seat of the rental car, a silver Mini, and pulled out Madison’s sunglasses, the world way too bright without them. The right side of the road was lined with motels and restaurants, but as I kept driving, there was very little again, an occasional motel, small attached cabins in bright colors, a car parked in front of each one, a pool surrounded by a chain-link fence in the middle, then down the road, a convenience store, a bait shop, a gas station, lots of nothing in between.
    I hadn’t slept at all and decided to stop at the next motel, get some sleep, begin my search for a needle in a haystack when I woke up. The excitement of what Jim had told me had ebbed as I peered out of the plane window into the black night. Anxiety had taken its place. Why would Sally return to the place where she’d gotten pregnant, when her lover had rejected her, when she had rejected the child of that union? What made sense on the beach in Coney Island and then sitting in Jim’s car in front of my cottage no longer did. But what in this case wasn’t held together by the slimmest thread? I’d get some sleep and see what I could find out when I woke up.
    About two miles past Long Key, I saw a vacancy sign, two rows of attached cabins badly in need of paint, a small, sad-looking swimming pool in the space between them, the ocean just steps across U.S. Highway One. Though I hadn’t seen another car since I left Long Key, and only two there, both delivery trucks, I signaled, then turned in and parked the car outside the small office. The woman behind the counter, a cigarette dangling from her lipsticked mouth, had waitress eyes—been there, heard that, couldn’t give a damn if she tried. She slid a small card across the counter toward me, a ballpoint pen with someone’s tooth marks on the cap, and swiveled her chair so that she could pull a key off one of the hooks on the Peg-Board behind her back, twenty hooks, one for each of the beat-up-looking cabins.
    “Ten,” she said. “It’s away from the road. Looks like you could use some sleep. Some sun, too,” she added. “You’re a northerner, right?”
    I nodded.
    “One night?” she asked. Not a place where people stayed longer.
    “Two,” I told her. There was a little plaque on the desk that said P. DeMille, Manager.
    “You only have to pay for one now,” she said. “Anyways, you might change your mind.”
    I handed her my credit card, watched her swipe it in the machine, wait for it to print the receipt.
    “Is there a place nearby where I can get some flippers and a mask?” I asked her.
    “Back to Long Key,” she said. “Or just up the road a piece. You can walk it. Hank’s. When he’s there.”
    “He doesn’t keep regular hours?”
    She snorted some air through her small, wide nose. “Yeah, he does. But not at the shop.”
    I waited. Ms. DeMille picked up a crossword puzzle, a pencil, went back to what she’d been doing when I came.
    I drove the car to cabin 10, parked in front, shut off the engine, picked up my tote bag and stepped up onto the communal porch, just a narrow deck with two wooden chairs out front. There were only two other cars parked in front of cabins, neither of them near mine.
    The key had a long tag hanging from it with the name of the motel, Polly’s Motor Park. I looked around behind me, the sun shining on the sad little cabins and on the water of the small pool. Not the place where Jim and Sally had stayed. No pool, he’d said.
    Except for the triangular piece missing from the bottom right-hand comer of one of the shades, they pretty much kept the sun out. But since I’d been up all night, it really didn’t matter. By the time I slipped under the scratchy sheet, I could have slept with klieg lights shining on me.
    I dreamed about fish again, the fish on Madison’s walls this time, the ones Sally had painted. They were moving in the dream, and the result was like what you see from a carousel,