Instead of Going Home

2

I want to go home.

Instead, I sit in the high back chair next to the window, looking out at the small duck pond. It’s the last thing before the woods, just past the little green shed, but it’s frozen this time of year and all the ducks have gone south without it. Two months have passed since the first snowfall, five since Mr. Adad’s dog went missing, and fourteen since we first got here.

Dad and I get the room where the roof slants and water drips from that pipe above the fireplace, so we have to leave a yellow bucket under there, and empty it every once in a while. The sound of the water falling into the bucket persists all day and all night. When the bucket is empty they make hollow pangs that keep you awake, when it’s getting full the sound is wet, and you dream of cold and damp places, then you wake up in a cold and damp place. What I usually do is watch the droplets fall, one by one, like a clock. I sit like this, in my chair, and watch. I watch because if I’m not looking I’m convinced the leak might get mischievous and move over—it’s done so before—and the constant dripping will warp the floorboards. Mom used to say that warped floorboards were bad luck, because they’d lead you to all sorts of crooked places if you walked and just watched your feet, not looking up.

In the Cockroach Motel, which sits in a very lonely place in the mountains, where you hear the wolves every night, there are other tenants, but you can’t rely much on seeing them. The house is very large, and it often does not feel entirely up to you where you end up inside of it. I know there’s a boy my age here, I’ve seen him once before, by the pond, in the summer. He was feeding the ducks.

Dad told me not to talk to him. “We aren’t like the other people here, Danicka.” He always says to me. “We’re not lost, we’re waiting.”

There’s an old man who lives in a room that’s almost all kitchen, full of pots and pans and hanging cloves of garlic, mason jars full of God-knows-what. He might be above or below us. I don’t think he’s on the same level as us though. While I’m sitting in my room watching the droplets fall, he cooks the most fantastic meals, and I can’t help but think that he would have made an excellent chef if he hadn’t hit her. Now his hands have all the violence wrung out of them, they’re old and gnarled and broken, made only for doing old man things, like someone took them and twisted them up like a washcloth until they were all dry and twisted and liver spotted—like I said, wrung the violence out of them. Except for when he cooks. When he cooks his hands become deft, young and swift, and there is a violence there, a kind of fury stirring in the Cockroach Motel. His lights are on all through the night and steam billows out from the chimney of his wood stove and into the stars.

I’ve only ever had one of his dishes. He invited me in to eat one day when I was wandering the cold wooded halls of the Cockroach Motel, crying. He sat me down and with a vigor served me a delicious soup full of strange meat. “Don’t be upset,” he said to me, “this is very exciting, I’ve never had the chance to cook this dish before!”

Dad used to go out a lot more than he does now. He worked on the car, which he insisted we’d be back to living in after winter, and we’d be moving on. Not going home, instead, still hunting Big Bill, who owns the construction company that killed Mom. It used to be all about him. Then that boy at the gas station died, and that wasn’t part of the plan, that was an accident, Dad said. If he had just handed him the money like he asked… we never wanted to hurt him, he wasn’t a part of it. And we’re not thieves. But we needed the cash.

The Cockroach Motel, lost in the windy chill of December, is full of thieves. Here, there used to be a girl who seemed to live nowhere except in the spaces between the walls, who stole everything that was red and kept away from people. Dad got in a fight with her once, when he lost Mom’s ruby necklace.

He had her pinned against the wall in the hallway, calling her all kinds of things and wrenching at the little red bag she carried around with her everywhere. He looked ridiculous. When he finally got it he tossed it to me, and I rifled through the contents, wide eyed, heart pounding in my ears, thinking find it find it find it while Dad yelled at me and she screamed and screamed and screamed until Dad screamed back, smashed the wall. “Fuck! Fuck! I’ll kill you, you screaming little bitch! I’ll kill you!” He yelled at her, his face red as the little bag. Then she cried.

In that moment, it struck me that we really were a lot less than thieves. We only found the necklace later, it had fallen under the couch.

Over the Cockroach Motel, at night, sometimes you can see the northern lights. One night I couldn’t sleep, so I went outside and there they were above me, shimmering waves of greens and reds and blues in the sky.

