Four Three Two One

by Courtney Stevens

  The camera cut away to a photo of Mrs. Reyes seated at a computer desk, pen in hand.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be the driver on his last trip. Winston Alden, who was scheduled to work that trip, had a baby come two months early, and Oscar volunteered so Winston could stay with his wife at the hospital. All proceeds from Life on the Bus will go to the preemie’s medical bills. You see, folks, these are people who need to be remembered. Every seat on that bus had a story, and I’m making it my job to tell them all.”

  “I love that man,” Gran said.

  “The first time we watched we thought he was crazy as a loon.”

  “He’s the good kind of crazy.”

  He must be. This video had been downloaded 1.3 million times.

  I traced a circle in the plywood desk where I’d left a glass of ice water sweating for too long. I made a third round, a fourth. Carter was still talking in the background. “Gran, I found one of the other survivors.”

  “Oh, Go, that’s fabulous.” She saw my face. “Is it not? Fabulous?”

  “Do you think I’m betraying Chan by talking to him?”

  Gran worked her glasses off her face, chewed the earpiece. “Well, dear, that depends on what you say to this boy.” Gran patted my arm and stood. She bent toward me. “You know I love Chan, but I think he’s betraying you by refusing to talk. And, dear, it bears some advice, there are no equilateral triangles when it comes to love. Do you understand?”

  I nodded that I did, but it was quite a revolutionary thought. She left me thinking. Thud. Shuffle. Shuffle. Thud. Shuffle. Shuffle. All the way down the steps. Rudy didn’t give me a chance to ignore him. He was there, complimenting me, and right or wrong, I caved to the conversation.

  Rudy: I think you’re brave. I have zero interest in being some broken dude.

  Golden: Same.

  Rudy: Do you know how to get past this?

  Golden: Not exactly.

  Rudy: Ride a bus again?

  Golden: Have you tried?

  Rudy: I bought a few tickets in town.

  Golden: And?

  Rudy: Chickened out so far. One of these days . . . I’ll go cross-country.

  Golden: Good for you.

  Golden: I tried to ask Chan to take me to “Accelerant Orange,” but I chickened out.

  Rudy: Chan, the other survivor? Your boyfriend?

  Golden: Yeah. And yeah.

  I rocked back in my chair, stretched for the ceiling, and rubbed my eyes.

  Rudy: He won’t go with you?

  Golden: He won’t talk about Bus #21.

  Minutes passed. I took out my contacts, brushed my teeth, and washed my face. He didn’t reply. I crawled under the covers and my phone lit with a message.

  Rudy: I wrote something about Bus #21. I’m attaching, in case you want to read or write something too.

  I opened the document.

  a journal entry by Rudy Guthrie

  I boarded the bus outside the Green-Conwell. Our tour group had 9/11 Memorial/Wall Street/Battery Park/Ellis Island on the agenda. Ellis Island was a curiosity for me. My great-grandfather came through on November 9, 1919. I was born November 9, 2001. I’m named after him, so I wanted to find a remnant of him there. That’s a micro-moment.

  That day was made of micro-moments and mega-moments.

  Micro-moment:

  I was listening to Ryan Adams cover Taylor Swift and drowning my hangover under a gallon of water. Someone in close proximity had his shoes off. I don’t know who. Maybe Neil.

  Mega-moment:

  Simon Westwood rocketed down the aisle, his hips bumping against shoulders as he went.

  “THERE’S A BOMB ON THIS BUS! ANYONE RECORDS ME AND I’LL BLOW THE BUS IN A HEARTBEAT.” He lifted his sweatshirt. There was the vest. Like something I’d seen on television.

  Micro-moment:

  Someone shrieked.

  Someone said, “Is this for real?”

  Someone said, “Simon, calm down, dude.”

  How did no one notice he was wearing that sweatshirt in June? Except the bus had been cold the entire trip. It wasn’t cold now. The first symptoms of pandemonium were interior. Hearts raced; blood thundered through veins; oxygen caught in throats. Words stopped. Everyone checked with one another. Is this really happening? our expressions asked.

  The consensus: yes.

