The Night Route

Brenda drove the last bus of the night, the one that left town at ten and ran along the coast road through the villages. The company called it route nine. The drivers called it the ghost bus, because on most nights it carried nobody at all.

Brenda liked it that way. Ten years as a bus driver had taught her that trouble travels after dark, and that an empty bus is a quiet friend.

That night she had three passengers. An old man with a bag of tools, asleep before the first stop. Ana from the restaurant by the sea, who sat in the seat behind the driver every Friday and told her how to drive. And, at the bus stop by the church, a man carrying a small girl wrapped in his coat.

"You are late," said Ana, as she did every Friday. "And you are too close to the wall."

"Good evening, Ana," said Brenda, as she did every Friday.

The man paid in small coins. His hands were shaking. The girl's face was white, and her eyes were open, but they were not looking at anything.

"She is hot," the man said. "She has been hot since this afternoon."

Brenda looked at the girl. She had two children of her own, both adults now, and she knew the difference between a child who is ill and a child who is in trouble. This girl was in trouble.

"There is a doctor in Marden," the man said. "That is our stop."

"The doctor in Marden closes at six," said Brenda. "She needs the hospital."

"The bus does not go to the hospital."

That was true. The hospital was four miles from the route, on the far side of the river. Rule four in the company book said a driver must keep to the route, whatever happens. There was a radio for everything else: call the office, and the office decides.

Brenda called the office. "Route nine," she said. "Route nine to the office."

The radio made a sound like rain, and nobody answered. It was half past ten at night.

She looked at the girl again in the mirror. The girl had started to make a small sound, over and over, like a machine that is going to fail.

At the bridge, Brenda left the route.

"This is not the way to Marden," said the father.

"No," said Brenda.

The old man woke when the bus turned. He looked through the window at the wrong road, then at the man with the girl, and understood at once, in the way old men do. He moved to the front seat. "Take the low road," he said. "It is faster."

Ana was already on her feet. In summer she taught people to swim, and every year she did the first-aid course again, because she did not trust anyone else to do it properly. "Give her to me," she said to the father. "You cannot hold her and think at the same time."

He gave her the girl. People usually did what Ana told them.

Nobody said anything about the route.

Four miles is nothing in a car. In a bus, at night, on a small wet road, it is a long way. Brenda drove faster than the rules allowed and slower than she wanted to. The father sat with his hands on his knees and watched the front window, as if watching could make the road shorter.

"Faster," said Ana. In ten years of Fridays, she had never said that before.

At the hospital Brenda stopped the bus at the main door, where buses do not go. The lights inside were very bright. A nurse hurried through the doors, took one look at the girl, took her from Ana's arms and ran. The father ran behind her.

Then the doors closed, and the bus was quiet again.

The old man was asleep again before the bridge. Ana looked at her hands for a while. Brenda turned the bus round, found the route again, and finished it, an hour late.

At her village Ana stood by the door until it opened. "You were too close to the wall at the bridge," she said.

"Good night, Ana," said Brenda.

The letter from the company arrived on Friday. It said she had broken rule four, that the matter was serious, and that it would stay on her record for two years.

The letter from the girl's father arrived a day later. It was shorter. It said the hospital had measured the girl's temperature, and the nurse had gone quiet when she read it. It said the fever broke at four in the morning. It said that another hour would have made this a different story.

Brenda read both letters at her kitchen table. She kept the father's letter in her coat. The company's letter she took to work.

That night, before route nine, she put it on the wall of the drivers' room, next to rule four, where every driver would see it. Under it, in small careful letters, she wrote two words.

Worth it.