The missing, p.8
The Missing, page 8
When Emily said, “Next stop, please,” and stood in the aisle, she hoped the man beside her wouldn’t notice where she got off the bus. She didn’t want him to follow her; she didn’t need any more men running into her at bus stops or following her home. She enjoyed living with just Dorinda at the top of the stairs. Neither of them needed extra men around denting cushions on the couch, staring out the window, lighting cigarettes with the stove burner. She certainly didn’t miss Nathan, the man she rode buses with last spring. Or, at least, she missed him only occasionally. Sometimes in the mornings, after breakfast; sometimes in the evenings, when she stood by the window. Nathan hadn’t known she was pregnant when he left her late in the summer, and since she found it difficult to remember the days and their events in the proper order, she was never certain which, of the times that he left her, was the time he never returned again. It was possible that Emily didn’t know she was pregnant when Nathan left her in the summer.
As the bus slowed, approaching Russell Street, Emily grasped a seat back to help her maintain her balance. As she walked toward the door at the rear of the bus, she occasionally placed a hand on a seat back on either side of the aisle.
Sometimes, that fall, Emily walked home, but her shoes were growing tight. She decided she got enough exercise just climbing the stairs to the third story of the house, and so, more and more often, she rode the bus. By late October it was dark outside, and young boys on her bus returning home from football practice made faces at the windows of the bus. Not long before Halloween, at the railway bridge, the young man with a blue tie got on and sat beside her. He carried an umbrella even though it was not raining, and he held it between his knees. The man with the tie was not the only man on the bus carrying an umbrella.
While Emily looked straight ahead, or at the schoolhouses outside the window, she wondered if he intended to speak.
“You missed your stop,” he said finally.
“It doesn’t much matter where I get off. Walking’s not a problem.”
The man said, “Next stop, please,” and he stood up as the bus slowed. He said, “I thought I’d run into you again before this, but you aren’t always on the bus.”
“Sometimes I walk. It’s not a problem.”
“It’s a long walk, when you’re pregnant.” He stepped into the aisle.
Emily said, “Don’t forget your umbrella.”
The next time the man sat beside Emily on the bus he offered her a peanut and told her his name was Lucas. He was wearing the same blue tie he had worn the week before. Emily was wearing a pink blouse with a smocked yoke.
“I’ve never seen so many men on the bus at once,” Emily said. “Do you think it has something to do with the weather?”
“Could be.”
“They come from all over the country, I think, and when they board the city buses, they sit across the aisle and in front of me and beside me. They are surveying the sidewalks, the schools, and the department stores. Most likely, they’re making plans. They get off the bus at Fern Street and Chase Avenue, and they walk, tapping their umbrellas in front of Cherry Dale Elementary, and in front of the Grand Worth Store; then they board the cross-town bus and ride. They get off in front of the First Harvest Bank, I expect, and walk up and down on the sidewalks, tapping back and forth by South Ridge Junior High.”
As the brick schoolhouses slid behind them, Emily noticed that most of the pregnant women on the bus wore plastic barrettes in their hair. Some of the women wore overcoats on top of their pink smocked blouses. Lucas offered Emily another peanut and said he’d been pursuing his missing sister for fifteen years. He had come close to finding her outside of Nashville, on a train north of Poughkeepsie, in a motel off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He said that when her children came to stay with him, it was difficult, in the beginning, for him to become accustomed to the ways they resembled her. “But then it was difficult to get used to having children around at all. That’s something you’ll discover pretty soon.” Lucas was staring at the pink gathered fabric beneath the smocking of her blouse. “Unless, of course,” he looked up suddenly, “unless you have other children.”
Emily shook her head. She told him she had a roommate, and her roommate had had children, but they didn’t live with her. “It is strange though,” Emily said. “Once I never noticed children at all, but lately they’ve been surrounding me. Yesterday, the whole length of Grant Street, there was a yellow school bus beside us. The children on the city bus waved and cheered and pressed their noses and tongues against the window, but the children on the school bus pretended they never noticed. They stared straight ahead at the backs of the seats in front of them. Then the school bus went through a puddle at the corner of Grant and Josephine, and soon it was dark, so I couldn’t tell what happened afterwards.”
