Homecoming (25 page)

“Why not four?”

“Just in case,” Dicey answered. “Two and two is not the same as four.”

James looked at her.

“Not in this case,” Dicey said. “In this case, it is but it isn’t.”

“You can say so,” James said. “And I’ll do it. And I see what you mean. But you’re
wrong. Two and two is always four.”

When they had all four tickets, Dicey started walking along the concourse. She found
the escalators leading down. “Now we go to the bathroom.”

The women’s room could have held Cousin Eunice’s house in it and had room to spare.
Lines of women waited before each closed door, old, young, medium, some alone, some
with friends, some with children, one with a tiny baby that rode in a pouch on her
chest. The air smelled of perfume and cleanser. Maybeth and Dicey entered the cubicle
together, because Maybeth didn’t want to go in alone. Dicey protested, “But you’re
nine.” Maybeth just shook her head.

They took turns, Maybeth first. Dicey set the suitcase on the floor and opened it.
She took out shorts and a shirt for Maybeth and her shoebox of money. She put twenty
more dollars in her pocket. As they left the room, they tossed Maybeth’s rolled-up
dress into the trash.

When they emerged from the women’s room, Dicey could not see James and Sammy. People
hurried past, some carrying suitcases, some shopping bags, some just purses or newspapers.
You could get lost here in this crowded station. You could get swept away. Or grabbed
by somebody.

“Maybeth? If we get separated—” Maybeth caught Dicey’s
free hand. “Just in case,” Dicey said. “We’ll meet back by that information booth
I went to first. Remember it?”

James and Sammy joined them. They had a hot dog apiece, standing up at a counter,
and a glass of orange drink. Dicey looked at a clock—only ten minutes until the bus
left. The air hummed with voices, distant motors, and the muffled droning of the loudspeaker
announcing what buses were leaving for what cities. If they could get on the bus all
right, and out of the city, then they were on their way. And they might make it.

James and Sammy went onto the bus first. Dicey dawdled by the gate, with Maybeth beside
her. Maybeth went first up into the bus. Dicey followed, pulling their two tickets
out of her pocket and handing them to the driver.

He looked at her with a grimace. “What is this, kids’ day out?”

Dicey tried to look as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Never mind. But I’ll tell you what I told them. We’ve got a long drive and I don’t
stand any horsing around.”

“We won’t,” she said.

“I know, I know. You’re angels from heaven. Go on back.”

After a few minutes, the driver closed the door and turned on the engine. He backed
out of the parking slot. With every turn of the wheel, Dicey felt her stomach loosen
and her muscles relax. By the time the bus entered a tunnel, a smile was beginning
to turn up the corners of her mouth. She felt her back relaxing into the back of the
seat. Beside her, Maybeth hummed softly. The bus zoomed out of the tunnel and into
the light. Dicey stretched, smiled, yawned—and fell asleep.

When Dicey opened her eyes, she saw the sleek, straight lines of the rectangular interior
of the bus. Out the windows, on both sides, lay farmlands. Fields of corn ripened
under a bright sun. The corn swayed in the wind, like dancers with scarves.

Dicey wasn’t tired anymore. She was relaxed inside and out. She felt lazy and unworried.
The bus rolled along.

It was as if, during that nap, Dicey had traveled days away from Cousin Eunice’s house
in Bridgeport. That time now felt like a distant memory, something so far behind them
that they didn’t have to concern themselves with it, not anymore.

She looked past Maybeth’s head, out the window. Fields, farmhouses, trees, sky with
clouds; her eyes roamed lazily over them all. Her thoughts roamed lazily too, over
memories and ideas. She rode outside of time and place.

She thought about Momma, and it seemed to her that she almost understood why all of
this had happened to them, to the Tillermans, all this sadness and running away. She
thought about the long walk from Peewauket to New Haven, and the grandfather who had
tipped them two dollars and Stewart with his blue-gray eyes; then her mind switched
to the journey ahead of them, as if the future were a road stretching ahead, twisting
and turning. What did it matter where they were going, as long as they were going?

Sammy was asleep on James’s shoulder. Dicey leaned over to ask softly where they were.
James told her the last stop had been Trenton.

