Q

by Christina Dalcher

  Z from St. Louis is cut off. Another voice replaces hers.

  “This is H from Washington,” the radio voice says, “telling us about her experience with WomanHealth.”

  “It was just a mistake. I got pregnant, and no, I wasn’t married. WomanHealth saved me.”

  I kill Petra’s voice with a finger, and scratch out a note on the pad usually reserved for shopping lists. It isn’t my best effort, but those damned Westminster Quarters chimes are singing out their time-to-go song. And for this, I think short and sweet is best.

  Dear Malcolm and Anne,

  I’m so sorry, but I can’t stay here anymore. Please don’t look for me. I hope to be home soon.

  Love, Elena/Mom

  A magnet, one Malcolm bought me from a long-ago trip to San Francisco, does the job of holding my words until someone comes home later today. After a last look around, I load the car with my three pieces, check for cash in my wallet, and start up the Acura, which I’ll dump at the nearest big-box store parking lot before going the rest of the way on foot. Cabs are no use to me; cabs keep records. My house, the house where Freddie and Anne played as toddlers, where Malcolm and I once sat up late discussing books and music and all things erudite, lingers for a few seconds in my rearview mirror as I drive away.

  And then it disappears, along with my forgotten coffee in the microwave.

  Thirty-Four

  Inside a brick building on the fringes of one of Washington’s less chic neighborhoods, the two women at the check-in desk are a study in shades of drab. Their name tags say Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Flowers, neither of which image they conjure up. Mrs. Parks teeters on a wooden stool behind the desk, a tall, insect-thin shape of a woman, while Mrs. Flowers takes our identification cards one at a time, scans them, and checks off names on a clipboard.

  “Sit down and wait until you’re called,” Mrs. Parks snaps at the woman behind me as she prints out a ticket and hands it to me. “Don’t lose this.”

  I turn, and the woman isn’t a woman at all, but a girl really, pink skin dotted with freckles, a thick froth of red hair, eyes that likely haven’t seen much of the world.

  “Sorry,” she says and moves to a row of chairs against the wall as Mrs. Flowers scans my card, checks my face against the photo on her computer screen, and puts a red tick next to my name.

  “You,” Mrs. Parks says, pointing her chin at the young woman. I take a step backward, because it seems that chin is about to poke me in the eye. She aims it toward me next. “Go. Sit.”

  “You forgot ‘Stay,’” I tell her.

  “Stay.” The eyes peeking out from above her horn-rimmed glasses show no sign of getting the joke. “You,” she says again.

  I roll my suitcase to an empty chair at the same time the girl-woman stands. “Ruby Jo Pruitt,” she tells Mrs. Flowers when she reaches the desk. “Good morning.”

  “Identification.”

  Ruby Jo fishes her yellow card from a tired leather hobo bag slung over one shoulder. And she promptly drops it. “Sorry.”

  “Pick it up, girl. I don’t have all day.”

  “You don’t gotta be so mean, you know,” Ruby Jo says, bending to pick up the card. Those eyes that haven’t seen much are shining. “Here.”

  Mrs. Flowers scans, looks, and ticks. Mrs. Parks prints another ticket, reminding Ruby Jo not to lose it. “Take your seat. Next.”

  In the past five minutes, more people have come into the room, mostly women, a few men, an entire spectrum of colors and ages and body types. The only free seat is the plastic chair, a relic from an old high school cafeteria, to my right. Ruby Jo takes it, setting her duffel bag between her feet. Her shoe brushes mine.

  “Sorry,” she says, rearranging herself, trying to make her body smaller than it already is.

  “Don’t worry about it. At least you didn’t scuff one of their shoes,” I say, nodding in the direction of Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Parks.

  “Yeah. Prolly woulda crushed me like a june bug if I had. How you like them two, huh?”

  Ruby Jo’s got one of those voices that most people can place on a map. It’s tinged with the hues of Appalachia, probably southwestern Virginia or West Virginia, the kind of dialect that screams poor, uneducated trailer trash. Looking at Ruby Jo’s dress and shoes, I might be on the right track about poor, but I’ll leave the trailer trash judgment to people like my husband.

