Walk Me Home (33 page)

“I don’t know. Everybody else always did. Where are we?”

“Bakersfield,” Malcolm says. Still without looking at her.

They eat in silence for a few minutes. The food is making Carly feel more grounded.

Then Lois says, “We don’t feel comfortable letting you hitchhike all the way to Trinidad.”

Like it’s her decision, Carly thinks.

It’s that sinking feeling that’s become so familiar. It takes her back to Alvin, saying, “I don’t want you and you sister leaving here on your own.” That definitive moment when an adult decides to take over your life.

“I have to get there, though. And it can’t be much farther.”

“It’s almost another five hundred miles.”

Carly’s heart falls. The half-eaten sandwich sinks in her hand until it’s back on the plate.

“Oh, no. It couldn’t be. From Fresno? Or from here?”

“From Fresno.”

“Couldn’t be.”

Lois gets up and brings her a giant road atlas that looks almost exactly like the one Alvin showed her.

“This looks like…” She was going to say “Alvin’s” but she decides she doesn’t want to bring up Alvin. Though she’s not sure why not. “A friend of mine had one just like this.” And, in the sting of the word
friend
, she knows why not. Some friend she’s been to Alvin. Promised him to his face he could trust her to stay put. And she knew the whole time it was nothing but a lie.

She looks up Northern California. Finds Fresno. Runs her finger up the coast to Eureka and beyond.

“Holy cow, that’s a long state,” she says. “But…Anyway, I’ve got to get there. I didn’t come all this way to give up now.”

“We’ll take you to the bus station in Fresno.”

“Oh,” Carly says. “OK.”

That allows her appetite to function again, and she picks up the sandwich and takes a few more bites.

That’ll be fine. She hasn’t got enough money for a bus, of course. But Lois doesn’t need to know that. Maybe she can spend the night in the station. In the morning she’ll be on her own again. She can just keep going. And there will be no one around to take over. No one to tell her what she can or can’t do.

If there was anything she couldn’t do, she wouldn’t be here right now.

If only other people knew that as well as she did.

Lois insists on coming into the bus station. Which is not the way Carly planned it at all.

“I’ll be right back,” Lois tells Malcolm. “Give me the keys.”

Malcolm just sits in the driver’s seat for a moment or two, hands at ten and two on the wheel. The engine is still running. Then he pulls back out into traffic, watching carefully in the side mirror.

“Malcolm, stop. No, wait. Don’t stop. We’re too far now. You’ll have to circle the block. Where did you think you were going, Malcolm?”

“Home,” he says.

“We’re taking the young lady to the bus station.”

“Oh.”

“And we were already at the bus station.”

“Oh.”

“Make a right here.”

“I know how to circle a block.”

Two more right turns, then they pull up on the other side of the station. The sun is well off to the west. It’s past dinnertime. Probably seven or seven thirty.

“Now stop, Malcolm,” Lois says. “Turn off the engine.”

Malcolm sighs. Shifts into park. Turns the key to off.

Lois reaches over and grabs the keys out of the ignition. As though she’s been practicing for years.

“Come on, honey,” she says to Carly. “Let’s go see what’s what.”

They step out the side door together. It’s the remains of a hot day in Fresno. It’s the kind of hot she knows from Tulare, which isn’t far away.

Carly thinks maybe she’ll just take off running. Get this over with. She looks both ways. Makes a decision.

She sticks. For the moment.

Maybe Lois will just come in, see when the bus is scheduled, then leave her there. That would be better.

They walk along the sidewalk. Round the corner together.

Carly says, “I don’t mean to be rude, but…is it safe for him to be driving?”

“Oh, my goodness yes. Malcolm’s a great driver. Never takes his eyes off the road. Never gets lost.”

“You’re not afraid he’ll forget how?”

“Honey, I should be so lucky that man could forget how to drive. It’s everything else he’s forgotten.”

She holds the door of the bus station open for Carly. A blast of cool hits Carly in the face as she walks inside.

“He’s forgotten me a time or two,” Lois says. “Until I got smart and started taking the keys. Left me once in a gas station in Seligman, Arizona. Remembered how to drive away but forgot me, and when I called him eight hundred times, he forgot what you’re supposed to do with the cell phone when it rings. That was a mess, let me tell you. But in sixty years, he hasn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket. If there’s one thing that man can do—and there may be only one thing left that man can do—it’s drive that rig.”

Lois marches up to the counter.

Carly sits down on a hard bench. Turns her back to the business being done. After all, it really isn’t her business. She’s not the one who thinks she can’t hitchhike. That’s a grown-up stranger’s decision.

It takes a long time. She can hear Lois talking to a man behind the counter. But she purposely stays too far away to hear what they’re saying.

She looks behind her once and thinks she can just slip out the door. But Lois might call the cops to get her picked up. Better she should wait. Lois will probably leave her here to wait for the bus. Maybe she can get herself locked inside for the night. In the morning she’ll be on her own. And on her way.

She looks up to see Lois standing over her again.

“OK, here’s your ticket, hon. Bus doesn’t go all the way to Trinidad. Goes to Arcata. That’s about sixteen miles away. Or maybe he said fourteen. Anyway, he says there’s a regional bus you can pick up right there at the same station. Almost like a city bus, but it goes up and down to those little towns on the coast.
Just ask in the station in Arcata, they’ll tell you. But the bus from here doesn’t leave till morning.”

Carly just stares at the ticket for a long moment.

“You bought me a ticket?”

“Well, how else were you gonna get there?”

“How did you know I didn’t have money to buy my own?”

“Honey…really…what kind of fool stands in the hundred-degree heat in the full sun in the Mojave Desert hitching a ride if they have enough money to buy
any
ticket to ride
anything
?”

