Subway Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “That’s probably better,” he said.

  Laura looked at his face. He looked sad, confused, maybe. He wasn’t all that much older than she was. Everyone has to figure out their own way to survive.

  “You could lie and tell me you’ll miss me,” Laura said. The light changed and brother and sister stepped down off the curb.

  “As a matter of fact, I will,” Mitchell said.

  HARDEST of all was telling her father. He looked sick and then angry and then sick again and then guilty as hell, and then he looked like he was going to cry, which was the worst thing of all. When Laura saw her father’s pain, she nearly regretted telling him about Bruce. She would rather have continued living in Woodstock than have brought this anguish to her dad.

  You can’t protect him from the chance to protect you.

  But Laura wasn’t so sure. In that moment, it seemed more frightening to see her father so defeated, but it was too late.

  And in the end, nothing so horrible happened. Her dad drove to Woodstock and picked up her things. He got her bed, her desk and chair, her chest of drawers, and most of her belongings. There were a few things he left behind, because he didn’t know they belonged to her. Laura didn’t want to see Bruce ever again, and not even her mother for a long time.

  TO tell the truth, Laura didn’t see or talk to her mother again until she herself was thirty-eight years old and received her cancer diagnosis, malignant neoplasm of the breast documented as carcinoma. Her mother drove across the country, from her home in Salt Lake City. Bruce was long gone. No one knew anything of what had become of him. Laura had spent some time in her early twenties trying to track him down, considering maybe confronting him, punching him in the face with her fist. But after a while it didn’t seem important anymore. Just as she knew she had to move on and live her life without Jonas, at some point she let finding Bruce go. She could finally store all those bad memories in another part of her mind, where they couldn’t hurt her anymore and they became just memories. And slowly, over time — not at first, and not for a long while, but eventually — she began to forget about Jonas as well. She went to the High School of Art and Design and then to RISD to study graphic art, always partial to urban art forms. Whenever the girls at school started talking about boys, about sex and love, Laura would think of a dream she had, a long time ago, and it made her smile.

  Mitchell lived nearby in New Rochelle, running a software company out of his home. He had three children. Laura fell in love and married Bobby Rabinowitz, and they were together for twelve years. They had no children of their own, but Bobby had two young sons from a previous marriage, and when Laura died, in 1996, they cried for her as they would have for their own mother.

  JONAS stopped waiting for her, but he never stopped keeping his eyes open. He took the subway more often than he probably needed to.

  “Jonas, you’re not eating much these days,” his mother said. “Is it the heat?” She knew it wasn’t — heat had certainly never slowed down his appetite before — but it was nice of her to throw that in there in case he still didn’t want to talk about it.

  It had been a horrible end to the summer, with record-breaking heat waves. Everyone was talking about global warming, along with all the other horrors of the modern world: Internet predators, identity theft, homegrown terrorism, AIDS, mad cow disease. Sometimes his heart ached so badly he tried to tell himself Laura was better off not living in this time.

  “It’s not the heat,” Jonas told his mother, which was pretty much the same as saying Yes, Mom. Something’s really wrong and I want to talk about it, but I think talking to you would be the world’s worst idea because you always overreact, make it about you, or, in this case, wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  His mother stayed quiet.

  “Where’s Lily?” Jonas asked. He took another bite of his chicken and then pushed his plate away.

  “She’s at Beatrice’s house. Isn’t that a funny name for a little girl? I haven’t heard that name since I was a kid.”

  Laura would never change in his mind, but of course, if she had lived, she would be his mother’s age or close to it. It would never have been possible; he knew that and he took some small solace in knowing she had gotten away from Bruce in the end. She was referred to as living in New York City. She must have moved in with her dad. They must have been on vacation together. He hoped she was having a good time and that she felt safe before . . .

  “I’m not doing so well, Ma,” Jonas began.

  She didn’t jump in. She didn’t even look too interested, so Jonas found the courage to go on. “I, well, I lost someone. Someone I loved. Really loved. And it’s not just that she’s gone but that it would never have worked out anyway, but I would have done anything to make it work. I feel like . . . I feel like . . . I feel like I would have . . .”

