by Shobha Rao
Before she left the diner, she bought a bag of chips, a bottle of water, and a package of what looked like little cakes.
She walked back to the bus station and sat on a bench outside, facing the row of trees but with a view of the street and the parking lot. It was fifteen minutes to eight, and she tried to stay awake until the ticket counter opened. She watched the drift of the low, round clouds rising out of the edge of the earth with the sun. To the west, the mountains, caressed now by morning light, turned pink and green and charcoal, the clouds above them also low, seeming to gather and gaze at those hills as if they were children. Savitha looked at the mountains and the clouds and thought, This is the most I’ve seen of this country. This is my widest view. And then she thought again of Mohan. A pain blossomed in her stomach and spread, thin and blue as ink, to her chest. She focused again on the mountains, the clouds, but they were distant and preoccupied. She concentrated instead on the street and the parking lot. At one point, a tiny swirl of tumbleweed rose into the air, spinning like birds. It was nearly transparent, whirling in the gust, carried by its own buoyancy and the slightest exhalation of wind. Savitha closed her eyes—just for a moment, she told herself—and fell into a light sleep.
She was woken by a car horn, or maybe a voice, and saw that it was a little after eight. She jumped up, cursing herself for falling asleep when they could be here, here, and ran inside, clasping her ticket stub. She went to the counter, held out her ticket, and said, “Hello, madam. When is bus to New York?”
The ticket lady, a black woman with crimson lipstick and silver glitter on her eyelashes, blinked, as if orbiting her two moons, and then she looked at Savitha’s ticket. She said something Savitha couldn’t understand. “Pardon me?”
The lady turned away and then brought out a chit of paper. On it, she wrote, $109. “But I have ticket,” Savitha said.
The lady shook her head and said, “That’s only to Spokane. This is the cost of a ticket to New York.” She pushed the chit of paper toward Savitha, and she took it. Another small white rectangle of paper.
She walked out of the bus station.
Along the side of the bus station was a curved road, and beyond it, another parking lot. And beyond even that were yet more buildings and yet more parking lots. Savitha looked and looked at the endless, unbroken pattern, despairing, and then she noticed that she was still clutching the chit of paper in her hand, dampening it with the sweat of her palm. She threw it into a trash bin. The clouds, since the early morning, had fattened, and scuttled lazily eastward; Savitha watched them with envy. She walked with a lurch to the southern end of the station, and then to the northern. She sat again on the bench outside, listless, wondering what to do. Then she got up and walked again.
She walked for some minutes until she reached the edge of a river. Here she sat down on another bench and tried to keep herself from crying. She hugged her knapsack to her chest, as if it were the only hope left to her, and she realized, with something nearing heartbreak, that it was. She had no idea what to do, how to get more money. She’d clearly misunderstood the man who’d sold her the ticket in Seattle, and now she thought, Even if I hadn’t eaten the sweet dosas in the restaurant, I still wouldn’t have enough money. I never did. She felt a stabbing pain at the end of her stub, a phantom pain she had not felt in many months. She shook out her arm and considered walking some more, but her tiredness returned, more parched, depleted, so she merely sat and looked at the river.
As it neared midafternoon, more people arrived at the river. There was a jogger or two; one man was peeling an orange; a few mothers stood in a group, watching their children at play.
Savitha blinked as if waking from a deep sleep. She was hungry, but she thought she should save her chips and cakes. She didn’t dare spend the money she had remaining. She drank water from a fountain and walked back southward, though away from the bus station; that was the first place they would look for her. She turned the corner. There was a long street, leading into a cluster of buildings. Cars were parked along the street, and as she drifted toward the buildings, she caught sight of the license plate of one of the parked cars. Savitha stopped in her tracks. She glanced up and down the empty street, then she bent down and read it again slowly. She was not mistaken: the letters added up to the words New York. She sat down, right there on the curb next to the car. What was she doing? She was waiting. What was she waiting for? Anything, she thought, I’m waiting for anything.
