Walk Me Home (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  This isn’t funny, Carly thinks, stopping in her tracks on the sweltering sidewalk. She can feel the sun baking down on her scalp at the part of her hair.

  The engine of the big motor home shuts down, giving way to silence. A moment later, the side door opens, and the woman leans out, a ring of keys jingling in her hand.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry about my husband. If I don’t take the keys from him, he just keeps on driving.’

  Carly takes a few steps. Not sure if any of this is for real.

  ‘My goodness,’ the woman says. ‘You’re so young. Don’t you know it’s dangerous to hitchhike when you’re so young? And what did you do to your chin? You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.’

  It causes Carly’s hackles to rise. But she moves a few steps closer. She can feel coolness pouring out the door of the rig. She doesn’t want to miss this chance. If it’s really a chance. If it’s real.

  ‘Did you just stop to tell me that?’ she asks the woman.

  The woman is white-haired, maybe in her seventies. Bright-blue eyes with laugh lines at the corners. Like Teddy’s laugh lines, only more so. Only a couple of decades later.

  ‘No, honey, we’re giving you a ride. Come on.’

  The woman backs up the three inside steps, into the living space of the motor home. Carly follows her in. It’s gloriously cool.

  ‘It’s nice in here,’ Carly says. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  ‘We never pick up hitchhikers, honey, but you’re so young. I was worried about you. You can sit down here on the couch if you want. Or even lie down and take a nap. You look tired.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You thirsty?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I just had a drink. Thank you, anyway.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  Like that’s all the business they could possibly have with each other.

  The woman carefully closes and locks the side door. Carly looks at the husband, behind the wheel. He hasn’t even turned around to see who’s joined them. He’s just staring forward, through the windshield. As if anxious to keep going.

  When Carly’s hostess is fully settled into the passenger seat, and has her safety belt fastened, she hands the ring of keys back to the driver.

  ‘OK, Malcolm,’ she says. ‘Now you can drive.’

  Just as Carly is dropping off to sleep on the surprisingly comfortable couch, the woman’s voice jolts her awake again.

  ‘Before you take your nap, hon, better tell us where you’re headed.’

  Carly sits up. Her head feels thick and muddled, like she’s been sleeping for twelve hours.

  ‘Far west as you’ll take me. Where are you headed?’

  ‘We go west and then north.’

  ‘Me, too!’ Carly says, excited now.

  Wind. At her back. Right?

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Trinidad.’

  ‘Trinidad?’ the woman asks. ‘Trinidad? Where’s that? Never heard of it.’

  Malcolm, the driver, mumbles something too quietly for Carly to hear.

  His wife leans over and swats him on the arm.

  ‘Malcolm, sometimes you just piss me off something royal. You know that?’

  ‘What’d I do?’ Malcolm asks, a little louder.

  He still hasn’t taken his eyes off the road. Carly still hasn’t seen his face.

  ‘One day in three I have to wake up in the morning and remind you my name is Lois after forty-nine years, but you remember the name of some little piss-ant town nobody’s ever heard of up by Crescent City. Damn you.’

  ‘Eureka,’ Carly says.

  ‘Eureka what, dear?’ Lois replies.

  ‘It’s near Eureka.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you meant you had an idea or something.’

  Malcolm mumbles again.

  ‘He says it’s in-between,’ Lois says. ‘North of Eureka, south of Crescent City. Damn it, it pisses me off that you know that. You don’t even know my name.’

  ‘Lois!’ he proclaims proudly.

  ‘Well, sure. Now that I tipped you.’ Then she turns around in her seat to address Carly again. ‘You go ahead and take your nap, dear. If you’re still asleep, we’ll wake you up when we get home to Fresno. We ought to be there by dinner.’

  Fresno. By dinner.

  Carly stretches out on the couch and tries to remember the details of how long she’s been on the road. She left last night … no, wait, the night before. No. It really was just last night. It only seems longer. And by dinner she’ll be in Fresno, California.

  Now that’s a tailwind.

