Find Me (20 page)

The bus stops in the middle of the road. The sky is a swamp of gray. I look toward the front and see that the driver has a map of his own. He is frowning and turning it this way and that. After a while he takes out a cell phone and clicks around. Eventually he puts away the map and the phone and we start moving again, but now there is no mistaking that we are lost.

We pass smoking hillsides, as though great fires are raging behind the rises. At a stop sign, I look to the right, to the road that extends east, and see that the asphalt is rippled and brown weeds have shot up between the cracks. A fallen tree blocks the path. The roots are black and frozen. White steam, thick as the hillside smoke, pours out of the metal grates in the ground.

We pass signs that read
DANGER: TOXIC GASES PRESENT
and
WARNING: GROUND PRONE TO SUDDEN COLLAPSE
. Outside, dusk is falling.

“My god,” the woman sitting behind us says. “We're in Centralia.”

Marcus and I twist around in our seats and ask what she means by Centralia and the woman tells us that this used to be a mining town but many years ago the landfill caught fire and the fire spread through the network of mines underground. Those underground fires couldn't be put out and there were problems with poisonous gases and sinkholes, just like those signs said. She stabs at the air above her. The town was condemned; the underground fires never stopped burning. This is not damage done by the sickness. This we did all on our own.

“Centralia,” the woman says again. “It's famous, this place.” She touches her window. She has a faraway look in her eye.

I am terrified by the idea of sinkholes, of being consumed by the earth.

Marcus and I sit back down in our seats and look at each other and I wish one of us knew what to do. I keep watch through the window and when we pass another block of condemned houses I think I see a woman standing on an icy lawn, waving at us through the smoke. She is wearing some kind of soft wrap or maybe a bathrobe and she is barefoot like that one pilgrim I saw from the Dining Hall window in the Hospital.

“Look,” I say to Marcus, but the bus is moving and the smoke is getting thicker and there is no way to tell if she is still there, if she was ever there at all.

The other passengers start objecting to the driver's course of action. The ones who have been asleep wake and open their mouths like animals trying to lose a strange taste. When they look out the windows, at the hot smoking ground, their muscles shed the looseness of sleep. They grab the backs of seats, knock on windows, call up to the driver. “Go left!” “Go right!” “Turn around!” “Get us out of here!”

The driver hunches over the wheel. The bus starts going faster.

We roll onto an unpaved road. A clunking sound and we're back to slow.

White dust blooms around us, luminous in the headlights. I smell rotten eggs and feel heat coming up through the floor.

“The other way!” someone shouts from the back of the bus.

The driver sends us in reverse, the tires crunching over gravel, and starts down another road. By then we are surrounded by nothing but night and all the things that night is capable of hiding.

 

26.

During an Internet Session in the Hospital, I found a video of my mother talking about the day she almost died. She was diving and rose too quickly. She knew all about decompression sickness, but she saw a spar wedged in a reef of brain coral and she was young and she got excited. During the ascent, her interval stops weren't long enough. On deck, she knew something was wrong. Her legs felt thick and numb. She heard a strange ringing, like bells were sounding on the ship, and said, “Where are the bells?” Her crew looked at her and turned over their palms, as though to prove they weren't hiding the sound in their hands.
What bells?
All she wanted was to lie on the cot in the lower cabin, but she didn't even make it down the stairs. She slumped against the wall. She clawed at the wood paneling. She wet herself inside her dive suit. She felt a sharp pain in her knees and elbows and in the bones in her feet; the pain spread like a rash, into her hips and spine. They were in the middle of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of the Dry Tortugas. She knew how to prevent this, she had been trained, but she had forgotten and now, because of that one mistake, that one moment of forgetting, she was slipping away.

Mud sliding down a mountain in springtime, as Dr. Bek once said, his hands making that little dive.

She remembered the white stretcher that carried her out of the stairwell, the hands that fastened the straps. The circle of freckles, the knuckles soft with hair, the scar on the thenar, the crooked ring finger. All these hands working in harmony, as though they belonged to the same body. The smell of salt.

