The Goldfinch (60 page)

She wasn’t throwing me off? I blinked at her, afraid to move or speak a word.

“You understand?”
she repeated, more ominously.

“Thank you—”

A bit belligerently, she shook her head. “
Oh,
no. Don’t thank me, honey. Because I am putting you off this bus if there is one single complaint. One.”

I sat in a tremble as she strode down the aisle and started the bus. As we swung out of the parking lot I was afraid to even glance at the other passengers, though I could feel them all looking at me.

By my knee, Popper let out a tiny huff and resettled. As much as I liked Popper, and felt sorry for him, I’d never thought that as dogs went he was particularly interesting or intelligent. Instead I’d spent a lot of time wishing he was a cooler dog, a border collie or a Lab or a rescue maybe, some smart and haunted pit mix from the shelter, a scrappy little mutt that chased balls and bit people—in fact almost anything but what he actually was: a girl’s dog, a toy, completely gay, a dog I felt embarrassed to walk on the street. Not that Popper wasn’t cute; in fact, he was exactly the kind of tiny, prancing fluffball that a lot of people liked—maybe not me but surely some little girl like the one across the aisle would find him by the road and take him home and tie ribbons in his hair?

Rigidly I sat there, re-living the bolt of fear again and again: the driver’s face, my shock. What really scared me was that I now knew if she made me put Popper off the bus that I would have to get off with him, too (and do what?) even in the middle of Illinois nowhere. Rain, cornfields: standing by the side of the road. How had I become attached to such a ridiculous animal? A lapdog that Xandra had chosen?

Throughout Illinois and Indiana, I sat swaying and vigilant: too afraid to go to sleep. The trees were bare, rotted-out Halloween pumpkins on the porches. Across the aisle, the mother had her arm around the little girl and was singing, very quietly:
You are my sunshine.
I had nothing to eat but leftover crumbs of the potato chips the cab driver had given me; and—ugly salt taste in my mouth, industrial plains, little nowhere towns rolling past—I felt chilled and forlorn, looking out at the bleak farmland and thinking of songs my mother had sung to me, way back when.
Toot toot tootsie goodbye, toot toot tootsie, don’t cry.
At last—in Ohio, when it was dark, and the lights in the sad little far-apart houses were coming on—I
felt safe enough to drowse off, nodding back and forth in my sleep, until Cleveland, cold white-lit city where I changed buses at two in the morning. I was afraid to give Popper the long walk I knew he needed, for fear that someone might see us (because what would we do, if we were found out? Stay in Cleveland forever?). But he seemed frightened too; and we stood shivering on a street corner for ten minutes before I gave him some water, put him in the bag, and walked back to the station to board.

It was the middle of the night and everyone seemed half asleep, which made the transfer easier; and we transferred again at noon the next day, in Buffalo, where the bus crunched out through piled-up sleet in the station. The wind was biting, with a sharp wet edge; after two years in the desert I’d forgotten what real winter—aching and raw—was like. Boris had not returned any of my texts, which was perhaps understandable since I was sending them to Kotku’s phone, but I sent another one anyway:
BFALO NY NYC 2NIT. HPE UR OK HAV U HERD FRM X?

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anything else—I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to
Wind, Sand and Stars
and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.

I think I must have been getting quietly sick ever since the stop in Cleveland, but by the time I finally got off the bus, in Port Authority, it was evening and I was burning up with fever. I was chilled, wobbly on my legs and the city—which I’d longed for so fiercely—seemed foreign and noisy and cold, exhaust fumes and garbage and strangers rushing past in every direction.

The terminal was packed with cops. Everywhere I looked there were signs for runaway shelters, runaway hotlines, and one lady cop in particular gave me the fish-eye as I was hurrying outside—after sixty-plus hours on the bus, I was dirty and tired and knew I didn’t really pass muster—but nobody stopped me and I didn’t look behind me until I was out the door, and well away. Several men of varying age and nationality called out to me on the street, soft voices coming from several directions (
hey, little brother! where you headed? need a ride?
) but though one red-haired guy in particular seemed nice and normal and not much older than me, almost
like someone I might be friends with, I was enough of a New Yorker to ignore his cheerful hello and keep walking like I knew where I was going.