Her stomach growled. She succumbed and ate the chips and the two tiny cakes.
After an hour or so, an elderly couple came walking toward her. The woman was wearing pink pants, just past her knees, and a yellow shirt that read New Mexico, Land of Enchantment. All Savitha could read was the word New, and she counted it as a good sign. The woman’s silver hair was curly and cut close to her head. She wore pink lipstick that she’d tried to match with her pants, but clearly hadn’t, in a gauche way, and Savitha thought she must’ve always been so, even as a young woman, on the edges of beauty, at the very walls of prettiness, but never quite inside. The man was wearing a baseball cap and jeans and a checkered shirt, and they were obviously married. And had been for many years, since their youth, Savitha thought, noticing the familiarity, the distance, the dull ache between them. When they reached Savitha, they looked at her inquisitively for a polite moment, and then they saw her stub; they turned, suddenly self-conscious, hesitant, to their car. The New York car. The man took out a set of keys.
Savitha jumped up. “Pardon me, sir, madam. New York? You go to New York?”
They both looked at her again, befuddled, and then the woman let out a small whoop, and she said, “Oh, honey, this is a rental car. We’re not going to New York. We’re heading down to Salt Lake.”
Savitha stood there and watched them.
“Show her, hon,” the woman said. “Show her on the map.”
The man brought out something from the glove compartment and unfolded it into a wide piece of paper. He laid it out on the trunk of the car, and all three of them bent over it. “Here,” he said. “This is where we are.” Then his finger traveled south and east, and he said, “And this is Salt Lake City. This is where we’re headed.” He looked at Savitha; Savitha looked back at him. She held her stub away, behind her back. But he seemed to no longer see her stub. He seemed instead to sense how confused she was, how crestfallen, and, as if it would comfort her, he trailed his finger to the very edge of the map and said, “And this is New York.”
They all turned back to the map, and by now Savitha had realized the couple was headed mainly south, not east. But she didn’t want them to leave; she liked them. She could tell they were parents, that they knew a kind of love that was limitless and hopeless, both at once. She grew desperate; she considered, at the very least, asking them for some money, but was shy, embarrassed, and didn’t know how. And then, again with a rare kindness, the woman looked at Savitha for a long while, and said, “Maybe she can ride with us, Jacob. Come over to Butte with us.”
He shook his head. “That’s all mixed up, Mill. She’ll be a tad closer, but Spokane’s a better spot for her.” He stopped and said, “What’s your name, anyway?”
Savitha nodded and smiled.
He pointed at himself and said, “Jacob.” He pointed at his wife and said, “Millie.” Then he pointed at Savitha.
She smiled again, wider, and said, “Savitha.”
“Saveeta,” he said.
Savitha looked at the mountains in the distance, standing like sentinels, like guards against the east. The old man followed her gaze and said, “A tad closer is a tad closer, I guess; come along if you want to.”
She turned to them. First to him, to decipher what he’d just said, and then to the woman. She was smiling. A little of the pink lipstick on her teeth. “Come on now,” she said, “get in,” and motioned to the rear door. Savitha stood for a moment, unsure what to do. She understood by now that they weren’t going to New York, despite their license plat
e. She also understood, in that moment, her piercing aloneness, her billowing sorrow—she had no money, no food, and no road behind her.
She climbed into the backseat.
The couple chatted between themselves for some time. At one point, the woman said, “Where you from, honey?”
Savitha didn’t understand what she’d asked, so she said, “Yes, yes.”
The woman opened a bag of peanuts and offered them to Savitha. She could’ve easily eaten the whole bag, but Savitha politely took one and said, “Thank you, madam.”
“Call me Millie,” the woman said, and then leaned her head back and was asleep a few minutes later. Savitha heard her softly snoring.
