This place is like The Shining, we say. Look at the lobby, old-fashioned but fancy, with the lacy wooden arches above the front desk, the green marble floor, those four huge columns—cracked in spots but trimmed with gold—that soar all the way up to the mezzanine (a word we just learned, which we love to say). Look at the elevators, which take us to our apartment on the sixth floor, or to the open balcony of the mezzanine, or to Irma’s room on the third floor. Can’t you just imagine those elevator doors sliding apart so blood pours forth and slow-motion shoves that gold sofa across the room, curling in waves over the oak tables and the brass lamps and trash cans? 

We live here now because Irma offered our mother a job when Mitch left us “high and dry.” Our mother says this every time his name is mentioned, how he walked out on her and her ten-year-old twin girls and bills she couldn’t pay and creditors calling, and those women—one with a sick baby on her hip—ringing our front door all hours, asking where that no-good son of a bitch had gone to. “Your guess is as good as mine,” our mother said. Then she slammed the door, even on that sad-looking lady with the gunky, snotty baby. 

We were glad to see Mitch go because he wasn’t our real dad anyway and he lied too much, yelled and made us all cry too much. After school let out for summer and our mother said it was time for us to “start from scratch,” we came to the Marx to live. It felt like an adventure at first, going from our brick house with front yard and porch, potted nasturtiums and two white plastic chairs, to this giant hotel across the tracks, where railroad men stay for a night or two, sometimes more, when they haul coal from West Virginia mines to Roanoke and then all the way down to Norfolk.  

It was like an adventure at first, but now it’s like we don’t exist. Our friends don’t know we’re here since we can’t tell anyone. Because we’re running from bill collectors, but also because decent folks don’t go around telling how they’re living at the Marx Hotel, which everybody in town knows is a place for rail men, but also for hookers and low-lifes and the “destitute” (a word we just learned, but hate to say). 

In the daytime, if we’re not on the white-hot sidewalks of the old downtown, slogging past the long-closed movie theater and diner or the boarded-up jewelry store, then we’re inside helping our mother behind the front desk. We check them in and out—the men with tired eyes and coal-black hands, their frayed nylon bags hanging at their sides. Sometimes we help Irma in the grill, which gets busy after the midnight train rolls in and the men are eager for cheeseburgers and beer. We take orders on little green waitress pads and feel grown up and important, stepping from table to table through air that smells of grease, fried onions, and coffee.  

Irma watches us like our own mother when we do this, and she doesn’t let anyone bother us, even that Frank Fletcher who got wasted one night and kept teasing that he’d grab us if we got too close. He had a funny smile, and we felt bad for him when Irma twisted his ear and hauled him to the elevator. She shoved him inside it and punched the button for his floor while everyone laughed. Irma is a big woman, with liner like black marker around each eye, and she doesn’t put up with a thing. But most of the men are kind, and only want to tell us stories and bad jokes. They want to be friends of the folks who live here so they feel like they belong too, even when this doesn’t seem like our place either. Even when we’re all so far from home. 

At night, we lie in bed and tell stories about the people we’ve met at the Marx, the things we’ve heard and seen, and we try to scare each other for fun. We talk about The Shining, which we saw just before we moved here, when a babysitter wanted to see it so bad she took us to a matinee and made us swear not to tell our mother. It was the only R movie we’d ever seen, and at night it creeps back on us. So we joke about dressing up like the ghost twins in the movie, holding hands and standing at the end of a hallway until a hotel guest walks out and sees us. We laugh so hard at this. We swear to do it as soon as we can find matching dresses. Meantime, we crook our index fingers and say, Redrum and It’s not real. It’s just like pictures in a book. 

At night, before sleep, we stare out the window by our bed, where we have a perfect view of the train cars below, all filled with coal, waiting to make their way to big ships at faraway ports. Look how easy, we say. We could jump from the overpass and straight into a coal car. Imagine hiding there, rubbing our faces and arms black with coal until we’re invisible. Then sleeping while the train rumbles along all night until we wake up in Norfolk, a whole new place, near the actual ocean. Can’t you just hear the gulls call? Can’t you taste the salt?  

But then, just look. See how the railyard shines beneath the lights, the cars glowing golden, the mounds of coal gleaming like slick, black diamonds. Can’t you see Frank Fletcher smile as he hands one to you, promising the real thing someday? Don’t you think it’s pretty? Don’t you think it’s the most beautiful place in the world? 

Cathy Cruise’s short stories have appeared in journals such as AmericanFiction, Appalachian Review, Vestal Review, Necessary Fiction, Phoebe, Pithead Chapel, Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. Her first novel, A Hundred Weddings, was a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist and a ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Prize semifinalist. She works as a freelance writer and editor in Northern Virginia whereshe lives with her husband and two children. Visit her at www.cathycruise.com.