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Chapter One

When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking about her final semester of college that she won’t be there for, not imagining her roommate missing her on the Sunday after spring break when Lena doesn’t return; she’s not thinking about her stalker (why he’s hers anyway, it’s not as if she chose him), not thinking about her father calling her a fuck of a daughter because she’d disappointed him again; she’s not missing her dog, or her mother, not even the MIA pieces of herself, though that will come. She’s thinking: do not throw up, do not throw up, do not throw up. Then she does.

Afterwards, she leans her head against a crooked wrought iron fence, holding her backpack against her chest. The darkness on the other side of the iron bars feels palpable though there’s nothing to see but space falling away into more darkness, and far below, the sound of water moving against stone. Three days on buses has simmered Lena’s body to a greasy essence of hand sanitizer, generic potato chips, and her own unwashed hair and sweat. If she could just rest without the feeling of something moving beneath her—those last twenty minutes of swaying on what she would later learn were switchbacks, the top-heavy bus weaving back and forth down the mountainside like a drunk coming home late—had done her in. The driver, paring his nails in the green light of the dash, had barely looked up as she almost fell off the last step into the road, another tick in the negative column for buses in general and this one in particular. But she has miles to go before she sleeps, metaphorically speaking: miles to go to put as much distance between herself and what was home as she possibly can; miles to go to outrun the voices in her head that tell her just to pull herself together, no one meant anything, she’s making too much of too little like she always does. These are the things she’s not actually thinking, just carrying, like the backpack, because when you flee your burning house you’re supposed to try to save something.

The bus is half a block down the road before she realizes it’s going and she’s not. Hadn’t she said, “I’ll only be a minute”? Hadn’t she? Grit black and fine as cinders flies in the air, stinging her face. She watches the bus take the turn back out of town, gears grinding for the switchbacks up the mountain that had necessitated her getting off it in the first place, its piggy little taillight eyes blinking fatalistically and disappearing in the swirling dark. She should run after it calling “Come back!” like a scene in the movies, but it never made a difference in the movies, either. She’s just a girl in jeans and a sweatshirt, after all. Isn’t that what she wanted? To be unremarkable and unremarked? Only now she’s standing on an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar town in a state she’s unsure of. Somewhere south: Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky—she doesn’t know. “Stupid,” she says. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” and even she isn’t clear whether she means the situation or herself.

There’s no bus station, just a shelter with a bench at the side of the road where she stands. One hundred yards away, an IGA and a Dollar Store share a small parking lot, and beyond them there’s a gas station with the lights out. Already the sky has lightened to the color of river rocks, sort of shiny with mist, softening the outline of mountains above the town she can just make out. Like she’s at the bottom of a large soup bowl. Thank god she has her backpack! Her coat’s gone—still bunched on the seat where she was using it for a pillow, but everything else is in her pack, her change of clothes, her toothbrush and her hairbrush, two books, her watch, a key, and her wallet. Just thinking about her coat traveling on without her makes her shiver.

Down the street, opposite the way the bus exited, a blue neon sign blinks on. In script, the letter D, followed in a blink by the letter I, and after that N, then E, then R. Each letter blinks on slowly as if for a reader just learning to spell. She watches it blink on and off several times, saying the letters out loud to herself each time they appear—D*I*N*E*R, off, D I N E R, off, DINER—until they don’t seem to spell anything at all, and then she settles her pack on her shoulder and walks towards it.

---

The D*I*N*E*R is tiny, silver with three red stripes and windows all around, like a cross between an airstream trailer and a caboose: something charming and out of place, like it’s been left in the small gravel parking lot by the rest of the train. Even outside, the air smells of coffee, fried meat and potatoes, and sugar. Lena swallows, suddenly aware she’s hungry, suddenly hopeful she’s somewhere with people who have ongoing lives and jobs and families and things to do. Maybe they’ll be friendly. Maybe this wasn’t a bad place to have ended up after all. Maybe she’s exactly where she’s meant to be, wherever this is. She climbs the three steps to a small platform in front of an aluminum door.

