For several months of my twenty-third year, I received an automated phone call every weekday from a number with a North Carolina area code. The purpose of the call was to inform me that the school bus was running late. After a while I stopped picking it up, and it went to voicemail. Dear Lillington families, the prerecorded message always began, in the tinny, rather severe voice of a woman I imagined as a narrow glob of auburn light with bones. This is Marcy Durand, assistant principal, she said. Due to mechanical issues, the bus to Lillington Junior High School will arrive approximately one hour behind schedule. We apologize for this inconvenience and look forward to welcoming your child to school soon. 

I had no use for this information. I lived in New York City. I hadn’t been anywhere close to North Carolina. I was childless then, and I didn’t know a single person attending junior high. I got a little worried for the students of Lillington, who seemed never once to have made it to class on time, but my concern was distant and anonymous. I wondered what the teachers did during that hour. I thought about calling Marcy Durand to tell her she’d made a mistake, but I never did. 

For months, almost every day, I only ever got that one call. Except once in late autumn, on a Tuesday I think, after I’d already received the message from Lillington, my telephone rang again. When I picked it up, I heard the news. 

The news was like a gas, a non-substance. What I mean is it did not seem to be made of language. After I’d heard it, I asked for it to be repeated. I heard it again. I hung up the phone. I was standing outside and it began to rain, but I didn’t notice right away. There was dryness and then there was wetness, and they reacted poorly to each other. The sidewalk fizzled. But this process did not involve me. I was still the same.

I went with a friend to Poughkeepsie the next day, to comfort another friend who lived there. All three of us had jobs and obligations that week, plans that didn’t matter anymore. The news was a significant inconvenience to us. You’re not supposed to say it, but that kind of news always is. It’s a task. It’s heavy, and you’re never really allowed to put it down. 

We took an early train upstate. Its cars were mostly empty. The name of the train, painted in dark blue letters on its side, was something odd, like POWERFUL JAW. The tracks had been twisted or chewed on just north of Yonkers, though, and we were told we had no choice but to get off there and ride the rest of the way to Poughkeepsie on a bus. People got frustrated about this, especially because it took the bus an hour to find us. When it came it was gray. It had two floors and no name. It was uncomfortable. 

In order to contemplate the view, my friend and I sat on the top floor, and when the bus started, everything around us began to tremble and sway. We could hear the ceiling rattling and the wind pressing against the tall windows. We clutched the coarse fabric of our armrests and closed our eyes. It felt as though we might cleave from the rest of the bus, like a head rolling off its body. 

I don’t remember how long these difficulties lasted. Eventually things grew still, and the weather was happening outside the bus without us. For a while we rode in pure silence. My friend, who was a remarkably small woman with long mahogany hair that reached her knees when she sat down, leaned against my arm as we exited Glenwood. It seemed she’d been weeping for a while before I noticed, and then only due to a zone of dampness on my sleeve. She wasn’t making any sound. Watching my friend in tears, resting against my body, made me feel close to her, and then strangely mournful for a version of our friendship where we wouldn’t have had to get this close. I spent some time trying to cry with her, wondered why it was so hard, and gave up. The bus was crowded, but for the whole ride almost no one spoke. A woman sitting across the aisle from us was whispering into her phone. From the tone of her low voice, it seemed she was speaking to someone young or otherwise stupid, like a baby or a dog. She was saying the same thing over and over. It sounded like, “Are you still there?” 

Suddenly, we were driving down a sparsely paved road with dense woods on either side. Withered streetlamps rose sporadically at the edge of the trees, like matches, emitting a fragile, temporary light. It was October, and where the woods weren’t bare, the surviving leaves, beneath that light, appeared oily and burning. I couldn’t see the end of the road. I thought this place must be very ominous at night. Then I realized it was night, and as much as I should have been confused or alarmed by how quickly the day had passed, I felt nothing. I was imagining the news standing beneath one of the skinny street lights like a figure in some noir film, the weathered brim of a fedora extending over its eyes and a cigarette on its lips. At every one of those lights, I saw it leaning there in its trench coat and it saw me. The sky was stone black, the ground raw, and I began to have trouble believing the road we were on was sanctioned by the MTA. But perhaps we were beyond that point. 