“It does get dark early now,” Lucas said. “You’ll want to be sure you don’t miss your stop again; you wouldn’t want to walk back to your house alone.” He could accompany her; he would like to, but he had to get on home. There were the animals, and he had to be ready in case, just in case . . .
Lucas frequently sat beside Emily in the late fall when they rode home in the evening. Because it was dark outside, they could not easily make out the schools the bus passed, but since the bus lights were on, they could see each other, and they could see the other passengers on the bus, the umbrellas, the jackets buttoned tightly over blouses, the jackets not buttoned at all. Sometimes he asked her questions about her roommate, but Emily’s answers were vague. She didn’t know if her roommate had a favorite restaurant; at home she ate mostly eggs. She had a job, sure. Probably she talked about her job, but it wasn’t the sort of talk you’d pay a lot of attention to. Other times, he asked her questions about her brothers. Emily said while she had several strange brothers with common names, not one of her brothers actually knew she was going to have a baby. “All the same,” she said, “in the early morning when the city bus stops at a yellow light, and when, at that light, a huge silver and blue interstate bus stops and everyone inside looks directly at me, I’m certain that all the members of my family have boarded large buses, two steps at a time, and I’m certain that, except for my youngest brother Edward, who, by mistake has climbed on a yellow bus which follows its own circuitous route not to my front yard, but to the parking lot of a blond brick school, my other brothers on their Greyhounds, Trailblazers, and Bonanzas are coming to me, to this city to give my baby their names.”
“I’ve heard that’s the hardest part about having a baby, trying to decide on a name.”
Emily sighed. She asked Lucas for ideas. He could tell her the names in his family.
There was Cristobel who was younger, there was Percival who was older, and his other sister who was older still; she was the one who had left home when he was still quite young. He asked the names of her brothers, and smiled when she said Edward, John, and George. He wanted to know if she kept in touch with her brothers. She said her brothers sent her cards at Christmas. She didn’t bother to answer. They called occasionally to say that they meant to visit soon. They were just going to check out the bus schedules.
“I say, ‘That would be nice.’ Then we hang up.”
All the windows of the schools the bus passed were lit up. Lucas said they were having parent-teacher conferences after school. He knew that because his nephew and nieces, when they visited, would sometimes attend school. He said they spent time with him in hopes that someday he would find their mother. He said once he liked to listen to opera in the evening, but he rarely did now.
One evening in March Emily left the bus without a thought at the corner of Russell Street and Parade. The bus left behind a fog of diesel, but Emily moved through it into the early evening on Russell Street where blots of snow crouched on the north sides of houses and on the grass where tree shadows lay in the mid-afternoon. As she walked, Emily maintained her balance successfully, although she was startled by faint pains in her lower abdomen, and by the shadows of cats in the corner of her eye. When she stood opposite the green house, she looked up at the third story window, but she could see no one looking out. She could only see dark glass and splotches of reflected sky.
As Emily crossed the empty street and damp lawn, she anticipated the pressure of the doorknob against the fingers of her glove; as she touched the doorknob she saw the stairs that rose for three flights and then ran into a window. By the time Emily had finished climbing the three flights of stairs, so much time had passed she thought it must be nearly morning, and time to walk down the stairs again. Since the apartment was empty and the bathroom was free, Emily took a bath, and she lay for a long time in the warm water. As she went back down the stairs in her bathrobe, Emily thought her pain might be contagious. She thought Dorinda might not want to be exposed. Dorinda might prefer that Emily take her pain elsewhere, away from the living room, but when she entered, she found that that room, like the front bedroom, was dark. Later, as she moved about the dark living room waiting for her skin to dry, and waiting for her tea to brew, she imagined what she’d say when Dorinda returned. The ends of her hair were wet, and one hiss after another leapt up as the drops hit the radiator and her shoulders. While the air grew humid, Emily walked to the window and imagined Dorinda standing at the door of the house, deciding whether or not to enter. But indecision never occurred to Dorinda. She had no problem climbing on buses. Tea splashed against Emily’s lower lip surprising her with pain. She could not, for a moment, remember why she was standing at the window staring down at the street, and she could not be sure why, since the tea had burned only her lip, there were pains in other parts of her body. With her hand she tried to locate a pain, but it disappeared, elusive. Emily looked down at the streetlamp and at the street. No one was looking up.
