Eventually the woods fall away. Eventually we find Memphis. Another river, another bridge. A strip of neon signs for BLACK DIAMOND and KING’S PALACE CAFE and GUS’S FRIED CHICKEN. The lights sting my eyes. We see a man in a wheelchair. He is wearing a sweatshirt that says GOD BLESS AMERICA and spinning himself in circles. We see people wandering the streets, masked by night. They stand under the signs with lit cigarettes, the smoke rising and disappearing into the above.
We go into a Bojangles’ for water and toilets and in the bathroom I find a woman lying on her back under the sinks. Condensation is dripping from the pipes and hitting her in the face. A tiny syringe is sticking out of her arm. I stand over her. She is blinking very slowly and sliding her head back and forth across the linoleum. There’s wet toilet paper all over the floor. The tiles are a sick shade of green. I remember the RECOVERY POSITION sign, remember practicing the action with Marcus, and roll the woman onto her side. She is heavy and hard to move. Her skin feels like putty. I run out of the bathroom and tell the man behind the counter that he has a problem in there.
Back outside I take breaths so deep my lungs burn with oxygen.
We board a bus and don’t stop. There will be no more motel rooms, no more houses, no more detours. No more chances to become lost. This is our thinking now. At rest stops, I slip into bathrooms and vomit into toilets. I slosh water around in my mouth and wipe my face with wads of toilet paper and try to understand how my body is changing.
On the bus, a woman sitting across from us is reading a book titled Almost a Psychopath, and I wonder where the line is.
In Tupelo, Mississippi, I look at myself in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. I look hard. I am surprised by the length of my hair. The dark tips brush my shoulders. I can tuck my bangs behind my ears. The evidence of Raul’s sheepdog haircut, the evidence of that locked-up person, is almost gone.
I comb my hair with my fingers and remember the feeling of his hot, rough hands moving over my scalp.
In the light of the bathroom, I see lines on my face. They almost look like scars except I’ve never been cut by anything but time.
When I meet this child, will I want to do what my mother did? Will I want to leave it behind?
On the bus, Marcus takes off his rabbit mask and puts it on me. The elastic band digs into the back of my scalp. It’s night again. I can feel the heat his skin has left on the plastic. I concentrate on the movement of the bus underneath, the light that cuts in and out. I feel like the bandit now.
I don’t think so, I decide, touching my stomach. I turn my head and watch the landscape pass through a window. I don’t think I’ll be that kind of person.
At a gas station in Tuscaloosa, I’m in line to pay for coffee. We are almost out of cash. A little black TV sits on a stack of blue milk crates behind the counter, the volume blaring. In the Mansion, there was no TV—how long has it been since I’ve seen one? The news is on. I hear about a virulent strain of the flu that has put a town in Texas in isolation. A rash of suicides by cyanide in Michigan. A woman quarantined at the Boston airport because she was showing signs of the sickness. A false alarm, but it makes a person wonder: what will we do if it comes back? An infant found abandoned in a sewage pipe in Virginia. I add that to my list of things a mother can do that are worse than leaving.
A new headline, “Kansas Project Exposed,” snakes along the bottom of the screen.
“Stop,” I say even though no one in the line is moving. I ask the cashier to turn up the volume.
“Do you want us all to go deaf?” he says, but does what I want anyway.
The broadcaster says news outlets are searching for details about a hospital near La Harpe, Kansas. Inside this hospital authorities have discovered eighty bodies. There were eighty-four people in the hospital when I left, which means four more must have died of the sickness after I was gone. These bodies were found tucked in their beds, slumped against walls, in hallways. According to the preliminary reports, the patients and staff appear to have died within twenty-four hours of each other. The cause is unknown, but the theories include: experimental vaccine, toxins in the water or food supplies, psychosis brought on by excessive winter, mass suicide. Casualties of the microepidemic.
There is a still of Dr. Bek in a simple white doctor’s coat. Without the silver bulk of his suit, he looks frail and old. His eyes are different than I remember. They are a darker shade of blue, impenetrable as lake water.
A camera moves across the exterior of the Hospital. It looks just as it did when I arrived and just as it did when I left—tall, fortresslike, surrounded by the plains, the land white with snow. I try to imagine the vast emptiness inside. The silent halls. The bare mattresses. The dead TV in the Common Room. The microwaves in the Dining Hall. The hole in the twins’ room that leads to nowhere.
If I had stayed, they would be talking about my own death, which would have been anonymous, a small shift in the total. The difference between eighty and eighty-one.
I drop the coffees. Brown liquid sloshes across the gas station floor. The cashier stands up from his stool and shouts.
I bolt outside and behind the gas station, into the stench of Dumpster garbage. I lean against a concrete wall and I can almost feel Louis coming up behind me, his hand on my spine, but then the ghost of his touch disappears and I am alone.
I close my eyes. I can hear Marcus calling my name.
I get sick behind the gas station. I am sick of the road. I am sick of TVs, of the news they keep bringing. I bend over and my body heaves and this time I know it’s not from the child.
*