Interlude: The Night Bus

Sunita took the last bus home on Fridays, the 11:40 from the hospital stop, the one that wandered through four neighborhoods before it reached hers.

She was a pharmacy technician, and it had been a long week, and at the end of it there had been a small thing. Around four o’clock a colleague named Joel had made a mistake on a label, an easy one to make, and Sunita had caught it. She had said, “This is the second time this month,” in a tone she had heard come out of her own mouth the way you hear a dropped plate. Joel had looked at her for a moment and said, “Fine.” Then he had fixed the label, and neither of them had said anything else for the rest of the shift.

Fine. On the bus, she leaned her head against the cold window and began to take it apart. Was it fine the way people say it when they mean it, or fine the way they say it when they are finished with you? Was it the second time? She was almost sure it was the second time. Or was it the first, and she was thinking of someone else? She reached for the exact words she had used and found that she could no longer tell what she had said and what she was afraid she had said.

The bus stopped. People got off and on, with the soft hiss of the doors. She noticed none of it. She was in the dispensary again, four o’clock, Joel’s face, Joel’s fine.

“Miss.”

The driver had turned in his seat. He was an older man with a gray mustache and a thermos wedged beside the gearshift, and his name tag said OKAFOR. The bus was empty, and the lights of the depot glowed ahead.

“This is the end of the line,” he said. “You were meant to get off at Alder Street. That was eleven minutes ago.”

Sunita looked around. She felt her face go warm. “I’m so sorry. I was somewhere else.”

“I could see that.” He did not seem annoyed. He seemed, if anything, curious. “Happens more than you would think. People ride right past their own stop. Never when they’re watching the road, though. Always when they’re watching something behind them.”

She laughed, a little embarrassed. “Is there a bus back?”

“Not till morning. But Alder is twenty minutes on foot, and the rain has stopped.” He gestured at the door. “Mind the step.”

She got off. The air was cold and smelled of wet pavement and, faintly, of someone’s wood smoke. The bus pulled away with a low groan and its lights shrank down the road until there was only the sound of her own shoes on the asphalt.

She walked. For the first few minutes, Joel’s fine walked with her, and she let it. But the street was wide and quiet, and there were things in it. A cat on a fence watched her with enormous composure. A window glowed yellow on the second floor of a house, and in it someone was ironing a shirt in the middle of the night. Above the rooftops, the clouds were tearing open, and there were stars, more than she had seen in months.

She noticed that her feet hurt, and that she was hungry, and that the cold felt clean in her lungs. She noticed that she was, for the first time in hours, entirely where her body was.

It was the second time, she thought. And I said it badly. Both of those are probably true.

It was a different kind of thought. It had edges. It could be dealt with, in the morning, in one sentence. I’m sorry I was sharp about the label. That was all it required. The rest, the long dissection, the searching of Joel’s face for a verdict, had never been about Joel.

She turned onto Alder Street at twenty past midnight, still hungry, still tired, and somehow lighter than when she had left the hospital.

The bus had only ever gone one direction. She understood that now. You could not turn it around. But you could get off.