She's Lost Control, Page 6

  Laughter in the background. “No, you may go.

  But she didn’t go.

  7

  She calmly went into the bathroom and washed her hands in the burning hot water. She stared into her reflection, and did not notice the water scalding her hands, or when her blood began to swirl down the drain as well.

  The video played in her mind, but this time she was in it. She sat before the intern the entire time, her face turned resolutely away. When they were done with the intern the video in her mind would rewind, and the junior secretary from two years ago replaced her. They broke her too, but the secretary was still there. She still looked away.

  Then the cleaning lady from four years ago. The legal assistant from before that. Another before that. The secretary always looked away.

  And suddenly, she was her mother, walking down a darkened hall, thirty years in the past. Hearing nothing. Seeing nothing.

  The secretary put her fist through the mirror.

  8

  When the junior managers left, she returned to her desk. She found a letter opener.

  Her boss was sitting at his desk, the TV now dark and silent.

  “Why Leora, I thought you’d gone home!”

  “I did sir. I forgot something.”

  He looked back down at his desk, no longer interested. She came up behind him, quietly. Her face was blank.

  When the blade touched his throat, her eyes filled with fire. When then blood cascaded down, she said not a word.

  No sound escaped her.

  Then the bloody and broken executive fell to the floor, and the secretary laughed.

  But her laughter sounds like screaming.

  THE BLACK WALLPAPER

  Cynthia Pelayo

  “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.”

  —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

  ERIC AND I rarely get away from the city. The city has its hold on us. Teeth clenched in the meat of our necks and sharp claws dug into our shoulders.

  He had been asking for months, perhaps even years it seemed, for us to get away. I couldn’t. First there was school. Then there was graduate school. Then there was work. And then, the blurred line between home life and work life blended into a watery existence where both became one.

  I couldn’t take time away from either because no matter where I turned there was someone coming to me with a request, a need for help, a chore, or just more work. Everything and everyone demanding more of me than I could ever provide. I was always needed. By someone. By something. And I was very tired.

  “The Congress Plaza Hotel?” I questioned when we arrived.

  “It’s just for the night, and come on, you made vice president. We have to celebrate.”

  Being promoted to vice president had been such a long time coming, such a grueling process that I didn’t even want to celebrate. I only wanted to sleep.

  “We could have celebrated at home, with dinner . . . ” I said.

  “You mean you behind the glow of a laptop screen? People have to learn to live without you. We have our lives to live. Plus, I’d like kids someday, you know?”

  I gave Eric a look that said not now.

  No one could live without me.

  On the drive here, my phone had vibrated countless times. There were calls, voice messages, text messages, and alerts from various social media accounts. Everyone seemed to be looking for me.

  “Don’t answer,” Eric said as he saw me reaching for my phone. “If there’s any day anyone could wait, it’s today. Hey,” he said just as we parked the car and waited for the valet. “Any thoughts on the wallpaper in that room?”

  I had many thoughts on the wallpaper in that room. I was happy, at least, that I was able to find a new wallpaper I liked for that room. The old wallpaper had been horrible. Yellow. I had never seen such horrible paper in my life.

  “No,” I answered. I didn’t want to talk about the wallpaper. Not now at least.

  He laughed at me, and I ignored him. “You were the one that wanted to change it.”

  I handed the valet the keys and just as we reached the revolving doors of the hotel Eric sucked in some air through his front teeth, and stopped right before the revolving doors. “I forgot my phone.”

  “Is the reservation under our name? I’ll just check us in.”

  “You don’t need to do that. You don’t have to take care of everything and everyone.”

  He was being especially nice and helpful. This was very unlike him. “I’ll check us in. Meet you at the bar?”

  “Yes,” he nodded, and I walked through the revolving door, and then he was gone.

  The reservation was in my name, and I laughed to myself because even in this small surprise gesture to do something nice for me, Eric felt the need to involve me at the planning stage.

  “Just one night?” the woman asked.

  “That’s all I need,” I answered.

  I made a right, passing the large lobby, and moved toward the bar, which was so dated it now seemed modern in a weird way, forced vintage. Visiting the bar at The Congress Plaza Hotel was an outing most Chicagoans had participated in at one point or another. Eric and I had visited the hotel’s adjoining bar a few times in the past, to escape the biting cold after viewing New Year’s Eve fireworks set across the sky at Navy Pier.

  It wasn’t a premier or modern hotel, but it was a massive hotel, with historical significance situated along Michigan Avenue. It was old. It was old Chicago, and in many ways it represented me, us, our work ethic and the hold this city held over us. That’s what we Chicagoans did: We worked hard. We endured time. And we did what sometimes seemed like the impossible.

  This hotel opened in 1893 and originally featured cobbled streets, gaslights and horse drawn carriages. I remembered that from when I was an undergraduate, working full time and taking mostly afternoon and night classes so I could work during the day, paying my way through college. Most of my peers were on scholarships or their parents were paying for their schooling. I didn’t have either luxury. One of my journalism professors worked as a walking tour guide, and one day she brought us out here to the hotel, to tell us about its structural and colorful history. I suppose this hotel had been a part of me for a very long time, and I suppose it would always be.

