A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [51]
“Yes,” she said, “I saw him again, but not until I became interested in the buried hotel, the hotel that sleeps, quietly, under the dunes. I was working part-time as a volunteer at the village museum by then, amassing my own peculiar collection and demonstrating that I could be successful in turning my obsessions to good use.” She sat back in her chair and described the village museum, her odd choices for the collection: a rendering of a family tomb made from human hair, a painting of a dog mourning the recently drowned body of a young child, cumbersome pieces of machinery that resembled instruments of torture, stuffed and boxed birds and animals, and all those ominous-looking porcelain dolls that she honestly believed had survived for a century or so because no child really wanted to touch them. There were certain hats, as well, hats that appeared to her to be mistakes of creation, as if some God hadn’t been able to decide whether He wanted to make a reptile or a bird or a clump of turf.
Jerome laughed. “I think I would like to see those hats.”
“Andrew had heard about the museum’s efforts to try to preserve the dunes,” Sylvia continued, “to prevent a cement company from carting away more and more truckloads of sand. He just came by to see if there were any old photographs in the collection, or any information at all about the hotel that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and I, I of all people, I took him out to the dunes. We drove the fifteen miles out to the very tip of the County.” She remembered the tension in the car, the sand shifting under their feet, his hand moving toward her hair, and the almost unbearable silence on the way back.
“So there really was a hotel buried by sand?”
Sylvia smiled. “You didn’t believe me,” she said.
Jerome did not answer. He leaned forward to crush the half-finished cigarette into an empty cat food tin on the table in front of him.
“Malcolm taught me to drive … another miracle, much celebrated by him. He taught me how to drive and, once he was certain that I had mastered this skill, he bought me a small car and set me free to explore the roads and architecture of the County. The roads were easy to negotiate, and had been well known by me ever since I had memorized the County atlas when I was a child. The shops were more difficult because once I entered them I would be forced to engage in conversation, and this alone would heighten my awareness of the oddness of situations where people had no foreknowledge of my condition. It was in such a shop, however—a shop near the dunes—where an old man had told me about the hotel. He had played in the attic of this building as a child, or at least he claimed to have done this, at a time when the rest of the hotel was already buried by sand. By the time he was a young man only the roof was visible, and then, not much later, the building disappeared forever.”
As she said this Sylvia remembered listening to the old man speak. She had been examining a butter press where a pattern of oak leaves and acorns had been carved into a block of pine about four inches square. The shop was dark and full of cobwebs, and had in a previous life been a milk house or stable. Dusty windows, grey light. She had picked up the object and paid for it while the old man scrabbled through a collection of paper bags in which he was going to wrap it. And all the time he had been talking, Sylvia had been seeing the faded, stained wallpaper of the rooms in which the old man had played, the sun coming through broken mullions, the sand surrounding it.
“I went home that day with one butter press, two bags of groceries, and knowledge of the very thing that—though of course I did not know this—would lead me to Andrew. The hotel, then, became my sole preoccupation for several months of that year. At dinner I told Malcolm stories connected with it, stories about the old man as a child playing there until he could no longer squeeze through the windows because of the rising sand. Stories about how the owner of the hotel awoke one morning