  Two seats in front of me (three seats from the exit), the girl I met in the bathroom last night scanned the bus.

  Mega-moment:

  Simon yelling, “STAND UP, BABY.”

  Nothing happened.

  Simon’s iron grip squeezing Caroline’s shoulder. I see the flesh turn pink, red. “I SAID, ‘STAND UP, BABY!’”

  She stood.

  “HERE’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN. CAROLINE IS GOING TO TELL EVERYONE THAT SHE SCREWED JIM LAST NIGHT. AND THEN JIM IS GOING TO PUT ON THIS VEST.”

  Micro-moment:

  Down Yonder bar last night. Jim Conner, who I don’t really know, walks to the jukebox. Caroline walks by. She stretches her index and middle fingers out. They brush Jim’s thigh. She disappears down the steps to the bathroom. Three seconds later, Jim has selected a song, and he’s following her, looking over his shoulder to see if anyone noticed.

  Mega-moment:

  Simon wrestled another vest like his from a duffel bag.

  “OH, JIM. CALLING JIM CONNER.” His finger curled in a come-here motion.

  “YOU’RE THE NEXT CONTESTANT ON ‘NO ONE SCREWS MY GIRLFRIEND BUT ME.’”

  Micro-moment:

  I have to say something, do something. Who sits here and lets this happen? Simon is five feet away. I’ve side-tackled guys from much farther. None of them were in suicide vests.

  Mega-moment:

  “Easy, Simon,” I said.

  “Sit down, Superman. I don’t need your help.”

  Simon sounded calmer when speaking to me.

  Micro-moment:

  The dude across the aisle from me, Neil Johnson, shrank to the floor. He was fourteen, and his rich grandma had bought him a ticket. A small puddle of urine spilled onto the floor.

  Others were panicking. I examined the exits. Front door. Was there a back door? An emergency release window? Maybe a window in the bathroom?

  Mega-moment:

  Jim Conner walked bravely to the front.

  Simon zipped the vest to his Adam’s apple. Taunted Jim with a simple remote. Taunted us all with how easy it had been to rig the dynamite to a wireless fireworks control system.

  “YOUR TURN, BABY DOLL. TELL THE BUS YOU SCREWED THIS LAME DICK.”

  Caroline was incapable of words. Or standing. Or breathing. I worried she might pass out.

  Mega-moment:

  I was not Superman.

  The bus blew.

  12. HAVE YOU EVER HEARD FILM WINDING?

  $47,977.00

  The end of Rudy’s journal entry.

  I was not Superman.

  The bus blew.

  Raw. Unrelenting. Incomplete. I tossed the covers off, froze, pulled them over me again. I reread the end. I was not Superman. The bus blew. God, Rudy. There were a million mega-moments and micro-moments that happened between those lines. One of them was with me.

  Mom was now silhouetted in the hallway light, and I thought about how beautiful she was and how I never told her and how I probably should because sometimes your life was I was not Superman and the bus blew and you weren’t one of the four who survived. I curled around my pillow and chewed the corner of the fabric.

  She set two cookies and a glass of milk beside my bedside lamp, and said, “I thought I heard you crying.”

  “I wasn’t crying.”

  When faced with my dry cheeks, she cocked her head to the side and dropped onto the edge of my bed. “Honey, what you did today—”

  I assumed she meant my suspension. “I’m not sorry.”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  “Baby.”

  “Stop wit
h the baby, Mom.” She looked weary and beaten by my request, the glow of last night long gone. Tell her you love her, a voice said. “Okay, you can still call me baby,” I said instead.

  She tried smiling. “I wish you wouldn’t sit in a dark room on your computer. And I wish you wouldn’t dam your emotions. And I wish I knew how to help you.”

  I tapped the plate of cookies. “You help.”

  “Did you talk to Chan about the bomb threat?”

  “I tried.”

  “Keep trying. Sometimes we don’t know what we need.”

  I need you, I thought, but the words weren’t there. Sometimes we can’t say what we need either.

