by Ann Hood
“A cat get it? I should have told you to put wire over the top.”
“I’ll do that tomorrow,” he replied. “I’ll definitely do that.”
Laura turned and went inside. He stayed to clean up the mess.
* * *
They talked it through. This was why Laura had been so moody. He could understand that. She thought he had figured it out and was angry. How could he have figured it out? Telepathy? Now, they were in it together. And they would stay together. She wanted the child. And he did too, after he had given it some thought. He did want it. It was a surprise, but they were living together. They were everything but married. So why not? They had agreed. They were together for the child, and they would stay together.
The day was like a dream. He called in late to work so he could layer more chicken wire over the coop. He double-layered the sides, ensuring nothing living, not even a mouse, could squeeze in. He walked through work like a zombie. He got dinner together. Something simple that wouldn’t upset Laura’s stomach. Rice. Grilled chicken. Virtually no flavor.
He walked Elmo down the dark streets. They rounded the corner where he had seen the drug deal. What he had thought was a drug deal. It probably wasn’t a drug deal. He stopped and looked where the two men had stood under the tree. What a crazy world, he thought. Left turn from the right lane.
Only in the dark could he see what he was feeling. He was terrified. And angry too. The anger was hard to explain. He was so angry; not like last night with the chickens when she told him, but something more durable. Things seemed to be spinning out of control. It was this neighborhood. The people. The dark streets. This was someone’s fault. Like them moving in together. Or those fucking chickens. Her idea. Her fault. He felt like he had been tricked. She had been a different person before. Was the new Laura who she truly was? Too late now. Lucky for her, he was a stand-up guy. He was going to do the right thing. He would grit his teeth and do the honorable thing. But goddamn it. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Goddamn fuck.
He loved her. He loved her before and he loved her now. That stuff in between was just confusion. They would communicate. He loved her last month and he loved her now. This was the natural next step. They would have gotten here anyway. She was for life. This was for real. They would not become his parents.
He stood on the corner with Elmo. He could let the dog loose right here and maybe he would run away. Probably he would. Elmo would go half-wild if not on his leash. Laura had never trained him, and Cal believed that if there was no structure, at a certain point the dog became untrainable. Elmo might get hit by a car, running in circles on Broadway or caught up on Route 10. He might be picked up by someone, a family who would keep him and care for him, or a thug who arranged dogfights with pit bulls. After a week or two, he might come whining at their back door, weak and exhausted, forever changed by his ordeal.
Cal’s hand touched the clip for the leash. He pushed the metal stud back and held it. The base of the clip hurt as it pressed into the tender part of his palm. The pain felt good. Elmo panted beside him, looking up at him expectantly. What are you gonna do? Put off answering, that was an answer. Trust that things will take care of themselves. That was an answer too. He let go of the latch and felt the lock click into place. The metal no longer pressed into his palm. He rubbed the spot against his pants to wipe the feeling away.
He was going to do the right thing. He wouldn’t let Elmo run off. He wouldn’t let the chickens be killed. He and Laura would have a child and he would take care of it too. And he would lose the anger. It couldn’t last, this desire to hit something. To hit it hard. His father must have felt this way. He clenched his fists and relaxed them. Clenched and relaxed. He jerked at Elmo’s leash, and the dog stumbled forward with a yelp. Cal ignored him and pulled harder. They needed to get back. Laura would be waiting.
TRAINING
BY DAWN RAFFEL
Providence Station
1.
The Mouth Is Saturated with the Taste of Something New
Wind is what wakes her, wind and rain, against the hotel window: he, in a slant across the king-size bed, as if to fill the whole of it; she curled tightly, knees to chest. Nausea rolls up in her. Feet to the floor. Nose to the glass. The rain, she sees, in the light from the street, falls thick like slush, not entirely liquid. Across the street a flag is madly flapping.
She enters the bathroom and splashes her face. Reflected back: pale, slim, her eyes slightly puffy—younger, she thinks, than hours before, dressed up, made up: the luminary’s girlfriend. Young as the daughter he does not have. The light has a flicker. The hotel he’d researched, meticulously. He likes to live in advance.
