They remove the woman from the room next to mine. Not dead, no. The opposite, actually. She’s never looked more alive than when they drag her out of the room, screaming and clawing at the door. I am already awake when it happens, staring out at the highway through a thin slat in the blinds. I am a few uninterrupted minutes away from leaving the motel and this town. My legs have been shaking for weeks. I dream of running and it feels like flying. My racing heart wakes me in the middle of the night.
An ambulance arrives silently. A police car after that. I gather, from the eventual confrontation, that she is being taken to some home for the terminally ill. Some estranged family member has made that choice for her.
Eddie is out of the bed and in the lot before I even wonder if the noise will wake him. He shouts at the paramedics until the police pull him aside and warn him against further interference. The woman screams after him- him, and eventually me, standing in the doorway- to convince them that she’ll be all right on her own. Neither of us do. How could we?
The woman’s room is left unlocked in the chaos, her door ajar. The sickly smell and yellow light seep out onto the pavement outside my room. I hesitate to cross it and, when I do, it’s only to close the woman’s door. I see the indention of her body on the comforter and the path of her pacing in the carpet and I shut them quickly away. Eddie jogs over.
“Think we should take some of her stuff to her?” he asks.
I demonstrate the locked handle and he puts on a face that he wears the rest of the evening. He’s wearing it at the table near the window, looking out the slat with me, when he says:
“I’m sorry things have been so shit recently.”
I thumb a card in my pocket, a picture of the Traitor, and I scratch my nose.
“Me too.”
Another Friday arrives and we play a few broken rounds of the game before Sebastian steps away to smoke and several others linger, bound by cautious unrest. Caleb is the first and only one to broach the subject.
“We need to change it back.”
Nobody disagrees, which is as much a mutiny as these men will ever conspire toward. They begin to drop the Traitor from their hand, drawing up as though someone had dealt them a missing card. Even Sebastian seems relieved, at first, to find himself lost in the old, familiar archetypes and their old familiar behaviors for an evening.
It isn’t until later, when Diego stands and drops a card from his sleeve that Sebastian sees what has happened. He seems to see them all- all the Traitors, all at once, secreted in pockets and stuffed between the pages of old novels on his shelf, folded under baseball caps and into shoes.
“What’s this?” he asks, picking the card up from the rug, “You cheating, Diego?”
“No, man,” Diego says, squirming in his clothes, “No… Me and the guys thought…”
His move to snitch sets the others off. They throw down their cards and shout about the problems with the game and threaten Diego and try to excuse the subterfuge. They spill beer and chew pretzels so that they can spray the crumbs from their mouths and make angry gesticulations. Sebastian is silent, for a moment, and I swear his eyes are on every card in the room. For that moment, he’s in the place he goes to make these things. Then, he holds up his hand and he says:
“I know who’s doing this.”
And, as sure as I am that he’ll say Caleb he turns to me instead.
“You.”
He bends the Traitor in his hand, folding off-center so that the illustration crumples on its arm.
“You all better be out of here by the time I get back,” he says, and he goes for another cigarette.
Everyone moves to pack up, the game abandoned on the table like a half-finished story. Eddie, seeing that I haven’t moved, sets a hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t know what that was,” he whispers, “But he’ll get over it.”
I should be embarrassed, I realize, to be called out like that. I should be thinking of every reason it couldn’t be me that’s ruining the game. Instead, I try to keep a straight face as pain racks the left side of my body, radiating from the arm Sebastian would have me lose.
-traveler
