Where (27 page)
Authors: Kit Reed
We go along in the dark, following beads of light in the floor to our seats in the very back row. It's so dark in here that we can't make out who the others are, only that they're kids and they won't talk to us. Whether they're asleep or drugged or just pretending is never clear. We'll never find out where these kids were or what they were doing when they got picked up or why they were picked up in the first place or why we're all in here together, although I can guess. That's OK, I think as we stumble into the back row, but I hate that it took us forever to get here, and these are the last seats in the bus.
And that there are so many people in here. From the outside the bus doesn't look that big, but there's no bus driver to steer by, no teacher herding us, nobody to ask. When you grow up without explanations, you don't ask. You keep doing what you have to do.
As if he is watching. In hopes.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Days go by, at least I think it's been days. Food happens, I think, but I can't know if it really does. Sometimes the bus fills with the smell of food, people farting, shifting in all the rows ahead of us, but the only ones I hear talking are Dorcas and Bill and me, and only a little bit. It's questions, like why they won't talk to us and when is the food, although we never get hungry. The bathrooms are right across the aisle from us, but nobody comes and I don't have to go.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
As we ride along we wonder, but we don't really want to know. It's enough to be running along ahead of the sad outcasts we were in the last place. Every few hours or days Bill or Dorcas will ask where this thing is going and we name places we used to live and places we want to see, just not the one we really care about, in part because we don't know exactly where that is. We don't ask each other who we're looking for because that's too personal, but we all know why we're here.
All the regular kids went back into the building that day, everybody but us. I think the war orphans left that place shortly after the telegram came to their house, unless the service sent somebody to break the news. Poor kids, their fathers got killed, this won't make it better but at least they know. And the rest? Ordinary, so they belong at St. Paul's. His job was essential to the war effort on the home front or he was too sick to serve; either way he didn't have to go. Either he never went to war, or it ended, and he came home, we don't know.
I know that they made Dorcas and Bill and me wait in the red tape box because we don't belong in that school.
There is no real place for us. Mother Immaculata thought one thing, but we know another.
Not dead.
They just don't know where he is, is all.
So here we are parked side by side by side in the back row of the bus, sitting in here in the dark and it's nothing we did, it's who we are. Then the silence gets too heavy and we talk. Or I think we do.
Bill starts. “So where were all the kids whose fathers did get killed?”
“What?”
“You know, back on the playground.”
It comes out of Dorcas in a wail. “I don't know, I Don't
Know.
”
I do. “They don't go to our school.”
“Oh.”
Bill pushes: “Is that better or worse than this?”
Dorcas is quick. “Oh, it's much worse.”
Not me: “I don't know, I don't
know.
”
Change the subject, Jessie. Change it fast, but don't ask the next question. It's too personal. Never ask us where we were when we got the telegram.
Don't make us tell you what that was like.
I ask the question that it's OK to ask. “Where did they say he was when it happened?”
“Chosin.” It comes out of Bill like a cough.
Dorcas whips her head around, all puzzled. “What's that?”
“You don't know?”
I think, but do not tell her,
Different war.
Bill turns to me. “Yours?”
“Coral Sea.”
“Where was yours?”
Dorcas finally gets it. “Manila Bay.”
We all do. Bill stands up and yells at the backs of a hundred heads on the unmoved, unmoving bodies slouched in seats ahead of us because they got on the bus before we did. He yells loud enough to reach everybody in every row all the way to the front of the bus and Mother Immaculata and all those ordinary kids back at our old school.
Shouting, “Where did they tell you they lost him?”
And the answers come from every row, all the way to the front of the bus. When they do, it is stupendous.
“Tikrit,” and “Manassas,” “Da Nang,” “Belleau Woods,” “Benghazi,” “Agadir⦔
The names of all the old wars and certain new ones and wars we haven't heard of yet come out in a blast, cries that go on and on, as though whatever the nail is, Bill hit it on the head.
For the first time the bus stops.
Ahead of us, the others cough and shift in their seats, embarrassed. Reassembling themselves. There's the confused stir of someone standing, way up there in the front of the bus, followed by the doors whishing open, the hush of footsteps stifled as the thoughtful person or people hurry down and out. Then the doors whish shut and clamp tight so we can shove off.
In the back row the three of us scramble to change places, shuffling ourselves like a deck of cards so we can take turns craning at the window, but there's nothing to see. It looks darker out there than it is in here. The bus is moving again, everything dark and everybody silent, sending the three of us back into our own heads where we sit, curled up tight around our hopes. The bus stops again, long enough for someone new to get out. It's probably time for the third row to line up at the exit, but at the next stop, nobody leaves. I don't hear that gasp the doors make when they whish open, or the rush of somebody pounding down the steps, which is a puzzle. At least nobody gets on.
At the next stop so many people get off that I can't count them and all my blood backs up in my head:
Me next, me, me!
Dozens get off and nobody comes back. A good thing, I tell myself. It could mean â¦
Oh, Jessie. Don't.
But the next time we stop kids seem to get off in no particular order, from the front of the bus, the middle of the bus, anywhere in the bus; they scatter before the doors clamp shut on their heels while the rest of us ride on, and I begin to think â¦
I don't want to think.
Bill says it. “We're never getting off this fucking bus.”
If John Paul Jones had a wife and kids that he left behind to fight for whatever; if he never came back, they're probably sitting up there in the dark somewhere near the front of our bus. Waiting. We aren't all the same age, in fact we're nothing alike. We are none of us the same person. What we are is people whose fathers got lost in some war, frozen at the age we were when we first heard. It won't matter when this happened to us or which war, the only thing that matters is, lost can mean anything. No matter how long you live or what they tell you later, he's still out there andâ you mull the unfinished sentence as you run on, listening for the rest.
Author's Note
: I've carried the story of the
Marie Celeste
in my head since I was, oh, ten, and first read the story. She was discovered adrift in the open sea in the late nineteenth-centuryâ everything shipshape, gear neatly stowed, food on the stove and dents in some pillows to suggest that lives there had gone on undisturbed, until â¦
Seamen boarded the ship and discovered that with no signs of violence or disaster, all hands had vanished. The thing about the missingâ lost colonies from the Roanoke Colony to the passengers of jumbo jets that are never found and servicemen declared Missing in Actionâ is that they're never really gone. They don't leave anything behind, no physical clues to the disappearance, no cryptic notes for history to decipher, not even truncated last transmissions or black boxes, no bodies, translated: no proof of death.
At any minute they could walk through that door.
In a way, the missing never die. Like all lost colonies, like all those lost servicemen, like every loved one who vanished without a trace to prove otherwise,
They're still out there.
âKR
Â
Kit Reed
is the author of the Alex Awardâwinning
Thinner Than Thou
and many other novels. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been a James Tiptree, Jr. Award finalist. She is also a Guggenheim fellow.
Kit Reed
lives in Middletown, Connecticut, where she is the resident writer at Wesleyan University. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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Contents
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
WHERE
Copyright © 2015 by Kit Reed
“Military Secrets” copyright © 2015 by Kit Reed. This story first appeared in the March 2015 issue of
Asimov's Science Fiction
.
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Getty Images
Cover design by FORT
A Tor Book