Laura van den Berg - Find Me

On the bus, a woman sitting across from us is reading a book titled Almost a Psychopath , and I wonder where the line is.

In Tupelo, Mississippi, I look at myself in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. I look hard. I am surprised by the length of my hair. The dark tips brush my shoulders. I can tuck my bangs behind my ears. The evidence of Raul’s sheepdog haircut, the evidence of that locked-up person, is almost gone.

I comb my hair with my fingers and remember the feeling of his hot, rough hands moving over my scalp.

In the light of the bathroom, I see lines on my face. They almost look like scars except I’ve never been cut by anything but time.

When I meet this child, will I want to do what my mother did? Will I want to leave it behind?

On the bus, Marcus takes off his rabbit mask and puts it on me. The elastic band digs into the back of my scalp. It’s night again. I can feel the heat his skin has left on the plastic. I concentrate on the movement of the bus underneath, the light that cuts in and out. I feel like the bandit now.

I don’t think so, I decide, touching my stomach. I turn my head and watch the landscape pass through a window. I don’t think I’ll be that kind of person.

At a gas station in Tuscaloosa, I’m in line to pay for coffee. We are almost out of cash. A little black TV sits on a stack of blue milk crates behind the counter, the volume blaring. In the Mansion, there was no TV — how long has it been since I’ve seen one? The news is on. I hear about a virulent strain of the flu that has put a town in Texas in isolation. A rash of suicides by cyanide in Michigan. A woman quarantined at the Boston airport because she was showing signs of the sickness. A false alarm, but it makes a person wonder: what will we do if it comes back? An infant found abandoned in a sewage pipe in Virginia. I add that to my list of things a mother can do that are worse than leaving.

A new headline, “Kansas Project Exposed,” snakes along the bottom of the screen.

“Stop,” I say even though no one in the line is moving. I ask the cashier to turn up the volume.

“Do you want us all to go deaf?” he says, but does what I want anyway.

The broadcaster says news outlets are searching for details about a hospital near La Harpe, Kansas. Inside this hospital authorities have discovered eighty bodies. There were eighty-four people in the hospital when I left, which means four more must have died of the sickness after I was gone. These bodies were found tucked in their beds, slumped against walls, in hallways. According to the preliminary reports, the patients and staff appear to have died within twenty-four hours of each other. The cause is unknown, but the theories include: experimental vaccine, toxins in the water or food supplies, psychosis brought on by excessive winter, mass suicide. Casualties of the microepidemic.

There is a still of Dr. Bek in a simple white doctor’s coat. Without the silver bulk of his suit, he looks frail and old. His eyes are different than I remember. They are a darker shade of blue, impenetrable as lake water.

A camera moves across the exterior of the Hospital. It looks just as it did when I arrived and just as it did when I left — tall, fortresslike, surrounded by the plains, the land white with snow. I try to imagine the vast emptiness inside. The silent halls. The bare mattresses. The dead TV in the Common Room. The microwaves in the Dining Hall. The hole in the twins’ room that leads to nowhere.

If I had stayed, they would be talking about my own death, which would have been anonymous, a small shift in the total. The difference between eighty and eighty-one.

I drop the coffees. Brown liquid sloshes across the gas station floor. The cashier stands up from his stool and shouts.

I bolt outside and behind the gas station, into the stench of Dumpster garbage. I lean against a concrete wall and I can almost feel Louis coming up behind me, his hand on my spine, but then the ghost of his touch disappears and I am alone.

I close my eyes. I can hear Marcus calling my name.

I get sick behind the gas station. I am sick of the road. I am sick of TVs, of the news they keep bringing. I bend over and my body heaves and this time I know it’s not from the child.

* * *

At night, we pass through Montgomery and Columbia, edge out of Alabama and South Carolina and into Georgia. While the rest of the bus drifts, I creep to the front, where a sleeping man has left a backpack by his feet. I unzip, reach inside, find a wallet. I take all the cash, moving once again inside a blaze of want. We will need money to get all the way to Florida. We will need money to find my mother. These are the facts. I tuck the bills into my back pocket and return the wallet to where it came from.

At first light, the man is still asleep and I’m counting the bills in the back of the bus. I’m expecting to see tens and twenties, but these bills are hundreds, crisp and clean, the cleanest bills I’ve ever seen. I count and recount, disbelieving. The sleeping man had two thousand dollars in his wallet.

I wake Marcus up. I watch him come to life behind the mask. Two thousand dollars is enough to cause a problem. There will be consequences once the man realizes his money is gone. He will come around to all the passengers. He will take his case to the driver. He will demand to know.

When the bus docks at a rest stop in Macon, we get off. Down here the air is wet and warm. I smell gasoline. The parking lot is filled with semi trucks. The drivers are standings outside, leaning against cabs, chewing toothpicks, the brims of their baseball caps pulled low. As we pass, they turn to stare at Marcus in his mask.

We walk up to a driver in a red baseball cap and a T-shirt that says PROUD TRUCKA. His jeans are too tight around the crotch. I look at the back of his semi and wonder where he’s headed, what he might be hauling. He watches us watch him and spits a white glob on the asphalt.

“You want some company out there?” I ask.

The man stands back and looks us over.

“What’s with that mask?” he asks.

“Childhood,” we say.

“Rabbits stink,” the man says. “Rabbits can be scared to death.”

He rubs his hands together and spits again. I hear honking, the rumble of engines, as some trucks begin to pull out of the lot, back onto the open road. He jingles his keys in his hands. He tells us to get inside.

“Florida!” the man says when we tell him where we’re going. Marcus is up front, rubbing one of his rabbit ears. I’m in the back, trying not to feel sick. I spread out my map of highways and follow the lines that lead south. If I puke on this man’s floor mats, I know we’ll be out of here.

“Here’s what I know about Florida,” he tells us.

His mother grew up in Nassau, the biggest city in the Bahamas. Years ago, when she was dying, she told her children that she wanted her ashes scattered in the water surrounding the island. This man and his sister drove from South Carolina to Miami with an urn strapped down in the backseat. In Florida, they planned to rent a boat, but private charters were too expensive, so instead one night they got on a party boat called Bottoms Up , bound for Nassau.

“You should have seen it,” the man says in a sleepy drawl. “People were taking Jell-O shots and dancing and glow-in-the-dark hula hooping and screaming ‘Eat my dick!’ whenever we passed another boat. And then there was my sister and me, stone-cold sober, holding this urn filled with our mother’s ashes.”

When the island was in sight, they opened the urn and let her go. A drunk bumped into them while this was going on and they dropped the urn in the ocean, which wasn’t part of the plan, but that was okay, they decided in the end. Let it go. Let it all go.