Nicholas Claro
Housekeeping
On the phone she said her hotel might be better. “I can’t do the house,” she said. “It’s too intimate and familiar. I left a key at the front desk.”
I am in the elevator thinking of this conversation. I remind myself how familiar I am with intimate details of her. The seahorse-shaped scar on her inner-thigh. The happiness she harbored after her mother’s death. The way she taps her collarbones when nervous.
The door dings and slides open.
A teenaged girl—blonde, freckled, maybe fourteen—stands in the doorway. She wears a baggy hoodie, pink swimsuit bottoms, flip flops. A rolled towel’s pinned beneath an arm.
She’s on the phone but stops when she sees me.
“My bad,” she says, and steps sideways to give me room. When I pass by, she whispers, “Not you, Kels. Just some guy.”
The room is at the end of the hall, across from the ice machine. I tap the card against the reader and the lock whirs.
I knock.
“Housekeeping,” I say, and push the door open.
She sits at the foot of the bed in a red silk blouse and black skirt. A hand rests at the base of her throat. Her thumb and middle fingers drum the bones there.
I get it. It’s been a long time. I thought I’d be nervous, but for some reason I can’t help but wonder if she wore this outfit on the plane or changed after check-in. If this matters.
Before I close the door, I slot the DO NOT DISTURB sign over the outside handle.
She stands and smooths the creases from her blouse.
I should say something. But the more I think of what to say the less sure I am of what that something should be.
She coughs—looks around the room.
A thick blade of light cuts through the cracked curtains. It climbs the queen-sized bed and up the wall next to a chair and lamp. There’s a dresser. The TV’s muted.
“It’s not quite the Ritz,” she says. “And your dad jokes still aren’t funny.”
“I should have just said ‘it’s me,’” I say.
“I meant jokes,” she says, taking a step toward me and tentatively lifting a hand before she drops it to her side.
“Did you think it’d be this difficult?”
“I had some idea,” she says. “But we can pretend it isn’t.”
*
She is curled beneath the covers, snoring. I slowly work my arm from beneath her pillow, clench and unclench my fingers until the feeling comes back to them.
I cover myself with a pillow and get out of bed.
Five stories down, there’s a kidney-shaped pool. Its surface mirror-like. I’m poised to cinch the curtains closed when I see the girl from earlier. She’s alone, standing at the edge of the diving board, knees bent, hands clasped above her head.
A memory flares. The YMCA. Our daughter, who never made it to the age where she could’ve dove into the water herself, scampers to the end of a baby blue diving board. I’m treading water—in this memory I am always treading water—and coax her to jump by saying, I’ve got you. She jumps and her small, slick body slips through my wet hands and goes under. This is only for a second, but it feels like forever. I bring her up, surprised she isn’t crying, but laughing, kicking wildly.
The girl dives.
And I dive, too. Back into pretending that I am on vacation. That the woman in bed is still my wife. Pretending now that this girl rippling below the surface of the pool is our daughter.
I keep watch.
She breaches at the far end if the pool, slicking back her hair before she hoists herself out.
The girl leaves a trail of watery footsteps on her way to the chaise lounge where she towels off, collects her things, and disappears.
From the hallway, ice clatters into a bucket.
I slide the curtains closed and crawl back into bed. Her sweet, simple smell rises off the sheets. She is still snoring. I curl a hand around her thigh and brush my fingertips over the firmer skin of her scar before I close my eyes.
On the backs of my eyelids, I watch our daughter step out of the elevator and walk down the hallway. She opens the door and walks into this room damp and smelling of chlorine, flip flops clapping her feet, until she realizes we are asleep and slips them off.
Nicholas Claro holds an MFA from Wichita State University. He is the author of the story collection This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Necessary Fiction, XRAY, Cleaver Magazine, Variant Literature, and others. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.