Carly nods a few times. All that bravado about how she can handle herself for another night, for another five hundred miles, melts away, leaving her overwhelmed with gratitude that she doesn’t have to.

“That’s very nice,” Carly says. “I appreciate it. But you have to write your name and address down in my little book. And how much you paid for the ticket. So I can send you the money back when I can.”

She opens her backpack and begins to rummage around, looking for the book.

“It doesn’t really matter, honey. We can manage.”

“No, really. It’s important to me. I want to give it back when I can.”

Lois shrugs. “OK, if that’s what you want.”

Carly wraps her hand around the book and pulls it free. Lois sits beside her and writes down the information in the tiniest, loopiest, neatest script Carly has ever witnessed.

Lois folds up the book and hands it back.

“Now come on back to the rig, and we’ll all get a good night’s sleep.”

“I can sleep here in the station.”

“No, you can’t. Man locks up at ten.”

“Don’t you want to get home, though?”

“Honey, we
are
home. That
is
home. When we get home, we just park it in the Crestview Trailer Park. Still home inside the rig. Only difference is what we see out the windows. Now come on.”

In her dream, Carly leaps through the narrow doorway into that boxcar a second time. Just like she did the first time. She makes it just as far in. Hits her hip just as hard. Then she’s falling back again, under the wheels of the train.

No one grabs her wrists.

She lands hard on her back on the metal rail. She can see the wheel that will take her life, that will cut her in two, bearing down on her in the dark.

She sits upright, belting out a gigantic noise.

Eyes open, she looks around. She’s in the old motor home with Malcolm and Lois. Sitting up on the couch across from the dinette table. She looks toward the bedroom in the back to see if she woke them. But nothing stirs. Maybe that huge noise she made in the dream was nothing but a rush of air in the real world.

It’s the second time in two days that she’s died—not in truth, but in her own head, her own perception. She’s getting tired of dying. She’s getting tired of that moment in which her life is supposed to flash before her eyes. Because both times it contained nothing at all. Her heart calms easily, but she can’t stop shaking. It’s an actual trembling, a shudder, as if it were below zero in here. Her teeth even chatter. It feels as though her nerves have been stripped bare. Like life is touching them. Even in the middle of the night, in the dark, with no actual life events in sight.

She berates herself, reminding herself that it was only a dream. But the minute she does, she knows the dream has nothing to do with it. She’s not scared of what’s behind her. It’s what’s ahead of her that’s causing problems.

She never gets back to sleep.

CALIFORNIA

May 19

Lois gets up at four in the morning. Before it’s even light. Carly knows it’s four because there’s a little battery-powered clock mounted over the dinette table. It ticks.

“What are you doing up so early?” Carly asks.

“Oh, I always get up at four. Always did. All my life. Well, my adult life, anyway. Used to get up at four to go to work. Been retired twelve years, but I still can’t seem to kick the habit. How about you? What are you doing up so early?”

“Never really got to sleep.”

“You OK?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, though she’s not. “I think I just have my days and nights turned around.” Which is half the truth, anyway.

Lois sits on the couch next to Carly. Fairly close. She still hasn’t turned on a light. She presses her hand against Carly’s palm. At first Carly thinks the old woman is trying to hold hands with her, which feels mildly alarming. Then she feels it. Cash. Some folded bills.
Carly doesn’t know what kind of bills or how many. Maybe three or four from the feel of it.

“It’s going to be late when that bus gets in tonight, and I want to make sure you have someplace to stay.”

“I can stay with my stepfather,” Carly says.

But she’s not 100 percent sure that’s true. She’s been up all night thinking of a hundred reasons why Teddy might not be able to take her in. Or why she might not want him to.

“I just worry that it’ll be late and maybe the first night you won’t have any place to go. I’d just feel better if you have enough on you to get a room.”

So now Carly knows the bills are not ones. Or fives.

“OK, thanks,” Carly says. “But I’m writing it down in my little book. And I’m going to pay you back.”

“Fair enough,” Lois says.

Then they sit without talking for a moment. Carly wants to say something, but she can’t imagine how to phrase it. Can’t imagine what words will not completely misrepresent her feelings. Then she realizes that she has that trouble a lot. Nearly all the time.

“I really, really appreciate that you’re being so nice to me,” Carly says. “But I don’t know why. I appreciate it, but I don’t know why you’d want to. You don’t even know me.”

Carly hears Lois sigh in the mostly dark. Her eyes are adjusted enough to the low light to see that the older woman’s hair is down, long and white and wispy and thin. It makes her look even older. And a lot more vulnerable.

“Both my parents died when I was young,” Lois says. “Younger than you.”

Immediately the tears come to Carly’s eyes. Because her mother died. It hits her that every time she’s cried since leaving
New Mexico, no matter what she thought she was crying about, she was really crying because her mother died.

“I went to live with my granddad. And that was OK, I guess. I’m lucky I had him. But he was already pretty senile. So it felt a lot like being alone.”

It strikes Carly as a cruel trick for life to play on poor Lois. Twice.

“Bet you must feel the same way now,” Carly says. Then she immediately regrets saying it. “I’m sorry. What a stupid thing to say. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded.”

“It’s OK,” Lois says, neatly wrapping up the moment and putting it to rest. “You’re absolutely right. I’m just saying my heart went out to you. You can understand that, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lois.”

“Yes, Lois. I can understand that. I don’t like being alone, either.”

“I don’t think anybody does.”

But Carly thinks some people are better at it than others. Like Jen. Jen can rely on her own wits and be OK. But Carly doesn’t say so.

Thinking about Jen brings a great pang of missing Jen.

It strikes her that she hasn’t even told Lois she has a sister. It strikes her that this older woman, whom she inwardly accused of taking over her life, has actually asked very few questions about Carly’s situation.