Chapter 14 #3
The husband made an exasperated huffing sound, but Denny sympathized with the wife.
Even with his own reserved seat, he didn’t feel entirely confident.
What if they shut down the trains before his train arrived?
What if he had to turn around and go back to Bouton Road?
Stuck in his family, trapped. Ingrown, like a toenail.
The man in front of him was called to a window, and Denny shoved his bags farther up. He was going to get the elderly agent with the disapproving face; he just knew it. “Sorry, sir …” the agent would say, not sounding sorry in the least.
But no, he got the cheery-looking African-American lady, and her first words when he gave her his confirmation number were “Aren’t you the lucky one!
” He signed for his ticket gladly, without his usual muttering at the price.
He thanked her and lugged his bags to the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy coffee and, on second thought, a pastry as well, to celebrate.
He was going to make it out of here after all.
The few tables outside the Dunkin’ Donuts were occupied, and so were all the benches in the waiting room.
He had to eat standing against a pillar with his bags piled at his feet.
More passengers were milling around than at Christmas or Thanksgiving, even, all wearing frazzled expressions.
“No, you can’t buy a candy bar,” a mother snapped at her little boy. “Stick close to me or you’ll get lost.”
A mellifluous female voice on the loudspeaker announced the arrival of a southbound train at gate B.
“That’s B as in Bubba,” the voice said, which Denny found slightly odd.
So did the young woman next to him, apparently—an attractive redhead with that golden tan skin that was always such an unexpected pleasure to see in a redhead.
She quirked her eyebrows at him, inviting him to share her amusement.
Sometimes you glance toward a woman and she glances toward you and there is this subtle recognition, this moment of complicity, and anything might happen after that. Or not. Denny turned away and dropped his paper cup in the waste bin.
The train at gate B-for-Bubba was traveling to D.C.
, where nobody seemed to want to go, but when Denny’s northbound train was announced there was a general surge toward the stairs.
Denny thought of what Jeannie’s Hugh had said the night before; shouldn’t all these people be heading away from the hurricane?
But north was where home was, he’d be willing to bet—drawing them irresistibly, as if they were migratory birds.
They pressed him forward, down the stairs, and when he reached the platform he felt a twinge of vertigo as they steered him too close to the tracks.
He pulled ahead, making his way to where the forward cars would board.
But he didn’t want the quiet car. Quiet cars made him edgy.
He liked to sit surrounded by a sea of anonymous chatter; he liked the living-room-like coziness of mixed and mingled cell-phone conversations.
The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop.
There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell.
He boarded through the nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself.
First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window.
Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his inside breast pocket.
Always that “Ahh” feeling when you settle into place, finally. Always followed, in a matter of minutes, by “How soon can I get out of here?” But for now, he felt completely, gratefully at rest.
People were having trouble finding seats. They were jamming the aisle, bumbling past with their knobby backpacks, calling to each other in frantic-sounding voices. “Dina? Where’d you go?” “Over here, Mom.” “There’s room up ahead, folks!” a conductor shouted from the forward end.
The train started moving, and those who were still standing lurched and grabbed for support. A woman arguably old enough to be offered a seat loomed above Denny for a full minute, and he studied his ticket with deep concentration till another woman called to her and she moved away.
Row houses passed in a slow, dismal stream—their rear windows drably curtained or blanked out with curling paper shades, their back porches crammed with barbecue grills and garbage cans, their yards a jumble of rusty cast-off appliances.
Inside the car, the hubbub gradually settled down.
Denny’s seatmate leaned his head against the window and stared out.
As imperceptibly as possible, Denny slid his phone from his pocket.
He hit the memory dial and then bent forward till he was almost doubled up.
He didn’t want this conversation overheard.
“Hey, there. It’s Alison,” the recording said. “I’m either out or unavailable, but you can always leave me a message.”
“Pick up, Allie,” he said. “It’s me.”
There was a pause, and then a click.
“You act like saying ‘It’s me’ will make me drop everything and come running,” she said.
Another time, he might have asked, “And didn’t it?” Three months ago he might have asked that. But now he said, “Well, a guy can always hope.”
She said nothing.
“What’re you up to?” he asked finally.
“I’m trying to get ready for Sandy.”
“Who’s Sandy?”