Dicey took a map out of her suitcase. She unfolded it halfway, to show Wilmington
and the Chesapeake Bay. Beneath her, the wheels rumbled on the road.

Sammy woke up. He punched James. James hit him back. Dicey quelled them with a glance
and instructed them to play odds-and-evens while she thought. “But I’m hungry,” Sammy
argued.

“I can’t do anything about that,” Dicey answered.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a hot dog tree,” Dicey said.

“Why not?”

“Because if I were, then you’d be one too because you’re my brother. Only you’d be
a pickle tree,” Dicey said, turning back to her map.

“Pickle tree,” Sammy repeated, trying to repress his giggles, not wanting to laugh
at Dicey’s joke.

Dicey studied the map. Just below Wilmington, the Chesapeake Bay drove up like a wedge
between two sections of land. The eastern shore of Maryland, where Crisfield was,
was on the land between the Bay and the ocean. It looked about two hundred miles from
Wilmington to Crisfield. So it might be a lot farther. Maybe as much as thirty days
of walking. Too far. But there were some cities that must have buses running to them:
Salisbury, Cambridge, Easton.

They’d already spent too much on bus tickets. Money was always the problem. Dicey
wanted to have money left over, so they could get back to Bridgeport, if they had
to. She figured they’d have to walk part of the way anyway, and she wanted to have
some tools for camping. A jackknife, one with a can opener on it. A pan of some kind.
Ponchos, for when it rained. She let her mind wander on briefly to other things, to
a backpack and bedrolls, to a portable stove. No, those would be silly; but fishing
line and hooks would be useful. There was a lot of water around, so there must be
fishing.

They had another choice: they could go down the western shore, to Baltimore or Annapolis—it
would have to be Annapolis because that was near the only bridge over the Bay. That
would leave them about half of the distance to Crisfield still to cover. Maybe two
weeks of walking.

They would have to get over the bridge if they did that. The map said Toll Bridge,
so they probably couldn’t walk over it. They might hitchhike, but Dicey didn’t like
that idea. She
didn’t like being in somebody’s car and not able to run away. Besides, who would pick
up four kids? They might have to take another bus.

Definitely, then, the eastern shore was better. At Wilmington they would get on a
bus going south. How far they went would depend on how much it cost. That was easy
enough. She folded up the map and returned it to her suitcase.

The bus made its way through Philadelphia and then south through more farmland, more
small cities. After another hour, after a bridge like a section of roller coaster,
they came into Wilmington.

The Wilmington Bus Depot was a one-story building, a single room with wooden benches,
a lunch counter, lockers where you could store your suitcases, six windows where tickets
could be purchased and at its center an information booth with a clock on top of it.
Three forty-five. Dicey told James to stay with Maybeth and Sammy by the door. Only
one bus stood waiting, now that the one they had ridden on had gone on to Baltimore.
That bus, she saw by the sign above its front window, was going to Annapolis.

Inside, Dicey picked out a schedule from the assortment at the information booth.
The first thing she did was to see if Crisfield was there, at the bottom of the list
of towns. It was. After Salisbury, Eden and Princess Anne, came Crisfield.

Her eye went back up to the top of the list, found Wilmington and traced the buses
leaving for the eastern shore. There were several, but most went no further than Cambridge.
Only one went down to Crisfield, a morning bus.

Then Dicey saw that the last afternoon bus heading south to Cambridge left Wilmington
at two thirty. The only bus after that didn’t leave until nine at night.

Nine. By nine, Cousin Eunice would have been home for
almost three hours. By nine, she could call Father Joseph. By nine, they might be
able to trace the Tillermans, and maybe find them, and stop them. She didn’t know
Dicey had money, did she? She might think the Tillermans were walking. But Dicey couldn’t
count on that. She couldn’t count on anything. She rushed up to the information booth
and asked when the bus for Annapolis was leaving. The man put his hand over the microphone
and told her, “Five minutes.”

