Chapter 10
I made one transfer in North Dakota. The second leg got me to Billings. When the bus pulled into the station, it was near midnight. There was no way I could reach Portland before the next morning, and I didn’t want the next jump to happen while I was doing seventy down the freeway.
I shuffled off the bus with the rest of the murmuring zombie passengers and stepped into the frigid winter night of Montana.
Fluorescent lights flickered inside the bus station, giving everything inside a surreal, overlit feeling.
The temperature changes, from hot bus to below zero and back into the hot station, made me queasy.
I hadn’t eaten much, either, which didn’t help.
I had my phone, which was a brick in my pocket now since Amy had long since stopped paying for my service.
I had Amy’s father’s overcoat, blue jeans, a T-shirt, and the cash. All my earthly possessions.
I went to a graffiti-scarred information kiosk near the station’s front door.
The station was surrounded by a cluster of low-end motels.
I used a worn map on the wall next to the kiosk to find the nearest and what I guessed was the cheapest. I looked around at my fellow passengers, none of whom had been on the bus with me in Minneapolis.
They huddled together, many with small children who were tired and cranky, if not already asleep.
No one looked back at me. I was struck, again, by the dizzying change in my life circumstances.
I pulled the collar up on my borrowed overcoat and pushed through the glass doors of the station. The cold slapped me in the face and sucked the breath out of my lungs.
Yesterday it’d been a warm September.
I shoved my hands in the coat pockets and trudged out of the Greyhound lot, past idling buses and snow-covered cars, toward the motel I’d spotted on the map.
It was less than two blocks, but in the cold and darkness it felt like miles.
There was enough traffic on the road that I had to keep to the side, walking on the edge of the plowed snowbank.
My sneakers got soaked, then they froze.
I lost the feeling in my toes in minutes.
By the time I reached the motel, my whole body was shaking. I jerked open the door, stepped inside, and shut it. I stood there, basking in the warmth.
“You ain’t got money you gotta leave, buddy,” a male voice called.
I opened my eyes to a heavily tattooed, black-clad teenager staring at me from behind a small counter. He had so much eye shadow it looked like someone had punched him in the nose and given him two black eyes.
“How much?” I asked, my teeth still chattering.
“Eighty-six after tax gets you a bed for a night. Shared bathroom, no TV. Any damage you do costs extra.”
I winced at the price. “Is that the cheapest room you have?”
“Yeah, man. Cheapest we got. You got the money? Because if not, you need to get the fuck on outta here, you hear me?” He might’ve been trying to sound tough. It wasn’t working.
I pulled out the meager remains of my cash.
I gave him four twenties, a five, and a one and tried not to think about how little I had left.
As he took them, I noticed his fingernails were all black, except his pinky, which was red and had an extremely long nail, much longer than the others.
I shut my eyes and took a breath as he grabbed a key from the wall behind him.
“Number four,” he said. I took the key, an actual metal key, large and heavy and scarred from decades of use. “You can smoke, but don’t make too much noise, and if you break anything, you buy it, you hear?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
He watched me without blinking as I rounded the counter and took the door to the hallway. I was physically relieved when I was no longer in his sight.
My room was tiny and barren and exactly what I expected. The bed was hard, the sheets stained with all manner of things I didn’t want to think about, and the blanket was thin and scratchy. But it was a room, with a lock and a dead bolt, and it was warm. Warmish.
I sat on the bed for a few minutes until I stopped shivering.
Then I went to the bathroom down the hall.
There was a single toilet, sink, and shower, apparently serving all eight rooms in the hall.
On the way to the bathroom, I heard the distinctive sounds of sex from two different rooms. Grunts audible through paper-thin doors.
In the bathroom someone had scrawled “Hello gorgeous” backward on the wall, so it was readable in the mirror.
Except they’d spelled “gorgeous” wrong, so some wit had written—also reversed—“Goodbye spelling.” It made me smile a little, despite the smell of the toilet and the myriad other bits of profane graffiti scratched into the walls.
After I cleaned up—at least enough I didn’t feel quite so grimy from the long bus ride—I headed back to my room.
When I was almost there, I stopped. A glint of metal caught my eye.
A pay phone, alone on the far wall. An actual pay phone, in the flesh, like it was still 1990.
I walked to it without thinking. The faded receiver, with an oblong patina shaped by ten thousand previous palms, was in my hand before I realized it.
Miracle: it had a dial tone. I dialed collect.
I went through the electronic menus, said my name at the prompt, and punched in my parents’ number.
I still remembered it, despite myself. Despite the years.
It helped that they’d had the same number since before the age of smartphones.
It rang four times before my mother picked up, groggy and disoriented.
It took her a couple seconds before she understood she was talking to a machine and being asked to accept the charges for a long-distance phone call.
It was several more seconds before she realized the phone call she was being asked to accept was coming from her son. “Yes, okay, okay.”
“Thank you for using 1-800-COLLECT,” the robotic female voice said. “You may begin your conversation now.”
A half-second pause. “Scott?”
I shut my eyes and leaned my forehead up against the rough, fading flower wallpaper next to the phone. Encapsulated in one word was almost forty years of history and emotion. I’d known what I was in for when I made the call, but the cascading flood of memories still almost overwhelmed me. “Mom.”
“Scott. Scott, oh my goodness.” Her voice ramped up in pitch.
“Where have you been? It’s been years. Amy called here, a few weeks ago, said you two were getting a divorce.
I tried to call you, sent emails, but it’s like you fell into a hole and the earth swallowed you up.
We thought about calling the police, but Amy said not to. ”
I could imagine it. My mother and father were far from online. I was certain they’d never seen any of the YouTube videos Beth had described, the ones that had been quickly debunked and decried as fake. I could imagine why Amy hadn’t even tried to explain the truth.
“It’s—it’s hard to explain, Mom.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No. Yeah. Kind of.”
“What is it?”
And despite all our history, all the small and large ways we’d damaged one another over the years, I still wanted to tell her everything, to give myself over to her care and have her make everything right.
She couldn’t, of course. She’d never been able to.
“Mom, I wanted to call and say I’m sorry.
For the way things have been between us, between you and me and Dad. ”
“Scott—”
“I’m going to go away for a while, Mom. You—I probably won’t ever see you again.”
“What? Scott, this doesn’t make sense. What’s going on?”
“I gotta find Lyle, Mom. I gotta find my son before it’s too late. That’s all that matters. I chose him over you and Dad. I chose him without even a second thought. I hope you understand.”
“Scott, you’re scaring me. Let me get your father, and we’ll talk this through, okay? Just wait.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. That’s one thing I can’t do.” I stopped, took a shuddering breath. “Goodbye.”
And before she could say anything, I hung up the phone.
I was exhausted, physically and mentally.
I thought about powering on my phone, opening the contacts, and using the old pay phone to try Severine’s number, or Sophie’s.
A collect call to my old friends, just to hear a friendly voice.
It was even possible Lyle had a phone now.
That was the kind of thing I could imagine Amy doing, especially as a single mother, making sure he could reach her anytime.
I should have asked Beth, but I hadn’t thought of it.
And now it was too late.
I left my phone off. Beth hadn’t had a charger that fit what was now an old model, and I was perilously low on battery—not that I could do much with it, anyway, since I didn’t have service anymore.
A stress headache pulsed between my temples, distinct from the one that heralded my jumps forward through time.
It was a bad one. Even the dim light from the single lamp next to the bed hurt my eyes.
I felt weariness in every part of my body.
All I wanted to do when I climbed into bed—fully clothed—was sleep.
Just empty sleep. Disappear and fall away into nothing.