She tosses a washcloth. Walks back out and watches him breathe.
In the glow from the street, the spit of light from the bathroom, she tries out a password. Second pass. Easy.
Asleep, he is almost as young as she.
2.
The Point of Departure
“Do you want to hear my idea?” he asked.
She didn’t, not really, not then. She was tired, having been up in the night. But it wasn’t a question, anyway. His mind was his wealth (and her youth was hers). That’s why she was with him, wasn’t it? She hungered for his fame, however middling it was, his place at the table—and hers as muse. He wasn’t one to fool himself (he told himself that; in fact, he prided himself).
They had hours to kill. They had coffee and some kind of sticky tart. Café La France, the place was called.
“It’s funny,” he said. “I’m setting it here.” His story, he meant, the work he’d been absorbed in, grouchy and distant, snappish to her, but now on a high. A triumph: the reading the night before, his old alma mater, the theater packed. A triumph indeed—that woman had said so, clutching his books, brushing her hair back, at the reception (cheese, wine, and something wasabi), again and again, and feting him, late, at the quaint café that the faculty favored.
“Here? Where?” She—the young and increasingly inappropriate girlfriend—opened a packet of sugar.
“Here in the train station. It’s perfect for this.”
He was ever so slightly hungover, she thought, a check in his pocket, wind in his lungs.
“Obviously, there are nuances and subtexts,” he said. “The point of departure . . . and matters will arise in the course of the composition, but this is the gist . . .”
* * *
The rain had turned to snow by the time he awoke several hours earlier—wet, sloppy flakes that would soon begin to stick (the forecast was certain) and blanket the city and bring it to a halt. He’d worried aloud—delays, cancellations—he had to get back to New York, he said. This wasn’t, he said, optional (meetings, et cetera), and so they had packed their bags in haste: he, the ironic jacket and tie, thick books unread; she, the tiny cobalt dress, crushed now and dirty, spiked heels—all wrong, she’d understood, arriving on campus (the way the gaze fell, the moneyed tone of voice)—toothpaste, Advil, mints, gum, her birth control not recently opened, soaps she had swiped from hotels over the years. He was in jeans now and she in dark leggings, a shirt that was his and was huge on her. “Swimming,” she’d said, with satisfaction in her voice.
Down to the lobby, past Aspire, the restaurant, the front desk—“We’d better move quickly,” he’d said to her. “Let’s try to get seats on an earlier train. It’s worth a shot, at least.”
Business, pleasure, wool, down: checkout was crowded. A mother and daughter (not much older, in fact, than the girlfriend) who’d crisscrossed states for a visit to RISD were heading home, a quarrel in gestation in the cool air between them. Their tour had been canceled: every campus everywhere, it seemed, was set to close. No school for you!
The airport was dicey.
“Taxi,” he said.
“Amtrak,” he said.
“Crap,” he said. “This is exactly, precisely, just what I didn’t need to have happen.”
* * *
“So here’s the
idea,” he said to her. Their train was running late, of course, coming from Boston, and no, there was not a seat, not one, on the earlier Acela. Sold out. Completely. He’d asked more than once, as the line to buy tickets stretched out behind them, heaving in impatience.
“It’s snowing,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Oh, you mean in the story?”
“Obviously. It’s snowing hard, the light is strange, and this young fellow—college student, goes to Brown, he’s maybe a senior, handsome, lucky, you know the type—he is waiting at the station to pick up this girl.”
“Girl?”
“Okay, woman. This woman, I should call her that. Louise is her name. I am naming her that, Louise, I think. I think I like the sound of that. The liquidy L. She is returning to him on the train from New York. But due to the weather . . .”
“Right,” she said. Café La France was crowded, a thicket of elbows. Girls eating yogurt. A toddler—God save them, the girlfriend thought. At least they had seats.