Someone has written “Fuck Me” on the steamed window beside the door, the backwards letters already dripping into illegibility. The door sticks when Lena pushes it. She’s precariously balanced on the small platform, getting ready to push it again, harder, when the door swings into her. She hangs onto the edge of the platform, her backpack pulling her down, when someone grabs her arm, saying, “Whoa, here’s a live one!” A huge hand lifts her almost out of her shoes, pulling her forwards. She’s like the end kid in a game of crack the whip, yanked by the force of someone else’s trajectory. She has a blurred impression of tall bodies, and then she’s falling into the heat and clutter. She puts her hands out to stop herself, and ends up pressed against a counter, leaning awkwardly across a stool, her butt in the aisle. Behind her a man’s voice says, “What’d you get there?” Another man says, “Catch of the day.” They’re guitar voices, twangy and slurry, not like drunk, but slowed down. The weight of her pack presses Lena down and some part of her just wants to stay that way. She had been hopeful and hungry, and now she just wants to disappear, but the same invisible force that yanked her into the diner lifts the pack away from her back, and she’s pulled upright. “Hey!” she says. She could cry. She needs her pack! From somewhere, Lena thinks she hears the sound of clapping, but she can’t be sure. Two men stand by the door where a cash register is jammed against a booth only a child or a supermodel could slide into. They’re wearing heavy jackets open over T-shirts and jeans, thick-soled boots, and baseball caps. One of them points a finger and winks at her. The other drops her pack at her feet.

A big girl with skinny arms and legs in a waitress’s apron slides from behind the counter to get to the cash register. “Y’all ready to check out?” she says. Lena shrinks into herself to get out of the way, but there’s nowhere to go.

“Whoa,” says that voice again, sliding the word into three, almost four syllables. “Traffic jam.” It’s an amused voice, and belongs to the taller of the two men near the door, the one with wire-hanger cheekbones. “You ever notice,” the second guy says, “how much room women take up?”

“You ever notice how full of shit guys are?” says the waitress at Lena’s elbow. She says it conversationally, as if they could all just stand around all day discussing the relative amounts of space in the world taken up by men versus women, but she looks expectantly at Lena. Is Lena supposed to answer that?

“Um, pardon?” she says.

Still conversationally, the waitress says, “Honey, we are at an impasse here.” She gestures at Lena’s pack, at the men by the register, at herself. “Your pack and my belly cannot occupy the same space. It is a physical impossibility.” Her voice sounds like honey on toast, sweet and slightly burnt, with a bubble of something like laughter underneath it.

The guys at the door flat-out laugh. Lena’s eyes fly to the waitress’s abdomen, to the sliver of very white, puffy skin she can see poking between the girl’s shirt and her pants where the apron doesn’t cover. Oh god. Oh god. She’s so dense, so stupid! “I’m so sorry,” she says. She lowers her pack and slides it under the counter, scooting back on the stool as far as she can go.

“No need for you to be sorry,” the waitress says. “This happened well before your watch.” She smiles and squeezes past. “Gentlemen,” she says, “how was your breakfast?”

---

A while later, the waitress slides a cup of coffee across the counter towards Lena. “You didn’t ask,” she says, “but I sorta think you could use this.”

“Oh, god,” Lena says, “did I hear clapping?” She pulls the coffee towards her and looks around for milk.

“Most likely,” the waitress says, pushing a tin pitcher of milk in her direction.

“For me?” She feels the prickle of heat at her hairline that always comes when she’s embarrassed. “I mean, for that debacle back there?”

“Well, I don’t know about debacle,” the waitress says, stretching out the syllables until the word seems to mean something different. “There’s always some kind of goings-on around here.”

Lena’s smile wobbles. Do not cry, she tells herself so fiercely she worries she’s said it out loud. But the waitress doesn’t react. Lena says, “Maybe not goings-on caused by a sleep-deprived idiot with a backpack?” She sips her coffee, expecting it to taste like the hot, dirty blandness she’s been living on for the past three days, but instead tastes the deep brown of velvet at Christmastime. “Yum.”

The waitress smiles. “It’s the one thing I miss,” she says, gesturing at her belly. “Well, that and cigarettes, but don’t tell anyone about the latter.” She holds out her hand. “Jeannine.”

“Pardon?”

Speaking extra slowly, the waitress says, “I. Am. Jeannine.” She makes an exaggerated pantomime, gesturing towards herself first and then Lena, ending by making a giant question mark in the air.

“I. Am. An. Idiot.” Lena laughs. “Also, Lena.”

“Hey, Lena. Want some more coffee before you eat that cup?”

Lena laughs again. It feels good to laugh. “It’s really good,” she says.

“Sy takes his coffee seriously.”

“Sy?”

“The all-knowing, all-seeing owner, cook, boss, head of Sy’s Diner.”

“The sign just says ‘Diner.’”

“Sy says that’s in case he has to make a quick exit.” Jeannine winces, pressing her hand to the small of her back. “But he’s just cheap. No one leaves Laurel quick; they’re all dead.” She winces again, arching her back.

“Are you okay?” For all her humor, Jeannine’s eyes are deeply shadowed and her mouth pulls tight at the corners.

