Habib let out one of those long crackly noises that crows make.
“Um, sure,” Alexis said reluctantly. “Well, anyway, it’s just the right time for it to surface—just in time to help save the hotel. Mom will be so proud of me.”
“Well, I think I might just go out and see to a couple of things,” LJ said. “Thanks for the tea.”
“But you didn’t have any,” Alexis pointed out. “You were outside.”
“Yeah, but it’s the thought that counts.” LJ and Habib left. In a big hurry, it seemed to Alexis.
Linda helped her put everything away in the cupboards. “Well, that was exciting,” she said.
“Sometimes I feel like the Mad Hatter, caught in a perpetual mad tea party.”
“And LJ is the Caterpillar,” added Linda. They both giggled.
“Thanks for the help,” Alexis said. “I’m going to go talk with my mom right now, see if she is OK.”
“Can I help with anything?”
“No, I’ve got it.”
“Well, just let me know when I can help. You know how to reach me.” Linda hesitated. “Babe, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you do realize that this building is worth more than a million dollars, don’t you? And that they won’t rent you the Paramount Theatre? And that if they did, we’d never get enough people to come to even pay the rent. Don’t you?”
Alexis couldn’t think of anything to say to that. She hung her head.
“I’m sorry, Alexis.”
“Thanks, Linda.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.” Linda leaned over and gave Alexis a smooch, smoothing her curly hair out of her eyes.
Alexis leaned into Linda’s hand but couldn’t meet her eyes. It would be so great if they could have a plan and have it work for once. Wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER 5
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
WATER DRIPPED ON ALEXIS’S HEAD as she made her way toward the stairs that led to the basement, trying to look like someone who actually planned to do laundry.
She opened the door, called a happy good-bye to the residents, and closed it quickly behind her, locking it with the old-fashioned key she kept on a chain around her neck.
What kind of basement locked from the inside? Alexis had always wondered, thinking about ghouls rising in the mortuary supplies below, but today she was grateful for the quirk.
She made her way down the stairs, automatically skipping the steps that creaked.
“Edith?” she called.
No answer, but somehow it made Alexis feel better to say her mother’s name. She sat in the little chair she’d hauled down days before—a vanity stool from the ’30s. The chair, a find from Deluxe Junk in Fremont, made her feel better too. Her mother had loved it.
Alexis couldn’t believe that no one had figured it out.
This was a house filled with family of a certain kind, but it was a family that did not pay much attention. Sometimes, Alexis felt like the oldest person in the place. She flattened her hand on the coffin, feeling the smooth polish of the wood. It had not seemed like a good idea to place Edith inside one of the fancier coffins, although that had been Alexis’s first impulse, so they’d chosen a plain coffin of good quality.
She wanted to cry, just thinking about it. Dusty and unadorned. Her mother would have hated it.
“I wish you’d told me about the problems with the hotel,” Alexis said.
“Don’t worry,” an imaginary Edith replied, her imagined voice as soft and melodic as it had been in life.
“Everyone here is going to be out on the street if I don’t worry.”
Alexis pictured her mother, her fake pearls around her neck, the way she’d count them with her fingers when something serious was being discussed.
“You’re too young to worry about this,” said the imaginary Edith, but she’d been saying that for years. She’d said it the night she died, and Alexis had believed her.
Now it seemed so stupid—all of it. The weeks of illness that had led up to this point, Edith’s refusal to go to a doctor. It hadn’t occurred to Alexis to force her. It had occurred to LJ, but his medicine took the form of pot, and though Edith was not opposed to marijuana, she hadn’t wanted any this time. Alexis had watched LJ leave Edith’s room, shaking his head.
“Your mother is an exceedingly stubborn woman,” he’d said, and that was obviously true.
Mercury poisoning.
Alexis smacked her hand on the coffin, and tried not to swear. Edith would hate it, but Edith was dead. Still.