Five minutes, how could she think it through in five minutes? Dicey hurried over to
a ticket window and bought four tickets to Annapolis. They couldn’t just sit around
the bus station for five hours, waiting to be recognized. Cousin Eunice would have
to do something to find them; she would think it was her responsibility.

Dicey joined her family. “We missed the last bus until nine.”

“Tonight? We better stay here,” James said.

“No,” Dicey said. “We can’t. We’ll go to Annapolis. It’s the only bus.”

“But Dicey—”

“Do as I say, James.”

She wasn’t thinking, she knew that. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She hurried her family
onto the bus just as the driver was closing the door. They sat at the back. Dicey
chewed on her lip.

“Nobody will expect us to go to Annapolis,” James said. “It was good luck that we
missed the bus.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dicey said.

The bus left Wilmington and headed south. This bus was air-conditioned, and you couldn’t
open the windows. The windows were smeared with grime, so you couldn’t see out. The
hour and a half to Baltimore seemed endless. At Baltimore, a lot of dressed-up people
got on, commuters, Dicey guessed, going home from work. The bus grew crowded.

The circuitous route from Baltimore to Annapolis, where they kept getting on and off
the same road to stop at little huts by the road and let off passengers, took another
hour and a half. Dicey tried to control her impatience by reminding herself that if
they had been walking it would have taken days and days. This was slow, but it was
faster than walking. They’d be walking soon enough.

At last, the bus turned into a parking lot before a low brick building. The bus driver
turned around and called, “Annapolis. End of the line.”

The Tillermans hopped up and joined the few people waiting to get off the bus. Dicey
just followed in the direction the majority took, turning left down a sidewalk, away
from the bus station. Behind her, the sun lowered, so they were walking on their own
shadows, heading east.

“Where we going?”

“We’ll find a place to sit down and think,” Dicey said. “I’m looking for a park.”

They passed a drugstore and a finance company and three banks. They saw bookshops
and card stores, clothing stores and a wine-and-cheese store. The road they walked
along came up to a traffic circle. Cars and trucks whirled around it, circling a church
that stood at its center.

Dicey led them around the circle. Streets led off, but none promised to go to a park,
although one said it went to the hospital. At the top of one street, Dicey looked
down and saw blue water with sails on it. She stood, staring.

It looked like the painted backdrop to a movie, not like anything real. The long main
street went downhill and then fetched up at the water. On the blue water, boats sailed
or motored as if they were in an entirely different world, and it wasn’t clear, in
the bright August light, where water ended and sky began.

They headed down the hill to the water, passing stores and shops and more banks. The
street was crowded: parked cars lined both sides, while moving vehicles crawled bumper
to bumper uphill and the sidewalks were crowded with people. At the foot of the street
was another circle, around which cars traveled slowly, with a steady chorus of horns
and many near collisions. Across this circle, a quiet finger of water, hemmed in by
concrete, marked the corner of a narrow area where people thronged, eating, talking,
sitting and watching one another. Dicey moved through the milling crowd and along
beside the water. They passed boats crowded as closely together as the cars in a parking
lot, motorboats, sailboats and old, worn fishing boats.

At the waterfront, beyond a huge parking lot jammed with cars, they found a public
park. It had no grass, just trees in wooden boxes. The ground was covered by wooden
flooring. Benches, however, there were in plenty. The benches right at the water were
all full, but one beneath a sparsely leaved young tree was empty. The Tillermans sat
on that.

“It’s hot,” James said. His face was red. Sweat plastered his hair to his neck. The
air hung moist and heavy over the park. A slight ripple of a breeze came off the water,
but that did little to relieve them. Everybody seemed slowed down by heat. Nobody
walked briskly, everybody sauntered. A lot of people were licking ice cream cones.
Dicey’s mouth watered.

“What time’s it?” James asked. Without waiting for an answer, he hopped up and asked
the same question of a man moving by, who held his suit jacket over his shoulder.
“It’s seven thirty,” James reported. “Time for supper.”

“How about ice cream for supper?” Dicey asked. She didn’t know just how much money
she had in her pocket, not enough for a real dinner.

“We passed a hamburger joint,” James countered.

“Ice cream,” Sammy said.

“Hamburgers,” James said.