... one whose borders were usually closed to tourists.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”
She realized she had named a person rather than a place, and how odd
(this guy’s probably looking at my wrists and neck, trying to see if the straitjacket left any marks)
it must have sounded. She blushed in confusion and embarrassment, and made an effort to clutch at her thoughts, to put them in some kind of order.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and a dismal premonition came to her: whatever else the future might hold, that simple, rueful little phrase was going to follow her like a tin can tied to a stray dog’s tail. There had been a closed door between her and most of the world for fourteen years, and right now she felt like a terrified mouse who has misplaced its hole in the kitchen baseboard.
The clerk was still looking at her, and the eyes above the amusing half-glasses were now rather impatient. “Can I help you or not, ma’am?”
“Yes, please. I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?”
“Oh, I guess about forty. One way or round trip?”
“One way,” she said, and felt another flush warm her cheeks as the enormity of what she was saying came home to her. She tried to smile and said it again, with a little more force: “One way, please.”
“That’s fifty-nine dollars and seventy cents,” he said, and she felt her knees grow weak with relief. She had been expecting a much higher fare; had even been prepared for the possibility that he would ask for most of what she had.
“Thank you,” she said, and he must have heard the honest gratitude in her voice, because he looked up from the form he was drawing to him and smiled at her. The impatient, guarded look had left his eyes.
“A pleasure,” he said. “Luggage, ma’am?”
“I ... I don’t have any luggage,” she said, and was suddenly afraid of his gaze. She tried to think of an explanation—surely it must sound suspicious to him, an unaccompanied woman headed for a far-off city with no luggage except her purse—but no explanation came. And, she saw, that was all right. He wasn’t suspicious, wasn’t even curious. He simply nodded and began to write up her ticket. She had a sudden and far from pleasant realization: she was no novelty at Portside. This man saw women like her all the time, women hiding behind dark glasses, women buying tickets to different timezones, women who looked as if they had forgotten who they were somewhere along the way, and what they thought they were doing, and why.
10
Rosie felt a profound sense of relief as the bus lumbered out of the Portside terminal (on time), turned left, re-crossed the Trunkatawny, and then got on 1-78 heading west. As they passed the last of the three downtown exits, she saw the triangular glass-sided building that was the new police headquarters. It occurred to her that her husband might be behind one of those big windows right now, that he might even be looking out at this big, shiny bus beetling along the Interstate. She closed her eyes and counted to one hundred. When she opened them again, the building was gone. Gone forever, she hoped.
She had taken a seat three quarters of the way back in the bus, and the diesel engine hummed steadily not far behind her. She closed her eyes again and rested the side of her face on the window. She would not sleep, she was too keyed-up to sleep, but she could rest. She had an idea she was going to need all the rest she could get. She was still amazed at how suddenly this had happened—an event more like a heart attack or a stroke than a change of life. Change? That was putting it mildly. She hadn’t just changed it, she had uprooted it, like a woman tearing an African violet out of its pot. Change of life, indeed. No, she would never sleep. Sleep was out of the question.
And so thinking, she slipped not into sleep, but into that umbilical cord which connects sleeping and waking. Here she moved slowly back and forth like a bubble, faintly aware of the diesel engine’s steady hum, the sound of the tires on the pavement, of a kid four or five rows up asking his mother when they were going to get to Aunt Norma’s. But she was also aware that she had come untethered