There’s a section of New York State, on the eastern border of Lake Ontario, where the town names make you feel like you’ve gone around the world.
I read the names out loud to my two-year-old daughter—Mexico, Syracuse, Rome, Poland—as I watch the snow swirl around the dark streets outside the bus windows. We are traveling from Gouverneur, New York to Everett, Massachusetts. It is my daughter’s first Greyhound bus ride, and it is my first time returning home after running away from my abusive ex-husband.
Jen, her round toddler’s cheeks pressed to the cold bus window, shows no signs of sleeping, but she’s quiet, and that’s what I need most. She is at the age where everything is “Why, Mommy?” or “What’s that?” and as much as I love teaching her new words, I can’t think straight. Thankfully, the kaleidoscope of swirling snow and the occasional signs in the towns we pass through keep her occupied. Still, she’s awake. Each time the bus stops, she asks who is getting on, as though I have all the answers. Her large brown eyes—my ex-husband’s eyes—are alive, quizzical. Though she usually falls asleep whenever a vehicle starts moving, she’d decided, in her sensible two-and-a-half-year-old reasoning, that this trip is different. For this one, she’ll pay attention.
Perhaps she’s sensed my fear of returning to Boston. Maybe she knows somehow that I lied to her when I told her that her father was gone, that she’d never see him again. Probably because I knew that was untrue myself. And she must know that I’m uncomfortable about the lie. Eventually, she settles down, curled in a maroon-snowsuit-and-work-boots ball, able to sleep anywhere at any time. I envy her. No sleep for me tonight.
The slushing sounds of the bus moving down snow-covered secondary roads lulls me. I sink into the rhythm of the bus, sensing the subtle shift of gears when it nears a station. The stops are about a half hour or so apart, just enough time for me to get comfortable before I have to wake up again. The garish lights of the Greyhound offices we pass destroy the dark safety and comfort that the tall, cushioned seats provide.
*
We stop in Mexico, and I have the strange sensation I am on one of those Twilight Zone buses that never reaches its destination but instead keeps on swallowing up and spitting out people with psychological problems. I imagine the doctor who had put me into the hospital a year ago, see him turn to me and say, “We should have kept you. Look at what you’re doing to your mother, out traveling these unsafe highways with a baby and one bag of clothes. You lied to me when you said you’d be all right. I know about those nights in the cabin when you smoke too much grass and forget to close the flue on the chimney stove at night. I know you shouldn’t be taking care of a little one like that.”
In my mind’s eye, the doctor nods at Jen then signs some papers to take her away from me, to give her to her father, the man I told her was dead, the man I said would never bother us again.
*
In Rome, a family of four clambers on. The wife wears a hooded parka and carries a toddler on her hip. The husband, tall and slim, the sleeves of his jacket too short for him, has no hat or gloves. He holds a boy’s hand. The kid, who looks like he is nine or ten, pulls his hand out of his father’s, then shoots him an angry look when his father grabs him by the elbow and shoves him into a seat.
I listen to them for a few moments, watch them shrugging off jackets, getting settled, hissing at each other to pass this or that. Then everything is quiet again. No one speaks or moves about, and it dawns on me that it is after midnight.
*
We pass through Poland and I wonder if I’ll ever see this city again. Will I ever see the real Poland? I’m not sure I want to. Paris, maybe. London. Sweden, where my grandmother grew up. But Poland? I imagine gray concentration camps, then Jen snuffles and wipes a hand across her nose, stretches her legs out. I pull them onto my lap and look down at her peaceful, sleeping face.
My mother expects us to arrive by 7 a.m. We would have been there sooner if I’d driven, but I knew about the storm coming in and had made the mistake of saying something to Ma about it, even though I know better. She worries; I am twenty-two and transporting her only grandchild. Ma immediately insisted I get a bus ticket. No matter it would take six more hours than driving. No matter the route wasn’t direct, and I’d have to ride on a bus all night with a two-year-old. No matter I had great snow tires, and I was used to driving on dirt roads where it was never plowed. A bus was safer.
