James smiled happily over his pile of books. “Sure thing,” he said. He ran up the steps to the doorway and turned to wave before he went inside.
Dicey hurried back to the little gray house. She had already told her customers she was taking the week off. She pulled the overnight case out from under her bed, put underwear, toothbrush, clean shirts and shorts into it. She put in the shoebox with her money the bus schedule and her map of Maryland. She would wear a dress for traveling.
Downstairs, Dicey wrote a hasty note to James, asking him to take charge until she got back, telling him where she was going, saying she was sorry but he would have to tell Cousin Eunice. She put her house key into the envelope and sealed it. She wrote James’s name on the front and left it on the kitchen table. Suitcase in hand, Dicey opened the front door.
James sat on the stoop.
“I thought so!” he crowed, laughing at her as she stood, open-mouthed, the suitcase in one hand, the door knob in the other. “You can’t fool me!”
“I left you a note,” Dicey said. “I’ve got to hurry or I’ll miss the bus.”
“The next bus doesn’t leave Bridgeport until ten,” James answered. “You’ve got a whole hour.” He smirked at her.
“James!” Dicey cried. “You’ve been snooping in my things.”
“And here comes Sammy, right on schedule,” James said. “I told him, when I found that money box. Besides, there was that man at the park, the grocer. I’d make a good detective. We’re going with you.”
“I don’t have enough money,” Dicey said. “What about Maybeth?”
“You’ll think up a way,” James said. “Where are we going anyway?”
“But what about your school?” Dicey asked. “I mean, you’re the one who’s really happy here. I will come back, you know that.”
“How do I know it?” James asked her. “I know you mean to—but what if you can’t, or don’t?”
“I wouldn’t do that!” Dicey protested.
“How do you know? How does anybody know? I don’t want you to leave me behind. Besides, school—well, Dicey? Listen. It’s me that makes the school so good, my brain. Other kids don’t like it as much as I do. So, there are books all over the world, in libraries. The fathers help me, an awful lot—but there must be other schools with good teachers. Even if there aren’t, I’ll always be me.”
“Are you sure, James?”
“I’m sure I want to go with you. And so does Sammy.”
Dicey couldn’t think clearly. She couldn’t think at all.
Sammy marched up to them. “I crossed four streets with lights,” he announced. “Hi, Dicey. I didn’t believe James, but he was right.”
Dicey didn’t even try to argue further. They all went back inside. She sent the boys upstairs to get changes of underwear for everyone, and shorts and shirts. She changed into shorts herself. She wrote another note, to Cousin Eunice this time, a note much harder to write. Dicey knew that Cousin Eunice wouldn’t understand, no matter what she said.
“We are going to Crisfield,” she wrote. “I don’t want you to worry about us, because I will take care of everyone. I don’t know what will happen there. When we find out, I’ll write to you.” Dicey chewed on the end of the pencil and tried to think of some way to let Cousin Eunice know that they were grateful to her. “No matter what happens to us, I think you should go ahead and become a nun because it is what you really want to do,” she wrote. “Your cousin, Dicey Tillerman.” Once again, she put the house key in the envelope and sealed it.
* * *
Dicey went alone to fetch Maybeth. The boys waited at the corner, with the suitcase.
Dicey walked right into the playground. Groups of little girls ran around. The young nun approached her. Dicey took a deep breath. “I’ve come for Maybeth Tillerman,” she said. “I’m her sister. Sister Berenice said I should pick her up now,” she lied.
The nun hesitated. She squinted her eyes at Dicey.
“You can go and ask Sister Berenice if you like,” Dicey said. “But then we’ll be late for Maybeth’s appointment and she’ll be angry.”
The nun called Maybeth from the sandbox where she was playing alone. Dicey took the little girl’s hand and walked slowly out through the gates. She had to hold herself back from running.
“Where are we going?” Maybeth asked.
“We’re going to see the place Momma lived in when she was a little girl,” Dicey answered.
“All of us together?”