  “Died to keep her?” his mother asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Of course, she understood. That’s how she felt when his dad left. Why she lay in bed all morning, all weekend, coming out only to fix dinner, or more likely order it in. He shouldn’t have gone here. He regretted saying anything.

  “Maybe she was your beshert.”

  Jonas looked up. “Was dad your beshert?”

  “Yes, I think he was. I think he still is, but he got lost. Did your girl get lost?”

  He didn’t want to cry. The last thing he wanted to do was cry, but his throat stung and burned. Laura got lost. They were both lost from the start.

  “She’ll be back, then.” Jonas’s mother began to clear the dishes. She had a peacefulness about her. Maybe it had been coming on for a while, but Jonas was only now noticing.

  “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t sit back down, and Jonas was grateful. She moved easily from the table to the kitchen counter, closing the ketchup, wiping down their plates. “Well, if you don’t find your beshert on earth, or if you meet each other but, for one reason or another, you fail to connect . . .” Her voice faltered but then she regained her strength. “Or if for some reason you connect but then one of you forgets, you get another chance.”

  “Another chance?” His mother was sounding a lot like Morah Frieda from Hebrew school, but it was comforting in an odd way.

  “You are reborn,” she told Jonas. “At least, that’s what the kabbalists say. Your soul will return to earth to find its mate. When two people are destined in heaven to be together, they are complete, and the repairing of the world can begin.”

  “You believe that?” Jonas asked his mother.

  She sat down across the table from her son. “I don’t know, Jonas. I know I loved your father and always will. I know we made two beautiful children together, and that’s my haolam habah, the world to come. And will we meet again in another life? Well, I truly hope so.”

  It seemed so sad, so terribly, wretchedly sad, and Jonas wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to say how sorry he was for breaking her heart, now that he had one of his own. How sorry he was for ruining her life.

  “You know, Jonas, you should probably know something else,” his mother began. He didn’t like the sound of that, but at this point, he didn’t have much more to lose.

  “What?”

  “I knew about your father. I knew it all — way before I found those e-mails in your room.”

  Now it was Jonas’s turn to stay quiet.

  “In a way, it was the best thing that could have happened. It was like shining a light on a hidden shame, and then it forces you to look at yourself. If you hadn’t done that, I might have gone on pretending.”

  “Maybe that would have been better.”

  “No, it’s never better. And it wasn’t the first time, or the first woman. So I should thank you for humiliating me once and for all.” She laughed. She actually laughed.

  “And in the meantime, there’s JDate.” His mother bounced up.

  “Hey, Mom. Did you lose weight?”

  She popped him lightly on the head with her dish towel
. “It’s about time you noticed.”

  HE tried to tell the boy; he tried to tell Jonas that she wasn’t coming back. She wasn’t ever coming back. It was crazy to watch him waiting like that, hanging around the subway stations and platforms. Then one night, when Max was working on a piece at the 149th Street layup, he thought he saw her. It was her, he was certain. What the hell was she doing up here?

  “Laura?” he called down the tunnel. His voice echoed, but no other sound returned. She was around; he knew it. But she wasn’t coming back. The rift shifted. The universe repaired itself. Someone needed to document, to bear witness. That’s what the artists are for.

  “You know what real crazy is? You know what’s really crazy?” Max talked out loud while he mapped out his idea with a marker. “Crazy is doing all this work, making my art, putting all my heart and soul into this shit, knowing it’s probably not going to last the week.”

  Max uncapped his cans and lined them up on the floor in the order that he would need them: Blue Ocean Breeze, Tangerine Orange, Cherry Red, Almond, Smoky Gray. Then he climbed up, grabbing the bar that ran across the top of the train, and dangling from one arm, he sprayed the outline that would appear above the windows. He jumped down and continued the line, unbroken, right across the glass and down to the bottom of the car.

  IT was a full year, or more, before Jonas could ride the subway without scanning every person, every face, every girl in the car, every time. He had hooked up a few times with a girl from his American history class. And once with another girl from health, and he didn’t even realize he had stopped looking until he saw her.

