“Look, we just missed it,” Mitchell said. The last car of the subway was pulled around the bend and was gone. The platform was empty. Mitchell plopped down on the wooden bench and let his legs stretch out in front, his feet balanced on the heel of his work boots. “Nice work, Laura.”
Maybe if she wasn’t so tired from the bus ride, or out of breath from running, she might have responded, but there wasn’t much her brother didn’t hold her responsible for. Laura saved her energy to concentrate on her surroundings. The fact that Mitchell was constantly high didn’t exactly promote security. Best she stay alert.
Sometimes Laura tried to imagine her life had her parents not gotten divorced and had they all stayed in New York City. She’d be an urban kid, hopping subways, maybe jumping on the back of city buses and holding on for dear life. She had a vague memory of sitting in the last row of a crosstown bus with her mom, seeing the faces of daredevil teenagers hanging outside the rear window, staring in, laughing. Of course, a few short months later, her mother would have been exulting in their anticapitalist method of travel, but that day she just explained that the teenagers were avoiding the bus fare.
Laura figured that if her parents had stayed married, she’d know her way around the city without having to look up every block at each street sign and calculate the avenues. She probably wouldn’t be afraid, the way she was now, in this dank underground that smelled like urine and was littered with garbage and graffiti. At least it was empty.
“I think I hear the train,” Laura said. She took a look to each side and behind her, to make sure no one was around, then leaned over and peered into the tunnel. The tracks headed off into the darkness, and there was more garbage down there, what might be a colorful candy wrapper, a soda can, but mostly all was black, just different shapes and degrees of black.
“It’s not the right one,” Mitchell said without looking up.
“How do you know?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were locked in an unfocused stare. He was probably still high from smoking with Bruce. With that thought, Laura felt a shiver run down her spine, as if she were bracing herself, as if Bruce were right behind her. Her body reacted before her mind could assure her that Bruce was far away, back in Woodstock, doing whatever it was he did during the day.
Maybe Mitchell wasn’t high from smoking. Maybe he had taken acid again.
What if we miss this train? Laura wished her father would meet them at the bus terminal.
The sound of the train got louder. Laura stepped back. She could feel the heat forcing its way ahead of the vibrations. There was always the momentary panic as the subway train pulled up. How would they know if this was the right one? Where was it heading? When would it stop next? How would they know when to get off? Laura turned back to look at her brother, realizing she relied on him completely and he had no concern for her at all. That combination didn’t make for a good outcome.
“Maybe it is our train.” The roar threatened to drown her out completely. Laura had to shout.
“So, if you think it’s ours, you can get on it,” Mitchell said. The train thundered, and spit and screeched, straining to stop. Car after car flew by until slowly the double doors presented themselves and hissed apart.
“But it’s not our train,” Mitchell said. He recrossed his legs and closed his eyes.
Definitely LSD, and it wasn’t even noon yet (as if there were a proper time to drop acid).
The subway car was empty, and for some reason the doors on the opposite side of the train opened also. Laura could see through the middle, past the illuminated seats and linoleum tiles and shiny metal poles, to the platform on the other side. There was a boy sitting on a bench, just like Mitchell was, only there was something unusual about this boy.
He was holding a camera, twisting the lens and then lifting it to his face. When he lowered it back down, he was looking right at Laura.
His hair was so short that Laura thought he must be in the military, maybe just returning from Vietnam, but he looked so young. The train lingered, one second, two, and then the doors shut, the subway lurched into motion, and when the last car cleared the platform, the boy on the other side was gone.
“YOU always did like those hippie girls.”
Jonas threw his sneaker at his friend Nicholas. “You’re an asshole, you know that? I didn’t say I liked her, I said it was weird. I’m positive she didn’t get on that train. I was looking right at her.”
Nick had his feet up on the desk, his whole body splayed on Jonas’s bed. The room was small, and getting to it meant having to walk through Lily’s larger room, the one with the fireplace. More than once, Jonas had complained to his parents about how unfair that was, but of course now it was just his mom, and complaining was out of the question.
“She probably just left while the train was passing. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
Jonas ignored the comment, mostly because it was true. He found himself thinking about the girl on the other platform, a lot, trying to figure out what had happened, how she had just vanished like that, but mostly wondering if he was going to see her again. There were eight million people living in New York City, over a million and a half in Manhattan alone. But then again, people tended to take the same subway lines, maybe around the same time of day or the same day of the week. If he really wanted to, he could go back and look for her.
“You’re not even listening to me,” Nick snapped. He pulled his feet off the desk, along with a few papers, a book, and an iPod.
“Hey, watch it.” Jonas bent down to pick it all up.
Jonas and Nick had been best friends since P.S. 211. They were thrown together as partners for math league in third grade, having both scored highest.
That was seven years ago. They were kneeling in the corner in Mrs. Tempe’s room, working on division work sheets.
“My knee hurts,” Nick said. He shifted to his bottom, cross-legged.
“Your high knee or your low knee?” Jonas asked. He knew it was a stupid joke — so second grade — but he still got a kick out of saying it. Besides, math was boring.
