The bus ride home was the longest of Lance’s life. The bus was completely full, almost to the point of spilling over. Each seat was stacked three kids deep, and even Lance had to share a space with a teenage girl who sat as far away from him as possible, nearly hovering in the aisle, her back turned to him.
The bus jounced and tilted as it rolled laboriously down the snow-scattered roads. Lance stared out of the sectioned window and watched the low-hanging gray sky. The clouds were thickening, and he wasn’t at all surprised when a few minutes later light flakes began to twist past and fall on the fields around them.
Stop after stop came and went, the bus steadily draining of its occupants until there were only three other children remaining in the rattling bus. The familiarity of contemplating his own death slid over him once again and the repeating thoughts strode out of the darkness like smiling demons.
His bowels were painfully full as the vehicle slowed and shook to a stop perpendicular to the long drive running across the fields to his left. The bus driver looked up expectantly in his overhead mirror, his eyes seeming to ask Don’t you live here, dummy? Lance rose from his seat and cinched his book bag tight over one shoulder.
The cold air met him with a push of wind and the stinging feel of ice crystals on his face. The clouds seemed to have dropped in altitude, as if they would eventually touch the ground and push their way into the frozen earth. The driveway stretched out ahead of Lance as the bus’s engine revved behind him, and the bus shot away down the road as though something were chasing it. Lance could see his father’s truck parked in its regular spot just in front of the garage. His let his head fall nearly to his chest as he began to walk up the drive, one foot after the other, treading now in the tire track opposite the one he had walked that morning. His breath puffed out before his face, obscuring the white ground he stepped on, but not before he noticed another tire track that was mixed in with the familiar Chevy tread. For a moment it seemed like all his blood had rushed up and congregated in his head, and his vision dimmed because of it. Had his mother returned? Had he been mistaken in thinking his father had done something to her? Lance resisted the urge to sprint up the hill and tried to calm his thoughts into a rational order. He looked again at the space near their garage and could now make out where the vehicle had stopped and then some time later jackknifed around and left the same way it had come. His excitement waned when he saw this. His mother wouldn’t have left once she came back, not without taking him with her or bringing an entire battalion of police to haul his father away.
The simplicity of the answer to his wondering stopped him in his snowy tracks. The sheriff had been here. He had known it all afternoon, deep inside where truth is the only thing that speaks. Why had he thought anything different? Why had he even hoped that his mother had come back? It was a foolish thought, and one he wouldn’t allow himself again. She was gone. Now his mind turned to what truly awaited him at the top of the hill, and the stone inside him that was his constant companion dropped lower and became hot.
When he neared the rear of his father’s truck, a smell began to permeate his nostrils. It was an acrid odor, a mixture of several things burning at once. He could pick out paper, plastic, and the charred smell of overdone food—his father was burning garbage.