Find Me (19 page)

In Somerville, I used to hear stories about the evangelical church baptizing new congregants in Foss Park. They had water that they had turned holy and they poured it over the person's head. They said a prayer and somehow that ritual was supposed to leave that person changed.

I always envied those people, envied the certainty of their faith, their ability to believe they were moving through life with a purpose.

If I stand upright, the water covers my waist, the rise of my stomach, and I feel the lethal chill of winter, so I sink down into the shadow of the clamshell. From there the clothing piled on the concrete edge of the pool looks far away.

I inhale, go under. I touch the lightning-shaped crack. I see the faded blue dolphins painted on the sides of the pool, flippers and noses bleached with time. I notice a freckle on my ring finger that did not exist before. My eyes are on fire from the chlorine and it is my choice to let them keep burning or not.

My choice, my choice.

Finally I get out and put on my bra and my jeans. I run back to my room, sweatshirt clutched to my chest, bare feet slapping the concrete.

I race past a woman standing by the ice machine in a nightgown, filling a plastic cup. When she sees me, the wet, shirtless girl running toward her, she screams and drops the cup and cubes scatter down the hallway, glinting like diamonds under the light.

In my room, I bolt the door and get in bed and wrap myself up in the sheets and the polyester comforter even though I know it has not been washed in a hundred years. Another little bug has gotten stuck to my collarbone and it leaves a dark streak when I wipe it away. I shiver and I shake until I have exhausted myself and fallen asleep, and a while later I wake certain of a presence outside my room. A presence that wants to get in. An intruder, the bolt of panic you feel before a strange man strikes you in the head or drugs you with chloroform, the nightmare that starts and ends and starts again when you wake in a basement, or never has a chance to start again because you don't wake at all.

The green numbers on the bedside clock say 3:05 a.m. and outside someone is pounding on my door. I am hazy with sleep, slow at first to register the sound. The knob is shaking so hard, I think it's going to fall off. I hear a boot striking, someone trying to kick their way inside.

In Mission Hill, the older girls kicked down bathroom doors while the younger girls were inside. This was one of the many ways they convinced us of their power. Every girl in Mission Hill learned how to finish peeing in twenty seconds flat, from squat to flush.

As I got older, I waited for that feeling of power to come alive inside me. I thought it would sprout on its own, like breasts or the downy hair on my legs. I didn't understand that it had to be claimed.

I creep up to the peephole and see No Name thrashing against the door. His face is warped through the glass, turning the proportions strange. His nose is a jutting ridge, his eyes are dark pools. The rings in his face glow silver. He's wearing the same clothes and his body is a black blur as he beats on the door. Something has happened to him since we worked those rooms together. He has changed, or maybe this person was there the whole time, smoking cigarettes and counting money in the break room, waiting to get out.

He stops for a moment. His mouth is open, his throat pale and tight. I can see that he's breathing hard. I wonder if he can sense that I'm right there, just behind the door. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

He licks the silver ring in his lip and then throws his shoulder against the door. The security chain jangles and I back away, afraid that somehow he can see me standing half-naked in my room and is already thinking, Come on, girl. Could you make this any easier?

I can't call the front desk because I know the manager will be on the side of No Name and will maybe even give him the key he needs to open this door, to make the jangling security chain the only thing between him and me. So I don't pick up the phone. I don't turn on a light. I put on the green gardening gloves. I get on my knees and crawl into the bathroom, moving slowly, my head animal low, and lock myself inside. The carpet leaves red marks on my knees. The floor is still wet from my watery footprints. I huddle in the tub. I cover myself with the bath mat. I rub away the dark streak on my collarbone. “Be still,” I say. My new meditation.

I wait in there until the noise stops, and I go out into the room and see light slipping through the blinds like a rescue.

 

25.

At dawn, I walk to the bus station. All the floors are quiet. The pool sits empty. There is no sign of the manager or No Name. There is no man in a trench coat selling books. I'm still wearing the gardening gloves. The city looks abandoned in the early-morning light.

