“Um, how much is a round-trip?”
He looked at the screen on his computer. “A hundred and eleven dollars and fifty cents,” he said.
“Oh.” I heard my voice and it sounded very small.
I needn’t have worried about him noticing if I’d been crying; the guy was a zombie.
Maybe my grandfather would pay for my return—or maybe I would never return.
“And for a one-way ticket?”
“Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents. It’s only forty-five if you buy it online.” His voice went up at the end of his sentence, like I ought to have done that. It was the one sign of life he showed.
“What time does it leave?”
He looked at the screen again. Everything was a great effort for him. “Next bus leaves at four a.m. There’s one after that at eleven fifteen tomorrow. You have to change in Boston on either one.” He looked at me.
I could tell my mouth was kind of hanging open.
I bought a ticket for the 4 a.m. bus. That left me with $32.75. I could have gone back to Penn Station and gotten a train back home, but I was on my way now. The hard part was done. I had my ticket. I had a destination. The open road was before me. Besides, there was nothing for me back home but trouble and loneliness. I was going to my grandfather’s house. I was going—I had always been going. I had nearly nine hours to kill before the bus.
It would be dinnertime at my house, but there would be no dinner. My parents would be extremely worried about me at this point. I had never disappeared like this before. I considered calling them from a pay phone. I wanted to send word that I was okay so they wouldn’t worry or call the police to come track me down or anything, but I didn’t want to talk to them. I needed to send an email. The Port Authority was at Forty-Second Street. That big library with the lions out front was on Forty-Second Street. How did I know that? I just did.
Instead of going out the way I came in, I ended up taking the escalator back up and walking through the whole building and heading out onto Ninth Avenue. It was fully dark now. The street was backed up; cars were lined up under signs for the Lincoln Tunnel back to New Jersey. Three cranes dotted the sky and dirty fences lined the street at two side-by-side construction sites. The sidewalk was closed, so pedestrians were pushed out into the street in makeshift walkways behind orange cones. I turned right, toward the corner of Forty-Second Street. Before I even got there, I passed this place with two old-fashioned computers sitting on the counter by the window. A sign next to the computers said, “Internet cafe.” Inside, a not-so-friendly guy behind the counter sold me a slip of paper with the login information on it. And I bought a Coke. In all, it cost me $6.50 for the soda and a half hour on the computer. I had $26.25.
Dear Mom, I wrote. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’ve just decided to take a small road trip. I will let you know when I get to where I’m going, it’s a surprise. It will especially be a surprise for Dad. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in advance, but I’m doing well and hope you are too. Please don’t worry or be mad. I’ll contact you soon. Love, Lucy. And I pressed send.
Then I sat and finished my Coke and watched people walk past the window. I was in no rush, that was for sure.
My stomach started grumbling. I was starving—actually, I shouldn’t say starving. I hate when people say that. I was in no way starving like people in Central America or Africa might be, but I was quite hungry. I had been so busy up to now that I hadn’t noticed—I hadn’t really eaten since breakfast. A little bit up the block and across the street was a pizza place that sold slices for a dollar—ninety-nine cents to be exact. I could see that I was not in a great neighborhood and the pizza place had nowhere to go in and sit down, just a window on the street where you got the slices. There were a lot of not-so-friendly-looking guys hanging out in front. But I had to eat.
I stepped up to the window and ordered a slice, and by the time I got back to the corner, I had eaten it all. The place may have been funky, but the pizza was super hot and tasty. I turned around and went back for another slice. There was a small line now. While I was waiting, a guy in a hoodie noticed me.
“Hey, girly girl. You like pizza?”
“Um, yeah,” I mumbled.
He must not have heard me because he said, “Yo, I’m talking to you, young lady. Are you deaf, princess?”
I don’t know if he was being mean or funny or what, but it got the attention of a few other people who I could feel turn toward me. My turn came at the window.
“One,” I said, holding up a finger. And I gave the pizza man a dollar.
One of the guys who had just noticed me came over. “Can you spare a dollar?”
I looked at him. Where his eyes should have been white, they were yellow. There was pus-like stuff in the corners.
Another guy shoved the guy with yellow eyes and said, “Leave her alone, man. Get outta here.” Then he grabbed for him. The first guy jerked his shoulder away. His arm went flying. He missed my face by an inch but his hand caught my shoulder pretty hard. I stumbled back and crashed into another guy. He spilled his Coke on the ground.
“What the fuck, man!” The guy with the Coke threw his free hand up in the air. Yellow Eyes slammed him into the wall. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the pizza guy ignoring it all, still holding my slice. The guy who had been shoved into the wall started screaming at the guy with the yellow eyes and got up in his face, real close. Everyone started closing in, cursing, screaming. I turned and saw a taxi, stuck in traffic. I lunged between Yellow Eyes and the other guy and dove to get in that car. I slammed the door behind me and pushed down the lock in one move. It was quiet. But not for long.
“Where you going?” the driver shouted over his shoulder.
“Um, nowhere really,” I kind of mumbled. “I just had to—”
“What?” he barked.
