To the Boy on the Night Bus
You could’ve been five or twelve, for all I knew. I’m not good with children; I haven’t been around them often, never witnessed or memorized the milestones that my friends my age seem to carry like instinct. When do teeth start growing? When do they fall out? When do knees stop looking soft and start looking knobby? You were small, that I know, sleep softening your face already soft with youth, lashes fluttering against your dusty cheeks, pressed against the fabric of your father’s shirt. The squish forced your lips outward, like a fish’s mouth. I felt a prickle of guilt then—and now—for not even being able to guess your age, for not being the kind of woman who is familiar with these sorts of things. I was once that small. I once curled up against my own father. How could I not know?
I’d gotten the last ticket for the last bus leaving that evening from Pakse to Vientiane, a bus I had to take to make my flight to Osaka the next day. It was poor planning on my part, a series of mistakes and spontaneous decisions that led to my standing in front of the woman at the counter, pleading for a spot on the bus. “I’ll stand if I have to,” I said, flashing her my friendliest smile.
She hesitated. “It’s…not really a seat,” she said. “It’s…a bed. In the back. With others.”
I nodded. I didn’t have another option. “That’s fine,” I said. “Totally fine.” I stuck my thumb up, fished out the right number of Kip, and an additional $5 U.S. dollar bill for good measure. Still, she paused before she handed me the ticket.
By the time I boarded, the sky had turned lavender, the low hills smudged like thumbprints against it. Inside, the bus smelled like plastic, dust, and feet, and the heat clung close and heavy. The aisle was narrow and already crowded with knees, dangling plastic bags, someone’s sleepily flung elbow. I held my pack tight against my chest. The mattress stretched across the back wall like an afterthought—thinly padded like a gym mat, no dividers, no boundary between stranger and stranger. There you were, already curled into a man’s side. He—your father? —looked at me, looked at you, and shifted without a word. You didn’t stir. I hesitated, unsure, but there was no other space.
I took off my shoes and climbed into the narrow gap left between you and the window. I lay down carefully, stiffly, on my side, trying not to touch you, but it was impossible. There were too many of us crammed into too small a space. My chest pressed against your small shoulder blades; my knees bent behind yours. Our breathing fell into a rhythm so gradually I didn’t notice until it was done, until I felt your ribcage expand in tandem with mine.
“These small, wistful griefs, born of almosts, always seem to carry that same kind of softness, and so many of them led me here.”
After a few minutes, there was some pain; the side I was laying on was still sore from a fresh tattoo of a tuna fish I’d gotten a few days before, from a tattoo artist I found on Google Maps. We didn’t have a shared language, but I showed him a picture of what I sort of wanted, and he drew up a sketch that was good enough. I’m not as precious about these things as I was before I got sick; it’s only ink on a body, only a lifetime. The tattoo is permanent only as long as the body exists, which is a limited amount of time.
Eventually, the pain came to be too much. I shifted, tenderly, so as not to wake you. I faced the window now; my nose pressed against the clammy glass. Outside, Laos drifted past in blue-gray layers, mist-laced mountains rising like sleeping giants, their edges blurred by dusk. Villages blurred by in a scatter of tin roofs and temple spires, gold catching in the fading light. We passed through towns I didn’t know the names of, flickering with neon signs and cooking smoke. I shifted again, laying on my back. The bus slowed to a stop, and the driver stepped off. Through the window, I watched him light a cigarette.
When the bus groaned into motion again a few minutes later, you, still asleep, rolled toward me. You nudged your forehead against my collarbone and flopped an arm over my ribs. I froze. I didn’t know what to do with my own arms, with my breath, with what felt like a sudden strange responsibility, with the lurching in my gut.
I didn’t know you; I had no idea what your name was or what your voice sounded like. I hadn’t felt this way about the baby a Bolivian woman shoved into my arms as she heaved crates of clucking chickens into the colectivo, or about a friend’s little brother who wouldn’t leave my side during a late-night turned early-morning barbecue. But there was something about you, something about the silence of the bus and of the night, that made me feel a sort of tenderness. It was a tenderness tinged with ache, the kind that accompanies the flash of a nearly forgotten memory, or a glimpse of a path not taken. These small, wistful griefs, born of almosts, always seem to carry that same kind of softness, and so many of them led me here.
I had been diagnosed with leukemia almost exactly a year before. After six months and three rounds of chemotherapy, I’d achieved remission and resolved to return, somewhat, to the life I had before: a life of budget travel, days spent wandering through new cities and nights on buses. Chemotherapy saved my life. It also took away the possibility of having my own biological children. I didn’t mourn this then, when I denied my oncologists’ offer to pause treatment so I could spend thousands of dollars to extract my eggs and then thousands more to store them in an egg bank, and I hardly mourned it in the months since. I’d never planned on becoming a mother. When I considered everything I lost to my sickness, the possibility of bearing biological children seemed relatively unimportant. But the way you trusted me, without words, without a glance—I felt like I had become something, just for a moment in time, that I would never become in this life.
My imagination started to spiral, as it always does on modes of transportation. What is it about the steady movement of a vehicle—a bus, a plane, a boat, a train—that makes every possible life I could live spill out in front of me? I glanced over at your father, still asleep, and wondered if he found me pretty (unlikely, as I wasn’t very pretty then, my hair still barely grown out, my face unsuited for its length) or if maybe we’d fall in love and you would become mine, in some way. It wasn’t that I was attracted to your father. Us falling in love was the only way I could fathom extending that feeling—a feeling so maternal it stunned me—beyond that night, beyond the bus. You wore a shirt with tiny buttons. What would it be like to button buttons so small?
“But the way you trusted me, without words, without a glance—I felt like I had become something, just for a moment in time, that I would never become in this life.”
By the time the bus hissed to its final stop in Vientiane, your arm was still wrapped around me. The city was just beginning to wake, the light coming in through the window in a pale blue wash. You woke slowly, rubbing your eyes with the backs of your little hands, and glanced up at me. I had steeled myself for the possibility that you’d be afraid of me when you finally woke—I was just a stranger after all—but you didn’t seem frightened. Perhaps there wasn’t time for that; your father took you into his arms as soon as you awoke. He nodded at me as he began to silently gather your things into a small cloth backpack.
At your father’s urging, you slipped off the mattress and disappeared down the aisle. He followed. I sat still, as if I, too, was waiting for someone to take me into their arms and help gather my things. Outside the window, you and your father walked hand-in-hand away from the bus and into the morning, your backs growing smaller until they were specks of color against the dusty road, until you were gone.
About the Author
Maggie Hart is a writer and leukemia survivor from Colorado. Her writing has been published in Narratively (True Romance Grand Prize Winner), The Blood Project, Mud Season Review, and The Audacity, among others. She's currently pursuing a master's degree in rhetoric and writing studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she also teaches first-year composition.
Read Maggie’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
Header photo by Garv Chaplot.
