Greyhound at Dawn

I said it quietly, because I did not trust my voice at any other volume.

"I'm taking her to my sister's."

Dunleavy did not move. He sat at the head of the table with his big hands folded on the map of downtown, and for a while the only sound in the conference room was the hum of a fluorescent tube that needed replacing. I watched the muscles move in his jaw. He had the look I had seen on parents at the end of a conference, the ones who came in sure of the plan and left knowing they would not get their way, who were deciding how much to say.

"Ms. Ostrander," he said at last. "Say that again, and say it slower."

"I can't do the bank." I made myself look at him. "I know it's the right move. I know you've done this a hundred times, and you'll have eight officers, and I'm sure it's as safe as these things get. But I can't put her in a car outside a building where a man is waiting for me with a phone. I won't. I'd rather be wrong somewhere far away."

"Distance isn't a wall."

"It isn't nothing."

"He knew the room number."

"Then I'll go somewhere he doesn't know." My hands were flat on the table. They were not trembling anymore, which surprised me. "Corinne has a house in Tucson. Nobody in this city knows her married name. She hasn't set foot in Ohio since our mother's funeral."

"Mom," said June.

I turned to her. I knew what I would see, and I saw it. The small face, set and white, the dark eyes fixed on mine, level as a ruler. She did not argue. That was the terrible part. A child who argues is a child who still believes you can be moved. She only said, in that quiet voice, "Please don't."

"June."

"I'm asking you, one time. Don't."

"I know." I put my hand over hers. "I know you are. And I'm sorry. I think you know things I can't. But you're thirteen, and I'm your mother, and tonight I'm going to be the one who chooses. It's the only thing I still know how to do."

She looked at me for a very long moment. Then she took her hand away, gently, and put it in her lap.

I think it was the first time in her life that she let me win.

…

Dunleavy did not shout. I had half expected it, and part of me had wanted him to, because anger would have been something I could set against my own. He only leaned back in his chair until it creaked and rubbed his big face with both palms, hard, the way a man does who has been awake for thirty hours.

"I can't hold you," he said, through his fingers. "You know that. You're not under arrest, you're not a witness in custody, and you haven't committed a crime. If you stand up and walk out of that door, there is nothing in the world I can do but hold it for you."

"I know."

"I can only tell you." He dropped his hands. His eyes were red-rimmed and enormous. "I can only tell you that this is the worst mistake you will ever make. I've seen the way these things go. People think the first mile is the dangerous one. It isn't. It's the thousandth. It's the night you're in a strange bed in a strange city and you start to think you got away."

"Then what would you do?"

"I'd stay where I could see them." He said it at once. "In a building with a lot of cops in it. For as long as it took."

"For how long?"

He did not answer.

"A week? A month?" I heard my voice rise. "You don't know. You've told me you don't know who he is, or where, or how many. You've told me you have no face. You want me to sit in a room with a bagel and wait for a man you can't name to decide to come back and finish the job. And in the meantime she can't go to school and I can't go home, and every night at three-oh-seven I'll—"

I stopped. I hadn't meant to say the hour.

Dunleavy looked at June. June looked at the table.

"All right," he said, very quietly. "All right, Ms. Ostrander."

…

He did one thing for us, and I have never forgotten it.

He took us downstairs to a locked cage in the basement of the station, the evidence property room, a long low space lit with caged bulbs and lined with steel shelves, and he talked to a bored clerk behind a counter in a language I didn't follow. The clerk went away and came back with a clear plastic bag. Inside it, on its side, with the lace trailing, was a small gray running shoe.

I knew it before I saw it. The rubber toe. The fuzzy collar. The little silver sticker on the sole, still catching the light: a cat in a spacesuit.

"Found on the sixth-floor landing by a fire marshal at four forty a.m.," said Dunleavy. "The Evidence Unit logged it. Strictly speaking, I should keep it until the file is closed." He peeled the seal and slid the shoe out into his palm. He held it a moment, as if weighing it. "But I'm told it's the only one she has."

He handed it to June.

She took it in both hands. She looked at it for a long time, at the worn heel and the grimy toe and the cat floating in its tiny sticker sky. Then she bent and pulled the sock off her right foot, and slid it on, and I knelt, because it seemed to be something I should do, and tied the laces with a double knot.

"Thank you," June said.

"Don't thank me," said Dunleavy gruffly. "It's evidence." He took a small notepad from his pocket and tore off a page, and wrote on it with his pencil, pressing hard. He folded it twice. "Kid. Give me your hand."

She held it out.

"Seven digits and an area code. It goes to the phone I keep in my sock drawer, and I'm not joking, it's an actual drawer. My wife thinks it's a bad habit. You lose everything else, you lose your mother's phone, your mother's mind, you remember that number. You call it, and I answer, any hour." He closed her fingers around the paper. "That's not an order. It's a promise."

"What if somebody's listening?"

"Then they'll hear a cop say 'Hello.'"

June studied the folded slip as if it were a word she had not met. Then she crouched, pulled up the tongue of her sneaker, worked a fingernail under the loose edge of the insole, and slid the paper in beneath it, flat against the rubber. She pressed it down with her thumb. She stood, and put her weight on the foot, and nodded once, as though testing a bridge.

"Good," said Dunleavy. "Don't tell your mother where it is."

"I already know," I said.

"Then don't tell yourself."

…

We spent the rest of that day in a room.

It was a spare office on the third floor of the station with a couch, a card table, and a coffee maker that no one had cleaned since the Reagan administration. A kind woman in a blue sweater brought us sandwiches. In the afternoon, with a young policeman at my elbow, I withdrew four thousand dollars in cash from a branch two miles from my own, an act of such cinematic melodrama that I nearly laughed, and pushed the thick envelope down the front of my sweater.