“My what?” Nick asked. He rubbed his left leg. “My high knee, I guess. Or maybe it’s my low knee. Is this my high knee or my low knee? What?”
It took Nick several long seconds, while Jonas fell into convulsions of laughter, to get the joke, and it was the beginning — just like at the end of that old movie Casablanca — of a wonderful friendship.
“Sorry. Look, if you’re so obsessed, why don’t you go back and look for her?”
“You can’t just go look for someone in the subway,” Jonas said.
But he was staring out the window, trying to figure out the best way to do exactly that. Tomorrow maybe, around nine. Or ten? Ten twenty? Jonas tried to remember if he had looked at his cell right about the time he saw the girl across the tracks. Her face flashed into his mind.
“I’ll tell you what,” Nick said. “I’ll even go with you.” He jumped to his feet with a bounce or, given his size, more of a thud. “C’mon.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s Saturday, for one thing.”
“Yeah, and —?”
“Well, if you go by the theory that the best way to find someone is to, at least, look for them at the same time you saw them last, then today and right now would not be ideal. Especially someone I don’t even know lives here.”
“You got something better to do today?” Nick asked.
Jonas ran his finger over the grime that always settled on the sill no matter how clean it was. What was it exactly that collected in the air of this city and stuck to flat surfaces? Exhaust from the cars in the street? Skin cells from the millions of humans? Whatever it was, it was black. And a constant.
“You know how they say there’s only one thing in the universe that’s constant?” Jonas started. “Change. Change is the only constant in the universe. And left alone, all things return to chaos.”
; Nick was at the door. He didn’t seem very interested in theories of change and entropy.
“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Jonas went on. “There’s New York City grime. That never changes, does it?”
“You coming?”
“Yeah.” Jonas grabbed his jacket off the floor. “Coming.”
INSIDE the subway car was more disgusting than the station, if that was even possible. The linoleum floor was sticky, and now so were the bottoms of Laura’s work boots. It bothered her, the thought of some gross substance being transferred to her shoes. Marcia Brady would never have to wear shoes this ugly in the first place — though it was actually Jan, the middle sister from The Brady Bunch, that Laura most identified with. Jan Brady was the one no one liked, the one that always got in trouble. She was jealous and conniving.
Focusing on The Brady Bunch wasn’t working. The subway jostled all of its passengers forward. People got on and off without thinking about it. Mitchell was dozing again in his seat.
Laura tried to concentrate on the police officer standing by the door between cars. He stood perfectly still, looking out the back window to where kids sometimes liked to ride between the cars. His gun was only partially visible, snapped into a holster with its handle jutting out, but his wooden billy club was fully exposed. Did he really hit people with that club? Like kids riding between the cars?
Would he use it on Bruce if he saw what he did? But then again, nobody ever saw what Bruce did.
The last time her mother took Laura shopping, she bought her a bra. She made Laura pick one out.
“What for?” Laura said. She was entering high school, but a couple of tight undershirts had done the trick so far.
The hypocrisy, of course, was that her mother had given up wearing a bra completely, along with her panty hose and cardigan sweaters.
“For Bruce’s sake,” her mother told her.
Laura felt her face burn with embarrassment and her stomach knot. She was already plenty afraid of Bruce. He had a quick temper, lots of facial hair, and a fast hand that often found its way across the back of Laura’s head when he didn’t like something she was doing.
No. Laura was certain that no matter how poorly she behaved or how hard her life was, Jan Brady never experienced anything like this.
“Next stop.” Mitchell knocked his knee into hers as a signal and stood.
“I know,” Laura said. She didn’t. She took hold of the metal bar and got out of her seat. The police officer didn’t even look her way. Maybe if he had, maybe if he had asked if she was all right, maybe she would have told him about Bruce, told him everything. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger, the way ladies tell everything to their hairdressers.
Laura turned back, but the policeman had gotten up and was wandering farther away, down the middle of the subway car.
Laura and Mitchell made their way through the crowd to stand close to the doors and wait for the train to stop. The car was full. Two people had already taken the seats vacated by Laura and her brother. People stood body to body, but a youngish teenage boy in a floppy, wide-brimmed hat pushed ahead of Laura and stood just inside the space between her body and the doors that would open any second. Laura watched as the teenager took out what looked like a drill bit. She might have been afraid, but instead she watched as he scratched letters into the metal on the wall. Nearly every inch of the subway car was already covered with sprawling spray-painted graffiti, mostly black, nothing really legible, some red, and in this car, much of the windows was blotted out with yellow of no particular design, but the boy found a tiny space, and on it he carved his name. “Spike,” he wrote, and the date: “October 8, 1972.”
JONAS hadn’t seen his father in four months. At first (after Lily accepted the fact that her dad wasn’t perpetually hospitalized with chronic kidney stones), his dad would come by the apartment on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays. Mostly it was to see Lily, Jonas figured, and so everyone could pretend that he wasn’t going right back to his girlfriend’s after watching Dora the Explorer on TV or playing a rousing round of Candy Land. As if not mentioning it made it not true.
