Three feet from the ticket window, Jonah watched a girl who couldn’t have been older than seventeen count the same handful of bills for what looked like the sixth time the kind of careful that only shows up once a person already knows the number isn’t going to change no matter how many times they check it.
The Bradford Bus Terminal smelled like diesel and old linoleum and something underneath he couldn’t name anymore.
She had a duffel bag at her feet.
The man beside her mid-forties, leather jacket, hand at the small of her back was not her father.
Jonah checked the wall clock.
Ten-forty-seven.
The Albany bus left at ten-fifty-eight.
The girl did not know she was on the wrong track.
The trafficker’s name was Roy.
The show had never named him.
Jonah knew because he had been at the Walgreens counter when Roy’s arrest made the local feed eighteen months after this night, and the article had mentioned a Bradford terminal near-miss that someone had flagged, and Jonah had thought that was tonight, and then he had gone back to scanning barcodes because the line was twelve people deep.
That was Earth.
Here, Roy was still operational.
The girl was still counting bills.
The bus was still eleven minutes out.
Jonah stepped forward.
“Mara.”
The girl looked up.
She did not know that name.
She also did not know her name was about to be Mara, because Jonah had just decided it was, and Roy was already frowning, and the terminal cop three gates down had glanced over at the sound of a name said too loud in a quiet room.
Jonah kept moving.
He smiled the Walgreens smile, the one that said I am harmless and you are late and we are both tired.
He stopped two feet from the girl and let his duffel bag slide off his shoulder to the floor with the kind of thud that made it real.
“I’ve been looking all over for you.”
The girl stared.
Roy’s hand slid off her back.
The cop was still looking.
Jonah pulled a notebook from his jacket not the notebook, a secondary he had bought at a bodega for exactly this kind of play and flipped it open to a page where he had written an address in Albany in his own handwriting thirty minutes ago on the platform bench outside.
He held it so the girl could see.
He did not hold it so Roy could.
“Your sister said you’d be at Port Authority.
I’ve been at Port Authority for an hour.
She’s gonna kill me.”
The girl looked at the address.
She looked at Jonah.
Her mouth opened.
Jonah watched her eyes and saw the moment she understood that the man beside her was a problem and the man in front of her was a door.
“I”
“It’s fine.
It’s fine.
We’ve got eleven minutes.
The Albany bus is right there.
You have enough for the ticket?”
She nodded.
She did not.
Jonah could see the bills in her hand.
Forty-something.
The ticket was sixty-two.
He pulled four twenties from his pocket and pressed them into her hand under the cover of the notebook.
She said you’d be short.”
Roy stepped back.
It was a single step, and it was the step that meant he had decided the play was not worth the cop’s attention.
Jonah did not look at him.
He looked at the girl and he kept his voice warm and he counted exits front door, side door, the bathroom hallway to the left and Roy took another step back and turned and walked toward the alley exit without a word.
The girl was shaking.
Jonah folded the twenties into her hand and closed her fingers over them.
“Go buy the ticket.
I’ll walk you to the bus.”
She went.
Jonah picked up her duffel and followed her to the window.
The ticket agent was a woman in her fifties who looked like she had sold ten thousand tickets to ten thousand people who were running from something, and she did not ask questions.
The girl bought the ticket.
Jonah walked her to gate seven.
The bus was already boarding.
He handed her the duffel.
“Your sister’s address is in the notebook page.
The one I showed you.
It’s real.
She’s expecting you.”
The girl looked at him.
Her eyes were brown and wet and she was maybe sixteen.
“I don’t have a sister.”
“You do now.
Her name’s Helen.
She’s a paralegal.
She has a couch.
She said you can stay as long as you need.”
That was not true.
Helen Cho was a violinist, not a paralegal, and she did not know Mara existed, but Jonah had her address from the show’s credits, and he had twenty dollars left in his wallet, and he would mail it to Helen tomorrow with a note that said a girl named Mara is coming, she needs a week, here’s money for groceries, I’ll send more, and Helen would either help or she would not, and Jonah had decided that Helen Cho, who played first chair and looked like she did not take shit from anyone, would help.
The girl nodded.
She did not say thank you.
She turned and got on the bus.
Jonah watched her sit three rows back, window seat, duffel on her lap.
The bus pulled out at ten-fifty-nine.
Jonah did not watch it leave.
He turned and walked back through the terminal and out the front door and into the rain.
Roy was gone.
The cop was still at gate three.
The terminal ticked through its long night.
Jonah walked four blocks to the subway and rode it south.
He did not open the notebook.
He did not write the rule down.
He already knew it.
Hand-craft first.
Rumor second.
Save the thing you can save without spending yourself.
By the time he reached the short-let it was eleven-forty.
The laundromat below was dark.
The notebook the notebook was on the table beside the coffee pot where he had left it.
He sat down.
Opened it.
Turned to the back.
Wrote:
Mara.
Bradford terminal.
Oct 4.
Albany bus, 10:58pm.
Helen Cho, 447 Bleecker St, Apt 3C.
$20 sent tomorrow.
Saved without Rumor.
He closed it.
Put it down.
Stood.
Walked to the window.
The street outside was empty.
The bodega across the way was dark.
Somewhere in Albany a girl who did not have a name six hours ago was on a Greyhound with eighty dollars in her sock and an address that would either save her or fail her, and Jonah had done what he could with the tools he had, and it had cost him nothing he could see.
That was wrong.
He sat back down.
Opened the notebook again.
Turned to the middle.
Wrote:
Toronto apartment.
Hallway.
Smell = ??
He stared at the question marks.
He had lived in Toronto for eighteen months.
The apartment hallway had smelled like something.
He could picture the door.
He could picture the stairs.
The smell was gone.
Jonah closed the notebook.
He did not write it down again.
The cost had landed.
The hand-craft had not been free.
It had simply taken something small enough that he would not notice until later, and later was now, and the hallway in Toronto smelled like nothing at all.
He stood.
Made coffee.
Drank it black.
At midnight he lay down on the couch and closed his eyes.
He did not sleep.
He thought about a girl on a bus and a man in an alley who had seen his face, and Roy would tell someone, eventually, because men like Roy always did, and that bill would come due, and Jonah had decided it was worth it.
By one the rain had stopped.
Jonah opened his eyes.
The ceiling was gray in the streetlight.
He thought about nothing at all.
He stayed that way until morning.