“Em, it's OK.” His smile widened. “Maybe I'll remember it. You just have to help me. Give me some details.”
“We were visiting your friend Jeremy, and he insisted that we go to his… what was it, his grandmother’s house?” She stopped. Searching her own memory was like picking fragments of something broken off the ground. Putting those memories into words shone a light on all the rough edges of the pieces as they failed to fit together quite as they were. She was more uncertain after dissecting the event in her mind. Was Leicester all in her head? Who was to say it wasn’t, anymore?
“Go on. I know Jeremy, obviously, and his Nan.”
“It’s OK. It wasn’t important.”
David sighed but did not protest.
Emma made a note to write names, dates, and places on all the photos in David’s shoe box when they got back to England. She didn’t mention it out loud, because she knew that if she did, he would want to talk about it. And she would not be OK.
She wanted to share as much with him as she could before it was gone. But she was too weak to bear it. That was the word for it. Weakness.
They spent the rest of the evening isolated in their own thoughts. Without saying a word, they went to bed early.
Emma woke up to a dark room. She looked at the window to confirm it was still the middle of the night. When she sat up the bed shifted like a car teetering on the edge of a cliff. But it felt wrong. There was no counterweight pulling the mattress on the other side. A grope in the dark found nothing but rippled sheets on the other side of the bed. Quiet. No sound of footsteps, no sound from the bathroom but the dripping from the next room over. She waited for her eyes to adjust enough to detect individual shadows. None of them moved. Nobody here.
She listened for sound from the street, from the hallway, anything but the tap next door, but there was nothing. It occurred to her that if she couldn’t hear anyone else, no one could hear her, as if she were locked in a thick pine chest. Her breath roared in her ears.
Her eyes had adjusted to the point that in the thin sheet of light eking between the curtains she could make out the desk, a lamp, and a general outline of everything in the room. The profile of a woman sitting up in the bed faced her from the mirror on the opposite wall. She stared at her reflection and listened to her own breathing until she felt her hands shake.
She pulled back the covers and tried to throw on her clothes from that afternoon. While pulling the black wool coat over her arms she tried to listen against the door. There were voices, no telling how far given that you could hear a houseplant die from three rooms over through The Rock’s thin walls.
She reached for the doorknob. For a moment there was no door at all, only walls in a room with no way out. Her knuckles smacked into the door frame. It took some seconds of groping to find metal. The room shrank around her ears until she found the knob and turned.
She cracked the door enough to get a better impression of the sound. It was two voices, one of them David's, coming from downstairs.
Dim lights in the hallway made more shadows than illumination. A brighter light shone up from the stairs leading down to the pub. Emma listened as she sneaked down the creaking steps.
At the landing of the floor below, she noticed the doorway at the end of the hall. It was of newer construction than the rest of the building, though this was not a high bar to clear, made when the rooms of this floor were consolidated into a single office and residence for the Governor General.
Emma approached it and put her ear against the wood. Nothing.
The doorknob was clean. As far as she could see in the darkness there was no dust anywhere. Fresh footprints lead away in the freshly cleaned carpet. Again, this was hardly unusual. Why would it be surprising her that a hotel would maintain its rooms? Did she expect cobwebs and bats?
She mustered enough self control to not test the doorknob.
Fresh murmurs downstairs brought her back to the task at hand. She crept halfway down the last flight of stairs. The pub had the same yellow wallpaper that every room in the building seemed to have. To Emma it seemed strangely unfamiliar, but she decided it was the darkness playing tricks on her eyes. She turned toward the voices and listened.
The room was empty except for David and Jessie, who were hunched forward in deep conspiracy. She could see that Jessie had her usual look of being right on the cusp of letting out a good panic. David faced the other way, but Emma could read his body language. He wasn't toying with her. This wasn't the posture he used when he was luring someone into a rhetorical trap for his own amusement. She listened to Jessie whisper the second half of what must have been a long story.
“...and then she didn't bring it back for three weeks. I had to go and get it. So she opens the door, and just stands there, looking like a rabbit about to bolt. Staring at me with her finger in her mouth. Oh, you won't know about Zoe's little ticks, but she bites her nails. It's not important. Anyway, she doesn't even invite me inside. Can you believe it? No wonder she got along with that other one at the station. Is everyone like that in England?” A shift in David's position betrayed that he had tried to answer, not guessing it was a rhetorical question. Jessie continued. “We had someone from New Zealand once. Very
