Chapter 9
SHAY
They found her in a train car.
It was the beginning of Shay’s third year at Columbia, and she was en route to a course on constitutional law.
It was early September, and she had just suffered through Labor Day with Andrew’s family, their first visit to Connecticut since becoming engaged the month before.
There had been dry chicken, dry martinis, dry conversation about the dozens of strangers who would have to be invited.
“I hope I’ll make the cut,” she’d said, and no one had laughed.
Well, William did, later, when she’d called him from the phone in Mr. Pruitt’s study.
He played her a Nick Drake song she’d forgotten about, and that was the only time all weekend—all month, truly—she’d been happy, knowing they were feeling the same calm current even though they were hundreds of miles apart.
In recent years, these moments had become rare, more precious than the diamond on her finger, though she knew that was her fault. She was the one pulling away.
The car was not very full, and the young man sitting a few seats away from her kept tilting his head in her direction.
Shay was used to men staring at her, but that day she wondered if it was for a reason other than attraction.
She had fallen asleep mid-morning watching Donahue and rushed out the door without brushing her teeth.
The start of classes had immediately thrown her sideways.
She could not remember when she’d last washed her hair, which made her ears—the only part of her body she was truly self-conscious of—stick out from the long, lank strands.
“You look like you’re traveling somewhere you don’t want to go,” the man said.
There was something about his voice. It was serene, without accent or affect.
Shay turned toward him, taking in his starched blue shirt and clean-shaven face, the wooden beads at his wrist. The woman across from them hid her face in her newspaper, cocooning herself from a potential scene, but the man looked unthreatening and familiar, like he could have been a college classmate, a cousin’s boyfriend.
Not handsome, but inoffensive. That’s why they chose me, he told her later. He had not yet shaved his head.
“Just going to class,” she said.
“What are you studying?” he asked, taking her curt response as an invitation. He lifted his thigh onto the plastic orange seat, so he was fully facing her.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“No.” He smiled. Girls should never speak to strangers, she heard Aunt Eleanor whisper, but Shay had never believed that.
She’d accompanied her father on countless reporting assignments, and even though she never exercised—never played sports, as that would require her to rely on other people—a part of her believed she could overpower any opponent through sheer force of will.
She wasn’t soft like William; she fancied herself tough in the way men were tough, not so easily hurt.
“Law. I’m studying law.”
“And you hate it, don’t you?”
Shay opened and closed her mouth in shock, because yes—school had never been difficult for her, but by the end of her first year, Columbia had begun to grind her to a pulp.
Often, she was the only woman in her classes, which made her mediocrity, how she sometimes floundered when called upon, particularly embarrassing.
Everyone in her life expected her to be brilliant in the way her father had once been brilliant, to never ask for help, and so she’d told no one about how much she was struggling, not even Joel, not even William.
It made her feel like she was not who she thought she was.
That she’d been lied to, or, worse, that she’d been lying to everyone else, that her intelligence and strength had always been a thin, fragile facade, deteriorating even faster than her father’s had.
That summer, she’d even started to steal things.
Slim rectangles of Wrigley gum. Cutex nail polish.
Single shoes that she would leave beneath benches in the park, like the detritus of some inexplicable scene.
A woman evaporating, leaving behind only one pristine beige heel.
An idiotic rebellion, to break the laws she was studying.
A part of her hoping that, if she was caught, they wouldn’t let her take the Bar, so she wouldn’t have to explain herself when she inevitably failed.
“Is it that obvious?” she asked, and she was surprised by how strained the words sounded. She had meant them as a joke.
“No.” He shook his head, suddenly very serious. “But I can see it.”
She looked around the train car. The two other passengers had gotten off, and the station before hers, with its concrete and painted steel pillars, was rushing past. In her dreams, she had begun to see her father walking ahead of her on the L platform back in Chicago, but he would never turn around, even as she kept trying to grab his hand, desperate to feel his familiar, warm palm, to hear him say her name.
She tried to remember if she’d eaten anything that day, if that was why this man was making her feel so vulnerable.
After Andrew had left for work, she’d stretched out on the couch, watching a woman in Donahue’s audience ask Gore Vidal if he’d ever read the Bible, really read it, with his heart, her face sincere and honest and open, and Shay had cried in the way she’d sometimes heard her father crying.
A wildness to it, a desperation, like he’d needed someone to hear him.
“No one is making you go,” the man said.
“It doesn’t feel like that.” Her voice was nearly a whisper.
“But that’s the truth of it. It’s your life.”
“It’s my third year.”
“ ‘Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.’ ”
The words plucked a chord in her. She felt them resonate in her chest, and she saw the man not as a stranger, but as someone who must already know her. That was the only way to make sense of it, how natural it felt to tell him things she’d never said aloud.
“Who said that?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
There was a firmness to his cadence that she admired, a confidence.
It was how she used to speak. How she still tried to in an effort to conceal the constant whispers of self-doubt.
Joel was starting to hear the difference, she could tell.
He’d always seen her too clearly, which was why she kept trying to pull away from him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Simon,” he said, and he stood as the conductor announced her stop. Shay followed him off the train even when he did not look back at her, the textbook in her cloth bag knocking against her hip.
They emerged into daylight, tree branches plumed with green and amber leaves reaching toward the sun, men and women in light cotton jackets shuffling past. Shay had once aspired to greatness; greatness had once felt inevitable.
Keen eye, quick study, her father often said.
Simon stopped and looked down at her, his attention absolute. His hands were in his jean pockets.
“Will you walk with me?” he asked.