Chapter Thirty-Five
THIRTY-FIVE
You don’t realize how loud a heart is until you’ve run the whole length of a train platform and you’re left standing in the cloud of silence that the train spews out as it abandons you.
“WAIT!” Ted bellows desperately at the lights, but that’s about as effective as throwing marshmallows at a whale and thinking it will change direction.
No one on board hears him, the train doesn’t care, that’s how everything goes to Hell. There goes a world-famous painting along with the ashes of the man who painted it.
Ted does a pirouette of anger.
“Why did you get off the train?” he snaps, with his lip split and blood dripping from his nose.
“Why did YOU get off the train?” Louisa retorts instantly, and when she clutches the straps of her backpack he sees how bruised her knuckles are.
“I was worried about you,” he confesses.
“Yeah, wow, I’M really the one you should have been worried about,” she snorts with a wild gesture toward his face.
Ted’s chest is thudding with exhaustion, it takes an awful lot of energy to shout at someone else when it’s yourself you’re angry with.
“Why… why did you get off the train?” he repeats.
She jumps up and down with anger at that.
“Because I… I can’t take responsibility for such a valuable painting! Why can’t you understand that? Why couldn’t YOU just keep it?”
Ted sighs, spraying more blood from his nose. His entire body hurts when he talks:
“Because he gave it to you!”
“Why the hell are you so STUBBORN?” she demands to know.
“I’M stubborn? You were the one who…,” Ted yells, but falls silent when he sees her whole face crumple.
“Things like this… they just don’t happen to people like me, don’t you get that?” she sobs angrily. “This is too good to be true, and that’s always dangerous. I’m just… I’m just trying to survive in this goddamn world…”
Then Ted jumps up and down with anger as well, which hurts tremendously, even though he doesn’t jump very high at all.
“I’m just trying to survive too!” he shouts, before quietly adding: “Ow…”
Her cheeks are wet.
“You don’t get it.”
His are too.
“What is it I don’t get?”
“THAT YOU CAN’T TRUST MEN!” she yells.
“DO YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?” he yells back.
They stare at each other with furious desperation. Then Louisa looks down the tracks and blinks, full of regret.
“I didn’t mean for you to lose the painting,” she whispers.
“I know,” he whispers back.
So the pair of them, two broken dolls, stand on the platform, faces streaked with tears. And sure, it might not have been a totally genius idea, Louisa can admit that. But everything had actually been going very well until she didn’t hear the train leave the station. She had gotten off the train, run out through the turnstile and down the steps, snuck past the men by the car and off along the road into the darkness. But there she had stopped, just for a few minutes, to listen for the train to disappear. It was stupid, but being stupid is human, and today she was extra human. So she stopped to listen, because she needed to lose hope. She needed to hear the train leave the station so she knew it was too late to change her mind and run back. Because she has never abandoned anyone, so she doesn’t know if she can. But being abandoned? She’s world-class at that.
But she didn’t hear the sound of the train. Instead she heard Ted yelling her name, then she heard him call for help, and now they’re standing at the end of the platform and the distance between them and the painting is growing at over one hundred miles an hour. So no, it wasn’t a perfect damn plan, it really wasn’t.
“If I’d known that you can’t be left alone for five minutes without getting beaten to death, I’d have locked you in the bathroom before I left,” Louisa mutters.
“Ten,” Ted replies sullenly.
“What?”
“You were gone ten minutes,” he insists.
She lets out a laugh at that, reluctantly, as quietly as a creaking door. Then she holds something out to him.
“Here.”
It’s Ted’s glasses. In the middle of the insanity and violent tumult down on the road she had seen something glinting on the ground, dropped the iron pipe, and picked them up.
“Thanks,” Ted manages to say.
“Oh, don’t mention it, they’re probably scratched and broken now, I…,” she begins, but he’s shaking his head.
“No, I mean… thanks for coming back. I… I thought I was going to die.”
She looks down at the platform and hides her feeling behind an insult, as usual.
“Oh. Well. Those glasses suit you. You see less of your face when you’re wearing them.”
He starts to adjust the tape holding them together and replies:
“It suits you, that laugh. I’m glad they didn’t manage to take it from you.”
“Who?”
“All the people who have tried.”
She looks him in the eye, only very briefly, perhaps she’s thinking of saying something smart, or perhaps something honest. But instead they hear voices from the other end of the platform, and suddenly the faces of the two young men appear over by the steps. One man’s arm is dangling uselessly by his side, broken, but in the other he is clutching the iron pipe. His eyes hardly belong to a human being anymore, he and his friend are no longer muggers, they’re hunters.
“Run!” Louisa snaps.
“Where?” Ted gasps.
“THERE!” she calls, and jumps down onto the tracks.
Before Ted even has time to think about it, he’s limping down after her.