In her memory, the orange coast guard helicopter was noiseless. She only remembered the water churning white beneath her and the sensation of being lifted and then lifted higher and the ocean looking like an enormous blue disc that stretched on into eternity.

*   *   *

In Harrisburg, Marcus gets off the bus with me. He has no place to go. I have no one else to go with. The choice to leave this bus together, to get away from this lost driver, who took all night to find Harrisburg, into the light of the day, is so easy it doesn't feel like a choice at all.

The morning is pale and cold. All the buses are going west or north; nobody seems to want to go south. When I say “Florida,” the drivers look at me like I've asked if a bus can swim across the ocean, if a bus can take us to Hawaii. Finally we get on a bus headed for Charleston, West Virginia. It takes eight hours to get there and by the time this new city is in sight, the afternoon is winding down into dusk.

We pass yet another river, the Kanawha, according to the signs, and a bronze statue of a man with a sword. All cities, I'm learning, are filled with their monuments.

With the money I earned in Kansas City, we get a room at an Econo Lodge. The lobby is cluttered with fake ferns, as though someone wanted to give the appearance of entering a jungle. At the front desk, there is a stack of brochures that tell us about the history of the Econo Lodge. The Econo Lodge was founded in Norfolk, Virginia, by a man named Vernon Myers and his son, Vernon Junior. They were the first motel chain to put beds on boxes instead of legs, an innovation in motel management at the time.

I close the brochure and have a funny thought: does anyone care about history anymore?

Our room is small and dark and smells like chlorine, even though there is no swimming pool. I'm tired in a way that feels permanent. I take off my sneakers. My toes are swollen, the pads tender. On my soles I find blisters filled with white fluid and think about the barnacles hugging the bottom of my mother's ship. If you open barnacles up, do you find something soft inside?

Our room has double beds with forest green comforters and headboards that are slabs of honey-colored wood. In the center of each headboard, there is a lattice cut of a bear walking through a forest. We sit on a bed, facing each other, and Marcus tells me about an exercise that can help you find a person you are looking for. It goes like this:

First, close your eyes and picture a movie screen. You are sitting in the audience, in the dark of the theater. Imagine this person appearing on the screen. See her face. Second, imagine a phone booth in the corner of the screen. See the doors to the booth open. Hear the phone ringing. Third, see yourself leaving the audience and entering the screen. See yourself answering the ringing phone. See yourself saying, Hello, where are you? Imagine you are hearing this person speaking back.

In this imaginary theater, I sink into the seat and wait for my mother to appear.

“How did it go?” Marcus asks when I open my eyes.

I don't tell him that I couldn't get past my mother's face on the movie screen, couldn't get to the booth and the ringing phone. My imagination is only feeling so cooperative.

“It went,” I say.

In the evening, Marcus wants to walk, to move: on the buses, we sat still for unnaturally long periods of time. We have energy stored inside us. We go out into the streets and watch clouds slip across a fat moon.

At this hour in Boston, on the brink of dusk, the windows in the buildings would start to shine bright as jewels. Here the skyline is low and the windows stay dark.

We wander down a broad empty street, the river, the Kanawha, on one side. We find our way to a white building with columns and a domed roof. It looks like an official building of some kind, powerful and secretive. I've forgotten the gardening gloves and my hands are cold. We walk up the steps and stand between the columns and look out at the river winding through the powdery blue light.

We continue on, under an overpass, the concrete pillars stained with bird shit, where we can hear the low hum of traffic. We find a little park with a fountain in the center. The tops of the trees are flat and dark like mushroom caps. They cast large shadows on the ground. The ice-crusted grass has become a net for trapping cigarette butts and the metal tongues of beer cans. The fountain is dry. Green pennies are stuck to the bottom. The paint is cracked and tiny weeds are forcing their way through the concrete. We climb into the base of the fountain and look out at the world around us.

“I was in a Hospital,” I tell Marcus. “I didn't think I was ever going to leave.”

