All We Know of Love

M
y mother was telling me something just before she left for good, taking nothing with her (as far as we could tell). Leaving behind everything she had ever bought, everything she had ever wanted, everything she owned or had ever been given.

And everything she had made: a lopsided clay bowl with the image of a tiny painted pineapple from her ceramic workshop days, a collage of family pictures cut in various sizes and shapes, pasted together and framed. She spent weeks on that. All the pressed wildflowers she had collected and laminated between sheets of clear plastic to last forever. And me.

Me, she left behind.

She walked out mid-sentence, before she finished what she was about to say.

It was a long time ago already, four years. Four years, four months, and fifteen days to be exact. And for four years, four months, and
twelve
days, I didn’t think for one second about what she never finished telling me. I gave no thought at all to her unfinished sentence. I suppose it is like being in a car accident. You don’t think about something as trivial as the conversation you were having at the moment of impact. Not until weeks later, if at all. It comes to you in daydream one day as you are remembering the crash, that awful crumbling-metal noise, and if you begin to reconstruct the instant at all, it may not be for months, or in my case, years.

At first all I cared about was that she was gone. I wrote her letters. I made her Mother’s Day gifts. When she had been gone sixteen months and seven days, I sewed her an orange dinosaur pillow in FACs class. I cried at night, and at sad TV shows, and, for some unknown reason, during first-aid filmstrips shown in gym class on rainy days. And then I stopped. Because all things need to come to an end. Good things and bad things.

But then just recently I started to remember and I began to reconstruct. And wonder: if only I had let her say what it was she was about to tell me, would everything have been different? Would I be in this situation?

My mother stopped mid-sentence. She was in mid-thought, about to tell me something.

She was talking about love.

At the Stamford bus station, there is a little newsstand with chips and candy and gum, stuff like that.
I should load up on snacks,
I am thinking. I don’t have anything I am going to need, except money, and not that much of that. The ticket was a hundred and twenty-six dollars, one way. When I called a few days ago to get the schedule, I found out how expensive the trip would be, and how long it would take. Twenty-four hours on a bus. I can’t imagine that. I’ll need some stuff to eat and drink, I guess. I should have made myself something at home, a sandwich or two, but I didn’t think of it.

It’s early. Way early, especially for a Saturday morning. It’s not even seven thirty. And this kid working behind the newsstand isn’t paying attention; he’s reading a book. I’ve been standing here for a while. Sometimes the world reminds me of how invisible I am.

My dad tells me it’s because my voice is too quiet, even when I’m shouting. He says it’s loud enough, but the timbre’s too soft, as if it were at a different frequency, like there’s something wrong with it and nobody hears me.

“Excuse me,” I say again, a second time. The boy who works at this newsstand is at that age. Not young, not old, so I don’t know how to address him, to get his attention.
Mister? Kid?

Hey, you
seems rude.

“Hello there,” I try. “Sir?”

Sir?

How stupid is that?

He looks up and smiles, like I just made a joke, when joking is the furthest thing from my mind. He is annoying me already.

“What can I get you?” he says. He lowers his book. I see he is wearing an orange T-shirt so faded its softness is almost visible. He hikes his jeans up over his skinny hips as he steps up to the counter. I see he is wearing a rope necklace around his neck, with one white shell that sits right in that spot, that little dip in a boy’s neck that always seems a little too intimate to be looking at.

“Um . . . I’m not sure,” I say, looking over everything, which all looks really unhealthy and fairly sickening.

“Stuff for your trip?” he asks me.

“Yeah.” I nod.
My trip.

“Where are you going?”

And when he asks me that, I know I am going to lie even before I open my mouth. Like I am trying it on for size, testing out my abilities.

“North Dakota,” I say.

“North Dakota, huh?” He smiles.

This guy is flirting with me, I think. I used to like this, but ever since Adam flirting has taken on a whole new meaning. In a way, it’s like I know what it means now. I know what can happen, and I don’t know what I want from it anymore.

“That’s a pretty long trip,” he says.

I want to smile back, but suddenly I feel a wave of nausea. Maybe from looking at the candy, or from this older man, who comes up beside me and reeks of cigarettes. Or maybe it’s something else entirely that scares me even more.

“Forget it,” I say quickly to the boy. “I don’t want anything.”

And I hurry away.

At least this is one of those big buses, the kind you get for really long, expensive school field trips. The kind with upholstered seats and little TV screens every few rows. But the screens are blank. So far the seat next to me is empty. I am doing a silent prayer that it stays this way all the way to Florida.

It is such a long trip to be sitting next to someone you don’t know, maybe someone awful. Someone fat. Every time a passenger walks down the aisle and then passes me by, I think I am that much closer to sitting alone. I am resting my head on the window, making it as hard as possible for someone to catch my eye.

So far so good.

The bus hisses and lurches forward. When we hit the highway, the sun is fully risen and on its way to completing another cycle, another day.

I make it all the way to New York City this way. Port Authority Bus Terminal, the driver announces. We have a half an hour wait here. We sit in our tall seats as the bus idles. The smoke from the exhaust blows up and across my window like a miniature H-bomb. The bus shakes as it idles, but I am grateful for the heat. I suppose it must be cold out. It’s February. It was freezing when I slipped out of my house this morning, but we are in an underground terminal system of some kind. As the bus looped its way from the outside world into this subterranean one, a long line of overhead fluorescent lines became the sky. The gray of concrete has never seemed so oppressive to me before, or so final.

Although I suppose if I wanted, I could still get off here.

I am not that far from home. I’m in New York. Big deal. I feel my legs start to move before my brain tells them to. I am about to stand, maybe get off the bus. It’s like a twitching in my muscles, separate from my thoughts but maybe with more common sense.

But now all of a sudden people start getting on the bus, and again I am doing my soundless please-let-me-sit-alone invocation. The chances seem slimmer. The bus is filling up quickly. Still, somehow I am sitting by myself when the driver finishes putting the luggage away underneath and heaves himself up the steps and into his seat. Then just as he pulls the doors shut, the last passenger shuffles down the aisle toward me. She is a big woman with two big bags in her hands. One is some kind of massive tapestry pocketbook and the other a clear plastic bag of knitting paraphernalia. There is a needle threatening to poke out the bottom of the plastic one. Her bags move before her as if they are individual people unto themselves, and all three stop directly at my seat.

I lift my head from the window for a second, not too much so it looks like I want to say hello or anything, just enough to see who she is.

She sits down next to me.

Her skin is the color of coffee beans before they are ground, and shiny like that. She’s pretty fat, too. She has knee-high stockings on that pinch the skin just below her knees, which I see when she plops that plastic bag onto her lap, and it makes her floral-patterned housedress rise up a little. She has on sandals, and her toes are painted a bright fuchsia. The tan mesh of her stockings dulls the color, but I can still see it. Sin City Pink, I imagine. Or Mango Tango.

I plop my head against the seat back and close my eyes. The bus is beginning to move, so if I had any plans to jump off and not go through with this, it’s too late now. This is when I notice that I have had my cell phone clutched in my hand since Stamford. It has nearly come alive with a power of its own, a life force beyond its battery and cell-tower capabilities. It is my connection, my constant accessibility, because Adam might call. Because any moment of any minute, he
could
call.