Le Petite Columbe

When I was a girl, my family bought a bed and breakfast by the sea. It was my mother’s idea. And my father, never one to pass up an opportunity to break out his tool chest, was only too keen to entertain his wife’s wishes. It took a year or two of searching to find the right place. I remember being dragged along from inspection to inspection, inn for sale to inn for sale, hopping up and down the coast in our beat up station wagon—the old blue one that refused to start before the third try. I’m not sure why they brought me to those meetings. The investors. The bankers. The loan officers. I didn’t understand a word of it. But surely my parents had to know that. After all, I was only a child.

Somedays, I like to think there was a reason for what happened, something to make sense of the slow hell that ensued. But even now, all these years later, I haven’t found it. I am still just as confused and alone as when I stood before the burning skeleton of my family’s labor, and listened to the screams of the man I once called father. I hope he found what he was searching for.

My parents bought the inn that was to become our own the morning of my thirteenth birthday. I know it was my thirteenth birthday because after the paperwork was filed, and the men in suits slunk back to their banks, my mother gave me a cake. It was round. Vanilla. And had a giant number thirteen scrawled across the top in vermillion icing. I still had the strawberry filling stuck to my chin, when my father sat down across the table and told me we were moving. My mother nodded sadly in the corner. She had her hand covering her mouth the way she did when she was trying not to cry. My newly minted teenage heart crumbled into dust.

I don’t know why, but I hadn’t considered moving. We lived several hours away and, in my innocence, I imagined we would simply drive back and forth between home and the inn. I thought about my friends at school and the park where I fed the squirrels on Sunday afternoons. What would I do without the run-down library around the corner from our house? Or the kind, old cashier who always gave me candy at the gas station downtown? Suddenly, I understood that the inn was a bad idea. I didn’t like the coast. I didn’t like the sea. The grey air stank of salt and fish and decay. And from what I’d seen on our drive in, the people in the town were as weathered and cold the stones they used to break the surf. Even the children, the ones I was meant to play with, were hunched and grizzled. The sun never seemed to fully rise in that frigid place.

I dropped my fork and cried. The clatter of silver on ceramic hung in the air like a ghost. My parents did their best to console me. It will be all right, they said. They promised that I would make new friends and get used to the neighborhood and find all sorts of things to love about our home. As it turned out, my parents were right. I did make new friends. I went to school and explored the town and discovered all sorts of great things about our new neighborhood. I even grew to love to the sea. By the time I entered high school, there was nothing I enjoyed more than waking up to the sound of seagulls.

For the next several years, we worked together as a family to fix up the old inn. “Le Petite Columbe” we called it. In French, it meant The Little Dove—my father’s favorite pet name for my mother. The inn was wood paneled and white washed, with a pointy, black shingled spire of a roof and a silver rooster on the weathervane. All the windows were round. There was plenty of room inside for us to build a home and entertain guests. We served coffee in the mornings, and tea in the afternoons. On weekends, I was in charge of making pancakes for breakfast and helping my father bring back the groceries. I remember his boyish laugher echoing through the halls. We were happy then. Content. I loved that inn like it was a part of me, right down to the squeaky, hardwood floors and gaudy, victorian wallpaper. But somehow, as it always does, that love only made what happened worse.

It was June when my mother was diagnosed. Cancer of the lungs. She called herself lucky. She’d never smoked a day in her life. I remember laughing when she told me the news over dinner. I didn’t know what else to do. Crying seemed too heavy. Talking seemed too pointless. And besides, it didn’t seem real. My mother couldn’t have cancer. I needed her to drive me to school. Who else would make dinner and play cards with me before bed?

In the months that followed, three things happened simultaneously. My mother grew ecstatic. Dreamlike. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve said she’d fallen in love. She seemed to float between rooms with her feet an inch off the ground, smiling and singing songs she heard on the radio. The doctor’s news set her free. Which was strange, considering the same words bound my father in chains. He started drinking again—hiding in the inn’s back office long into the night, only to stumble out come morning with disheveled hair and an untucked shirt, smelling of liquor and cigarettes. And I, desperate for distraction, started dating a boy.