I’d thought Popper would be overjoyed to get out and walk, but when I put him down on the sidewalk Eighth Avenue was too much for him and he was too scared to go more than a block or so; he’d never been on a city street before, everything terrified him (cars, car horns, people’s legs, empty plastic bags blowing down the sidewalk) and he kept jerking forward, darting toward the crosswalk, jumping this way and that, dashing behind me in terror and winding the leash around my legs so I tripped and nearly fell in front of a van rushing to beat the light.

After I picked him up, paddling, and stuck him back in his bag (where he scrabbled and huffed in exasperation before he got quiet), I stood in the middle of the rush-hour crowd trying to get my bearings. Everything seemed so much dirtier and unfriendlier than I’d remembered—colder too, streets gray like old newspaper.
Que faire?
as my mother had liked to say. I could almost hear her saying it, in her light, careless voice.

I’d often wondered, when my father prowled around banging the kitchen cabinets and complaining that he wanted a drink, what “wanting a drink” felt like—what it felt like to want alcohol and nothing but, not water or Pepsi or anything else.
Now,
I thought bleakly,
I know.
I was dying for a beer but I knew better than to go in a deli and try to buy one without ID. Longingly I thought of Mr. Pavlikovsky’s vodka, the daily blast of warmth I’d come to take for granted.

More to the point: I was starving. I was a few doors down from a fancy cupcake place, and I was so hungry I turned right in and bought the first one that caught my eye (green tea flavored, as it turned out, with some kind of vanilla filling, weird but still delicious). Almost at once the sugar made me feel better; and while I ate, licking the custard off my fingers, I stared in amazement at the purposeful mob. Leaving Vegas I’d somehow felt a lot more confident about how all this would play out. Would Mrs. Barbour phone Social Services to tell them I’d turned up? I’d thought not; but now I wondered. There was also the not-so-insignificant question of Popper, since (along with dairy and tree nuts and adhesive tape and sandwich mustard and about twenty-five other commonly-found household items) Andy was violently allergic to dogs—not just dogs, but also cats and horses and circus animals and the class guinea pig (“Pig Newton”) that we’d had way back in second grade, which was why there were no
pets at the Barbours’ house. Somehow this had not seemed such an insurmountable problem back in Vegas, but—standing out on Eighth Avenue when it was cold and getting dark—it did.

Not knowing what else to do, I started walking east toward Park Avenue. The wind hit raw in my face and the smell of rain in the air made me nervous. The skies in New York seemed a lot lower and heavier than out west—dirty clouds, eraser-smudged, like pencil on rough paper. It was as if the desert, its openness, had retrained my distance vision. Everything seemed dank and closed-in.

Walking helped me work out the roll in my legs. I walked east to the library (the lions! I stood still for a moment, like a returning soldier catching my first glimpse of home) and then I turned up Fifth Avenue—streetlamps on, still fairly busy, though it was emptying out for the night—up to Central Park South. As tired as I was, and cold, still my heart stiffened to see the Park, and I ran across Fifty-Seventh (Street of Joy!) to the leafy darkness. The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits but yet it was as if I was seeing another Park beneath the tangible one, a map to the past, a ghost Park dark with memory, school outings and zoo visits of long ago. I was walking along the sidewalk on the Fifth Avenue side, looking in, and the paths were tree-shadowed, haloed with streetlamps, mysterious and inviting like the woods from
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
If I turned and walked down one of those lighted paths, would I walk out again into a different year, maybe even a different future, where my mother—just out of work—would be waiting for me slightly wind-blown on the bench (our bench) by the Pond: putting her cell phone away, standing to kiss me,
Hi, Puppy, how was school, what do you want to eat for dinner?