“Just the baby making itself known is all. You drink your coffee. I’ll be back to see about your breakfast after I get some orders out.” Jeannine turns in the narrow space between the counter and the kitchen and reaches for the plates in the pass-through. She piles them along her arms as if she’s a circus performer getting ready for her big act, and walks them to a table where four older men sit, her toes turned out like a dancer’s and an easy quip on her lips. She looks ready to burst and she makes it all look easy.

Lena takes another sip of coffee, reaching unconsciously with her other hand for her braid—a nervous gesture left over from childhood, which wasn’t, as the crow flies, that long ago. But her braid’s gone, cut it off in the bus station bathroom in Syracuse. Disappearing isn’t all that hard. You can look up anything, including step-by-step instructions on how to leave your life. In every article the consensus had been clear about changing your appearance: cut your hair, change the clothes you wear, put on glasses or take off glasses, travel light, don’t leave breadcrumbs. You’re not going back. Cutting her hair had been hard. It had tied her to her mother—all those afternoons of putting it up in a bun for ballet, her mother holding the hairpins pressed between her lips, twisting Lena’s ponytail, apologizing for pulling the hair, telling her she looked great, telling Lena how proud she was of her even though they both knew she couldn’t do the fast turns and the high leg lifts, even though they both knew she wasn’t really a dancer, just a girl who liked to dance. It hadn’t mattered. Her mother, too, had had the same long dark hair, threaded with gray, but wavy just like Lena’s until it started falling out.

In the mirror in Syracuse, and in all the bus station mirrors that followed, Lena looked shorn and smudged, like a bad drawing from art class. She had tucked the braid into the pocket of her backpack, pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt, and gone back out into the main terminal where other travelers sat in the cage-like metal chairs waiting for their buses. It had been late. Most people slept where they sat, perched against their bags or their suitcases, their hoods or their hats pulled close around their faces. Maybe they were all running away from something, Lena had thought. Maybe they were all together on the same strange adventure even though they were all strangers. It had been momentarily comforting to think so, but no one had spoken to her, and no one had noticed her when she found a row of empty seats and curled up with her head on her pack, and that was good.

The diner fills, empties, and fills again. The noise and clatter, the heat and steam create a kind of pocket of anonymity that Lena nestles into gratefully. No one knows her here and no one needs to. Mostly men enter, wearing jeans and T-shirts and dark flannel over said T-shirts. Most wear baseball caps too. An older woman with the no-nonsense look of a school librarian or principal sits in a booth by herself, reading. At the counter on either side of Lena, men order eggs and bacon, hash browns and coffee and cinnamon rolls. Jeannine banters her way up and down the counter, refilling coffees, including Lena’s with a conspiratorial wink. The counter also holds numerous glass-topped cake plates overstuffed with sweets and baked goods so fresh the glass clouds up, and Jeannine has to part the ways to put the customer’s plates and cups down in the narrow space.

“You planning on ordering something to eat anytime soon,” Jeannine says. She laughs at Lena’s stricken face then. “I didn’t mean for you to get up. You can keep that space for as long as you want. I just thought you might be hungry.”

Lena’s so hungry she could eat two breakfasts and then some, but she reaches for her wallet first. She doesn’t know how long her money needs to last before she arrives at her destination and finds a job. And now she needs to buy a new bus ticket. Shit.

Shit.

Her wallet’s not in the side pocket of her pack. Front pocket? No. She feels around the shirts rolled and tucked into the main compartment. Shitshitshitshitshitshit.

Through her panic, she hears Jeannine’s honey-on-toast voice say, “We don’t generally advocate unpacking at the counter,” but when Lena looks up, Jeannine drops the joke and says, “What’s wrong?”

And then Lena knows: her coat, oh god, her coat. The coat she had bunched on the seat for a pillow, tucking her wallet into the pocket to protect it in case she slept. And she was so nauseous when the bus stopped in this dark little town in the back end of nowhere that she hadn’t given her coat or her wallet a thought in her rush to get off.

The guy sitting next to Lena at the counter stands, a wall of flannel and flesh. He cocks his index finger and thumb towards the kitchen pass-through and says, “Later,” and picks up his check. He hasn’t touched his toast.

Lena stands too. She feels sick. “I’m good for the coffee,” she tells Jeannine. “See.” She pulls a five-dollar bill and some change from her pocket. “I just seem to have misplaced my wallet.” She begins stuffing her T-shirts into the pack, not even trying to keep them neat. There’s no identifying information in the wallet, she’d seen to that, so there’s no way she can be traced through it. No way to get it back, either. Anyway, the chances of the money still being in it are slim to none.