A broken thermometer months ago had not seemed like a big deal. Alexis had been wandering through Capitol Hill, doing her usual rounds, and when she got home, Edith was in the midst of vacuuming up the mercury.
“The Internet is full of people who are smarter than you,” Alexis told her mother now. “Would have been nice if you could have fucking consulted them.”
“What did you say?” the imaginary Edith replied. “Did I hear the F-word?”
“No,” said Alexis. “You didn’t hear anything.”
“Maybe I’m dead, but I’m listening to everything you say.” Edith’s voice sounded peevish. Most mothers washed mouths out with soap. Edith washed a mouth out with bourbon and vinegar, convinced that it would get the taste for alcohol out of Alexis’s system, along with the taste for swearing. Neither thing was true.
Alexis now knew that you were not supposed to vacuum up mercury. You were not really supposed to do anything with mercury other than look at it from far, far away while wearing a face mask. But Edith, who took her own temperature typically seven or eight times a day, her sole hypochondriacal indulgence, had broken the thermometer while shaking it down.
She’d managed to inhale the mercury, Alexis now suspected. The last three months of Edith’s illness had been increasingly worrying, and in the last week of her life, her memory had grown so spotty that she was unable to remember Alexis’s name.
“We’re going to save the hotel,” Alexis said now. “I wish you hadn’t died, but you did. You wish I didn’t swear, but I do.”
“There are things you don’t know about me,” Edith informed her. Alexis looked around in frustration. This was true.
“Maybe you’d like to tell me who my dad is? Any thoughts on that, Mom?”
Edith had long claimed that Alexis did not need to know her father’s identity, but who had given that violin to Mr. Kenji? And why? The violin existed. Normally things that appeared out of Mr. Kenji’s room were less than substantial. He’d been known to make rabbits appear out of hats, twist them into complicated knots, and then turn them into scarves again.
“Was my father a violin player?”
“How should I know?” the imaginary Edith responded. “This coffin could be lined in a much better shade of silk for my coloring.”
“Did my father live here? Did he leave his violin when he left?”
“I have no answers,” said the imaginary Edith, sounding suspiciously like Mr. Kenji’s performance persona.
Alexis looked around the room. She thought about the day her mother had died. There’d been a note outside Edith’s door.
“Don’t come in, honey. Get Lynn, and have him come see me.”
Alexis felt doomed the moment she read it, but instructions were instructions, and bourbon and vinegar awaited a daughter who disobeyed.
It took a moment for her to figure out who Lynn was, but once she had, Alexis located LJ and followed him upstairs. Did they really think she’d stay outside? This was her mother. She’d followed him all the way into the room, stopping only when LJ started to cry.
It was shocking. Normally, if LJ cried it would only be because he’d managed somehow to lose his copy of Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Alexis knew exactly how he’d lost his copy of said novel: to Alexis. She’d heard that Cowgirls was the most stolen item in the Seattle Public Library system, and that it had to be kept behind the counter like cigarettes. No wonder.
This time
, though, LJ’s tears had been genuine. Alexis had never seen him so upset, and then she’d turned the corner, and there.
Was.
Edith.
In her bed, her hair and makeup done more beautifully than she’d ever done it in life.
LJ knelt beside the bed and held Edith in his arms while Alexis stood, paralyzed. She knew it was bad, of course. Her mother had been very sick. But she had not imagined this could happen. How could Edith die? She ran everything, all the time.
LJ turned to Alexis and asked her, “What are we going to do?”
She was appalled.
“Why did he ask me?” Alexis asked her imaginary mother now.
“You’re the grown-up now,” Edith said, and in Alexis’s mind, she smiled. Her mother had the kind of smile that could persuade a person to do anything.
“Fuck,” said Alexis, but under her breath so that no one, dead or alive, could hear her swearing.
“We’ll put her in the basement,” Alexis had told LJ, after she’d gained control of her voice. Her words echoed inside her own head, sounding foreign. She acted without giving herself time to grieve. She couldn’t think about the fact that her mother was gone. There was no time. She knew what would happen if the police found out, if anyone found out that her mother was dead. She’d be screwed. Foster care, or something like it. Homeless. They’d lose the Angeline.
