A Secret Time Machine

Susan was a wife and mother. She was a member of the PTA. She was not the type to go around breaking and entering. Yet here she was, doing just that.

Entering, anyway. Someone else had already done the breaking.

She couldn’t help herself. Every time she drove past the abandoned hotel, she felt it calling her. One day last month she’d poked around the outside, wandered the grounds and peeked in the windows. She’d hoped that would satisfy her itch to explore the place. It had—for a while. Now the itch was stronger.

She wanted to walk through the arched doorways she’d seen from the windows. She wanted to close her eyes and envision what it had looked like in the ‘40s, when it was a gathering spot for the beautiful people. She couldn’t have explained it to anyone—and hadn’t even tried—but she was tired of fighting the urge. Today she’d just do it.

She parked a couple of blocks away, in case an empty car outside would trigger a call to the police. For the last few days she’d struggled to come up with a way to sneak out of her house at night to explore the hotel under cover of darkness, but she’d finally decided that would look more suspicious anyway. She would walk up in broad daylight, as if she had every right to be there.

On her last visit, Susan had discovered a back door with a broken latch, wedged shut with a block of wood. Teenagers or street people or someone had obviously been there. “Not breaking,” she whispered as she toed the wood away and pulled the door open. “Just entering.”

The air inside smelled like the pages of ancient books. Appropriate, because she thought the hotel was like a book with its own story to tell. She’d come into what had once been the kitchen. She closed her eyes, blocking out the sight of decay, and heard pots clanging, a chef yelling, the clatter of dishes against countertops. Susan smiled. She could make her own mind-time machine in this place of history.

Susan spent two hours wandering the hotel. She found evidence that others had been there, but she found no one there now—another good reason to visit in the middle of the day. She walked through the lobby, danced in the ballroom, made her way into one of the guest rooms and imagined all the living and loving that had happened there.

By the time she left to pick the kids up from school, Susan felt calmer than she had in months. Her time wandering amid the ghosts had revived her in a way no afternoon at the mall ever had. “My own time machine,” she whispered, then met her gaze in her rearview mirror and smiled.

It helped, in the middle of an ordinary suburban life, to know where the escape hatches were.