Cynthia Yachtman, Hummingbird
Minor in Car Nine
Wendy Palmer
The train is louder than I thought it would be and slower as we pull away from the station. I’m in the quiet car, according to the sign, next to a window that doesn’t open, with nobody sitting beside me.
It was only a thought at first. Same thought I have every time I pass the station on my way home from school. Hop a freight, my stuff in a bandana tied to a stick. Next train to Yonder, like the song at Mission Camp. Scramble into an open car and hide in a corner till the whistle blows and we’re going too fast to jump off. Same thought every day, though I usually forget the whole thing by the end of the block.
Today a flower guy was setting up by the station steps, a folding chair and buckets of daffodils closed so tight you’d never know they were yellow inside. It was cold and windy. His face was red and so was his hat, flaps down, buckled under his chin.
“Hey kid,” he called to me. “Want to go somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Somewhere better than here.” He motioned me closer. “Look at this.”
Ordinarily I would walk away from a guy who wanted to show me something.
He waved a thin strip of paper at me. “Ticket,” he said, “for the Silver Star. Take you as far south as you want to go. Won’t get you back, but that’s neither here nor there. Want it?”
It looked like he was about to let it go in the wind, so I grabbed it. Then he pulled a shiny coin from his pocket.
“Silver dollar,” he said. “For luck. Track’ll take you where you need to go better than a ball of string, but a little luck never hurt.”
I didn’t get that, but I know money when I see it, and I knew anywhere was better than here. I was up the steps and inside the station like I’d been blown there.
A huge cave, windows to the ceiling, lights hanging down. Packed with people dragging suitcases every which way. A blur. Guitar music from one corner. Garbled announcements. No end to the noise or distance anywhere I turned. Big signs flipped ever-changing lists of trains and times and track numbers. I finally found the Silver Star–Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Miami, Florida, stopping in Savannah, Georgia–leaving in ten minutes on Track Six.
“Try Savannah,” the flower guy had called after me, “haunted houses. Moss hanging off the trees.”
Aunt Pauline, I said to myself, though the flower guy couldn’t possibly know that.
I found Track Six just in time. Now here I am with my backpack, a silver dollar and two weeks’ milk money I never passed in. The whistle blowing like I always imagined. All happening so fast it seems unreal. A movie about a scared kid on a train, running away from home. Except it’s me. And I don’t feel scared. I’m actually proud of myself to be in a passenger car, in a big seat by a window. Not a cold, dark corner of some freight car with who knows what, or who, in another cold, dark corner.
We pass long, low office buildings, the sun flashing window to window. A housing project like a giant beehive. Boarded up warehouses, messy factories, a steaming power plant. Ride alongside a marshy river, tires and trash in the grass. We speed up, and everything goes by faster. Hard to look at any one thing. Look too close and it’s blurry. Blink and it’s gone. You have to look into the distance where everything moves more slowly. Church steeples, smokestacks. Clouds.
The conductor comes from the back of the car to take tickets. I pull my cap down over my hair. He warns the two girls behind me to keep quiet. I saw them when I got on, younger than me and very quiet but must look like girls who could burst out giggling or yell to their mother, who is across the aisle reading. The conductor reminds them they’re in the quiet car. Any sound, even a peep, he says, and he’ll move them to what must be the noisy car, though I never saw that on a sign. I read every sign. Nobody watching out for me but me.
When he reaches my seat, he threatens to move me away from my mother, too, presuming she’s in the bathroom and will soon occupy the seat next to me. The conductor is a big man with a gray face, a dark blue uniform and dark blue hat too small for his head. I wonder how it stays on without an elastic strap. He will remove me from her, he says, and from this car without a second thought. I’m pretty sure a second thought will arrive as soon as he figures out I’m traveling alone, long since removed from my mother. I nod seriously, and he moves on through the car.
I adjust my backpack on the floor so both feet are touching it in case I fall asleep and somebody tries to take it. That’s what I do on the bus. I could have dumped it at the train station, nothing in it but books and homework. Undelivered notes from Sister Evelyn. No food. But it felt safer to bring it, if only to have something to carry.
I’m twelve, at least till the end of this trip. I’m tall; people think I’m older. I’ll turn teenager in Savannah, with or without Aunt Pauline. Till then I’ll keep a low profile. Five foster homes in eight months taught me that. They were talking about moving me again. Said I was unresponsive, kept saying I was in shock. Who wouldn’t be?
The quiet car feels empty, the seats so high and deep I can’t see anyone except the mother reading and somebody’s elbow on the arm rest three rows up. Nobody can see me.
Outside my window, bare trees go by like one of those little flip books, jerky and fake. Yellow and pink, forsythia and crab apple like outside the library. Graffiti in the underpass. Fading hearts and initials. How do they know a train’s not coming?
My stomach is growling. There’s a snack bar in Car Three. According to the menu in the seat pocket, my milk money won’t even buy a cheese and tomato sandwich. And I’d have to walk up six cars and back. Too high profile.
I’m used to being a little hungry. You get what’s on your plate and no more. Eight of us at the table in the last place. Money you get for taking in a foster kid won’t feed a bird they say, but they don’t do it for the money. They do it out of love for all God’s children. And with eight or nine of us, they can buy in bulk.
I never left a crumb on my plate. And I learned how to slip a couple slices of bread out of the super king-size loaves in the freezer when I was on dishes, hide them in the pages of a magazine under my bed until they thawed. Sometimes a slice picked up part of a picture but still tasted OK.
All of a sudden, like God changed the channel, it goes pitch black and loud. A big freight train, inches away, roaring north. Which is why the windows don’t open. The track would be littered with heads and hands. Now, just as suddenly, it’s bright again. The freight is gone and we’re passing a trailer park. Little yards divided by chain link. Sandboxes and plastic climbing toys, covered grills. It must be loud when a train goes by.