No one could know.
Alexis was thinking fast when she told LJ to send everyone out of the house. Gas leak, she said. It would not be surprising. Such things happened in the Hotel Angeline about once a week. Alexis sometimes felt amazed that the whole place, with its crow, with its pirate, with its goldfish falling from the ceiling, hadn’t blown up yet.
She and LJ bundled Edith—Alexis couldn’t think about her as her mom, not at that moment—into her favorite silk nightgown, and then into her blankets. LJ carried her down multiple flights of stairs, all the way to the basement.
“Like a bride,” he said.
“You have it backwards,” Alexis said. “You’re carrying her out from the threshold, not in.”
“The kid’s got it right for once,” said LJ, and then he wouldn’t speak to Alexis any further on the subject.
She waited at the bottom of the stairs, dancing from foot to foot. In truth, LJ had trouble navigating the steep staircase, as he didn’t understand which treads were unreliable. Alexis herself had spent plenty of time lurking in the basement. Some of the makeup used on corpses was immensely flattering on teenage girls who wanted to make strangers worried and friends impressed.
LJ lurched. Edith’s blankets were snagging on the banister, and her foot, pale and pedicured, was revealed.
There was a sound behind the upper door, which was only half shut. Alexis had failed to lock it for this, the most important use of a lock in the door’s history.
The door creaked open.
“Who is it?” LJ managed. He already had a couple of small time offenses in Seattle.
Was it illegal to carry someone down a set of stairs? Of course not. The parts of Alexis that were not filled with grief filled with righteous indignation.
“This is a business establishment,” she shouted up the stairs. “And we’re closed!”
She clenched her fist, looking at her mother’s silver toenails. There was another creak which resolved into a crawk, and then the crow flew down, making what was already a morbid scene worse.
Now and forever, Alexis would be forced to think of Habib when she thought of Edith. She would also think of how Habib had flown down to peck at her mother’s shining silver toes.
“Get away!” she’d screamed, and the crow flapped his way up to the ceiling, looking down on the room with a baleful glare.
LJ placed Edith gently in the coffin, when they’d finally chosen the one they would use.
“Are you sure we should do this?” LJ asked again, clearly uncertain of anything. He looked collapsed. Even his hair seemed shriveled. “There might be other options. We might find some of her family, look through her papers . . .” His voice trailed off.
The imaginary Edith interrupted her daughter’s thoughts. “You have no other family,” she informed Alexis.
“I know,” Alexis said. She could easily recite the list of family members, times and dates of death, even which mortuary had laid them out. Growing up in a house like the Hotel Angeline did that to a person.
“No other family,” the imaginary Edith repeated, and although Alexis had begun to question her on this point, she did not feel like arguing with her mother, dead or alive.
“There are no other options,” Alexis had informed LJ, and now part of her regretted it. She’d expected him to turn her down, expected him to solve the problem somehow, but he hadn’t.
“I’m going to run this hotel, and you’re going to help me,” Alexis had said, and he’d believed her.
For a moment, she thought wistfully about what it might be like to go into foster care. Someone might take care of her. She would not need to fix staircases and find wrenches, nor would she need to fish goldfish from out of the stairwells. Most important, she would not need to figure out where the money to keep the hotel operational was going to come from.
“There’s going to be a concert,” she tried again. “Mia’s going to play the violin. We’re going to make a million dollars to keep the Angeline.”
Somehow, of all the stories of the hotel her mother had told her, one stuck in her head: the time the twins, Kato and Kevin, had fought and decided to separate from each other, only to find that without Kato, Kevin could only talk in half sentences, and without Kevin, Kato could only walk backward.
She thought of how her mother had always said—
And the imaginary Edith said it again: “The Hotel Angeline is your family, and you have to take care of your family.”