This boy’s name was Achilles, like the hero in Greek mythology. But he wasn’t greek, I don’t think. Achilles was a year older than me. He grew up in town and was popular at school. He had a car too—a cherry red pickup truck with a rusty, white door on the passenger side, replaced after an unfortunate run in with a rogue pine tree (his words, not mine). Achilles was funny. He made me laugh and told me stories and drove me around town when I didn’t want to be at home. Which, by the end, was every day.

My father wasn’t the same after the funeral. Once the relatives cleared out of the inn’s dining room and all the townsfolk went home, I caught my father standing in the middle of the staircase. The lights were off and he was staring at the wall. Not at a photo or a painting, just a bare spot of periwinkle drywall. I asked him if he was alright. He didn’t answer. I asked again. My father shook his head and offered a half-hearted smile. Scratching the back of his neck, he mumbled something about rats in the walls. Then he climbed up the stairs and went to bed, leaving me with a wake’s worth of dirty dishes.

I handled my mother’s death as best I could. After several blurry weeks, I began journaling. This was accompanied, unsurprisingly, by copious amounts of rock music—the harder the better. But writing was tedious. And no matter which record I brought home (Achilles often helped me pick them out), I couldn’t ever seem to get the volume loud enough. When I finally returned to my classes, the school counselor offered to help me “process my feelings” during lunch hour. This was a kind invitation, but just as fruitless as journaling. My friends weren’t any help either. They were teenagers, like me. I could hardly hold their trite words and empty platitudes against them. Nor could I count anything they said as sound advice.

There was one thing did help, however. The summer of my junior year, Achilles brought me to a party. A friend of a friend he said. He promised we’d be in and out in no time. I’d never been to a party before. Upon entering the door, someone I didn’t know handed me a red, plastic cup. Punch, the guy explained. I drained half a dozen of those cups in an hour. For the first time in months, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be sad about. I knew I had to be sad about something. Those cups didn’t make the hole in my chest go away, no matter how many I drank. Instead, they did something better. Every sip of cherry elixir that slipped past my lips, turned the yawning chasm inside me into a god—an all-consuming source of worship and glory. My sadness became a song that all of reality sung at the top her lungs. And I was there to dance. I shoved my way into the living room dance floor, filled with sweaty, teenage bodies that smelled of lust and bubblegum and I lost myself in the glory of those red, plastic cups. It was there, with mascara streaming down my cheeks, barely able to hear myself think over the mind-numbing synth, that I crowned myself the queen of all suffering— our lady of perpetual sorrow.

Achilles found me a little while later. He held my hair while I puked on the lawn and gave me a cold bottle of water for the drive home. He stroked the back of my neck the way I liked all the way to Le Petite Columbe. By some miracle, I managed not to throw up in his car. After helping me stumble up the front stairs, I invited Achilles inside. I wanted to show him my bedroom. He seemed hesitant. I saw it in his sea foam eyes—that flicker of a squint. My slurred explanation only served to push him farther away. Finally, after some convincing, Achilles agreed to help me up the big staircase inside. He didn’t want me to fall.

The glass paned front door of my family’s inn opened with a creak. It was pitch black inside the main lobby. Which was odd. We usually kept at the wall sconces on for the guests, incase anyone got lost on the way to the bathroom. I fumbled for the light switch. Click. And there, revealed in the incandescent glow, was my father, face down on the hardwood floor, a broken bottle at his side. He was lying in a dark red pool. My heart leapt into my throat. Not him too. Not now.

“Father!” I cried. I shoved Achilles off and ran to the figure on the floor. I tripped and fell, skidding to a stop by his side. I shook him about. Terror filled my lungs. Then my father jerked, spasmed as if woken from a dream of falling. He turned to glare at me. His hair was long and greasy and his breath smelled of the spilled wine on which he lay.