The man drove in silence for a long while. They were in Idaho now, and the clouds grew thicker, huddled close against the horizon, and were laddered against the distant mountains, now to the east and to the west. The mountains themselves, Savitha noticed, were streaked with tendrils of blue and red. The valley between the bowl of mountains, the one they were passing through, was green and fertile and reminded her of the fields around Indravalli, fed by the Krishna.
The man popped a peanut into his mouth. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. “Spent many of my days out here,” he said, clearly talking to Savitha, though she had no idea what he was saying. “Fishing. The Bitterroot, Salmon, every little creek and stream. Spent most of my twenties and thirties back there in Coeur d’Alene.” He pointed out the passenger side window. “Right there, right down there is Trapper’s Peak. Spiked, like this.” He showed her with his hands, his elbows guiding the steering wheel. “Can’t look at it too long, though. It’ll break you up inside. That’s how some mountains are.”
His eyes in the mirror were watching hers.
“What is your story, anyways? How’d you end up on that damn sidewalk? And how in God’s name did you lose that hand?”
She met his gaze and then looked down. She liked his voice. She liked the way it summoned her, summoned even the uncomprehending, the wandering parts of her.
“I couldn’t even take a guess. Not one. And what are you? All of twenty?”
She wanted to tell him something, maybe something about Poornima or her father or Indravalli, but there was nothing she could piece together that would’ve made sense to him, and so she was quiet, listening.
“Well, I know accidents happen. I know all about that. I’ve had my share. I could tell you stories. Boy.” He stopped; he shook his head. Savitha’s eyes lit up. She understood that word: boy. She began to listen even more carefully. “I got one,” the man said, his voice rising. “I got a story for you. It’s about a little boy. Little. I’ll say he was about four. He and his mama and daddy lived in Montana. Just them. Just the three of them. His father was a ranch hand. One of those cattle ranches with hundreds and hundreds of heads. One of those ranches where you could spend an entire year just fixing the fences, let alone calving and vaccinating and culling and weaning. A big place. You get the idea. Well, one day, when this boy was four, his mama up and ran off. With some traveling salesman that came around, maybe, or a heavy machinery salesman. Hard to say, because immediately, before the boy could say boo, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Arizona. Tucson. His daddy put him on a bus, by himself, and sent him down to the desert. And you know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened: the boy found his spot. He loved it, the desert. His grandparents lived in a little house surrounded by dirt and sand and cactus, no fences, and with a yard that ended far away, in a low range of blue and purple and orange mountains. Well, the boy couldn’t get enough of it. He’d play, but mostly he’d sit and watch those mountains. He’d watch them so close it was as if he expected his mother to walk right out of them. Walk out, take his hand, and lead him away. Not back to Montana, mind you, but deeper into the desert.
“Some time after the boy moved to Arizona, his grandparents hired another boy to work for them. Older. A teenager. Just someone to come around and help with the chores. For instance, they had a detached shed that needed to be cleaned out. Out back. And they wanted help with building a porch. The sides would be braided thistle, to keep the sun out during the day, but open to the west, facing into the mountains and the sunset. They joked with their grandson. They watched him staring into the mountains—coming in only for the hottest part of the day, when the sun was directly overhead—and they laughed and they said to him, When that porch is built, we’ll never see you again.
“Well, the teenage boy—let’s call him Freddie—began with the porch. He built it in a couple of weeks, and then he moved over to the shed and started in on that. He must’ve seen the grandson dozens of times, talked with him, even answered a question or two the little boy had for him, but he’d never shown any particular interest in him. He was a teenage boy, after all, and the grandparents thought having a bit of company must’ve been nice for their grandson.
“And it was. It was. But the third week in, Freddie called the little boy over to him. It was just about sunset. The boy’s grandparents had finished their dinners, and they were sitting out on their new porch with iced teas and smoking. When the boy walked into the shed, hardly any light coming through the door, Freddie coaxed him into a corner, took the boy’s arm, and he said, Shhh.
