The Mystery of Hollow Places(51)

I kill the hour-and-a-half wait by rereading A Time to Chill for the eleventy-hundredth time and plowing through vending machine packages of peanut butter crackers and mini cookies. My prom fund is rapidly depleting, though I should have plenty for a taxi from the bus stop to Todd Malachai’s and back, with cash left over. The return trip is a little shorter and I actually stand a chance of beating Lindy home, depending on how long she spends with Officer Griffin at the police station. If not, maybe I can lie and say I went to Jessa’s to make nice. I’ll probably have to add that it didn’t go so great.

Before I know it, my bus is boarding. I settle into a seat in the rear, pull the hood of my coat up, curl inward around Dad’s book, and accept that there’s no turning back.

Thankfully, I make both bus transfers in Springfield and in Hartford, Connecticut, and disembark outside the Cumberland Farms. The “bus stop” is a row of black iron benches outside the convenience store, gleaming with ice, and not a cab stand in sight. I’ve hung around Boston enough to know how to fish for taxis, but this isn’t exactly the city. Beyond the parking lot is a street stuffed with two-family housing in a faded rainbow of unhealthy colors. I’m not even sure which direction to head to get to Pines Road, and I can’t call a cab company.

All right, so it was fairly dumb to cross state lines without any kind of cell phone. Unsure of my next move, I stand on the sidewalk and tuck my chin into my jacket. It’s no warmer in Windham than in Sugarbrook, and as a bonus there’s a cold, ripe fog, the sky dull even though sunset is hours away.

The only thing I can think to do is retreat into the little yellow-lit store. I wait in line behind a woman buying yogurt raisins and lottery tickets to talk to the clerk, a boy about Chad’s age. Watching me through bleary eyes, he drones, “Can I help you?”

Everyone is always asking me that.

“I was wondering, how do I hail a cab around here?”

“Have to call one, I think. Try Ace Taxi Service. You gonna buy something?”

I lean in toward him the way Pari Singh leaned into Chad, draping my hip against the counter, propping one elbow on the conveyer belt. “See, that’s the problem. I don’t have a phone on me, so I can’t call. But if you’ve got a phone . . . I’m really stuck, you know?” I can’t possibly replicate the Pari effect, not with my hideous coat, my strawberry hat, my puffy eyes and raw lips.

“My phone’s in the back room. Are you gonna buy something, or what?”

The old man behind me coughs pointedly, rearranges his bags of chips on the belt.

I straighten, defeated. “Look, just . . . please? Please, can you help me?”

He curls his bottom lip, fuzzed with a feeble little soul patch. “Whatever. I got a break in twenty. Have to hang around till then. Now can you get out of line?”

So I loiter in the canned-goods aisle until Shaggy from Scooby-Doo takes his break, and use his phone to call a cab while he taps his foot impatiently on the tile floor, pack of cigarettes and lighter in hand.

When the taxi arrives it takes me to Pines Road, which is actually a condo complex. Identical peach-colored two-stories snake around the development. It looks nice here. Nice and neat, with perfectly flat-topped shrubs below each white shuttered window, and a fancy knocker on every door. Old-fashioned lampposts at the foot of each walkway look like miniature, twinkly brass houses.

The ride costs me $14.45 and I peel off a two-dollar tip, thinning my bankroll even further. Before I climb out of the taxi I ask for the time.

“Around four,” the driver says, checking out number fifty-six through his passenger side window. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” he says. “Want me to wait till you get inside? It’s starting to snow.”

I shake my head and pull my gloves on. “No, thanks. I’ll be okay.”

The whole trip down I was wondering how it’d feel to ring the doorbell, but it’s not a problem. Even before I cup my hands and peer through the glass of the side window into the dark beyond the door, I can tell there’s no one home.

So I sit down a front stoop identical to the front stoops around it, sheltered from the snow by an overhanging (and pristine) gutter, and I wait.

And wait.

I don’t know for how long. The already-dark sky darkens further, and snow powders the shrubs around me until they’re white-capped, and I have to cross my legs and run my hands briskly over my jeans to keep the blood in them. To distract myself I dig into my bag, meaning to pull out Dad’s book but landing on the MFA brochure instead.

With shivering hands, I flip to the picture of my mother and try to untangle the little knot of hurt I feel when I look at her.

All this time. She’s been all across Massachusetts—and beyond!—and still when it came to it, I managed to track her down quick enough. Here I am one week later, freezing on her front stoop.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in the same house my whole life. We’ve never changed our phone number. For god’s sake, we never change the magnets on the fridge.

I don’t really care about her, I tell myself. I don’t feel this way because I miss her. I don’t even know her. I only miss the family I’ve been imagining since I was six years old and first heard my bedtime story; the family we will never be. And that kind of missing hangs around like the pain of a rotten tooth, throbbing when it’s knocked against. Maybe this is horrible, but that was okay, I figured, as long as somewhere out there, she was in pain too.