Eventually the bus broke down, and we had to get out and wait for another one. The bus itself, as if to exhibit some maturity of character, behaved undramatically. There was no smoke or loud noise or crying wind; it just stopped. At this juncture, the road had almost dissolved into wilderness. We tripped on thick roots and heard things eating in the dark. The night was cold and my friend and I were hungry. 

The driver, whom I had not noticed before, stayed inside the bus after he told the rest of us to get out. He had to make a few calls. I wondered why we weren’t allowed to hear them. I watched him mumble into a radio and then into a phone. He turned the lights on above the empty seats. When he finally did exit, he wore a face that spoke of multiple divorces, a face that knew to expect everything about our situation. He said we’d be back on our way soon, in the new bus that had just been dispatched. The new bus, which was identical to the old one, took over an hour to arrive. The old driver did not join us on board before we pulled away. I guess someone was coming to get him. We never saw him again. 

His replacement was an unfortunate case. It had begun to rain torrentially, and my friend and I, who were now sitting on the first level at the very front, watched as the new driver admitted to everyone that he’d gotten lost. I had no idea how far we were from Poughkeepsie. 

“I have no idea how far we are from Poughkeepsie,” he said, his voice quavering over the intercom. He peered through the windshield at the helpless dark. He seemed to lack his predecessor’s channels to the outside world. He was a big man; his belly and knees pressed against the bottom of the steering wheel. He was sweating a lot. You could see the water glistening on his face in the light from the road, where the news might still have stood, smoking.

There were maybe fifty of us on board, all told. It was almost 10 o’clock at night. Whatever outrage we could have mustered earlier we were far too tired to dredge up now. It occurred to me that we might have become victims of a vague, half-hearted kidnapping. It felt like we had traveled past the law. After all, where was the river? I’d thought Poughkeepsie was right on the eastern bank. Wasn’t it easy enough to get to? 

I was also experiencing a new affinity for the children of Lillington, North Carolina. Was this their life? It must have been infuriating to spend a childhood studying the misfires of adult transmission, the daily breakdown of our machines. What lessons did this sort of thing imprint upon the adolescent mind? None of us left in the world were innocent anymore, and we were still so unimpressive. After all this time, why was it so hard to travel from one place to another? This was frustrating to think about. I should have been thinking about the news. But why had Marcy Durand only begun calling in the months before it came? Perhaps I was supposed to have seen some symmetry in these events. But I suspected it was just that my phone belonged to a number, and the number belonged to me, and through the phone, through the number, I could be reached. 

I wanted to speak with my friend about this, to tell her, as I had told only one other person, about the calls. But I found that she was sleeping, and as much as I wanted someone to talk to then, I couldn’t disturb her, because maybe she was somewhere the news was not. 

A while later, by some miracle, we were outside of a building — the first we had seen in some time. The building was a motel. At last I woke my friend, awkwardly cupping her shoulder as we were told that this was where we’d stay the night, free of charge. The driver’s company would be accommodating us for our trouble. He reassured us that our situation was extreme. I wondered if the motel maintained some kind of partnership with the driver’s company for this express purpose. That was a genre of motel, after all: motels for people who had failed to arrive where they were going. 

“We could sue,” said the woman who had been whispering on the phone. “This was supposed to take two hours. We should sue.” A few people grunted affirmatively. 

At this, the bus driver, still seated, wiped his wet brow, took down a kind of manual from the sun visor, and started skimming it, squinting and flipping through the pages as if searching for something. Then he folded it up and put it in his lap. He looked at the woman in the rearview mirror and slowly began to cry. I thought he was coughing at first, his shoulders rolling up and down, his earlobes shaking spasmodically. But then I realized that the sweeping, whalish sounds were sobs. He wiped his nose with the manual. Were these his instructions? He cried for so long that we started filing out of the bus, glancing timidly his way as we went. He cried nakedly, his hands at his sides. I was one of the last people to leave, and when I reached the door I found that I was looking at him with admiration and jealousy. 