“Shh!” My father growled drunkenly. He put his ear back to the floor. “Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

My father glanced at me out the corner of his eye. “Her.”

At the time, I didn’t know what my father meant. I was too drunk to care. But that single word—her—it opened the gates of hell. If I had known what I know now, I would’ve called for help that very night. Gotten a doctor. Or maybe the police. Although I’m not sure it would’ve done any good. In those days, father had a doom about him that he held with an iron grip.

Achilles helped me gently to my feet and carried me piggyback up the stairs. Against his better judgment, I’m sure, he took off my shoes and helped me into clean clothes and laid me softly in my bed. I tried to get him to stay, but he wouldn’t hear it. I even threw off the covers and made space for him at my side. I put my hand on his waist and slid it down. Achilles smiled at me sadly. Our first time shouldn’t be like this, he said. Then he shut my bedroom door and was gone.

I awoke the next morning to the screaming of seagulls and a blinding headache. My very first hangover. It was Saturday, and I had to make pancakes for the guests. I made my way to the basement kitchen and found my father, shirtless and in sunglasses, trying to reach under the oven with a long-handled serving spoon. When I asked him what he was doing, my father seemed surprised to see me. For a long, uncomfortable moment, he couldn’t remember my name. Then he smiled and told me he’d dropped a quarter, and was trying to get it back. When I asked what was so special about this quarter, my father stood up and walked out the room. He was still holding the spoon. I frowned. I’m not sure what came over me. I’m not a naturally curious person. But I dug in the kitchen drawer after he left and found an old flashlight. After replacing the batteries (twice), I got down on my hands and knees and peered beneath the oven. Dust and crumbs. Not a coin to be seen.

Little by little and year by year, my father slipped away to some place else. I caught him in the oddest of places, doing the strangest of things. He was up at all hours of the night, stomping to and fro and rummaging through boxes in the attic. Always drunk. He would stare at the walls and chase imaginary entities through the cabinets. One morning I came down the stairs to find all the furniture in the lobby turned upside down. When pressed about what it was he was looking for, what he was chasing, my father always gave the same answer. Her. He wouldn’t say who she was. He didn’t have to.

It was only a matter of time until the rumors began to spread. All our guests stopped coming. The inn fell into a state of disrepair. Paint began to peel off the paneling, and everyone at school talked about me in low tones, like I had a disease. I was avoided at lunch and picked last for group projects. The rumor was that madness ran in my family. Looking back, maybe they were right.

Shortly before graduation, Achilles and I broke up. He said it was his fault, nothing I did wrong. He was moving away for college and working at another town for the summer. He claimed he’d felt us drifting apart for a while. I didn’t have a response. Other than to break into my father’s liquor cabinet that night, and sit on the back porch listening the rush of the sea, getting drunker by the hour. It was well past midnight when I finally slid off the rocking chair to go back inside. I put my dizzy hand on the bronze door handle and stared at my reflection in the panel glass. God, I was ugly. Terrifying even. Then I realized, though the stringy hair and sunken eyes gazing back at me were familiar, they were not my own. They were my father’s. He was standing behind the door, staring. Though strangely, not at me. Just staring. The moonlight shone silver in his tired eyes. I rapped on the glass. My father shook his head, glanced at me, then locked the door. His whisky bottle clanked against the glass.

“What are you doing?” I slurred.

“Don’t come in.” My father said, his voice muffled through the glass. “You’ll let her out.”

“What—What are you talking about?”

My father blinked and disappeared into the dark.

I woke up the next morning, curled up by the door, shivering uncontrollably. I bought a cheap car with my paltry savings and left a few weeks later. I had a friend in the town where I was to attend college, and I decided to stay with her for the summer. I desperately needed a break, some fleeting relief from the chaos into which my home had fallen. Months passed. And slowly but surely, I started feeling better. The distance and fresh start lifted a weight off my shoulders. I lost a few pounds and stopped drinking. I felt light and free. Happy even. Then I went home again.

