Just Get Home, page 5
And so Kate got her assigned to a new house. The Greelys this time, whose oldest son, Eric, also came into her room at night.
So Beegie knew better now. Frying pans and fires.
Sometimes you think you’re in the fire, but you’re not.
Or maybe you are in the fire, but it’s always possible to get moved to a part of the fire that’s even hotter than the part you used to be in. And now, this new place is gonna make you all crispy and charred.
Barb’s house was the frying pan. Beegie could live in the frying pan. Had to live there.
But not tonight. For now she just needed to kill time.
Beegie decided she would just be on the bus for a while. Use her pass. Ride it to the end of the line then back again. Maybe she could do this all night. Back and forth, back and forth until dawn. At least she would be sitting down while she decided how she was gonna make it better with Barb.
A bus squealed up to the stop. Air brakes pitching their two-tone whistle. Beegie clocked the route number as she climbed aboard. This is the bus I used to take home, she thought.
And then, No. It wasn’t home. None of them are.
What she should have thought was that it was the bus that used to take her to the Greelys’. The Greelys’ wasn’t home. Neither was Barb’s. Janelle’s. Even the place she used to live with her mother, that wasn’t home. They were places she kept her stuff. Where she slept.
Beegie made her way to the back as the bus pulled away from the stop. Lots of people on here this time of day. The sun just starting to go down. Everybody on their way back from work. All crammed together, smelling like the end of the week. Sweat and corn chips. So many people made the air on the bus clammy.
Beegie grabbed a pole just past the stairs in the back. Someone would clear out soon.
She looked out at her fellow passengers. Almost every one of them staring at something. Their phone. A book. The window. Every one of them in their own worlds. Thinking about their own lives.
The weird ones, Beegie thought, were the people who just folded their hands in their laps and stared straight forward. Like they were able to just...take off, go somewhere else without a book or phone screen.
Absent themselves...that was the word.
Absent...like she had been from school.
Ten days. She didn’t know it had been that many.
What have you been doing, Beegie?
Nothing. Mostly.
One day she’d been walking to school from the bus...and she had just kept walking. No reason. She didn’t feel like going. So she didn’t.
Instead she went to the park with her book. It had been a good one. Weird though. About a white family whose house was a little bit bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. And then one day they come home and there’s a new door where there wasn’t one there before and it opens into a hallway that shouldn’t be there. And then everyone was freaking out ’cause this is all happening in their home.
It made Beegie laugh. If a mysterious room opened itself up in Barb’s house, she’d probably call the agency and tell them they should approve her for more kids.
Ten days though. Beegie had only skipped when she thought she really needed it. To go to a park or the library and forget herself in something scary for a minute.
Guess I needed it a lot.
Beegie thought maybe the reason she liked scary things—movies, books, stories, whatever—was that at the end of most of them the monster was defeated. That was how the stories would go; everything was good, then a monster came, then the monster was defeated and then everything was good again.
That wasn’t how things were in real life though. In real life people live with their monsters. In real life the monster didn’t come...in real life the monster was already there.
The image of Eric answering the school’s phone calls about her absences danced into her mind.
Fuck him. Beegie could just see the way his lips would’ve curled over his tiny little baby teeth at hearing she was in trouble.
The bus squealed to another stop. Beegie rocked on her feet, tightening her grip on the bar. The back doors swung open and Beegie pushed her way into a newly freed seat by the first riser.
There was a burst of loud talking from the front of the cab. Someone behind the queue of newly boarded people. “No one here’s gonna tell if you take one. It’s a tip!”
The crowd cleared a bit, and Beegie could make out a man leaning over the bus driver. The driver was shaking his head furiously and yanking his hand, gesturing for the man to move back. The guy shrugged and picked a heavy box up from the floor before moving on.
He was halfway back when Beegie realized that his heavy box was a case of beer. The bus rocked as it started moving again, and the man stumbled a little.
All of the emptied seats had been filled again, and so the man stopped, right above the stairs, in the space where Beegie had been standing only a minute ago. He set the case of beer down on the ground with a thud.
Beegie watched him out of the corner of her eye. He wore a button-down. Tan pants. He looked like a guy with a job. Like a guy with people.
But he was acting wrong. Like the bus was a party, not a place where everyone worked hard to pretend they were alone. Instead, this guy was smiling, trying to catch people’s eyes.
He reached down through a hole ripped in the top of the box. “Anybody want a drink? I’m buying.” He wielded the can above his head. “Anybody?”
Everyone ignored him. Kept staring out their windows or at their books or screens. If anything, the bus got even more quiet in response to his invitation. No one wanting to draw his attention.
He cracked the beer. The sound of the tab popping rang through the cabin.
“It’s Friday, motherfuckers!” he announced before taking a big pull. Beegie watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed.
He pulled his lips away from the can with a satisfied gasp. His eyes catching Beegie’s as they opened.