“I don’t need to go anywhere,” I yelled to the driver through the Plexiglas partition that separated the passenger seat from the driver. “I’ll just get out.” I reached for the door handle on the side away from the trouble.
“I already started the meter,” the driver shouted.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You owe me four dollars.”
“What?” I said.
“You get in, I start the meter, that’s how it works.”
“But I just got in to get away from those guys. I didn’t—”
“You get in, you pay.” He had turned around to face me. There was a throbbing vein on the side of his forehead. I couldn’t tell if he was really angry or if he just had to shout through the Plexiglas. “Four dollars.”
I reached into my pocket and grabbed the first bill I touched. I shoved it into the tray cut into the Plexiglas and reached for the door. It was locked.
“Hey!” I shouted at the driver. “Open the door!” I was trapped.
The driver pushed a dollar back into the tray.
In my rush to get out I had forgotten my change. I grabbed for it. He popped the lock and I flung the door open. I now had $20.25 left, and I hadn’t even gotten out of New York.
I got out of the cab on the street side, away from the pizza place. The driver yelled at me not to get out that way, but I slammed the door on him. My heart was pounding almost out of my chest. The taxi hadn’t even moved more than ten feet from where I got in. I cut across the street. When I was almost to the other side I looked over my shoulder. The altercation at the pizza place had settled down, and things looked pretty much as they had before I went over. Nobody was thinking about me. I hadn’t even gotten my second slice of pizza that I paid for.
I started screaming, really loud. I just stood there on the sidewalk and let it rip. What was funny was that since it was already so loud on the street, with all the cars honking and the trucks and buses and everything else, my scream really didn’t seem that loud. I did it again. A few people walking by looked at me as if I was strange, but by the third scream I started laughing. A lady walked by with a little boy, maybe
three or four years old, and when the kid saw me screaming, he screamed, too. Then we were both screaming and laughing.
The mother pulled the boy away by his wrist. “Felix!” she scolded him.
Some people are so uptight.
13
The bus station was much larger than it first seemed—and it had felt huge from the start. An overpass above the street connected an entire other building, much bigger than the first one. Both buildings were dingy.
There was even a bowling alley in the upstairs corner of the bigger building. I thought it would have been nice to watch a little bowling while I waited for my bus, but it was not to be. The bowling alley had a bar, and since it was after 8 p.m., they wouldn’t let me in.
I went down to the Bangladesh man’s newsstand again, but it was closed. Nearby there was another newsstand, not as neatly organized, and I flipped through magazines for a long time, until it looked like the guy behind the counter was going to say something to me. My friend with the beautiful singsong accent would have let me read all night long, I’m sure.
I was still hungry. Across the way was a little stand selling snacks. The donuts in the glass case looked to me like scared mouths crying “ooooo!” Their glazed frosting was a bit crusty, as if they had been there quite a while. I wanted one anyway, but my cash was draining fast, so I decided against the donut. I was furious with that guy who had shoved me and started the whole fight so that I couldn’t get my second slice of pizza.
The station began to thin out. There were more weirdos and homeless people as time went on. Perhaps they had always been there, and it was just that when things got less crowded I simply noticed them more. One guy in particular was engaged in a pretty heated discussion with someone who had done him a serious wrong; the only problem was that the other guy wasn’t there.
There was a small waiting area right beside Gate 83, my gate, but a homeless guy was sleeping stretched out across a row of chairs, all his stuff piled up next to him in garbage bags. He smelled pretty bad. I sat on the ground by the door. I figured just in case I fell asleep, the bus driver would nudge me.
I was tired, but I didn’t doze. My mind wandered. Thoughts kept returning to my sister. I’m not someone who misses people as a general rule. Even as a kid, when I was away at camp, as other people were quietly, or not so quietly, weeping into their pillows, I was totally fine. I never wasted a second being homesick, but I was sitting there missing Julie for some reason. I was thinking about how, when we were a lot younger, we used to play these crazy imagination games, for hours, about living on another planet. I hadn’t thought of that in a long time.
Then I must have fallen asleep for I don’t know how long, but when I woke up, the bus still hadn’t arrived. The room around me was quiet; almost everyone I could see was asleep. Those who weren’t were just staring off, waiting for a bus or for morning. I had no idea what time it was. For the first time all night, I was scared. This whole trip suddenly seemed like a really bad idea. I could feel myself starting to panic. There was a pay phone by the escalator. I dug into my pockets and found some change.
I almost couldn’t remember Simon’s number. When I did, the call went right to his voice mail. “Hey, it’s Simon here,” his silky voice said. My shoulders dropped and my eyes welled up. “Leave me a message if that’s your thing, and I’ll get back at you when I’m free.” Then the phone beeped. I stood there holding the dirty receiver—who knows how many people had clutched this same phone, making that one last call to a loved one before they set off for God knows where. Eventually I hung up without leaving a message. What was there to say—except everything.
Back over at my gate there was activity. A sleepy-looking man in a gray uniform was moving the stanchion away from the door. He had a small moustache and a very large stomach. He told me they would be boarding in a few minutes. About fifteen people gathered around the gate. Everyone was moving pretty slow. A lot of the people had suitcases, and for the first time it occurred to me that I didn’t even have a toothbrush.