  The slip of paper Mrs. Parks gave me is nothing more or less than a ticket. On the left is my origin and destination, printed in black. On the right side, there’s a barcode. The time at the bottom states an 11:00 AM departure. If we drove straight through, we’d cross the Missouri-Kansas border in about seventeen hours.

  Seventeen hours on a bus. Shit.

  “Where you headed, ma’am?” Ruby Jo’s eyes, the ones that haven’t seen much of this world, move toward my ticket.

  “Kansas,” I say, holding the slip of paper up. I’ve got nothing to hide.

  “Me too. Never seen Kansas. Never seen a place that’s all flat like that. Never seen the ocean, either, come to think of it.”

  Like I said, eyes that haven’t seen much.

  I put Ruby Jo in her early twenties, too young to have her doctorate, so, unlike me, she must be coming from a teaching gig at a green school. She also must be either out of her mind or have some unflappable call to the teaching profession to have gotten into the education game so recently. Looking her over, my best guess is the unflappable call, but there’s another possibility.

  Not many younger men and women pick teaching these days, not voluntarily, not like they did when Anne was starting school. There’s too much goddamned pressure now. It got to a point about ten years ago where the education departments at most universities saw enrollment rates spiral down to nothing and attrition rates skyrocket. Word was out to steer clear of teaching as soon as Madeleine Sinclair’s predecessor passed his Senate confirmation.

  So what’s to be done when there’s a demand but not a supply? What’s the procedure for that? For the Department of Education, backed by the muscle and money of the Fitter Family Campaign, there were two answers: finance and force. A carrot and a stick, to put it in simple terms.

  As it turned out, the stick worked better.

  Even with scholarships and stipends and promises of high salaries, pensions that would make a career navy admiral turn green with envy, it still wasn’t enough to fill college classrooms with prospective teachers.

  So started the draft.

  Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Flowers bark out another set of orders to the now-crowded room, and I wonder if they were on the committee that identified me as a potential educator and shunted me into the box I’ve been living in.

  “I figure you for an English teacher, ma’am.” Ruby Jo says “figger,” not “figure.” It’s new to my ears, but endearing all the same.

  “Nope. Biology and anatomy. You?”

  “Chemistry.”

  You’re kidding, I think, and as soon as the words are in my head, I regret them. They sound too judgmental, too needlessly surprised, too much like Malcolm. Instead, I say, “Organic or inorganic?”

  “A little of both,” Ruby Jo tells me. “You think maybe we can sit together on the bus ride, ma’am?”

  I take a look around the room. Every man and woman here seems miserable, like they’re about to be loaded onto a cattle car to a state penitentiary. Ruby Jo, though, she’s got a bit of spark.

  “On one condition,” I say. “You stop calling me ‘ma’am’ and start calling me Elena. Deal?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she says, and her face opens into a broad smile that warms me like a summer sun.

  Thirty-Five

  THEN:

  “Maybe you should try talking to her,” Oma said. We were in the kitchen at my parents’ house, and I had just come home from school.

  “Why?” I said. Today’s topic was the new girl in my third-grade class. She was small and dark and shy, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Rosaria Delgad
o didn’t speak more than ten words of English. The problem was compounded when our teacher made us partners for a science project and I ended up tied for the lowest grade in the class. “I got a C because of her.”

  “So, what? You’re going to make her feel even worse by treating her like a piece of old cheese? Leni, I am ashamed of you.”

  I stood there, arms folded in a defiant nine-year-old snit, watching Oma smear butter on toast. She offered me a slice, and I turned up my nose, even though I wanted it.

  The things we do for spite.

  I never spoke to Rosaria again, and I made sure my friends didn’t. It was easier than I thought, making up stories about Rosaria Delgado’s family and where they lived. We sneered at her outfits and mimicked her accent. If our teacher put one of us in a group with her, we ignored her input and did things our way.

  We did this from January until June. In September, Rosaria didn’t come back.

  We’d won.

