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Chapter Twenty-Six

After Gilfoyle left with Tucker, June went to the fourth floor.

Although every door was closed, there was nonetheless the sensation of vital activity; everyone was awake, talking about the approaching departure. Even if she could not hear their conversations, she could feel them. Everyone can tell the difference between a sleeping hotel and a wakeful one.

She was headed to 411.

For the longest time, the Gilfoyles had lived on the fourth floor. This was before her time, when Mr. Francis was a much younger man, and the current family apartment was still being used as a presidential suite, those rooms brought up to a standard of luxury the rest of the hotel had yet to achieve. In a fourth-floor suite, he’d raised his young family, buried his first wife, married his second. He did not talk much about his past, but he had once said, I didn’t mean to stay so long , and June had been unable to tell if he meant it fondly or wistfully. She hadn’t asked for more.

Now, she stopped outside his old door. A dark stain appeared to creep from beneath it; hard to tell if it was a trick of the light. She pressed a toe into the carpet. Damp squeezed from the carpet; no, it was real. She lifted her eyes to the number plate.

The Wolfes’ old suite.

Mr. Francis’s old suite.

Leave the water to me.

Fetching out her master key ring, June let herself in. With a soft intake of breath, she closed the door behind herself.

The suite stank of sulfur and blood. A sluggish, shallow stream glistened from the sitting room to one of the closed bedroom doors. Damp streaked the wallpaper, bled from beneath the mirror, trickled from an outlet. The lights struggled to pierce the thick air. A whispering, chuckling sound came from nowhere and everywhere, the sound of an unseen stream over rocks.

The water was turning.

For so many years, she’d kept this at bay. She’d spent endless hours hanging in the narrow shaft of the Avallon IV, the water the same temperature as her listless body, soaking in every terrible impulse a guest had ever had, letting it leech every positive feeling from her. It had been worth it to see that joy amplified later. On the Winnet field, in the dining room, as poetry twirled over the ballroom. She had seen her efforts written up in magazines, talked about in conferences, reflected in the powerful guests who came to revel in her mind for a little while, not realizing just how thoroughly they were praising June when they said, This place, this place!

June pressed open the bathroom door. Stench roiled out; humidity coated her skin. The bathtub was not on, but it was full. Cloudy water had come up the drain and filled it to the edge, and then some. A rank puddle reached nearly to her feet.

She wondered how Mr. Francis had first stumbled across the ruined hotel. Where had he been going that he found himself here, in the middle of the mountains, his hand hovered over the top of a pool of bright water? Why had it stopped him in his tracks?

But she remembered how it felt to put her hand in the water at Casto Springs. She would have been caught, too.

Abandoning the bathroom, she followed the seeping water to the closed bedroom door. Inside, heat roiled. The water here was steaming. She smelled hot earth, damp stone, green things, growing things, the smell of the water as it completed its journey to the surface, just after being superheated by a hidden, undulating core. June’s feet splashed through the puddle as she pushed open the balcony door. Here, steam rose even more densely. The floodlights down below shot the cloud through with crazed glowing shafts. A carved mountain lion screamed sweetwater into the font.

She knew she had to go to the Avallon IV again. If not tonight, then tomorrow night, as soon as the diplomats were gone. Or else there would be no summer season, no fall season. The Avallon would cease to be an unchanging island, where all that mattered was a glorious present, every day. She would be general manager of nothing.

Upstairs, downstairs, inside, out. How wonderful it had been to realize that, with the water at her back, she could be understood. Not just understood, but beloved. She hadn’t begrudged the Avallon IV taking its due; the cost made it rare. But now it was hard not to think of the scale of it all. The joy, the luxury, the expense. June was the Avallon’s mind, the sweetwater its magnificent beating heart. But if she was wrong—then the Avallon was instead a huge, ugly animal, the sweetwater making the ideas more powerful than June herself ever could on her own.

Sandy had refused it.

Mr. Francis had safeguarded it until he found someone else.

And now June had no one but herself left.

She spread her hand over the top of the font’s churning water, but didn’t touch the surface. Had the water heard Lieselotte Berger as she jumped from this balcony? Or had she heard the water? It was hard to tell here at the Avallon. The guests made it what it was; it made the guests what they were; back and forth, mirrors facing each other.

The water strained toward her.

Run.

···

“Let me in,” June said.

The door was barely cracked. 411’s brilliant green eye appeared in it. “GM, are you drunk ?”

“411, let me in.” 411 had never opened the door all the way, not even on that dreadful night ten years ago, and June had never really asked her to. But tonight, June put her palm on the cracked door and pressed.

“Darling, you’re disgusting,” 411 said. “Do not ever do that in public where a man could see you.”

June hadn’t even realized she was crying. She said, “I need to talk to you. Actually talk to you.”

411 opened the door.

June fell through it.

For ten, fifteen, twenty years, no one had entered room 411, apart from Toad. Room service left food at her door. Housekeeping took the trash she left outside her door. Runner boys left her varied orders; every so often, boxes of discarded items took their place outside her door. If she ever got bored, lonely, or sick, there was no sign of it from the hallway. Everything was paid for by Mr. Francis, silently, automatically, and even after his death, a trust fund enabled her permanent existence here. If Madeline knew about it, she never said. Carrie sometimes threw rocks at 411’s window, but that was the closest anyone had come to articulating the shape of her story.

