From a Balcony Room to the Twenty-Second Floor, One Bus Ticket Away

The bus ticket was still warm from my father's pocket. He pressed it into my hand at the station like it was a prescription, something that would fix a condition neither of us could name, and then he stood back and put his hands in his jacket and looked at the clock above the ticket window instead of at me. "You'll be fine," he said. "Your aunt's got a place down there. She'll take you in." I was eight. I had a backpack with two shirts, a toothbrush, and a paperback about a girl who lived in a museum. My mother had been dead for three years, and in those three years my father had learned to cook exactly four meals, all of them from boxes. Then Denise moved in, and after that he learned nothing at all, because Denise cooked, and Denise wanted the apartment to feel like hers, and I was, in the specific way she said it, an adjustment. The ticket said Route 42, eleven hours, Coastal City. I asked him where the south was. He pointed down the platform. South of everything, he said, which was not an answer, but he was already walking back toward the doors by then, and the doors closed, and I found a seat near the front and put my backpack on my lap and did not cry, because I had learned that crying in front of my father made him leave faster. I had one photograph of my aunt. It was in a shoebox my mother had kept, and I had taken it out and put it in my pocket before Denise could throw the shoebox away. The photo was old. My aunt was maybe eighteen in it, standing in front of a house with a red door, wearing a denim jacket and looking at the camera like it had interrupted something. Behind her, my father was a blur, cut off by the edge of the frame. That was the whole photograph. Two people with a hundred miles of silence between them, and then me, on a bus, eleven hours, one way. The bus stopped in four towns. I counted them. In the first town, old man got on and ate a hard-boiled egg and the whole bus smelled like it for an hour. In the second town, a girl my age got on with her mother and they sat three rows back and the mother read to her the entire way, and I put my head against the window and watched the fence posts go by and thought about how long eleven hours actually was. Eleven hours is long enough to change your mind about a trip. It is long enough to convince yourself that the person waiting for you at the other end has already moved, has already decided against you, has already locked the doors. By hour six, I was certain she wasn't coming. By hour nine, I had made a plan: I would stay at the bus station until someone noticed me, and then I would figure out the rest. By hour eleven, the bus pulled into a terminal that was a hundred times bigger than the one I'd left, with a ceiling like a warehouse and signs pointing everywhere, and I walked down the steps with my backpack on both shoulders and stood still, and everyone flowed around me like I was a rock in a river. I was looking for a woman who might not exist. I was looking for a greeter sign, or a woman the shape of the photo. I was looking for anything. What I found was a black SUV parked along the curb with its blinkers on. The back door opened. A woman got out. She had long wavy hair the color of dark honey, sunglasses that covered half her face, and heels that made her almost as tall as my father. She wore a cream-colored coat over a plain black dress and a watch that caught the sun when she lifted her hand to push the sunglasses up onto her head. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "So you're my brother's throwaway kid." Her voice had no question in it. It had a c***k in it that I couldn't place, somewhere between a joke and an accusation. I didn't know what to say. I had practiced three sentences on the bus. The first one was, Hi, I'm sorry to bother you. The second one was, I can be quiet. The third one was, please. She looked at my backpack, then at my shoes. She didn't smile, but she didn't turn away either. "How old are you," she said. "Eight." "Eight." She said it like it was a number she had to check against something. "He didn't even call me. He texted. One line. You know what it said?" I shook my head. "It said, 'Your niece needs a place. Bus arrives 6:40.' Signed with his first name. Like I'd forget." A man in a black jacket came around the front of the SUV and took my backpack off my shoulders without asking. He put it in the trunk. I stood very still. She watched me the whole time, and something in her face moved, small, like a door opening a c***k and then closing again. "My name's Margot," she said. "Get in. I don't stand on curbs." I got in. The inside of the SUV smelled like leather and something floral. There were two cups in the cupholders and a phone charging on the seat. She sat in the back with me, not the front, and buckled my seatbelt herself, and her hands were quick and sure and her nails were clean. "You're not going to ask where I'm taking you?" she said. "Where are you taking me?" "Home," she said, and the word came out strange, like she was trying it on. "For now." The SUV pulled out into traffic, and the city went by, and it was bigger than anything I had ever seen.