The Other Way Around (8 page)

The sink is the only sign that the bus was once a camper. All the other seats have been removed, and G, Lyle, Emily, and Tim are sprawled or sitting cross-legged on the floor of the van. The back of the van is packed with duffels, tote bags, and sleeping bags. There are a few garbage bags bulging with clothes. These items form a wall that prevents the driver, or
anyone else, from seeing out the back of the van. I'm glad to be sitting up front, strapped safely into the passenger seat.

We stop at the Irving station on the outskirts of town—the only thing we pass that's open. I wait uneasily for Jesse to pump the gas—eager to be moving again. When we're stopped I start to think about Mom sitting at home waiting for my call—or, more likely, frantically dialing and redialing my cell phone, which I have since turned off.

I hand Jesse the money so he can pay for the gas. When he gets back in the van he gives me that strangely sincere smile again, and then we are off.

In the back of the van, everyone is settling in to what seems to be a familiar routine. Lyle is wearing a headlamp and reading a small paperback of
1984
. Emily is wearing Tim's headphones, and G is shuffling a deck of cards. Suddenly I feel a moment of panic, and out of nowhere I shout, “I don't do drugs!”

Lyle looks up from his book an amused smile on his face. G is grinning too. Emily pulls off her headphones and says, “What?”

“He doesn't do drugs,” Tim repeats.

Emily looks confused. She shrugs her shoulders and puts the headphones back on.

“Neither do we,” G explains. “We're all straight edge.” She twists around and lifts up her short black hair so I can see the black
X
tattooed on the back of her neck. “Do you know what it means?” she asks.

“Kind of,” I lie.

“I don't think they have straight edge in Glens Falls,” Lyle says. He has a way of punctuating all this sentences with a condescending smile that's half a smirk.

“It's a commitment,” G says, ignoring him. “No drugs, no booze, no cigarettes. Clean living, pure and simple. We're also vegetarians.”

“Or vegans,” Emily shouts loudly, her ears buffered by the headphones.

Lyle reaches over and pulls one of the ear covers away from her ears. “You're shouting,” he says.

“Oh, sorry,” Emily says. She smiles sweetly and lies down with her head in his lap. Lyle picks up his book again and begins to gently rub her back.

“You want to find some tunes, Andrew?” Jesse asks.

“Sure.” I lean forward to adjust the buttons on Shirley's radio. The van is old. The buttons for the radio are the kind that you push in and the needle slides over to find the preprogrammed station. When none of these produce a signal I begin to gently twist the knob to find a station.

“Those don't usually work,” Jesse says. “They're programmed to the stations up near Lake Placid. That's where my dad lived. The van was his. I haven't bothered to figure out how to change them yet.”

“So he gave you the van.”

“Kind of,” Jesse says. “He died this year, and I got the van.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. Now that I think of it, I may never change those stations. It's kind of cool that no matter where we go, my radio is trying to connect to those stations back home. Even if all I get is static.”

I twist the dial until I find the classic rock station playing a Van Morrison tune. It wouldn't be my first choice, but it seems like something unlikely to offend anyone.

“My grandmother just died,” I say, trying out the words for the first time. They don't even seem right. Dying isn't something Mima would do.

“Yeah,” Jesse says. “G mentioned something about that. She said your moms didn't handle it all that well.”

I shake my head. Even just thinking about it, my throat begins to tighten with anger. It feels really good to be moving away from her at sixty miles an hour.

“You'll deal with it when you're ready,” Jesse says, like he's seeing the future. “That's the beauty of the bus, man. No past, no future, just today.”

I nod. It's cheesy, but I can tell he means it. What would my life look like with no past; no stupid divorce or disappearing father? And no future? Well, not much lost there.

“Were you close to your dad?” I ask.

“Yes and no,” Jesse says. “He had all these ideas about what I should be studying at college. He was supposed to go. He was going to be the first one in his family. He was all set up at this little community college in Portland, Maine. And then his first week there, the apartment building where he was renting a room burnt down. He didn't have anything saved. So he came back home and started working in the mill.”

