8

I am wide-awake to Buffalo, drowsy by Rochester, and sound asleep by Syracuse. I miss Albany altogether. I wake cotton-mouthed and cramped in a window seat. I need to pee, and the person beside me has stretched out her legs and sleeps with her cheek propped up against her hand. If I try to slip out, I know I’ll step on her. We haven’t spoken and I can’t remember when she got on; the bus has gone on and off the highway so many times, I can’t remember each little town or hole-in-the-wall bus stop we’ve pulled up in. The whole of New York State is a tangle of sodium-lighted pauses along the way, each one a delay in my pursuit, and I try not to think about how much longer this ride is taking than if I could have rented a car. I would have been there by now. I would have found Artie by now.

I guess I can hold on for a little while longer. I’d like to go back to sleep myself, but now I am wide-awake. The dim interior light of the bus turns everything a vague green and I feel like I’m underwater. Outside, the pinpricks of light from houses unfortunate enough to be located along a highway remind me that I am not home, tucked beneath the patchwork quilt that I have moved with me everywhere I have been. The quilt that Tony peed on as a baby, and that Mack inevitably chooses to lie on when he’s wet. This quilt that is the only possession I have that came from my mother, who, by being blessed by sudden death, is forever my ideal of motherhood. An ideal I was never able to achieve. I’ve sorted through my memories of her, and keep only those that appeal to me. Each of my recollections corresponds to one of the four pictures I have of her: Easter morning, Christmas morning, my fourth birthday where she bends over me helping me to blow out candles, and the random photograph that isn’t of her, but of my father. She is caught in the background, but it is the only one of her pregnant. In each photo she is idealized and that’s how I like to keep it.

The house lights move by and the bus moves back into deep countryside. I have no idea where I am.

Dawn creeps up on me. Maybe I’ve slept again, because suddenly the trees and fences, the barns, and the cattle standing in the fields are distinct. Color eases its way into the landscape. I still don’t know where I am, but it’s pretty. I’m on the wrong side of the bus to read the signs that might let me know how much farther I have to go.

The woman beside me suddenly startles herself awake with a violent jerk of her legs and hands. “Oh!” She looks at me sheepishly and wipes the drool from her chin with the back of her hand. “Where are we?”

“Don’t know. Not there yet.” I excuse myself, climb over her, and make for the stinky rest room.

When I get back, my seat companion stands up to let me climb back into my place. She’s a large woman, in her fifties, if I was to guess. She wears a loose dress clearly chosen for its traveling comfort and not the fact that it makes her look nine times bigger than she is. She fumbles around in a cloth grocery bag until she extracts a can of Coke and a banana. “I got more. Want one?”

I’m not proud. I’m really thirsty, so I say yes. The Coke is sweet and hardly my morning drink of choice, but it burns through the cotton in my mouth and makes me feel less gross.

“I’m heading for Springfield, going to see my grandkids. Where you heading?”

We haven’t even exchanged names, but the rules of the road are clear: story time.

“New Bedford.”

“Never been there. Went to the Cape once. But mostly we go to Canada for vacation.” My companion needs nothing further from me. She chatters happily on and on. I wonder how close we are to Springfield. I wonder if this is her normal way, or whether she’s quiet at home, keeping to herself, baking those pies for the church supper, minding her own business. But traveling by herself to visit kids she probably rarely sees opens something up in her and the floodgates of talk gush open. Kids, grandkids, little Mikey’s First Communion. I’m not even listening when she tires of herself and asks me the inevitable woman-to-woman question: “You got kids?”

The question is a normal one. She’s handed the deck to me. My turn to deal story now. “A son. He’s grown.” I don’t say grown and gone. He was gone and then grown. “Tony.”

“Where’s your boy now?”

This is a hard question. Before I have to answer with some tepid reply, my phone plays its little tune and I fish it out of my pocket, that little compulsive prayer that it be Artie singing along with the tune: Let it be Art-tie. Please be Art-tie. I don’t even look at the display to see who it is. The woman beside me presses back against her seat, as if that gives me privacy.

“He’s going to a warehouse to leave the trailer.” Candy gives me the address, and I know Boston well enough to recognize a street along the harbor, near or even in Southie. Not terribly far from South Station. A cab ride, a good walk. I thank her and promise to keep her posted. I can’t find any paper in my duffel, so I write the address down on the palm of my hand. The bus schedule I have doesn’t tell me anything about buses from Boston to New Bedford, but I know they must be fairly frequent. We’re entering Springfield now. Boston is at most two hours away. At the least, Artie got there at night and may still be asleep in his cab. I press a hand to my chest to feel the impulsive beating of my racing heart. I feel like this is that TV show, The Amazing Race. I’m closing in. Maybe I’ll catch him. Maybe this will all fade to a bad dream in a few hours. I’ll have my boy back. My Mack. He’ll jump into my arms like he does at the end of our performances, overjoyed. A furry bundle of wiggles and kisses.

“Are you okay?”

Funny how so many people have asked me that question in one form or another in the past twenty-four hours. I look at my companion, who is gathering up her Coke cans and bundles of presents for the grandkids. We’re at the Springfield station, her stop.

“Yeah, I’m fine. You enjoy your family.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Her chubby face doesn’t hide the fact that she has beautiful eyes. I expect that it was those eyes that drew her husband to her, those eyes that have kept him despite the baby weight that didn’t disappear, but settled in; despite the years of caring for children, caring for his house, settling for a life lived in terms of vacations to Canada and First Communions. “You, too.”

She struggles to make her way down the narrow bus aisle. I can see a woman who must be her daughter, a little kid clasped by one hand. Simultaneously, they both open their arms to the woman as she lumbers down the bus steps.

Yeah, I’ll be enjoying my family all right.

*   *   *

The points of the compass are not nominal values, but instinctive. Standing on the verge of the highway, he raises his muzzle to the air, orients himself, and begins to walk. Cars bullet past him, flattening his coat by the force of their passing. He keeps to a westerly course but moves into the protection of the tree line, keeping up a businesslike trot despite the ache in his ribs. This takes him under the highway and into a culvert that has only a sluggish trickle of water running through it. Inside the culvert is the scent of ground animal, possum or raccoon. Mack is fiercely thirsty and laps gratefully at the shallow stream as if he could lap it dry.

As he emerges from the culvert, Mack pauses, listens. Justine must be somewhere. He heard her voice. He’s not ignorant enough to believe that she was trapped in the cell, but he has a vague idea that if he could hear her voice, she can’t be far off. If he wanders too far, she won’t find him. Even so, he keeps moving, instinct telling him that she won’t find him here in this wild place.

The highway is a distant susurration; the slow passing of cars on a back road is closer. One at a time, slow enough that he can discern the sound of their radios, smell the waft of cigarette smoke exhaled through cracked windows, the voices of couples arguing late at night.

Justine will expect him to wait for her someplace. He needs to find that place. In their life together, she often tells him down-stay, leaving him waiting outside doors, or gates, or on sidewalks. He needs to find a place where Justine might ask him to down-stay. And then wait for her.