The Boy on the Bus

A Novel

Deborah Schupack

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780743242219
• eBook ISBN: 9781416583097
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Meg Landry expected it to be a day like any other -- her asthmatic eight-year-old son would step off the bus, home from school. But on this day, the boy on the bus is not Meg's son -- or at least doesn't appear to be. This new boy shares Charlie's copper hair, tea-brown eyes, and slight frame. But there is something profoundly, if indefinably, different about him. He has a finer nose, his skin is shinier, and his face looks more mature, as if he has grown into being Charlie more than the real Charlie ever had.
In the wake of Meg's quiet alarm, her far-flung family returns home, and a jangly unease sets in. Neither Charlie's father, Jeff, nor Charlie's rebellious teenage sister, Katie, can help Meg settle the question of the boy. They look to her for certainty -- after all, shouldn't a mother know her own child?
In this daring novel, Deborah Schupack dissects a family stretched out along the seams of postmodern small-town life. With the precision of a literary wordsmith, Schupack has crafted an extraordinary tale of a mother's love for her son and a mystery that may ultimately rip them apart. Tense and atmospheric, this debut is a rare combination of intellectual sophistication and page-turning suspense.

1

THIS RITUAL, her son coming home from school, was all wrong. It was taking too long, and now the driver was coming around the bus.

She gave a half wave from the front door. “Everything all right?” she called. “What, Sandy? What is it?”

She pulled her cardigan tighter around her and hurried down the short slate path.

Sandy Tadaveski looked over his shoulder at the bus.

“What?” she said, pushing by him. “Charlie?” she said. “Charlie!”

Meg boarded and could see instantly and with great relief that he was alive and well in the back of the bus. A sense of right now, young man shot through her, setting her expression, her stance. He perked up but did not leave his seat.

“Hon?” Meg started to walk down the aisle but slowed almost immediately, each step smaller than the one before. As he shifted from distant to close, she slowed to a stop. This was not her son.

He looked quite a bit like Charlie, on the slight side for eight, with copper hair and tea-brown eyes. But there were differences: eyes narrower, more discerning than Charlie’s; curls tending to kink rather than fluff; a finer nose; skin more shiny than powdery, and filling with freckles. All told, a more mature face. Fuller, firmer, more grown into itself than Charlie Carroll’s pale, tentative baby face.

“Hi,” the boy said, clearly delighted with her presence. He showed no sign of being home, no sign of rising, dutifully and well rehearsed, and walking directly to the front door.

She took two more steps. He looked so much like Charlie. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be their similarities that were remarkable. Now, of course, it was their differences.

She wanted to touch his face; touch seemed the only path to sense. Separated from him by half a bus, she instead gripped the top of a seat, massaging it like a shoulder. The celled green vinyl, worn and warm, felt like skin.

“Hon? Charlie?” She spoke softly. “Chappy?”

He nodded at the nickname, then, like any boy with his own mother, turned his attention out the window. His eye lit on a goose in the side yard. “There it is again!” he said. “I wonder what its name is.”

When a goose began appearing on the property a few weeks ago, Charlie had asked if he could name it like a pet. His mother had explained that wild animals are not ours to keep and that, furthermore, the goose he saw around the backyard might not even be the same one all the time.

“It should probably be called something,” he said to himself, thumping the seat as though to call up memory. “Something.”

“Meg?” Sandy had gotten back on the bus.

“Whose idea was this, Sandy?” she said quickly, before turning to face him.

“Sometimes the route takes a little longer in mud season,” he began. “But otherwise, today was the same as every other Thursday afternoon. Thirteen times we stopped, flashed the lights, halted cars if there were any, let kids run across the road to their houses. We got one horn today, one driver in a hurry. Mostly, it seems, drivers are happy to be good citizens, to make life safer for the children.”

She looked from Sandy’s story to the boy, to Sandy again. She waved a bent arm in front of her, like a windshield wiper. Start over, move on. Clear the air.

“Then we got here—last stop—and, well, this,” Sandy said. He gestured to the back of the bus.

Meg instead looked ahead, into the overwide rearview mirror, row after empty row collapsed into two dimensions. She saw what Sandy must have seen when he first stopped here, the boy sitting alone in the last seat, consumed by what he was looking at, tracing an outline on the window.

She took a few steps forward, toward Sandy, although with the trick of the mirror she was also moving closer to the boy.

“What did you do?” she asked Sandy.

“I walked down the aisle, just like you did. And I said, ‘Charlie?’”

Meg turned back to the boy, in living color and three dimensions.

“‘Charlie?’” Now Sandy was reenacting, raising his voice to fill the present.

The boy looked up, cocking his head at the question. Not quite yes, not quite no. As though he were being addressed by a version of his name that he was not used to, or a surname instead of a first name.

“‘Getting out here?’” Sandy said, still reenacting, his words more a for-the-record accounting than a question to be answered.

“Here?” the boy said, surveying out the window.

“That’s just what he did the first time I asked,” Sandy said to Meg. “Said ‘here?’ and looked out the window like that.”

Sandy himself looked from window to window, as if trying to site something properly through slats. “There’s something about your place,” he said, “something that makes it seem like a place everyone could have, or should have, come from.”

All Sandy knew was the shape of the white farmhouse, low and rambling, with its charcoal shutters and maroon front door and, halfway across the yard, an old vertical-board barn, the size of a one-car garage. She had never asked him inside, although neither had she counted on there being enough privacy outside.

“Is that real?” the boy asked. He hit the window with the heel of his hand, and the goose shook itself, water drawing its feathers to spines. It looked like the goose was answering him, shaking its head no, but by shaking its head at all it was actually answering yes.

“Used to be something else out there,” Sandy said. “When we first got here, he was looking out the window at something else.”

“Just tell me,” she said. She could stand no more variables, no something else.

“You,” Sandy said. “At the front door. I kind of scolded him—‘Your mother’—and then we looked back out the window and there you were, reappearing at the front door when you had been standing there only a second ago. Like a film that gets stuck showing the same frame over and over.”

Meg could see it: the mother appearing … the mother appearing … the mother …

“I’m going to leave you two alone,” Sandy said and left the bus without having stepped beyond the painted white safety stripe in front.

Meg sat in the row in front of him, facing forward. He seemed to be a good boy—whoever he was—and eager to please. He had fielded every question: Nothing much at school today. No, he was not cold with his jacket unzipped. The hot lunch was tuna melt. Fine, a little salty, but he liked salt.

She quickly ran out of small questions and could not yet ask the large ones, not folded like this, safe for now, her knees against the seat in front of her. She did her best to envision a world, childish but at the same time defensible, in the topography of the seatback between her knees. She concentrated as if her life in this world depended on it. She imagined a forest—not very clever, she knew, since the school-bus green made the suggestion with a heavy hand. But she was pleased with the exactness of what she read in the vinyl’s bumpy texture: puffs of treetops as seen from a medium distance.

She slid lower in the seat. She felt ground down, could not face the craggy intricacies of another world. She had no idea how he felt. Her mind struggled even to picture him (she would not look). She recalled this boy’s argyle sweater, new to her, white- and black-threaded into shades of gray, more like something a man would wear. He might be taller than Charlie, or it might be that he was more patient.

“I made cookies this afternoon,” she said, although she hadn’t.

She had used cookies before as bait or balm—but by promising that she would make them, not lying that she already had.

“Chocolate chip?”

He sounded like Charlie, but a mother’s mind can play tricks. If she needed to, she could extrapolate. The top of a head aisles over in the grocery store could be Jeff, even though he’d been out of town for most of the past year, and she couldn’t remember when they’d last been in a grocery store together. If ever. A girl’s petulant “Come on, Ma” could be Katie, even though she was away at private school. Coughing, anytime and anywhere, could be Charlie.

“No, we didn’t have chips,” she said, still not facing him. “Plain.”

She felt him squinting at her back to get her attention. “That’s okay,” he said. “I like plain cookies. Remember?”

She turned around. Refracted through a meniscus of tears, he was another generation removed from familiarity. She blinked him kaleidoscopic.

“Colored sugar on top?” he tried.

She could see it in how she was seeing, the multicolored, large-granuled sugar he meant—something she never would have used, never would have had in the house. “No,” she managed. “No sugar on top.”

“That’s okay.” He shrugged, dismissing his fancy hopes. His sweater hitched at his collar.

She had to look away again.

“Colored sugar is just for decoration,” he went on. “I’m sure they taste good.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, in case this was the scale of grace for them from now on.

She wouldn’t look outside anymore, either. Dusk had gathered, as had a few neighbors, the school bus standing in their midst well past three o’clock. Debbie Palazzo had jogged past and doubled back. Her husband, Vince, probably on his way home from work, had left his car a respectful distance up the road and milled back to the bus, as had Leah Gheary. The elderly Cosgroves must have been on their twice-daily constitutional and stopped to see what the crowd was about. And, of course, Joan Shearer was here. Hers was the only house in sight of the Landry-Carrolls’, and she was always on the lookout.

A breeze? A changing of the guards, sun and moon? Something was checkering the sky in lighter and darker shades of dusk. Each time a band of light opened, Meg seemed to make out a voice.

—Is he armed or something?

The question deflated her. How bad a parent would she have to be to raise an armed eight-year-old in Birchwood, Vermont? Whoever he was. Her mind dragged this behind its every thought, like a banner behind a light plane.

“Well, are you?” It flew out of her mouth when she turned to him.

He reached up under his sweater. She had forgotten, even in this short time, that he was perfectly able to initiate action. With a flourish, he took a ballpoint pen from his chest pocket. “Ta-da,” he said, waving it in the air. He clicked the retractable point playfully, in mock menace.

“I’ll give you exactly five seconds to tell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• A Conversation with Deborah Schupack
• About the Author