LOST Chapter 6: The Guesthouse

Read chapter 6 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The guesthouse has six rooms. Four face the harbor, one faces the alley, and one faces the hill, and I have learned that you can tell something about a person by which room they ask to be moved to after their first night. The harbor people want the view even when the view is fog. The hill people are looking for quiet, or for a particular quality of morning light they have probably read about in a travel essay. The alley people have stopped expecting much and are pleasantly surprised by the alley, which is in fact a perfectly good alley, shaded in summer and dry in most weathers, with a neighbor who grows tomatoes in pots along the base of the opposite wall and who has never once minded me taking a few. I am telling you this because it is the kind of thing I pay attention to now. I have been running this guesthouse for five years and I have been in this world for six and in that time I have become someone who notices what people want before they say it, which is useful for the guesthouse and useful for everything else. I recognized the man in the photograph three days before he checked in. The photograph is the one I keep in the back of the linen cupboard on the second floor. Not hidden, not exactly, but not displayed, because it is a photograph of eleven people standing outside a building in a world that is not this one and I do not need guests reading it over my shoulder while I make up the beds. I look at it occasionally, the way you look at something you need to remember accurately. Seven of the eleven I know personally. Four of them I know only from the photograph, one of whom is a man standing in the back row, slightly out of focus, who is looking at the camera in the specific way of someone who does not quite believe this is happening. His name is Sai. I knew his name before I saw it on the booking form because his name is on the back of the photograph in Nao's handwriting, with a note that I will not reproduce here because it is Nao's note and Nao's business. I had not met him. I had been told, in a conversation six months ago that I have gone over many times since, that he would come. I had not been told when. I had not been told how he would arrive, though I could make an educated guess, or in what state. The booking form said one night, possibly extending. The handwriting was the handwriting of someone filling out a form while thinking about something else. He had taken the first available room without asking what faced what, which meant he had either looked up the guesthouse in advance and knew the layout or he had not thought about it. Room four, which faces the harbor. He checked in at two in the afternoon. I watched him cross the small lobby from behind the front desk, which is where I do most of my watching, because it gives me a direct sightline to the entrance and the stairs and the corner where the chairs are, and from which I can see without appearing to look. He was carrying a messenger bag that had the dented quality of something taken everywhere for years, and he was wearing the expression of someone managing several things inside their face simultaneously. Tired. Alert. Trying to appear less alert than he was. I know this expression. I wore it myself, the first six months. I gave him the key and the breakfast information and told him the harbor-facing rooms got fog in the mornings but that it usually lifted by eight. He said that was fine. He said it looking just past my left shoulder at the notice board behind me, which has the tide times and the bus schedule and a hand-drawn map of the harbor walk that a guest made three years ago and left behind and that I have kept because it is genuinely useful and also because I liked her. He was reading the notice board with the unfocused attention of someone who is not reading the notice board. He looked at the entrance again before he went up the stairs. The second time. I noted this in the way I note things now, which is to say I filed it and went back to what