When she woke in the night Emily realized that she’d never heard Dorinda come in, and that the shape of the window was crooked against the wall. When she woke again with a tight throat, the window hung in a different place on the wall. She remembered hearing screams, although she remembered no dream.
When they told her in the hospital, she wondered if, maybe, it was just as well the baby had died. After all, it’s a rough life, the life of a child: you spend so much time contained in blond brick buildings, squirming on hard plastic chairs. You peer through windows, all those dirty windows—school bus windows, school windows that open out, but not far enough: you can’t push out your hand. You could, maybe, get something done with your life, but there’s all that time you spend worrying about your mother, wondering if she’s in the kitchen now or did she already go outside? Will she stick around? How long will your mother hang around?
Emily stared at the nightstand and nodded when the tall nurse told her. She knew the nurse was thinking that Emily nodded bravely. Emily nodded again, and then she started to scream. She wanted to know when. She cried, “When did the baby die?”
The nurse only said it was born dead; she wouldn’t tell Emily when.
In the hospital they continued to call the baby it, although it had been born a boy. A dead boy. After a while Emily no longer screamed out loud, but she never knew how long she had carried him dead, on the buses, and up the stairs.
After she got out of the hospital, in the early spring, Emily rode the bus back and forth to work. To keep from thinking, she allowed the outlines of the buildings and the shapes of tree limbs to impress themselves below the clear space of her forehead, onto the smoothness of her cornea, but pictures of Dorinda’s children would crowd out the buildings and tree branches and she would think of the ones abandoned in Texas and Nebraska. She thought of their bedrooms, and the small spaces between their toes. And then, except for the slight change of temperature on her cheek as shadow replaced sun, the buildings and trees moved by unnoticed.
Each day Emily was sure new buses came into the city, buses with silver and blue streaks, buses with windows framed in red, and, in the windows, eyes framed in blood. The buses were bringing in more men with umbrellas, bringing Dorinda’s children, bringing her brothers from various corners of the country. The men with umbrellas had familiar names, like her brothers’, or they had no names at all. She didn’t know because they didn’t tell her. Instead, they put their umbrellas beside them in the aisles when they sat down, and they picked the umbrellas up when they stood to get off the bus. No longer were there women with pink smocked blouses on the bus, or perhaps these women wore overcoats and kept their blouses covered up.
One morning Emily was frying eggs when Dorinda climbed the stairs and walked into the kitchen.
“I don’t want to hear about your night,” Emily said to the eggs. The butter coated the lace edges of the whites, turning them brown. Dorinda sat on the counter smoking and speaking. She turned on the radio, and Emily braced herself for the voice of a man selling bedroom furniture. She heard Schubert and she was grateful. As Dorinda smoked, some of her curls imitated the curve of the smoke, some imitated its color.
“When we went to Aram’s rooms above the jewelry store,” Dorinda said, “I thought of calling you, but I figured you’d be asleep.”
“Besides, the phone is out of order.”
“Yes, and Aram didn’t even bother to turn on the light. You know, your eggs are growing hard.”
Emily nodded. She looked at ashes piled in a very small mountain far below Dorinda’s feet. She lifted the eggs with a fork—that was not easy—laid them on a cold plate, then, one at a time, picked up the tired eggs with thumb and finger and dropped them in the wastebasket.
