Casper says, “It makes me very uncomfortable, you leaving with your kit. Even if it’s empty.”
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. My backpack, with the empty tender kit inside, rests at my feet. Louisa gave me her suitcase, a square, tough old-fashioned thing she’s covered with stenciled skulls and roses. She shrugged. “This is my last stop for a while, anyway.”
Her smile was thin, and worried me, but she just stroked the tips of her hair. She stepped forward and gave me a feathery kiss on the cheek. She whispered, “I wish you’d stayed longer. I had so much to tell you. I just know you would have understood.”
They returned everything to me. It’s all tucked in the suitcase: my Land Camera, my socks, my bag of charcoals and pencils. Miss Joni gave me a brand-new sketchbook, too, a super-nice one, which she must have bought with her own money, and which made me feel a little guilty.
Casper is perched across from me on a folding chair borrowed from Rec. Doctors are not allowed to sit on the beds of patients.
Her enormous blue eyes are kind. I still feel so bad about what I did to her.
She raises her hands and traces the shape of my body in the air. When her fingers reach my boots, she says:
“You own all of yourself, Charlie. Every last bit.” She pauses. “You understand what’s going to happen, yes?”
I swallow hard. “I’m going back to live with my mother.”
Casper has given me a piece of paper with the numbers for the halfway house, a support group, a hotline number, her email address. This paper is tucked at the bottom of my backpack.
“No drugs, no drinking, no silence. You have to work hard, Charlotte, to stay ahead of your old habits. Old things, old habits are comfortable, even when we know they’ll cause us pain. You are going out into the unknown.”
I pull the backpack up on my lap and hug it close. I can’t look at Casper. I concentrate on the slippery quality of the backpack’s fabric. Mamamamamama.
Casper says, “Cool moss,” and smiles at me. I don’t say anything.
She tries again. “You look like a farmer, Charlotte. A very disturbed, balding farmer.”
I look down at Mikey’s sister’s overalls, the Dead T-shirt, the ratty peacoat his mother put in the box. I wiggle my feet in my boots. I missed my boots, the heavy, definite feel of them. When Vinnie brought them to me, I held them close for a long time.
We don’t say anything in the hallway as we pass the closed Rec door. I can hear them murmuring inside. Like with Jen, they’re not allowed to say goodbye to me. As the elevator descends, the heat in my stomach builds into an enormous ball. My words start slipping away again. The doors slide open.
She’s at the desk, holding a sheaf of papers and an envelope. She’s all gray: gray zippered jacket, gray jeans with a hole in one knee, gray sneakers, gray knit hat.
The only color on my mother is her hair.
It’s still like fire, a deep red that she’s wrangled into a slippery ponytail.
My own hair is dark blond tucked under Mikey’s sister’s red wool cap, just the slimmest bit of it since I cut my dyed black nest of street hair off.
My mother doesn’t smile, but I didn’t really expect her to. Just for a minute, though, I see something, some wave of some thing, flit across her eyes.
Then it’s gone.
Inside my pockets, my hands tremble. I close them into fists, tight as I can make them. I haven’t seen her in almost a year.
Casper is all business, striding to my mother. “Thank you for coming, Misty.” She looks back and motions me forward. “Charlie, it’s time.”
The closer I get, the less I feel myself. I am slipping away—there it is again, what Casper says is dissociation. If only my mother would smile, or touch me, or something.
She looks at me for only a minute, before she turns to Casper. “It’s good to finally meet you. Thanks for everything. With Charlotte, and all.”
“You’re welcome. Charlie, take care.”
Casper doesn’t smile, she doesn’t frown, she just touches my arm, and then gives me the smallest push before turning back to the elevators.
My mother begins walking to the bay doors of the hospital, ponytail limp against her jacket. Without looking back, she says, “You coming?”
Outside, the sky is a quilt of puffy clouds. My mother’s cheap sneakers squeak on the sidewalk. “I don’t have a car right now,” she says into her chest, lighting a cigarette as she walks. I wonder how she got to the hospital, if someone dropped her off. She’s always hated the bus.
It’s warm out; the tip of her nose is shiny. I can tell already that the peacoat is going to be too hot. As we come to the corner, I look back, and there they are behind the window of the fourth floor, assembled like dolls, watching me, Blue’s hands against the glass.
My mother rounds the corner.
I have to run to catch up with her. I start to say what Casper and I rehearsed. I try to make it sound believable, because I know what the alternative is. “I’m going to follow rules, Ma. Whatever you want. Get a job and stuff, okay?”
She stops so abruptly I crash into her shoulder. I’m almost as tall as she is now, which isn’t saying much. We’re both small.
She holds out the envelope. “Here, this is your stuff, bus ticket, birth certificate, all that shit.”
I don’t understand. “What?”
I don’t take the envelope, so she grabs my hand and curls my fingers around the edges. “This is as far as I go, Charlotte. You’ve got everything you need in there, okay?”
“I thought…I thought I was going home. With you.”
