The Night Sister

Mama says Rose is jealous of me, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think she genuinely loathes me. But, then again, maybe I’m not so special—Rose seems to loathe everything and everyone. No one blames me for avoiding her.

The highway has come through, as promised, and ruined everything. It’s just like what happened to the Bates Motel in your last picture, Psycho, only this is real life. My uncle Fenton took me to see that picture three times. It was your most brilliant (not to mention shocking!) yet. I liked it even better than Vertigo, which had been my absolute favorite film of yours. Fenton managed to talk the man at the theater into giving him the Psycho poster after the engagement was over, and I put it up on my wall, above my bed. Daddy made me take it down, though. He didn’t want to have to see Janet Leigh in her underclothes every time he came into our bedroom. Fenton’s got it up in his trailer now.

Sometimes I wonder if my letters might have inspired part of your story about the Bates Motel. Did they?

Just like the Bates Motel, no one comes to the Tower Motel anymore. The town of London, my family, the motel—they’re all mere ghosts of what they used to be.

I hope you don’t mind that I keep sending you letters. I understand you are very busy, and cannot write back, but I do wish I had some way of knowing that you were at least reading my girlish ramblings.

I need to know someone is listening.

Sincerely yours,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater The Tower Motel





328 Route 6


London, Vermont





Rose


Rose sat in the living room, scowling at the balloons and streamers hanging above her head. Uncle Fenton had painted a banner that said Happy 18th Birthday Sylvie and hung it on the wall behind the couch. Fenton and Daddy had moved the coffee table, television, and chairs into the dining room, and Mama had set up snacks on the buffet table: meatballs and cocktail frankfurters on toothpicks, deviled eggs, a cheese ball encrusted with pecans. There were bottles of Coca-Cola in a bucket of ice.

Sylvie wore a sleeveless pale-green dress with a matching headband that she’d sewn herself from the same shimmering fabric. She had on the emerald earrings Mama had given her at Christmas, passed down from Oma. Mama had only two pieces of jewelry of her mother’s: the emerald earrings and a pearl necklace sent over from England after Oma’s death. Mama had never worn either of them—“not really my style,” she would always say with a wry smile, but Rose knew she was saving the jewelry, that it was too special to wear for cleaning motel rooms and mending other people’s clothes. That the jewels were to be part of the girls’ heritage. Once Sylvie got the earrings, Rose knew the pearls would be hers. Maybe when she turned sixteen, or perhaps even before.

Mama had let Sylvie borrow her red lipstick, and she looked all grown up, hardly recognizable as the young girl who’d once run the chicken circus. Sylvie had invited three of her friends: Marnie, Kate, and Dot. The other girls oohed and aahed over Sylvie’s dress and how beautiful and sophisticated she looked. They took dainty bites of the snacks as they chatted about work (Sylvie and Dot both worked at Woolworth’s) and a big football game the London Raiders were playing that weekend. Marnie, who was a year younger and still in high school, was going steady with the quarterback. Sylvie didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t seem to have any interest in one. When Davy Palmer invited her to the dance last weekend at the Elks Club, she’d told him she had other plans, then just stayed home. Since graduating that summer, Sylvie had helped out at the motel (on the rare occasions when there were guests), worked part-time at Woolworth’s, and done some typing for a friend of Daddy’s who ran an insurance agency. Every Saturday, she’d go out to the movies with Fenton and Rose. Other than that, she hung around the house, reading magazines and listening to records.