“Look!” says one of the girls behind me. “The Washington Monument!”
I recognize it from the picture in my history book. Tall and white. I’m farther from home than I’ve ever been. Eight states between Philadelphia and Savannah.
I hear the connecting door slide open and close my eyes, open my mouth a little, concentrate on looking deeply and quietly asleep, breathing evenly until I hear the door at the other end and Mr. Grumposaurus is gone. It feels good to have my eyes closed, sunk in the big seat. Wish I had a blanket. I force my eyes open. Trees are a pale, lacy green here. I play with my seat buttons, work the foot rest. Open the tray table and turn on the little light over my head. Check the kid’s activity book in the seat pocket. A story about trains, an already done maze and an abandoned crossword puzzle.
I wonder how long I should wait to eat. My milk money plus the silver dollar would buy me a sandwich, but I should hold out as long as I can. Arrival in Savannah is 4:29 in the morning, twelve and a half more hours. How they can be so exact? What if there’s a cow on the tracks somewhere? What if nobody gets on or off somewhere? Will I lose my luck if I spend the silver dollar?
A junkyard runs alongside us now, piles of smashed cars, wheels up, wheels down. Rusty and crumpled and colorful. A billboard with a man in a bow tie points at me as we pass. Get what’s coming to you! he says. Call 1-800-ALAWYER!
Here comes Mr. Grumpo again. I quickly slide a book from my backpack, and even though it’s science, which I hate, I pretend to read so intently, so studiously I shouldn’t be interrupted. He stops anyway.
“Are you alone?” he asks, sounding annoyed, as if it’s my fault I’m an orphan heading to live with a great-aunt I never met who doesn’t know I’m coming.
“Let’s see your ticket,” he says. I don’t have it, of course. He’s already stuck it in the slot over my seat. He shakes his head when he looks closely at it, as if it’s also my fault he didn’t notice earlier that he has a kid in the quiet car. “Where you getting off?” he says.
“Savannah.”
He punches my ticket. “Just my luck. Unaccompanied minor,” he says to himself but I hear him. Everyone can hear him, it’s the quiet car.
I never thought of myself as minor before. It was a spelling word. Less important. Minor league, minor key. Minor character in a play.
“You fourteen?” he asks. “Have to be fourteen to travel alone.”
I nod. If I have to be fourteen, I’m fourteen.
He moves on, still shaking his head.
We slow down at Fredericksburg, just an empty platform. No one’s waiting, so we speed up, go through a series of tunnels, dark then light then dark again, a quieter dark than the passing freight. I wonder if the dining car is open all night.
I wake up as we slow down and stop in the middle of a tunnel. I must have dozed off. The overhead lights flicker off and on, and all I see out the window is my own pale reflection. I’m not sure where I am for a minute.
“Accident,” I hear someone say.
“Cow maybe,” says another person.
“Suicide,” somebody whispers.
My nose burns like I’m going to cry. I want my mother, but it can’t show. It’s hard to breathe. The lights flicker and go out for good. People grumble. I wipe at the tears.
I first heard about suicide from Timmy O’Donnell. A mental guy escaped from the hospital, he said, and jumped in front of the commuter train at Waverly Station. You can see blood on the tracks. We all went to see, but it was hard to tell for sure. Might have been rust. My father didn’t jump in front of a train. He shot himself in the head after he shot my mother.
I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of my building, and two police cars. It was the beginning of seventh grade. Sister Evelyn didn’t even have my name right yet. My building has fifteen apartments. The man in 3B went out in a straitjacket twice. I’ve seen stretchers come downstairs with gasping people, even dead people, strapped to them. The cop wouldn’t let me in my own apartment but he couldn’t stop me seeing two covered stretchers come out.
Shock is what happens when you stick your finger in a socket, set your hair on end, then you go back to what you were before. This is different. You can never again be who you were when you had parents, good or bad, good and bad.
The train’s so quiet I can hear my heartbeat. My eyes won’t adjust. Nobody moves. The girls behind me whisper softly. A scary little breeze in the trees, coming to get you, no place to hide. I hate the dark. My mother used to let me sleep with the light on. I barely remember her face, just her long brown braid and the Bruins T-shirt that smelled like her. I slept in it, hid it in a closet until Mrs. Nosy Bitch found it and washed it. After that it didn’t smell like her anymore. So dark. Is this what it’s like to die? Will I feel my soul rise through the ceiling of the train?
Then the lights pop on, and with a squealing grinding noise, we start to move again. I can’t see why we stopped. Nothing out there but a deer by the woods, a hawk circling. Cows with white birds on their backs. Thick bushes with purple flowers. Then fields. Horses by a fence. A tractor, a house, a boy on a tricycle, more fields. A tiny red pickup races the train in a cloud of dust. A swamp. Dead trees draped with vines like headless zombies, big, dark birds slouched on their shoulders. The water is thick and green. I can only imagine the alligators. I hope Aunt Pauline doesn’t live near a swamp. Hope she’s not an uppity old bitch like my father said when she wouldn’t lend him money.
All I know is she’s a Southern lady who used to work at some big magazine. My grandmother was her sister. They were little together. I don’t have a sister or a brother, but I’ve seen them on TV. They get on each other’s nerves, but family always comes before friends. Aunt Pauline and I are family, have the same blood in our veins.
The sky turns purple then dark. Too dark to see anything outside and harder to stay awake. It will still be dark when we arrive. I sit half-on, half-off my science book to stay uncomfortable as we speed through the blackness. Is anybody out there to see our lit-up faces? I won’t spend the silver dollar until Aunt Pauline says for sure she’ll take me and won’t blame me for what my father did. I’ll convince her I don’t take up much space. Learned that in the first foster home. People are more apt to leave you alone if you only take up a tiny space. Five homes in eight months and the only thing I ever lost was the smell of that T-shirt.