It was the week before my classes started. The dorms were finally open and it was time to move in. I had beat a hasty retreat from Le Petite Colombe earlier in the summer, and, in my hurry, left many of my belongings upstairs in my bedroom. I considered just leaving them there, but I didn’t yet have a job and I missed the comfort of my posters and blankets and books.

For hours, I sat in my car, parked in the abandoned lot across the street from Le Petite Columbe, waiting for my father to leave. Eventually, a man exited the front door and stumbled down the front steps. I didn’t recognize him. He was rail thin with greying hair, his lips pulled back tight against his grinning skull. The sleeves of the man’s denim jacket were stained with red. I furrowed my brow and sunk down in my seat, watching. It wasn’t until the man dug in his pocket, pulled out a set of keys, and got into our family’s old station wagon that I recognized the beleaguered stranger as my father. I felt sick to my stomach. It was guilt mostly. Part of me wondered if I hadn’t left, if my father would have been alright. Another part of me knew that wasn’t true. The two of us brought each other down, drinking ourselves into the same, desolate hole, night after night, only rooms apart. Truthfully, things probably would have been worse if I had been home. I don’t think I could have lived through what he’d done to the place.

The front door to the inn was unlocked. Several of its glass panes were shattered, and the broken glass still littered the floor. The door opened with that high, familiar creak. I stepped inside the silent lobby and gasped. I remember feeling like I’d stumbled upon the scene of a terrible car accident. All the inn’s furniture had been collected from across its rooms and thrown into haphazard piles around the lobby, stacked like refuse at the dump. There was garbage everywhere— broken bottles and cans of beer and empty pizza boxes. The air smelled of rot and piss. Even stranger was the walls. They had been stripped of their drywall and plaster, which now lay in crumbled white piles about the baseboards like the ruins of an ancient city, leaving only the pale studs to guard their naked rooms. Loose wiring hung from the bare, wooden beams like intestines from a ribcage. The ceiling was the same. And the great chandelier which once hung so proud and bright from its place over the stairwell, now sat in a crumbled heap upon the hardwood—its collection of antique crystals broken and distributed at random across the ruined lobby.

Holding the neck of my shirt up against my face to block the smell, I ascended the stairs and made my way to my bedroom. I opened the door, prepared for the worst, only to find the room untouched. Everything was just as I left it. Even the window was still open. That same feeling of guilt I’d felt watching my father stumble down the front steps once again rose in my gut. He had tried to save the memory of me from his madness. The implication was damning. He knew what he was doing.

As quickly as I could, I gathered my belongings from my bedroom and made my way back down the stairs. Every second I spent inside those tortured halls filled me with dread. It was then that I heard a sound, coming from the inn’s office behind the lobby counter. I stopped. There it was again—a strange and rhythmic clicking. Once again overcome by an uncharacteristic curiosity, I set my things on the ground and crept towards the office door. It was cracked open slightly. A light flickered inside. It was bad enough my father had gutted the place. It didn’t seem right that there might be squatters or intruders inside as well. I picked up a broken two by four off the ground and crept towards the open door. My heart hammered in my chest.

Opting for surprise over caution, I threw the door open and charged inside, beam of wood raised. Immediately, I gagged. The smell was overpowering. A hoard of flies, disturbed from their feast, took to the air en masse. The two by four dropped from my hands. Blinking against the burning odor of decay, I saw the clicking sound was simply an old, rotating fan in the corner. And the flicker was nothing more the dying bulb in the office’s desk lamp. What made my heart drop, however, was the writing. On every surface in the office, across the desk, down the cabinets, on the floors and ceilings—even on the chair and the door—was the same two sentences scrawled over and over again in half-dried, reddish-brown blood. The words squirmed with hoards of tiny maggots, as if each one were alive, possessed with life unchecked.

Find her. Set her free.

Find her. Set her free.

Find her. Set her free.

Find her….