“You want?” he asked, smiling.
Beegie shook her head and looked away.
But she could feel his eyes still there. Sipping his beer and watching her. She looked back, and he winked at her, before finally looking away.
Beegie looked back out the window. They were now in her old neighborhood. The place she’d accidentally called home.
She wished she’d thought to grab her book before she left Barb’s. When she’d been running out the door. Then she could have lost herself in it now.
The bus squealed to a stop. Beegie’s old one. Not much had changed in the past year.
A sudden resolve solidified inside her.
Without thinking, Beegie was launching herself out of her seat. Ducking past the Busman with the beer. He leaned back for her and she stooped under his arm. “Have a nice night,” he said as her feet hit the stair. She glanced back at him, for a moment, before swinging onto the crumbly piece of sidewalk she used to come back to every afternoon.
As the bus pulled away, Beegie felt her palms go sweaty. Her limbs felt loose, elastic with a kind of wild energy. Something had happened on the bus, thinking those thoughts, seeing these old sights.
She was still angry. But not with herself anymore.
12 AM
DOWNTOWN
8
Overlay. That was the word for it.
As Dessa walked through the remains of the Jewelry District, she realized she had an overlay of what it should be. Her memories of the place, of what it was and what it should be, lay over what was in front of her, over her, under her bare feet.
Like the insert in the H edition of her grandmother’s encyclopedias, Dessa’s favorite one: HUMAN. Each layer of anatomy printed on a separate sheet of clear cellophane. Skin, muscle, bones. Dessa would flip them back and forth, dressing and undressing the skeleton with flesh, until her mother tsked at her and took the book away.
The building that was on fire was also not on fire. The florist stand that had toppled and cracked onto the street was also upright, a display of cheap carnations and tightly budded roses in buckets along its front. The street was filled with both the cracked remnants of buildings and moving unblemished cars. The light flickered, orange from the blaze, but it was also the pink tinged gray Dessa had walked in to get to the restaurant.
Dessa blinked hard. Trying to discipline herself to mind the physical now. That was what was important. This was some trick her brain must be playing on her, calling these memories up. Forcing her to look at them. Was it too early for the symptoms of post-traumatic stress? She wasn’t post anything...the trauma was ongoing.
It had only been an hour. Almost ten when she spoke to Joe. Just past eleven when his phone and Hailey’s had failed to connect with hers.
There was a hail of sparks from within the burning building. Something collapsing within. The fire leaped up in response. Licking at the edges of the other structures. The air thick with char.
The light grew brighter in response, sending the street’s inhabitants’ shadows jumping. It was these people for whom Dessa had no overlay, and so they were the ones she focused on.
Survivors, she supposed, all of them. But they were not all the same.
Some were victims. Their faces blank or pained.
And some were...not victims.
These others bounced around the streets with a frenetic energy that distinguished them from their counterparts. Crowbars and baseball bats hanging from their hands.
Not victims. Opportunists.
There were not many of them, but their whoops and calls, their excitement was so wrong, it terrified Dessa. Did they have no idea of the scale of what had just happened? Or did they simply not care?
A group of them rushed past her, close enough that Dessa could feel their wind on her bare arms. They were boys really. Maybe four or five years younger than the men who had taken shots from between Heidi’s legs earlier tonight, or the guys who had talked to her before the earthquake. Alpha and his friends.
Of course none of those men had survived. And these boys had.
Maybe they had a right to their gleeful looting.
One of the opportunists turned toward her. Dessa gasped at the sudden change in his direction. The swing of attention to her. She braced herself against the wall. A reflex.
The boy laughed at her bare fear. “Hey, Mama!” he said. Wagging his tongue. Fingers held up in mock devil horns on his head.
And then he was away from her. Bouncing to catch up with his friends, already bashing their way into a jewelry store.
But Dessa was still awash in the fresh panic and fear he had called up. She took a breath and watched as the group of boys heaved themselves through the smashed windows and into the dark interior of the store.
What must it be like to have that power? To not be afraid, but to have others be afraid of you? Not just right now on this dark street, but on all the dark streets.
* * *
Dessa reached her car about ten minutes later. The entire front section of the car, the engine, had been crushed. The front wheels splayed out beneath the heavy gravity of the something that had fallen on it. There was no way to identify what it was that had killed her car, and with it, any hope of her driving out of here inside of it.
Dessa stared at the vehicle, only now realizing her idiocy in even coming this way. What roads were you planning on driving out on, Dessa? she asked herself. The one that fell on you?
A flurry of voices behind her. Breaking glass. More opportunists. She needed to hide. The car door protested as she wedged it open...but it gave. Dessa swung herself inside the backseat, her heart knocking on her chest. She hit the remote. Once, twice. Two watery beeps emerged from the ruined front of the car. Locking her in.
“I can’t do this.” Her voice sounded so young. A teenager’s whine.
Her father’s face flew into her mind.