The motel was constructed entirely of cherry wood, so that it was hard to tell, especially in the near-dark of the sparse antique lamps, where ceilings ended and doorways began. Leather sofas and coffee tables were scattered around the lobby. My friend, her long hair matted on one side, looked around blurrily, as though still dreaming. I was also struggling to stay awake. The fact that a day had gone by since the news had come seemed impossible. 

The passengers hobbled inside and stood around, slightly damp from the rain, and waited for new directions. Two men who had ridden the bus with us, the tops of their heads tinged with silver, walked to the center of the room. They each carried a djembe and a fold-up stool. They sat down and steadied their hands above their instruments. I remember a pang of dread — it wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear music; I just wasn’t sure I could deal with anything else happening that day. 

They began slowly stroking their drums, as you would a domesticated animal. Then they started beating gentle rhythms that seemed to organize the chaos of rain outside. Soon, they were drawing circles of noise with their fingers, and we stood watching them in a kind of horseshoe formation, my friend’s head leaning again upon my arm. The news sat just across from us in an armchair, its wet clothes making rubbery noises on the leather. In a high school psychology class, I’d learned that the mind cannot picture a human face it hasn’t actually encountered before. It is impossible, for instance, to dream of someone, even a person you don’t recognize, if you haven’t been in front of them, at least once, in your waking life. The news seemed to defy this principle. Though its face belonged to a dream, I knew I’d never seen it before.

My friend and I shared a room. It had a small TV mounted up in a high corner, where you might put a security camera. The white sheets of our queen bed were a relief from the oppressive cherry wood, which also dominated the motel’s upper floors and private suites. 

“We should call Thomas,” she said. That was our friend in Poughkeepsie. He had been expecting us many hours ago. I wondered if it would be too late or somehow beside the point to call and tell him what was happening to us. The phone is ruined, anyway, after certain things pass through it. It becomes a kind of cruelty to make it ring. 

I must have fallen asleep with his number half-dialed, deciding.

But Thomas seemed intuitively to know what was going on, or at least to understand, without expressly being told, that we were going to reach him a day later than we’d meant to. He laughed about it the next morning on the phone. It was strange to hear laughter. I don’t remember anything he actually said. The motel’s brown was less imposing in the washed daylight. I received another call from Marcy Durand, assistant principal of Lillington Junior High, and allowed myself to consider, as I often did, that I might have been specifically chosen to know this random information. I thought about those students waiting to be driven to school. It didn’t matter how early they awoke, how long they waited: the mechanical issues persisted. There was always a decision being made without them, something they could neither witness nor prevent. 

At the far edge of our double bed, my friend was crying in her sleep. The news lay beside her like a long stone. 

I sat down on the bed and put my hand, again, on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “Hey.” 

We ate a continental breakfast in the lobby with the other passengers. There seemed to be fewer of us now. I couldn’t see the woman who had threatened litigation anywhere. I’d forgotten the extremity of my hunger. It had been a long time since we’d eaten. On account of this fact, and on account of her being so small and so unhappy, I watched anxiously as my friend ate, and offered several times to get her seconds. 

The third bus ride took no time at all. The second driver was nowhere to be seen, and the third one appeared, by contrast, steadfast and authoritative, even kind of handsome. Our surroundings were utterly changed, too; the stifling, personless back road we’d spent all that time traversing was gone. A reel of stately suburban homes unspooled across each of the bus’s windows. There were trash bins, other cars driving beside us, fathers leaving for work, people saying goodbye to each other. Then, with stunning ease, we were in Poughkeepsie, a town that had, I found, a talent for appearing simultaneously overrun and abandoned. Pictures of young dead soldiers were displayed on banners lining the streets — “Hometown Heroes,” they were called — and you forgot them as soon as you passed by. There were gleaming cars everywhere, vintage models you couldn’t keep in the city. The air felt unsettled, as though Poughkeepsie were preparing for a parade, or a memorial procession. 

Thomas was waiting for us at the bus station, which was just a big parking lot. Seeing him, it was like the day before had been deleted, but there was still a blank, burned-out space in the shape of it somewhere behind my head. 

