The Goldfinch

But I didn’t. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn’t—I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street—which was, of course, I love you.

xx.

I WAS SO TIRED that the drugs didn’t last long, at least not the feel-good part. The cab driver—a transplanted New Yorker from the sound of him—immediately sussed out something was wrong and tried to give me a card for the National Runaway switchboard, which I refused to take. When I asked him to drive me to the train station (not even knowing if there was a train in Vegas—surely there had to be), he shook his head and said: “You know, don’t you, Specs, they don’t take dogs on Amtrak?”

“They don’t?” I said, my heart sinking.

“The plane—maybe, I don’t know.” He was a young-ish guy, a fast talker, baby-faced, slightly overweight, in a T-shirt that said PENN AND TELLER: LIVE AT THE RIO. “You’ll have to have a crate, or something. Maybe the bus is your best bet. But they don’t let kids under a certain age ride without parental permission.”

“I told you! My dad died! His girlfriend is sending me to my family back east.”

“Well, hey, you don’t have anything to worry about then, do you?”

I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the ride. The fact of my father’s death had not yet sunk in, and every now and then, the lights zipping past on the highway brought it back in a sick rush. An accident. At least in New York we hadn’t had to worry about drunk driving—the great fear was that he would fall in front of a car or be stabbed for his wallet, lurching out of some dive bar at three a.m. What would happen to his body? I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in Central Park, though apparently there was a regulation against it; one evening while it was getting dark, I’d walked with Andy to a deserted area on the west side of the Pond and—while Andy kept a lookout—dumped the urn. What had disturbed me far more than the actual scattering of the remains was that the urn had been packed in shredded pieces of porno classifieds: SOAPY ASIAN BABES and WET HOT ORGASMS were two random phrases that had caught my eye as the gray powder, the color of moon rock, caught and spun in the May twilight.

Then there were lights, and the car stopped. “Okay, Specs,” said my driver, turning with his arm along the back seat. We were in the parking lot of the Greyhound station. “What did you say your name was?”

“Theo,” I said, without thinking, and immediately was sorry.

“All right, Theo. J.P.” He reached across the back seat to shake my hand. “You want to take my advice about something?”

“Sure,” I said, quailing a bit. Even with everything else that was going on, and there was quite a lot, I felt incredibly uncomfortable that this guy had probably seen Boris kissing me in the street.

“None of my business, but you’re going to need something to put Fluffy there in.”

“Sorry?”

He nodded at my bag. “Will he fit in that?”

“Umm—”

“You’re probably going to have to check that bag, anyway. It might be too big for you to carry aboard—they’ll stow it underneath. It’s not like the plane.”

“I—” This was too much to think about. “I don’t have anything.”

“Hang on. Let me check in my office back here.” He got up, went around to the trunk, and returned with a large canvas shopping bag from a health food store that said The Greening of America.

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d go in and buy the ticket without Fluffy Boy. Leave him out here with me, just in case, okay?”

My new pal had been right about not riding Greyhound without an Unaccompanied Child form signed by a parent—and there were other restrictions for kids as well. The clerk at the window—a wan Chicana with scraped-back hair—began in a monotone to go down the long baleful list of them. No Transfers. No Journeys of Longer than Five Hours in Duration. Unless the person named on the Unaccompanied Child Form showed up to meet me, with positive identification, I would be released into the custody of Child Protective Services or to local law enforcement officials in the city of my destination.

“But—”

“All children under fifteen. No exceptions.”

“But I’m not under fifteen,” I said, floundering to produce my official-looking state-issued New York ID. “I am fifteen. Look.” Enrique—envisioning perhaps the likelihood of my having to go into what he called The System—had taken me to be photographed for it shortly after my mother died; and though I’d resented it at the time, Big Brother’s far-reaching claw (“Wow, your very own bar code,” Andy had said, looking at it curiously), now I was thankful he’d had the foresight to carry me downtown and register me like a second-hand motor vehicle. Numbly, like a refugee, I waited under the sleazy fluorescents as the clerk looked at the card at a number of different angles and in different lights, at length finding it genuine.

“Fifteen,” she said suspiciously, handing it back to me.

“Right.” I knew I didn’t look my age. There was, I realized, no question of being up-front about Popper since a big sign by the desk said in red letters NO DOGS, CATS, BIRDS, RODENTS, REPTILES, OR OTHER ANIMALS WILL BE TRANSPORTED.

As for the bus itself, I was in luck: there was a 1:45 a.m. with co

“Where is he?” Groggily, I looked in the back seat. “What’d you do with him?”

He laughed. “Now you don’t and… now you do!” With a flourish, he removed the messily-folded copy of USA Today from the canvas bag on the front seat beside him; and there, settled contentedly in a cardboard box at the bottom of the bag, crunching on some potato chips, was Popper.

“Misdirection,” he said. “The box fills out the bag so it doesn’t look dog-shaped and gives him a little more room to move around. And the newspaper—perfect prop. Covers him up, makes the bag look full, doesn’t add any weight.”

“Do you think it’ll be all right?”

“Well, I mean, he’s such a little guy—what, five pounds, six? Is he quiet?”

I looked at him doubtfully, curled at the bottom of the box. “Not always.”

J.P. wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave me the package of potato chips. “Give him a couple of these suckers if he gets antsy. You’ll be stopping every few hours. Just sit as far in the back of the bus as you can, and make sure you take him away from the station a ways before you let him out to do his business.”

I put the bag over my shoulder and tucked my arm around it. “Can you tell?” I asked him.

“No. Not if I didn’t know. But can I give you a tip? Magician’s secret?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t keep looking down at the bag like that. Anywhere but the bag. The scenery, your shoelace—okay, there we go—that’s right. Confident and natural, that’s the kitty. Although klutzy and looking for a dropped contact lens will work too, if you think people are giving you the fish eye. Spill your chips—stub your toe—cough on your drink—anything.”

Wow, I thought. Clearly they didn’t call it Lucky Cab for nothing.