Dreamland(20)

Later, they left that bus for good. They were somewhere in Illinois, but still a long way from Chicago. She sent Tommie ahead of her, watching as he took a seat on the bench in the terminal. After a couple of minutes, she went to the ladies’ room, where she hid in a stall. She had told Tommie to wait, so he did. Ten minutes, then fifteen, and then twenty minutes, until she was confident that anyone else who’d been on the bus had already departed the station. Once she was sure it was quiet, she stood in front of the cracked and dingy mirror in the restroom. She quickly removed her wig but kept her hair pinned up and put the baseball hat back on. Now she was a short-haired blonde. The sunglasses went into her backpack, and she applied heavy mascara and black eyeliner. When she emerged, the bus station was devoid of people except Tommie. She told him to stand near the restroom when she went to the ticket window again. She bought tickets for the next bus that was leaving, not caring where it went, only that it would take her in some random direction and make her journey that much harder to follow. Again, she mentioned she was traveling with her sister, and again she sat apart from Tommie; again, they boarded the bus at separate times.

And then, after another day and a half on the bus, she and Tommie stepped off for good. They left the station and walked toward the highway. Near the on-ramp, she put out her thumb and caught a ride with a woman driving a station wagon, who asked them where they were going. Beverly answered that she could drop them anywhere, and the woman gazed over at Beverly and Tommie and saw something in Beverly’s face and didn’t ask any more questions. In time, the station wagon came to a stop in a small town, and Tommie and Beverly got out. From there, they hitched another ride—this time from a middle-aged man who smelled of Old Spice and sold carpets for a living—and when Beverly made up a story about her car breaking down, Tommie knew enough to stay silent. They eventually arrived at another small town. Beverly and Tommie grabbed their backpacks, and Beverly brought Tommie to get something to eat at a roadside diner. Beverly asked for a cup of hot water and added ketchup to it, making a thin soup, while Tommie had a cheeseburger and fries and a slice of blueberry pie and two glasses of milk.

On the next street over, she spotted an inexpensive motel, though she knew she didn’t have enough money to stay more than a couple of nights. Not if she intended to rent a place. But it would have to do for now, and after she got Tommie settled in the dated but functional room, she went back to the diner and asked the waitress if she could borrow her cellphone to make a quick call, along with a pen and a napkin. The woman—who reminded Beverly a little of her mom—seemed to sense the urgency of Beverly’s request. Instead of making a call, Beverly pretended to do so and then, with her back turned, she searched local real estate listings. There weren’t many, and she jotted down addresses and then cleared the history before returning the cellphone. After that, she asked strangers on the street for basic directions and found the dingy apartments first, but they were no good. Nor was the equally dingy duplex. Nor was the one house she’d been able to find. But there was one listing still to go.

In the morning, after bringing Tommie to the diner for breakfast and then back to the motel, she went out again. Aside from the two apples and granola bars, she hadn’t eaten for three days. She walked slowly, but even then she had to stop and rest every few minutes, and it took a long time to find the house. It was on the distant outskirts of town, in farm country, a grand two-story place surrounded by massive live oaks, their limbs stretching in every direction like gnarled, arthritic fingers. Out front, the patchy grass was slightly overgrown with dandelions and goosegrass and prostrate knotweed. A dirt pathway led toward a covered front porch sporting a pair of ancient rocking chairs. The front door was candy-apple red, ridiculous against the dirty and flaking white paint, and the sides of the house were thick with azalea and daylilies, the decaying blooms like splashes of color in a forgotten forest. The house was fifty or a hundred years old and isolated enough to keep prying eyes away.

She cupped her hands to various windows so she could see inside. The colors on the first floor were dizzying—orange paint on the kitchen walls, a burgundy wall in the living room. Mismatched furniture; wide, scuffed pine plank flooring covered with thin rugs in the hallway and living room, linoleum in the kitchen. Sills painted so many times she wondered whether she would be able to open the windows. But she walked back to town and asked the waitress at the diner if she could borrow her phone again. She called the owner of the house and returned later in the afternoon, so she could go inside. She made sure to delete the call, just in case. For that visit, she donned the same disguise she’d used on the night they ran away.

As she’d walked through the house, she knew it would need work. There was a ring of lime in the sink, grease on the stovetop, a refrigerator filled with food that could have been there for weeks or months. Upstairs were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a linen closet. On the plus side, there were no water stains in the ceilings, and the toilets and showers worked. On the back porch, there was a washer and dryer, both of them rusting but still functional, as well as a water heater that looked almost new. Next to and above the appliances were shelves stacked with odds and ends, along with cans and cans of latex paint, enough to paint the entire interior, all different colors, at least a dozen. On the floor in the corner was a dirty plastic bucket filled with rollers and paintbrushes, along with a pan, surrounded by rags that looked anything but new. It was nothing like the house she had shared with Gary, with its harsh modern exterior and his clean, straight-lined furniture and organized cupboards, nothing ever out of place. Their home had been like something from the future, as cold and empty of feeling as outer space, while this home radiated a feeling of familiar comfort.