I know the address: 35 West Gaston St., Savannah, Georgia. I saw the form they sent. I can’t knock on her door at 4:30 in the morning. I’ll have to find a place to wait. I can take care of myself, doing that long before last September. Just don’t think about what happened, everyone said. As if I was thinking about it on purpose. It runs in my head like a silent movie I can’t stop.
April and still no “permanent arrangement” for me. Months before they even tracked down Aunt Pauline to ask her to be my guardian. She never answered. Maybe she was on vacation, maybe she was sick. Or just threw it out because everybody north of Virginia is a no-account heathen.
Hopefully she’ll believe me when I say her niece is my mother. She’s probably never seen a picture of me. I have my library card but it doesn’t have a picture. She never got married, never had children. What if she hates children? Is twelve a child? I’ll have to convince her I’m not a no-account heathen. I’ll go to church with her. Learn the songs. I’m strong, neat, know how to make my bed and clear the table. A blood relative is my best bet.
They’ve probably missed me by now. They’ll have to report it but nothing will happen till tomorrow. Nobody does much about runaways.
We stop for fifteen minutes at Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Gateway to Dixie. Two more states. Six more hours. Hardly any more stops, according to the schedule, and some just a signpost.
I must have dozed off again. We’re approaching a little town. Streetlights along a short main street. A neon sign says Gas and Groceries. Another says Terminal Drugs. An old lady with flowers on her hat waits on the platform. A younger lady with a cane waits too. I wonder if they’re together. They aren’t talking. When the train pulls away, they’re gone, so I guess they got on. Mr. Grumplestiltskin will be busy taking their tickets, a good time to check out the bathroom at the back of the car.
It’s shiny like the inside of a space ship with a little window. Only room for one person. Water comes out of a little faucet, soap from a little spout. I don’t really have to go, which is lucky, since I can’t see how you flush. I get back to my seat as fast as I can. No sign of Mr. G.
Due to lack of refrigeration, says the loudspeaker, the dining car will remain closed until further notice. Grumpo comes through with a cart of bottled water. He gives me one and keeps going without a word. It tastes better than any water I ever drank.
“Want a sandwich?”
One the girls behind me hangs over the top of my seat. She has short black hair and glasses, and dangles a foil-wrapped square. “Just PB and J,” she says. “We have tons.”
I have no idea how she knows I have no food, but I’m not going to turn it down.
“Thanks,” I say as she disappears back into her seat.
I unwrap it slowly, careful not to tear the foil. It’s beautiful. Thick bread, chunky peanut butter, deep red raspberry jam. Chewy and delicious. Half is enough to get me hours south. I re-wrap the other half and tuck it in my backpack.
Always have an escape route, my father used to say on his way out the back door with somebody pounding on the front. Always have a plan B. We wouldn’t see him for weeks. My escape route is Philadelphia to Savannah, but what’s my plan B?
I wake up again when Grumpo comes through from the front. I’ve lost two hours and got a crick in my neck. He’s telling the girls and their mother to get ready to get off. Next stop Yemassee, ten minutes. I hear them gathering their things. I slouch lower, try to watch without being noticed, pretending to search in the seat pocket, half turned. He’s taking their tickets, putting them in his vest pocket. He follows them through the door at the front and doesn’t look back. The train barely stops, and I picture them leaping with their suitcases from the steps onto the platform. Now there’s no one behind me. No one near the back door.
We speed up leaving Yemassee, and as soon as I dare, I reach up and grab my ticket. Still time to come up with a plan B, but I need to keep my ticket. After all, it goes as far south as I want to go, the flower man said. All the way to Miami, Florida, if necessary.
If I get to live in Savannah, I’ll work harder at school, be one of the smart kids. Prove to Aunt Pauline I’m not a godless piece of trash like my father. My mother shouldn’t have told him she said that. She took a punch for Aunt Pauline. There should be a map in the Savannah station. I can walk to West Gaston Street. I can walk for miles. It will be warm. Flowers everywhere. Maybe get there in time for breakfast. Maybe she lives in a house. Maybe she has horses.
Even without a watch I know we’re close. We blow through Denmark, South Carolina. Next stop Savannah, Georgia, two hours and forty-eight minutes. My eyelids weigh a ton, but I don’t dare let them drop for even a couple seconds, which would feel like sinking into the softest, warmest bed.
The sound of the sliding door is like a thunder clap. I jerk awake. How long has it been? I blink my eyes hard to get alert before he reaches me. He tells someone a few rows up that Savannah is the next stop. Then he tells me the same thing, as if we’re in a crowded room and I’m deaf. “Savannah is your stop kid. Don’t get off until I come back to get your ticket, gotta hand you over to somebody. Pray to God somebody’s there this time of day.”
“Thank you,” I say for some unknown reason. As soon as he leaves, I go to wash my face, put away my cap and fix my hair. The exit door across from the little bathroom has two latches, one just above my head and a lower one waist high. According to the sign they don’t release until the train comes to a complete stop.
I put my ticket in the inside pocket of my jeans. Jacket on and zipped. Backpack zipped and on. Money counted an absurd number of times and safe in my deepest pocket. Every nerve, every cell in my body, ready to spring into action the instant our speed changes. Off and gone.
At last I feel the train slow just slightly, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the engineer was only starting to think about slowing down, and I’m so hyperalert I picked it up all the way back in Car Nine. I stare at the front door of the car.
If I see him, I’ll look him in the eye and run. I’ll have my ticket and he’ll never catch me.
The train is definitely slowing. I can see individual lights in a warehouse. I stand by the door, hand on the higher latch.