“What is Sandy, idiot. Sandy the hurricane; where have you been?”
“Ah.”
“On the news they’re showing people laying sandbags across their doorways, but where on earth do you buy those?”
“I’ll see to that,” he told her. “I’m already on the train.”
Another pause, during which he held very still. But in the end, all she said was “Denny.”
“What.”
“I have not said yes to that yet.”
“I realize you haven’t,” he said. He said it a bit too quickly, so she wouldn’t retract the word “yet.” “But I’m hoping that the sight of my irresistible self will work its magic.”
“Is that right,” she said flatly.
He squinched his eyes almost shut, and waited.
“We’ve already talked about this,” she told him. “Nothing’s changed. No way am I going to let things go on like they were before.”
“I know that.”
“I’m tired. I’m worn out. I’m thirty-three years old.”
The conductor was standing over him. Denny sat up straight and thrust his ticket at him blindly.
“I need somebody I can depend on,” she said.
“I need a guy who won’t change jobs more often than most people change gym memberships, or take off on a road trip without any notice, or sit around all day in sweat pants smoking weed.
And most of all, someone who’s not moody, moody, moody. Just moody for no reason! Moody!”
Denny leaned forward again.
“Listen,” he said. “Allie. You’re always asking what on earth is wrong with me, but don’t you think I wonder too?
I’ve been asking it all my life; I wake up in the middle of the night and I ask, ‘What’s the matter with me?
How could I screw up like this?’ I look at how I act sometimes and I just can’t explain it. ”
The silence at the other end was so profound that he wondered if she had hung up. He said, “Al?”
“What.”
“Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
He said, “My dad says he remembers my mom’s gone even while he’s asleep.”
“That’s sad,” Allie said after a moment.
“But I do, too,” he said. “I remember you’re gone, every second I’ve been away.”
All he heard was silence.
“So I want to come back,” he said. “I want to do things differently this time.”
More silence.
“Allie?”
“Well,” she said, “we could take it day by day, I guess.”
He let out his breath. He said, “You won’t regret it.”
“I probably will, in fact.”
“You won’t, I swear to God.”
“But this is a trial run, understand? You’re only here on approval.”
“Absolutely. No question,” he said. “You can kick me out the first mistake I make.”
“Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I’m such a pushover.”
He said, “Are my things still in your garage?”
“They were the last time I looked.”
“So … I can move them back into the house?”
When she didn’t answer immediately, he took a tighter grip on the phone. “I’m not saying I have to,” he said. “I mean, if you tell me I have to live above the garage again, just to start with, I would understand.”
Allie said, “Well, I don’t know that we would need to go that far.”
He relaxed his grip on the phone.
The two young girls just behind him could not stop laughing.
They kept dissolving in cascades of giggles, sputtering and squeaking.
What did girls that age find so funny? The other passengers were reading, or listening to their music, or typing away on their computers, but these two were saying “Oh, oh, oh” and gasping for breath and then going off in more gales of laughter.
Denny glanced toward his seatmate, half expecting to exchange a look of bafflement, but to his horror, he discovered that the boy was crying.
He wasn’t just teary; he was shaking with sobs, his mouth stretched wide in agony, his hands convulsively clutching his kneecaps.
Denny couldn’t think what to do. Offer sympathy?
Ignore him? But ignoring him seemed callous.
And when someone showed his grief so openly, wasn’t he asking for help?
Denny looked around, but none of the other passengers seemed aware of the situation.
He transferred his gaze to the seat back in front of him and willed the moment to pass.
It was like when Stem first came to stay, when he slept in Denny’s room and cried himself to sleep every night and Denny lay silent and rigid, staring up at the dark, trying not to hear.
Or like when he himself, years later in boarding school, longed all day for bedtime just so he could let the tears slide secretly down the sides of his face to his pillow, although not for any good reason, because God knows he was glad to get away from his family and they were glad to see him go.
Thank heaven the other boys never realized.
It was this last thought that told him what to do about his seatmate: nothing.
Pretend not to notice. Look past him out the rain-spattered window.
Focus purely on the scenery, which had changed to open countryside now, leaving behind the blighted row houses, leaving behind the station under its weight of roiling dark clouds, and the empty city streets around it, and the narrower streets farther north with the trees turning inside out in the wind, and the house on Bouton Road where the filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch.