Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (26 page)

And God knows, except for the buses, I do not take whole days away from my work.

"But," Jacob e-mailed me, "isn't it time to start that second childhood? Isn't it time to be a little younger at heart?"

I surprised myself. For the first time in ... I don't even know how long, the part of me that routinely answers "Sorry, I can't" fought a little less fiercely.

"Okay," I told him. "But I'm not wearing a bathing suit. I'll wear shorts and a T-shirt." Beth, perhaps not coincidentally, told him the same thing.

"I'm asking you to loosen up," he e-mailed back. "Writers need to experience what others experience to get a true understanding of life, correct? I want to give you more than a glimpse of fun—I want you to feel it. Don't worry about how you look, none of us are beauties."

Then he and Carol took Beth to Wal-Mart, after coaxing her off the bus one afternoon. "I don't
want
a bathing suit," she insisted, but once she was strolling along the aisles in the nucleus of a family, and once she saw the racks of swimsuits in her favorite tropical colors, she changed her mind. They applauded her when she selected one, a yellow neck-to-thigh ensemble.

"Let's go for it," Jacob wrote me. "Be not afraid."

So here I am, in a loose sweater and skirt over a one-piece black swimsuit, stepping across the sand, my head beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat.

The ocean glitters out to infinity, and sailboats glide across the horizon. I realize as I draw near that the three girls tossing the ball are Carol, Grace, and Beth. My sister catches with both arms and throws underhand into the sky. Carol and Grace laugh, and Jacob offers me a chair. Beth looks as happy as I've ever seen her.

As a school of dolphins arcs across the horizon, Jacob and I talk. We have recently begun swapping e-mail, initially so I could check in with him about how Beth was doing and so he could keep me abreast of major bus developments, but eventually this correspondence evolved into exchanges about what he calls the "Big Things": how to be good even when it's hard, why some people are not good even when it's easy, why it's important to keep trying. Now, as we sit on beach chairs and continue our dialogue in person, he tells me that, as careful as he is to treat his passengers and family well, and as faithfully as he tries to emulate Christ's selflessness, he still struggles to give himself to others.

On being critical: "This is tough for me, because I see every little thing that's wrong. But I work at it—all the time. So even though I see faults, I try real hard not to deal with other people, and myself, so harshly."

On why we're here: "We're here to learn, sooner or later, to surrender our pride and do unto others as you would have others do unto you. But most people don't want to hear this until they hit bottom."

On prayer: "It means so much more than what people think. It ain't just sitting there, mumbling things. My prayer has graduated from asking for things to downright praise and gratitude. And instead of wondering whether I'll get something I want, I pray for others. It's how I keep myself at peace."

Then Beth joins us and, without preamble, says, "I'm
afraid
to have my eye operation. But I have to, I know."

We talk about hospitals and healing. Jacob lifts his T-shirt to show us the scar from his liver transplant. Beth has told me he gets sick more often than most drivers. "Are you okay?" I ask, concerned. "Oh, yeah. It's under control." He smiles reassuringly.

The voices of children playing nearby rise and fall. Grace and Carol sit a few yards away, building a castle. Beth gets up and shoots a water pistol at me, giggling.

Later, along the boardwalk, we stop in shops with beaded curtains and seashell jewelry, watch hermit crabs crawl in wire crates and see the Ferris wheel rock to a stop, meander through an old-fashioned candy store, and ogle machines that make saltwater taffy. Banners zip through the air tied to light airplanes. We wave at a hot-air balloon.

Jacob takes pictures. We admire a miniature golf course with cartoon themes. Then Grace takes pictures. In a shop, Carol tries on a blue bathing suit that makes her look as fetching as a mermaid. Then she takes pictures: Jacob with his arms around Beth, Grace, and me. "Now you have
three
daughters," Beth says to Jacob as the shutter clicks.

I have not yet gone into the water. I don't care for being in over my head, or tempting the tides, or chancing across a rabid jellyfish swimming too close to the shore.

After lunch, we wind our way back through the sunbathers to our chairs. Jacob and Grace say, "Let's go in!" But I remain on the dry sand, with Carol and Beth.

"This is the beach!" Jacob says when he returns, dripping wet. He scoops up the ball. "Come on, you'll be fine."

"I'm fine here in my chair with my book," I say as he runs back in.

I watch him and Grace jumping about in the waves, tossing the ball. He returns one more time to say, "You drove all the way here and you're not going in?" Without waiting for an answer, he scurries back to the water.

Carol shrugs. "You're on your own."

Beth says, "I'll go if you go."

I pause. "Okay. I'll try."

I set down my book and remove my skirt and sweater and shirt and hat and sunglasses and wristwatch. An ocean breeze whistles past, pricking up goose bumps on my arms and legs. I feel as if I'm in my underwear, except that I can't lower the blinds.

Then Beth and I head past the many beach towels to the water's edge.

Jacob and Grace, happily tossing the ball in the deep, catch sight of us. "Hey!" Jacob calls above the breaking waves. "You're here!"

Beth and I put our toes into the foam. "It's cold!" we say.

Jacob reaches his arm over the water toward us, his fingers beckoning.

Beth and I linger on the shore, giggling, holding each other. He keeps on, finally throwing me the ball. I step out to catch it—up to my ankles. He throws it again, aiming deeper into the water. I move toward it—up to my knees.

"Come in!" he calls.

Beth, I see, has retreated to the beach. I throw the ball back. I am alone.

"You throw well!" Jacob says.

Grace joins in. "Come on out here!"

I let myself go partway in. Jacob is making his "come here" gesture.

The water is up over my knees. Over my thighs.

But then: "I'm cold!" I say.

"Just get in! C'mon!"

"I can't!"

"You'll warm up as soon as you get used to it!"

