Where We Wait
by Z. Marlow
3 min readI put the shelter back together before the buses began running.
The glass panel had not broken, though Tomas and I had passed through it. It stood in its frame with frost feathering the inside, impossible to reach with a cloth. I replaced the timetable, tightened the lower bolts, and wiped our fingerprints from the outer surface.
His remained on the other side.
When the first bus came, its brakes sighed warmly against the curb. The driver opened the doors. No one boarded.
I told her my brother had gone home.
A few minutes earlier, Tomas was standing beyond the glass with his daughter.
Mara looked as she had on the morning she vanished: yellow coat, red wool cap, one shoelace dark from a puddle. Twelve years had passed for us. None appeared to have touched her.
She held Tomas by two fingers.
Behind them lay a long concourse roofed in milky panes. Lamps burned at careful intervals, showing benches, litter bins, route maps, all the patient furniture of public travel. Beyond the lamps there was no city. Only snow falling into a darkness too deep to contain weather.
People sat along the benches. Some leaned forward with shopping bags between their shoes. Some slept against one another. I recognized no one until an old woman raised her face.
My mother had been dead since spring.
She smiled as if I were late.
In that moment I understood why an empty shelter can feel occupied, why we sometimes make room on a bench without knowing we have moved.
No one had ever waited alone.
Tomas called my name. His voice came faintly through the glass.
Mara looked at me too. There was no pleading in her face. That made it worse. She seemed content, and so did he.
Then engines began turning over across the city. The lamps above the concourse went out one by one.
I struck the glass with the heel of my hand.
Tomas lifted Mara into his arms. He had not held her since she was small enough to sleep there.
The frost grew between us.
Before that, I had followed Tomas through the side panel because he said he could hear her humming.
There was no doorway. He stepped toward his reflection and became briefly flat, like a man printed on wet paper. Then the glass admitted him.
I went after him.
The air beyond smelled of wool coats drying on radiators. Snow rested on the tiled floor without melting. Somewhere, out of sight, a bus bell rang once.
We walked past bays marked with names instead of destinations. Some were familiar. Most were not. At each one, someone waited beneath the sign, watching the dark.
Tomas did not look left or right. The humming had become clear.
It was the song Mara used to sing when she tied her shoes.
Earlier still, the freezing rain had stopped every bus at once.
I was sent to check the shelter on Bellweather Street because its arrival board kept displaying the same message. Tomas came because that was where Mara had last been seen, and because grief makes a person answer certain calls long after the telephone has been disconnected.
The shelter appeared ordinary. Salt whitened the pavement. An abandoned glove lay under the bench, stiff with ice.
Only the reflections were wrong.
In the glass, the street continued where the brick pharmacy should have been. More shelters stood in a shining row, each lit from within. Their roofs receded farther than the street itself could run.
Tomas wiped the fog with his sleeve.
A small hand wiped back.
Before I called him, I stood alone under the shelter roof while sleet ticked against the glass.
The arrival board had gone blank. Then pale letters surfaced slowly, as if written by a finger beneath dark water.
PLEASE REMAIN. SOMEONE IS COMING.
I thought of Tomas at once.
I did not yet wonder who had sent it.