“Hiya.” Said the boy. I hadn’t noticed him. “Couldn’t sleep? Hey, what’s your name?—you’re very pretty.” He wore a bright red shirt like a warning sign in the dark, and he was hucking bits of corn at the sleeping ducks in the pond. He was smiling, and it suddenly occurred to me that he was flirting, and I was so terrified of boys that I didn’t say a thing, just gawked at him before turning right back around and heading inside.

“Hey, you don’t have to be scared.”

He ran off with the clepto girl later, into the woods. He came back but she didn’t. In my chair I wonder why she ever trusted him in the first place.

Mr. Adad’s dog was my only real friend here. I used to play with him by the tiny green shed where the daisies bloom in spring. I would sit in the grass with him as we watched fat bees lazily buzz about their business like big yellow snowflakes with a mind to get somewhere, tell him all about how bad Big Bill was and why we had gone after him, explain to him how we never meant to hurt that boy at the gas station. He was a great listener before he disappeared. I cried for days after that, until the cook said to me, “I’m sure a part of him is still inside you.” And I thought that was such a beautiful thing to say, I didn’t know why it made him laugh. He will hang himself soon—just like Mr. Adad—I’ve seen the length of manilla he has hiding in his closet; he had that laugh once but his face is usually as dark as the work of slaughter.

Everyone who stays at the Cockroach Motel has a reason. The house is full of reasons, and secrets, so full you can almost hear them being whispered between the sconces that line the hallways, passed along the baseboards, rattling through the rafters and howling in the eaves on stormy nights. Dad sits at the foot of the bed every morning, his back broad and head hung. I pretend to be asleep and watch him, and I wonder if he is listening hard for them, these secrets. He looks like a man ready to catch something.

I wasn’t sad when Mr. Adad died, his hugs were too long and I only ever really cared about his dog. The old cook never much liked him either—they knew each other from before they came here; Mr. Adad was the one who told me about what the old cook did to the woman: “He beat her, sweetheart, beat her just like she was a dog. He beat her too hard and now we’re both in this mess.” He sighed. “I always wanted to help her.” You got used to seeing that look in their eyes, that look of thoughtful regret.

When I finally look over at the yellow bucket it is about to flow over, it will need to be replaced.

I want to go home.

Dad is out there in the snow looking at the car again, pretending instead of just telling me the truth.

One day another lost little girl will show up here in the raging wake of her own dad, and I will tell her to get out of here while she still can, that they’ve bugged the walls, the cook serves dog soup, the boy in the red shirt is a murderer, anything to make her leave. I will tell her about the dripping water, the ghostly gong of the grandfather clock out in the hallway that wakes you up every midnight, the rats in the walls and the terrible cold musty air that makes every sound inside the house a lonely sound.

Drip-drop.

Behind me the bucket is starting to overflow. It reminds me of a clock counting seconds. Tick-tock. The seconds go by, tick-tock, back and forth, the hands complete a rotation and start all over again, and you wonder if the time is really going anywhere.

The filling of the bucket can’t fool me; if you listen to the drip-drop you can tell that no time passes at all.

1

“Look who’s awake.”

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere, Danicka, I just think we need to stay off the road for a while and lie low, off the radar.”

“Don’t get us stuck.”

“Look at this, there’s a building here, right in the middle of the woods.”

“It says Cockroach Motel. Holy shit it’s huge.”

“Don’t say shit. Okay, hold on, you stay here, I’m gonna go take a look inside, see if they have any rooms available. It’s off the beaten path so it’s probably our best bet without camping. You keep the car running, okay?”

“I want to go home.”

“We will. Keep the car on, okay?”

I am hungry and tired of running, and I just want somewhere to stay, so I don’t say anything. I just nod. Dad smiles at me before he shuts the car door. Then he takes careful steps up the stone staircase to the front door of the Cockroach Motel.

I never meet the man, but I guess that it is the landlord who gets him to stay. He is very convincing, he tells Dad that we can take a room for as long as we want, for no fee at all, but he never says what it will cost us.