I see the other Savannah passenger, a guy in an army uniform, buckling his bag. Stretching, yawning. He’s not in a hurry and he’s facing front. I’m a statue behind him, my fingertips on the latch waiting for a slight click, a soft little thud. Like a safecracker in a bank.
Then the train stops and it happens. Click! I pull both handles at once and I’m out the door, down the steps, and on the platform. In front of me is a low metal fence, a gate to the station, and a sign that says Savannah. A few people waiting. It’s warm and sweet smelling. Quiet and soft, like it just stopped raining. I realize I’m standing under a floodlight and dash through the gate, turn, and walk quickly along the fence until I’m past the caboose and out of the light, then duck down behind some bushes. Wait for the train to leave.
I see him through the branches. He looks out the door, comes down the steps, looks carefully in both directions, twice, then goes back up the steps, leans out and waves his arm and the train begins to move. My heart is pounding, forehead prickly. I wait until the taillights of the Silver Star turn to tiny dots before I stand up and breathe. Grumposaurus on his way to Jesup, Jacksonville, Ocala, Miami.
The train depot is modern, low and flat like a gas station, empty field on one side, empty brick building on the other. Still dark. A clock over the tracks says 4:35. The station is deserted. Bright and glassy, red vending machines, plastic chairs. Overflowing wastebaskets and a sign that says Watch your Bags! with a big hand reaching toward a suitcase. I realize the lumpy thing in the corner is a person sleeping on the floor. Hopefully not dead. I check my money: $6.50 not counting the silver dollar, which I knew.
Outside, an empty road disappears into the dark. A phone on a post. Just lift it up and you’re connected to somebody at a cab desk somewhere.
“Where to?” they say when I pick it up.
“How much to Gaston St?”
“East or west?
“West.”
“Where you calling from?”
“The train station.”
“$9.50”
I knew that didn’t include a tip.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
“Ten minutes,” he says.
The cab arrives in five, yellow with a light on top. “You alone, kid?” the driver asks.
I’m ready for that. “Yes. I’m going to my grandmother’s house, 35 West Gaston Street.”
“Got the fare?”
“My grandmother will pay when I get there. She’s waiting for me.”
I said grandmother because it came out easier than great-aunt, and sounded like I knew her better, and like she would pay for me no question and tip well for getting me there safely. He just shrugs and opens the back door.
I keep my backpack on and sit tall in the back seat, watching through the windshield and side to side, even more alert than I was on the train. The cab smells like cigarettes. I roll down my window to feel the warm air. The driver is bald and has pink splotches on his skull, white hair on his hands.
“Sure she’ll be up?” he says, eying me in the rearview mirror. “Not even five.”
“She gets up to walk her dog,” I say. “And she’s expecting me. Mrs. Pauline Mercer.” I’d seen Mercer Street and Mercer Medical School, an important sounding name. Not about to spill her real name. So easy to lie, must get that from my father.
“Sure thing,” he says.
“East Gaston,” he announces a few minutes later. Liquor stores, a 7-Eleven, Burger King, all closed this early. Not many trees. No people. “Low end, if you catch my drift. Not your end. You’re in the middle of the historic district.”
The closer we get to the better part of town, the friendlier he gets. “Little sightseeing trolley goes right down your street, learn all the history of the city.”
I watch the houses, odd numbers on my side, one-eighty-three, one-eleven. Big houses, some very grand, trees hanging over the street. Moss. Old-fashioned streetlights, better cars. A nice neighborhood, though I know from Philadelphia that big houses can have small apartments in them and I see more than one doorbell on some.
Out the other window is a park.
“Your granny lives right on the park,” says the driver, slowing down. “Number thirty-five, right?”
We’re in front of forty-three and closing in. I have a hand on the door handle.
“Sorry!” I say. “Twenty-five! Her handwriting’s hard to read.”
“No problem,” he says cheerfully.
He drives around the park, slows, stops in front of twenty, backs up to twenty-seven. There is no twenty-five. He drives forward and back again. Then he stops.
“So kid . . .”
Before he can even turn around, I open the back door, jump out and tear across the street into the park.
“Hey!” I hear him yell. I keep running, zig-zagging between trees, duck under some branches, freeze and listen, hear the cab idling, see the lights move slowly away, then back, then away, fast and angry.
I tiptoe through the park until I’m close to number thirty-five. Tall and narrow, two floors. One doorbell. Pink with a fancy black gate and flowers under every window. A light on upstairs.
I’ll stay in shadow until the sun’s up and people start to come out of their houses. I’ll neaten my hair, walk across and ring the bell. A short polite ring. I’ll probably have to tell her the whole story if she never got the letter from DCS. And I’ve still got $6.50, a silver dollar and my plan B ticket in my pocket, half a sandwich in my bag. She might find it heartwarming I came all this way alone. She might call the police, try to send me back.
I close my eyes, feel the warm air, and try to imagine Aunt Pauline opening the door, gasping with surprise at the sight of me on her doorstep, wrapping her arms around me and crying for joy. Probably an unrealistic vision.
I think if she lets me I’ll change my name. Nothing like Debby, Judy, Kathy. Names that end in y sound so babyish. I knew a girl named Claire. You can picture a grown-up with that name. You can’t shorten it. I’ll be Claire. It won’t matter, since I’ll probably never see the real Claire again. Maybe I’ll have my own room.
I step gently out from behind the trees onto the sunny sidewalk and stop. You came all this way, I tell myself. I tiptoe across the quiet road, slip through the gate like a ghost, and climb the five steps to the shiny black door.
I stare at it, willing it to open, terrified it might. Afraid to push the doorbell but more afraid of plan B. I close my eyes, hold my breath, and push the button quickly. Two notes sound. I hear footsteps and try not to cry.