Jeannine catches her arm. “Slow down,” she says. “Two coffee’s ain’t exactly grand larceny.” Between them the glass dome protecting a pyramid of scones shimmers with sweat. “You best go look for it. I can watch your pack.”

When Lena doesn’t answer, Jeannine says, “I think we both know I’d be hard-pressed to make a getaway with your stuff.”

Lena laughs, weakly, but she laughs. “Never mind,” she says, “it’s gone. It took the bus right back out of town without me. I can picture where it is, but I can’t get it.”

“You can call the company,” Jeannine says, but Lena shakes her head. “I can’t,” she says.

Jeannine looks like she’d like to argue, but then changes her mind. “Well, you know your own mind, I guess” is what she says, but what she means is Lena is one crazy bitch. Lena can feel it. She wants to say sorry though she doesn’t have anything to apologize for. Instead she asks, pointing to her empty cup, “Is it bottomless?”

“As an artesian well.” Jeannine fills Lena’s cup. She sets a fresh tin pot of cream beside it. When Lena glances at the untouched plate of toast left by the flannel man, Jeannine pushes it in front of her. “Good idea,” she says, “I hate food going to waste. It ain’t like Walt needed the calories.”

Heat floods Lena’s face, beating against the barrier of skin. Should she say something to Jeannine? Refuse the toast? But Jeannine’s already filling other coffee cups, smiling at other people, her free hand fisted in the small of her back. Fine, then. Just fine, Lena thinks defiantly. It is a shame when food goes to waste. She reaches for the jam and her knife.

---

After five cups of coffee, Lena stands from the stool to stretch. Flannel Man’s toast—Walt, Walt’s toast—is long gone. Jeannine, too, has disappeared. The librarian-looking woman still reads her book in a corner booth. There’s clattering from the kitchen, but basically Lena’s got the place to herself. She hasn’t figured out what to do: about her wallet on the bus, about continuing her journey, about staying here, maybe throwing herself on Jeannine’s mercy for a day or two until she can figure out what’s next. She can even go back. No one at home or at college knows she’s gone yet—the beauty of spring break: she’s off the grid. Her father thinks she’s with friends; her friends think she’s gone home. All it would take is a phone call: “I was checking out graduate programs in the South. I’ve lost my wallet. Can you wire money?” That simple, and the past three days and all the days that led up to them would disappear. The knowledge that she can return without anyone being the wiser sits with her uneasily, like a free offer you know isn’t free.

The door to the diner’s single bathroom is closed. Lena waits her turn beside a screen door that leads to a gravel lot bordered by a narrow dirt road with a wire-fenced field on the other side. Buds and new leaves coat the trees in a sheen of neon green and pink. Above it all—field, diner, trees, and road—the high blue silhouette of the mountains. Now the diner’s cleared out, the relative quiet should be comfortable, but Lena feels exposed, especially with the bathroom tucked in so close to the kitchen. A song she doesn’t recognize, something about a coal train hauling it away, blares from a radio, and then an ad for the new phones comes on: Can anyone hear me now? Lena turns away even though there’s not actually anything to turn from or to. Behind the bathroom door, a fan buzzes noisily. Back in the diner proper, sunlight rakes the windows and the half-cleared tables. She looks at her watch. 10:02.

She can’t hear any sounds except for the fan. It’s pretty loud, but shouldn’t she hear water running or a toilet flushing or paper crinkling or something? What if no one’s in there? What if she’s just waiting and being stupidly polite and there’s no one actually using the bathroom? She regrets all that coffee.

10:05.

10:10.

10:12.

Fine.

The door swings open as if it never really latched properly, as if it hasn’t actually been closed all this time, which does, in fact, make Lena feel like an idiot. She shuts the door and runs, fumbling with her jeans, practically falling onto the toilet. Sweet relief. Oh, thank god. She bends across her lap, her head in her hands, and lets herself relax.

“Sweet Jesus.” It’s what Lena’s mother used to say when something astonished or upset her, usually both simultaneously, but Lena had never said it. Before now.

Jeannine slumps against the far wall with her pants off and her knees drawn up. The first thing Lena thinks when she sees her is: how’d she get in here? Then she realizes Jeannine has been here all along. Jeannine’s mouth opens wide as if she can’t get enough air, as if she might scream, although she doesn’t. Her eyes close and her back arches as if she’s been shoved from behind. She presses a hand to her swollen belly, pushing against it as if she could dislodge the huge thing beneath her skin. “Fuck,” she says. Air, clammy and slick, blows from the fan. Fluorescent light paints the walls a sickly yellow.

