The Night Sister

Amy smiled impishly and tucked a chunk of her pink bangs—dyed with Jell-O—behind her triple-pierced ear. She had neon-blue eye shadow on, too, along with a big streak of silver that went all the way up to her eyebrow. She looked like she’d just stepped out of an MTV video. The little sister of Cyndi Lauper, maybe, but Amy thought Cyndi Lauper sucked, so Piper would never mention the resemblance out loud.

“Come on, I’ll tell you,” Amy said, undoing the rainbow laces on her white skates. Piper did the same, and both girls slipped on their flip-flops and climbed the ladder out of the pool. It was the end of summer—there were only two more weeks until school started—and both girls’ legs were bronze from the sun. Amy’s were long and lean, the legs of a dancer, like one of the Rockettes Piper had seen when her mom took her to Radio City Music Hall.

“Where are you going?” Margot asked, scowling. She hated to be left out, but often was, because she was really still a baby even though she pretended not to be. Her pigtails stuck out like antennas from under her helmet, making her look like an angry beetle.

“Be right back,” Amy said. “Stay here.”

Piper and Amy hurried across the concrete patio that surrounded the pool, over the crabgrass that had pushed its way up through the cracks, and past the line of broken lounge chairs that led to the motel office, with its steeply peaked roof. A red Closed sign hung in the window, and all the dusty plastic blinds were drawn. Attached to the office on the right were Rooms 1 through 14; 15 through 28 were in a second building, around back.

All of the motel rooms were now sealed up like little tombs, even though the keys with their blue plastic tags still hung on the metal rack behind the office desk. Sometimes the girls would sneak into the rooms, which had been left unchanged since the motel closed in 1971. The beds were covered in brown-and-mustard paisley spreads, and dull turquoise carpeting full of cigarette burns and years’ worth of unidentifiable stains was underfoot. There were prints of yellow and orange marigolds in heavy frames. The old color TVs had been sold, but the tables that had once held them remained, along with bureaus and nightstands, some of which still contained mildewed copies of Gideon’s Bible. Their finishes were nicked and scratched, covered in circular water stains—the ghostly images of wet glasses left by guests long gone. Some of the bathrooms still had soap wrapped in paper, but most of the soap had been chewed through by mice. There were ashtrays in all the rooms, and sometimes when Piper went in she swore she was breathing 1971 air—it smelled like dust and cigarettes and long-faded perfume. Like ghosts, if ghosts had a smell.

The roofs in some of the rooms had begun to leak; the ceilings were water-stained and mildewed, the plaster crumbling in places. Some of the rooms still contained matchbooks and notepads printed with the Tower Motel name and logo—a simple drawing of the castlelike tower that stood at the base of the driveway by the road.

Amy’s grandma had shown them pictures of the tower being built. Her gnarled fingers, stained yellow from nicotine, pointed at the curled black-and-white photos glued in an old album.

“He always said he built the tower for me,” Grandma Charlotte would say. “But we knew the truth. He did it because he wanted to. Because he thought it would bring people in from all over, make us rich and famous.”

The pictures were not all that exciting: Amy’s grandfather wanted the tower to be a surprise, so he’d built large staging around it, sheathed in boards and tarps so that no one could see what he was doing. At last, in the final photo, the great unveiling: Clarence Slater stood, a dashing figure in a suit and hat, dark hair slicked back, one eye squinting slightly. He was holding his wife’s hand; Grandma Charlotte was young and beautiful then, not the disheveled old woman Piper knew now. They posed with the painted wooden sign he’d put up in front of the tower, angled to catch the eye of drivers on Route 6: Come See the Famous Tower of London.