Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Card
On her first night at the desk Meg reads the rules, locks a guest out by obeying them, and calls his room while he knocks on the glass, then watches him walk into the lake at six and come down the stairs for coffee.
The rules were on a laminated card taped to the front desk, and the day clerk wanted to go home before I finished reading them.
"Out loud is better," Erin said, zipping her fleece. "Last winter I read it every night. It helps."
It was 11:46 on my first night at the Tamarack Lake Hotel.
The lake had frozen over for the first time that afternoon.
I read it out loud.
RULES FOR THE NIGHT DESK
1. After midnight, you are the only person awake in this hotel.
2. The front doors lock themselves at midnight and unlock themselves at six. Do not open them in between, for anyone, whatever face it wears.
3. Anything that knocks after midnight is a late guest. Do not let it in.
4. Never leave the desk between midnight and six.
5. If a guest calls the desk after midnight, tell them to stay in their room until morning.
6. Never go down to the boathouse level.
7. If you find the lake door open in the morning, close it and tell the manager. Tell no one else.
8. Keep the lobby curtains closed after midnight.
9. At six, whatever is still outside belongs to the lake.
I looked up.
"Rule five says a guest might call me after midnight," I said. "Rule one says nobody else is awake. They can't both be true."
Erin smiled.
"Then do what both of them say."
"My mother's upstairs in 214. She has Alzheimer's. She's been awake after midnight every night for three years."
"I know. First winter they ever let a clerk bring family." She pulled on her hat. "Sit with her at the desk if she comes down. Just don't open the doors."
The job paid forty-five thousand dollars for the winter.
Memory care cost nine thousand dollars a month, and I had eleven hundred in the bank.
At 11:51 the old man from 108 came down the stairs in his overcoat with a pipe in his teeth.
At dinner he'd told my mother a joke about a moose and put three creams in his coffee.
"One quick smoke on the side porch, young lady," he said. "I'll be in before the bell."
"Doctor's in by midnight every night," Erin told me. "Night, Meg."
She went down the back stairs to the staff rooms, and I was alone.
At midnight the bolts in the front doors slid shut by themselves, loud as a dropped shovel.
Nobody had touched them.
At 12:20 somebody knocked on the glass.
It was the man from 108.
He stood on the front porch in his overcoat and pajamas, holding his pipe, and his breath fogged the glass in two big clouds.
"The side door locked behind me," he called. "Silly old fool. Let me in, would you?"
He pressed his left hand flat on the pane, and his wedding ring clicked on it.
I didn't get up.
The front doors were forty feet across the lobby, and rule four said I didn't leave the desk.
"Miss? It's ten below out here."
I picked up the house phone and pressed the button for 108.
It rang twice.
"Hello?" said his voice, thick with sleep. "Is it morning?"
On the porch, the same man knocked again and called, "Miss?"
My hand was shaking so hard the cord rattled.
"Stay in your room until morning," I said into the phone.
"All right, dear," he said, and hung up.
The man outside kept knocking.
He told me he was a family doctor from Saranac Lake.
He told me his wife had been dead four years and he still talked to her in the car.
He told me he had a daughter who visited on Sundays.
I kept my eyes on the card.
At 1:05 my mother came down the main stairs in her flannel nightgown, holding the rail with both hands.
"Peggy," she said. "Where's the water? I want to go see the water."
Rule one said she wasn't a person.
I came around the desk to the bottom step, which was as far as I'd let myself go, and took her hands.
They were warm and dry and smelled like the lavender lotion I put on her every night.
My father's wedding ring turned loose on her left hand, the way it always did.
My mother was a person, and the card was wrong about her.
I told myself it was still right about a man who could be asleep upstairs and knocking downstairs at the same time.
I sat her on the bench behind the desk and tucked my cardigan over her knees.
She saw the man at the glass and frowned at me.
"Peggy, let him in. He's freezing."
"I can't, Mom."
"Your grandmother would never leave a man out in the cold."
"I know."
She fell asleep against my shoulder at two.
The man outside stopped knocking at four and sat down on the porch swing in the snow.
He watched me through the glass until it started to get light.
At six the bolts slid back by themselves.
He stood up, set his pipe down on the swing, and walked down the lawn to the lake.
He walked out onto the new black ice, about forty yards.
It opened under him without a sound, and then it was flat again.
I sat there with my mother asleep on my shoulder and couldn't move.
At 6:04 the stairs creaked behind me.
The man from 108 was coming down them in a plaid bathrobe, holding the banister with his right hand.
"Morning," he said. "Is the coffee on?"
His wedding ring caught the lobby light.
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