We talked a lot, my mother and I, about the wisdom of my coming back. She wanted to see me and Jen, but what if “he” showed up? She couldn’t even say my ex-husband’s name anymore; she had never liked him and had even told my father to offer me a trip to Europe instead of the wedding I wanted. A trip to Europe was an enticing bribe, but I didn’t take the bait. I often wish I had made a different choice, but if I had, I wouldn’t have a daughter asleep beside me.
*
The closer we come to Schenectady, the heavier the snow and the brighter the towns. Gone are the romantic, other-country names given to miniscule Upstate New York hamlets. Gone is the sense of peace I’d cultivated, the vision of traveling all over the world without ever leaving the Northeast United States.
The bus begins to take on a slightly repugnant odor, like wet dogs and wet wool mixed together. The desolate streets, powdered with a cleansing first snow, appear to be in disguise, and the sense that these streets are more populated during the daytime, more likely to unload their crime onto the bus, begins to creep under my skin. I nudge Jen awake, reassuring her we are getting close to our halfway point, the station where we’ll spend four hours waiting for the next direct Greyhound to Nana and Grampie’s house. She looks at me blearily for a moment, as if she doesn’t recognize me, then settles her head on my shoulder and promptly falls back to sleep.
We pass a bank with a large clock tower covered by a thin layer of snow, but I can see the numbers: 3:24. The last time I’d been up this late was a year ago when my best friend, Pati, and I had gone to a nightclub in Boston’s Kenmore Square. Less than ten minutes after we got to the club, my ex showed up; we tried to ignore him, but when Pati’s ex, Sarge, showed up an hour later there was no ignoring him. We spent the night trying to dodge both of them, but finally gave in and let Sarge take a cab with us. And by 3:30 that morning, the cabdriver and I were struggling to unhook Sarge’s fingers from their death grasp around Pati’s throat.
I went back to Pati’s second-floor walkup in the Charlestown Projects with her, and we entertained questions from the police until well after 5 a.m.. The next day, I dealt with my parents, who’d been babysitting, and argued with my ex all day on the phone. He showed up that night, broke my kitchen window, and knocked a glass jar of grape jelly onto my white linoleum floor. I still hadn’t been able to remove the stain when he came back four months later with a different mission: to kill the man who had taken his place.
*
The lights from tractor trailer trucks at the next bus stop remind me I haven’t called my boyfriend, Artie, to let him know what time I’m coming in. When I first left Everett, he’d told me he never wanted to see me again. After all, it was my fault he was in the hospital with a busted nose, courtesy of my ex. Artie had done nothing to deserve it except to love me, and I wanted that love to continue—but I couldn’t blame him for being afraid of the crazy man to whom I’d been married for two years, three months, and thirteen days. My ex and I had been together long enough for me to get pregnant and have his child. Jen was six weeks old when I left him with only the clothes on my back and her diaper bag.
*
The bus stops more frequently now. Taking out my wallet, I check my money and wonder whether Artie will take a collect call from me. Though he calls me every Monday night, I know his family still hates the thought of him being with a single mother. As I count out some change so I can make a quick call, I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t been forced to flee that hot August day. If I had moved to Washington, D.C. with the legal firm I’d been working for, what would I be doing this evening? Would I have a nice townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia? Would I be dating the young lawyer who’d talked to me as we waited in line to get our food that evening at the trial lawyers’ conference?
I had been so pleased with myself that summer. I graduated with honors from Bunker Hill Community College, had finally gotten out from under my ex-husband’s “spell,” as Ma called it, and found myself a job with the Association of Trial Lawyers of America in Harvard Square. I saw a future with them as an editorial assistant. I was on my way. Then Artie came along, and with him came all the complications of being in love.
Even though my ex had his own live-in lover, he paid close attention to what was going on in my life. Phone calls in the middle of the night. Visits to my office. Arguments in the middle of Radcliffe Yard. He wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t. But I wanted to move on. Had to move on. I’d had enough of the abuse.