  Oma didn’t seem to think so. “Here is a question, Liebchen,” she said. “What if she were your daughter?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. Not at nine years old. So I made one up, just to make her think I wasn’t backing down. “My children are all going to be perfect.” And I stormed out of the kitchen with my best nine-year-old attitude, thinking, So there.

  Thirty-Six

  Here’s a thing I’ve learned:

  Never trust any of those mapping apps.

  It isn’t that the apps are wrong, but they don’t account for refueling stops, rest stops, unclogging-the-onboard-toilet stops, food stops, change-of-driver stops, or letting-off-the-passengers-whose-final-destination-is-Missouri stops. Nor do they foresee unexpected snow in the mountains, a tire blowout in southwestern Pennsylvania, or the roadwork that reduces I-70 to one slow-crawling single lane of rush hour traffic on the outskirts of Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis.

  To put it kindly, our trip from Silver Spring, Maryland, to ten miles outside of Columbia, Missouri, is twenty hours of blue burning hell.

  And, as Ruby Jo puts it, “We ain’t done yet, honey.”

  We’ve napped. We’ve eaten apples and stale microwaved apple pies from fast-food restaurants. We’ve taken turns watching each other’s bags when one of us goes to the bathroom, which, by the time we reach Columbia, Missouri, has begun to smell like the bottom of the monkey cage at the National Zoo. We’ve traded stories and shoulders to rest on, played that old license plate game, and stared out the window at streetlights, telephone poles, cornfields, nothing. We’ve cried.

  In twenty hours, Ruby Jo Pruitt and I have become friends.

  “So,” she says while we’re in line at what I hope will be the last burger and fries joint I see for the next decade, “how come you’re here?”

  I tell her everything there is to tell. Freddie’s transfer, my intentionally screwed-up teacher test, doing a runner from my home like some desperate refugee. In turn, I get Ruby Jo’s story.

  “I flunked,” she says. The “I” comes out like an “Ah.” “Flunked it good and well and honest. They asked some question like could I comment on the effects in the global chemistry community of some sonofabitch old guy who got the Nobel Prize in 1925. I just couldn’t do it. I mean, does that—pardon my French—horseshit really matter?”

  “No. It doesn’t. And let me get this,” I say, forking over a ten-dollar bill for eggs and cheese on biscuits. The food smells like old grease and sweat, but at least it’s not a hamburger this time. I order two salads as an afterthought and hand the girl at the cash register another five.

  “You know,” Ruby Jo says between bites of her biscuit when we’re back in the bus, “they don’t do biscuits here like they do where I come from.”

  “I bet they don’t,” I tell her. I’ve had real southern biscuits, the kind made with lard and Martha White self-rising flour, the kind that tricks your tongue into thinking you’re eating a cloud. What we’re eating could be used as a weapon.

  Ruby Jo tells me about her scholarship and her high school sweetheart and how she almost set her chem lab on fire when she made plasma with two halves of a green grape and a microwave. “Fascinating stuff, them plasmas,” she says.

  My face must have taken on the shape of a question mark.

  “No. Really. All you need is a little grape and one of them cheap microwaves. You got your ions in the grape, right?”

  I nod. It’s not my field, but I follow, like any well-trained and overeducated citizen. Also, I know Ruby Jo is doing her best to distract me, to stave off another crying jag.

  “Look, any living thing has ions,” she goes on. “So you get yourself a living thing that’s the right size, about a quarter wavelength of the stuff your microwave puts out, like a grape. Then you gotta cut it and make sure it’s still connected.” She breaks a piece of tomato from her fast food salad so only the skin holds it together. “This little section here acts like a sort of antenna, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Now you got your ions and your electrons and your energy, and everything gets all excited and bursts into flame!” I recoil into my seat when she says this. “Wanna hear about my manganese dioxide and hydrochloric acid experiments?”

  To be honest, I’m not sure I do.

