Chapter 3
The girl’s legal name was Clare Markham, and that was the name the law enforcement officers of the State of Oklahoma would use to look for her.
She had the sense to get out of Oklahoma on the day she learned they were blaming her.
She plugged in her phone charger and left her phone under her bed, and walked over to the house where her best friend, Allison Thompkins, lived and asked Allison to drive her east across the state line.
As Clare watched Allison drive off, she knew that she would never see her again. This reminded her of the deaths in her family. Once she lost sight of them, people weren’t coming back, so it was best to turn your face forward as soon as you could manage.
She was going to have to wait a long time to even start.
She sat on a bench in the station for a while, leaned on her backpack, fell asleep on it, and then woke up with a stiff neck and an angry woman staring down at her.
The woman appeared to be about fifty, and she had the badly wrinkled skin of hard drinkers and heavy users.
Her eyes had blue irises but whites that were jaundiced.
Clare sat up and said, “Hi.”
The woman said nothing, but sat down hard in the space that Clare had vacated when she’d sat up.
The woman glared at her again, but then turned straight ahead.
There were about twenty people in the station now, but at least ten other seats that were empty.
After a couple of minutes, the woman said in a low voice, so only Clare could hear, “When I was young, a Black girl wouldn’t have taken her seat and mine too. ”
Clare got it. This wasn’t the first time. Many Senecas had dark skin, and she was one who did. She said, “Too bad that Black girl couldn’t make it. I’m sure she would have been better company than you.”
Clare realized instantly that she had made a mistake.
This awful woman would tell everybody she could corner about the dark-skinned girl who had been rude to her.
There just might be somebody coming through here in a day or two asking about a young woman traveling by herself who had done something in Oklahoma and was in a hurry to go far and fast.
Clare knew the best thing she could do was to get away from the station and this woman before she made some kind of a scene that people might remember.
She picked up her backpack and went straight out to the street.
She walked about a half mile before she passed under the marquee of a movie theater.
It had the name of a newish movie that had won some Oscars, showing at 7:00 and 9:30, but she’d seen it already with Allison.
Below that, a smaller line said “Classic Matinee Double Features.” She stopped to look at the antique posters for old movies in glass cases around the ticket booth, like a collection in a museum.
Old posters had always struck Clare as odd—touched up so the lips were too red, the eyes too blue, the teeth too white.
She saw the names of movies that she had heard of, but knew nothing about, except that they were made years and years ago. Lawrence of Arabia. Blow-Up.
She saw that a woman with long red hair was sitting on a tall stool in the ticket booth staring at her phone and typing furiously with her thumbs.
Above her was a sign that said “Classic Matinee Double Feature, $8.” She liked the price, and didn’t feel like walking from then until 1:00 A.M. so she gave the woman the money.
She guessed that the movies from a lifetime ago that people still watched might be pretty good, but if they were bad, she could sleep.
When she was in the theater, she saw that the dozen other customers were mostly alone, spread out in all sides of the theater, and some were slouched low in their seats as though the idea of sleeping had occurred to them too.
She watched Doctor Zhivago with Omar Sharif, a handsome man, and Julie Christie, a pretty woman, but she had no idea what was going on.
Then she watched The Graduate, which was a bit more comprehensible to her, and at least was set in America.
When the matinee was over and the lights came on, she went to the restroom and then came back when the lights were off again, and slept.
When she woke, she was alert and hungry, so she left the theater and hunted for food.
She found a place that sold pizza by the slice and had big plastic cups of cola. It was not a pretty restaurant, but it wasn’t in a hurry to get customers to clear out, so she was able to stay for hours at a small table along the wall.
She had spent the past two days sitting in a car and then a theater, and sitting that long made her feel tired and stiff and unhealthy, so she stood up for a while, but wasn’t eager to go out on the street again.
A young girl alone on a big city street was vulnerable to creepy men.
She really did not want to have to stab another one.
She walked back to the bus station at nearly 1:00 A.M., and the bus arrived only a few minutes later.
The driver opened the door at the front and began to check people’s tickets.
She had ridden enough buses to know that it was not a good idea to sit in the back.
The ride was bumpier there, and if there was a problem with ventilation, that was always where it was worst because the exhaust was back there.
She chose a seat five rows from the front next to the window.
When the door whished shut and the bus began to move, her heart started to celebrate in her chest. She was going back to the place where her ancestors had come from, or at least the spot where their particular recipe for DNA had been mixed and formulated by the Creator.
Her grandmother had shown her a picture of the place she had taken on some trip, but it was just trees and hills and a lake.
That didn’t matter now. She would be in Buffalo, New York, at 4:35 the day after tomorrow, and then she could start looking for Jane Whitefield.