Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (38 page)

Melanie is smiling down at us, reaching toward the lever for the door. My throat feels heavy, and I touch Beth's shoulder. "I hope that's okay," I say.

She turns back, and whatever expression had crimped her face a moment ago is gone. Now she is shaking her head from side to side.

"What?" I say.

"You're
wee-ard
" she says.

I can't help it; I laugh. "Well, sis," I say, "so are you."

The door opens. She steps toward it, and glances back to me. "Wee-ard," she repeats, and then, also laughing, she adds, "but you're cool, too.
Some
times."

Then she reaches for the railing and hauls herself in.

I stand on that corner for a long time. Too full to move, too empty to think, watching the bus pull slowly down the street until it is swallowed by the distance.

But when I finally climb into my car, it seems to know just where to go.

In the afternoon light, I drive across the city once more, making the turns the buses have taught me so well. Up this hill here, down the fork there.

Then I park across the street and look up to his third floor. That's the room where his pool table is located. The light is on. It must be his day off—and he's home.

I cross over to his house and ring the bell. He opens the door and, when he sees me there, he smiles.

"My buddy!" Rick says. "But I thought your sister—"

"Well, we were done. I could have gotten on the bus with her, but I decided not to." I pause. "Are you free?"

"For you, any time," he says.

We stand there in the surprising sunlight and shift our weight on his front step, neither of us knowing quite what to do. Then he says, "Hey, let's go for a drive." "How fitting," I tease. He grabs his coat and we get into his car.

"Where to?" I ask when he turns on the ignition.

"Everywhere," he says.

We drive and drive, and talk and talk. In the car with him, with the wind rushing by the windows, I forget about being a Somebody, or a perfect sister. I am just a woman in a car with a man, and we are making each other laugh.

Late that afternoon, as the sun is setting over the valley, he takes me up to the top of the wooded mountain. For a year I have seen this mountain from Beth's buses, and thought I was near the peak many times. But I was wrong; I'd never quite gotten to the top. I see that now, as Rick pulls up to a secret lookout spot he knows. We step out into the dusky violet light and face the wide valley below, a slice of moon hovering above us.

"Look at this," he says, holding out his arms toward the city. "Isn't it an amazing view?"

A hundred streets, a thousand streets, crisscross one another in the dying light. But there is just enough sun left for me to make out a silvery bus, moving like a fish, winding between the curbs. Maybe a bus where my sister sits. Or a bus with someone who is somehow, in ways he doesn't even know, like her. Then I look to the north and I see another bus. And to the east, there's another, and another, and another. Each one its own private history class, or luncheonette, or quilting bee, or schoolroom, or comedy theater—yet each one linked, one person at a time, to all the others. Because I can see, as Rick points it out, how they glide along, stopping for riders—riders who might have been on that run last year and are now over here, and riders from over here who might be transferring to a bus over there—and how the journeys seem separate, yet are constantly and inextricably joined together. I step back and take in all the buses coasting and turning and stopping and going—the enormous web of the world.

"Isn't it something?" he asks.

"It's beautiful," I reply.

He puts his arm around me, pointing out the sights. The air is growing cold and darkness is coming fast. We huddle close to each other to keep warm.

At three o'clock on this May afternoon, as sunlight spangles my bedroom, I stand in my slip before the mirror, in a daze of disbelief. It's not the fragrance of roses in the room that has cast a dreamy spell on me. It is that I suddenly realize that this moment is real.

Blinking myself back to alertness, flicking a look at the clock, I reach for the hanger, hooked over the wooden frame of the mirror. As I lift it up, a card that I'd stuck in the corner of the glass flutters to the floor. I crouch down to retrieve it, a Day-Glo burst of stars and exclamation marks against an orange background. I remember how pleased I was when I received it and open it now for one more look.

to, Rachel,
Hi. I aM. SO happy. For You.
Cool Beth and Cool Jesse too
(also signed by)
Bert—best wishes
Len
Good luck!—Jack
Melanie—Best wishes to you
Congrats—wish you the best—Happy Timmy
God bless—Estella
Good for you—Bailey
Years of happiness, your friend, Henry
Marco
Wow to ya—Karl
May many happy and prosperous adventures be with you,
Love, Jacob

I gaze at these signatures, executed in their handwriting with her purple pen, and think of the year and a half that has passed since my last ride with Beth and of how so much has changed. Happy Timmy's third child was born. Jacob's health ebbed and flowed, but he held on. Often, when I came to town on Sundays or weeknights to visit Beth, sometimes meeting at the bus terminal parking lot so that, just as the buses docked in the garage for the evening, she could introduce me to her newest fellow traveler, Jacob would invite us for dinner or a car ride to take in the Christmas lights. I wondered if I might see Rodolpho, who settled down with his sweetheart, then left bus driving behind to enter the police academy. I never did, though I often ran into Estella in the dispatcher's office, or Bailey in the drivers' room, or saw Henry's wide-armed wave hailing me from a passing bus. Jack did not find his long-lost love, nor did he shift from his independent ways. Bert, inching toward retirement, cut back on his driving. Cliff, to Beth's dismay, quit to become a car mechanic. She mourned for weeks, especially after she sent him a heartfelt letter wishing him well and he never responded. "Thaz life," she told me, first with a sigh, then a shrug. Rick moved on, too, becoming a driver for another bus company that made long runs to distant cities. Melanie continued to drive.

