I remember that the night was crisp, something only my brain perceived, not the rest of me. There was the knowledge that it was cold—like someone told me or something—but I never felt that it was cold. Like I was sleepwalking or something, in a dream. I could hear myself sobbing like I was watching it on TV. An observer, not a participant. I don’t remember telling the driver—a short, shadowy man, nothing more than a muddled voice to me, a pair of eyes in the rearview mirror—where to take me. It was as if he knew. I got in the car and he sped off, down the choppy street, driving fast and jerky, and I remember thinking that he must have heard Matthew say to hurry or something because he was going so fast. Matthew must have told him. I clung to the door handle and braced myself for every turn, wondering if this is what it felt like when Momma died, when that Datsun Bluebird started spinning somersaults down the road.
The building that the driver pulled up to was short and gray, the word Greyhound written across the brick in big blue letters. It was on the corner of some street, a city street that was all but abandoned at this time of night. Outside, an older woman stood, with her sparse gray hair, puffing on a cigarette, her free hand thrust deep in the pocket of a flimsy coat.
“Seventeen dollars,” the cabdriver said with a grating voice, and sitting like a birdbrain in the backseat of that cab, I asked, “Huh?”
He pointed to the stack of money in my trembling hand and said again, “Seventeen dollars,” and I counted out the fare from the cash Matthew had handed me, and carried that leather suitcase inside, watching the woman as I passed by.
“Spare some change,” she said to me, but I folded up that money and squeezed it in my hand, real tight so she wouldn’t see.
Inside I found a vending machine, and the first thing I did was slip in a dollar and press the red button. A soda dropped down, faster than expected, and I took it and sank sideways into the rows of empty chairs. Out the window, it was still dark, the first whiff of daylight creeping up from the bottom of the sky. A grumpy old man sat behind the ticket booth, counting dollar bills into a register, grunting all the while he did so. I could hear a TV, though I didn’t see it, the sound of early morning news, traffic and the day’s weather.
I didn’t know what I was doing here. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. It hadn’t sunk in yet: the fact that Joseph was dead. Tears clung to my cheeks, my eyes feeling fat and puffy from crying. My heart hadn’t slowed its pace, a relentless gallop that made my head start to spin. Tucked beneath the sweatshirt, on a white undershirt, were splotches of blood that had spattered me when Matthew came tearing into my room.
Joseph’s blood.
I was sure of it. I tried hard to piece the bits and pieces together: the broken glass, the knife, the guttural scream that awoke me from sleep. Matthew appearing in the door, his words: Go now. Before... Before what? I sat there and wondered. Before the police arrived. Before Isaac appeared. It had yet to really hit me: the fact that I was on my own. That I no longer belonged to Joseph. That he would no longer be coming into my room.
I sat there for I don’t know how long. Taking slow sips of my soda, listening to the TV. It was warm in the bus station, and bright. I stared for some time at a fluorescent light flickering on the ceiling and watched as a man came into the station in jeans and a tattered T-shirt, a Huskers cap on his head. I thought that he should’ve been cold with just the T-shirt on, but he didn’t look cold. He looked at me, out of the corner of his eye, trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t staring. But I could tell he was. He carried an overstuffed duffel bag in one hand, too much stuff inside to zip it clear shut.
He nodded, kind of a half nod, as if saying I see you, and then walked, smack dab to a chart on the wall, and when he got there he just stood and stared. I saw the words on the wall above that chart.
Departures.
Arrivals.
The bus schedule.
I waited until he purchased a ticket to Chicago from the grumpy man behind the booth and then sulked into a hard chair on the other side of the station, and pulled that cap over his eyes and appeared to sleep. I slid from my chair—wiping my eyes with the back of a sleeve—and wandered to that chart on the wall, staring at so many words and numbers it made me dizzy. Kearney. Columbus. Chicago. Cincinnati.
And then I saw it, two words so unexpected, I knew they were meant to be: Fort Collins.
Fort Collins. The same words that I’d seen time and again on the return address labels of those letters Big Lily sent me from her home in Colorado. My Lily, little Lily, lived in Fort Collins, Colorado.
It was time to go to her. To see my sister again.
HEIDI
Graham stands three feet away in the darkened room, watching with gluttonous eyes as I lower my undergarments to the ground, the pale pink bra falling upon the kitten heels and pink panties, beside sheer nylons now wadded into a ball and cast aside.
His eyes look me up and down deliberately, unhurriedly, coming to a standstill on the diagonal scar, red and ever-present, running from my belly button down, its tail end lost amid pubic hairs. A constant reminder.