the air whoosh behind her as it shut.
Inside the terminal everyone moved swiftly. Lisa Fay let the energy propel her toward the ticket windows. She had planned it carefully: buy a bus ticket north, finagle a ride west, follow the map Willow had drawn to Meg’s house. There were no buses into the Mattole Valley. They stopped at Garberville and then passed on to Fortuna, Eureka, up into Oregon—as far north as you wanted to go, but if you were headed west then good luck to you. She had a map of the state that showed the area as a hazy green blur. Lisa Fay knew there were roads where Meg lived. Willow had drawn them in, labeled them in her confident hand. But they were too small to show up on the map of the state; they weren’t real enough, she suspected, to show up. That area, that whole knob of land, seemed like a new growth on the body of California, some untendered, nonnegotiable figment of the imagination, risky for visitors and subject to change without notice. She pictured it a Shangri-La that disappeared behind the mists once the rains started and only reemerged when the sun came back and baked it dry. Which is why she should go now, in October, in the dry time.
Or risk losing him for good. That land was so wild, her friend Alma had told her, a person could get lost in those mountains and never get found. Lisa Fay glanced down at the crumpled map she held. The creases were worn white from the hours she’d spent studying it. Her rib cage ached, her bones, those muscles, her heart—Wrecker couldn’t be lost. There were big trees, weren’t there? She calmed herself with that thought. Enormous trees. You can drive a car through one, Alma had told her. If the land could support giant trees surely it could hold on to one small boy. She screwed her courage and approached the ticket window.
“How much to Garberville?” Her voice was a whisper.
The clerk turned to face her. He had kind eyes, loose and watery, behind thick lenses, and a neck that rested in accommodating folds over a tight collar. “Speak up, dear.” He tapped a bulbous device that wormed into his ear canal. “I can barely hear you.”
“Garberville,” she said, louder this time.
He nodded. His eyelids flickered rapidly, almost imperceptibly, but his gaze remained steady on her face. “Twice a day,” he said. “You missed the first one. Next bus leaves at one fifty. Check back for the platform number. How many in your party?”
Her voice was so soft it barely puffed past her lips. “Only me.”
“Three?” He tilted his head to thrust the listening device closer to her.
Lisa Fay shrank back from the window. His eyes were too friendly. The plastic aid was disturbing, and the next bus would not leave until one fifty. It was 1983, she was forty-one years old, and she’d been waiting fifteen long years to see her son. She could make her own decisions, now; wasn’t that true? She could determine for herself who to smile at, how to move in the world, where to rest and when to move again. And still she would have to wait. Fifteen years. One fifty. Five hours. Five hours? Fifteen long years and for the moment she could remember none of it. Her mind was flooded with the image of his face as he had been, and she could barely stand. A small cry escaped her lips.
“Miss?” The clerk’s eyes glistened with concern.
She turned her back on him and fled into the city.
Lisa Fay stood on the sidewalk and let the sunshine strike her eyelids and warm her cheeks. The city noises filled her ears. The city smells traveled in through her nose to reach that part of the brain that forgets nothing.
She’d meant to write a letter. She had started it a thousand times in her head; a dozen times she put pen to paper. Dear Son. And had gotten no further.
She’d written a letter to Meg, a long one, and heartfelt.
Dear Son.
There was so much to tell him.
A paper cup lay overturned in the gutter; a pigeon lit beside it and gave it an idle, exploratory peck. A bus rumbled by and the draft lifted the edge of Lisa Fay’s untucked blouse. The air smelled better out here. There was salt from the bay and a sweet burnt odor from a coffee cart down the block. It was