At the policeman's quiet suggestion, I left my phone.

It was the hardest thing I did that day. I took it from my pocket and held it in my palm. It was a plain cheap Android with a cracked corner and a case with a pattern of daisies, and it held three thousand photographs, eight years of text messages, my mother's last voice mail, saved. A phone is a window, the policeman said, apologetically, and a window goes both ways. I put it in his hand. It was as light as a cough drop.

By midnight, we were nobody.

We had no phones, no cards, no address. We had one small bag that smelled of the station's lost-and-found, and four thousand dollars. At half past three in the morning, a young officer I had never met drove us in a Ford with no markings through the dark and empty streets, and let us out a block from the Greyhound terminal on Chester Avenue. He would not come closer. "It'd be a tell," he said. "Walk it. Good luck, ma'am." And the car pulled away.

…

The station at four in the morning is a place that exists outside of time.

It was a long gray hall under a dirty skylight, with banks of orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a smell of floor wax, old coffee, and wet wool. A television hung from the ceiling and played a weather map to nobody. A man slept across three seats with his shoe under his head. At the far end, behind a window of scratched Plexiglas, a clerk with a gold tooth and a name tag that said DARLENE was reading a paperback.

"Two to Tucson," I said. "The five-ten."

"Round trip?"

"One way."

She looked at me over the top of her glasses. She looked at June. She said nothing at all, and printed two tickets, and slid them under the glass, and took my cash, a hundred and ninety-eight dollars each, and counted it out loud into the drawer. "Gate nine," she said. "Boarding at ten till. Honey, you want a soda for the kid? There's a machine."

"No, thank you."

"Take care of yourselves."

It was the kindest thing anybody had said to me in twenty-four hours, and I did not trust myself to answer.

We sat on the far side of the room, against the wall, under a sign for a personal-injury lawyer. I held the bag in my lap. June perched beside me on the edge of the seat with her feet together and her hands tucked under her thighs. Neither of us spoke. I counted the tiles. There were seventeen across. I stopped counting.

Behind the ticket window there was a mirror.

I hadn't noticed it before. It was a convex security mirror bolted in the corner above the clerk's head, a round dome of silvered glass that gave a fisheye view of the whole concourse, the chairs, the doors, the vending machines, the sleepers, the plastic ferns. It had been installed so that the staff could see anyone coming up behind a customer. June was looking into it.

She had been looking into it, I realized, for several minutes. She hadn't moved. She sat with her chin lifted and her eyes fixed on the little glass world where we were two bent figures in a row of orange chairs, and her face had the careful, flat, listening quality of a girl reading a hard book.

"What is it?" I said.

"Nobody came in."

"What do you mean?"

"Since we sat down. Nobody." Her voice was a thread. "Not a man, not a woman. Nobody's come through those doors who wasn't already coming. Nobody has looked at us. The man with the shoe hasn't turned over. I've been watching the doors for eleven minutes."

"That's good, June. That's what we wanted."

"If nobody follows us," said June, very softly, "it's worse."

"Why?"

She turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were dark and enormous and terribly, terribly old.

"Because they don't need to."

I felt it like a draft under a door. For a moment the whole cold station seemed to lean toward me with its row of plastic chairs and its hissing vents and its hundred silent fluorescent tubes, and I felt the small hairs on my neck lift. I wanted to say what do you mean. I wanted to ask her what she knew, and how she knew it, and what it was that she had seen in the dark last time that still lived behind her eyes.

I put my arm around her. I pulled her against my side and held her hard, and kissed her forehead, which was cool and damp.

"It means we got away," I said.

I said it firmly. I said it the way you say a thing you intend to make true. And she let her head rest against my shoulder, and said nothing, and in the convex mirror our two bent figures sat quite still and watched the doors that did not open.

…

At ten to five, a loudspeaker crackled, and a sleepy voice announced the departure for Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and points southwest. We shuffled out under a low roof into a cold that smelled of diesel and rain.

The bus was long and silver and humming. A driver in a gray jacket, with a thermos in his hand and a face like a boiled ham, took our tickets, tore them, and told us to mind the step. We climbed. It was nearly empty. Six or seven people sat in the front rows, wrapped in coats. I took the seat in the back, by the window on the left, where I could see the street, and June settled in beside me with her bag on her knees and her new old shoe pressed hard against the floor.

The doors folded shut with a sigh.

The engine rose. The bus shuddered, backed, and swung in a long slow arc out of the bay, and I put my forehead against the cold glass and watched the terminal slide away. We turned onto Chester Avenue, and the great dark city opened up around us, streetlights and billboards, a row of shuttered shops, an all-night diner with a neon coffee cup. For a block or two I let myself think about nothing. I let the motion lull me. I thought: it's done. It's done. We're out.

At the corner of Chester and East Fortieth Street, the bus stopped for a red light.

I don't know why I looked. I wasn't thinking of anything. I only turned my head to the right, idly, the way you turn it at any light, and let my eyes rest on the curb.

A car was parked there.

It was a sedan. It was black, or very dark, and it sat tight against the curb under a dead streetlamp, facing the same way as the bus, engine running, a thin ghost of exhaust curling from its tailpipe in the cold. It had no headlights on. Nobody sat in the front seat that I could see. I looked at the rear bumper as we idled beside it, and the license plate was caked, so thickly and so evenly that it could not have been an accident, with a smooth dried plaster of gray mud.

June's hand closed on my wrist.

She didn't say a word. The light turned green. The bus lurched and rolled, and the black sedan stayed where it was, motionless, unlit, patient as a stone, until the corner took it from my sight.