“You smoke too much,” Maya said. “I work in a hospital.”
“It would be my tenth if you were allowed to smoke on the bus,” he said.
“I’m going to throw out the cigarette,” she reported, as if she feared the darkness would take her.
“I am destroying my health, and also a litterer,” Frank said, looking down at the butt he had tossed underfoot.
Maya walked to the edge of the terminal. From the well-lit spot where she had stood with Frank, the area beyond had seemed impenetrable, but away from the light it picked up a blue hem that softened the darkness. Maya stared at the crumpled butt in her hand, which sent up a distressed odor. On the other side of the roadway was an embankment that rose several feet above human height. It tilted at an angle that made it seem climbable; several cotoneasters spotted the bank. The roadway was freshly paved; Alex would have been pleased; Maya could not recall one vehicle passing in the time she and Frank had stood smoking, though, surely, some had. It wasn’t the swallowing darkness she feared, but her own unreliability; her attention was off.
Maya felt Frank at her shoulder. “I am not sure do you want solitude or company,” he said watchfully.
She conjured a weak smile that she hoped showed her gratitude. “I’m just killing time till—” He pointed at the bus. She nodded. She was standing farther from home than she had traveled in years, talking openly with a man she hadn’t known two hours before. The order of things was like the thin spots of ice on a wintertime lake. You stepped badly and the cold gleam was around your ankles. This was what Raisa was trying to ward off. Usually, Maya waited out Raisa’s admonitions: superstitions and prejudice. But it occurred to her now that the woman had lived a life, too — had not always been a round ball at the feet of her husband and son.
“When Max was tiny,” she said to Frank, “he disliked even to be taken out of the house. When the stroller appeared, he would bawl. My father-in-law said you have to break boys — the outdoors turns little boys into healthy adults. He decorates an office chair fifty hours a week, so I guess he would know. They were sitting out on the deck one time — Max was already a walker, my father-in-law was reading the newspaper — and a swarm of hornets came down over his head. I started screaming and ran for him — and was bitten. My father-in-law reached for him — and was bitten. But Max was not bitten.
“There were other times — we had to put a kind of harness around him so he wouldn’t swim out too far in the lake. And every time, you ask yourself: Is that him being a child, or is that him being my child? And all the months that have gone by without you remembering, the count goes back to zero.”
“I don’t understand fully,” Frank said apologetically.
“Max is adopted,” she said, not looking at him.
“Oh,” Frank bounced his head.
“No one knows,” she said. “Not even Max. And I just said it to you.”
“Oh,” Frank said in a different way. “You ask yourself the same questions when you’re biological,” he said, wanting to help her.
“Yes, but you can answer them,” she said.
“I guess so,” he said. They stared at the darkened roadway and the bank beyond. “He’ll turn up,” Frank said with the resentment of someone forced into platitudes.
Maya felt a pain climb up her right arm and go off between her shoulder and collarbone. She was grateful for the sensation — her body at its own work, beyond hers. She wanted to use it. She dropped the butt into the trash can and set off across the roadway. A feeble call rose from Frank. She ignored it.
“Hey!” Frank called out. “Lady. I don’t know your name!”
Her nails sank into the dried soil of the bank like a hide. She wanted something, anything, to occupy her hands, which for six hours had flitted between her mouth, her temples, her chest, as if she were restraining organs that wanted to leap out. Up above the lip of the bank, she imagined that her son awaited her in the shallows of some lake like the frog Frank watched on holiday trips. On her touch, the frog would transform into her son, as in the fairy tale. Her son turned into a frog when he left her, and now she would rescue him.
Frank cursed, chucked his cigarette, and set off after Maya, his girth preventing direct forward movement. Some of the awaiting passengers looked up. He looked ready to burst.
The bank shuddered slightly under her hands. She clutched roots and plants — the earth was less bare than it had looked from across the road — and prayed that they weren’t poison ivy. The soil crumbled in her fingers like dry bread and lined her fingernails. She felt a sweat start in her groin.
She was surprised to discover herself fit enough to scamper up the bank without great difficulty; her body worked with resentful, creaking eagerness. She felt a deranged thrill. She was nearly up to the brim when Frank arrived at the bank. He stared at it uncomprehendingly.
“Lady,” he whispered.
“It’s Maya,” she called back from her place.
“You’re crazy!” he yelled. “What the hell are you going to do?” He affixed himself to the bank like a crab and clung to it, as if this effort alone was noteworthy, and now some mechanism should accelerate him up the incline. He cursed all mothers and began to lumber after Maya.
“Frank, you need to quit smoking,” Maya breathed over her shoulder as she scaled the last of the bank, panting happily. Even in the grape-colored darkness, she saw the stains on her capris. There was loose soil between her toes.
“I don’t leave the ground,” he gasped. “I don’t take elevators. I don’t fly. I drive the bus and I go home.”
“I don’t fly either,” she called.
There was nothing up above the lip, only a farm field flanked by telephone posts, wires clumping between them; it was divided into furrowed rows of what looked like lettuce and an unmowed segment that looked like pasture, though she saw no animals or fencing. Maya made the outline of a house on the far edge of the field, its windows glimmering like gold icons. It was definitely pasture — she smelled shit. The air was prickly with chill, and goose bumps went up on her skin. She breathed deeply of cow shit.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Frank said. He was bent over the top of the bank, wheezing dangerously.
She turned around — from the height of the embankment, the bus terminal was like a settlement on a lower flank of a mountain. She reached down and got a hand under both of Frank’s armpits and pulled. He was heavy and her hands slid down his arms until she was within several inches of the maimed hand. Frank heaved into the sweet earth. She moved to close Frank’s hands with her own and awaited the feel of the tormented flesh, but he pulled away at the last moment.
Frank coughed painfully. “I have a lunatic on my hands.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her brief hilarity gone. “You didn’t have to—” She stopped herself from speaking obtusely.
She slipped back to the ground, where Frank was. The smell of shit entered her nostrils more forcefully. She was sitting in the grass like a baby, one foot splayed under the other knee as if she had yet to learn where everything went. She pulled a clump of grass out of the soil with each hand. What kind of grass was it? Her son would know. She had walked ten miles with him to gather the many grasses of New Jersey for science class. He had rained the names on her — fescue, ryegrass, bluegrass, orchard grass, bromegrass, timothy, switchgrass, bluestem big and little, deertongue. They sounded like witch potions, and she felt slightly occult in their wanders through fields with no trails but ample signage against trespassing. “What kind of grass is it, son?” she said now to no one, released the clumps, and fell onto her back. The grass was itchy beneath her, and she tried not to move. A rash of stars disfigured the night sky above.