Niagara Motel Read online

  NIAGARA MOTEL

  Copyright © 2016 by Ashley Little

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Cover and text design by Oliver McPartlin

  Edited by Susan Safyan

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  To come

  ISBN: 978-1-5515-2661-4

  While some historical events depicted in this novel are factual, as are certain locations, persons, and organizations in the public eye, the following is a work of fiction. The author acknowledges that some temporal inconsistencies exist in the novel. The characters and their actions are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author, nor does the author pretend to have private information about such individuals.

  For Warren

  Contents

  Part One: The Motel Life

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two: Living the Dream

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Three: Home is Where Your Mom Is

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Tucker’s Mix-Tape

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  THE MOTEL LIFE

  1

  I was born in a laundromat in Paris, Ontario. If you knew Gina you wouldn’t think it was that weird. Gina is my mother. She says she’s a dancer. What that means is she’s a stripper. Sometimes she says exotic dancer if she’s really comfortable with you. Sometimes she goes all the way and there’s another word for that. But I’m not allowed to say it. Not when Gina’s around. Sometimes late at night when Gina’s at work and I can’t sleep and I’m lying in bed in whatever crap-hat motel room we’re in, I whisper it up to the ceiling, whore, hoo-er, hoaaar. And sometimes I think that word sounds kind of beautiful.

  Gina has a condition. It’s not her fault. She had it before me and it got worse after she had me. It’s called narcolepsy with cataplexy. The doctors took a long time to figure out what was wrong with her. Some people thought she was lazy, some people thought she was severely depressed, some people thought she was a drug addict, but Gina’s not any of those things. What happens is she falls asleep a lot. Then other times, she gets a sleep attack where she conks out and can’t move, but she’s not actually asleep, she can still see and hear. That’s the cataplexy part. Sometimes she falls asleep while driving and that’s how I learned to drive when I was seven and why we mostly take the bus now. Sometimes she falls asleep when we’re walking down the sidewalk, and I have to stay beside her and make sure nobody steals her purse. Sometimes she falls asleep when she’s at work but the managers don’t know about narcolepsy with cataplexy and they think Gina’s messed up on drugs so she gets fired and then we have to get our skinny asses the heck out of Dodge, as Gina says. Other things happen to Gina too because of the narcolepsy. She can’t sleep at night like regular people do. She sometimes has dreams while she’s awake and when she has nightmares, she thinks they’re really happening. She has medicine for it but it’s really expensive and it doesn’t always work and sometimes she runs out and doesn’t get more for a while. The medicine is called GHB which is the same thing that’s in the date rape drug. I’ve heard Gina tell her friends that she’s the only person she knows who gives herself roofies, and then they all bust a gut laughing like it’s the funniest thing in the world.

  I’m eleven years old and I’ve been to sixteen different schools. Last summer we rode the Greyhound from Penetanguishene to Prince George and stopped in all the dumb little towns along the way so Gina could work. Gina says I’ve seen more of the country than most adults.

  It’s not so bad, I guess. Sometimes if I start making friends with kids at school, or if I can tell a girl has a crush on me or something, I’ll wish we didn’t have to leave so soon, but sometimes if I don’t like my teacher or the kids are mean, then I’m glad we get to leave, so it’s good but it’s bad too. Mostly, I keep to myself and read books at lunch and recess. I used to figure, what’s the point of making friends since we’re just going to leave in a few months anyways? But recently, I realized that even if you have a friend for one week or one month, and you’re super sad when you have to leave them, it’s worth it.

  So one night I’m sitting around in my underwear in our room at the Prince Motel, eating salt and vinegar chips, watching Late Night with David Letterman, and Gina comes in, looking tired ’cause she always looks tired, ’cause she doesn’t sleep properly on account of her condition.

  “Hey, Tucker.”

  “Hey. How come you’re home so early?”

  She sat down on the bed and took a chip out of the bag and ate it. Then she took another one. “How do you feel about Niagara Falls?”

  “I don’t know. Have I been there before?” I kept watching Letterman, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was looking at me with that mushy face she sometimes gets when she’s sad.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  Gina figures there are more people in Ontario so there’s more married businessmen there and married businessmen are the best tippers. Also, a woman named Daisy that she worked with in Edmonton told her that Niagara Falls was a goldmine. So the next morning we packed up all our stuff then went for breakfast at Denny’s. I got the Lumberjack Slam and Gina got what she always gets, the Moons Over My Hammy because she loves saying it and thinks it’s hilarious.

  “Give me a sip of your chocolate milk.”

  I slid my glass over to her.

