“Where are we going?” I asked Matthew again, and again he said, “You’ll see,” as the bus seesawed down the busy street, pitching me back and forth on that hard plastic seat, stopping every block or so to let more and more people on, until the bus nearly burst with folks.
I did what I usually did when I was scared. I thought of Momma, with her long black hair and her blue eyes. I thought back to Ogallala. Just whatever random memories I could bring to mind. They were few and far between these days: stuff like riding on the back of the shopping cart at Safeway, staring at an abandoned grocery list the last shopper left behind in the basket of the cart, the blue ink smeared across the page in a billowing cursive I couldn’t read—with Lily tucked in the seat. I thought about biting into a ripe ol’ peach and laughing with Momma as the juice dripped from my chin, and sitting under that huge oak tree that nearly consumed the backyard of our prefab home, reading to Momma from books that were meant for adults only to read.
“If you were so scared, why didn’t you tell Matthew you didn’t want to go?”
I thought about that for a minute or two. I watched Louise Flores nibble a prepackaged shortbread cookie and I thought about her question. I was scared for a whole bunch of reasons. I was scared about the people outside the home, but even more than that, I was scared about Joseph finding out we’d been gone. I knew in my mind that Joseph was at work, and that Isaac would be at school first, followed up by an after school job as was usually the case, but still, I wasn’t so sure. And Miriam? Well, Miriam hardly knew when I was there so she’d hardly know when I wasn’t. But still, I was scared.
So why didn’t I tell Matthew I didn’t want to go then? It was simple really. I did want to go. I was terrified, but I was excited, too. I hadn’t been out of that house for a long time. I was fourteen or fifteen by then. Getting out of that home was the third biggest wish I’d had for six long years, the first being that Momma and Daddy come back to life, and the second being to get Lily back. My Lily. I trusted Matthew like I hadn’t trusted anyone in the past six years, even more than Ms. Amber Adler who’d come to the home in Ogallala with the police officer to tell Lily and me that our folks were dead, as she kneeled down before me on the laminate flooring and with the kindest smile on her simple face, promised to take care of Lily and me and find us a good home.
I never thought for once that she was lying. In her mind she did just exactly what she said.
But Matthew was different. If Matthew said everything was okay, then everything was okay. If he said no one would hurt me, then no one would hurt me. It didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified as we hopped off one blue-and-white bus and onto another—and then yet another—thinking of as many memories of Momma as I could possibly dredge up (Mrs. Dahl and her cattle, Momma’s taste for banana and mayonnaise sandwiches or the way she would eat all the way around the crust first, saving the insides—the guts she called them—for last) because thinking of Momma helped quash that notion of being scared half to death.
I love you like bananas love mayonnaise, she’d say, and I’d just shake my head and laugh, watching her prance around our home in her black shift dresses and beehive hairdos.
That bus took us past buildings that looked like the apartment buildings I remembered from Ogallala, short buildings splayed over the tawny lawn, made of pressed clay bricks, brick red. There were parking lots as wide as the buildings themselves. Electrical wires running alongside the street, making the air through the open bus window buzz. We drove through slummy neighborhoods, past run-down, boarded-up houses, past ratty cars and rough-looking people who loitered along the cracked sidewalks. Just loitered. We passed American flags, flying in the stubborn wind, patches of dirt showing through the deadening grass on the side of the street, past bushes with puny leaves, brown and tumbling to the ground, and trees, naked trees, hundreds of thousands of them.
There was an enormous parking lot that we passed, with pieces of cars. When I asked about those cars, Matthew told me it was called a junkyard, and I asked him what’s a person possibly to do with cars without wheels or doors.
“They use ’em for parts,” he said, leaving me to wonder what good wheels or doors do without a car. But I found myself searching for Momma and Daddy’s Bluebird nonetheless, for the upside-down car, the smashed-in hood, the broken headlights, the mirrors that hung from the door by a string, bumpers and fenders squished down to half their size. This is the image I’d carried in my mind for all those years, a snapshot on the front page of the paper: I-80 Crash Leaves Two Dead. Momma and Daddy’s names were never mentioned. They were called casualties, a word I didn’t even know at the time.
“Where are we going?” I asked for a third and final time.