“All of us together,” Dicey said. “That’s the only way the Tillermans travel.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
The motor rumbled like hunger in the belly of the bus. The fumes that floated in through the open windows were swollen with heat. They were on their way. Again.
Dicey leaned back in her seat and tried to make herself relax. They had until evening, when Cousin Eunice got home. Unless the camps wondered why all the Tillermans were absent and called Cousin Eunice at work. She didn’t think that was likely.
James leaned toward Dicey. They were the only people sitting in the back of the bus. Nobody would hear them over the sound of the motor.
“It’s like a prison break, isn’t it?”
Dicey knew what he meant. Even so, “That’s not fair,” she said. “Cousin Eunice wasn’t a jailer.”
James shrugged. “Whadda you think?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth. “I think, if we can get to New York without being caught—we’ll be home free.”
Home, Dicey thought. She remembered the inscription on the tombstone: Home is the sailor, home is the hunter. Until she died, Dicey wouldn’t expect any place to be home. Home was with Momma—and Momma was in a hospital where the doctors said she’d always stay. There could be no home for the Tillermans. Home free—Dicey would settle for a place to stay. Stay free.
Cousin Eunice’s house wasn’t free; it was expensive. The price was always remembering to be grateful. And there was danger to Sammy and Maybeth, of being sent to foster homes or special schools; danger to Dicey and James of forgetting and saying what they thought before wondering if it would sound ungrateful. At Cousin Eunice’s house, they were kept busy so they wouldn’t be a bother, couldn’t get in trouble.
Dicey had lowered her sights. She no longer hoped for a home. Now she wanted only a place where the Tillermans could be themselves and do what was good for them. Home was out of the question. Stay might be possible, if this grandmother could be persuaded. . . .
Dicey stopped thinking. She wanted to keep it simple. Get to Crisfield and see, that was her plan. That was all of it.
“Anyway, they know where we’re going,” Dicey told James.
“How could they know that?”
“I said so in the note I left.”
“Dicey! Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t think it would be fair to leave her to worry.”
“She’ll worry anyway. She likes worrying.”
“I can’t help that, James. I can’t help what she’s like. I can only help what I’m like.”
“You’ve ruined it,” James went on. “We can’t be running away if they know where we’re going.”
“We’re not running away—we never were running away,” Dicey said. “We’re just going to see.”
James shook his head. “I’m running away. Before—we were always the ones who were run away from. This time I want us to do it. What’s your plan?”
Dicey didn’t answer.
The road flowed under the wheels. They were back on Route 1. Maybe it was her doom, always to get back on Route 1. She squeezed Maybeth’s fingers. “Maybeth? What’s the matter? You scared?”
Maybeth looked at Dicey and nodded.
“So am I, a little,” Dicey said. “We’ll just wait and see. That’s all we can do.”
“I don’t want to go back.” Maybeth spoke in a small voice.
“I thought you liked it,” Dicey said. “The church, the pretty dress you wore th
ere, all the attention.”
“I did,” Maybeth said.
Dicey decided to tell the truth, now. “We might have to go back. Do you know that?”
Maybeth nodded.
Well, Dicey thought. She had underestimated Maybeth. She’d been fooled, like the nuns were fooled and Maybeth’s teachers. She’d been fooled into thinking Maybeth wasn’t who she knew Maybeth was.
“Look, Maybeth,” Dicey said, “if we do have to go back I’ll go with you to church, and we’ll both talk to the nuns. To Sister Berenice. I won’t leave you alone so much.”
Maybeth smiled, a tenuous little smile, and turned back to the window.
Smog made the air seem thick, like light, yellowed fog. In the heavy traffic the bus stopped and started, stopped and started. Buildings soared up higher than Dicey could see out the window. She twisted her head down to see their tops.