“Well, you can imagine what happened next. And it kept happening almost every day for the next month. And during all that time, the boy heeded Freddie’s words. He never made a sound, not one, but in the evenings, in the desert quiet, he could hear his grandparents, sitting just a few feet away on the porch. They’d laugh, they’d bicker, but mostly, they’d just talk of this and that. The weather, for instance. Or the cactus out front that had bloomed last year, but not this year. Or their small aches and pains, the ones that come with age. And the boy, from the shed, as Freddie did what he did, would listen with all his might. He’d listen to the voices of his grandparents. Although, to tell you the truth, they ceased to be his grandparents. They were just voices now, voices that he listened to with such intention, such intensity, that he slowly lost his own power of speech. He spoke less and less, and one day, toward the end of the month, he stopped speaking altogether. His grandparents were mystified; they never understood why. They thought it was from his mother leaving him and the move to the desert. But the boy knew why. Maybe not at the age of four, but later. He came to understand why: he came to understand that the most magical words, the only words that mattered, were the ones spoken by his grandparents. While they sat out on the porch—grown old now, their concern for the bloomless cactus, or the clouds, or the pain in their knees filling the night sky. Filling it like stars. You see, the boy knew, knew, even at the age of four, that he would never in his life sit on a porch as his grandparents did. He would never sit with another person and speak of small things. Or great things. Or even the most effortless things. And that that was what Freddie had taken from him. The boy knew this; the boy knew this as he knew those mountains, as he knew his mother would never come out of them.”
There was silence. A silence so deep that when Savitha closed her eyes, she felt a warm wind brush against her face. Why is there a wind, she wondered, in a closed car?
“And you know what’s most interesting,” the man continued. “It’s not what happened to the little four-year-old boy. No. He just grew up like the rest of us. A grown man by now.” He paused; he seemed to Savitha to be studying the road. “Living somewhere, I guess. Mostly unhappy, like the rest of us, but mostly getting by. But you know what’s most interesting? What’s most interesting is what happened to Freddie. The boy who built the porch. He went off to college eventually—using the money he’d saved up from his odd jobs—and then, in one of his college classes, he met a pretty gal by the name of Myra, and they got married. After graduating, they moved to Albuquerque, and then to Houston. Freddie got a job at an oil company, paid good money, and he and Myra had three children, two boys and a girl. Before you know it, they had a five-bedroom house in the suburbs, and two cars, and eventually, eve
n an in-ground pool.”
The old woman let out a little snort, adjusted in her seat, and went right on sleeping. The man looked over at his wife and, as if he were talking to her, as if she were awake, he said, “Now, as I was saying, Freddie had three kids. Two boys first, and then a little girl. Freddie Jr. was the oldest boy, and he was his namesake, all right. Took after his dad, and did everything with him: they went hunting and fishing, threw the ball around. In fact, Freddie Jr. got so good that his Little League team went to Williamsport one year. Well, one summer, the two boys, Freddie Sr.’s two boys, went to stay with their grandfather, Freddie’s dad, and his new wife back in Tucson. He’d been widowed, you see, and had married a woman he met while golfing in Palm Springs. He still lived out in Tucson, and besides, it was only for a couple of weeks. So the two boys got on a plane, just the two of them, and headed to the desert. Sound familiar?” He let out a laugh, and then he said, “As you can imagine, it was boring at first for them. They sat around the house and watched television or played video games. Their grandfather, you see, had a large plot of land just west of town, but unlike the first little boy, these boys weren’t at all interested. They found it dull. But eventually, a few days in, a boy about their age, a neighbor of the grandfather’s, came over and the three became fast friends. He showed them how to have fun in the desert: how to hunt for Gila monsters and go sand sliding and dig for whiptail eggs. The neighbor boy only went home for dinner, and sometimes not even that. In fact, toward the end of the two weeks, Freddie Jr. and his brother didn’t even want to go back to Houston.