The Night Sister

Rose didn’t mind. She loved these times, when it was just her and Mama, alone. Sometimes Mama would read to her from the paper, or tell her stories about when she was growing up back in England. Rose tried to picture Mama as a little girl; she imagined a neat, stern-faced child who ran the neighborhood doll hospital and never once broke any rules.

Rose was tired. Her eyelids kept drifting closed as she stared at the bright office light. The screen door was closed, June bugs and moths thumping into it. The sign said Vacancy, they seemed to say. Can we come in?

It was well past bedtime now, but Mama said Rose could stay up a little while longer, just in case another guest showed up. Rose wanted to be the one to run down to the road and flip the sign to No Vacancy.

She loved to be there when people checked in, road-weary, blurry-eyed. She’d slide the little manila registration card across the desk to them, watch as they wrote down their names, addresses, number of people in their party, car make and model, license number. Rose loved to see where they were from: Staten Island, New York; Portage, Pennsylvania; once, they had an older couple from Christmas, Florida. Imagine, a town called Christmas!

Sometimes they’d mention where they were traveling to: New Hampshire, Maine, all the way up into Canada. There were even people going to see the ocean, which Rose had seen only once, when Mama and Daddy took the girls to Hampton Beach a few years ago. They’d gone in the winter, because when you’re motel people you can’t go anywhere during the busy season. Sylvie had run up and down the shore, collecting rocks, shells, and bits of driftwood, oohing and aahing about how beautiful it was, how lovely it was to lick your lips and taste the salt of the ocean. Rose stood shivering on the beach, thinking only that the ocean looked cold and dark and seemed to go on forever. She tried to imagine the beach crowded with swimmers and sunbathers stretched out on towels, the smell of hot dogs and candy apples in the air, but it was no good. It was like standing on the empty stage long after the school play was over and all the costumes and sets had been packed away.

Rose loved the names of the cars people arrived at the motel in—Dodge Coronet, Hudson Hornet, Studebaker Starliner—the heavy steel bodies, the sparkling chrome grilles, the tires spinning through the gravel of their driveway, tires that had been turning for hundreds of miles, been to places Rose could only imagine.

The cars, Daddy said, got bigger and faster each year. Rose imagined one day cars would be more like rocket ships, like in one of Uncle Fenton’s science-fiction books. You’d be able to blast off and go from London, Vermont, to Christmas, Florida, in less than an hour. Maybe even all the way across the ocean, to London, England, where Mama was from.

Down at the road now, a car went by. Rose could see the taillights fading away. They turned the corner and were gone, moving toward downtown London. Soon they’d be passing the Texaco, Woolworth’s, London Town Library, Congregational church—everything shut down, locked up tight this time of night.

There was talk, lots of talk, about how the interstate highways were coming. Her teacher, Miss Marshall, said that President Eisenhower was promising bigger, better roads that would connect the whole country. Rose liked the sound of this (though she would never tell her father, who got red in the face whenever the word “highway” was mentioned), of being able to follow a highway from here all the way to the other side of the country. A highway built for all those beautiful cars to rumble along, engines purring, tires spinning so fast they were just a blur. Not quite like rocket ships, but a step closer.

Sometimes she dreamed of machines. Of cars and rockets. Of the big machines that would build highways: of bulldozers and graders, mechanical shovels and steamrollers. She dreamed they were coming this way, tearing up the land, dynamiting rocks, making a smooth blacktop surface for cars to race along. Coming closer. Closer. Rumbling, chugging.

“Where’s your sister?” Mama asked, and Rose looked up and rubbed her eyes.

“Up in our room. She’s got a headache.”