  I took a seat at the bar. The bartender placed a cardboard coaster on the copper top counter in front of me. The image on the coaster was that of the hotel, two towers linked together by a smaller building in the center.

  I ordered an old fashioned.

  “Preference of whiskey?”

  I had once read that in an 1882 article from the Chicago Daily Tribune, a Chicago bartender said that the most popular of the in-vogue old-fashioned cocktails were made with whiskey.

  I looked at the shelf behind him. “Death’s door.” It seemed the fitting whiskey given the occasion and the place.

  I placed my phone on the counter. My mother had called three times since I entered the hotel. My brother six. I had several new text messages, all of which I ignored. I wasn’t going to read any of them. There was still no message from Eric.

  I turned to the photos in my phone and the first had been a collection of wallpaper swatches against the wall in that room.

  “This paper looks vicious,” I had said to myself when I was comparing patterns.

  “How can paper look vicious?” Eric had asked.

  “Some things have an influence on you,” I answered.

  That night Eric told me to go to sleep early, that he would help take care of things. Instead he fell asleep on the sofa. I stayed up all night preparing that room. The next day I lead three conference calls at work. Later that next night when I got home, I went to the basement where I kept my art supplies, acrylics and charcoals, canvas and pencils. I screamed because I wanted to paint but no longer knew how. Work, home, life had taken whatever creative energy I thought I had.

  My drink was ready and then it was gone. Another arrived. The sun outside
had set and the room filled. They were mostly tourists from out of town, surrounding suburbs, and nearby states who hated the city yet came here to play.

  A group of about twenty people stood just near the entrance of the bar, huddled around a figure with a curled mustache, dressed all in black.

  “Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen,” the man in black projected a radio announcers voice that filled the bar “you will see that very light in the corner flicker.”

  The bartender noticed my look of curiosity. “Ghost tour,” he said as he wiped the bar top with a white cloth. “Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”

  I had done one of those tours before. A long time ago. It was just another thing that felt like the Chicago thing to do.

  The tour guide continued. “There’s very little connection to Al Capone and the hotel. The most I have been able to tie to him is that there are indications a phone call was made from the lobby of the hotel to his home in Florida just moments after the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

  I glanced back at my phone. Now a call from my car dealership. I sighed. My car was more than overdue for an oil change. Yet another thing to do I didn’t have time for.

  “You look tired,” the bartender said.

  “I am.” I had probably slept four hours that night before and probably less than that the night before that.

  “Kids keeping you up late?”

  “Everything’s keeping me up late,” I said.

  “Did H.H. Holmes ever stay here?” a woman wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey asked a little too eagerly. The bartender and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. Tourists liked that about Chicago; they had an almost fervent need to know each and every gory detail of crimes from the past. Yet, crimes that occurred in the present repulsed them so that they flung hateful words about the city every time it made the news. Crimes of this city’s past were once crimes of the present.

  Someone from the ghost tour group had motioned to the bartender and in minutes he was pouring beer into pint glasses.

  “Before we make our way to the site of the Eastland Disaster at the Chicago River, three more horrifying things to note about this hotel.” The tour guide held out his left hand, holding up one finger. “First: The Florentine Room. There are tons of stories about whispers and phantom gunshots being heard from this ballroom when no one is there. One night-security guard quit on his first day when he heard music coming from this room, and no one was inside.

  “Second: Another ballroom, the Gold Room, what I’ve mostly recorded about this room is a general feeling of unease. There have been accounts of people saying they heard a woman whisper into their ear. I can confirm that I experienced the same thing during one of my paranormal team’s investigations.”

  “What does she say?” a teenage girl with blue-black hair asked.

  “It’s just this faint female whisper and it’s difficult to make out what she’s saying.”

  She’s probably begging people to leave her alone, I thought.

  “Finally, the Shadow Guy. Some people think it’s the ghost of Captain Lou Ostheim, a Spanish American War veteran who shot himself in the hotel in 1900 after waking up from a nightmare. A lot of guests have reported seeing this shadowy figure. One guard even told me that he chased it up to the rooftop, thinking it was a person before realizing what it was. There have been many other suicides here.”

  I tapped the glass on my phone. Still nothing from Eric. Once again I turned to the photos. I settled on the picture of the wallpaper I had chosen for that room. “It has a sort of sub pattern,” I remembered telling Eric as I held the paper to the light. “It’s a different shade here, and here.” I pointed out the lace pattern within the paper, but he didn’t looked up once from his phone.

  “Hey, my mom’s having a birthday party for my dad tomorrow,” he said. “Can you pick up a cake after work?”

  “Really, Eric? You’re telling me now? How many times have I told you I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”

  His face was blank.

  “I guess I’ll take myself to the doctor.”