Wendy Palmer
The train is louder than I thought it would be and slower as we pull away from the station. I’m in the quiet car, according to the sign, next to a window that doesn’t open, with nobody sitting beside me.
It was only a thought at first. Same thought I have every time I pass the station on my way home from school. Hop a freight, my stuff in a bandana tied to a stick. Next train to Yonder, like the song at Mission Camp. Scramble into an open car and hide in a corner till the whistle blows and we’re going too fast to jump off. Same thought every day, though I usually forget the whole thing by the end of the block.
Today a flower guy was setting up by the station steps, a folding chair and buckets of daffodils closed so tight you’d never know they were yellow inside. It was cold and windy. His face was red and so was his hat, flaps down, buckled under his chin.
“Hey kid,” he called to me. “Want to go somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Somewhere better than here.” He motioned me closer. “Look at this.”
Ordinarily I would walk away from a guy who wanted to show me something.
He waved a thin strip of paper at me. “Ticket,” he said, “for the Silver Star. Take you as far south as you want to go. Won’t get you back, but that’s neither here nor there. Want it?”
It looked like he was about to let it go in the wind, so I grabbed it. Then he pulled a shiny coin from his pocket.
“Silver dollar,” he said. “For luck. Track’ll take you where you need to go better than a ball of string, but a little luck never hurt.”
I didn’t get that, but I know money when I see it, and I knew anywhere was better than here. I was up the steps and inside the station like I’d been blown there.
A huge cave, windows to the ceiling, lights hanging down. Packed with people dragging suitcases every which way. A blur. Guitar music from one corner. Garbled announcements. No end to the noise or distance anywhere I turned. Big signs flipped ever-changing lists of trains and times and track numbers. I finally found the Silver Star–Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Miami, Florida, stopping in Savannah, Georgia–leaving in ten minutes on Track Six.
“Try Savannah,” the flower guy had called after me, “haunted houses. Moss hanging off the trees.”
Aunt Pauline, I said to myself, though the flower guy couldn’t possibly know that.
I found Track Six just in time. Now here I am with my backpack, a silver dollar and two weeks’ milk money I never passed in. The whistle blowing like I always imagined. All happening so fast it seems unreal. A movie about a scared kid on a train, running away from home. Except it’s me. And I don’t feel scared. I’m actually proud of myself to be in a passenger car, in a big seat by a window. Not a cold, dark corner of some freight car with who knows what, or who, in another cold, dark corner.
We pass long, low office buildings, the sun flashing window to window. A housing project like a giant beehive. Boarded up warehouses, messy factories, a steaming power plant. Ride alongside a marshy river, tires and trash in the grass. We speed up, and everything goes by faster. Hard to look at any one thing. Look too close and it’s blurry. Blink and it’s gone. You have to look into the distance where everything moves more slowly. Church steeples, smokestacks. Clouds.
The conductor comes from the back of the car to take tickets. I pull my cap down over my hair. He warns the two girls behind me to keep quiet. I saw them when I got on, younger than me and very quiet but must look like girls who could burst out giggling or yell to their mother, who is across the aisle reading. The conductor reminds them they’re in the quiet car. Any sound, even a peep, he says, and he’ll move them to what must be the noisy car, though I never saw that on a sign. I read every sign. Nobody watching out for me but me.
When he reaches my seat, he threatens to move me away from my mother, too, presuming she’s in the bathroom and will soon occupy the seat next to me. The conductor is a big man with a gray face, a dark blue uniform and dark blue hat too small for his head. I wonder how it stays on without an elastic strap. He will remove me from her, he says, and from this car without a second thought. I’m pretty sure a second thought will arrive as soon as he figures out I’m traveling alone, long since removed from my mother. I nod seriously, and he moves on through the car.
I adjust my backpack on the floor so both feet are touching it in case I fall asleep and somebody tries to take it. That’s what I do on the bus. I could have dumped it at the train station, nothing in it but books and homework. Undelivered notes from Sister Evelyn. No food. But it felt safer to bring it, if only to have something to carry.
I’m twelve, at least till the end of this trip. I’m tall; people think I’m older. I’ll turn teenager in Savannah, with or without Aunt Pauline. Till then I’ll keep a low profile. Five foster homes in eight months taught me that. They were talking about moving me again. Said I was unresponsive, kept saying I was in shock. Who wouldn’t be?
The quiet car feels empty, the seats so high and deep I can’t see anyone except the mother reading and somebody’s elbow on the arm rest three rows up. Nobody can see me.
Outside my window, bare trees go by like one of those little flip books, jerky and fake. Yellow and pink, forsythia and crab apple like outside the library. Graffiti in the underpass. Fading hearts and initials. How do they know a train’s not coming?
My stomach is growling. There’s a snack bar in Car Three. According to the menu in the seat pocket, my milk money won’t even buy a cheese and tomato sandwich. And I’d have to walk up six cars and back. Too high profile.
I’m used to being a little hungry. You get what’s on your plate and no more. Eight of us at the table in the last place. Money you get for taking in a foster kid won’t feed a bird they say, but they don’t do it for the money. They do it out of love for all God’s children. And with eight or nine of us, they can buy in bulk.
I never left a crumb on my plate. And I learned how to slip a couple slices of bread out of the super king-size loaves in the freezer when I was on dishes, hide them in the pages of a magazine under my bed until they thawed. Sometimes a slice picked up part of a picture but still tasted OK.
All of a sudden, like God changed the channel, it goes pitch black and loud. A big freight train, inches away, roaring north. Which is why the windows don’t open. The track would be littered with heads and hands. Now, just as suddenly, it’s bright again. The freight is gone and we’re passing a trailer park. Little yards divided by chain link. Sandboxes and plastic climbing toys, covered grills. It must be loud when a train goes by.