  If Malcolm doesn’t forget how to find Fresno, things are working out better than she could ever have imagined.

  Carly wakes up, blinks. Sits up on the couch in the big old motor home. It’s afternoon. Maybe late afternoon. She’s been asleep a long time. Her stomach is growling. Her bladder is straining with all that water she drank this morning.

  The motor home is not moving.

  Lois and Malcolm are sitting at the dinette table, eating sandwiches. It’s the first time she’s gotten a look at him. He’s as old as Lois, or older, seventies at least, but he seems big and almost handsome. His hair is full and dark except for a little gray at the sideburns. He looks like he was a strong man for most of his life. But his eyes are far away. He never bothers to look at Carly. Maybe he’s been watching her sleep, and has gotten his fill. But somehow she doesn’t think so. She thinks probably he just doesn’t care.

  Carly can see and smell what they’re eating. Tuna fish on wheat bread. It smells great. Her stomach cramps painfully. But at least she has that pack of peanuts.

  Lois looks over, sees that Carly’s awake, and immediately jumps to her feet. Still chewing, she bustles over to the little refrigerator. She extracts another sandwich, already made, on a stiff paper plate, and garnished with pickle spears and potato chips.

  She sets it on the dinette table.

  ‘For me?’ Carly asks, hardly willing to believe such a thing could be true.

  ‘Well, of course for you,’ Lois says. ‘You think we’re going to eat in front of you while you starve? If you don’t like tuna fish, Malcolm will eat that and I’ll make you peanut butter and grape jelly.’

  ‘I like tuna fish. A lot. Thank you. That was very nice of you.’

  ‘You want some lemonade?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Think I could use your bathroom before I eat?’

  Lois points. Though, really, there’s only one little boxed-off area in the motor home that could possibly be a miniature bathroom.

  Carly stumbles over and opens the door. It actually looks big to her, because she got used to the one in Delores’s trailer.

  She sits down gingerly on the toilet – every muscle and bruise still aches – her knees nearly brushing the door. Wondering how Malcolm fits. There’s a mirror on the inside of the door, and it makes her uncomfortable. The scrapes on her chin look almost black. The sunburn blisters on her forehead and nose are peeling. Her hair looks as though it hasn’t been brushed in weeks.

  I look homeless, she thinks. Then it hits her. She is.

  She flushes the toilet with a pedal on the floor, and washes her hands in the sink. There’s a shower in here. She wonders whether her hosts would allow her to use it. A shower sure would feel good. Delores only had a bathtub in her house, and Carly only used it once. They had to fill it with buckets of water from the pump at the well. They had to heat two of the buckets on the propane stove. Most of the time they took sponge baths in the trailer.

  She sits down at the table with Lois and Malcolm. Lois smiles at her. Malcolm doesn’t look up.

  She sips the lemonade first. It delivers a blast of flavor she was not expecting.

  ‘This is homemade,’ she says.

  ‘Well, of course. You think I’d serve you that powder out of a jar?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everybody else always did. Where are we?’

  ‘Bakersfield,’ Malcolm says. Still wi
thout looking at her.

  They eat in silence for a few minutes. The food is making Carly feel more grounded.

  Then Lois says, ‘We don’t feel comfortable letting you hitchhike all the way to Trinidad.’

  Like it’s her decision, Carly thinks.

  It’s that sinking feeling that’s become so familiar. It takes her back to Alvin, saying, ‘Don’t want you and your sister leaving this place on your own.’ That definitive moment when an adult decides they’re taking over your life.

  ‘I have to get there, though. And it can’t be much farther.’

  ‘It’s almost another five hundred miles.’

  Carly’s heart falls. The half-eaten sandwich sinks in her hand until it’s back on the plate.

  ‘Oh, no. It couldn’t be. From Fresno? Or from here?’

  ‘From Fresno.’

  ‘Couldn’t be.’

  Lois gets up and brings her a giant road atlas that looks almost exactly like the one Alvin showed her.

  ‘This looks like …’ She was going say ‘Alvin’s’ but she decides she doesn’t want to bring up Alvin. Though she’s not sure why not. ‘A friend of mine had one just like this.’ And, in the sting of the word ‘friend’, she knows why not. Some friend she’s been to Alvin. Promised him to his face he could trust her to stay put. And she knew the whole time it was nothing but a lie.

  She looks up Northern California. Finds Fresno. Runs her finger up the coast to Eureka and beyond.

  ‘Holy cow, that’s a long state,’ she says. ‘But … Anyway, I’ve got to get there. I didn’t come all this way to give up now.’

  ‘We’ll take you to the bus station in Fresno.’

  ‘Oh,’ Carly says. ‘OK.’

  That allows her appetite to function again, and she picks up the sandwich and takes a few more bites.

  That’ll be fine. She hasn’t got enough money for a bus, of course. But Lois doesn’t need to know that. Maybe she can spend the night in the station. In the morning she’ll be on her own again. She can just keep going. And there will be no one around to take over. No one to tell her what she can or can’t do.

  If there was anything she couldn’t do, she wouldn’t be here right now.

  If only other people knew that as well as she did.

  Lois insists on coming into the bus station. Which is not the way Carly planned it at all.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ Lois tells Malcolm. ‘Give me the keys.’

  Malcolm just sits in the driver’s seat for a moment or two, hands at ten and two on the wheel. The engine is still running. Then he pulls back out into traffic, watching carefully in the side mirror.

  ‘Malcolm, stop. No, wait. Don’t stop. We’re too far now. You’ll have to circle the block. Where did you think you were going, Malcolm?’

  ‘Home,’ he says.

  ‘We’re taking the young lady to the bus station.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And we were already at the bus station.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Make a right here.’

  ‘I know how to circle a block.’

  Two more right turns, then they pull up on the other side of the station. The sun is well off to the west. It’s past dinner time. Probably seven or seven thirty.

  ‘Now, stop, Malcolm,’ Lois says. ‘Turn off the engine.’

  Malcolm sighs. Shifts into park. Turns the key to off.

  Lois reaches over and grabs the keys out of the ignition. As though she’s been practicing for years.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ she says to Carly. ‘Let’s go see what’s what.’

  They step out the side door together. It’s the remains of a hot day in Fresno. It’s the kind of hot Carly knows from Tulare, which isn’t far away.

  Carly thinks maybe she’ll just take off running. Get this over with. She looks both ways. Makes a decision.

  She sticks. For the moment.

  Maybe Lois will just come in, see when the bus is scheduled, then leave her there. That would be better.

  They walk along the sidewalk. Round the corner together.

  Carly says, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but … is it safe for him to be driving?’

  ‘Oh, my goodness, yes. Malcolm’s a great driver. Never takes his eyes off the road. Never gets lost.’

  ‘You’re not afraid he’ll forget how?’

  ‘Honey, I should be so lucky that man could forget how to drive. It’s everything else he’s forgotten.’

  She holds the door of the bus station open for Carly. A blast of cool hits Carly in the face as she walks inside.

  ‘He’s forgotten me a time or two,’ Lois says. ‘Until I got smart and started taking the keys. Left me once in a gas station in Seligman, Arizona. Remembered how to drive away but forgot me, and when I called him eight hundred times he forgot what you’re supposed to do with the cell phone when it rings. That was a mess, let me tell you. But in sixty years he hasn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket. If there’s one thing that man can do – and there may be only one thing left that man can do – it’s drive that rig.’

  Lois marches up to the counter.

  Carly sits down on a hard bench. Turns her back to the business being done. After all, it really isn’t her business. She’s not the one who thinks she can’t hitchhike. That’s a grown-up stranger’s decision.

  It takes a long time. She can hear Lois talking to a man behind the counter. But she purposely stays too far away to hear what they’re saying.

  She looks behind her once, and thinks she can just slip out the door. But Lois might call the cops to get her picked up. Better she should wait. Lois will probably leave her here to wait for the bus. Maybe she can get herself locked inside for the night. In the morning she’ll be on her own. And on her way.

