Many years later, he was traveling west to Seattle with his family to visit Grampa Robbie and Mamaw Stephanie, as his two girls called them. Always in the past they had gone by plane, but this time they were taking the trip over several days, traveling at a leisurely pace to get a good look at the country. Each day he had watched the map as they came a little bit closer, tracing its red veins with his finger—an inch, another inch, increments that together represented hundreds of miles of mountains and forests and rivers and cornfields and grassy plains—and now he was less than a palm’s length away from the place he had told himself he wasn’t going.
Last night they had stayed in a small town in eastern Montana just off Interstate 90. In the morning, they woke to an almost limitless horizon. It was summer, and the weather was fair, but on the line of hills to the west storm clouds had begun to simmer, little dark hearts at the edge of the wide blue sky.
After breakfast his wife discovered an antiques store, and he told her they were in no hurry, it would be fine if she looked around. He heard the shop door open, heard the tinkling of a bell, and he stood on the sidewalk with his head tilted back to take in the warmth of the sun, and he thought that he could be anywhere. But it wasn’t just anywhere. It was I-90, and he was getting close to Good Night, Idaho.
He had spent years telling himself he wasn’t going there. That bright winter day when he and Robbie and Stephanie had pulled out of town receded with the years, and his promise had receded with it. He was no longer determined to go back, but swore to himself, in the dark, cold place that had somehow, on that long-ago morning, burned its way into his center, that he never would. During all those years, sealing off the memories with a ruthless attention to the present, to the future, so that his wife and daughters would not have recognized the dazed, dreamy child he was back then, he had told himself that there was no need for his return. His parents wouldn’t have wanted it. He refused to become a mere souvenir, one of those lost and lonely travelers, beaten, defeated, shuffling slowly up the old street as if wandering homeward, gazing forlornly at the hotel windows, seeking rest. But in planning this trip—innocently enough, as far as his family could tell, talking about educational opportunities for the girls, all the beautiful scenery—he had felt himself becoming someone else, a secret keeper, a wearer of disguises. He didn’t like the feeling, though it was one he’d grown accustomed to.
The girls wanted to wait outside the shop, so he offered them a couple of words of caution about staying out of the street, staying out of people’s way on the sidewalk, and he followed his wife inside. He meandered through the shop, which was full of bric-a-brac that didn’t interest him, old farm tools and rickety furniture and outdated appliances, and he thought about what they would pass by today, before the sun set—Interstate 90, exit 70, a road sign that said Good Night. Had he underestimated it, the pull, the sway?
Even in his mind’s eye the road sign made his thoughts blur, and snow seemed to fall at the edges of his vision. Already, in some corner of himself, he was turning into the ten-year-old boy he had tried so hard to leave behind. How strong would the urge be when he actually arrived at Good Night? He tried to steel himself against the way he knew his thoughts would wander, how his mind would begin to whittle down the outside spaces, narrow and tighten them until he knew nothing but the reality of that sign and the desire to put on the blinker. Let’s stay here tonight—might as well be here as anywhere. Would he do that? Was he the sort of man who put his family in danger? In a near dream, he watched himself drive the car up the dusty main street, pull up at the curb, take out the suitcases, stroll into the lobby as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Was that what his own mother had done back then? He wouldn’t. He had no intention of staying there—all he wanted was a peek.
He took a deep breath, took stock of the situation. There was his wife a couple of aisles over, a pretty woman with long black hair and a degree in economics. She was trying to strike a bargain with the owner on an area rug, something they could put in the living room. Outside the shop windows his two girls, ages eight and five, were playing a game that involved swinging around a lamppost. His older daughter, unfailingly responsible—he had trained her to be that way—kept an eye on her sister, warning her against stepping off the curb. He wanted to tell them both to come inside, but his wife would say he was being overprotective.
He removed his car keys from his pocket and ran his thumb along the old iron key, the one his father had given him. He had kept it on his key chain for years, but his wife, too practical to think of such a thing, had never asked him about it, and he had never told her anything. The true circumstances of his parents’ disappearance were embedded deeply in lies—lies he’d told his wife and children, sometimes himself. His wife thought his parents had died in a terrible accident, in the middle of a snowstorm, on the way home after Christmas. In his version of the story, he had been the only survivor, raised by his uncle Robbie and Stephanie.
He hardly knew why he kept the key. His memories assailed him on occasion, but he had forced them down so successfully and for so long that, even when he tried to recall things exactly as they had occurred, the recollections were suitably weak and hazy, and he could even bring himself to doubt them.
But recently there had been a phone conversation with Robbie (who had had a few beers, a rare occurrence, and so was maybe a bit more responsive to questioning than usual), and Robbie had told him, for the first time, the real story of what had happened in the hotel that early morning, how he had seen Dewey’s mother, who was no more than a ghost, how he had tried to save his brother and how he had failed, how there had been no way to open the door, how there had been no key. Because he hadn’t really wanted to remember, he reassured Robbie (all the while thinking of the picture Robbie and Stephanie kept on their mantel, the one with the boy and the girl sitting on an antique sofa) that it was all right, there was nothing to feel sorry about. He didn’t want to remember the key in his pocket, didn’t want to remember what his mother had said to him. He had a normal life, a happy one. He had almost forgotten all these things, the awful cold and silence, the snow constantly floating in the air around his head, the moment his father had fallen, his hand releasing the key, bequeathing it to him, the feel of the key in his fingers when he clutched it in the snow, the proud, erect bearing of his mother as she came toward him that last time, her calm smile. But on that morning, in the diner with Robbie, he had promised himself that he would see them once again. So he had promised them, too, in a sense, hadn’t he? And here he was, only a short distance from the destination. Here he was standing in this shop, a man with a family of his own…and with the key right here in his hand. He had failed his father before—but what door might the key still open?
Maybe he could just swing off at the exit, say he thought he’d run over something and needed to check the tires. Maybe if he could just gaze from the top of the ramp, exit 70, down the road that led to Good Night, he could glimpse the place in the distance, like some shimmering mirage—Travelers Rest—and then get back on the highway and leave it behind forever. Maybe that would be enough for him. But maybe not. Maybe in some small part of his mind he had always been a souvenir. Maybe he belonged back at the diner with Hugh and Lorraine.
While his wife and the owner discussed the merits of the rug—the pattern was worn, the edges were frayed, the owner should lower the price by at least 15 percent—he tried to keep his eye on the girls out the window and give the impression of someone simply toodling around. He ran his hand over a bearskin rug hung on the wall, turned the handle on a flour sifter. Along the far wall on a small wooden table rested an old-fashioned telephone, the kind with a separate mouthpiece and receiver, something he remembered seeing somewhere. Somewhere—he knew where; who was he fooling? An old phone in a hallway, fingerprints on a snow globe, a hand that released a key. You’ll know I’m here. You’ll dream of me. How had he ever thought he could be rid of these memories? If he closed his eyes, he could see every flake of snow that fell.
He didn’t want to, didn’t want to conjure the past and give himself up to remembering, but he knew that somewhere deep down he had always been prey to his moods, his impulses. They were bound to defeat him sometime. And he was tired. It had been his life’s work, really, hadn’t it? Forgetting that lonely child? Forgetting that cold hotel room that gnawed at his bones, the echo of his boots on the dusty, creaking stairs, the never-ending spirals of snow? Those lonely, empty days. They had followed him all the way here. They were why, sometimes at night—almost not himself, almost in a dream—he would rise quietly from bed, and he would walk to the door of his daughters’ room to see them sleeping warm under their blankets, and he would go down the stairs and look out past his driveway to the street, where the streetlight shined, and he would find himself in communion with that ten-year-old boy, whose mother and father had loved him so well. And the lights would glaze over in his eyes, and he would hear the tiny hiss of snowfall, and it would be all he could do not to weep. He was so tired of fighting. Every memory was telling him—right now—what he had to do.
He relented. He moved to the telephone, touched it with trembling fingers. He grasped the base in one hand and with the other held the receiver to his ear. His wife glanced over at him now and he smiled to show her that it was just a joke, a silly whim. From the corner of the room, an old clock clanged out the hour. The shop owner gave a dry little cough. A scuffing sound, the muffled footsteps of someone passing by on the street. Far away, so far away.
To his ear came a faint crackling on the line. The air opened up, he felt it as a presence, as if the space around him were expanding. He held the receiver tight to his ear, trying to calm his breathing. On the other end of the line, he could hear someone else breathe, as if in response. The two of them breathed out and breathed in, at the same time, over the ancient phone, in a strange synchronicity. Outside, the morning sun was strong and bright. His daughters waved at him through the window. But he might as well have had his eyes closed, might as well have been dreaming. He listened hard to the phone line, forming an image in his mind of the one he hoped was there.
“Is it you?” he said.