  She was the tiniest bit shorter and had reddish hair, not dark brown. About his age, fifteen, maybe sixteen, years old. She was wearing a vintage shearling coat and a long scarf. It was Christmas season in New York; the city was crowded, the subways packed with too many people and way too many packages. Jonas watched her get on, and when she got up to leave at Grand Central, he followed her off.

  It was crazy, and his heart was beating hard. He wove in and out of the hordes of people, trying to stay close to her but not stalkerish close. She was walking like she didn’t quite know where she was going, like maybe she was from out of town. But she made her way through the underground walkway and then up to the train station.

  There was a huge crafts fair going on in the lobby, just like there was every year in Grand Central, real high-end stuff, overpriced but fun to walk through. The arch that stretched over the whole event was decorated with tiny white lights and garlands. The items must have been too expensive for the girl, because she wandered up and down, touching things, talking to the vendors, but didn’t buy anything. Jonas made sure to stay far enough away, but every now and then he caught a piece of her voice.

  “This hat would look perfect on you,” one of the vendors was saying. “It’s totally throwback. Couldn’t you just see this on Janis Joplin?”

  “Or Stevie Nicks,” the girl said. She held the hat and looked it over in her hands. Jonas stepped closer.

  “What do you think?” She popped it on her head and turned to look right at him.

  “Me?” For a second he froze. Maybe she knew he had been following her, but she didn’t seem worried. She just looked happy and flirty, adorable.

  “Well, sure, you. What do you think?”

  Lots of girls look great from behind, but then they turn around. Jonas always said that, though Nick wouldn’t agree. For Jonas, it was the face that mattered most. This girl had looked great from behind, and Jonas had had a long time to notice. Now she was looking right at him. Now he could see her skin and her eyes, her cheeks, her smile.

  And she was beautiful. She put her hand up to twist a piece of her hair between her thumb and ring finger. It was a gesture he couldn’t mistake. It was so familiar, his heart ached, his heart broke, his heart soared.

  EPILOGUE

  Graffiti art has all but disappeared from the New York scene. In the 1980s, subway art became associated with crime. Crack was becoming an epidemic in cities all over the country. In 1984, the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) began a five-year program to eradicate graffiti. At the same time that it was disappearing, graffiti had begun to enter the contemporary art world, and, though it was still controversial, many people considered it a legitimate form of expression. Some of the better-known street artists actually went on to become reputable commercial artists and muralists.

  In May 2013, the Portia Gallery on Spring Street mounted a retrospective called Art of the Underground, collecting the very few extant photographs depicting the graffiti-covered trains and some very rare shots of the artists themselves. The gallery owner, David Lowery, had gone to considerable lengths and expense to enlarge one photo in particular. It was a single long, continuous shot of a burner, an entire train, coming across the El in what looks to be the South Bronx. The lighting and composition are exquisite. The early-morning light can be seen illuminating the brilliant colors, so that the train appears to shine from the print. There is some disagreement as to who took the photo, or how it was done. According to anyone who is knowledgeable about the subject, photographic technology enabling such a crystal-clear panoramic shot of a moving train had not yet been made available to the general public. But everyone who saw the photograph had to admire it, stop a moment, pause, and take in the purple message: Know how to live with the time that is given you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With incredible gratitude to:

  Nancy Gallt, Marietta Zacker, Deb Noyes, Pam Marshall, Hannah Mahoney, and Ann Stott. The writing life might be solitary, but a book is the effort of many talents.

  And to all those who kept me alive this past year, you know who you are.

  And to Steve, Sam, and Ben.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Cover photographs copyright © 2014 by Edith Levy (subway car);

  copyright © 2014 by RimDream/Shutterstock (girl);

  copyright © 2014 by Tetra Images/Getty Images (boy);

  copyright © 2014 by Thiti Saichua/Shutterstock (steel texture)

  Chapter opener photograph appears courtesy of Error46146 at en.wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org).

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2014

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013946617

  ISBN 978-0-7636-6845-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-7041-2 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com