  She looks up to see Lois standing over her again.

  ‘OK, here’s your ticket, hon. Bus doesn’t go all the way to Trinidad. Goes to Arcata. That’s about sixteen miles away. Or maybe he said fourteen. Anyway, he says there’s a regional bus you can pick up right there at the same station. Almost like a city bus, but it goes up and down to those little towns on the coast. Just ask in the station in Arcata, they’ll tell you. But the bus from here doesn’t leave till morning.’

  Carly just stares at the ticket for a long moment.

  ‘You bought me a ticket?’

  ‘Well, how else were you gonna get there?’

  ‘How did you know I didn’t have money to buy my own?’

  ‘Honey … really … what kind of fool stands in the hundred-degree heat in the full sun in the Mojave Desert hitching a ride if they have enough money to buy any ticket to ride anything?’

  Carly nods a few times. All that bravado about how she can handle herself for another night, for another five hundred miles, melts away, leaving her overwhelmed with gratitude that she doesn’t have to.

  ‘That’s very nice,’ Carly says. ‘I appreciate it. But you have to write your name and address down in my little book. And how much you paid for the ticket. So I can send you the money back when I can.’

  She opens her backpack and begins to rummage around, looking for the book.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter, honey. We can manage.’

  ‘No, really. It’s important to me. I want to give it back when I can.’

  Lois shrugs. ‘OK, if that’s what you want.’

  Carly wraps her hand around the book and pulls it free. Lois sits beside her and writes down the information in the tiniest, loopiest, neatest script Carly has ever witnessed.

  Lois folds up the book and hands it back.

  ‘Now come on back to the rig, and we’ll all get a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘I can sleep here in the station.’

  ‘No, you can’t. Man locks up at ten.’

  ‘Don’t you want to get home, though?’

  ‘Honey, we are home. That is home. When we get home, we just park it in the Crestview Trailer Park. Still home inside the rig. Only difference is what we see out the
windows. Now come on.’

  In her dream, Carly leaps through the narrow doorway into that box car a second time. Just like she did the first time. She makes it just as far in. Hits her hip just as hard. Then she’s falling back again, under the wheels of the train.

  No one grabs her wrists.

  She lands hard on her back on the metal rail. She can see the wheel that will take her life, that will cut her in two, bearing down on her in the dark.

  She sits upright, belting out a gigantic noise.

  Eyes open, she looks around. She’s in the old motor home with Malcolm and Lois. Sitting up on the couch across from the dinette table. She looks toward the bedroom in the back to see if she woke them. But nothing stirs. Maybe that huge noise she made in the dream was nothing but a rush of air in the real world.

  It’s the second time in two days that she’s died – not in truth, but in her own head, her own perception. She’s getting tired of dying. She’s getting tired of that moment in which her life is supposed to flash before her eyes. Because both times it contained nothing at all. Her heart calms easily, but she can’t stop shaking. It’s an actual trembling, a shudder, as if it were below zero in here. Her teeth even chatter. It feels as though her nerves have been stripped bare. Like life is touching them. Even in the middle of the night, in the dark, with no actual life events in sight.

  She berates herself, reminding herself that it was only a dream. But the minute she does, she knows the dream has nothing to do with it. She’s not scared of what’s behind her. It’s what’s ahead of her that’s causing problems.

  She never gets back to sleep.

  California, 19 May

  Lois gets up at four in the morning. Before it’s even light. Carly knows it’s four because there’s a little battery-powered clock mounted over the dinette table. It ticks.

  ‘What are you doing up so early?’ Carly asks.

  ‘Oh, I always get up at four. Always did. All my life. Well, my adult life, anyway. Used to get up at four to go to work. Been retired twelve years, but I still can’t seem to kick the habit. How about you? What are you doing up so early?’

  ‘Never really got to sleep.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, though she’s not. ‘I think I just have my days and nights turned around.’ Which is half the truth, anyway.