The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,66
You clutch it with both hands and bury your face in the stitches, breathing in the smell of the nuns, trying not to float away completely. Until you recognize the truck stop where you bought an apple pie for your seventeenth birthday, but you were not alone then and you are now.
—
Except for the stranger who leans over and says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Me?”
He looks around. “We’re the only two people on this bus,” he says.
The spell is broken. I am a person, back in my old body.
I look into his eyes, which are a funny shade of green, like beach glass washed up on the shore. His face is weathered, so it’s impossible to tell his age.
“So, I was wondering,” he says, “I’m going to meet someone for the first time and she’s about your age. I’m nervous about the gift I got her.”
I wonder how old he thinks I am. I could be seventeen or seventy; I don’t know how much my outside matches my insides anymore.
But he’s busy riffling through his backpack and pulls out two bars of homemade soap. “Soap?” I say, and I can tell he was hoping for more enthusiasm. “I mean, wow, soap,” I say again. He laughs a deep, barrel-chested laugh that warms up the empty bus.
“A friend of mine made it,” he says. “I thought teenage girls liked things like baths and…stuff.”
“No, really, she’ll love the soap,” I tell him, and he hands me a bar. It smells like lemons. “I lived with some…uh, women…who made soap,” I say, the longest sentence I’ve uttered in weeks.
He doesn’t press me to say more. I hand him back the soap and then curl up on the seat pretending to read.
Outside the bus windows, the sky is turning pink; the sun is already setting even though it’s only two in the afternoon. There is nothing but miles and miles of mountainous terrain reminding me that I am just a tiny speck in the universe.
The next time I wake, there are a few more people on board. Mostly men, and I wonder what I must look like, a young girl traveling alone at Christmas. Soap guy is talking about fishing and boats with a man who must have got on near the border. The new guy has a dry bag sitting on the seat next to him that smells like diesel, mildew, and fish.
Selma’s most recent letter falls out of my book. I forgot that I stashed it there, a few weeks ago when the words failed to make any sense to me.
Selma says she finally learned the truth about where she came from, but she can only do the story justice in person—she can’t wait to tell me. Her cousin, Alyce, has been accepted to a college dance program; there’s a bunch of new boys in town attracting all sorts of attention; and, most perplexing, Dora and Dumpling (who has recovered slowly from her accident) spend a lot of time at my house, with Lily and Bunny.
I want to hear Selma’s story and I want to see Lily and Dumpling, but beyond that I haven’t let myself think much about going back.
The abbess did say Gran would meet me at the bus station. I wonder if she’ll pretend nothing’s happened and act like she did before—because I’m not the same person I was before. And I doubt I can see her the same way, either, after everything Sister Josephine’s told me.
It makes me so tired just thinking about Gran that I fall back to sleep, Selma’s letter fresh on my mind, the smell of that man’s dry bag filling my nose.
I dream I am sitting on the edge of the ocean. The moon is shining, and I can see huge rocks bobbing into view as the tide goes out, and the beach is suddenly full of starfish and small crabs scurrying away under the moonlight. Something is sitting on the rock and I see it is a woman; she has dropped her clothes into a pile. She leaves them on the rock and comes to the beach, stepping gingerly over broken shells and seaweed. She walks right past me but doesn’t see me; she’s heading to the harbor where the boats are tied up, lights shining inside their wheelhouses. My curiosity draws me to the rock. What I thought were clothes is a wet, shiny sealskin, reeking of rancid fish. The skin is oily and slips from my grasp into the ocean. I