"No, no. The water seems warm, but the air is cold!"

He calls, "You know what that is? That's writer's crock!"

I'm suddenly shivering so hard I can't try any longer. I turn and run back up the beach.

Three months after Beth disappears, I am in class on a dewy spring morning when a student who works in the office comes to the classroom door. "Rachel has an emergency phone call," she says. I know, I just know, it has to do with Beth.

I tear across campus. It is a friend of Dad's, telling me that Mom's husband had called that morning and said he was about to put Beth on a plane in Albuquerque. Dad was told to get to La Guardia to meet her. Immediately.

Why so suddenly? Why didn't mom call?

It is mysterious and frightening. When I step outside the office, I faint for the first time in my life.

I stay out of classes all day, waiting for Dad. He is supposed to swing by my school after he and Max have picked up Beth. I lie on my dormitory bed in silence, listening, telling myself my worst fears could not be founded.

Then I hear that cadenced, quacky voice.

I whip into the corridor. She is down the hall with my brother, grinning. She has the same heavy, awkward walk, the same body, the same laugh—though some of her hair has fallen out, her hands and face are grimy, and her all-yellow outfit is filthy beyond words.

I barrel down the hall and throw myself into her embrace.

Minutes later, we get into Dad's car, feigning normalcy. "So, Beth," I say, as Dad steers us down the country roads toward his apartment, "did you like the plane ride?
"

"
I liked Las Vegas
"

"
I thought you were in Albuquerque
"

"
Las Vegas
"

Dad says, "Albuquerque was a lie. They obviously don't want us to know where they are.
"

"
She has almost no clothes," Max says. Dad adds, "And what she has hasn't been washed." Hiding my dread, I ask, "What happened, Beth? Where have you been?
"

She pours it out. Our mother and this guy—"He was mean and he yelled. He was nuts!"—have been running from what he said was the KGB and the CIA. They have been living in hotels under aliases, running from skipped bills, shoplifting. He beat Mom and once held a knife to her throat. He slept all day and drank all night. He wouldn't let them make calls except to Grandma, and they couldn't tell her where they were, and eventually they couldn't call at all. He wouldn't let them go out alone, or speak to anyone, even waiters or taxi drivers. Over and over, they left their luggage behind when they ran away from hotels in the middle of the night, except that he always kept his Samsonite, which was filled with guns and knives, and running away meant really running, doing it on foot, because they sold Mom's station wagon two months ago and she kept the money in her support hose because he didn't like banks and ever since then they'd traveled around Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico spending whole days on buses—

"
Buses?" I say.

"
Yeah. Long, long bus rides. They'd sit together in one seat, and I'd sit in my own seat and look around to see if anyone could help.
"

On a bus. Independent, yes, but not the way I'd envisioned it. She was on her own on a bus.

And all along, Beth kept planning to get away and call us to come rescue her. Everywhere she went, she looked for a pay phone. Yesterday she'd made her break. While he and Mom were in a casino, Beth sneaked out of her hotel room. She asked strangers in the lobby for their loose change and then she walked outside to find a phone. Showing a resourcefulness that had been incubating for three months, a resourcefulness she'd never shown before, she did find a phone. She figured out how to call the operator. She remembered Laura's phone number.

But Laura's landlady answered and said that Laura was away at class.

Moments later, when the man found her, he'd thrown himself, punching and raging, at Beth, saying he wanted to kill her. "Thaz when the crap started." He sent Beth to her hotel room, wouldn't let Mom come in, and held my sister at gunpoint all night, as she sat on her bed, staring at him in terror. This morning, at the airport, Mom kissed her over and over, and told her, crying, "I have to send you back, if you're going to stay alive
"

Then Beth, in the car with us, begins to sob, and Dad does too. And then Max breaks down, and then me. In a cascade of tears we cruise down the road, not noticing the budding trees or the young corn in the fields.

So Beth also moves in with Dad, joining Max and Ringo, and, when she finishes the semester at college, Laura. In June, my summer vacation arrives, and I move into Dad's place, too.

We cannot begin to understand our mother, who seems to have gone off the deep end. We piece together that her new husband is a lawless alcoholic, for whom life careens between boredom and paranoia. But Mom went along with it all, to the point of talking her own mother into helping her. To the point of almost letting her daughter get killed.

Maybe, we think, our mother liked it. She
must
have. She must be a monster inside. Why else would she do that?

The sleet from that February afternoon has settled deep into my chest. I feel nothing for my mother. I lose myself in my homework and writing.

Laura and Max feel the same as I do about her. We dogleg around her name in conversations. We see only holes where she stood in our dreams. We try to forget with black humor, sundaes, new friendships, and scorn for phrases like "maternal instinct." Only rarely does anyone bring up what happened.

But sometimes in the afternoon we find ourselves in the living room while Dad is grading papers in his study and an old movie is on TV and feelings I don't understand poke out of the ice inside me. I'll be sitting on the wing-backed chair, writing to a friend in New Jersey, my pen going on about Richard Brautigan or the new Grateful Dead album, and then suddenly it'll veer off into a bold-letter marquee:

T
HE
S
TORY OF THE
D
ECLINE OF THE
S
IMON
E
MPIRE
WRITTEN, DIRECTED, AND STARRING
THE INCOMPARABLE RACHEL SIMON
(
WITH ASSISTANCE FROM BLOOD RELATIVES
)

Max and Laura don't know I'm spilling our tale to distant friends. It doesn't occur to them; they're hunkered down over the dining room table, each involved in a game of Solitaire. All the while, with their eyes on their cards, they talk. Laura says, "We just need to move on, forget it, begin a new life." Max says, "Life is a bowl of sour grapes. If I can beat myself at this game, that's enough for me.
"