“Would the passenger who wants to get off everywhere come up to the front?” Frank said into his microphone.
“What gives, lady?” Frank said after Maya had shuffled up to the front, sleeping faces stirring resentfully. His face asked if his impression at the nice moment they’d shared at the beginning had to be revised because actually she was a lunatic.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stone-faced. “There’s. . it’s. .” She felt tears start.
Frank’s eyebrows, of the same gray bristly mix as his beard, slunk together. “All right, now,” he said. “Take it easy.” The night shift regularly put him in acquaintance with the glitches and flaws of human design, but Maya didn’t seem crazy, only despondent. She nodded vacantly, grateful not to be dismissed so far from home, and turned back to her seat.
“Don’t pull the cord anymore,” he called to her. “I’ll slow down at the stops. I’m supposed to, anyway.” Maya nodded mirthlessly. At home, riding the bus had seemed zealous in the right way. Was her poor judgment a temporary function of her worry and grief, or were the worry and grief disclosing something about her true nature otherwise concealed by generally benign circumstances? She didn’t know how to answer, did not want to.
Soon — Maya tried to keep up her vigilance, but the monotonous run of streetlights, churches, and trees lulled her — the landscape took on a different look. Neat lines of vinyl-sided homes gave way to homes spaced farther apart, and set farther back from the road, and then unpainted clapboard homes, and then homes that looked like farmhouses, some with giant red stars on the front, and then no homes at all, and then she was rolling through an inky-green blackness without regular streetlights that could have meant another country, even Ukraine. Around the next bend, forty kilometers from Kiev, Uncle Misha’s farm would appear. Maya would disembark and commence cutting down sunflowers, binding every dozen with bast and laying each bundle into the bed of Misha’s truck, resentfully driven by him to the open-air market in Kiev, a city he avoided at all costs.
Only old people lived in the village, the young ones having run away to the city — except for Misha, who ran from the city. The family he left behind — his sister, Maya’s mother; his parents, lucky unlike so many to have survived the war — he placated by visiting one weekend a year, during which he raised a glass to everyone’s birthdays and all the national holidays in one go. He was so tormented by the city’s restlessness and pretensions that even his parents, who spent the other days of the year mourning his absence (two million people Kiev was good enough for, just not Misha), took pity and sent him away early.
Misha was unmarried. No one asked why, though it was generally assumed that he would be able to tolerate the constant presence of a woman no better than that of the capital city. That didn’t make sense to Maya, because while Misha did wander around in an ill humor when he was in Kiev, muttering about plums and cabbage and sunflowers through the cigarette in his mouth, it took only one call of his name by his niece for the weather on his face to disperse.
With each visit, he seemed broader and shorter, as if the earth was getting a stronger grip on him; he had the same embarrassing mullet as his draft horse; only one’s face, however, was commanded by a nose in the shape of a pear. The other villagers called him Mikol, the Ukrainian Orthodox version of Misha. This set his Jewish mother wailing. One day at the farm when Maya was visiting, Misha buried his hand in one of the furrows left by his tractor and stuck an oily lump of chocolate-black earth in her face. “You can eat this soil. If this soil says I am Mikol, what difference does it make?”
Maya had spent with him every summer from twelve to eighteen. “I hope you are satisfied.” Maya’s grandparents shook their heads at her mother. “She is turning into him. And now you are sending her away to America.” And to think, when Maya had first been told she would be spending the summer with Misha, she felt guilty for an unknown error; was her mother trying to get rid of her? And what about their summertime rituals? The TV tower, the Viennese Café, the boxful of glasses they hurled against the brick wall of the garbage terminal, because you needed to hurl something now and then. To her own parents, Maya’s mother solemnly acknowledged her dereliction, then sent Maya away all the same.
The Warwick Bus Terminal cut into Maya’s recollection with a savage fluorescence. They were at the end of the line. She inhaled sharply. On the 8:37 to Warwick, you’ll see passengers you don’t see on the weekend matinee buses, and if you close your eyes, the unslacking roar of the engine will lull you into minutes-long vacancies during which no boy is missing. But you will not see your son.
Maya disembarked to look around. Frank followed, lighting a cigarette out of the good hand.
“How long does it wait here?” she said.
“You mean we’re going back together as well?” he said.
She urged up a stiff smile; he was trying. They listened to the replacement passengers eating potato chips by the ticket counter, the crinkle of the small plastic bags the sole proving sound of humanity in the night. The terminal was a burp of blue light into the surrounding blackness.
“You want to tell me what’s on your mind?” Frank said. He held the cigarettes out toward her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had had one. Her first drag produced no special sensation; she remained there, in the parking lot with Frank.
“My son is lost,” she said, toe-boxing the pavement. She drew on her cigarette as if it would give her her son. “We called the school. He rode this bus in the afternoon. That’s all we know.”
Frank looked relieved — about this he could do something. “I’ll radio the dispatcher,” he offered.
Maya nodded silently, afraid that if she spoke, she would be cut off by tears. “Please,” she managed hoarsely.
“I have one,” Frank said. “Seventeen. He’s not missing, but it feels that way.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m sorry — that was flippant.”
“He’s somewhere around here,” Maya said stubbornly. “He likes grassy places.”
Frank nodded indulgently. Maya became aware of how shallowly optimistic her words sounded. She felt no especial chagrin, for she really felt what she claimed to feel. He was somewhere around here, near the end of the line, in countryside that looked more like Ukraine than New Jersey or New York.
She had not known that you could have such complete darkness somewhere in New York or New Jersey; she had never been anywhere else in America. Because of a vestibular imbalance aggravated by pressure changes, Maya was unable to fly, and this prevented her from going far quickly; Alex’s work prevented them from going far slowly; as a result, she was the one waving good-bye as a taxi took Alex, Raisa, Eugene, and Max to the airport for the Rubins’ annual all-inclusive week on the Riviera Maya.
Frank called out for her. The ash was hanging off her cigarette in a barrel. She smiled with deprecation and ground it underfoot. The Warwick Bus Terminal felt like a ship at the edge of the world: a strong wind and it would tip over. “What is it like here?” Maya said.
Frank shrugged and started on another cigarette. “It’s a farm town. Up that way is a lake full of bald eagles. On holidays, the wait time between trips is more like two hours, so I drive up there if it’s daylight. They’ve got an itty-bitty type of frog there, it’s all over the place.”