The Last Bus on Route 9

🕐9 min read

Route 9 Terminates at Wickford Landing

I drive the 11:40 PM departure out of Central Station — the last bus on Route 9. It runs through the industrial district, past the hospital, along the river road, and terminates at Wickford Landing, which is a bus shelter at the edge of a defunct rail yard that the transit authority has been threatening to decommission since I started driving this route six years ago.

Nobody gets on at Wickford Landing. Nobody gets off at Wickford Landing. The stop exists because it has always existed — because a bus route needs a terminus and because removing a stop requires paperwork that no one at the transit authority wants to file. The shelter has a bench and a streetlight that works about half the time. There are no houses within walking distance. The rail yard behind it has been closed since 1997. The nearest open business is a gas station a mile and a half back on Route 9.

When I reach Wickford Landing, I sit for four minutes — union-mandated break — then turn the bus around in the rail yard access road and drive the route back to Central Station dead-heading. It is the loneliest part of the shift. Most nights, the bus is empty by the hospital stop, and the last twenty minutes of the outbound route are just me, the engine, and the river road.

Most nights.

The First Time

November 3rd. Cold, clear, no rain. I pulled into Wickford Landing at 12:24 AM. The streetlight was working, which was unusual. I could see the shelter clearly.

There was a woman sitting on the bench.

She was dressed like she had been waiting, not like she had wandered there. A coat, a bag on her lap, sitting upright with her hands folded. She was looking at the bus as I pulled in, the way you look at a bus you have been expecting — not surprised, not alarmed, just ready.

I opened the doors. She stood up, walked to the front of the bus, and paused at the farebox. She was older — sixties, maybe older, with gray hair pulled back and a face that was more tired than anything else. Not the kind of tired you get from one bad night. The kind you carry.

“How far are you going?” I asked.

“Central Station,” she said.

This was a problem. Wickford Landing is the terminus. The bus does not carry passengers back. It dead-heads — runs empty — to the depot, and the schedule does not resume until 5:15 AM. I am technically not allowed to carry passengers on the return trip.

But it was after midnight and cold and she was alone at a bus stop that has no reason to have anyone at it, and I am not the kind of driver who leaves a woman stranded. I told her to sit down. She walked to the middle of the bus — not the front, not the back, the exact middle — and sat by the window.

I did not ask her to pay. She did not offer.

The drive back to Central Station takes about forty minutes dead-heading because I do not stop. She sat in the middle of the bus the entire time. She did not look at her phone. She did not read. She looked out the window at the river road in the dark, and I could see her reflection in my mirror — just sitting, watching, very still.

When I pulled into Central Station, I opened the doors and said, “End of the line.” She stood up, walked to the front, and said, “Thank you.” Her voice was very quiet — not whispering, just quiet in the way of someone who does not speak often. She stepped off the bus and walked toward the station entrance.

I watched her in the side mirror. She walked through the entrance doors and was gone.

Central Station closes at midnight.

The doors she walked through are locked from 12:01 AM until 4:45 AM. They are glass, and I could see the darkened lobby through them. She walked through locked glass doors as if they were open.

I sat in the bus for a long time.

The Pattern

She was there again on November 7th. Same bench, same coat, same bag. Same question from me, same answer, same quiet ride to Central Station, same “thank you,” same walk through the locked doors.

And again on the 12th. And the 18th. And the 23rd.

By December, I had stopped being alarmed and started being curious. The pattern was not nightly — it was roughly every four or five days, without a fixed schedule. Some weeks she was there twice. Some weeks not at all. There was no weather pattern, no day-of-week pattern, no correlation I could find with anything.

I started paying closer attention. Her coat was always the same — dark wool, double-breasted, the kind women wore in the eighties. Her bag was a brown leather handbag with a clasp, the kind you see in vintage stores. Her shoes were low heels, practical, slightly worn. Her clothes never changed. Not similar outfits — the same clothes, every time.

She never initiated conversation. She answered direct questions — “Cold tonight” got “Yes” — but she did not volunteer anything. She was polite without being warm. She was present without being entirely there. The bus seat creaked when she sat down. Her reflection appeared in the window glass. She cast a shadow when the streetlights hit her. Whatever she was, she had weight and substance.

In January, I asked her name.

“Margaret,” she said.

“Do you live near Wickford Landing?”

“I used to.”

“Where do you go when you get to Central Station?”

She looked at me for a moment — the first time she had looked directly at me since that initial November night — and said, “Home.”

She did not say it the way you say “home” when you mean your house. She said it the way you say it when home is a concept, a direction, a place that exists in relation to where you have been rather than where you are going.

What I Found

I am not a superstitious person. I drive a bus. I deal in schedules and fare zones and traffic patterns. I believe in the things that have timetables. But I also believe in what I see, and I was seeing a woman board my bus at a stop where no one lives, ride to a station that is closed, and walk through locked doors.

I went to the public library on my day off and looked up Wickford Landing. The rail yard had been an active freight hub until 1997. Before that, in the forties and fifties, it was a commuter rail stop. The bus route was established in 1962 to replace the rail service after the commuter line was cut.

The library had digitized newspapers from the local paper going back to the twenties. I searched for “Wickford Landing” and found the usual — development proposals, zoning disputes, a fire in the switching house in 1983. And one article from February 1998, six months after the rail yard closed.

A woman named Margaret Calloway had been found dead at the Wickford Landing bus shelter. Exposure. She had been sitting on the bench in a wool coat with a leather handbag on her lap. The coroner estimated she had been dead for twelve to sixteen hours when she was discovered. She was sixty-seven. She had lived in a house near the rail yard that had been demolished as part of the closure. Her next of kin could not be located.

She had been waiting for a bus that, the article noted, had not served Wickford Landing for six months due to a temporary route suspension. The bus service to Wickford Landing was not restored until 2003.

Margaret Calloway froze to death waiting for a bus that was not coming, at a stop that was not active, trying to get home from a place that no longer existed.

Now

I still drive Route 9. I still take the 11:40 PM departure. Margaret is still there, some nights, sitting on the bench in her wool coat with her handbag and her quiet patience.

I always open the doors. She always gets on. She always sits in the middle of the bus and watches the river road go by in the dark. I always take her to Central Station and she always walks through the doors that are always locked.

I have never told the transit authority. They would decommission the stop, and I do not think that would help. I do not think Margaret is waiting because the stop exists. I think the stop exists because Margaret is waiting. Some places persist because the need that created them has not been resolved. Some routes stay on the map because someone still needs to ride them.

Last week she said something as she got off the bus. Not “thank you” — something different. She said, “It’s getting warmer.”

It was February. It was not getting warmer. But she said it the way you say something you have been waiting a long time to be true, and I said, “Yes, it is,” because some things are more important than accuracy.

The last bus on Route 9 leaves Central Station at 11:40 PM and arrives at Wickford Landing at 12:24 AM. It carries however many passengers the city requires and one the city does not know about. She has been waiting since 1998. The least I can do is not make her wait alone.

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