  Ruby Jo doesn’t wait for an answer before explaining how to make chlorine gas, or how to create explosions with gummy bears, or how she wrote secret messages to her girlfriends with lemon juice. “There was one girl in my school who had real strict parents. I reckon they were half off their rockers. Anyway, when they took her out of the fourth grade to homeschool her, I’d send her blank pieces of paper and she’d read ’em when she did her ironing chores. Then she’d sneak a note back to me the same way.”

  Somehow I don’t think I could do as much damage, or be as sneaky, with biology and anatomy. What would I do? Send secret messages in blood and bones?

  Ruby Jo’s made up of ions and electrons and chemicals, too. She’s got more energy in her than—as she would put it—a rutting jackrabbit. It strikes me that the bus we’re on could have made it from Maryland to Kansas on Ruby Jo Pruitt power. She keeps talking, changing from one subject to another, keeping the conversation alive and keeping me sane. Finally, she stops and asks me a question.

  “Think you could teach me to talk nice like you?”

  “What’s the matter with the way you talk?” A list of epithets, every one of which I’ve heard from Malcolm’s mouth, floats up in a cartoon thought-bubble: cracker, yokel, redneck, hillbilly, white trash. Never mind that “hillbilly” might even make some sense, since half of the Scotch-Irish Protestants who set up home in the mountains named their firstborn sons after William of Orange. Maybe more than half. All these words Ruby Jo has probably heard at one time or another. I wonder how much they sting.

  “You know. Like what them folks from town call poor white trash.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Hell, I mean, we are poor. My granddaddies worked in coal mines and came home black as midnight for a sack of nothin’. But poor ain’t dumb.” Ruby Jo gazes out the window at another crappy, depressed town. “Well, not all the time, anyway. But the way I talk, that’s the first thing people think.”

  I want to tell her accents are pretty much fixed once a kid hits her teen years, but Ruby Jo beats me to it.

  “Look at Madonna. She’s from Michigan, right? But now she sounds all English.”

  “Sure, hon,” I tell her, thinking Madonna’s linguistic affectations probably necessitated a small army of dialect coaches. “We can work on it if it’s important to you.”

  Another smile, another one of those happy-warm-sunshine feelings floods through me.

  When we reach the Kansas state line, there are only three of us left on the bus. Ruby Jo, me, and an older woman who keeps her head down and her mouth shut.

  “About five hours to go,” the driver says.

  Five hours to go. Five more hours until I see Freddie.

  Thirty-S
even

  Kansas is flat as a pancake. No, it’s flatter than that. It’s so flat, it might as well be concave. And I’ve never seen as much corn as I have in the past few hours. I can’t think how anyone could possibly use this much corn.

  We turn off about fifteen miles west of nowhere, onto a gravel road leading up to double gates. A low sun slices through the window where Ruby Jo’s head is resting. When the bus swings wide to the left, the light moves across the iron rails of the gates and rests on a small hut. A gatehouse.

  “Looks grim,” she says.

  “Grim” is a nice word for what this shithole looks like.

  “Just like my old granny said it would.” Ruby Jo shades her eyes and peers out toward the gatehouse.

  “Huh?” I ask, but she hushes me.

  A man heaves himself up from his chair behind the small building’s window, pulls open the door, and swaggers out, beer belly swaying in a rhythmic plop-plop over the beltline of his uniform. He’s dressed in gray, and the two patches on his left shoulder are familiar. One is the sunshine-happy Fitter Family Campaign’s emblem; the other is the Department of Education’s tricolor peace symbol with the words Intelligentia, Perfectum, Sapientiae. From where I sit, the guard doesn’t look intelligent, perfect, or wise.

  “All right, people. I need to see tickets and ID cards,” the guard says, like he’s addressing a mob of anxious concertgoers at Madison Square Garden instead of three high school teachers at the entrance to a crumbling complex of nineteenth-century buildings in Winfield, Kansas. He climbs aboard, checks the bus driver’s manifest, and looks us over, one by one. “Mm-hmm. You first.”

  The old woman with the bent head stands and picks up her purse. She’s not too steady on her pins, but neither the driver nor the guard seems to give a shit. I stand up, tossing the bunched-up fast-food bag on the empty seat next to Ruby Jo, and walk toward the front of the bus.