with only water to its east. She’d said to the man at the ticket counter, “How much New York?”
He’d said, “Lady, first you gotta go to Spokane, and then you gotta get on another bus to New York.” And then he’d said, “Thirty dollars.”
She hadn’t understood the first part of what he’d said, but she’d understood that the ticket to New York was thirty dollars. All that way for only thirty dollars!
She’d glanced at the doors to the station, clutched her ticket in her hand, and seated herself in a chair farthest from the entrance; her eyes never left it.
How long would it take her to get there? And what would she do when she did? How would she even begin to look for the jilebi-haired lady with the pearlescent teeth? None of these questions had answers, not yet, but once she was on the bus, pointed away from Seattle, and the fear and the adrenaline had stopped racing, and her heart had stopped pounding, she realized, looking out at the silhouettes of the pine trees and into the dark of the mountains, the road a bolt of cloth draped over them, that sometimes leaving was also a direction, the only one remaining.
They went over Snoqualmie Pass, though Savitha had closed her eyes again by then. Just before she did, the swing of the bus’s headlights caught a clump of purple wildflowers at the base of one lone pine, as if it were an umbrella over the shivering blooms. They passed a long stretch of water on her side of the bus, but the water went on for so long that Savitha thought she might be imagining it in her disorientation, her near delirium. When she woke finally, near sunrise, the mountains were dark, blanketed with trees and farther away. The sky was steel-gray and thick with clouds. There was just enough predawn light that Savitha saw the young pine saplings all along the road, gray-green clumps that held close together and seemed to spin like dervishes in the early-morning songs of birds and wind and even the swoosh of the bus as it sped past them.
Savitha shifted in her seat, her muscles stiff, and she realized with a start that there was a woman seated next to her. Where had she gotten on? She couldn’t recall the bus stopping, but maybe she had switched seats in the night. Savitha looked at her. She was fast asleep, her head lolling toward Savitha’s shoulder. She was as young as Savitha, maybe younger, with fingers littered with silver rings, all except one thumb and one pinkie. There was a tattoo in the triangle between her right thumb and index finger, a symbol Savitha didn’t recognize, but it was a faint tattoo, a watery blue-green, and Savitha sensed, looking at the young woman’s sleeping face, the fine lines around the eyes and the lips already forming, that she hadn’t intended it that way, that she’d intended the tattoo to be a rich blue, a blue with density, depth, the ocean at night, but that it hadn’t worked out that way. Nothing had.
The bus stopped near sunrise, and all the sleeping passengers were herded off. Savitha’s first thought was that maybe they’d already arrived in New York. She’d gotten on at one in the morning, and it was now a little after six. Could it be? But then she looked at the sign above the main door: S-P-O-K-A-N-E. She went to the map again and saw that she wasn’t even out of the state, let alone in New York. A profound tiredness enveloped her. At this rate, it would take her months to get there! She rubbed her bleary eyes and wanted to ask about the bus to New York, but the ticket counter was closed until eight. On the signboard, it listed only two departure times: one to Seattle and the other to a town called Missoula. She checked the map again; Missoula was to the east, Savitha saw, not by much, but east, and was scheduled to leave in two hours. Maybe she would have to take that bus and transfer again? She didn’t know. She wanted to wait at the bus station for the ticket counter to open, but she saw that the coffee stall inside the station was also closed, and she was hungry. When she walked outside, she looked up and down, and then at every car in the parking lot; she looked for a red car and a