Below her the lights slid by. She rested her forehead against the cold plastic of the window and closed her eyes, and there it was.
* * *
The bus was a Greyhound, the old silver kind with the running dog on the side, and it smelled of diesel and stale cigarettes even though smoking had supposedly been banned. It was the spring of 1989. Cecilia was fourteen. Danny was nine.
They were going to Pittsburgh because there was a doctor there, at the children's hospital, who was supposed to know about boys like Danny. Back then nobody in Johnstown used the word autistic, or if they knew it they didn't say it. The school wrote "retarded" on his forms and said "special" to their mother's face. The neighbors called him "that Vargas boy." Their father, before he left, had called him nothing at all, which in its way was worse.
Danny did not talk. He had a few words, out and no and Mama, and sometimes Cee for his sister, but mostly he didn't use them. What he did was hum. He hummed one low note, steady as a motor, and he could hum it for an hour. Their mother said he'd started it as a baby, lying in a laundry basket in the corner of the hospital basement while she worked, listening to the big industrial dryers turning over and over. She said he was singing along with the machines. When he was upset, he hummed louder. When he was very upset, he screamed.
He carried a picture book everywhere, a cardboard book about trains that he'd had since he was two, its corners chewed soft and its spine held together with electrical tape. He turned the pages in order, always in order, one through twelve and then one through twelve again. If you took it away, the world ended.
On the bus he sat by the window with the book in his lap and hummed. Cecilia sat beside him. Their mother sat across the aisle, because her back was bad and she needed to stretch her leg out, and she had closed her eyes because she'd worked a double the night before so she could take the day off.
Two rows ahead sat a woman in a camel coat with a fur collar. Cecilia had noticed her when they got on, because no one in Johnstown dressed like that. She had a leather bag with a gold clasp, and her hair was the color of honey, and it did not move. She looked like a woman out of a magazine. She looked, to Cecilia, like the future.
Somewhere past Blairsville, the woman turned around in her seat.
"Excuse me," she said, and she was looking across the aisle at Cecilia's mother. "Can you keep your boy quiet? Some of us are trying to rest."
Cecilia's mother opened her eyes. She looked at the woman, and at Danny, and her face did something complicated: a door closing, something tired behind the door. "I'm sorry," she said. "He can't help it. It's how he—"
"Well, can't you do something?"