We stayed in the yard that evening for about an hour, Marcus and me, sitting on the steps of bus 7 with the radio off, working out what we actually had.
I have driven with Marcus for six years. He is fifty-eight, he was a long-haul driver before this, and he has the specific carefulness of a man who has spent his life not hitting things.
What we had, once we laid it out, was this.
The boy rode Marcus’s bus in the early morning. First pickup, six-ten, north county, already standing at the stop when Marcus arrived. Two or three times a week since — Marcus thought — late September.
The boy rode my bus in the mid-morning, from Vance, three weeks.
The boy did not ride either bus in the afternoon.
Marcus’s north county run and my Vance run are on opposite sides of the county. Between the two of them there is a forty-minute drive and no public transport of any kind.
I said, “How is he getting from your route to mine?”
And Marcus said the thing that made my stomach drop, which is: “He isn’t. He’s already on the bus.”
Here is what Marcus meant and it took me a minute.
The buses do not go back to the yard between runs. There is not time. Marcus finishes his north county drop at the high school at about seven-forty, and then he has an hour of nothing, and he parks at the school and eats breakfast and does his paperwork.
I finish at eight-forty and do the same.
A boy who did not get off Marcus’s bus at seven-forty would be sitting on a parked bus at a school for an hour with a driver eating a sandwich twelve feet away, and Marcus does not walk his aisle after the high school because the high school is his last stop and the bus is, by definition, empty.
Marcus said, very quietly, “I never check. Why would I check. They all get off.”
We did not go to anybody that night, and I have thought about that a great deal since, and I still do not know whether it was right.
Our reasoning at the time, which I can reconstruct exactly:
We had a child who was going to school. Every day. That is the thing we kept coming back to. Whatever else was happening, this boy was getting himself onto a bus at six in the morning and going to school, and whatever we did next was going to interfere with that, and neither of us was confident we could interfere in a way that made it better.
Marcus said, “If we report it and it’s nothing, we’ve made a kid’s life complicated for nothing.”
And I said, “And if we report it and it’s something, then what?”
Neither of us could finish that sentence, which should have told us both something.
What we did instead was decide to find out where he got off.
Which sounds like surveillance of a child by two adults and I am aware of how that reads. I want to put down what we actually agreed, because we did talk about it and we did draw a line.
We agreed: we do not follow him. We do not photograph him. We do not get him alone and question him. We do not touch his backpack.
We agreed: we watch our own buses, which are our responsibility, and we find out where on our own routes a child is getting off.
That is a thing a driver is entitled to know and arguably obliged to know, and I have held onto that as the justification, and it is a real justification and it is also — I can see this now — the justification I needed in order to do the thing I had already decided to do.
Marcus watched his aisle at the high school on Wednesday.
He walked the bus, front to back, checking the seats, at seven-forty-one.
Empty.
He called me at eight. I was mid-route. I called him back from the middle school and he said, “Nothing. He wasn’t on it this morning at all, I don’t think — I looked at six-ten and he wasn’t at the stop.”
And I said, “He’s on my bus. He got on at Vance twenty minutes ago.”
It took us until the following Tuesday to work it out, and we worked it out because Karen — the third driver, who we had told by then, because keeping it between two of us had started to feel like the wrong shape — said something completely offhand in the yard.
She said, “Which stop at Vance? Because there’s two.”
I said no there isn’t.
And Karen said, “There’s the one by the mailboxes and there’s the old one by the laundry. They moved it in 2019. Some of them still wait at the laundry if it’s raining and then walk over when they see you coming.”
I said what does that have to do with anything.
And Karen said, “Nothing. Except the laundry’s got an awning and it’s the only covered thing on that whole lot, and if a kid was somewhere he shouldn’t be at five in the morning in October, that’s where I’d be.”