Then—suddenly—I stopped. A familiar presence in a business suit had shouldered past and was striding down the sidewalk ahead of me. The shock of white hair stood out in the darkness, white hair that looked as if it ought to be worn long and tied back with a ribbon; he was preoccupied, more rumpled than usual, but still I recognized him immediately, the angle of his head with its faint echo of Andy: Mr. Barbour, briefcase and all, on his way home from work.

I ran to catch up with him. “Mr. Barbour?” I called. He was talking to himself, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. “Mr. Barbour, it’s Theo,” I said loudly, catching him by his sleeve.

With shocking violence, he turned and threw my hand off. It was Mr. Barbour all right; I would have known him anywhere. But his eyes, on mine, were a stranger’s—bright and hard and contemptuous.

“No more handouts!” he cried, in a high voice. “Get lost!”

I ought to have known mania when I saw it. It was an amped-up version of the look my dad had sometimes on Game Day—or, for that matter, when he’d hauled off and hit me. I’d never been around Mr. Barbour when he was off his medicine (Andy, typically, had been restrained in describing his father’s “enthusiasms,” I didn’t then know about the episodes where he’d tried to telephone the Secretary of State or wear his pyjamas to work); and his rage was so out of character for the bemused and inattentive Mr. Barbour I knew that all I could do was fall back, in shame. He glared at me for a long moment and then brushed his arm off (as if I were dirty, as if I’d contaminated him by touching him) and stalked away.

“Were you asking that man for money?” said another man who had sidled up out of nowhere as I stood on the sidewalk, astonished. “Were you?” he said, more insistently, when I turned away. His build was pudgy, his suit blandly corporate and married-with-kids-looking; and his sad-sack demeanor gave me the creeps. As I tried to step around him, he stepped in my path and dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder, and in a panic I dodged him and ran off into the park.

I headed down to the Pond, down paths yellow and sodden with fallen leaves, where I went by instinct straight to the Rendezvous Point (as my mother and I called our bench) and sat shivering. It had seemed the most incredible, unbelievable luck, spotting Mr. Barbour on the street; I’d thought, for maybe five seconds, that after the first awkwardness and puzzlement he would greet me happily, ask a few questions,
oh, never mind, never mind, there’s time for that later,
and walk with me up to the apartment.
My goodness, what an adventure. Won’t Andy be pleased to see you!

Jesus, I thought—running my hand through my hair, still feeling shaken. In an ideal world, Mr. Barbour would have been the member of the family I would
most
have wanted to meet on the street—more than Andy, certainly more than Andy’s siblings, more than even Mrs. Barbour, with her frozen pauses, her social niceties and her codes of behavior unknown to me, her chilling and unreadable gaze.

Out of habit, I checked my phone for texts for what seemed like the
ten thousandth time—and was cheered despite myself to find at long last a message—number I didn’t recognize, but it had to be Boris.
HEY! OPE U2 ROK. NOT 2 MAD. RING XNR OK SHE HZ BEN BUGEN ME

I tried calling him back—I’d texted him about fifty times from the road—but no one picked up at that number and Kotku’s phone took me straight to voice mail. Xandra could wait. Walking back to Central Park South, with Popper, I bought three hot dogs from a vendor who was just shutting up for the day (one for Popper, two for me) and while we ate, on an out-of-the-way bench inside the Scholars’ Gate, considered my options. In my desert fantasias of New York I’d sometimes entertained perverse images of Boris and me living on the street, around St. Mark’s Place or Tompkins Square, quite possibly standing around rattling our change cups with the very skate rats who’d once jeered at Andy and me in our school uniforms. But the real prospect of sleeping on the street was a whole lot less appealing alone and feverish in the November cold.

The hell of it was: I was only about five blocks from Andy’s. I thought about phoning him—maybe asking him to meet me—and then decided against it. Certainly I could call him if I got desperate; he would gladly sneak out, bring me a change of clothes and money snitched from his mother’s purse and—who knows—maybe a bunch of leftover crabmeat canapés or those cocktail peanuts that the Barbours always ate. But the word
handout
still scalded. As much as I liked Andy, it had been almost two years. And I couldn’t forget the way that Mr. Barbour had looked at me. Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn’t quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.