When she was fourteen, he had taken her on a canoe trip. Her mother had begged off, saying that two weeks without indoor plumbing didn’t seem like her idea of a vacation. Dad had kept inviting her though, all the way until he had closed the trunk of their car. Mom had watched them from the driveway, pulling away in the dawn light.
“You knew she wouldn’t come,” Dessa had said.
“Yeah. But she liked that I asked.” He had fixed Dessa with a conspiratorial look. “Plus if I hadn’t asked, she would’ve insisted that she come along... And then we’d all have been miserable.”
Dessa tried to imagine her well-coiffed, impeccably dressed mother on the vacation her father had described. The hikes he had called portages. The promised days of endless paddling. The mosquitoes. “Yeah, you’re right.”
But once she was on the trip, she worried maybe she should have stayed home with her mother. A preference she had almost never shown and was now showing less and less as an adolescent.
No doubt, it was beautiful up north. But Dad also asked more of her here. A lot more. Each day, she was expected to gather wood, throw the bear pack line and haul up the food. Rise early, put on boots still chilly wet and strike the tent. She had to carry a pack that was nearly half her weight while he carried the canoe on his shoulders down the trail.
When she finally complained about the weight of the pack, he offered to switch. The boat looked lighter on his shoulders, an easier load to carry, so she quickly agreed. At first it wasn’t bad, not after the canoe was settled on her, yoke balanced on her bony shoulders, fingers forward hooked into the gunwale. It wasn’t exactly easy, but she did prefer it to the formless Duluth pack she had been hunching down the trail.
“Okay, now take it down,” Dessa’s father said.
Dessa knew the mechanics. To push up with one hand, while gripping with the other. Swing the whole of the boat over one’s head while turning your knees into it...making a flat table of them to receive the bulk of the vessel. She pushed with one arm... It was impossible.
“I can’t.” Dessa’s voice reverberated inside the boat.
“What if I injure myself while we’re on the trail? You have to be able to get yourself out of there.”
She tried again. The weight of the stern shifted back, and she stumbled, pushing her fingers forward to catch and rebalance it.
“I can’t do this!”
Her father didn’t answer. The boat over her blocked her entire view of the world above her waist level. “Dad?”
She couldn’t see his legs anywhere. “Dad?”
Her father had disappeared. Proving a point. Either she was going to do it without him or she was going to just stand there waiting until he decided she was telling the truth and she really couldn’t do it.
Fuck you, Dad, she thought. I can wait just as long as you can.
She imagined him watching her from a distance. Could tell he was there, the way the insects were quiet. Still she waited, the yoke digging into the crest of her shoulders. But then the mosquitoes found her. They landed on her arms, and she could not slap them away without losing her balance and dropping the tip of the boat. She watched them on her skin, three of them. Their bodies extending with her blood.
“God damn it!” she yelled and pushed. The trick was that it was almost a throw. You only needed to get it up halfway before gravity kicked in and did the rest of the job for you, swinging it around and down. She banged her knee because she hadn’t gotten it out fast enough...but she got it down.
Her father smiled at her from where he had been watching, about three yards off, close enough to intervene if she had gotten into trouble.
She wanted to tell him to go to hell. She even considered how much trouble she would get in for doing so.
But he had looked so fucking proud.
* * *
Thoughts of her father brought her down, quelled the panic. Her father before. When he was still himself.
“Before you say you can’t do something, think of what would happen if you didn’t have any choice,” he had said to her.
Outside, another pack of nonvictims came jogging past the car. Dessa dropped to the leg well and tried to make herself as small as possible.
“THAT TICKLES!” said a loud voice, filling up the car.
Dessa’s heart nearly stopped. She pulled a patchwork dog with an incongruous grin out from underneath her. Dessa hated this toy. The vaguely psychotic giggle. The tacky “Press Me” hands and feet. The unnerving way it went off by itself, when no one was near it. “HAHA!”
“HUG ME!”
A gift from Gretchen, likely picked for its offensive qualities. It smelled of raisins. Animal crackers. Baby shampoo.
It smelled like Ollie.
Dessa wiped the tears off her face with the back of her wrist. She swept her hand under the seat, pulling out a heavy metallic flashlight. The kind cops use.
She clicked it on and directed it at her foot, afraid of what she might see. The light bent on its way through a shard that had embedded itself deep in Dessa’s heel, a pain she had been ignoring. Dessa took a breath. I can’t do this, she thought once more.
And then she did.
The piece came free, releasing a stream of blood. Dessa pressed at the wound, cursing herself for not anticipating the gush. She fumbled around for the package of baby wipes she kept in the back of the car to clean up Ollie’s messes. Drops of blood fell onto the floor, stains. Reflexively Dessa was upset before she realized, It’s not like I was going to drive it anymore. She pressed the wipes down into her foot, staunching the flow.
If she was going to get anywhere, she was going to need a new pair of shoes.
