THE ONES WE KEEP Excerpt!

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Inside the bus station she catches sight of herself in a wall of mirrored glass. The rubber band she had used to hold back her hair for the hike has fallen off, and clumps of wet, unbrushed strands hang around her shoulders. She’s hot and bright red, and rivulets of sweat are running down her neck. No wonder the people she passed on the sidewalk had stared.

At the ticket counter she joins a short line. When it’s her turn she shrugs off her backpack and, while the lady at the ticket counter waits, tapping her fingers on the counter, Olivia unzips the various pockets until she locates her wallet. It contains only two fives and one lone credit card.

“Can I help you?” A clipped, impatient voice. The woman is glaring at her.

“Can you just hold on a sec?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I thought—­”

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“Portland,” the woman barks. “Bangor, Albany, Woodstock, Middlebury, New York City.”

Why can’t she think?

But New York, of course. That was the plan.

Her ticket finally in hand, she studies the board. There’s a full two hours to wait. Arrival time: four in the morning. Taking a seat at the back of the waiting room, as far from the door as she can get, she closes her eyes and dozes off.

She comes to when she’s jostled by a man settling into the seat beside her. The station is filling with people. A few are standing in front of a television screen that’s mounted high on the wall, and everyone’s eyes are riveted. What are they watching? Olivia holds her breath. Has it got something to do with what happened earlier today, just a few miles from here?

“Apollo 15,” the man beside her says. The screen is filled with clouds, advancing and receding and advancing again, and then, in the distance, a tiny black speck, getting larger and larger. The camera recording the historic moment jerks this way and that.

Suddenly the speck becomes two parachutes that open, and the moment after that the whole station claps as what the narrator calls the command module falls into the water.

“Three parachutes were meant to open,” Olivia’s seatmate says. “But there are only two.”

“—­appears to be all right,” the narrator is saying in excited tones, “—­hasn’t turned over.”

Was it supposed to turn over so the astronauts could extricate themselves? Olivia watches, spellbound, as the module bobs 34

T he Ones We Keep

up and down. How ironic if, after the flight all the way to the moon and back, the astronauts, supposedly safe now on their own planet, were to perish as the world watched.

Her eyes fill with tears. If I am to do this, she tells herself, I must numb myself. That is my task, my only task: to numb myself while I wait.

“They’re fine,” says the man beside her, holding out a tissue.

Wait for what?

“They’re safe. Wouldn’t it be funny if—­” But she’s stopped listening to him. When a voice over the loudspeaker announces the Middlebury bus, he reaches for his bag and gets up.

“You take care of yourself,” he says. A few minutes later, buses to Bennington and to Manchester, New Hampshire, are called.

Olivia consults her watch. It’s nearly four thirty.

She hasn’t had anything to eat since the sandwich she’d had on that rock. In a corner of the terminal is a coffee bar with a few small tables. She walks over and orders a Coke and a bowl of tomato soup. Pulling her credit card from the side pocket of her backpack, she offers it to the woman behind the register.

“Plastic for $1.08?”

She looks helplessly at the woman, who accepts the card and runs it. Olivia’s hesitant to let the two fives go. Ten dollars cash leaves very little margin for error, at least until she gets home, where, under her jewelry box, the one Harry gave her when he asked her to marry him—­Oh, pray that it’s still there—­is the five hundred dollars they keep for emergencies. Still, without a plan, she has no idea how much money she will need and when, and 35

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the credit card is risky. She could be traced. Even now, she thinks, glancing at the entrance to the station, as if someone might burst through the door looking for the lady who just ordered a bowl of tomato soup.

She carries the tray to a table under the window. Through it she can see an old man seated on a bench. He has something in a paper bag, which he drops in bits onto the pavement, and greedy pigeons peck it up. When he’s finished, he crumples the bag and tosses it on the ground. Then he yawns and, reaching into his pocket, pulls out a cigarette. He bends forward to light it, inhales deeply, leans back against the bench, and gazes over at the station.

Olivia draws back, not wanting to be seen watching. Instead she sits, letting her soup grow cold, as people move in and out of the waiting room before boarding their buses. When the bus to New York City is called, she’s the first on, choosing a window seat at the very back. The driver swings into his seat and maneuvers the bus into the road with a screech of metal.

It begins to rain, softly at first, then harder. Water streams down the windows, blurring the tiny towns they pass through, each with its white painted church and town square. It’s as if the artist, upon completing his work, had taken his thumb and drawn it across the scene, rubbing it back and forth until what was left wasn’t the thing itself but the suggestion of it.

By the time they pull onto the highway, the rain is teeming down, flooding the road and the green fields, pouring off the branches of trees. Olivia stares through the window until it grows dark and the cars speeding toward them on the other 36

T he Ones We Keep

side of the median are replaced by the reflection of a stranger in a sun hat.

Perhaps there is a place where you can run from your family and friends with impunity—­a strange and wonderful place where the point isn’t to love and be loved so hard that, if something happens, you can die of the wounds that love has inflicted. The point, Olivia thinks as she begins to nod off, is something quite different, although at the moment she can’t imagine what it might be.

At Woodstock she’s awakened by a tall young man in a raincoat taking the seat beside her. It’s nearly two thirty in the morning.

She smiles briefly, then closes her eyes again and finds herself being swallowed by a whirling blackness until she, too, is whirling, whirling, away from the day and everything that has happened. When the bus finally pulls into Port Authority, her cheeks are wet. She’s been crying again but has no memory of it. She glances at her seatmate, who is studying her face. She holds his eyes for a moment, then reaches under the seat for her backpack.

When the doors open the young man steps into the aisle, allowing her to proceed.

“Is there someone meeting you?” he asks, and when she doesn’t respond, he says, “Take care of yourself, hear?” echoing the words of the man in the bus station.

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