Day bled into night.  A man who got off in Barstow left his book on the seat:  An Introduction to German.  When he didn’t return for it, she took it as her own, and began re-teaching herself German.  She’d taken the class in high school, but they were mostly forgotten.  It made the time pass.  Liz liked languages.  Every time the bus stopped, Liz considered getting off to stretch her legs; if her first thought was that she could get a drink, she stayed where she was and practiced her German silently.  She called herself a pathetic little shit in three languages until the bus started moving again.

She fell asleep, cramped in the seat, and got another fourteen or fifteen hours of bus sleep.  It came fitfully; she woke every few minutes with cramps or when the sulky baby in the rearmost row started wailing again.  When she finally did fall asleep for a length of time she awoke starving, in pain and with her right hand reaching across her body to clutch at the window frame on her left.  The sun had come up and there was a grossly obese woman taking up both seats across the aisle from her. 

Her name was Denise, Liz learned shortly, and nothing short of full REM sleep could stop Denise from striking up a conversation.  Realizing her predicament, Liz tried looking out the window, closing her eyes, and even making snide comments, but none of it worked.  The monologue continued through Oklahoma and deep into Missouri.  Liz heard all about Denise’s children (who were in Columbus, Ohio) and her job (as a cafeteria worker in a college dormitory) and her problems, oh God yes, Denise’s problems (bad back, bad neck, bad knees, some nebulous kidney issue, an equally nebulous digestive issue that apparently allowed green beans to pass through her system untouched, painful periods, astigmatism, pinched nerves, the list went on and on).  Her psoriasis monologue was thankfully interrupted by a rest stop.

Liz fled the bus, digging the peanut jar out, and crossed the road to get to a big field full of the tall browning grass of late fall.  She looked back at the bus station–actually a convenience store along the highway, surrounded by fields.  Some of them were cultivated and already harvested, others, like the one she stood on the edge of, wild.  She had fifteen minutes before the bus continued on its way through Missouri or Kansas or Illinois or wherever the hell they were; she hadn’t been paying attention.  It had all looked the same for most of the day.  She had picked this field at random; it just felt right.

She carried the long-suffering yellow grasshopper in a loosely cupped palm.  When she was an appropriate distance from the road, she held her hand to her lips.  “This is it,” she told it softly.  “This is the place I was telling you about.”  After a day and a half with Liz, the grasshopper was actually becoming a little bit tame.  When she opened her hand, it surveyed the area, but didn’t jump away.  Maybe it was actually starving to death; she hadn’t fed herself or it since leaving California.

She could hear crickets and other bugs chirring happily away all around her, happy with the dying days of the indian summer.  “Hear that?  Isn’t this better than LA?  Fresh air, lots of other bugs.  Go on, you.  Sire some offspring or something.”

The grasshopper jumped.  It sailed in a high arc, free, and at the top of the arc a flash of brown feathers swept down in an intercepting path, and it vanished. The bird flew off with just as much grace as the grasshopper had shown.

Liz let out a wordless cry of outrage and horror.  She felt tears in the back of her throat. Which was stupid, and she knew it instantly, feeling badly for getting a grasshopper killed.  It was just the stupid irony of it, she’d bonded with the damn thing and she had really wanted to help it, which had turned out to be the worst thing for the grasshopper in the end. It wasn’t a boost to her shaky self-confidence, that was for sure.

Liz straightened, and her hands started to shake.  Maybe they’d been shaking all along; she wasn’t positive.  She was dizzy from hunger.  Stupid.  She needed to take better care of herself, not starve to death.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t hungry.  She was thirsty.  So goddamned thirsty.

Okay, she told herself.  You have to eat something.  You’ll go in the store, and get something with some damned protein in it, and then you’ll get back on the bus and go back to sleep.  No wine.  No beer.  Water, if anything.  She wished they’d stopped at a real bus station instead–they didn’t serve alcohol.  Did the Midwest have dry counties?  That would have done nicely.

She couldn’t take the first step toward the store, though.  She knew that no matter what she told herself, no matter what she planned, she’d come out with a fifth of whiskey in the bag.  It was destiny.  It was something worse than that.

Thanks for not lying to me, she said to her body.  You pathetic fuck.

She went to the pay phone at the far side of the parking lot instead, searched her murky memory, then dialed collect.