I ran from Le Petite Colombe like a prisoner escaped, breathing ragged through my nausea. I threw my clothes and my books and the rest of my belongings into the trunk of my car and took off down the road, engine roaring beneath my feet. I reached the first intersection, when a familiar station wagon crested the hill in front of me. I couldn’t help it. I locked eyes with the driver as he passed. The man met my gaze with that same hollow stare he’d given me through the glass paned door that night on the porch. But this time, for reasons beyond my understanding, what I saw in his eyes was not madness, but sanity—a cold and detached knowing. Those eyes had a seen a truth too heavy, too terrible to bear. Then he passed. I glanced in my rearview mirror just in time to see the station wagon slam on it’s brakes and reverse. I pressed the gas harder. My engine screamed. And I was gone. I cried the whole way back to school. I wished never to see that man or that inn or that beat up old station wagon again. Sometimes wishes really do come true.

Two years later, it was Christmas. I decided to go home. I hadn’t spoken to my father since leaving for school, and, foolishly overcome with the spirit of the holidays, or perhaps in service of my latent guilt, I was suddenly and irrationally inspired to mend the gap between us. I had high hopes. I spent the last few semesters in campus counseling, working through the loss of my mother and my father’s descent into misery. I felt strong, ready for a holiday filled with deep and meaningful conversation. Maybe things could go back to normal. I could help my father clean himself up and get the inn back in shape. We could repaint the walls and fix the glass paneling and put all the furniture back where it belonged. We might even throw a grand reopening. Have a party. Invite the town.

I pulled onto our road after driving through the night, and was greeted by the pale glow of dawn on horizon. But that couldn’t be right. The sun wasn’t set to rise for another hour at least. A wordless terror bloomed in my chest—the sort of dread you feel when the phone rings at a time when it shouldn’t. Something had happened. I blew through a red light after red light, rocketing towards Le Petit Columbe. My knuckles were white on the wheel, my stomach knotted and squirming.

In a cloud of dust, I peeled around the last corner and swore. My face turned orange in the apocalyptic glow, while my mouth fell open wide. The inn was engulfed in flames. Our old station wagon sat in the drive, dripping molten metal and spewing tongues of hateful light. Its tires popped like gunshots. The inn’s round windows were broken out and crackling. Much of the outer wall had already been burned through, its white paint peeled to scalding black. Only the main steeple remained unburned, its silver rooter spinning wildly in the rising heat.

I bumped hard over the curb and skidded across the lawn, knocking over our mailbox in the process. I leapt out of my car and took off in a dead sprint towards the front door. The air smelled of gasoline. I made it up the first stair when I fell back, coughing uncontrollably. The heat was unfathomable. The smoke, caustic. I watched the hairs on my arms wither and curl as I squinted against the blinding fury. A moment later, something big, a structural beam or staircase, cracked and fell inside the inn. There was a horrible crash. Flames leapt exuberant from the windows. Sirens wailed in the distance.

Then, rising above the horrible din, came the last noise in the world I expected to hear. It was laughter—my father’s. But it was not the cackle of the mad man I expected. It was the innocent, boyish laugh I hadn’t heard in nearly a decade. It was the laugh my father saved for the most joyous occasions, the one that shook his shoulders like flowers in the wind and filled his eyes with tears of mirth.

“Father!” I screamed. I searched the cruel light in the windows for his shape, stinging tears blurring my vision. I found nothing.

“At last!” I heard my father shout. “Look at you fly, my love!”

“Father!” I screamed again. I still couldn’t see him. “Please! Come out!”

My father’s ecstatic cries climbed over the flames like high, choral praise, rising into the heavens with the black and bitter smoke. A loud, creaking sound caught my ear. I looked up, just as the greedy flames swallowed our black shingled steeple. The spinning, silver rooster melted in a flash. I saw it bend and fall. The entire steeple followed suit, crashing down in on itself an explosion of sparks and debris, which rose and mingled with the dying stars. For a moment all was still. Then I began to laugh.