The bus turned onto a new street and headed east. Dicey felt as if they were in a maze and would never make their way out. Cars honked. Lights changed. They traveled down a narrow channel over which other roads crossed on high bridges. All the traffic, all the people, the tall buildings—Dicey felt scared, and exhilarated. There was so much life, all here in one place, teeming, whirling about her. More than at the crowded summer beaches in Provincetown. It was like a pot of vegetable soup boiling on a stove, everything moving. A restlessness and excitement came into Dicey with the air she breathed. Anything can happen, she thought.
At last the bus turned off into a huge warehouse. It followed a ramp, up and around, then fitted itself into a slot before a wall of glass doors. It became one of a row of buses.
The Tillermans stood up. Dicey led them to the front of the bus and down the steps, one after another, onto the sidewalk before the doors. Everyone was hurrying. Everyone acted as if he or she or they knew exactly where to go.
“What now, Dicey?” asked James.
“An information booth,” she answered briskly. “Then bathrooms, and maybe something to eat.”
They entered a huge, hollow hall lined with benches and ticket windows. Emptiness hung high over their heads although the room was crowded with people. The information booth was in the center of this hall. Dicey stationed her family by a water fountain and went up to stand in line.
When her turn finally came, she couldn’t think straight. The girl behind the glass window spoke without looking at Dicey: “Next? Little boy?”
Dicey gulped. “When’s the next bus to Wilmington, Delaware?”
Without speaking, the girl handed her a schedule.
“Where are the bathrooms?” Dicey asked.
“Lower level, on the street side.”
“Where can I buy a ticket?”
“Upper level, any window with a yellow or green light.”
Dicey fled, dragging her suitcase.
“She thought I was a boy,” she said to James.
“So did Louis and Edie,” he answered.
Dicey put the suitcase down and opened the schedule. They had forty minutes to wait. She would play it safe. “Okay, listen, James. Take this money”—she gave him a ten dollar bill—“and go get two tickets for Wilmington. That ticket window over there with a green light.”
“Why not four?”
“Just in case,” Dicey answered. “Two and two is not the same as four.”
James looked at her.
“Not in this case,” Dicey said. “In this case, it is but it isn’t.”
“You can say so,” James said. “And I’ll do it. And I see what you mean. But you’re wrong. Two and two is always four.”
When they had all four tickets, Dicey started walking along the concourse. She found the escalators leading down. “Now we go to the bathroom.”
The women’s room could have held Cousin Eunice’s house in it and had room to spare. Lines of women waited before each closed door, old, young, medium, some alone, some with friends, some with children, one with a tiny baby that rode in a pouch on her chest. The air smelled of perfume and cleanser. Maybeth and Dicey entered the cubicle together, because Maybeth didn’t want to go in alone. Dicey protested, “But you’re nine.” Maybeth just shook her head.
They took turns, Maybeth first. Dicey set the suitcase on the floor and opened it. She took out shorts and a shirt for Maybeth and her shoebox of money. She put twenty more dollars in her pocket. As they left the room, they tossed Maybeth’s rolled-up dress into the trash.
When they emerged from the women’s room, Dicey could not see James and Sammy. People hurried past, some carrying suitcases, some shopping bags, some just purses or newspapers. You could get lost here in this crowded station. You could get swept away. Or grabbed by somebody.
“Maybeth? If we get separated—” Maybeth caught Dicey’s free hand. “Just in case,” Dicey said. “We’ll meet back by that information booth I went to first. Remember it?”
James and Sammy joined them. They had a hot dog apiece, standing up at a counter, and a glass of orange drink. Dicey looked at a clock—only ten minutes until the bus left. The air hummed with voices, distant motors, and the muffled droning of the loudspeaker announcing what buses were leaving for what cities. If they could get on the bus all right, and out of the city, then they were on their way. And they might make it.
James and Sammy went onto the bus first. Dicey dawdled by the gate, with Maybeth beside her. Maybeth went first up into the bus. Dicey followed, pulling their two tickets out of her pocket and handing them to the driver.
He looked at her with a grimace. “What is this, kids’ day out?”