Then I was invited to the conference, and my boss asked me about following the company to Washington, D.C.. Artie and I had to re-evaluate our relationship; he urged me to go, and I sensed a shift in my life. And my ex started becoming more persistent. He called my house the night I was at the conference, but it wasn’t Artie who answered the phone. It was my brother. But my ex didn’t believe it and decided he’d had enough.
When he walked into my tiny yard, he found the snow shovel I kept beside the back door, and as soon as Artie opened the door, my ex struck him repeatedly. Hit him and slammed him in the stomach with the butt of the shovel. Smashed the flat blade against Artie’s face. Broke his nose and cracked several teeth.
The conference dinner was almost over when I called home to check on Jen. Artie told me, rather calmly, he was headed for the hospital, that my crazy ex had visited, and that the cops were on their way. It wasn’t the first time cops had visited my house, but it would be the last.
I can still remember the sound of the music from the conference fading as I slipped out a side door and the echo of my clicking heels as I walked down an alleyway to my car. It took me exactly twenty-two minutes to drive from downtown Boston to my house on Main Street in Everett. I went inside, spoke briefly to my brother and father, found out my sister had already been there to scoop Jen up and spirit her to my mother’s. Artie’s brother had come to take him to the hospital. My father and brother were wishing my ex would come back so they could do to him what he’d done to Artie.
Without a word, I grabbed the bat I kept on the cellar stairs and got back into my car. I don’t think I blinked until I reached my destination: my ex’s apartment. It didn’t dawn on me that putting a baseball bat through his glass door would make a lot of noise, but no one bothered me. A scant five minutes later, when I realized I was finished, I took a breath and looked around. I’d demolished the downstairs rooms, had put my bat through his stereo system, and cracked the television screen. A calm enveloped me like a strangely persuasive drug. I glanced toward the stairs, then went up, urged on by some unknown force to see the bedroom where he slept with the woman who believed him when he said he had never abused me.
Sometimes, when I think about it, I don’t believe I ever mounted those stairs, that I ever put the baseball bat through the mirror above her dresser, that I ever tore all the phones out of the walls, that I left the door open behind me. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t the violent one. He was. Maybe I believe this because my ex never blamed me for what happened that night in his apartment. He always thought it was one of his drug deals gone bad, someone who had come back to even the score. A guy. It was almost as though God gave me the right to express my anger, to destroy something without hurting anyone—as my ex had hurt me. Not a word was ever said. No cops came to my house to ask questions. My ex never even mentioned the destruction of his house and all his precious things.
Maybe I imagined it all. Or maybe he had far worse enemies he could blame. Maybe he didn’t think I had it in me.
But I did.
*
Jen stirs and tightens her grip around my neck, then yawns. A whiff of sleepy baby breath hits me in the face, and I bend down to give her warm cheek a kiss. Passengers move about, getting suitcases out of the racks above their heads, lights flicker on, people start talking.
Outside the snow has thickened. The windows of the Greyhound station are trimmed with brilliant lines of ice, as if someone has created a Christmas design using a can of fake snow. People head into the station, skittering across the icy walkway and holding their scarves over their mouths. They shake their heads and slam their boots when they get inside.
I zip up Jen’s jacket and push her chubby hands into the mittens I made last week while sitting in front of the television. The woman up the road gave me a skein of yarn, a small gift but a godsend. Without it, my daughter would have had nothing to warm her hands. How could I have known the snow would come early this year?
The bus slowly empties. Jen and I have been sitting in one of the last rows, so by the time we get off, the bus driver is standing, tapping his foot, and I am reminded of my father who’d been a bus driver throughout my teenage years. I smile as I slide by, and the driver says, “Lousy night to be traveling with a little one. You must really need to go someplace bad.”
Nodding, I look into his eyes, see myself and my father, and say, “Home.”
______
Photo credit: Sidereal / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND