The temperature dropped more than twenty degrees without the sun. Early September and Adelaide, spoiled by a childhood in the Lucerne Valley, felt crippled by the chill. She limped alongside Mr. Olsen. He asked if she felt all right more than once and she lied, told him she felt fine.
The Mudges had come from rural Washington and seemed better suited to the relentless chill. Blindness or not, those boys looked heartier than her right now. With the daylight gone, the night enveloped them like a shroud, and Mr. Olsen lit the lantern. Any landscape more than ten feet from them had been erased. If not for the light in Mr. Olsen’s hand, the night would’ve gobbled them up altogether.
“Have to spend the night at the old hotel,” Mr. Olsen told them, his voice somber, almost apologetic.
“When will we get there?” Mrs. Mudge shouted.
“There it is,” Olsen said.
And suddenly, as if dreamed up by the plains, the old hotel appeared.
Two stories and derelict and every window dark. Ugly as a rotted tooth. The whole structure leaned to one side, near ready to collapse. Would it be safer inside or outside?
“Used to be a town here,” Mr. Olsen said as they approached the front steps. “I can’t recall its name. The land took it all back. Except this place.”
“Are there beds?” Mrs. Mudge asked, looking back at her sons.
“Nothing inside but the floors and walls,” he said. “Some of the rooms still have a ceiling. You all get yourselves in. Take any room you want. I won’t get sleep tonight.”
Mrs. Mudge climbed the stairs and tried the front door. When it opened, the door damn near fell off the one good hinge that held it. The woman turned and guided her sons up the front steps, one by one. They entered the hallway and were lost to the darkness. Adelaide wouldn’t even have known they were inside if not for the sounds of their boots scuffing the floors.
She looked back toward Mr. Olsen to thank him, but who had time for courtesy? He’d already started back. She watched him go. The light of his lantern remained visible for a long while because the land was so flat. She couldn’t make out the silhouette of the man, so it seemed as if only the light traveled across the plains, a spirit in search of rest. Adelaide wondered if Mr. Olsen would return.
Eventually the chill forced her inside. She wrestled the front door back into its frame and even the scant moonlight of the plains disappeared. She stood quietly at the entrance for who knew how long until she could see, faintly, because of the moonlight pouring through the broken slats of the walls.
One empty entranceway, one empty parlor, ten empty bedrooms. Adelaide had expected to find a few strips of cloth, a broken chair or two, but everything had been sold, stolen, or withered away. Adelaide carried a box of matches in her bag. A match from this box had burned down the farmhouse in California. Turned her mother and father into ash. But she hadn’t brought a lamp, not in her travel bag. So she struck a match and held it in two fingers and made her way through the fathomless dark.
She heard Mrs. Mudge on the flight above her. Cursing as she reached the top of the stairs, guiding her boys by the sound of her frustration. Adelaide followed the beacon, too. She might never have discovered the stairs otherwise.
As she climbed she felt a tickle at the base of her scalp. She told herself it was only the wind. More than enough cracks in the walls for it to sneak inside. And yet she couldn’t escape the feeling of someone behind her on the stairs, blowing at the back of her neck. When her match flame died, she rushed to light the next, spilling one or two matches out of fear.
The Mudges entered the first room at the top of the stairs. Adelaide knew this because there were windows in that room and moonlight illuminated the interior. Adelaide stumbled toward the open door, but Mrs. Mudge held her back. She pulled the door closed so Adelaide could hardly see inside.
“Doesn’t seem fitting,” she said. “My boys sleeping in the same room as an unmarried woman. What would people say?”
“But we’re the only people here,” Adelaide replied.
Adelaide heard the Mudge boys bedding down. She wanted to plead with Mrs. Mudge—woman to woman—promise she’d make no noise; she’d sleep facing the walls. Just to be in a room with others rather than by herself.
“It would make a difficult night less difficult,” Adelaide said softly. “If you let me in.”
Mrs. Mudge cleared her throat. “Difficulty?” she asked. The slim woman opened the door a bit more, called out. “Joab. Come close.”
The floor creaked faintly and, in a moment, the youngest boy appeared by his mother’s side.
“This woman is suggesting that sleeping alone in a hotel room is a difficulty she can’t manage.”
Adelaide leaned back. It sounded so silly when Mrs. Mudge said it out loud, and yet, it was how she felt. Why make a show of it to her child?
“I didn’t know I was blind until I turned six years old,” the boy said. His voice trembled in that place between childhood and early maturity. He might’ve been twelve or a small thirteen-year-old.
Joab.
“I mean to say,” the boy continued, “I didn’t know anyone else considered my lack of sight a problem. Our mother never let us think of it as an affliction. We worked our land, walked to and from school without her once we knew the path. She taught us to persevere.”
Mrs. Mudge looked at the boy, nearly as tall as her, and placed a hand on his shoulder, and Adelaide felt an ache. That simple touch, from mother to child, she would never know it again.
“A boy finally made me realize my circumstances,” Joab said. “My difficulty. He started to follow me everywhere singing ‘Three Blind Mice.’ He made a game of it, I can tell you. One day, on the walk to school, I led him to an old well. Then I pushed him in.”
Adelaide bolted upright. Dropped her match, which died on the floor. What did this boy just say?
Mrs. Mudge frowned, huffed once.
“Well, the boy didn’t die,” Mrs. Mudge said. “Did he, Joab?”
“No, ma’am,” the boy agreed. “But he never sang that song near me again.”
Mrs. Mudge nodded, looked back to Adelaide. “Difficulties are to be overcome, not indulged.”
Well, what the hell was Adelaide going to say to that? She reached down and lifted her travel bag, placed a hand against the wall, and patted along as she searched for the next room. Behind her, she thought she heard the Mudges’ door shut. But when Adelaide looked back over her shoulder—she couldn’t be sure because of the utter darkness—she swore she saw the dark figures of Mrs. Mudge and Joab still out there on the landing. Watching her as she pawed through the shadows alone.