I stand there and absorb the force of that feeling. It is a physical recognition, a warm pressure in the center of my belly. In the Hospital, in the unending cold of winter, I began to believe that I would never again see another city or park or monument or river. I began to believe that version of my story, but that version turned out to be wrong, because here I am in the capital of West Virginia, with Marcus, on my way to find my mother.

I should be free of that feeling now, hundreds of miles from the Hospital, but the shadow of it hangs over me, like there's a part of me that is still locked up and will never be anything but locked up.

“You got out.” Marcus rubs his plastic lips. “You'll always get out.”

“I got out,” I say, hoping to convince that locked-up part of myself.

I jump onto the edge of the fountain. I place my hands on my belly. I feel the warm pressure building. I stare out into the night and scream and am stunned by my own loudness. Marcus jumps up beside me. He grabs my hand, hot and slick, and we scream together. I see our voices rising into the trees and getting tangled up in the branches, making nests of sound.

Eventually we walk away, calling out everything we know about rabbits. Rabbits are excellent at leaping and digging and running. For their entire lives, their teeth keep growing. They can live everywhere except for in Antarctica. They can infect people with rabbit fever, a disease that makes the patients sweat and itch. They like the dark. They do not like to be alone.

Just when the city is starting to feel like it belongs to us, the city sets us straight.

We are away from the park, wandering down a narrow side street, when a mob of people dressed in black, their faces painted a ghoulish white, rush out from behind the corner of a building. A cavalry of acrobats, I think, even though I know enough to know “cavalry” and “acrobat” are not two words that belong together.

We stop in the center of the street. These people are charging toward us and before we can escape, we are in the thick of the pack. I see holes in their black shirts and patches where the white paint has faded, revealing the humanness beneath. Wild eyes. Beneath us the asphalt rumbles. Marcus is carried away from me. I see the yellow fluff spilling from his coat. We cast our arms forward like swimmers in a roiling sea, trying to fight our way back to each other.

These people don't stop or speak or try to take us with them. They run with animal indifference, like those horses in Paola. I don't know who they are or what they have decided to be.

For a second, I am tempted to follow them.

Marcus disappears from sight. I tumble toward the edge of the group. I try to break free. My toes get stomped on, a jab to my tailbone makes me howl, the vibrations of their running moves like electricity through my body. I tuck my chin to my chest and push my way through.

There is a moment that must be like the eye of a storm, where the noise of the footsteps is so loud, so overwhelming to the senses, it becomes a kind of silence. I turn inside the dark swirl. Mouths open, feet strike asphalt, and I can't hear any of it. I see an orange helicopter hovering over an ocean and the white froth of the water below and my mother on a stretcher, sealed inside a world where there is no noise and all the hands working the straps belong to one body and the borders of the ocean are not borders at all, because they are endless.

*   *   *

The stampede leaves our hearts pounding and our hands shaking and that warm pressure in my belly is being replaced with something as cold and hard as stone. Marcus's rabbit mask has gotten twisted on his face. An eyehole has been displaced to a temple. I watch him put his features back in order. We stand on the empty side street until the vibrations have dripped out of our bodies and the asphalt has gone still under out feet.

We start back to the Econo Lodge, but we get lost. We go down street after street. In the dark all the buildings look the same. For a while, we run like the people in black, but eventually we get tired and fall into a stumbling walk. Who are we kidding? We find ourselves under the same overpass, back in the same park with the mushroom trees, back inside the fountain, circling and circling. This time we don't jump inside and scream.

Panic creeps in, winds its way around my bones. What if we are searching like this forever? What if morning never comes? In the park, Marcus closes his eyes and tries to see our street and our motel and the way back, but his imagination is not feeling cooperative either.

We wander down a street where all the traffic lights are a dull red. We see a little white building called Johnny's Luncheonette, a gas station called Stop & Go. Instead of being tucked into the pumps, the nozzles are all lying on the ground like they were once an alive thing that someone has killed. The inside of the station is aglow with light.