the slot. It was pencil on rumpled notebook paper. It read:
Hewn Oak Rd.
Dead End
Off Jackson
That was it. No names—not mine, not his—and no map. I looked again at the old man. He was back at the jumble, his glasses sliding down his nose. I knuckled the glass.
“You know where this is?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “Off Jackson,” he said.
At least finding Jackson was not difficult. It appeared to be Bloughton’s key thoroughfare. I passed a grocery store called Sookie’s Foods, a gas station, a sewing shop, a Christian bookstore, two churches, something called the 3-D Chow Box, a consignment shop, a hardware-store-slash-pharmacy, a bank, a library, and sparse rows of aged houses. But I passed no one who might point me in the right direction. Night was falling and I had been walking for thirty minutes. There were limited ways to rearrange my heavy load, none of them good. I thought of my mother. Had she known these streets? Had she ever traveled them? How could I know so little about this part of her life, how could I have asked so few questions? I forced determination into my gait. For her sake I would find the answers.
I came upon a building larger than most. I was almost past it when I realized it was a high school. I was fully past it before I realized that it was my high school. I stopped to give it another look. Beige brick marred by an old CLASS OF 99 RULEZ tag above the auditorium, white sidewalks spotted with bubble gum, yellow lawns striped by the shortest distances between any two popular points: it was a school, all right. How hard could it be to walk inside tomorrow morning? I could be anyone I wanted. I could remake myself. I told myself this over and over as I passed the dark football field, two tennis courts, and an empty parking lot.
Hewn Oak arrived long after I had given up hope. Sidewalks had given way to grass shoulders. Corn had swept up from distant fields and met the road. Still I trudged down Jackson, my bags spinning, the sweat from my palm lifting the words from my father’s note. Soon there would be no directions there at all, no proof of his existence, no proof that I belonged here. Then the turnoff appeared and I took it—a winding dirt path through the woods.
After a few minutes I saw a light. I kept moving, my heart now heavier than all my bags put together. A house, little more than a cabin: I could see it now, small, square, and silent. Beyond the cabin, the bright twinkling of a river. My shoes parted the long grass of an unkempt lawn. My father’s home, at last—my home. This was where my mother wanted me.
It was full night. The stars above me, far from Boris’s facsimiles, shone with a fierceness I’d never seen in the city. I made a fist, knocked on the warped wood of the door. I felt my face curling into a defensive grimace and tried to twist it into a smile. There was a long pause. I counted to one minute, then two. Time lost track of me. I listened to the river.
After a while, I pushed open the door and directly inside was a man on a chair staring at me. He spoke in a voice like gravel and hay.
“Tell me how this happened.”
5.
HE WAS BROAD-SHOULDERED and brown from sun. His bloodshot eyes focused somewhere over my head while his large hands held down his dirt-stained knees. Shadows from an unseen fire mottled his skin.
“They told me a bus,” he said. I was still standing outside the doorframe, the weight of my luggage forgotten.
“They told me a bus,” he repeated with a wince, lifting one of his hands and pushing it through the wild gray hair that flew from the back half of his head. “But I need more information. Which way she was heading. The route of the bus. North? I always picture her heading north.”
A pop quiz, my specialty. I conjured a mental map of the fateful intersection. After some calculation, I shook my head.
“South,” he said grimly. I nodded. “And the bus. Eastward? It was heading along an eastward course?” His sight line changed; for the first time, he met my eyes and I felt his agony. The answer he craved—if I knew it, I would give it. All I had was the truth, so I shook