“Look!” says one of the girls behind me. “The Washington Monument!”
I recognize it from the picture in my history book. Tall and white. I’m farther from home than I’ve ever been. Eight states between Philadelphia and Savannah.
I hear the connecting door slide open and close my eyes, open my mouth a little, concentrate on looking deeply and quietly asleep, breathing evenly until I hear the door at the other end and Mr. Grumposaurus is gone. It feels good to have my eyes closed, sunk in the big seat. Wish I had a blanket. I force my eyes open. Trees are a pale, lacy green here. I play with my seat buttons, work the foot rest. Open the tray table and turn on the little light over my head. Check the kid’s activity book in the seat pocket. A story about trains, an already done maze and an abandoned crossword puzzle.
I wonder how long I should wait to eat. My milk money plus the silver dollar would buy me a sandwich, but I should hold out as long as I can. Arrival in Savannah is 4:29 in the morning, twelve and a half more hours. How they can be so exact? What if there’s a cow on the tracks somewhere? What if nobody gets on or off somewhere? Will I lose my luck if I spend the silver dollar?
A junkyard runs alongside us now, piles of smashed cars, wheels up, wheels down. Rusty and crumpled and colorful. A billboard with a man in a bow tie points at me as we pass. Get what’s coming to you! he says. Call 1-800-ALAWYER!
Here comes Mr. Grumpo again. I quickly slide a book from my backpack, and even though it’s science, which I hate, I pretend to read so intently, so studiously I shouldn’t be interrupted. He stops anyway.
“Are you alone?” he asks, sounding annoyed, as if it’s my fault I’m an orphan heading to live with a great-aunt I never met who doesn’t know I’m coming.
“Let’s see your ticket,” he says. I don’t have it, of course. He’s already stuck it in the slot over my seat. He shakes his head when he looks closely at it, as if it’s also my fault he didn’t notice earlier that he has a kid in the quiet car. “Where you getting off?” he says.
“Savannah.”
He punches my ticket. “Just my luck. Unaccompanied minor,” he says to himself but I hear him. Everyone can hear him, it’s the quiet car.
I never thought of myself as minor before. It was a spelling word. Less important. Minor league, minor key. Minor character in a play.
“You fourteen?” he asks. “Have to be fourteen to travel alone.”
I nod. If I have to be fourteen, I’m fourteen.
He moves on, still shaking his head.
We slow down at Fredericksburg, just an empty platform. No one’s waiting, so we speed up, go through a series of tunnels, dark then light then dark again, a quieter dark than the passing freight. I wonder if the dining car is open all night.
I wake up as we slow down and stop in the middle of a tunnel. I must have dozed off. The overhead lights flicker off and on, and all I see out the window is my own pale reflection. I’m not sure where I am for a minute.
“Accident,” I hear someone say.
“Cow maybe,” says another person.
“Suicide,” somebody whispers.
My nose burns like I’m going to cry. I want my mother, but it can’t show. It’s hard to breathe. The lights flicker and go out for good. People grumble. I wipe at the tears.
I first heard about suicide from Timmy O’Donnell. A mental guy escaped from the hospital, he said, and jumped in front of the commuter train at Waverly Station. You can see blood on the tracks. We all went to see, but it was hard to tell for sure. Might have been rust. My father didn’t jump in front of a train. He shot himself in the head after he shot my mother.
I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of my building, and two police cars. It was the beginning of seventh grade. Sister Evelyn didn’t even have my name right yet. My building has fifteen apartments. The man in 3B went out in a straitjacket twice. I’ve seen stretchers come downstairs with gasping people, even dead people, strapped to them. The cop wouldn’t let me in my own apartment but he couldn’t stop me seeing two covered stretchers come out.
Shock is what happens when you stick your finger in a socket, set your hair on end, then you go back to what you were before. This is different. You can never again be who you were when you had parents, good or bad, good and bad.
The train’s so quiet I can hear my heartbeat. My eyes won’t adjust. Nobody moves. The girls behind me whisper softly. A scary little breeze in the trees, coming to get you, no place to hide. I hate the dark. My mother used to let me sleep with the light on. I barely remember her face, just her long brown braid and the Bruins T-shirt that smelled like her. I slept in it, hid it in a closet until Mrs. Nosy Bitch found it and washed it. After that it didn’t smell like her anymore. So dark. Is this what it’s like to die? Will I feel my soul rise through the ceiling of the train?
Then the lights pop on, and with a squealing grinding noise, we start to move again. I can’t see why we stopped. Nothing out there but a deer by the woods, a hawk circling. Cows with white birds on their backs. Thick bushes with purple flowers. Then fields. Horses by a fence. A tractor, a house, a boy on a tricycle, more fields. A tiny red pickup races the train in a cloud of dust. A swamp. Dead trees draped with vines like headless zombies, big, dark birds slouched on their shoulders. The water is thick and green. I can only imagine the alligators. I hope Aunt Pauline doesn’t live near a swamp. Hope she’s not an uppity old bitch like my father said when she wouldn’t lend him money.
All I know is she’s a Southern lady who used to work at some big magazine. My grandmother was her sister. They were little together. I don’t have a sister or a brother, but I’ve seen them on TV. They get on each other’s nerves, but family always comes before friends. Aunt Pauline and I are family, have the same blood in our veins.
The sky turns purple then dark. Too dark to see anything outside and harder to stay awake. It will still be dark when we arrive. I sit half-on, half-off my science book to stay uncomfortable as we speed through the blackness. Is anybody out there to see our lit-up faces? I won’t spend the silver dollar until Aunt Pauline says for sure she’ll take me and won’t blame me for what my father did. I’ll convince her I don’t take up much space. Learned that in the first foster home. People are more apt to leave you alone if you only take up a tiny space. Five homes in eight months and the only thing I ever lost was the smell of that T-shirt.
