Night Road(2)

Now, she stared out the dirty window of a Greyhound bus. Her caseworker sat beside her, reading a romance novel.

After more than twenty-six hours en route, they were finally nearing their destination. Outside, a steel-wool sky swallowed the treetops. Rain made squiggling patterns on the window, blurring the view. It was like another planet here in Washington; gone were the sun-scorched bread-crust-colored hills of Southern California and the gray crisscross of traffic-clogged freeways. The trees were steroid-big; so were the mountains. Everything seemed overgrown and wild.

The bus pulled up to a squat, cement-colored terminal and came to a wheezing, jerking stop. A cloud of black smoke wafted across her window, obscuring the parking lot for a moment; then the rain pounded it away. The bus doors whooshed open.

“Lexi?”

She heard Ms. Watters’s voice and thought move, Lexi, but she couldn’t do it. She looked up at the woman who had been the only steady presence in her life for the last six years. Every time a foster family had given up on Lexi, returned her like a piece of fruit gone bad, Ms. Watters had been there, waiting with a sad little smile. It wasn’t much to return to, maybe, but it was all Lexi knew, and suddenly she was afraid to lose even that small familiarity.

“What if she doesn’t come?” Lexi asked.

Ms. Watters held out her hand, with its veiny, twiglike fingers and big knuckles. “She will.”

Lexi took a deep breath. She could do this. Of course she could. She had moved into seven foster homes in the past five years, and gone to six different schools in the same amount of time. She could handle this.

She reached out for Ms. Watters’s hand. They walked single file down the narrow bus aisle, bumping the cushioned seats on either side of them.

Off the bus, Lexi retrieved her scuffed red suitcase, which was almost too heavy to carry, filled as it was with the only things that really mattered to her: books. She dragged it to the very edge of the sidewalk and stood there, perched at the rim of the curb. It felt like a dangerous drop-off, that little cliff of concrete. One wrong step could break a bone or send her headlong into traffic.

Ms. Watters came up beside Lexi, opening an umbrella. The rain made a thumping sound on the stretched nylon.

One by one, the other passengers disembarked from the bus and disappeared.

Lexi looked at the empty parking lot and wanted to cry. How many times had she been in exactly this position? Every time Momma dried out, she came back for her daughter. Give me another chance, baby girl. Tell the nice judge here you love me. I’ll be better this time … I won’t forget about you no more. And every time, Lexi waited. “She probably changed her mind.”

“That won’t happen, Lexi.”

“It could.”

“You have family, Lexi,” Ms. Watters repeated the terrifying words and Lexi slipped; hope tiptoed in.

“Family.” She dared to test out the unfamiliar word. It melted on her tongue like candy, leaving sweetness behind.

A banged-up blue Ford Fairlane pulled up in front of them and parked. The car was dented along the fender and underlined in rust. Duct tape crisscrossed a cracked window.

The driver’s door opened slowly and a woman emerged. She was short and gray-haired, with watery brown eyes and the kind of diamond-patterned skin that came with heavy smoking. Amazingly, she looked familiar—like an older, wrinkled version of Momma. At that, the impossible word came back to Lexi, swollen now with meaning. Family.

“Alexa?” the woman said in a scratchy voice.

Lexi couldn’t make herself answer. She wanted this woman to smile, or maybe even hug her, but Eva Lange just stood there, her dried-apple face turned into a deep frown.

“I’m your great-aunt. Your grandmother’s sister.”

“I never knew my grandmother,” was all Lexi could think of to say.

“All this time, I thought you were living with your daddy’s people.”

“I don’t have a dad. I mean, I don’t know who he is. Momma didn’t know.”

Aunt Eva sighed. “I know that now, thanks to Ms. Watters here. Is that all your stuff?”

Lexi felt a wave of shame. “Yeah.”

Ms. Watters gently took the suitcase from Lexi and put it in the backseat. “Go on, Lexi. Get in the car. Your aunt wants you to live with her.”

Yeah, for now.

Ms. Watters pulled Lexi into a fierce hug, whispering, “Don’t be afraid.”

Lexi almost hung on too long. At the last second, before it turned embarrassing, she let go and stumbled free. She went to the battered car and wrenched the door open. It rattled and pinged and swung wide.

Inside, the car had two brown vinyl bench seats, with cracked seams that burped up a gray padding. It smelled like a mixture of mint and smoke, as if a million menthol cigarettes had been smoked within.

Lexi sat as close to the door as possible. Through the cracked window, she waved at Ms. Watters, watching her caseworker disappear into the gray haze as they drove away. She let her fingertips graze the cold glass, as if a little touch like that could connect her with a woman she could no longer see.

“I was sorry to hear about your momma passing,” Aunt Eva said after a long and uncomfortable silence. “She’s in a better place now. That must be a comfort to you.”

Lexi had never known what to say to that. It was a sentiment she’d heard from every stranger who’d ever taken her in. Poor Lexi, with her dead, drug-addict mother. But no one really knew what Momma’s life had been like—the men, the heroin, the vomiting, the pain. Or how terrible the end had been. Only Lexi knew all of that.