Chapter 22
22
F lora drove straight to the ferry terminal and got in line for the afternoon ferry. She didn’t know where she was going, but the further she went from Rainshadow, the more she felt a painful tugging sensation, like there was a rubber band tying her to the island, to Ethan, that would only get tighter and tighter and never snap.
She gritted her teeth and drove onto the ferry with her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her fingers went numb and sat in the car instead of going up to the ferry passenger deck, where a person could buy coffee or a beer. She unloaded on Whitney Island about two hours later, another island connected to the mainland with a narrow bridge. She was driving toward Seattle, a city she’d been to only a few times. When its skyline appeared on the horizon, gray and dull in the late afternoon light, she felt nothing. Had she come months before, she might have felt hopeful, but now there was only an intense feeling of loss, a hot, sticky bitterness in her belly that roiled at the future, a future with no Ethan, no Rainshadow. She had money, beautiful clothes, a flashy car, and all the time in the world, but no hope that she would ever be happy again.
She pulled into the parking lot of an inexpensive-looking downtown hotel just as it was getting dark. The thought of driving at night in a city she knew nothing about with a bag full of cash terrified her. The hotel, called Hotel De Laurenti and towering in the gloomy dusk, was all brick, and looked out of another time. She took a few hundred dollars out of her satchel, slipped it into her pocket and, after parking in the dark, dingy garage, went inside the tired-looking hotel.
The hotel’s lobby and front desk looked antiquated. Ancient columns with peeling plaster and pressed tin ceilings hinted at a grander past, and for a moment she thought of Rainshadow, its beautiful, aging elegance. She tried to feel confident as she strode to the front desk, but winced when the attendant looked at her and smirked. They could tell that she was basically a child, had never been in a hotel before, didn’t know what she was doing. It didn’t help that she felt like a fugitive, like someone would jump out from behind one of the plaster columns and demand to know where she got the money, the jewelry, and if she knew any vampires.
“Hi, just a room for one night,” she said to the smirking attendant.
“Just for you?”
“Yes, is that a problem?” she asked, defensive.
“No.” The attendant looked surprised. “We have different rates for doubles and singles.”
Flora blanched, embarrassed. “Oh, right,” she tried to say, but it came out as a mumble.
Alone in her quiet hotel room, she paced, got into bed, tried the TV, couldn’t find anything to watch, and took the longest shower of her life. She was feeling something she’d never felt before, an extreme irritability.
She pulled on one of Sylvia’s designer dresses, grabbed her purse (also Sylvia’s), and thirty dollars, and walked out of the room, into the night.
She had never been to a real bar, but it wasn’t long before she found a pub where a mix of blue-collar workers and young, hip people were shooting pool, cracking jokes, and knocking back cold Rainiers, the local beer. She sat down at the bar, ordered a beer, and it wasn’t long before a guy with long hair and a peach-fuzz goatee ambled up and asked if he could buy her her next round.
An hour later they were back in her room, and Flora was letting him tear off her clothes. She was hungry for touch, and this man’s, a stranger’s, was not truly satisfying. It was like eating a slice of cucumber when what you really wanted was a steak. She undressed him, and liked the way his eyes grew wide as she mounted him in the bed, rocking herself on top of him, looking with feverish intensity into his eyes.
“Are you ok?” he asked, his eyes flickering between her face and her small breasts, swaying.
“Yeah,” she growled. “I need this. I need you.”
“Ok,” he said, “yeah. I need you too. I need you.”
When she looked down at him though, she saw all of his imperfections. Ethan was a perfect image of masculine beauty. This man, with his scruffy hair, his thin lips, and the light smattering of pimples on his chest, was not like Ethan at all. He could not make her feel the way that Ethan could make her feel, that incredible joining of his need and pleasure with hers, so deeply gratifying that it was like burning from the inside out.
After, as she lay next to the stranger, he put a sweat-damp arm around her.
“What are you doing here, in Seattle?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I lived on the islands, but I had to leave. I need a job, I guess.”
“What do you want to do? What’s your dream?”
Her only dream, the only one she could remember really caring about, was about Rainshadow.
“I don’t know,” she said to the stranger. “I can’t remember what my dreams were.”
“I want to be a musician,” he said. “I play guitar, and there’s a lot happening in the scene right now, you know?”
“No,” she said. She had no idea what was happening.
“You should come see me play,” he said. “At The Crocodile.”
She smiled at him but knew she wouldn’t. She felt gross. She felt sick. She had just had sex with a disgusting mortal man.
“I think I want to go to sleep now,” she said, tuning over and hoping the man would leave.
He rolled over, and she felt his eyes on the back of her neck.
“Can I stay here?” She took a deep shuddering breath, hating him.
“I think I kind of want to be alone,” she said, her voice very quiet. “Sorry.”
She tried to imagine Sylvia speaking in such a small voice, saying “sorry” when she wasn’t sorry.