But those were only the headlines. The more important stories lay deep inside Beth, sometimes too deep to find their way into letters: new affections, new end-of-the-line confessions, sudden downshifts in tolerance for her companionship. Throughout it all, I listened if she chose to share and offered comfort when she wanted it. Jesse steadfastly did the same. When, near the end of these many months, she had to return to the hospital, this time for a hysterectomy to eliminate the uterine fibroid problem, she sought my comfort, though once again I was only one of the people she relied on. Olivia, whose recent promotion beyond case manager had not prompted Beth to curtail her morning weather calls, phoned often, as did Wendy, who replaced Olivia. Vera, now healthy again, stopped by the hospital. Drivers old and new sent cards. Jesse sat at Beth's side while she slept, talking to me about how to take it as it comes in life. And Dad invited her to recover at his house after the surgery, and cared for her day and night while her scar healed.

But the biggest change has been my own, and on this brilliant spring morning sixteen months after I climbed the mountain with Rick, I know that it would never have happened had I not spent my year with Beth. It was she whose very presence caused the ice around my heart to thaw and who nudged me tenaciously to find the courage to go out with a man again. Rick's kind ways and fondness for me stirred me further; in the special friendship that ensued, I had let myself care. Beth's wish to have a driver as a brother-in-law has not come to pass, but through our Scrabble games in Rick's living room and our walks on rainy golf courses I came to want a different life for myself—and, for the first time, believed I was capable of having one.

This is what I am thinking, as I rise, set the card on the bed, and step into my wedding gown. I am forty-one, and, today, by incredible coincidence, Beth and I became twins again. As I stand in the bedroom, adjusting the shoulder straps of my cream-colored dress, I glance outside, down to the yard of the house where I now live with Sam: a house to which I moved last week as a fiancée and to which I will return tonight as a bride. He is waiting for me in that sunlit yard, ablaze with indigo and cranberry-colored flowers, and I know, were he to look up and glimpse me in the window, he would smile in his loving way and mouth the words we have been saying to each other for the past ten months since I called him—this time not hanging up—and we began a surprising and wondrous courtship: "It's a miracle."

I step back from the window, and then I hear, blocks away, a city bus passing in the distance. I am no longer scared, I think. I do not feel cold. I lower the veil over my face, over the same hair and eyes and—at last I can admit—love of life that I share with Beth. Then I reach forward and open the door.

The material in this book was derived from my observations and memories and from interviews with people in Beth's life. I am deeply grateful to the bus drivers and to the many others at the bus company who provided me with information. I also could not have gone forward with this project without the warmth and insight I received from Beth's service providers, both those who appear in these pages and their colleagues behind the scenes. Special thanks go as well to the members of my family, whose recollections helped me broaden and sharpen mine, and who have courageously allowed me to tell our story.

In addition, I am indebted to the friends, coworkers, people affiliated with the field of mental retardation, and readers whose literary insights, patient encouragement, comic relief, and late-night brainstorming kept me on this sometimes bumpy path: Susan Balée, Amy Burns, Angela Capio, Connie Falcone, Bethany Gorney, Patricia Hamill, Marshall Hill, Sharon Klepfer, Fran Metzman, Diana Myers, Kristine Nilsson, Sherina Poorman, Kathy Ramsland, Betty Randolph, Lari Robling, Alice Schell, the many participants on SibNet, Michael Smull, Joy Stocke, John Timpane, and David Tucker. I am particularly honored to have encountered Anne Dubuisson, a lucky happenstance orchestrated by Justin Cronin; had it not been for her compassionate tutelage, I would not have embarked on this journey, nor could I have lifted myself as deftly out of the occasional rut. I appreciate too the historians, linguists, and writers who provided background on the region, including Troy Boyer, George M. Meiser IX, Dr. Eugene Stine, Nancy A. Stine, the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, and the Pennsylvania German Society. And an uppercase Thanks to Jayne Yaffe Kemp, my superb manuscript editor, for her meticulous eye and cheerful demeanor.

I will always marvel at the remarkable fortune that delivered me into the hands of two of the most indefatigable, perceptive, and generous spirits I know, Elaine Pfefferblit, my editor, and Anne Edelstein, my agent. One might dream of such devotion and diligence, as well as astuteness and optimism, but to find all these qualities in one's closest associates at the same time is one of life's rare gifts.

And the Number One thanks on this Top Ten list goes to the Purple Sheriff, who opened her life to me.

I feel blessed to know all of you.