She gave her name to the operator, said, “For Andrew Ford,” and waited.  “Please be there,” she whispered, speaking Japanese without thinking.  “Please still live there.”  AT&T informed her that it was three-thirty-seven pm where she was calling, and then the phone started to ring.

The charges were accepted.  “Liz?”

“Ondrew,” she said, suddenly drained.  She leaned heavily on the phone, closing her eyes.

“Holy shit!  It is you!  How have you been?  Where have you been?”  He was as happy as a puppy, like he had always been.  “Forget all of that.  Where are you?”

“I’m coming home,” she said softly.

“Home southern California, or home southeastern Michigan?”

“To Michigan,” she said. 

“Fucking wonderful!  We can still have a picnic when you get here, and go for a ride!  It’s not that cold yet.”

“I don’t have my bike, Ondrew.  I don’t…”  She didn’t want to tell him she didn’t know where it was.

He got a little more serious as he picked up on the weary, beaten-down tone in her voice.  “D’you need a ride or anything?  A place to crash?”

She smiled, thinking of Ondrew’s cute little farmhouse-with-no-farm out in the middle of nowhere.  “I think my papa’s putting me up.  He’s going to babysit me, some shit like that.”

“Calling for moral support, then?”

She felt tears well up in her throat.  That was about as close as she had gotten to crying for several years, that she could remember.  “I fell off, Ondrew.  I fell off so hard.”

“I know,” he said.  “I was there.”

Liz bit her lip, feeling even closer to tears.  She thought she’d stayed sober until she had left Michigan, but apparently that wasn’t the case.  “Fuck,” she whispered, ashamed of herself.

“But you’re back on again, right?”

“Yes.  I almost died,” she said.  She told him what had happened, including her father’s ultimatum and her bus trip back to Michigan.

“You’ll be okay,” Ondrew said, his usual cheerfulness coming back.  “You’ve got me and all the others for moral support.  But most importantly, me.”

“Yeah, just what I need.  The Boilermaker God of Michigan.”

“No!  No, that’s the Boilermaker God of the Entire Northeast, thank you very much.  I earned that title, now you bow down and respect it.  I’ll throw myself in front of any alcohol that comes toward you.  I can drink for two.”

“Bastard,” she said, but she was smiling.  “I’m starving, Ondrew, I have to get some food.”

“So go on.  I’ll see you when you get here.”

“It’s a party store,” Liz whined, hating having to ask for help, not even knowing what she was asking for.  “I don’t think I can go in there.  I’ll come out with something.”

“No, you won’t.  You’re strong.  You’re not an animal.”

Liz opened her eyes, looked at her feet.

“C’mon, just eat something.  It’ll go away.  If I could go in there for you, Liz, I would.  But I can’t.”

Just knowing that she still had a friend out there somewhere who gave a shit was an immense boost.  “I can’t do this,” she said, but she wasn’t quite believing it any more.

“Bet you can.  I’ll bet you dinner.  If you don’t buy any alcohol, you get to make me dinner.”

“How is that winning?”

“Because if you do get a drink, I’ll cook dinner for you.  And I’ll make you finish it, too.  No matter how fucked up it is.  I got this great recipe for tuna with a yellow curry sauce, and you bake it with Cheetos on top–”

“Okay, okay, you’re making me sick now, thanks.”

“G’wan.  Get a Hostess fruit pie and get back on the bus.  Get your ass up here so we can see you.  Peach and Rob miss you, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” she said.  Her smile was stronger when she got off of the phone.  Andrew wasn’t like Charlie and Pogo and the others.  She had friends in Michigan.  She’d run away from them, and forgotten about them, but they hadn’t forgotten about her, or at least Andrew hadn’t.  She allowed herself a little bit of hope.

It went okay.  Liz spent a bunch of party-girl money on multi-grain breakfast bars, little bottles of orange juice and milk (they were at the opposite end of the cooler from the alcohol), a box of Fig Newtons (which were kind of like real food) and a bag of popcorn, then fled to the temptation-free safety of the bus.  Soon the Greyhound was eating up miles again.

With food in her stomach, Liz felt somewhat better, but if Denise got going again, she was going to have to kill the woman.  Sure enough, as soon as the bus hit the freeway, Denise started talking about her plans for Christmas, and how to get her kids away from her ex-husband for that particular week.  “I’m going to get everything all unwrapped and set up the night before,” Denise said, as if every parent in the country didn’t do the same thing, “and then my boyfriend is going to rent a Santa costume.  It’s for the kids, you know, Natalie’s almost ten but she still gets into it.  She still believes in Santa, you know, and my mother says that–”

Inspiration struck in the form of a memory.  “I stopped believing in Santa Claus because my papa killed him,” Liz said.

