…”every kid on that bus. All twenty-three of us. I wrote them down that night, because I was eleven and I was sure we were going to die, and I wanted somebody to know who was there.”
He unfolded the paper and held it out. It was a route sheet from Duluth Public Schools, Bus 9, dated January 1996. On the back, in a child’s careful pencil, were twenty-three names.
“My name’s Tom Berglund,” he said. “I’m an emergency room doctor now. I found your retirement in the paper last week. I’ve spent the last six days finding everyone on this list.”
Then he turned around and opened the door to the back room of the restaurant. And they came in. Grown men and women in their late thirties and early forties, some with kids of their own on their hips. Seventeen of them. A teacher. A firefighter. Two nurses. A woman who’d driven up from Minneapolis that afternoon.
One by one, they walked up to my dad and shook his hand, or hugged him, or just stood there, not knowing what to say. My dad didn’t say anything either. He just kept nodding, with his decaf in one hand.
Tom read the last name on the list out loud. “Ryan Lindqvist. Seat three. He had an asthma attack around hour two, and Mr. Gordon kept the heater running the whole way so he could breathe, even though it meant risking the fuel.”
My uncle Phil’s head came up.
Ryan is Phil’s son. He was six that winter. Phil had been on a business trip in Chicago. His wife had told him the bus was “late because of the snow.” That was all he’d ever known.
Ryan was standing at the back of the room. He’d come, too. He walked up to my dad, shook his hand and said, “Thank you for getting me home.” Then he looked over at his father, and didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t need to.
Phil set his glass down. For the first time I can remember, he had nothing to add.
Later that night, after everyone had gone, Phil found my dad in the parking lot, scraping ice off his windshield. I watched from the doorway. I couldn’t hear what he said. But I saw him take the scraper out of my dad’s hand and finish the windshield himself.
Tom had the route sheet framed. It hangs in my parents’ hallway now, right by the front door. Dad walks past it every morning. He still says he was just “a little late.”
