Between Two Words
Episode 13 - The Bus to Nowhere
We last saw Emily in Taiwan making her way through the night to Keelung.
Episode 11 recap… Full episode here
The street she stood on was quiet, the shops shuttered, the windows dark. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, a sharp sound that echoed off the concrete walls and faded into nothing. Emily straightened her hat, adjusted her grip on her valise, and began to walk.
Between Two Words
Episode 13 - The Bus to Nowhere
The bus station was a small concrete building at the edge of the city. Its dingy windows steamed with the breath of waiting passengers. Emily found it by following the quiet dark windows until lights showed intermittently in the dark. Her feet felt like stone, carrying her through streets that grew wider as she moved away from the harbor.
It took her the rest of the night to cross the city to the bus stop. She was exhausted from the effort, but knew now is not the time to give in. She must reach Taipei.
She arrived just as the first bus of the morning was boarding, a rattling green coach bound for Taipei. Mindlessly, she bought a ticket. She did not ask the price or the route; she heard Taipei and that was good enough for her over extended brain, heart and body. She handed over the money necessary in coins from her pocket, took her ticket, then climbed aboard.
She found a seat near the back, by the window, and pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
The bus filled slowly. An old woman with a basket of vegetables, a young man in a school uniform, a family with a sleeping child. No one looked at her. No one asked her name. She was just another passenger, another woman with a bag and a destination, and the ordinariness of it was a kind of relief.
The bus pulled away from the station as the sun was rising, the light spilling over the hills to the east and turning the city gold. Emily watched Keelung slip past the window. The slowly filling streets, the concrete buildings, the harbor glinting in the distance. She felt her breath slow. For the first time she let her shoulders drop a bit. She had made it. She was on her way.
She did not know how long the journey would take. She did not know what she would find when she arrived. She only knew that Taipei had an airport, and the airport had planes that flew to London, and somewhere in London, Harold was waiting.
She closed her eyes and let the motion of the bus rock her toward sleep.
She woke to silence.
The bus was stopped. The engine was off. And the other passengers were gone. Emily sat up, her heart lurching, and looked around. The bus was empty, the seats abandoned, the door at the front standing open.
Outside, the world was green. Huge green hills rising on either side, filled with lush trees, vines and thick wildlife. A narrow road cut through them like a sliver of dirt, and nothing else. No buildings were in sight, and unfortunately also no people. She only heard the sound of the wind in the trees and the distant calls of a bird.
Emily grabbed her bag and hurried to the front of the bus, stepping out into the morning light. The air was cool and clean, smelling of earth and leaves and something sweet. The road stretched ahead of her, winding into the hills, and behind her, back the way they had come, it curved out of sight. There was no village, no town, no sign of life at all.
A string of curses in Chinese and English flooded from her mouth. She stomped her foot more in fury at her incompetence than that of being stranded in a foreign place, in the middle of nowhere, with only a bag of clothing. She was not some heroine who craved adventure.
She stood on the road, her bag in her hand, and felt a wave of panic in her chest. Tears started in her eyes. She wearily wiped them away.
No Tears!
She had not asked. She had not listened. She had bought her ticket and climbed aboard and closed her eyes, and now she was alone in a country she did not know, on a road that led nowhere she could see, with no map and no plan and no one to ask for help.
She walked to the front of the bus and looked inside. The driver’s seat was empty, the keys gone. A basket of vegetables sat on the seat behind him, forgotten. The old woman with the vegetables, the student, the family with the child, all of them had vanished, as if they had never been.
Emily turned in a slow circle, looking for something, anything, that would tell her where she was. The hills rose on either side, thick with trees, their slopes shadowed and secret. The road was paved, but the edges were crumbling, grass growing up through the cracks. There were no signs, no markers, no indication of how far she was from Taipei or any other place.
She had a choice. She could wait here, hope that the driver returned or another bus came, and risk being found by whoever, or whatever, had emptied this one. Or she could walk.
She looked at the road ahead, winding into the hills, and then at the road behind, curving out of sight. She had left Hong Kong. She had crossed the sea. She had escaped her mother’s house, her father’s expectations, the life that had been planned for her before she was born. She had come this far.
She took as many of the vegetables she could hold in her pockets and bag and turned away from the bus.
She could walk. Her muscles ached as she took her first step. With a sigh she began one tentative step in front of another.
To be continued...
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The last letter from Harold is here…
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She simply keeps taking the next step. Somehow that feels more courageous than certainty ever could.
The bus going from sleepy little almost-safe morning to um, excuse me, where did literally everyone go, had me doing a nervous laugh... Emily stealing vegetables before marching off is exactly the kind of exhausted girl survival math I respect way too much, like yessss babe, panic later, pocket the snacks first.