Down the street from the motel I find an empty lot with circles of ice as large and dark as oil slicks. There are spidery cracks along the perimeter of one circle, a sharp plunge in the center. Farther down I see clusters of brick factories with tall glass windows and slender chimneys. What kinds of lives are happening here? The sun is a pale gold disc in the sky.

I board a bus bound for Birmingham, Alabama. I wonder what I will do or what will be done to me the next time I need cash.

In Columbia, Missouri, we collect more passengers. A man in bifocals sits down next to me and digs a ringing cell phone out of his pocket. “Fuck the guilt,” he says to the person on the other end of the line. “It's no way to live.”

He hangs up and turns the phone over in his hands.

I sink into my seat and watch the slim points of tree branches bend in the wind.

The bus stops. The passengers change. The man in bifocals disappears into the day and a nun sits down next to me and starts talking about the immortal soul. She says we worry too much about the body, about where we take sacraments and pray, but the immortal soul isn't inside us, isn't in the body.

“Where is it then?” I ask her, and she says it can exist anywhere, that we have to go in search.

I wonder how it's possible for the soul to live outside the body. Will I find it on my mother's island? Will I see it drifting over the water like smoke?

The nun gets off in Jefferson City. At a rest stop, I buy chips and a Coke from the vending machines. I nearly miss the bus from spending too long touching the warm buttons, trying to remember how to choose.

We pass a small airport. The tarmac is a jumble of machinery, rusting engines and squat white trucks and carts with black wheels. A little green plane sits at the end of a runway, the wings heavy with snow.

After the airport, the landscape turns rural. In the fields, sprigs of brush stick up through the snow. These fields are surrounded by disintegrating wood fences, panels that have fallen to the ground like dislocated body parts. A steel grain silo. More brown cows, scruffy and sick-looking and weaving through the winter muck.

I see distant lines of trees, the silhouettes slight and charcoal black, like they've been burned. I see power lines, the cords sparking and swaying in the wind.

A mist rolls in and covers the trees. The windows fog. It feels like we're driving through a cloud.

I unfold the map of American highways and follow the lines that will lead me south. From Birmingham, I'll ride down to the Gulf Coast, pass into Florida through the Panhandle, and keep going.

When I look up from the map, I notice a man three rows ahead. I don't remember seeing him get on in Jefferson City. He's sitting in the window seat. He's staring out and I wonder if he is seeing anything through the fog or if his view is as dense and white as mine and he too is pretending that we are no longer on earth.

No one is sitting next to him. He is alone, like me.

I remember the masked man standing on the street corner in Chinatown and the masked man I followed all around the Stop & Shop in the middle of the night. I remember wearing the vampire mask in my basement apartment and thinking that if I never took it off I would just slowly suffocate under the heavy sweet smell of the rubber.

I fold up the map and tuck it into my pocket. I leave my seat and sit down next to this man. He is wearing a rabbit mask. The round eyeholes are surrounded by swirls of white plastic fur. The ears are a pair of white points, the cheeks mounds of pink. The lips are plump and rosy. A nice healthy rabbit. He looks like a cartoon character or a make-believe bandit—except I am touching the pointed ears and he is not yelling or telling me to get away. Behind the mask he is breathing deep and slow.

He's wearing black pants and a puffy maroon coat with a hole in the stomach, so the cotton stuffing spills out. I watch him reach into his lap and push the yellowed guts of his coat back inside.

I remember him showing me how the life line on my palm ran long and deep. I remember the white tuft of hair, which I know is hidden somewhere under that rabbit mask. I want to reach inside and find it. I remember the Real-Life Ghost Stories and the hair dye on our fingernails and Latin homework and the sweaty smell of his boy body in the bathtub.

I remember.

He pulls off the green gardening gloves, one at a time, and looks at my hands.

The bus slows. The air is thick with fog. Something inside me collapses, goes warm and soft, and there is a wet heat on my face. Never have I wanted someone to remember me as much as I want to be remembered now.

“Marcus,” I say.

