“Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”
This woman probably thought I was having an out-of-mind experience, but I didn’t care. If I couldn’t ask this question of astranger at a bus stop in what was possibly, maybe, I couldn’t tell, adream, then when could I?
But the woman, to my surprise, took the question in stride. “Ah, sure,” she said. “Florida—that’s got Disney World. Do you live near there? I went to Disney World once, long time ago.”
“Pretty close,” I said, not feeling like getting into Florida geography, the way that traffic could makepretty closeinto a decent drive. “Is that where you had your out-of-body experience?”
This time she did give me a look, like she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dropping it. “No,” she said. “Although some of those rides, you’d think you left your stomach back at the start.”
“Very true.” I decided I was going to drop it. Whatever this woman was going to tell me, something made me doubt it would be along the lines ofI woke up in a strange place and didn’t know how I got there.
But she seemed to take pity on me, or at least understand that the question was important to me in some way. “The out-of-body experience, that was at my wedding to my Seamus, going on fifty years now. He was spinnin’ me around so fast I couldn’t keep my head on. My feet were off the ground, and for a minute, I swear to ye, I was floating above the dance floor and could see everyone below like something out of the cinema. My Uncle Frank wearing the most ridiculous secondhand suit, so big it was falling off him. My sisters, who’d been arguing over Gran’s necklace, I’d worn it for the wedding andthey were sayin’ how I’d better not think to keep it. And then I saw my own father, who’d died twelve years before.”
She blinked her watery blue eyes up at me before giving me a smile. “Course, I hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before, and I didn’t eat very much to make sure I’d fit my dress. No wonder I was seein’ things. I was also in love. Bit of an out-of-body experience, that, when you’re young.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love like that.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, you would know if you had. It’s not got a reputation for being subtle.”
I almost asked about Seamus, her husband, but then there were those groceries in her basket. Microwave meals, a couple single bananas, a small carton of milk.
The bus came around the corner, and the woman thrust her arm out to flag it down. There was a whoosh of air brakes, and the wheelchair ramp started lowering to accommodate the woman’s motorized scooter.
“You go on before me,” she said. “I’ll be a minute.”
But I’d just realized that, even if I wanted to go to Dublin—and I wasn’t sure that I did, wasn’t even sure that Icouldor if I’d only take another dream-turn where suddenly I was back in my childhood bedroom or flying through the air like a bird—I had no money. I had no ticket or token or card or whatever else was required to use public transportation, and I wasn’t about to ask this nice woman for a handout.
“I just remembered I have something else I need to do first,” I said. “I’ll catch a later one.”
“I hope thatsomething elseis getting yourself a coat,” she said, giving me one last look-over and a cluck of her tongue. “God bless.”
I watched her navigate up the ramp, stopping at the front to chat with the driver for a moment before disappearing inside the bus. I was surprised at how lonely I felt the moment the bus pulled away. I wouldn’t go so far as to call that woman a friend—we’d spoken only a few sentences to each other, and I hadn’t even learned her name. But it had felt good, to have a somewhat normal conversation with a seemingly normal person. I was glad to have been able to express how unmoored I was feeling, even if I couldn’t explainwhybecause I didn’t know myself.
There was a low stone wall by the bus stop that might have been part of private property, but I just had to sit down. I boosted myself up there, scraping my palms a bit against the stone as I settled in. That brief, stinging pain was another jolt, a reminder like when I’d pinched myself. I could feel things, and I still wasn’t waking up.
That woman’s story was living inside me, so vivid I could’ve painted the scene of her wedding, viewed from above—her uncle with his ill-fitting suit and her arguing sisters and her father, and in the middle of it all, her and Seamus dancing, young and in love. It had been a long time since I’d gotten that kind of flash, not since I’d packed away all my art supplies and stopped looking at the world with an eye to put it on canvas. But here, I wanted to paint everything—the line of cars parked along the curb, the shrubbery spilling out over the stone wall, that blue sky.
The woman had a point, though. Itwaschilly, and I was only becoming more aware of it as I sat there, some of the initial exertion from my walk and the adrenaline from my situation having worn off a while ago.
I was still on that wall, hunched over and trying to tuck my body into itself as much as I could, when a shadow fell over me.
He was backlit, the expression on his face impossible to see, and he was wearing a chunky knit sweater now instead of the grease-stained T-shirt I’d seen him in before. But I recognized him immediately, because of course he was one of two people I’d spoken to so far on this bizarre and unexplainable journey. The mechanic.
“The bus not come?”
Something tightened in my stomach. I should’ve saidNot yet, which would’ve been simpler, but instead I shrugged. “It did,” I said. “I’m just waiting.”
Again, even though I couldn’t see his face, I thought I could read the set of his shoulders loud and clear.What the fuck are you waiting for?This man had very expressive body language, and somehow it always conveyed the f-word.
He moved a little closer to the wall, and only then could I make out his expression, eyes squinted against the sun. His gaze flickered over me fast, the way someone might look at a wound they knew they had to check out but didn’t really want to see.
“Do you need money for the fare?”
That’s why he’d been looking at me—he must’ve noticed that I didn’t have any sort of purse or bag or anything else.
“No, no,” I assured him. “I’m fine.”
I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, if I wanted to get on the bus at all. As disorienting asthiswas, I was scared to do anything drastic that might change things. It was easy to forget that this could be a dream. The details were incredible. Like with this guy—the scuffs on the toes of his boots, the way the hem of one of his pant legs had gotten caught when he must’ve put the boots on, hitched up to where I could see a strip of sock. I thought suddenly of those frayed jean bottoms, sprinting away from me as I crashed to the pavement. A knot of panic was starting to form in my throat, so I made myself breathe, trying to ground myself by noticing more things in the here and now. This man’s hands, strong and capable, a mechanic’s hands, blunt nails, knuckles scraped and scarred. A thread of cream-colored yarn hanging from the bottom of his sweater, where it was starting to come undone.