  “Do you want a bite of my Moons Over My Hammy?” She started to laugh. Then it happened.

  Her head hit the side of the plate as she slumped over the table. Her eyes were open and she was looking at me, sort of, but she was totally paralyzed. The waiter came over, flapping his arms around like a startled pigeon.

  “Oh my God! Is she okay? Do you want me to call 9-1-1?”

  “No. Don’t worry.” I reached across the table for the ketchup and squirted a pile of it onto my plate. “This happens all the time.”

  He stared at Gina and looked like he might start to cry.

&
nbsp; “Do you have any hot sauce?”

  2

  The Greyhound bus from Prince George, BC, to Niagara Falls, Ontario, takes three days, eight hours, and fifteen minutes. Gina wanted to get there as soon as possible, and since we didn’t have to stay in a motel for three nights, we’d have a little extra money so we could do some fun stuff like go to Marineland and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and crap like that.

  Gina slept for the entire trip. I didn’t even see her get up to go to the bathroom. I tried to wake her up a few times when we’d stop for meal breaks but she’d just turn toward the window and scrunch up more in her seat. I remember she told me once that the only time she can get a really good sleep is when she’s riding in a car or on a bus. Something about the motion of the road being like a cradle, rocking her to sleep.

  The woman across the aisle from us had curly blonde hair, enormous boobs, and a leopard-print shirt. She did crossword puzzles, drank Diet Coke, and smoked one cigarette every time we stopped. She kept her cigarettes in a little silver case. I think they were menthols but I couldn’t be sure. The first night on the bus, she was sleeping and her blouse kind of fell open and I could see a little bit of her nipple. I stared at it for about two hours until I fell asleep.

  The next morning we were somewhere in the mountains and she smiled at me. Her lips were all glistening and pink.

  “Do you want a piece of gum?” She held out a stick of Juicy Fruit across the aisle.

  “Sure.” I took it and our fingers touched. “Thanks.”

  “That your mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she do?”

  “You mean besides sleep?”

  She laughed. “Yeah.”

  I looked at the woman clacking her fake nails against the arm rest. I shrugged. “Same as you, I guess.”

  She sniffed. “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

  “She’s a washed-up touring stripper.”

  She blinked a few times, and I could see the globs of mascara flaking off around her eyes, then she turned toward the window. The next time the bus stopped, she moved all her stuff up to the front, and I didn’t see her or her nipples for the rest of the trip.

  When I was younger, Gina would sometimes bring home friends from work after her shift. They would drink wine coolers and eat pistachios and laugh and tell jokes that I didn’t understand the punch lines to. They told me that I was adorable and I used to love them all. With their high, tight boots and their colourful sparkly bras, I thought they looked like superheroes. But eventually, they all started to look the same, and somehow, as I got older, they got older too. Their laughs got raspier and their makeup got thicker, and instead of telling jokes, they complained about everything in the world. They stopped telling me I was adorable and started telling me to treat women right and never to break anyone’s heart, to put the toilet seat down and stand up straight, to wear a condom, but if I forgot, at least stick around if I ever got a girl pregnant, and to always, always, always leave a tip for good service. Roz always gave me these pointers while pinching my cheeks. Roz was Gina’s friend who didn’t have any skin between her nostrils, just one giant nostril, and looking at her was like staring into a black hole. Roz pinched my cheeks so hard sometimes I had to go to school the next day with two blue bruises on my face. One day I told Gina I was sick of her friends telling me what to do all the time and just who did they think they were anyways?

  “They’re my friends, Tucker,” she said. “They just want the best for you.”

  “They’re stupid.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  She sighed. “It might be true, but everyone needs friends. Especially when they don’t have a family.”

  “I’m your family,” I said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Look,” Gina said. “What if I told you that you couldn’t hang out with your friends? How would you like that?”

  I shrugged. “I wouldn’t care.”

  “You wouldn’t care?”

  “We’re never in one place long enough for me to make friends anyways so it doesn’t even matter,” I said.

  “You’ve had friends before,” Gina said.

  “Not really.”

  She looked at me and tilted her head to the side.

  “I’ve never had a best friend.”

  Her eyes got misty. She touched my hair but I pulled away. “One day we’ll find a place that’s just right and stay there for a good long while,” she said.

  “Like a whole year?”

  “At least a year, maybe more.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That would be good.”

  She smiled.

  “But can you tell Roz not to pinch my cheeks anymore? I really hate it.”

  “I can do that,” she said.

  When I saw Roz after that, she didn’t pinch my cheeks, but she gave me noogies, which hurt even worse, but at least didn’t leave bruises.