*   *   *

In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman liked to play the Powerball lottery. Marcus and I would sit on the floor, just beyond the light of the TV, and braid the shag carpeting. We would watch little white balls jump around in a plastic bowl and a man in a tuxedo call out the winning combinations. Ms. Neuman always played the same numbers. We didn't know what those numbers meant to her; we only knew that she never won a dime. Once Marcus whispered a set of numbers to me, the bloodied lips of a zombie mask brushing my ear, and then I saw that same sequence appear on the TV. He did it again, a month later. Here Ms. Neuman had spent years trying to guess right and Marcus had done it twice in a row. That was the first time I realized his mind didn't work the same as everyone else's. The second time was when he woke me in the middle of the night already knowing Ms. Neuman was unconscious on the floor.

*   *   *

We don't say anything for the longest time. We stare straight ahead and watch the fog begin to lift and the road unfurl like a scroll before us.

I'm the first to speak, to ask how he found me. Marcus has no way to explain. After the sickness ended, he started traveling the country by bus, moving from one city to another to another until he ended up here.

“I wanted to get out there,” he tells me. “I wanted to see.”

He has passed through Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, through places called Cuba and Brazil and Lebanon. Cities named for countries. He felt a westward pull, though he never made it as far west as Kansas.

A list of what he has seen: a helicopter crashed on the white edge of a field; an abandoned watchtower, the clock hands stuck at noon; a replica of the Statue of Liberty, only instead of standing on an island and holding a torch, this lady was outside a church and holding a giant wood cross. He has seen hitchhikers and shooting stars and a bleating goat tied to a fence and a nightfall that closed around him like a fist. A woman sitting on the side of the road, a sleeping bag draped over her shoulders. A gas mask discarded in a parking lot.

For both of us, these long hours on buses have shown us more of America than we have ever seen.

We pass a field with humps in the snow, like there is a creature living underneath all that white.

When Marcus wants to know where I'm going, what I'm doing here, I look at him and say, “I have a mother.”

I catch a road sign for Indianapolis, which doesn't seem right at all. According to my map of American highways, we should be seeing signs for Fayetteville and Little Rock and Jackson, but then again what do I know about cross-country bus routes.

A damp snow starts falling. It covers the yellow highway lines.

“You have a mother? Since when?”

“Since two months ago.”

“Where is she?”

“Florida,” I tell him. “Shadow Key. That's where I'm going.”

“I've never been to an island before,” Marcus says.

I look down at his hand. I reach for his fingers and squeeze. His skin has the same soft feeling I remember from childhood.

Soon there is another river, wide and glossy with ice. A light fog hovers over the river and it looks like the water is breathing. The trees on the banks are stooped and gray. They have an ancient way about them.

I see a distant bridge and wonder when's the last time somebody jumped.

“What about you? Where are you trying to end up?”

“Nowhere,” he says.

*   *   *

In Dayton, it becomes clear that all along this bus has been going in the wrong direction, that it has no intention of taking me to Birmingham. I go up front to talk to the driver and he tells me this bus is going east and has always been going east and he doesn't know where I got my ideas about Birmingham. I ask about the next stop and he tells me it's Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, unless I want to be let out on the side of the road, in which case he will be perfectly happy to oblige.

I have a feeling this driver does not believe in existence affirmations.

“We're going to Pennsylvania,” I tell Marcus when I return to my seat, and I am squeezed tight by the fear that the forces of nature are trying to drag me back to Massachusetts, to Somerville and the Stop & Shop, and away from my mother.

It takes us three hours to get out of Ohio, to cross over the Pennsylvania state line. We pass signs for Pittsburgh, a city divided by a river, and after a while the highway tapers into a narrow road bordered by forest. I look into the trees and see dark darting things through the branches. This road leads us to a town where the streetlights are burned out and the power lines are drooping and the earth beneath the sidewalks has swelled, pushing up the concrete squares so they look like rising waves. We pass a block of little houses with rusted awnings and crumbling foundations. White sheets with black
x
's cover windows. Yellow notices hang from doors.