“I already had the idea,” he said. “Before this trip. That’s what’s strange. The train, the snow. The guy, I haven’t named him yet, but you know, a Chip or what have you, but not quite that, drives a nice sports car.”
“Mercedes?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he replied. “He’d driven Louise here a few days before, to the station—outbound, her train to New York. But this is the thing: she really hadn’t told him exactly, precisely, where she was going or why she was going, details and reasons, this girlfriend of his. He hadn’t really asked. She did this sometimes, anyway, the years they’d been together—three, I think. Yes, three it is. But this last time she’d looked so sad, so slumped, he thought, so thin, her long curls spilling into her face, her eyes sad and desolate . . . She’d worn a blue coat. A color like cobalt. Going away . . . and of course he had a car; he had driven her here, to the station. He knew he hadn’t wanted to look at her sadness. It angered him slightly. And he, too, was sad—yes, he was, because he knew he had to end it.”
He waited for the question, begging for it.
“Why?”
“Why?” he said, as if surprised she had asked. “Because for all that he loved her, for all that she knew him—you know, knew that he wanted, for instance, to act, to be an actor, and not to be the, let’s see, the lawyer his father expected—for all they had shared and done and dreamed, he knew it couldn’t last. His parents would insist, of course, subtly, but still . . . His father, his mother, the family name . . . Louise was inappropriate . . . smart and ambitious, but still, there was a matter—let’s say religion, and, well, ilk.”
“Ilk?”
“Don’t sulk,” he said. “You know what I mean. And this is in the past, I said. Didn’t I say? Late ’70s. I had to have mentioned that, no?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It wasn’t so easy for him,” he said, becoming defensive.
“Really? In the ’70s?”
“Little you know. You know, hippies—post-hippies, whatever they were, free love and all that, the way the world was changing, all of it changing—sure, of course. But not for him. Louise had to go. Louise could not last. He knows that, accepts that, the way it has to be, and he knows that it ought to end sooner than later, and also he knows that she knows that too. Of course she does. She’s smart, Louise. And now at the station, he is waiting for her, and he is filled with trepidation and lost in his thoughts; he is waiting and waiting, and so upset—the train is delayed, the station looks strange, looks wrong, transformed, not the way he remembered it, not how he thought of the place at all. Nothing’s as it used to be. He’s shaking. And also, despite that it’s terribly crowded—the station is not that big to begin with, round, domed, and now it is packed full of families and students, the art kids with sketchpads, women in pairs, the men in suits, you know—everyone gives him a sort of berth, as if maybe they don’t want to brush up against him. As if he smells. As if, he thinks, it’s the sadness he feels, the strangeness he feels. He is tired too. He goes to get coffee but doesn’t remember the coffee being expensive like this, fancy like this, and he doesn’t have cash, or not enough. He doesn’t have it on him. The girl behind the register is looking at him, as if he doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t much like that. And so he walks away again. He sits on the floor, against a wall, that wall, that one over there—the seats, every one of them, taken, you see. The board keeps rolling, more delays. Coming in increments. Later, later. Snow keeps falling, thicker now, according to the chatter of the people around him, muffled as it is. He, from where he is, cannot see the snow fall. He starts to sleep. He falls asleep. He starts to dream in his sleep. He is possibly even snoring a little, there on the floor. And this is the dream: The dream is the future. His future self. And he is entering a house like the house he grew up in, similar in stateliness, silver and oak, the predictable children—a girl and a boy. He has a briefcase in hand. There is a weight in his heart, and from another room he can hear a woman speaking, maybe on the telephone—yes, on the telephone—and then he sees the woman, the one who is his wife. And she is not, of course, Louise, of course she’s not, and he is suddenly flooded, there in the dream, with a bone-chilling sadness, a wave of emotion that makes him ache. He wakes up on the floor.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a bite of this?”
“No,” he says, peevish. “Listen. As I was saying . . . Well, maybe. A taste.”
“What happens next?”