Thomas was taller than I remembered. He had more hair. My friend and I embraced him, first individually and then at once. I reacquainted myself with the hardness of his back and his rainy woolen smell. I tried to make my embraces long and full of meaning. I wanted to communicate my feelings with these embraces, and Thomas seemed to want to communicate his own feelings back to me. But I had no real idea what either of us was saying. 

The two kinds of people are those who have heard the news and those who haven’t. One kind is not better than the other; in the end, they’re just different. The first kind, I’ve noticed, are often those who’ve just lived longer. All my friends who have died before a certain age did so without encountering the news, or hearing it whistle. This is probably why the living sometimes envy the dead, for their placid images of streetlamps and telephones. 

We ate something — we couldn’t get enough of eating — and watched the people of Poughkeepsie. They walked around carrying their dogs and babies. We sat on a park bench, my friend on one side, me on the other, and Thomas in between us. A steady stream of cars circled the park. The day was maturing. It was strangely warm and dusty. After a time we all just looked at the ground. The result of our long journey was disappointing. We already knew we weren’t going to learn anything from it. I tried again and I still couldn’t cry. 

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in so long,” I said to Thomas. 

“You’re always beginning sentences that way,” he said. “With, ‘I feel like.’ I forgot that about you.”

“We missed you,” said my friend, on the other side of him. “What did you do yesterday? Did you hear from anyone?” 

From another bench, the news watched us, seeming somewhat upset, as if to eat in its presence were disrespectful. I let myself pretend I didn’t see it. I understood, of course, that I would eventually have to see it again. We all would. Certain things were required of us now, and they were not going to change. 

I forgot to mention something kind of fabulous that one of the djembe drummers said. I don’t think I dreamed it. It was far too nice for my mind to invent. Their performance — so much like an orange, something round and good that occurred in nature of its own accord — had ended. In the motel lobby of unending cherry wood, we surprised ourselves with the volume of our applause. And when at last it died down, and the rain outside continued, one of the men thanked us, and the other folded up his stool and looked around at all the passengers and said, “I’m glad you feel the same way.”

In the park, I was trying to tell this story to Thomas, about the drummers, about the busted train tracks and the motel. I guess I still figured he deserved an explanation. 

“We were late because,” I began. “Well — when you were a kid, how did you get to school? Did you take a school bus?” 

“Sure, didn’t you?” he said. 

“Well, no, actually. I took the subway.” 

“Alright,” he said, rolling his eyes. 

Beside him my friend gave a sneering laugh, crumpling the paper from her sandwich. “City kid over here,” she said. 

We were at the age when it seemed very important where everybody had grown up. It was never so important afterward. But back then we all had to be very careful about our lives — where they took place, the people they involved, and if we loved them enough. 

“My point is,” I went on, “did your school bus ever break down?” 

I looked toward my other friend as if for help, but she wasn’t paying much attention. She was flattening the sandwich paper across her knee. She already had all the information I was offering. 

“No,” said Thomas. “I mean, I don’t think so. I think I’d remember. I remember the driver’s name, even. It was Antonio. We had a lot of fun with that, as kids, just saying his name. The bus never broke down, though.” 

He looked over to the edge of the park, where the grass met the pavement, with a face of serious contemplation. Wherever he is now, I imagine him looking that same way. 

“The only times we stopped were when Antonio pulled over and screamed at us about how loud we were being. He’d make us sit there in total silence for five minutes before he would turn the engine back on. If anyone spoke at all, we had to start over. My brother and I always sat next to each other, and we never made a sound. It didn’t matter to us how long it went on. Once we had to do it on the side of the freeway, though. Antonio had really freaked out that time. The freeway we took was very old, and the shoulder was so narrow that every time a car sped past us, honking, the whole bus shook on its wheels.” 

What else can I say about Poughkeepsie? It’s still amazing to me that anyone has looked at it on a map, its little dot, pointed to it and said there. I don’t know what conversation I was seeking. We had been forgiven for our lateness; why did I go on trying to explain? The tiny roundabout park was getting colder. My other friend was listening to Thomas. 

“For five whole minutes, we rocked back and forth in our seats while the cars drove by,” he said. “That’s how close they were.”