Lena pulls up her jeans, then kneels. She’s about to say something idiotic like “What can I do?” but Jeannine’s hand closes around her wrist until Lena feels her bones move. Her knees soak up moisture from the floor. The red floor. She isn’t sure who whimpers, herself, or Jeannine, but then Jeannine arches back, pulling Lena towards her. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” she says, “I am not having this baby.” Lena holds on until the contraction subsides.

Jeannine’s eyes close; she’s breathing shallowly. Then she opens her eyes and winks. “Helluva way to earn that toast,” she says.

Lena wants to go for help, but Jeannine groans into a new contraction, pushing away from the floor, pulling Lena with her, and Lena holds on. “Don’t let me alone here,” Jeannine says. “Don’t you dare.” Her awful belly, furred and striped, convulses between them.

Lena had seen a mare give birth once. All the girls at the stable had been waiting and hoping to see the foal born. It was just dumb luck that Lena’s ride had been late. It had been she who found the mare down on her side, head turned as if to bite the rising mound of her flank, the bloody mess in the straw, the deep groans and the struggle to rise and the falling back. None of the girls had thought about what the birth would be like for the mare. Why would they? The mare was a docile Morgan they all liked to ride. Lena had ridden her in a show the summer before and won a pink fifth-place ribbon that she’d hung over her bed at home. Even watching the mare labor and hearing her groan, she hadn’t been as aware of the pain of birth. She’d been too amazed by the presentation of the whiskery muzzle pressed against the tiny hooves, the impossibly long-lashed eye that opened and winked as if they were all in on something special and fine.

Lena gathers newspapers from the hall to pad the floor for Jeannine, opening the door just a crack. “I’m not leaving,” she says. There is so much blood and muck.

Jeannine groans, pulling on Lena’s arms, her back rising against the wall until she’s almost squatting. Something round the size of a fist emerges from her bloody bottom, then recedes as unseen forces pull it back. There are no words for her body’s courage. Even in the mess and noise, how little she actually shows on the outside for all that rending as the blind mole burrows through her body’s darkness, a strange creature that could break her. Will break her.

After the contraction passes, Jeannine slides back to the floor, panting. Lena realizes she’s panting too, gulping breaths of air in the fetid room. Jeannine’s ponytail has come loose and her hair sticks to her face; she tries to smile. “This is some full-service diner,” Jeannine quips. It would be funny, but then her hands tighten on Lena’s arms as she stiffens again and pulls back against the wall. “I need,” she says, and stops. They look at each other, breathing hard. There is no world but this bathroom. Lena remembers the way the vet’s calm assurance had soothed the mare. She doesn’t have assurance, but she can fake it. She pushes Jeannine’s hair back, leaving a dirty streak. “I know,” she says, not knowing what she knows. She scoots even closer to the huge belly, bracing Jeannine’s legs with her feet.

When the head appears, the back of a head, a face-down head, Lena holds it in her hand, feeling the nose, the eyelashes, the humanness, and tries to keep it off the floor. She braces again. Then Jeannine growls, there is no other word, and keeps growling until something pops, like water pushing through rocks, and the whole baby slides out, half in Lena’s hands and half on the newspapers. Purple and squashy-looking, slimy, open-eyed and alive. She hopes. Lena scoops it onto Jeannine’s huge belly, shielding it with her hand to keep it from rolling off. Jeannine struggles to sit up. “No, you stay here,” Lena says. She shrugs out of her sweatshirt, draping the warm fleece side over the baby. Isn’t it supposed to cry? Isn’t someone supposed to come? She doesn’t realize she’s slid next to Jeannine, half lying and half sitting against the wall, still shadowing the baby with her hand to keep it from falling off.

Jeannine opens her eyes again. “We have to stop meeting like this,” she says.

Oh god. It hurts to laugh. As if she’s been holding her breath for days.

The umbilical cord disappears inside Jeannine’s torn body like they’re having a weird, ongoing phone call. She isn’t going to deal with that. Someone will come.

Beached on Jeannine’s belly, the baby begins to cry.

 

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SUSAN MOREHOUSE grew up in West Virginia and now lives in rural New York where she teaches creative writing and literature at Alfred University. Her essays, fiction, and flash have appeared in a number of journals, including The Southern Review, Willow Springs Magazine, New Ohio Review, and Sycamore Review. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, and has been nominated for Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction. You can find her on Instagram @susan.p.morehouse.

 

Featured image by R. Mac Wheeler, courtesy of Unsplash.