Now June was inside her room, gazing around with dumb surprise. She was not sure what her expectations of the room were, only that it defied them. She’d imagined the walls to be sloping with unsorted materials, evidence of a shrunken life, halted midstride by an affair that altered the course of it forever.

But it was not like that at all.

It was beautiful.

Every inch of every surface was designed. Art and unusual objects decorated the sitting room wall at precise, museum-like intervals. Books were neatly stacked this way and that to form a perfect rectangle of words beneath a desk that held three dress forms, each wearing a marvelously wild blouse, two still in safety pins. Another mannequin in the corner wore a jaunty top hat, a beautiful dress, and a man’s vest, the arms positioned to hold a book open. Here was a lamp with a hand-pieced shade, here a half-completed drawing of Winnet players. Here a gramophone, here a magazine propped beside an assortment of scented creams and masks. A trellis twined with scraps of leftover chiffons framed the door to the balcony.

There was no sense that 411’s life should have been anything but this.

411 herself was no abandoned garden, either. She was a handsome mature woman of indeterminate age. Her dark, shoulder-length hair, shot through with gray, was curled timelessly, with heavy bangs disguising any wrinkles on her forehead. She could not have been expecting anyone, but she was made up as if going out.

She was smoking a cigarette and she used this to indicate the chair by the desk. “Sit down and clean yourself up. You smell like purgatory and look like hell. I suppose it’s the same as it was last time, isn’t it?” She said last time as if none of their conversations between the first and this one had happened.

There was a tissue box on an end table; June used one to wipe her tears. “This isn’t about Gilfoyle.”

To her astonishment, she knew it was true the moment she said it.

Stubbing her cigarette, 411 poured two drinks. She drank both of them and then, after some thought, refilled one and handed it to June. It was strange to properly see her, because it was as if June had been seeing her all along. There was no surprise to her full appearance, standing there with a hand on one hip, giving June that glittering look; it somehow carried exactly the same effect as her eye glimpsed through the crack in the door.

“So what is this about?” 411 asked.

What was it about?

June said, “It’s about the Avallon and I.”

“The Avallon and me .” 411 went to stand on her balcony. How many times had June seen her from the other side, silhouetted just like that? “It is strange that you never left, isn’t it?”

The way she said it was meant to sting, and it did. June accused, “ You never left. You spent your whole life waiting for Mr. Francis!”

411 whirled around at once. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know! You as much as told me! Spent your life waiting for him to leave Madeline for you!”

The laugh. The laugh was definitely different on this side of the door. From the hall, it was buttercream. In person, it was arsenic and vinegar and vodka, all applied in the fondest way possible. 411 said, “It would have been a dark day if that man ever reappeared in these rooms, GM. Do you know why I stay? Look around you. I have been living in the finest hotel in America for half my life, on someone else’s nickel, letting me use all the means I have acquired and inherited to delight myself. What a wonderful life. I love the Avallon.”

The inflection was clear. “And me?”

“You’re just afraid to see what you are without it.”

June still had not touched the drink 411 had put in her hand, so 411 took it back. She downed it with a balletic air of practice.

“?‘Possum farmer,’?” June shot back.

411 laughed wildly. She amused herself enormously.

“What if my decision is wrong? No one manages me but me.”

“Are we still talking about the hotel and you?”

No. She was talking about Hannelore now, although she didn’t want to say that to 411. June was considering interfering in the rarefied air of high international law, and she didn’t want anyone else involved unless they had to be. June had made many plans in her day, and now she mulled over a new one: taking the matter of Hannelore into her own hands. And, more important, she considered what it would look like if she didn’t take the matter of Hannelore into her own hands. If she just kept the old chin up and got the hotel running as usual while the girl sailed silently back to Germany. June would have to live the rest of her life knowing that, for a few months, she had Hannelore under her roof, in her hotel, with all the power of the sweetwater behind her, and yet had done nothing. Was she really considering sacrificing it all for a single person?

Wasn’t that luxury?

“Come to think of it, I should do whatever I want and just frame you, you sow,” June said, and 411 snorted, breaking her second smoke ring in half. “This is right serious. I’m talking about maybe losing this place, maybe losing who I am here. You’d have to find a new social partner to talk to through the door. Toad, maybe.”

This line of conversation didn’t interest 411 at all. Bored, she said, “Who you are? Right now, you are just performing a wonderful script for society, pretending they’ll have you one day. How long would you like to pretend for? Another decade? Two?”

“Says the woman laden with diamonds.”

“Darling, don’t you understand? I’m not society, either, I’m just rich. What is it you love to say?”

Wealth isn’t luxury.

411 waved her off, reminding her, quite suddenly, of Tucker. “You just want me to cosign whatever you’ve already decided. Frank loved himself a bit of theater, too. Do you know what I think my best idea was, here at the Avallon? The glass snails. They were all over the carpets when he first bought this place, you know—live ones. You’d have to scoop them out of the fonts every day. Everyone thought they were hideous. Grotesque. Even after the place was cleaned up, you’d still find them inside. I told Frank to churn out beautiful glass snails for the guests and tell them they were special to this place, and suddenly it was an event whenever a live snail was found. It was the promise of the hotel fulfilled. So wonderful! The snails hadn’t changed. I just tricked everyone into loving them for a little bit. Here is my opinion: get out of my chair and go do what you’re going to do, GM. And tell your boys to hurry up with my books; I’ve run out.”

Just like that, June found herself back in the hall. The door was closed as if it had never been opened, and only the faint scent of brandy on her fingertips convinced her the entire episode had happened at all.