The Bus That Still Runs Route 7 — And the Driver Nobody Recognizes

I want to start by saying my daughter is fine. I need you to know that before I go any further, because by the time you finish reading this, you're going to wonder.

We moved to Elm Hollow Road in late August, right before the school year started. The neighborhood is the kind of place that looks like it was assembled from a catalog — Dutch Colonials, mature oaks, a cul-de-sac that dead-ends into a stand of pines so dense the light goes brown in the afternoon. We liked it. Mara liked it. She's seven, and she was already talking about making friends before we'd finished unpacking the kitchen.

Photo: Elm Hollow Road, via photos.zillowstatic.com

The first morning she mentioned the bus driver, I didn't think anything of it.

"He waved at me," she said, over cereal. "From the window."

I asked what bus, because our district had assigned her to Route 12, which picks up at the corner of Elm Hollow and Pratt. She shrugged the way seven-year-olds do when they've already moved on. I let it go.

She mentioned him again the following Tuesday. Then the Thursday after that. Always the same detail: an older man, she said, with a gray uniform and a cap that sat too low on his forehead, and he waved at her from the driver's seat of a yellow bus that came down Elm Hollow around 7:15, slowed at the end of our driveway, and then continued on without opening its doors. She'd been watching from her bedroom window.

I started watching too.

The bus was real. I saw it myself on a Wednesday in late September — caught just the tail end of it rounding the bend past the Holloways' place, yellow paint, no visible route number on the back, moving at the unhurried pace of something that had been making the same stops for a long time. I figured it was a different route, maybe serving the elementary school one town over. I figured there was a simple answer.

There wasn't.

I called the district transportation office and asked about bus routes serving Elm Hollow Road. The woman I spoke to was friendly, professional, and then briefly not either of those things when I mentioned Route 7. There was a pause I've replayed in my head many times since. She told me Route 7 was decommissioned in 1989 and that no bus with that designation had been in service for over thirty years. When I described what I'd seen, she said I must be mistaken about the road and gave me the number for the district's main office.

The main office didn't call back.

I found Gerald Purcell through a retired bus drivers' association forum — one of those ancient web pages with a counter at the bottom that still ticks up. He'd worked as a dispatcher for the district from 1974 to 2001, and he answered my email within an hour, which I thought was a good sign. His reply was four lines long. He said he remembered Route 7. He said the driver, a man named Arlen Meade, had died at the wheel on the morning of November 3rd, 1989, of a cardiac event — somewhere between the Holloway property and the pine cul-de-sac, which meant somewhere close enough to our driveway that I felt it in my back teeth when I read it. He said the route was retired the same week. He said he'd heard from three other families on Elm Hollow Road over the years, always asking the same questions I was asking.

Photo: Gerald Purcell, via cache.legacy.net

Photo: Arlen Meade, via media.cnn.com

He did not say what he told them.

I found the logbook entry myself, eventually, in a box of district records a retired school board member had kept in her garage and was willing to let me photograph. November 3rd, 1989. Arlen Meade, Route 7. Cardiac event reported by student passenger at 7:22 AM. Bus came to rest at 441 Elm Hollow Road. Six students on board, all unharmed and transported by emergency vehicle. Route discontinued pending review. Review never completed.

441 Elm Hollow Road is a vacant lot now. It backs up against the pines.

The part I haven't let myself look at too carefully is the list of stops Route 7 was still scheduled to make that morning when Arlen Meade's heart gave out. I found the original route sheet paper-clipped to the back of the logbook page. The stops are listed by address. I recognized most of them — houses I drive past every week, families I've waved to from the car.

Four of those addresses, spread across three decades, have a small notation in pencil beside them. A different hand from the rest of the document. The notations are just initials and years. I've only been able to match two of them to anything concrete, and I wish I hadn't looked.

Both were children who went missing from Elm Hollow Road. One in 1993, one in 2007. Both cases are still open.

Our address is not on the route sheet. I've checked it four times. I keep checking it because Mara keeps watching from her window, and because last Friday she told me the driver had stopped waving.

"He just looks now," she said. "He looks at me like he's trying to remember something."

I stood at the end of our driveway this morning at 7:10. I stood there until 7:30. The bus came at 7:18, same as always, and it slowed the way it always slows, and I watched the door and I want to tell you it didn't open.

I want to tell you that.

Mara is fine. She's at school right now, on Route 12, with a driver named Paula who sends home a newsletter every month. Everything is fine.

I'm going to go move the trash cans away from the end of the driveway now. I don't want anything out there that looks like a reason to stop.