The Sun Down Motel

I handed her another slice. She was small under that poncho, but she could pack pizza away. “Town history, remember?”

“Okay,” she said, lowering the slice. “The Sun Down Motel. Let me think. There was a time in the early seventies when people thought Fell would be a tourist destination, even though we don’t have lakes or mountains or anything to see. There were plans for a big amusement park that would bring thousands of people a year, so businesses got built—the Sun Down, a few other motels, some ice cream shops and restaurants. Then the amusement park plan fell through and none of it happened. Most of those old businesses are gone, but the Sun Down is still there.”

“It didn’t go out of business?”

“It’s pretty dodgy,” she admitted. “Maybe it gets by taking in drug dealers and such. I wouldn’t know. A few kids in high school liked to go there on weekends to drink, but my parents are prudes and never let me go.”

I pulled my laptop toward me on the sofa and opened it, my mind working.

“They say it’s haunted,” Heather said.

“Really?” I asked in surprise.

“Well, sure,” Heather said. “Isn’t every hotel haunted since The Shining? People have probably died there, I bet.”

I looked at my Google Map of Fell, with a pin in the spot where the Sun Down was. If it was built in the 1970s, then it was still relatively new in 1982. Had it been unsavory then? Had it been haunted?

Aside from Graham’s stupid stories and the odd scary movie, I’d never really thought about ghosts, whether they were real. But sitting in Viv’s apartment, living where she’d lived before she disappeared . . . I thought about it. I thought about ghosts and whether she was here somewhere, looking through the window or trapped in a doorway, watching us. If she’d been killed, would she come back? Would she come to this place or somewhere else? If every person who disappeared came back, wouldn’t the world be full of ghosts?

I scratched my nose under my glasses and said, “Heather, are you tired?”

On the floor, she sighed. “I’m never tired. I told you, I have insomnia.”

“Don’t you have to study or something?”

“I’ve read my textbook twice. One has to read something.”

I smiled. “Well, since one doesn’t have to study, would one like to go to the Sun Down Motel with me?”

Her head appeared above the rim of the vintage coffee table. “Really?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’ve come this far. I may as well go, and now is as good a time as ever.”

She lit up, like I’d suspected she would. “One would be delighted.”

I closed my laptop. “Let’s go.”

Fell, New York

September 1982

VIV



   She didn’t want to stay in Fell, exactly, yet somehow she did. She worked another shift at the Sun Down, and another. Janice paid her some money, and Viv found an apartment on Greville Street that had cheap rent and a roommate named Jenny. Jenny was a night shift nurse at a local nursing home, working the same hours as Viv. She was tired, single after a bad breakup, and not in the least curious. The two girls came and went, slept all day and worked all night.

“I don’t get it,” Jenny said one evening. She was preparing to iron a blouse, fiddling with the knobs on the iron as it heated up. “You were on your way to New York City. Why didn’t you go?”

Viv turned the page of the People magazine she was reading, leaning against the kitchen counter. “That’s just something I told my mother,” she said. “I didn’t really want to go. I just wanted to leave home.”

“I get that,” Jenny said. She had ash blond hair, cut in feathered layers like Heather Locklear. She licked the pad of her finger and lightly touched the face of the iron to see if it was hot enough yet. “But this is Fell. No one wants to be here. I mean, come on. People leave.”

“You haven’t left,” Viv pointed out.

“Only because this job is good. But trust me, I’m going.” She licked her finger again and touched the iron. This time there was a sizzling sound and she jerked her finger away. “I’m going to meet a rich, gorgeous guy and marry him the first chance I get. The women’s libbers say it’s wrong, but I still think it’s the best thing a girl can do.”

“That’s it?” Viv asked her. “Get married?”

“Why not?” Jenny shrugged and tugged the blouse onto the ironing board, started to work on it.

Viv didn’t want to get married. She’d dated boys, made out with them. She’d even let Matthew Reardon put his hand down her pants. But she’d only done that because they were on their third date, and he expected it. His fingers smelled like cigarettes, and she hadn’t liked it much. Her entire life in Illinois had been about doing what other people expected, never what she actually wanted.

“Don’t you want to do something with your life? Something big?” she asked Jenny.

Jenny didn’t look impressed. “If you wanted to do something big, you should have gone to New York, don’t you think?”

Maybe. It was stupid to think you had some kind of destiny in life. It was extra stupid to think that Fell, New York, was somewhere you wanted to be. But Grisham belonged to Viv’s family, and New York City belonged to everyone else. Fell, in its shadowy way, was hers.

She bought a car, a used Cavalier, the first car she’d ever owned herself. She took two hundred dollars out of her bank account to buy it, and she didn’t feel the panic she thought she would.

There was a movie theater downtown, a hole in the wall called the Royal that showed second-run movies for a dollar. Viv went to the early show before her shift sometimes, sitting in the half-empty theater. She watched E.T. and An Officer and a Gentleman and, on one memorable night, Poltergeist. She ate sandwiches from the Famous Fell Deli, down the street from the theater, and sometimes she got a milkshake from the Milkshake Palace, around the corner, for fifty cents. She cut her hair, which she’d worn long like all of the other girls in Grisham. Good girls don’t have short hair, her mother always said. Viv cut her light brown hair to shoulder length and teased the top and the sides with hair spray.

She called her mother, who was furious even though Viv hadn’t ended up in the den of sin that was New York City. “I’m not sending you money,” her mother told her. “You’ll just spend it on drugs or something. I guess you’ll see what it’s like to be a grown-up now. Why can’t you be like Debby?”

Debby, Viv’s little sister, the good daughter. At eighteen, Debby wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to stay in Grisham, work in Grisham, get married in Grisham, and most likely die in Grisham. She looked at Viv’s angry restlessness as something alien. “I’m working extra shifts at the ice cream shop and saving for college,” Debby said when she got on the phone. “I think you’re crazy.”