Little Hidden Darknesses

I entered the motel reception with my arms by my sides and my feet dragging across the floor. For the first – and possibly only – time, I didn’t consider the skulls the most frightening items in the room. No. The thing that scared the most me was made of scratchy, blue-and-white, chequered material and had lace around its collar, sleeves and seam.

My maid’s uniform.

A frown pinched between my eyes as I said through gritted teeth, “Do I really have to wear this?”

“You sure do,” Alejandro replied, thick with laughter. I could tell he enjoyed this, seeing me suffer. As if reminding his mum to fetch it in the first place wasn’t bad enough, he had to rub it in as well. “It’s motel policy. We’re a professional establishment, you know.”

I tilted my head to sneer at him, when Mrs. Perez entered the reception and clapped her hands together. She wore an apron with a chilli on it, and had flour around her neck, chest and lower arms. “¡Hermosa!” she exclaimed. “Wow, don’t you look like a fine young maid.”

A fine young maid? I never thought I’d hear someone use those two words together in a sentence. Especially not when the dress hung like a sack across my shoulders, reaching all the way below my knees, and smelled like moth balls and leftover sweat from who knows when.

And who knows who ...

“You don’t look that bad,” Alejandro tried to console me. He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk, a cunning smile around his mouth. His eyes briefly scoured my body before they reached my face. My lips. When I caught him staring, he cleared his throat and pushed away from the desk. The wood creaked as he did so, the skull rattling.

“So, what can I do first?” I asked in an attempt to fill the silence. “If it’s cooking, though, I might burn down the motel.”

Mrs. Perez wiped the sides of her floury jaw as she scanned the reception. She pursed her lips, visibly thinking, then parted them to say something, when the lights started to flicker. Her head snapped around to share a glance with Alejandro, just as they completely went out.

She slapped her arms against her sides and sighed.

“No lo puedo creer,” I heard her mutter, now rubbing her thick, unkempt brows with her fingers. “There goes the power again. These stupid old buildings. It gets worse by the year.”

“That’s generally how it works, mamá. Things get old and break.” Alejandro walked around the desk, his face lit up by the beam of light that cast through the canteen’s entrance. He touched his mum’s right arm. “I could have another look at it, but like I said last time, I don’t –”

“Si, si,” Mrs. Perez chimed in, brandishing her hands through the air. “I know we need someone to come out here, but that’ll cost more than we can afford. You know this, chiquito.”

Alejandro glanced sideways at me, his stance suddenly curved. I acted unfazed, even though I didn’t have to. Despite sharing a surname with the richest people on the island, I was no stranger to money problems. In fact, they were the crux of my entire life.

The very definition of my current situation.

“I’ll go with you to the fuse box,” Mrs. Perez spoke on. She began to take off her apron, her attention back on me now. “Eira, check the guestbook and head off to the corresponding rooms. Just make the beds, replace the towels and clean the bathroom, okay? Nothing fancy.”

I shook my head and watched them dash down the corridor left of the reception desk. Their footsteps trailed off, along with the faint pitch of Alejandro explaining something in Spanish. Whether or not they were bickering, I couldn’t tell. It all sounded the same to me.

A smile spread across my lips as I recalled it: the feeling of bickering with one’s mum. My smile immediately faded, though, as I realised how much I missed it. How much I missed her.

What I wouldn’t give for one last bicker. Be it over who left an empty milk carton in the fridge, even.

My eyes went waxy for a moment, but I blinked and they clarified. I buried my grief at the back of my mind and focussed on the task at hand: figuring out how to be a maid. A good one, preferably.

I padded across the reception to the desk, then rounded it and raked the guest book toward me.

The light from the canteen fell across it, an old and tattered leatherback with crinkly, yellow pages. When I opened it, I thought it might fall apart. Specks of dust wafted through the air, all the way into my nose, tickling it. I sneezed. Twice. Why was everything around here so dusty? I licked the tips of my fingers and flipped to the most recent entry other than my own, the booking of a certain Mr. Henry Small, the plantation worker.

Room nr. 05. Paid cash. Check-in date, 11AM on –

No, this couldn’t be right.

I narrowed my eyes at the page, my fingers dusting the ink. It crumbled from the slightest touch, although the date didn’t change. Not even when I blew on it. Mr. Henry Small apparently checked in at 11AM on the 13th of March, 1901. More than a hundred years ago.

A scoff escaped my lips. Typical Alejandro. He most likely wrote it in here as a joke or something. Why, I had no idea. Perhaps to freak me out, or simply to entertain himself, to emphasise the fact that Henry practically lived here. It could’ve been funny, had he chosen a more realistic date. But a hundred-year-old guest? Only a child would believe that.

I scanned under the desk – just in case I had missed the real guest book – but came up clean. The book was real alright. As real as an empty ledger with fake dates could possibly be.

I renewed my scoff and flipped through the rest of the pages.

All empty.

It seemed the Perez Motel hadn’t accommodated a single guest since old Henry checked in. Except for me, of course.

I licked the tips of my fingers again and flipped through the final pages of the guest book. Mrs. Perez had entered my name on the last page. Eira Vinsant. What a sad, sad sight. A motel with only two guests. Two guests and three senior citizens who only came for free breakfast.

Well, I better get cracking. Old Henry’s toilet awaited me, a porcelain throne in all its glory. The thought of it filled my mouth with bile, but I endured it for the sake of a place to sleep.

And free breakfast, of course.

I shoved away the guest book and was just about to turn, when the pages opened in the centre.

On another entry.

One that I had missed before.

My insides twisted and coiled, even before I read the name. Was there another guest staying here? No, Alejandro would’ve told me. And I ought to have seen them in the canteen that morning.

The guestbook’s pages crunched under my fingers when I pressed them down to read the name. But I needn’t look at it to recognise the signature in the rightmost square. The very one I had so often seen, so often tried to imitate when sent home with a bad grade.

My heart dropped right into my shoes, almost as if to pull me through the floor into the earth.

I held my breath.

There, before my eyes, in black ink and curly letters, stood the one name no one in town seemed to remember: Piper Vinsant. Check-in date: the 16th of July, 2000. Twenty years ago on the dot.