I know the address: 35 West Gaston St., Savannah, Georgia. I saw the form they sent. I can’t knock on her door at 4:30 in the morning. I’ll have to find a place to wait. I can take care of myself, doing that long before last September. Just don’t think about what happened, everyone said. As if I was thinking about it on purpose. It runs in my head like a silent movie I can’t stop.
April and still no “permanent arrangement” for me. Months before they even tracked down Aunt Pauline to ask her to be my guardian. She never answered. Maybe she was on vacation, maybe she was sick. Or just threw it out because everybody north of Virginia is a no-account heathen.
Hopefully she’ll believe me when I say her niece is my mother. She’s probably never seen a picture of me. I have my library card but it doesn’t have a picture. She never got married, never had children. What if she hates children? Is twelve a child? I’ll have to convince her I’m not a no-account heathen. I’ll go to church with her. Learn the songs. I’m strong, neat, know how to make my bed and clear the table. A blood relative is my best bet.
They’ve probably missed me by now. They’ll have to report it but nothing will happen till tomorrow. Nobody does much about runaways.
We stop for fifteen minutes at Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Gateway to Dixie. Two more states. Six more hours. Hardly any more stops, according to the schedule, and some just a signpost.
I must have dozed off again. We’re approaching a little town. Streetlights along a short main street. A neon sign says Gas and Groceries. Another says Terminal Drugs. An old lady with flowers on her hat waits on the platform. A younger lady with a cane waits too. I wonder if they’re together. They aren’t talking. When the train pulls away, they’re gone, so I guess they got on. Mr. Grumplestiltskin will be busy taking their tickets, a good time to check out the bathroom at the back of the car.
It’s shiny like the inside of a space ship with a little window. Only room for one person. Water comes out of a little faucet, soap from a little spout. I don’t really have to go, which is lucky, since I can’t see how you flush. I get back to my seat as fast as I can. No sign of Mr. G.
Due to lack of refrigeration, says the loudspeaker, the dining car will remain closed until further notice. Grumpo comes through with a cart of bottled water. He gives me one and keeps going without a word. It tastes better than any water I ever drank.
“Want a sandwich?”
One the girls behind me hangs over the top of my seat. She has short black hair and glasses, and dangles a foil-wrapped square. “Just PB and J,” she says. “We have tons.”
I have no idea how she knows I have no food, but I’m not going to turn it down.
“Thanks,” I say as she disappears back into her seat.
I unwrap it slowly, careful not to tear the foil. It’s beautiful. Thick bread, chunky peanut butter, deep red raspberry jam. Chewy and delicious. Half is enough to get me hours south. I re-wrap the other half and tuck it in my backpack.
Always have an escape route, my father used to say on his way out the back door with somebody pounding on the front. Always have a plan B. We wouldn’t see him for weeks. My escape route is Philadelphia to Savannah, but what’s my plan B?
I wake up again when Grumpo comes through from the front. I’ve lost two hours and got a crick in my neck. He’s telling the girls and their mother to get ready to get off. Next stop Yemassee, ten minutes. I hear them gathering their things. I slouch lower, try to watch without being noticed, pretending to search in the seat pocket, half turned. He’s taking their tickets, putting them in his vest pocket. He follows them through the door at the front and doesn’t look back. The train barely stops, and I picture them leaping with their suitcases from the steps onto the platform. Now there’s no one behind me. No one near the back door.
We speed up leaving Yemassee, and as soon as I dare, I reach up and grab my ticket. Still time to come up with a plan B, but I need to keep my ticket. After all, it goes as far south as I want to go, the flower man said. All the way to Miami, Florida, if necessary.
If I get to live in Savannah, I’ll work harder at school, be one of the smart kids. Prove to Aunt Pauline I’m not a godless piece of trash like my father. My mother shouldn’t have told him she said that. She took a punch for Aunt Pauline. There should be a map in the Savannah station. I can walk to West Gaston Street. I can walk for miles. It will be warm. Flowers everywhere. Maybe get there in time for breakfast. Maybe she lives in a house. Maybe she has horses.
Even without a watch I know we’re close. We blow through Denmark, South Carolina. Next stop Savannah, Georgia, two hours and forty-eight minutes. My eyelids weigh a ton, but I don’t dare let them drop for even a couple seconds, which would feel like sinking into the softest, warmest bed.
The sound of the sliding door is like a thunder clap. I jerk awake. How long has it been? I blink my eyes hard to get alert before he reaches me. He tells someone a few rows up that Savannah is the next stop. Then he tells me the same thing, as if we’re in a crowded room and I’m deaf. “Savannah is your stop kid. Don’t get off until I come back to get your ticket, gotta hand you over to somebody. Pray to God somebody’s there this time of day.”
“Thank you,” I say for some unknown reason. As soon as he leaves, I go to wash my face, put away my cap and fix my hair. The exit door across from the little bathroom has two latches, one just above my head and a lower one waist high. According to the sign they don’t release until the train comes to a complete stop.
I put my ticket in the inside pocket of my jeans. Jacket on and zipped. Backpack zipped and on. Money counted an absurd number of times and safe in my deepest pocket. Every nerve, every cell in my body, ready to spring into action the instant our speed changes. Off and gone.
At last I feel the train slow just slightly, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the engineer was only starting to think about slowing down, and I’m so hyperalert I picked it up all the way back in Car Nine. I stare at the front door of the car.
If I see him, I’ll look him in the eye and run. I’ll have my ticket and he’ll never catch me.
The train is definitely slowing. I can see individual lights in a warehouse. I stand by the door, hand on the higher latch.
