My Abandonment(37)

It's darker now, late enough that the workers have left the hotel. It stands all fenced in. They didn't knock it down today. The signs on the fence say DEMOLITION and every night I have to find a new way through. I count the floors up all the steps and around all the trash in the stairwells, the broken shopping cart and everything else.

In our room Father has taken everything out of my little pack and put it neatly on the mattress. He is taking things from his pack and putting it in mine. He kisses me but he's thinking of something else.

"I saw a blind lady," I say.

"I think I have to go out," he says. "For a while. I'm waiting to hear from someone."

"I bet I know who," I say.

Father knows plenty of people in the city. He has a lot of different names. I don't have to know these people and it's better if they don't know me. Some of them are from other times and some are helpful now. Vincent is one of these people, Vincent who is even taller than Father but much skinnier and probably weighs half as much. He always wears dark creased slacks and a white shirt. His shoes shine. I am not to talk to him. I am never to be alone with him not that I'd want to be. When he walks he hardly bends his knees.

There's a knock at the door then and Father looks up. Through the peephole I can see Vincent's face: His black beard is pointed and the hair on his head is exactly the same length as that beard so it's like a helmet where you can only see the skin of his face around his mouth and high on his cheeks and his white forehead and black eyes.

"Open the door," Father says. "Let's see what he wants."

Vincent is not winded from walking all those flights of stairs.

"Hello," he says. "I have come. I have come because there's something to do."

Vincent has a different way of talking with his voice hardly rising or falling and there are no commas in anything he says. I count for a full minute and Father's eyes blink eight times and Vincent's only blink once. My eyes blink nine times in a minute which is hard to test when I'm paying attention. All I'm trying to get clear is that Vincent's eyes hardly blink.

"Does this interest you?" he says.

"Can you maybe give me a little more information?" Father says.

"It's a delivery," Vincent says.

"More wire?" Father says.

"A delivery and a pickup," Vincent says. "And then perhaps another delivery. That's what I know."

"All right," Father says, "same deal as last time. Caroline, you lock the door. I'll be back late, after you're asleep."

They leave the room and I lock the door and after a little while I can see out the window, them getting into Vincent's white Chrysler K-Car with the trunk that opens and closes as it drives away from the hotel which is all surrounded by fences and barbed wire.

There is not glass in all our windows so it's almost as good as sleeping outside, I can breathe halfway decently. We have a mattress that's queen-sized, bigger than we've ever had and than we need. There are only beds from the sixth floor up. Below that the rooms are empty since Father says the workmen probably got tired of emptying it when they're going to knock the whole building down anyway and gravity will do that work for them. He says this was a nice hotel, once, over a hundred years ago. Now there's no electricity and all the water's been turned off. All the toilets are full or there's just trash in them but that's all right since we use a chamber pot again and some of the drains still drain. Father carries buckets of water up all the stairs. It stretches out my arms and hurts my fingers to try. You have to stay away from the elevators even though the doors are closed. It is dangerous.

I do everything I can think of doing in our room. I straighten all my things and I write. I have no books to read and I am not to read Father's books or to look inside his pack. Here I am, a girl in this hotel and no one knows I'm inside here. The building that Miss Jean Bauer works in is not far away and I wonder if she still thinks about me and what she would say if she knew I was this close.

Days, weeks and maybe a month has gone. Mostly we stay here in the hotel at night. Father and I change the hands on our watches around so much that it confuses the numbers in the little window that would tell me the day. It is hard to keep the days straight.

Alone I am not to unlock the door or leave our room at night without Father but I do. I wander with the headlamp in my hand, my fingers around it so the light won't draw attention. I wear shoes because of the nails and dirt and dust. Other people sleep here but they are afraid of Father. He won't let anyone else sleep on the seventh floor or even above us. I do go above us to the eighth floor and even the ninth floor. I don't dare go below the sixth. The door to the rooftop is locked with a thick chain around all the handles.