Don't You Cry(60)

“I tried to find my family,” she says again after some time, after a long time, so long that I’d decided she was never going to tell me, “and I did. I tracked them down.” I can hear her breathing in the sleepy night, her breath weighted down like mud. It doesn’t come easy. An upshot of the walking—or maybe the stress. Maybe the grief.

“But they still didn’t want me,” she adds. “After all those years, they still didn’t want me,” and my heart snaps for her, knowing what it did to me after my mother rejected me. I listen as she tells me how she found her family, but as soon as she did, they tried to elude her, to refuse her phone calls, to pay her to go away. And suddenly my mother’s one single rejection doesn’t seem so bad. If I saw my mother again and she refused me for a second time, I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d likely lose it.





Quinn

“Pipe down, lady,” says the bus driver, a big man with an even bigger voice. He hardly turns in his chair, just enough to see that I’m not being raped at gunpoint. But he doesn’t slow down the bus. He doesn’t step on the brakes or reach for his walkie-talkie doodad to call for help. “Everything okay?” he asks, his voice as apathetic as if he’d asked if I wanted fries with my meal.

Behind me sits the bum who likes to touch my hair. And it’s instantaneous almost, the sense of relief. Not a killer, I tell myself. Just a creep.

But the relief is short-lived.

When he smiles, I see half of his teeth are missing. The rest are yellow and misshapen. He’ll lose those, too. I just know it. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked him in the eye before, other than a sideways glance and a simple request: Stop touching my hair, please.

He’d be creepy even on a good day, but this isn’t a good day. He’d be creepy if the sun was out and it was the middle of day, but this is not the middle of day, and outside the world is quiet and dark. Here and now he’s downright scary.

He has a lot of hair, on his head, on his face. It’s frizzed and crimped and standing on end. I can hardly see his cratered skin for all the hair. He wears a hat on top of his head, a navy-colored driving cap that doesn’t do a thing to keep his ears warm. He carries with him a backpacking pack with the harness and hip belt, and a trekking pole. There isn’t much to his coat, a soft-shell hoodie the color of mushrooms. But the size of him—big—might be enough to keep him warm. On his feet are mismatched gym shoes. A handout from some aid organization—Goodwill or the Salvation Army, I’m guessing, or a lucky Dumpster dive. His hands are unwashed. He smells. He wears a lanyard around his neck with a nametag that says Sam. I’d bet my life he’s not Sam. He found the nametag or, better yet, he stole it.

I look behind him and realize that, save for a couple of scenester teens in the back of the bus, we’re the only people here. They pay us no mind. They wear sunglasses at night. They send text messages to each other. They wear headphones and use words like tight and dope and tool, none of which have the same meaning as was intended by Merriam and Webster. One of the boys rises to his feet and says, “I’ve gotta bounce.”

Another says, “Bless up, my friend.”

They can’t save me. No way.

The rest of the bus is filled with row upon row of empty pews. No one to help.

And then the creep says, “I like your hair,” as he reaches out again to touch it, and I jerk back with haste, dropping my purse so that half of its contents fall to the floor: my wallet, my makeup case, my phone. I reach my hand beneath the grimy bus seat as far as it will go to make sure I haven’t managed to miss something, but my hand comes up empty. Well, empty save for the spit off someone else’s chewed-up gum.

“It’s pretty,” the creep says, and I say to the driver, “Let me off. I need to get off the bus. I need to get off this bus right now,” while sweeping my belongings up off the dirty bus floor and into my bag.

And what does the bus driver say to me? “Next stop’s a half block away,” is what he says. “Unless it’s an emergency, you’ll just have to wait.”

And then he yells at the homeless man to leave me alone and for the next twenty seconds he does.

He stops touching my hair. He leans back in his seat and stops talking to me.

I grab my belongings and stand. I pull the cord for the next bus stop, grateful that it’s my own. When the bus comes to a halt, I don’t walk. I run.

My feet pound the pavement. I’m not entirely alone on the street tonight, but I feel entirely alone. Knowing every soul I pass is a potential threat, there’s no telling who’s good and who’s bad.

Who I can trust.

Who I can’t trust.

I bypass people, those coming and going through store and restaurant doors; women walking dogs and men with other men, talking and laughing. I watch them all. I watch them all and wonder. Are you the one? Are you? Are you?

The question runs over and over again in my head: Has Esther hired someone to kill me?

I double-and triple-check for cars before crossing an intersection; I sidestep street gutters and storm drains in case they’ve been intentionally removed so that I will plummet to my death. Can one die in a storm drain? I don’t know. There’s no telling what kind of accident might befall me. I avoid walking too close to buildings with window air-condition units in case they might become loose and tumble down onto my head. Traumatic brain injury. That can certainly lead to death. Brain hemorrhaging. Intracranial pressure.