I see the other Savannah passenger, a guy in an army uniform, buckling his bag. Stretching, yawning. He’s not in a hurry and he’s facing front. I’m a statue behind him, my fingertips on the latch waiting for a slight click, a soft little thud. Like a safecracker in a bank.
Then the train stops and it happens. Click! I pull both handles at once and I’m out the door, down the steps, and on the platform. In front of me is a low metal fence, a gate to the station, and a sign that says Savannah. A few people waiting. It’s warm and sweet smelling. Quiet and soft, like it just stopped raining. I realize I’m standing under a floodlight and dash through the gate, turn, and walk quickly along the fence until I’m past the caboose and out of the light, then duck down behind some bushes. Wait for the train to leave.
I see him through the branches. He looks out the door, comes down the steps, looks carefully in both directions, twice, then goes back up the steps, leans out and waves his arm and the train begins to move. My heart is pounding, forehead prickly. I wait until the taillights of the Silver Star turn to tiny dots before I stand up and breathe. Grumposaurus on his way to Jesup, Jacksonville, Ocala, Miami.
The train depot is modern, low and flat like a gas station, empty field on one side, empty brick building on the other. Still dark. A clock over the tracks says 4:35. The station is deserted. Bright and glassy, red vending machines, plastic chairs. Overflowing wastebaskets and a sign that says Watch your Bags! with a big hand reaching toward a suitcase. I realize the lumpy thing in the corner is a person sleeping on the floor. Hopefully not dead. I check my money: $6.50 not counting the silver dollar, which I knew.
Outside, an empty road disappears into the dark. A phone on a post. Just lift it up and you’re connected to somebody at a cab desk somewhere.
“Where to?” they say when I pick it up.
“How much to Gaston St?”
“East or west?
“West.”
“Where you calling from?”
“The train station.”
“$9.50”
I knew that didn’t include a tip.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
“Ten minutes,” he says.
The cab arrives in five, yellow with a light on top. “You alone, kid?” the driver asks.
I’m ready for that. “Yes. I’m going to my grandmother’s house, 35 West Gaston Street.”
“Got the fare?”
“My grandmother will pay when I get there. She’s waiting for me.”
I said grandmother because it came out easier than great-aunt, and sounded like I knew her better, and like she would pay for me no question and tip well for getting me there safely. He just shrugs and opens the back door.
I keep my backpack on and sit tall in the back seat, watching through the windshield and side to side, even more alert than I was on the train. The cab smells like cigarettes. I roll down my window to feel the warm air. The driver is bald and has pink splotches on his skull, white hair on his hands.
“Sure she’ll be up?” he says, eying me in the rearview mirror. “Not even five.”
“She gets up to walk her dog,” I say. “And she’s expecting me. Mrs. Pauline Mercer.” I’d seen Mercer Street and Mercer Medical School, an important sounding name. Not about to spill her real name. So easy to lie, must get that from my father.
“Sure thing,” he says.
“East Gaston,” he announces a few minutes later. Liquor stores, a 7-Eleven, Burger King, all closed this early. Not many trees. No people. “Low end, if you catch my drift. Not your end. You’re in the middle of the historic district.”
The closer we get to the better part of town, the friendlier he gets. “Little sightseeing trolley goes right down your street, learn all the history of the city.”
I watch the houses, odd numbers on my side, one-eighty-three, one-eleven. Big houses, some very grand, trees hanging over the street. Moss. Old-fashioned streetlights, better cars. A nice neighborhood, though I know from Philadelphia that big houses can have small apartments in them and I see more than one doorbell on some.
Out the other window is a park.
“Your granny lives right on the park,” says the driver, slowing down. “Number thirty-five, right?”
We’re in front of forty-three and closing in. I have a hand on the door handle.
“Sorry!” I say. “Twenty-five! Her handwriting’s hard to read.”
“No problem,” he says cheerfully.
He drives around the park, slows, stops in front of twenty, backs up to twenty-seven. There is no twenty-five. He drives forward and back again. Then he stops.
“So kid . . .”
Before he can even turn around, I open the back door, jump out and tear across the street into the park.
“Hey!” I hear him yell. I keep running, zig-zagging between trees, duck under some branches, freeze and listen, hear the cab idling, see the lights move slowly away, then back, then away, fast and angry.
I tiptoe through the park until I’m close to number thirty-five. Tall and narrow, two floors. One doorbell. Pink with a fancy black gate and flowers under every window. A light on upstairs.
I’ll stay in shadow until the sun’s up and people start to come out of their houses. I’ll neaten my hair, walk across and ring the bell. A short polite ring. I’ll probably have to tell her the whole story if she never got the letter from DCS. And I’ve still got $6.50, a silver dollar and my plan B ticket in my pocket, half a sandwich in my bag. She might find it heartwarming I came all this way alone. She might call the police, try to send me back.
I close my eyes, feel the warm air, and try to imagine Aunt Pauline opening the door, gasping with surprise at the sight of me on her doorstep, wrapping her arms around me and crying for joy. Probably an unrealistic vision.
I think if she lets me I’ll change my name. Nothing like Debby, Judy, Kathy. Names that end in y sound so babyish. I knew a girl named Claire. You can picture a grown-up with that name. You can’t shorten it. I’ll be Claire. It won’t matter, since I’ll probably never see the real Claire again. Maybe I’ll have my own room.
I step gently out from behind the trees onto the sunny sidewalk and stop. You came all this way, I tell myself. I tiptoe across the quiet road, slip through the gate like a ghost, and climb the five steps to the shiny black door.
I stare at it, willing it to open, terrified it might. Afraid to push the doorbell but more afraid of plan B. I close my eyes, hold my breath, and push the button quickly. Two notes sound. I hear footsteps and try not to cry.