Their mom would always leave the apartment during those visits and stay out longer than she needed to in order to avoid seeing their dad. When she came back, she would walk in tentatively, as if she didn’t belong, and then begin cleaning ferociously, as if reclaiming her territory. But after a while, after one or two birthday parties or a playdate took priority for Lily, or their dad had something else to do and couldn’t make it on a particular weekend, the visits slowed down, and eventually they stopped. Jonas suspected that his dad was arguing to have “the kids”— by which he meant Lily — come to his new place, where he lived with Dingbat (as she was known in their house), but that his mother would never go for that.
So imagine his surprise when Jonas saw his father and his girlfriend on the platform of the Fifty-ninth Street subway station, walking right toward him. It was so sudden, so out of the blue, that Jonas forgot his mission to find the “hippie” girl. He forgot Nick was right beside him. He momentarily forgot how to breathe.
Jonas saw his father immediately, but it was Lorraine who called out to him first.
“Jonas?”
He had met Lorraine only once before, the last time his father came by to visit Lily. His mother wasn’t home, and his dad and his girlfriend both came to the door. Lorraine introduced herself and then — apparently — waited out on the sidewalk, talking on her cell phone or playing on her BlackBerry the whole time. Jonas was grateful she hadn’t tried to come in, and he was surprised she remembered him now.
Jonas’s father still hadn’t figured out what was going on. He looked around as if there was someone else named Jonas that this woman might be calling out to.
Nick whispered, “Is that her? Shit, she’s hot. Sorry, man, but she is.”
She was, if you liked that kind of body — round, big breasts, long legs in high heels. Never Jonas’s type. Not his father’s type either if you judged by the woman he had been married to for the past eighteen years. Nothing like his mother.
Nick and Jonas slowed their pace but moved forward, and eventually the four were face-to-face. Jonas’s father made the first awkward move. He leaned in stiffly, hugged his son, and then turned to shake Nick’s hand.
“Hello, boys,” he said. “Well, Nick, you’ve certainly grown.”
“That’s generally what happens,” Jonas said.
Then it was quiet.
A train roared into the station, but nobody moved. Lorraine suddenly spoke up. “So, Jonas. Are we going to be seeing you one of these days?”
It was strange — like someone had given her a different script and she was reading for the wrong movie. Like, hey, maybe you haven’t noticed but my dad was married when he started shtupping you, and now my whole family is totally fucked up. So, when are you going to be seeing me? Probably never.
“Seriously?” Jonas said. “We gotta go.” He started walking away, and then, just like it was a movie, a trio warming up against a wall — violin, guitar, and bagpipes, of all things — started their woeful music.
“There’s no cause to be rude,” his father said.
“Well, technically you could . . .”
But his father raised his hand and cut him off before Jonas could continue. Jonas watched as his father protectively took Lorraine’s arm and led her away as if from a contaminated dump site.
“What the hell was that?” Nick asked. They sat down on the same bench where Jonas had been sitting the day before when he had seen the girl who he so badly wanted to find again.
“What?”
“That. That. Your dad. What the hell?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just came out.”
“Damn.” Nick shook his head.
Jonas was silent, still struggling in his mind with the image of his dad and that woman touching. She had taken his arm? Or had he taken hers?
Nick and Jonas both looked straight ahead
at the platform on the other side.
“Is that where she was sitting?”
Jonas nodded. “Yeah.”
“Does she have brown hair? Long, parted in the middle?”
Jonas felt the beat of his heart quicken. “Yeah.” He looked around for her.
“Is she kind of slim and really, really pretty?”
“Yeah, where?”
“Is that her, right there? Walking toward us?”
It was an old woman, the kind who might be a bag lady but then again might just be someone’s grandmother who wore too many layers of clothing. And carried a lot of plastic bags.
“Oh, fuck you, Nicholas. I’m not in the mood.”
“Sorry.”
Jonas slouched down on the bench. “You’re sorry a lot.”
“I guess so, but I really am. I was just trying to take your mind off your shitty dad.”
He was, wasn’t he? Shitty. But it really wasn’t for anyone else to say.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “Again. I know, yes. I’m sorry a lot.”
“It’s all right,” Jonas said. “So am I, I guess.”
LAURA noticed her brother had slowed his pace. The sprint he had led her on as soon as they got out of the subway ended as they turned onto the avenue and neared the apartment.
The doorman recognized them and opened the door.
“You here till Sunday?” he asked. He sat back down on his stool and swiveled around toward the phone and the switchboard. He would need to call up first to let their father know they had arrived.
Mitchell actually stopped walking to answer. “Yeah.”
They weren’t the only kids whose parents were divorced, but Laura didn’t know too many others. Maybe Mitchell was ashamed, maybe that’s why he seemed deflated as they walked into the lobby, but Laura was just sad. As much as she feared being home with Bruce, as much as she fought with her mother and lived like she had been dropped onto an alien planet, the more she wanted to stay there, the more she wanted to belong. To her mother. With her mother. There was the lure of seeing her dad, of TV and hamburgers and chocolate milk, but almost as soon as she got to her dad’s, she felt desperate to attach to her mother again, and Sunday seemed like a million hours away.
Subway Love Page 2