  On her way from my room, Mom touched the edge of a framed photo. The New York skyline. Taken from the plane with my phone. I got out of bed, walked across the room to shut the door, and traced the plastic frame with my finger. The night wasn’t over. I was hours from sleep. Staring at those blue-gray clouds and skyscrapers, I wrote my own moment.

  a micro-story by Golden Jennings

  John William Jennings came through Ellis Island on June 16, 1907. He was my granddad’s grandpapa. He bought the nine hundred acres I call home. John Jennings also bought the camera that I would shoot my first photo with—a No. 3 Kodak with a velvet red bellows and brown leather case. “Eight turns,” my granddad would say. We’d crank the camera key together, counting each turn aloud. Have you ever heard film winding? It’s a beautiful sound.

  In the summers, when I was still young enough to nap and small enough for Gran to crowd my twin bed, she rubbed my back and chronicled family details until I fell asleep. Her grandparents were from Ireland. Granddad’s were from England. She stocked me with marvelous stories, further feeding my obsession. In elementary school, I drew the Statue of Liberty; I sent my spit to Ancestry.com for my eighth birthday; I googled photos of Ellis Island. Whatever I could scrounge. None of the photos I googled were as awesome as the two from our family. The first of Great-Great-Grandpapa John and his family. The second of Gran and Granddad, shot with the same No. 3 Kodak, in the same pose at Ellis Island.

  “Why didn’t Mom and Dad do one?” I asked. I must have been about ten. “Oh, honey, they’re not as cool as us,” Gran said with a wink. Even then, I understood my parents weren’t into traveling beyond our farm or town. It could have been the cost too.

  Gran will never go back to New York. Her arthritis and crumbling discs make long car trips painful, and her thoughts on planes are “If God gives me wings tomorrow, I’ll be there. Until then, I’m grounded.” But, in her heart of hearts, she wanted the two of us to go. For me to continue the family tradition and take a new photo. “You’re my little wanderer,” she told me when I was a little girl. “My greatest hope.” I never forgot that. Despite her spunk, she’s slowing down, and I feel the clock screaming, “You’d better do this soon if you want her to be alive to enjoy it.”

  For her seventy-fifth birthday, Chan and I planned the gift: I would get that third-generation photo on Ellis Island, shot with the same Kodak Grandpapa John had worn around his neck. Chan had sold two nativities, working day and night, to make the trip happen.

  That’s why I was in New York.

  When I finished, I shared with Rudy.

  Three minutes later, he pinged me back.

  I assume you were going for the June 16 anniversary of when your great-great-grandpa came through? How did you end up heading to Ellis Island on the 15th instead?

  I typed three responses:

  Chandler got a one-day permit to cut logs on the Weymeyers’ land. We had to leave the city early to go back to Kentucky.

  They were calling for rain the next day.

  You and I met in the Down Yonder bathroom.

  I erased them and wrote back a totally uncomplicated truth.

  Golden: I decided the date didn’t matter.

  Rudy: Did you ever get your photo?

  Golden: No.

  Rudy: I hope you get it someday.

  Golden: How about Sunday?

  He didn’t answer before I fell asleep.

  I woke at 4:47. He’d written: If only I had a ride.

  That’s when I decided I was going back. With or without Chan.

  CAROLINE

  Because I wasn’t stupid, I never googled how to make a bomb.

  Instead, I searched where people frequently killed themselves in New York City, which ruled out the George Washington Bridge and all of Midtown as overpopulated options. I had a plan. I’d bum a ride to my future college town, Rochester, and then make the seven(ish)-hour train trip to Penn Station. From there, I’d pick my place. I couldn’t die on Keuka Lake, not when I loved it so much.

  The guys hadn’t given up sourcing C-4. Whenever they got onto the topic of bombs, I kept my mouth shut. If they wanted to do something nasty, they didn’t have to buy military-grade stuff. Not when ANFO (ammonia nitrate with fuel oil) or dynamite was easy to acquire.

  “Why do you always look smug when we talk about this?” Simon asked.

  “I’m not smug. I don’t know anything about bombs.”

  Except I did. If they wanted a bomb, they needed a farmer with questionable morals and tree stumps he hadn’t gotten around to removing.

  Have you ever noticed when you think something no one else has thought of—no matter how simple—your face glows? Simon slapped the glow away.