As she smokes, I see how dry her hands are, how chapped. She takes a last pull from her cigarette, crushes it under her sneakers.
I sneak a look at her, at the slight bump on the bridge of her nose. The nose I broke with a pan. Her mouth wobbles as she watches the cars slip past in the street. She won’t look at me and I can’t look at her for too long.
There is so much broken between us. My eyes blur.
“Your friend Mike came by late last night. We all know it’s not gonna work out, you with me, or you in some freaking teen halfway house. That’s not you, Charlotte. I don’t know what is you, but I’m not it, and I’m pretty sure some curfewed house isn’t it. Mike’s mom bought you a bus ticket to Arizona. You’ll stay in his apartment down there. He says he’ll help you.”
She roots for another cigarette in her pocket. “He left a letter for you. You’ll be alone for a little bit, until he gets back from his trip. I guess he roadies for some band? Mike’s the good kind, Charlotte. Try not to fuck anything up.”
So Mikey did do something after he got my message. I’m not going to live with my mother. I’m getting on a goddamn bus. To the goddamn desert. Far, far away from Fucking Frank, from the goddamn river, from all of this.
I’m so happy and so scared and so confused I don’t know what to do.
Slowly, my hands trembling, I open the envelope and rifle through the bus ticket, my old ID, my birth certificate. There’s a folded-up letter—that must be from Mikey—and something that makes my heart jump.
A rubber-banded stack of cash wrapped in Saran wrap. I stare at the cash, gradually realizing what it is. “How…how did you get this?”
My mother inhales deeply on her cigarette. “Eleanor’s mother found it a while ago. They’re selling the house and moving out west. To be closer to her. She’s in Idaho, you know.”
Paris, London, Iceland. Just, anywhere. Ellis and I mowed people’s lawns, we helped Mrs. Hampl over on Sherburne clean out her garage. That was hard and took a long time. She was some sort of writer and had all kinds of files with news clippings and old magazines. We tried anything to earn money.
“Judy thought you should have it.”
I slide it into the pocket of the peacoat and quickly swipe at my eyes. I don’t want her to see me cry.
Something catches in my throat—sorrysorrysorrysorryImissyou—but it stays there, tucked and quiet. My mother says, “I have to go now, Charlotte. I have to be somewhere.”
She starts to walk away but turns suddenly, wrapping her arms around me so tight I can’t breathe and so tight I see red rings around the puffy clouds, and then she presses her mouth against my ear.
She whispers, “Don’t you think this isn’t freaking breaking my heart.”
Then she’s gone, and my body grows cold, cold, as I stand there, on the corner of Riverside and Twenty-Second, the emptiness of the world so large, and so small, all at once. The Greyhound station is a long walk. I don’t even know what time it is.
I stare down at the ticket. Departure: Minneapolis, Minnesota, Arrival: Tucson, Arizona. I flip through the rest of it, the names of the cities we’ll stop in blurring in front of my eyes. The desert. When I asked Mikey to save me, he didn’t say anything for a while, then he finally typed, On it, and logged off.
I’m going to the desert. I’m going to ride a bus alone across God-knows-how-many-states to be with Mikey when I’ve never been anywhere my entire life. And how am I supposed to get to the bus station? What time is it? I look back at the hospital and wonder if I should go back in, but then realize I can’t. They think I left with my mother. And what am I going to do when I get there? How long will Mikey be gone? How long will I be alone down there?
Things are moving too quickly and I can’t breathe. I’m too hot in the peacoat.
“Need a ride, tough girl?”
I turn, the white van with the hospital logo idling next to me. Vinnie throws his cigarette out the window. “Get in.”
In the van, he says, “All I know is, right now I’m on my way to pick up some anorexics on Day Pass at Mall of America, got it? I am not transporting a minor, away from her legal guardian, to an undisclosed location.” He guns the van. “Buckle up! I don’t need any dead girls in this piece of crap. Where we headed?”
I tell him. We don’t say anything until we get to the Greyhound station. There are a few people inside, surrounded by suitcases and boxes, paper bags and plastic sacks. He fishes in the pocket of his black coat and pushes some bills into my hand.
“I don’t ever wanna see you here again, Charlie-girl.”
I nod, my eyes blurring with tears.
“Everything and everybody that’s busted can be fixed. That’s what I think.” He glances at the bus station. “Now, you go in there, girlfriend, and when you get on that bus, you sit in the goddamn front, not the back. The back is badsville. Stay away. Don’t take nobody’s cigarettes if they offer, don’t take a drink unless it’s from a machine. You stay like this. Tight.” He hugs himself. “And when you get to where you going, it’s gonna be sunshine and sunny days forever, yeah? Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. I got my ways of knowing things about you girls. Now, go.” He reaches across me and nudges the door open.
He smells like strawberry Swisher Sweets and warmed milk, like the streets and like a home.
I breathe him in deeply, in case he is the last kind thing I will know for days, and then I get out of the van, dragging Louisa’s suitcase and my backpack behind me.