“Oh, well,” he said, running a hand over her back, “I’ll just be quiet then.”
What would Sylvia do?
“Actually.” Flora sat up in the bed, turned to the man. “I want you to leave now. Thanks.”
He looked at her, a little stunned.
“Ok,” he said. “I’ll… I’ll just go then.”
She watched as he dressed, occasionally looking at her as if for sympathy. She stared back at him coldly until he finally shambled out the door and she could lock it behind him. She felt so dirty that she took a shower, scrubbing herself with a washcloth until her skin was pink, then got into the now-soiled bed and cried.
She wanted to go home, but she had no home, no home in all the world. She had always believed that outside forces conspired to keep her on Anderson Island, but now she was certain that she was a pathetic little nobody who, leaving the confines of the island, of Rainshadow, was as vulnerable and exposed as a mouse scurrying around looking for a hole to retreat to.
Flora cried so hard she was choking, barely breathing, a flood of self-pity so deep she could drown in it. She wanted to drown in it. She imagined Sylvia crying. Had Sylvia ever cried? Or was she as cold a bitch as she seemed, immune to the pain she had caused Flora? She ruminated to the point of obsession, imagining a young Sylvia stumbling into a beautiful man, money, horses, everything she could ever want, and not even appreciating it, throwing it all away by being a bitch and a drug addict.
She sobbed and sobbed, hating and hating.
In the morning, she felt empty. She had to get out of the hotel room, contaminated by the man, the stranger who was not Ethan. She packed quickly and rushed to her car in the parking lot, only to find one of the windows busted out. She had kept everything valuable with her, but whoever had busted the window had stolen the stereo, ripping it out of the car.
She ran back into the hotel lobby.
“I’ve been robbed,” she cried, breathless. “Call the police!”
“Robbed?”
“My car was broken into!”
“Oh, in the parking lot?” The lobby attendant, a different one from the day before, was a woman with frizzy gray hair and a pair of yellow cat-eye glasses.
“Yes, in the parking lot,” Flora cried.
“I can call the police, but they’re not going to do anything,” the woman said. “Except for take a report.”
Flora stared at the desk attendant, chewing her lip, frantic and not knowing what to do, what to say. “Ok,” she finally said.
“Just go to an auto body shop, there’s one not too far from here, they can fix it in a few hours.”
Flora nodded, felt her jaw tightening. She wished somebody, anybody, would help her.
She calmed down enough to get directions, then drove there slowly, broken window wide open, glass in the passenger seat.
At the auto shop, a man saw her pulling in with her busted window and laughed, shaking his head.
“How’d a girl like you end up with a Corvette?” he asked, poking around in the car a little while later.
A girl like her? Flora didn’t know what he meant exactly, but she could assume. She was mousy, plain, rural, poor, and it was obvious she was out of her depth. She wanted to cry.
“We don’t keep windows for this car in stock. They’re hard to get and expensive. It’ll be a few days.”
“I don’t live around here, though,” she said, her voice small.
“Oh, well.” He looked at the car. “Do you want me to tape a trash bag over it and you can drive it home, get it fixed there?”
“I don’t—” Flora sucked in a breath. “I don’t know where home is going to be…?” She said it as a question. “I, uh, I’m moving, and I don’t know where I’ll end up…?”
The mechanic looked at her, not knowing what to say. She realized that she wanted him to tell her what to do, give her a plan. He just stared at her. “Do you want me to fix it or not?”
“I don’t know,” Flora said.
The man grew visibly frustrated. “Look, I don’t care what you do, but?—”
“Just give me a trash bag,” she said, “and tape. I’ll tape it up.”
Flora drove to the library with the trash bag fluttering. She wished she could turn on the radio, but there was only a gaping hole where it had been. She found the Seattle Public Library, parked on the street, and hauled her bag full of money, jewelry, and clothing in with her. She felt tired like she never had before, like making choices and trying to decide what to do was exhausting.
She hated Maureen then for never teaching her to be self-sufficient, never modeling it. She couldn’t help that she was helpless, and it made furious with bitterness at her circumstances. It was all her mother’s fault, and then Sylvia’s fault, two women who never worked for anything, didn’t deserve anything they had. The unfairness of it made her stomach sour. She wanted to call Ethan and ask him what to do. She knew he would be there, would help her, but she couldn’t stand to share him. She knew that now.
She swallowed her anger and sat at a desk, poring over classified ads for jobs, houses, apartments, and rooms to rent. She stood in a phone booth on the street, called numbers, and had stilted conversations, none of which led anywhere. She sat in her car and cried, not knowing what to do next. She had more money than she had ever had, but she had no idea what to do, or how to take care of herself. Finally, she started the car and began driving again, trash bag fluttering. She drove out of the city, toward the looming mountains in the distance, unsure of what she was looking for.
Whatever it was, she wouldn’t find it in Seattle.