“Not bad,” he says, brushing a crumb off. “A little too sweet. So there he is, sitting, waiting, filled with this sadness, and that’s when it hits him: she might have been pregnant! That must have been it . . . she went to New York, Louise—why else, what for? And of course it was his, his child, and how could he not have known before? He vows on the spot to propose to Louise, to marry Louise, throw it all to the wind, take heed of the dream, the sadness, if only it’s not too late . . . you know . . .”
“I get it,” she says. “But why New York? It wasn’t illegal in Rhode Island then, was it?”
He makes a motion with his hand as if to swat away the question. Logistics, for all of his forethought, annoy him; she knows that well.
“I’ll figure it out,” he says to her. “That isn’t the point. So anyway, the train at last is coming, it’s coming at last, and filled with resolve, he waits by the tracks. He goes down to the tracks. Track 2. A mass of people. Confusing. The looks he gets, as if he is dirty—why, he can’t fathom. The train comes in, the one heading for Boston, and people pile off. Rush off. Parents and children, their coats and their bundles, their baggage, their breath . . . It’s cold down there and snow falls hard, he can see it from the platform. And then . . . there at the end of the platform, the girl at the edge of his vision must be her, Louise, a little bit ghostly, but only for a moment, a moment and then: she is gone. He simply can’t find her. He looks and he looks. The train is pulling out again . . .”
She swallows her latte. Glances at her watch.
“And then he reconsiders. He must have been mistaken. He must have been confused. It must have been the next train. She must have told him something. She must have missed her train—they didn’t have cell phones, not back then.”
“I know that,” she says.
“He simply has to wait. He sits on the bench now, a seat newly vacant. He’s tired, so tired. The room seems strange. And then he falls asleep again. I think he falls asleep again, waiting, and feels her, Louise, her arm around his shoulder, her presence, there as if to comfort him, as if to forgive him, and then . . .”
“Then?”
“The trains come and go, come and go. The light dies. At last it is the last scheduled train of the day that’s arriving. Announced on the speaker. Track 2.”
Around them are people holding their coffees, their yogurts, their muffins, waiting to sit. She does not interrupt him.
“He gets off the bench now and goes down the stairs, descends, so cold, so tired, track 2, and s
now is still falling, falling . . . There she is! Yes, there she is! But dressed wrong, somehow, there amid the passengers coming off the train, and the lines of her body, and then her face, her eyes . . . Not her. He heaves an awful, crushing sigh and breath fills the air. And he looks in the windows, looks in a door, but the train is on the move again, onward to Boston. Onward to Boston.”
She hears how his voice is filled with emotion.
“Back in the station, he looks and he looks, by the newsstand, distraught, and out by the cab stand . . . and then . . .”
“Then?”
“The ladies’ room! The ladies’ room! He thinks that must be it. She must have gone in there. He ought to have known. He goes and he opens the ladies’ room door, and a woman yells, Hey! Hey, mister! What do you think you’re doing in here? And here come the cops.”
“Police?” says the girlfriend. “There in the station?”
“Well, station personnel,” he says. “Really. Whatever. The point is, they take him by the arm, they’ve come to take him away, but just for a second he catches a glimpse of a ravaged old man in the ladies’ room mirror. Come, you have to leave now, the cop or the guard or whoever he is says, shooing him out. You know you can’t be here.
“Louise! he cries. Louise! Louise! And he is out on the street.”
People are listening in on them, the girlfriend thinks.
His voice is raised: “The poor soul, he’s harmless, the second guard—he’s worked there longer—says to the first. Whenever it storms like this, he’s here. The poor old guy. He shakes his head, the guard does. Somebody told me he once was a lawyer. Crazy now. That girl died thirty years ago, the guard says. Before the new station—back when the train stopped south of here. They say the girl jumped—to the tracks. Track 2.”
“She jumped?” said the girlfriend.
He looked at her expectantly.
“That’s it, the story?”
“What do you think? The point is he’s guilty. He killed her. Okay, he didn’t push her, at least, I don’t think so; it’s still his fault. He is crazy from guilt, regret that was dormant for much of his life.”