“Whoa,” I say. It comes out before I can help it. I've never really known anyone who didn't go to college or even worked in a mill. I kind of thought that was just something people did before there were colleges. But thankfully Jesse doesn't hear it that way.

“Yeah,” Jesse says, “the fire completely wiped him out.”

“What was he going to study?” I ask.

Jesse looks thoughtfully ahead at the road. The white and
yellow lines whizz by us on either side. “I don't know,” he says. “Business, I guess. That's what he was always on my case about.”

“He wanted you to major in business?” I try to sound polite.

“Yup,” Jesse says. “You've known me for half an hour, and you can already see that wouldn't work. I don't know why
he
couldn't figure it out.”

I shake my head with disgust. “It seems like parents should know their own kids a little better.”

Jesse nods. “Yeah, you would think so. But I don't hold it against him.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Well, maybe I did for a while. But it's kind of different now. I guess he was just doing the best he could, you know, the way he'd been brought up.”

“After he died, I found out he was way in debt trying to pay for school. He never told me. He got hurt a few years ago at the mill, and he always made it sound like they gave him some big settlement. I probably shouldn't have believed him. My grandmother sold his place, but the bank owned most of it anyway. All that was left was Shirley.” He pats the steering wheel affectionately. “That was last spring. I finished the term, but there was no way I could go back to school on my own dime.” He shrugs his shoulders. “So here I am.”

“Where's your mom?” I ask, hoping the answer wouldn't be dead.

Jesse shrugged. “She's around,” he says noncommittally.

“My dad's like that,” I say softly.

Jesse nods, but he doesn't pry. I shift in my seat so my head falls back into the bucket headrest. I know I can still go back. I know we aren't that far from Glens Falls and that Jesse would pull over in a heartbeat if I asked him to. I also know that my cell phone has a full charge on it, and that it will last at
least another day. A slightly queasiness comes over me when I realize that I didn't stuff the charger into my backpack. I look at my watch; it's a little before eight. I could probably call Mom right now and be back in my living room by ten thirty. But I don't. My skin is prickling, and I'm suddenly conscious of my breathing in a different way. I've crossed a line into a genuinely new experience—something I don't do very often.

I close my eyes, but the bumping and shifting of the van, not to mention my unease in this new situation, make sleep just a bit out of reach. Mom hates heights—she even had to take a Xanax to go skiing. One time when Mima was visiting, we drove up 87 because Mima wanted to go leaf-peeping. She convinced Mom to go on this gondola ride up the side of some family-run ski resort. Every time we hit a little bump passing one of the poles, Mom gripped the side railing with white knuckles. Mima just laughed and told her to lighten up. She stood as close to the windows as possible and said she could think of worse ways to die. She just loved to go for a ride. I squeeze my eyes tighter, holding back memories and tears.

I try and stay awake, just in case they're secretly planning on harvesting my organs, but my head lolls forward on my shoulders and periodically my eyelids flutter closed. I wake up as we are pulling into a Walmart parking lot.

“I'm bushed,” Jesse says. “Anyone else want to drive?” There's no response. “All right, then who's up and who's down?”

“I'm up,” G says, “and you drove,” she adds.

“That means there's three of us back here?” says a male voice, either Tim or Lyle.

“I don't have to,” I start to say as I sit up.

Jesse puts his hand on my shoulder. “Nah, man, stay where
you are.” He reaches in the back for a sleeping bag, which he stuffs in my lap. I shake it out of the stuff sack and arrange it around me as best I can. The bucket seat goes back so I'm almost horizontal. The rest of them shuffle around in the back, and I hear the sounds of the top of the bus creaking open. There's some thumping overhead as G and Jesse climb up to sleep. And then it's quiet for a few minutes until the sound of a loud, rippling fart splits the air.

“Jesus Christ!” says a voice that I'm pretty sure is Lyle. I'm starting to recognize the nasal tension of his voice.

“Sorry, man,” Tim says.

“If you didn't eat all those weird mushrooms it might not smell so bad,” Lyle complains into the darkness.

“Hey,” Tim says, “let's not make this an Asian thing.”

“They stink when you cook them, they stink when you eat them, and they sure as hell stink when they come out your ass!”

Tim responds with another tiny rocket-fire fart. He giggles like I've never heard a boy, man, whatever, giggle. It's all high-pitched and really funny. Suddenly we are all giggling in the darkness. All except for Lyle, who is still grumbling about the smell. I try and tell myself it's just like the first night of camp. The first night sleeping anywhere different is always a little weird. But it's not just the new sounds and the weird smells. I'm about to close my eyes and submit to a state of complete and total vulnerability within arm's reach of five people I barely know. I'm going to do it, and not because someone else signed me up. I choose to do it.

When I finally drift off, it's into a restless sleep. It feels like every few minutes I wake up and have to feel around to figure out where I am again. I wander in and out of dreams filled with bus stations and airports. In one of these moments I find myself back in the huge, carpeted playroom of a house we lived in when I was five. Dad had a dartboard and an air hockey table, and I used to build forts underneath it. In the dream someone was handing me the phone, and when I listened to the receiver it was Mima. “Oh,” I say. “I didn't know you could call.”

“Of course I can,” she says. “I just wanted to tell you that I'm fine. Everything's fine here.” In my excitement I hand the phone over to my mother so she can say hi too. But when she takes the receiver she looks at me quizzically.

“There's no one there,” she says above the droning dial tone.

Close to morning, I dream that Mima and I are walking down the sidewalk, holding hands. I have an ice cream cone and she asks me for a lick. I hand it over and she winks devilishly as she devours half of it in a single bite. “You're sweet enough already,” she says.

I'm the first one up the next morning. The sadness of my dreams lodges like a piece of stiff cardboard in my throat. It's cold. My eyes open slowly, taking in the gray morning light. I try not to move too much, to avoid both waking people and coming into contact with the parts of my clothing that aren't warmed by my body. My neck is stiff from being twisted up against the bucket seat, and there's a strand of dried drool on my chin. I wriggle out of my seat, shedding the sleeping bag like a snakeskin, and carefully pull the metal door handle, pushing the van door open. The sun is up, but it's obscured by a blanket of gray clouds and has barely the brightness of a full moon. Still, it seems warmer outside the van than in it.

The Walmart parking lot is big but not empty. Apparently we aren't the only ones to use it like a motel. A few RVs are parked together in one corner, and a rusting sedan stuffed midway up the windows with clothes and papers sits two rows over. I can't tell if there's a human in it. I put my hands over my head and try to stretch out my back by bending first to one side and then to the other. It's a mistake. The second I put my hands over my head, my shirt comes untucked and a draft of late autumn air sweeps up under it. I shiver and jump in place for a while to warm up.

There's no avoiding it; I need to call Mom. I'm sure she's losing it, and every minute is probably making it worse. As far as she knows I'm arriving in Cleveland this morning where I will get on another bus that will bring me back home. Except that's not going to happen, and I'm not sure how to tell her. I look back at the van nervously, hoping and fearing that someone will wake up and come out to interrupt me.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and press the power button waiting for the lights to come on and the phone to beep. I
take one more look at the van but no one is stirring. So I dial.

“Andrew,” she says. With that one word I can tell she hasn't slept.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Andrew, where are you?”

“I'm in Cleveland,” I lie.

“Andrew, we need to talk about this, and we
will
talk about this when you get home. But right now I just need to know what bus you're getting on and whether or not you need to me call in a ticket for you.”

Here's the jumping-off point. I stand on the platform, staring straight down at the ground. I can't do it. I'm not going to jump. I need to be pushed. There's a long pause while she waits for me to say something.

“Andrew? Are you there?”

“Yeah, Mom, I'm here.”

“Do you have any idea how irresponsible and dangerous your behavior is?”