Dicey tried to look as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Never mind. But I’ll tell you what I told them. We’ve got a long drive and I don’t stand any horsing around.”
“We won’t,” she said.
“I know, I know. You’re angels from heaven. Go on back.”
After a few minutes, the driver closed the door and turned on the engine. He backed out of the parking slot. With every turn of the wheel, Dicey felt her stomach loosen and her muscles relax. By the time the bus entered a tunnel, a smile was beginning to turn up the corners of her mouth. She felt her back relaxing into the back of the seat. Beside her, Maybeth hummed softly. The bus zoomed out of the tunnel and into the light. Dicey stretched, smiled, yawned—and fell asleep.
When Dicey opened her eyes, she saw the sleek, straight lines of the rectangular interior of the bus. Out the windows, on both sides, lay farmlands. Fields of corn ripened under a bright sun. The corn swayed in the wind, like dancers with scarves.
Dicey wasn’t tired anymore. She was relaxed inside and out. She felt lazy and unworried. The bus rolled along.
It was as if, during that nap, Dicey had traveled days away from Cousin Eunice’s house in Bridgeport. That time now felt like a distant memory, something so far behind them that they didn’t have to concern themselves with it, not anymore.
She looked past Maybeth’s head, out the window. Fields, farmhouses, trees, sky with clouds; her eyes roamed lazily over them all. Her thoughts roamed lazily too, over memories and ideas. She rode outside of time and place.
She thought about Momma, and it seemed to her that she almost understood why all of this had happened to them, to the Tillermans, all this sadness and running away. She thought about the long walk from Peewauket to New Haven, and the grandfather who had tipped them two dollars and Stewart with his blue-gray eyes; then her mind switched to the journey ahead of them, as if the future were a road stretching ahead, twisting and turning. What did it matter where they were going, as long as they were going?
Sammy was asleep on James’s shoulder. Dicey leaned over to ask softly where they were. James told her the last stop had been Trenton.
Dicey took a map out of her suitcase. She unfolded it halfway, to show Wilmington and the Chesapeake Bay. Beneath her, the wheels rumbled on the road.
Sammy woke up. He punched James. James hit him back. Dicey quelled them with a glance and instr
ucted them to play odds-and-evens while she thought. “But I’m hungry,” Sammy argued.
“I can’t do anything about that,” Dicey answered.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a hot dog tree,” Dicey said.
“Why not?”
“Because if I were, then you’d be one too because you’re my brother. Only you’d be a pickle tree,” Dicey said, turning back to her map.
“Pickle tree,” Sammy repeated, trying to repress his giggles, not wanting to laugh at Dicey’s joke.
Dicey studied the map. Just below Wilmington, the Chesapeake Bay drove up like a wedge between two sections of land. The eastern shore of Maryland, where Crisfield was, was on the land between the Bay and the ocean. It looked about two hundred miles from Wilmington to Crisfield. So it might be a lot farther. Maybe as much as thirty days of walking. Too far. But there were some cities that must have buses running to them: Salisbury, Cambridge, Easton.
They’d already spent too much on bus tickets. Money was always the problem. Dicey wanted to have money left over, so they could get back to Bridgeport, if they had to. She figured they’d have to walk part of the way anyway, and she wanted to have some tools for camping. A jackknife, one with a can opener on it. A pan of some kind. Ponchos, for when it rained. She let her mind wander on briefly to other things, to a backpack and bedrolls, to a portable stove. No, those would be silly; but fishing line and hooks would be useful. There was a lot of water around, so there must be fishing.
They had another choice: they could go down the western shore, to Baltimore or Annapolis—it would have to be Annapolis because that was near the only bridge over the Bay. That would leave them about half of the distance to Crisfield still to cover. Maybe two weeks of walking.
They would have to get over the bridge if they did that. The map said Toll Bridge, so they probably couldn’t walk over it. They might hitchhike, but Dicey didn’t like that idea. She didn’t like being in somebody’s car and not able to run away. Besides, who would pick up four kids? They might have to take another bus.