A siren cried and Emily jumped.
“The siren’s on the radio,” Dorinda said.
“I understand.” She carried the frying pan to the sink. It was an old sink, a deep one, and the water hit the center of the pan hard, splashing up the sides. “I don’t understand about your brother and the children. I always used to see Lucas, but nowadays he’s never on the bus.”
“He’s coming up with a plan.” Dorinda was smiling. Her upper lip curled and revealed her teeth. “Lucas is only comfortable when he has a plan. Then he’ll give me a call.”
“And the phone doesn’t work.”
“Hmmm.” Dorinda took a knife from the sink strainer and gestured toward Emily with the bone handle. “You think I should, after all this time, have something to do with those children. You’re missing your baby, and you think you’ve got everything all figured out.”
“I don’t know about that.” Now Emily was hungry and there were no more eggs.
Dorinda put out her cigarette.
One afternoon in late April, Emily waited for a bus that seemed to be a long time coming, and sparrows rustled among paper bags caught in the nearby bushes. This was not her usual bus, but she needed to get to the library. Maybe she would walk—it wasn’t two miles. Perhaps it was two, perhaps more. Emily looked south toward Orange Street, as if she were watching the fat front of the bus lumbering north toward them, toward the Railway Bridge. You don’t have to get on, she thought, but it was, perhaps, beginning to rain. Quiet people stood, waiting in the cold, in the rain. The young woman with two shopping bags and one child. The man with no shopping bags and no children whose briefcase stood between his shoes. The two blonde teenage girls who chewed gum and exchanged glances. Emily could not believe all of the people were waiting for the bus with absolute assurance. One of them must be thinking—when the bus came, he’d bolt.
When she was on the bus Emily looked away from the four chewed fingers on the seat rail in front of her and toward the window. They passed a red brick elementary school on Water Street with empty seesaws in the playground, a gray brick department store on Saratoga Avenue, a house with large windows, a woman combing her hair, a woman with her throat cut. There were smudges on the window of the bus. There was an empty seat beside her, and Emily was afraid men with umbrellas would sit and tell her stories she had heard before. For a while no one sat beside her, although a few men with umbrellas were actually on the bus. Also, many more were on the sidewalk. Emily was certain that the city was being besieged. Small pellets of rain disturbed the patterns on the bus windows, and men with umbrellas said, “Next stop, please,” got off the bus, walked rapidly down the sidewalks, and, in unison, tapped their umbrella points on the sidewalk. She knew they were deciding on the moment they would stop tapping the sidewalk and would start knocking against the windows of the department stores. She knew, when she wasn’t looking, the men opened and closed their umbrellas, arranging blots of color against the brick-gray background, generating small gusts of wind.
Lucas was waiting at a stop north of Wildwood Park. As he approached her, down the aisle, he appeared surprised to see her.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
Emily said she was riding to the South Branch Library in search of a book on Peruvian artifacts. They passed a brick school with small-pane windows, a cemetery without any grass. South of Bryant Avenue, snow was falling, although it was late April.
Lucas remarked on the snow, saying he’d arrived last fall in a snowstorm, and when, three weeks ago, his niece, Alexandra arrived, it was snowing as well.
“Then, of course, it was just March. It’s supposed to snow in March.”
“I expect Dorinda told you Alexandra was here. She’s spoken with her on the phone, more than once. I think Dorinda was quite happy to hear from her. Don’t you? Quite soon, we think, she’ll be ready for a meeting.”
There was an explosion as the bus passed Centennial High School. The bus windows rattled.
“It’s those men, the ones with the umbrellas you know,” Emily was nodding. “They’ve finally begun their demolition. What were you saying about your niece?”
“She’s in touch with the others. They want to come out. We’re trying to ease Dorinda into the idea. She’ll get to know the children when they visit, and if things go well, and I think they should, we’ll all go back to Texas together. Maybe in the summer, in the early summer, before it gets too hot.”