Denise was derailed.  “Whuut?”

“I was six or so.  Christmas Eve.  I woke up in the middle of the night and I was starving.  Little-kid hungers, you know?  And I started thinking about the cookies we put out for Santa, since they weren’t all gone or anything.  Not that I was going to take Santa’s cookies or anything, but there were more in the bag.

“So anyway I put it off, and put it off, and tried to go back to sleep, but of course that wasn’t going to happen.  I didn’t want to get caught awake, and I just knew I was going to, and the only thing that was going to put me to sleep was a cookie.  So finally I gave up, and I figured I’d sneak out and get a cookie then sneak back to bed and everything would be cool.  I figured if I hid under the covers Santa wouldn’t know anyway, you know.”

Denise was listening.  Liz kept talking, just so she wouldn’t have to hear the woman’s voice for a few more minutes.

“So I finally decided to do it. I put on my sweatshirt with the hood so I could cover my head just in case Santa did catch me.  I don’t know what I was thinking, I was just a little criminal-minded kid.  I didn’t turn on any lights, so as not to give myself away, and I stayed low.  I knew the whole commando shtick from watching CHiPS or whatever, I was cool.  I stayed away from the windows and stayed out of the light from the tree and everything.  When I made it to the kitchen, I had to climb up on a chair to get to the cabinet where the cookies were.  I got the bag and it made this huge crackling noise, and I froze, because it was the loudest thing in the world just right then.  I held still and listened.  I don’t know what for.  Maybe Papa waking up, maybe Santa’s little spies whispering to each other.  Who knows?

“Anyway, there wasn’t any noise, so I made to get my ass back in bed before I did get caught.  And just when I went out of the kitchen and started around the corner, I saw him.  There was this huge man standing next to the tree holding a bunch of presents in his hands and it wasn’t my dad!”

“Hol-ee crap.  I don’t know what I would have done,” Denise said.

“I do.  I screamed my little head off.  I dropped the bag of cookies and I just screamed my ass off.  The guy dropped the presents too and he came at me.  I covered my eyes up and started crying to Santa that I didn’t see, I didn’t see, and I was gonna go back to bed.”  She smiled.  “I wasn’t even scared that there was a strange man in our house, I was just afraid I was busted and wouldn’t get any presents.  He grabbed me, and he said ‘You saw Santa, you bad little girl,’ real quiet like that.  I remember he smelled like soot too, but that might have been my imagination.  I said ‘No, Santa, I didn’t see,’ in a tiny little squeak.  Then I said it in Japanese, I have no idea why.  He said ‘Oh yes you DID!’ and lifted me way up, so high I thought I was gonna hit the ceiling.”  Denise’s eyes were wide.  Liz was enjoying this; it hadn’t occurred to her to just hit the woman with stories from the headlines of her own life.  She wished she’d have thought of this eight hours ago.  “Right around then I peed myself.  Then the lights all came on, and my papa yelled, and ‘Santa Claus’ dropped me and I heard Papa’s service revolver go off–BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOM!–and when I opened my eyes again Santa was lying in the foyer on his face and Mama was pulling me away in this big hug and trying to cover my eyes at the same time.

“You know the thing that scared me the most?  I thought I was gonna have to go to school after New Year’s and explain that no one got any presents because my papa shot Santa Claus.  But of course, it turned out to be a burglar, and I figured out the rest of the Santa Claus myth by myself some time around Valentine’s Day, I think.  It sounds kinda depressing, but it wasn’t, really.  I think that’s the reason Papa moved from California back to Michigan and refused to go back, though.  The burglar, I mean.”  Come to think of it, it was probably part of the reason that her parents had divorced.  Her mother had often said that her feelings for her father had changed after seeing him shoot at the man holding her daughter, with no apparent thought for Liz’ safety.

Denise looked like a photograph of a woman in shock.  When she finally shook off her righteous horror, she said, “That is the most horrible thing I ever heard.  How could your father do a thing like that?”

“I thought you’d say that,” Liz replied with a smile.  She closed her eyes, turned her back to Denise, and pretended to sleep.