“Three blocks away is this ice-cream shop—”
Jolie’s eyes darken. “He’s not on the list to leave premises.”
Elise rolls her eyes. “But maybe he’ll, like, come to, without ECT.”
“I can’t.”
“I would love you forever,” Elise says, rubbing her belly.
Jolie blows her bangs up like: Are you really gonna push it? Then she looks away for a long moment. “Goddammit. It has to be quick. Tomorrow, during my lunch shift.”
That night, Elise asks the Gorowskis to take Buck for a few days.
“Thank you so much,” Elise says evenly.
She drops him off with food and a leash. Mrs. Gorowski loves Buck like a grandmother loves a gangster grandson, and she pets him awkwardly, giggling.
Buck knows. He can’t stop moving, pacing and whimpering.
Elise holds his face. Her fingers tremble.
“You such a good boy,” she says in a baby voice that isn’t steady.
He looks with big amber eyes, inquiring, frightened.
Oh, how he wagged his tail like a maniac every time she walked in the door—he’d jump vertically, then squiggle around at her knees, in love, forever grateful he’d been taken in when he was ugly and sharp-ribbed and he had no home, and he and Elise walked those New Haven streets, both lost but finding their way, block by block, together. Bucky Buck, the big boy, my Buck, she called him, and he came to her every time, head down and eyes up, used to being beaten but knowing she would never. Shadowing her around rooms, watching to see what she’ll do on any given day, trotting up and hanging his head so she can click on the leash to walk. How can this be goodbye? How can she leave him? He looks to his leash, as if asking: Don’t you want to snap it on right now, take me with you, do anything but leave me here? Please?
She walks out of the apartment without him, bites the heel of her hand until she gets upstairs and then bawls into a pillow. She hits the mattress, over and over, her face red, until she’s exhausted, hiccupping from crying.
The next morning, she shows up at the hospital, face bloated.
“What’s wrong?” Jamey asks with half-lidded eyes.
“It’s a surprise,” Elise tells him nonsensically.
Jolie shows up. “Ready?”
They tiptoe down the emergency stairs without talking.
The sun floods Jamey’s brain the second he walks out the door, almost getting through to him. He holds out his hands like it’s rain.
They walk down bright and bustling blocks to the ice-cream shop with the yellow awning on Seventy-First Street. Jamey orders mint, and Elise gets strawberry, even though she can’t imagine eating.
“Jolie, come on, get something,” she says in forced cheerfulness.
The nurse orders vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.
Elise devours hers, hands tremulous, and throws out her napkin. Jamey has pale green cream on his lip and is taking his time.
“You done?” she asks Jamey meaningfully.
“I guess,” he says unsurely.
Elise takes his hand and stands up.
Jolie looks at them, stops licking sprinkles off her hand, stricken. “You’re not going to do this.”
“I’m sorry, Jolie.”
Elise puts her switchblade on the table.
Jamey watches.
“Is this a joke?” Jolie asks, looking at the knife.
“You can say we made you,” Elise says apologetically. “I dropped the knife and ran.”
Elise marches Jamey down the street to the Korean nail salon where she paid twenty bucks to store their backpacks. The owner twirls a pink telephone cord around her finger, and nods You’re welcome without breaking her conversation in another language.
“We got to hurry,” Elise says, forcing him to run.
Tokens into the turnstile, they take the C train to the A train to Port Authority, heads tucked.
At Port Authority, hands reach up from the floor like monsters out of a swamp. A woman approaches, in slippers and bathrobe, with no teeth, holding out a claw. A man hollers at everyone, shit staining his sweatpants. A suburban kid with a Hello Kitty backpack moves through the crowd, doomed. Elise and Jamey scan the departures board, numbers and letters flipping, while hustlers scrutinize newcomers.
“Where do you want to go?” Elise says.
“I want to go where you want to go,” he says dully.
“Choose!” Elise says, panicking.
He stares up. “Wyoming?”
It leaves in five minutes. They buy tickets and rush to the gate on the lower level, where twenty buses all lean and cough, ready to be boarded, and they climb up the steps to theirs, find seats together, and collapse.
They pull out of the netherworld, and the bus careens into the Lincoln Tunnel, burping and hissing.
Jamey looks at Elise’s reflection in the window, as she watches the vanishing city.
“Shit, they were gonna electrocute you,” she says without turning to him.
En route to Baltimore first. They pull into a gas station.
“What do you need?” he asks her, already sharper than when they left, although his eyes are still half-lidded.
“Mountain Dew?”
As the bus rolls out, he massages her back as she leans forward and sips her soda.
“You’re knotted up,” he says.
Now she cries, the stress caressed out, tears dropping off her cheeks.
She sleeps with her head on his shoulder. Late afternoon, she wakes, bleary.
Her eyes consume everything they pass—amazed and skeptical.
“What!” she’ll say suddenly, pointing out something ordinary like cows gathered under one big tree. “Is that cows?”
They stop and start through the ruins of Detroit.
“My ass hurts,” she says.
She sleeps for much of the night, snoring, head on his shoulder.
And he barely sleeps. He doesn’t want to miss anything.
This morning, he studies a carnival that isn’t running, a field of spinach. Vultures spiraling.
Everything he sees is significant. There’s little time left, and everything matters.
A biker in the next lane doesn’t glance up to the bus window—blond, a craggy face, denim vest, her arms browned in the sun. Jamey looks at the humid sun blinking off the motorcycle, at the scrappy woods beyond, at the dead possum whose mouth opens to ruby entrails, a sign for Honey Creek, the telephone wires rushing by while the sky is stationary. Someone is holding his jaw—Don’t look away, Jamey. He squints his tired eyes open. He’s committed.
And he suddenly understands that he’s waiting to see a signal to leave.
Not today, or tomorrow. But soon.
Grand Rapids.
The passenger is tall and maybe a hundred pounds, hair soaked in oil and combed—his face narrowed like a ferret by the speed he’s been doing for so long. His body re-formed by addiction, curved into endless need, refusal, humiliation, and perseverance.