The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,67
watch in horror as it starts to float away and I can’t grab on to it—I’m swimming and swimming, and if I don’t save it that woman will never be able to go back to the sea, but I can’t reach it.
Crash!
I wake up on the floor of the bus.
“Sorry, everybody—moose in the road,” says the driver, who slammed on the brakes. “We’ll be in Fairbanks in about fifteen minutes.”
“Are you okay?” asks stinky dry-bag guy as I pull myself up off the floor.
I nod, but my coat is wet and splotched with mud and dirty snow melted from people’s boots. He turns back to talk to soap guy.
“I have to buy some roses,” he says. “I’ve been warned by my ex-wife that if I show up at The Nutcracker without roses, I may as well not show up at all.”
Soap guy laughs and says, “I hear that’s where I’m headed, too.”
It’s the last thing I’d expect from either one of them.
The bus pulls into the station garage, where the lights are blinding and it’s hard to make out the faces of the people waiting on the curb. Everyone looks a tiny bit different. There is Alyce in full stage makeup, looking shockingly out of place. She’s wearing a sparkling tiara and a puffy down coat over her Nutcracker costume.
From inside the bus, I watch her throw her arms around the dry-bag guy as he steps onto the curb. Alyce pulls on the arm of a boy—a handsome boy—who comes forward and shakes hands with the guy. I’ve never seen him before, and I’ve never seen Alyce’s eyes shine like that, either.
My feet have stopped working. The universe is moving at a much faster pace than I’m used to. It’s loud and colorful, after months of living in a black-and-white world with whispering nuns, so I take my time getting off the bus. It’s easier, watching from this side of the window anyway, until I get my bearings.
Selma’s face pops up in the crowd. Not the boisterous Selma I remember—the one who lines up first to get a shot in the arm, or throws back her head and laughs like a hyena—but a hesitant Selma, who is walking shyly toward the soap guy. He’s just stepped off the bus with his bag full of lemony soaps slung jauntily over his shoulder.
He holds out a wide hand for her to shake, but she surprises him (and me) by launching herself straight at him. I’ve never seen so much hugging in all my life. So I’m not the reason Selma’s here, I realize as she pulls out another lumpy orange hat and presents it to him as if it’s the goose that laid the golden egg. Poor Selma—the biggest heart in the world doesn’t make a whit of difference for her knitting. And suddenly I’m laughing—still on the bus, all by myself, laughing. It feels so good.
Until I see Gran—way off on the side of the crowd. She looks older, her hair thinner. In her threadbare overcoat and nylon stockings, she must be freezing. She does not look angry or scary, just nervous and cold. Selma is walking over to her, proudly dragging the soap guy by the arm. Gran shakes his huge hand in her frail little one. It makes her look even smaller—she is shrinking with every minute I don’t get off this bus.
It’s time I rejoin the world.
I finally stand to leave, when I see him.
Hank.
He is watching someone with that same expression he had the day I saw him watch his brother Jack eat a pink Sno Ball. I follow his gaze, and of course, there’s Jack. He’s smiling at Selma and the soap guy as if he created them out of thin air. The handsome boy with Alyce is there, too; now he’s shaking soap guy’s hand and it all looks so cozy—but also impossible for me to reach.
As I think this, Hank glances up and sees me through the window.
He walks slowly toward the bus. Slow enough that I have time to replay our entire last meeting in my mind. By the time he stands at the door of the bus, I have once again seen him naked with a bouquet of bluebells, and draped in a white sheet sitting on a clump of cranberries, saying, “Maybe I can see you in Fairbanks someday?”
Now I am standing two steps above him, and apparently this is “someday.”