II. THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

She had a great many bad moments during the first weeks of her new life, but even at what was very nearly the worst of them all-getting off the bus at three in the morning and entering a terminal four times the size of Portside-she did not regret her decision. She was, however, terrified. Rosie stood just inside the doorway of Gate 62, clutching her handbag tightly in both hands and looking around with wide eyes as people rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As she watched, a man sprinted toward a woman who had just gotten off Rosie’s bus, seized her, and spun her around so violently that her feet left the ground. The woman crowed with delight and terror, her cry as bright as a flashgun in the crowded, confused terminal. There was a bank of video games to Rosie’s right, and although it was the darkest hour of the morning, kids-most with their baseball caps turned around backward and at least eighty per cent of their hair buzzed off-were bellied up to all of them.

“Try again, Space Cadet!” the one nearest to Rosie invited in a grinding, inhuman voice.

“Try again, Space Cadet! Try again, Space Cadet!” She walked slowly past the video games and into the terminal, sure of only one thing: she didn’t dare go out at this hour of the morning. She felt the chances were excellent that she would be raped, killed, and stuffed into the nearest garbage can if she did. She glanced left and saw a pair of uniformed policemen coming down the escalator from the upper level. One was twirling his nightstick in a complex pattern. The other was grinning in a hard, humorless way that made her think of a man eight hundred miles behind her. He grinned, but there was no grin in his constantly moving eyes. What if their job is to tour the place every hour or so and kick out everyone who doesn’t have a ticket? What will you do then? She’d handle that if it came up, that was what she’d do. For the time being she moved away from the escalator and toward an alcove where a dozen or so travelers were parked in hard plastic contour chairs. Small coin-op TVs were bolted to the arms of these chairs. Rosie kept an eye on the cops as she went and was relieved to see them move across the floor of the terminal and away from her. In two and a half hours, three at the most, it would be daylight. After that they could catch her and kick her out. Until then she wanted to stay right here, where there were lights and lots of people. She sat down in one of the TV chairs. Two seats away on her left, a girl wearing a faded denim jacket and holding a backpack on her lap was dozing. Her eyes rolled beneath her purple-tinged eyelids, and a long, silvery strand of saliva depended from her lower lip. Four words had been tattooed on the back of her right hand, straggling blue capitals that announced I LOVE MY HUNNEY. Where’s your honey now, sweetheart? Rosie thought. She looked at the blank screen of the TV, then at the tiled wall on her right. Here someone had scrawled the words SUCK MY AIDS-INFECTED COCK in red Magic Marker. She looked away hastily, as if the words would burn her retinas if she looked at them too long, and gazed across the terminal. On the far wall was a huge lighted clock. It was 3:16 a.m. Two and a half more hours and I can leave, she thought, and began to wait them through.

She’d had a cheeseburger and a lemonade when the bus made a rest-stop around six o’clock the previous evening, nothing since then, and she was hungry. She sat in the TV alcove until the hands of the big clock made it around to four, then decided she’d better get a bite. She crossed to the small cafeteria near the ticket windows, stepping over several sleeping people on her way. Many of them had their arms curled protectively around bulging, tape-mended plastic garbage bags, and by the time Rosie got coffee and juice and a bowl of Special K, she understood that she had been needlessly worried about being kicked out by the cops. These sleepers weren’t through-travelers; they were homeless people camping out in the bus terminal. Rosie felt sorry for them, but she also felt perversely comforted-it was good to know there would be a place for her tomorrow night, if she really needed one. And if he comes here, to this city, where do you think he’ll check first? What do you think will be his very first stop? That was silly-he wasn’t going to find her, there was absolutely no way he could find her-but the thought still sent a cold finger up her back, tracing the curve of her spine. The food made her feel better, stronger and more awake. When she had finished (lingering over her coffee until she saw the Chicano busboy looking at her with unconcealed impatience), she started slowly back to the TV alcove. On the way, she caught sight of a blue-and-white circle over a booth near the rental-car kiosks. The words bending their way around the circle’s blue outer stripe were TRAVELERS AID, and Rosie thought, not without a twinkle of humor, that if there had ever been a traveler in the history of the world who needed aid, it was her. She took a step toward the lighted circle. There was a man sitting inside the booth under it, she saw-a middle-aged guy with thinning hair and hornrimmed glasses. He was reading a newspaper. She took another step in his direction, then stopped again. She wasn’t really going over there, was she? What in God’s name would she tell him? That she had left her husband? That she had gone with nothing but her handbag, his ATM card, and the clothes she stood up in? Why not? Practical-Sensible asked, and the total lack of sympathy in her voice struck Rosie like a slap. If you had the guts to leave him in the first place, don’t you have the guts to own up to it? She didn’t know if she did or not, but she knew that telling a stranger the central fact of her life at four o’clock in the morning would be very difficult. And probably he’d just tell me to get lost, anyway. Probably his job is helping people to replace their lost tickets, or making lost-children announcements over the loudspeakers. But her feet started moving in the direction of the Travelers Aid booth just the same, and she understood that she did mean to speak to the stranger with the thinning hair and the hornrimmed glasses, and that she was going to do it for the simplest reason in the universe: she had no other choice. In the days ahead she would probably have to tell a lot of people that she had left her husband, that she had lived in a daze behind a closed door for fourteen years, that she had damned few life-skills and no work-skills at all, that she needed help, that she needed to depend on the kindness of strangers. But none of that is really my fault, is it? she thought, and her own calmness surprised her, almost stunned her. She came to the booth and put the hand not currently clutching the strap of her bag on the counter. She looked hopefully and fearfully down at the bent head of the man in the hornrimmed glasses, looking at his brown, freckled skull through the strands of hair laid across it in neat thin rows. She waited for him to look up, but he was absorbed in his paper, which was written in a foreign language that looked like either Greek or Russian. He carefully turned a page and frowned at a picture of two soccer players tussling over a ball.

“Excuse me?” she asked in a small voice, and the man in the booth raised his head. Please let his eyes be kind, she thought suddenly. Even if he can’t do anything, please let his eyes be kind… and let them see me, me, the real person who is standing here with nothing but the strap of this Kmart bag to hold onto. And, she saw, his eyes were kind. Weak and swimmy behind the thick lenses of his glasses… but kind.