  That same day, I purchased a car, since I could no longer depend on him.

  My phone rattled on the counter.

  “You’re popular,” the bartender said.

  It was my mother calling again. She left a voice message I wouldn’t check. Nearly every voice message I had in recent memory came from my mother. In nearly each message she ended with telling me I needed to sleep more, eat better, take care of myself. However, she never told me how.

  I returned to the picture of the wallpaper. I remember how it looked like the first time I brought it into that room. The color. The embellishments. It’s like that paper was made specifically for our house, and that room.

  “Alright,” the tour guide announced. “Make sure you settle up your tabs and let’s be off.”

  A few members of the tour made their way back to the bar. The bartender printed up totals and handed out bills.

  The tour guide was a little more than a quarter way through with his beer when an older gentleman in a blue polo asked, “What about the sealed room?”

  A few heads turned, seeking whatever gruesome find he could provide. “I noticed there were a few young ones in the audience. I usually save that one for adult only shows, but,” he searched nearby making sure there were no children in hearing distance.

  “None seem to be listening.” He knocked back the rest of his beer and set it on the counter.

  “There’s stories of a room being so haunted it had to be sealed off. Some say it was room 666, and actually, there really is an office where the number room 666 should be, but it’s not numbered that, of course. There’s also one other Chicago ghost tour guide, my old boss, who claims that Stephen King’s 1408 is based off of a room here at the hotel, but that’s not true. King never mentioned any specific room in this or any hotel in the introduction of 1408.”

  The old man shook his head. “No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of.” The old man looked behind the tour guide and waved over to a woman in a bright peach blouse. She was holding a bag from the gift shop at the Art Institute of Chicago, multicolored scarves and art books peeking out from the top of the bag.

  “Dear, what was that one we were told about? On the thirteenth floor . . . ?”

  I turned to the bartender and took another sip from my old fashioned. He was scanning a credit card and shaking his head, again, trying not to laugh.

  “No, it was the twelfth floor,” the woman said.

  The tour guide drew in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he hesitated. The base of his radio announcer’s voice faded. His participants now crowded around him, awaiting a tale he seemed hesitant to share.

  “The Congress Plaza used to house immigrants and refugees from around World War II. In 1939, forty-three-year-old Adele Langer of Czech-Jewish descent had been staying at the hotel with her two sons, Jan Misha and Karel Tommy. Her husband wasn’t there, since his travels had been delayed. Adele and her children were in the country on a six-month visa, which was scheduled to expire. Adele grew nervous. Her husband wasn’t there. The threat of deportation hung over her. She was in a foreign country with her two small children, and she was alone. She grew depressed. Worried. Overwhelmed.

  “On August 4th of that year, she took her children to the zoo for the day. They returned to their room on the twelfth floor. There, she called her children over to a window. She opened it. She pushed them both out. Then, she jumped out of the window. What’s worse is right after their deaths, an unopened letter was found awaiting the family’s response. They had been offered permanent refugee status in Canada.”

  “Maybe that’s the horrible sealed off room people talk about,” the woman said.

  The tour guide agreed and then rushed his group off to their next destination. To another location of murder and mayhem. This city was host to many.

  My phone vibrated. The blue screen alerting.

  “I’m at the room. W
here are you?”

  I rolled my eyes and silently cursed Eric. Like always he had completely ignored or just entirely forgotten what I had said.

  “Told you I’d meet you at the bar.”

  “Sorry. Coming.”

  “No, Fine. Wait there,” I responded.

  After walking past the lobby, going through the gilded elevator and down a long corridor, I met Eric in our room on the eleventh floor. The front desk had given him a keycard. He was seated on the bed. The room was furnished no worse than inharmonious.

  “Welcome to a Lakeview King Room.” He took my bag and set it down. “Where you have a king-sized bed, decorative round table, two chairs, and a desk where I hope you will not be working from all night.”

  “Where’d the valet park the car?” I removed my jacket and hung it in the closet. “Back at our house?”

  “The car was blocked in. An accident or something. Didn’t you hear the sirens?”

  “No,” I sat down on the bed and allowed myself to fall back against the stiff mattress. My entire body ached. “I’m so tired.”

  “You work too hard.”

  “You say that like I have a choice. I have to work. There’s the house, and every single repair that seems to come up at the most inconvenient time. My student loans. My credit card debt. My car. My mom’s car . . . ”

  “I know you like taking care of them…”

  “Like taking care of them? I have to take care of them. If I let my brothers take care of them both my blind father and diabetic mother would be near death.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe you should go back to painting. You were happier when you were painting.”

  I laughed. “Find me the time to paint.” I was so mad I wanted to cry, but didn’t. I had learned to hold it in until it burned.

  I lay my arm across my eyes. That did a decent job of blocking out the light. The lighting in the room was that dim.

  “How was the bar?”

  “Fine. Old fashioneds and entertainment.” I moved my arm away and sat up. “Dammit.” I remembered an email I owed my boss.