  I put my seat back and slept for awhile. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night to a car horn beeping and couldn’t get back to sleep. I read my book, Choose Your Own Adventure: The Abominable Snowman. I got to climb Mount Everest but I kept dying. Once I was swallowed by an avalanche. Once I went too high up the mountain without letting myself acclimatize to the lack of oxygen. The third time, I froze to death because I lent my jacket to a friend who had fallen on a patch of ice and broken his arm. I didn’t want to die anymore and I didn’t care about finding the stupid Yeti either. He probably didn’t even exist. Why do some people spend their entire lives hunting for creatures that no one really believes are real anyways? Why doesn’t anyone take them by the shoulders and yell in their face, “Hey! Look! This thing you’ve spent your whole life thinking about and looking for doesn’t friggin’ exist so you can stop wasting your time now and go do something useful!” I shoved the book to the bottom of my backpack. There was another book in there that Mrs Jamieson, the librarian at my school in Prince George, had given me on my last day, Where the Red Fern Grows. It had a big stamp across the top that said DISCARDED. I spent the rest of the night reading it. Then I was glad that leopard-shirt lady had moved up front and Gina was zonked out, because I got kind of emotional over that book, and I didn’t want either of them to see me like that. I stared out the window at the sunrise. It looked like someone had spilled their orange juice across the prairie sky. I wondered what it would be like to have a dog, to have anyone love you so much that they would sacrifice their own life for yours. I looked over at Gina. She was fast asleep. Her white-blonde hair fell around her face like dandelion fluff. I thought about how she’d had me when she was just a teenager, practically still a kid, like me—and that maybe, in a way, she had done that for me. Then I thought about how if Gina died, I would probably stop eating too, like little Ann had done when Old Dan died. And as I drifted off to sleep, I hoped that when Gina and I were dead and gone, someone would plant a red fern between our gravestones.

  We picked a motel that was away from the strip because Gina said it would be quieter. What she meant was, it would be cheaper. The paint on the sign out front was all cracked and peeling so you could barely read what it said. If you stood back and squinted you could almost make the letters out. It said, Niagara Motel. I thought it sounded regal. When we passed the payphone in the lobby I imagined calling up Bryce, a boy I knew from Prince George, and telling him that I was glad to finally be out of stinky P.G. and that I was staying at the Niagara Motel. And that my life was absolutely wonderful and would be from now on.

  I was excited to be in a new city, but most of all, I was happy to be off the bus. My back hurt and my feet felt fat and my mouth was all dried up inside. Gina, on the other hand, had just broken the Guinness World Record for Longest Nap Ever Taken and was practically glowing from the rejuvenation of it all. After we checked into our room and had showers, we got Cool Ranch Doritos and Crystal Pepsi from the vending machine. Gina sai
d Crystal Pepsi was better for us because it was clear and that it tasted the exact same as regular Pepsi. Not very often, but sometimes Gina is very wrong about things. How could a clear drink taste the same as a coloured drink? It was pretty much impossible. I hated Crystal Pepsi but drank it anyways because I was so thirsty. Then we went out to explore our new town. Gina and I went to a wax museum, and Brick City where you could build stuff with LEGO all day, and even though I’m way too old for LEGO now, it was still pretty cool. The wax museum was my favourite though. Upstairs it was all wax movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and the Terminator and that president of the United States who was also an actor, but downstairs was called The House of Horrors and it had all these famous criminals from the olden days. There was lots of blood and guts and gross write-ups about what the criminals had done and how many people they had killed and Gina said it wasn’t appropriate but she let me look at it all anyways because I said it was a history lesson, and besides that, we had already paid.

  “How come criminals get to be as famous as movie stars, even though they do bad things?” I asked as we studied the wax figure of Jack the Ripper.

  “I don’t know,” Gina said. “I guess you don’t need to have any real talent to become famous.” She put her hand on my arm. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  We went to an IMAX and learned all about the legend of the Maid of the Mist and the people who went over the falls in barrels and survived, then we got mini-donuts and hot chocolate and rode the Ferris wheel for about an hour. We were supposed to get off after the wheel went around three times, but Gina blew a kiss to the operator and he let us stay on. When we finally got off he asked Gina for her number. She said we didn’t have one yet because we just moved here, which was true.

  “Maybe I can take you out for coffee sometime, then.” He looked down at his boots, then back up at her.

  “Oh, I don’t drink coffee. Can’t sleep if I drink it.”

  This was also true. But it was kind of sad how his face fell as she said it. She grabbed my hand then and pulled me away. “Thanks for the ride!”