Alexis thought about Linda for a moment. If Edith were truly here, what would she think about that? Would Linda become part of the Angeline family?
It was horribly hard not to tell Linda about Edith’s death. It was hard to do anything without telling someone about Edith. Alexis felt herself starting to cry, but she swallowed her tears.
“We’re going to save the hotel,” she said again, but this time she believed herself.
“I never doubted you for a moment,” said the imaginary Edith. “Except for the moment when the bird got to my pedicure.”
Alexis sighed. She was doing the best she could, and it was never quite good enough for her mother. She wished she had a father. It seemed like a father might be more understanding of imperfections.
She thought about what might truly startle Edith, but nothing startled Edith—not crow droppings, not twins wandering forlorn and talkative through the hallways, their brooches shining like tinfoil diamonds.
She thought about Linda, and how she, at least, loved Alexis’s imperfections.
“Everyone’s a disaster, chica,” Linda had said. “Everyone’s crazy. It’s no big deal.”
This while Alexis was examining the enormous zit that had overtaken her nose—a blinding beacon of disappointment, right in the middle of her face.
“I think you’re beautiful,” Linda had told her. “That zit just improves your bone structure.”
Then she’d cackled her distinctive laugh and gone on with drawing a portrait of Alexis. All this was back in the glory days before Edith’s death.
Edith would not have approved of it. How could she? Her daughter, fooling around secretly with a girlfriend? There had been sleepovers. Edith believed that girls should stay virgins.
“For how long?” Alexis had asked her.
“As long as you can stand it,” Edith had said. “And then another three years.”
“How long is that?”
“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I don’t know, and please, if you love me, don’t lose your virginity to any of the tenants.”
“I have something to tell you, Mom,” Alexis said now. Her skin prickled with nerv
ousness.
“Tell me you have everything under control,” said the imaginary Edith. “Tell me there are no leaks.”
“No leaks,” Alexis said. “I fixed them.”
“Illegal pets? Extra pirates? Twins have a new sibling?” asked the imaginary Edith, and Alexis pictured her with the fake pearl necklace between her fingers. There was no help for it.
“I’m gay, actually,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you while you were alive.”
Alexis pictured her mother’s necklace breaking and plastic pearls being flung all over the basement, scattering into the dark corners and rolling like marbles over the tiled floor. Still, she felt better.
“That’s not so bad,” said the imaginary Edith.
“Really,” said Alexis.
“I thought you were going to say that you’d let Habib into my jewelry box,” the imaginary Edith said. “I love you, but don’t let the bird eat my pearls.”
“It’s Linda,” Alexis said.
She waited for a response, but realized that she didn’t know what her mother might say to that news.
She was a girl talking to a dead woman, a girl in charge of a hotel, a girl who needed to make a million dollars. A girl with a girlfriend who was waiting somewhere outside, trusting Alexis to deal with her life.
Alexis stood up from the coffin and made her way up the stairs with a skip over the creaky ones, with a leap over the broken one.
“Bye, Mom,” she whispered over her shoulder, and then she unlocked the door and left the basement. She had things to do, and though she had spent the previous hour living in the past, the future was waiting for her.
Habib landed on her shoulder as she walked into the upper part of the house.
The bird nibbled her ear, and she imagined him telling her that all of this was going to be fine.
CHAPTER 6
STACEY LEVINE
ALEXIS STOOD LEANING ON THE stone stairs outside Garfield High School. She felt the breeze playing with her hair. The past few days had brought tension enough to swirl her head and block out teachers’ voices—those daily commandants who were after her about her recent absences. High school seemed the proverbial dream for some giddy teens, yet they were in another world; Alexis simply was not one of those. Swarms of students passed by. As the tide lessened, a confused-looking admin woman from the school’s front office appeared outside with a clipboard, a beeping radio device on her belt. Alexis leaned down such that her hair fell across her face. She was vaguely aware of guilty feelings about letting her academic work slip. However, the admin woman was not looking for Alexis; glancing at her radio, she disappeared.