Instead of having a Greyhound on the side, the bus was painted green and said Peter Pan, with a little flying guy in a lame hat hovering between the words Peter and Pan. I asked the driver if I was at the wrong bus—that’s all I needed after all this waiting.
“The companies merged. You’ll get a Greyhound in Boston,” he explained. He was fairly pleasant for the middle of the night. I took one more look at the little Peter Pan guy on the side of the bus. I hate that Peter Pan story. I could never understand how someone would want to stay a child his whole life. I’m sorry, but I cannot relate. Ever since I was very little I’ve wanted to be older.
I took a seat about halfway back on the bus, by a window. It was a huge relief to be on board. I think I was asleep before we had pulled out of the station.
I felt the bus stop a few times, and at one point I could feel someone come and sit next to me, but nothing could have woken me up until the driver shook me by my shoulder.
“You have to change buses,” he said. “We’re in Boston.”
“Already?” I was instantly wide-awake. “Okay, thanks.” The bus was empty and I got off fast.
I had never been to Boston before, but after the bus station in New York, Boston was a breeze. This place was beautiful. There was a giant circular skylight in the center of the ceiling; it looked like a flying saucer was about to land on your head. You really felt like you were arriving somewhere special. And more important at the moment, it had a shop called Honey Dew Donuts, which I had never heard of before. I am generally not a donut person; they are not something I usually spend much time considering. But since New York, when I didn’t buy one because I was trying to save money, I had been itching for a taste.
I had three.
At 99 cents apiece, they were worth every penny. I shall never forget those honey-dipped beauties. I was, in that instant, as content as I can remember being in a long while. I had the simple pleasure of superb junk food in my stomach, half my journey completed and an exciting half to go.
There was only an hour between buses, and I had to hustle if I was going to make it. I really enjoyed Boston. I would definitely come back and see more of it. I found my next bus and was back on the road.
I sat up front so I could see out the windshield. Once we cleared the city, and then the suburbs, it didn’t take all that long till we passed a sign welcoming us to New Hampshire. The vista was all tall evergreen trees on both sides for as far as the eye could see. I know next to nothing about trees, but these looked very much like the one that grows in the middle of our deck back home, under which I was sitting when I found out about Thomas.
There was a big deal made about that particular tree a number of years back when my parents were about to build the deck. At first they were going to chop down the tree but then my dad had a fit, saying that the whole atmosphere would be ruined if the tree was gone. So then he decided to just not build the deck, and my mom was really upset about it. She didn’t say anything for three days. Did not speak. It was very bizarre.
Looking out the window now, I wondered if those trees were plagued with as much sap as that tree back home, and it occurred to me that maybe my mom being so upset back then was really not about the deck. From what they had told us, it would have been right around this time that she learned about Thomas. Perhaps that’s what her silent treatment had really been about.
The deck situation was rescued by my sister—believe it or not—who was around eight herself at the time. “Why don’t you cut a hole in the deck and let the tree stay there?” she said one day out of the blue.
From the mouth of babes, right?
So that’s what they did. I have to say, it was a pretty brilliant idea. My parents decided to make the deck even bigger, and to this day there is this giant tree growing right up out of the middle of it.
For some reason I started thinking about the fight outside the pizza place again. It was hard to get the image of that guy with the yellow eyes o
ut of my head. I think it had freaked me out even more than I thought at the time. I hate to admit it, but I honestly wondered if I was more afraid of him because he was an African American than I would have been if he’d been a white guy. Does even asking the question make me a racist? I know you’re not supposed to think stuff like that, let alone say it out loud—but how are we supposed to figure it out? I’m sorry, but this whole race thing is something I feel bad about; all these feelings everybody has about everybody else, although half the time we don’t even know we have them, or want to have them, while we all try to do our best. I don’t know how it will be resolved, at least in my generation.
While my mind was wandering around all this, a sign caught my eye out the window—we were in Maine, just like that. Wow. I started laughing.
That was easy, I thought. But then my stomach started to feel a little queasy. Maybe it was due to riding for so long, but I was also getting a little worried. I really started to wish I had my phone. As I said, I’m not that into looking at the phone every thirty seconds, but there are times when it’s better company than whatever is on your mind. In this particular instance, what I began to think about, and couldn’t stop thinking about, was the fact that I didn’t really know my grandfather at all. I began to wonder if I’d even recognize him. Or would he be mad that I just showed up on his front lawn unannounced? And since I would be almost out of cash, with no means to get back, I started to become concerned.
Although, I have to say, Harold—that’s my grandfather’s name—did seem to like me when he met me. He kept calling me Lulu and would raise his voice on the second part, so it sounded like LuLU. No one had ever called me by a nickname before, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. My dad said that his father only had nicknames for people he really liked. Perhaps that’s what had made me kind of partial to my grandfather—that and his love for ice cream.
At one point, I got up to go to the bathroom in the back of the bus. Somebody had missed and the toilet seat was a mess. I decided to hold it, and when I returned to my seat the lady across the aisle started talking to me. Up until now she had not made a peep. I didn’t think she had even noticed me—and now she was talking as if we had been having a conversation the whole time.
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