  To make him stop, I told him about the farmers.

  When we met “Z” behind a no-tell motel in Ithaca—I was driving again, they were tanked again—he passed a heavy wooden box with misspelled Sharpie writing across the top. Dangerus. His face matched that spelling, wrong in more places than right. He’d welded an American flag to his rusty Ford; a ball sack hung from the hitch. His cab oozed McDonald’s wrappers—two fluttered out his open window when he passed me the box. He was everything I expected him to be.

  “You aren’t buying a vest next, are you?” Z asked, hints of nervous laughter escaping his lips. “’Cause I can’t be selling to terrorists.”

  “No way. This is for shits and giggles,” I said.

  Z lifted a cell, snapped a photo of us. “Good, ’cause I’ll nail your ass if you get me into anything.” Which was stupid, because we could obviously nail his ass too, but whatever. He tapped the side of his truck and said, “Don’t forget. Shits and giggles are dangerous”—dangerus—and then drove off, ball sack swinging.

  Back in the boathouse attic, I opened the box and made a grand gesture, “What did I tell you?”, hoping the nonsense stopped here.

  “Pure Science gets a gold star,” they raved.

  “Did anyone see you buy it?” Dozer asked, because he, like the rest of them, could barely remember his own name at the moment, much less Z’s.

  “Are you kidding? I’m a magician, same as the rest of you.”

  We say the things that people most want to hear.

  13. YOU’D HAVE MADE THAT SAME WALK NAKED.

  $49,333.00

  Chan’s breathing was perfectly even and his body was diagonal and twisted in the sheets. When I slid onto the bed beside him this morning and wrapped my body around his, he smelled like the absence of toothpaste and the presence of sweat. Familiar rather than unpleasant. I probably smelled like coffee beans and Crest. I blew my breath at his nose, smiling as he twitched awake.

  “Hey.” He yawned.

  “Hey.”

  He stretched—back arching; toes sticking out the sheets; his muscles and veins ropelike. God, I loved him like this. Groggy and sweet. Squinting and squirming. It was like waking a lion cub. Chan’s glasses weren’t on the bedside table. I scooted closer, nearly nose to nose. I changed the part in his hair, smoothing it left and then right, searching absentmindedly for the amber sprinkled throughout the mahogany strands.

  “Chan, you okay?”

  “I am now. I’d kiss you except I haven’t brushed my teeth.”

  “That was a serious question.”

  Our eyes locked. His were a green I never t
ruly captured in a photograph. A green that you could tell were green in a black-and-white image.

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  Deep breath. “Where did you put New York?”

  “Put New York?” He made the city sound foreign. Like Kyrgyzstan or Djibouti.

  Faced with the choice to disengage or double down, I doubled down. I moved my hand under the sheet, knowing my touch would be cold on his bare chest. He cringed as I drummed the skin over his heart. “June fifteenth. I want to talk about what happened. I want to talk about going back.”

  “We covered this.”

  Have we? Because on Sunday, there’s a thing. “Can’t you feel the weight? Everything we don’t say lives between us. And it’s changing us, or . . . I don’t know, but I’m alone and you’re right here. I need something from you.”

  I need something from you should have worked. If you say I need something from you to someone you love and they don’t say What? or I’m listening, it’s problematic at best, relationship ending at worst. I’m not crazy to have this expectation.

  Chan broke eye contact and moved my hand to my side of the bed. “I’m gonna brush my teeth.” He stalked across the room in his boxer briefs.

  During his absence, Mike, his dad, poked his head into the room and said, “You want any breakfast, Golden? I’m making biscuits.”

  “No, thanks. I made your coffee.”

  Chan reappeared on a mission, and Mike moved out of his way and disappeared down the hallway. Chan stood at his dresser, shimmying into jeans, jamming deodorant into his armpits.

  “Brushing your teeth doesn’t negate the question,” I said.

  He added a T-shirt, shoved his hat over his eyes, and planted himself in a gaming chair instead of returning to the bed. Bending over, he rested both elbows on his knees and cracked his knuckles. “We know each other, right?”