by Gary Jansen
I walked for most of the night between Old Town and New Town. Sometimes I would sit on the cobblestones of the Charles Bridge and stare at the statues of saints that lined the walls and wish they could talk and tell me what they had seen over the centuries—the lovers that strolled beneath the stars, the Nazis that crossed the bridge in tanks, the Russians, with their rifles and cigarettes. My feet hurt. I was tired and wild-eyed, and a little bit dehydrated from drinking Pilsner Urquell for the last twenty-four hours (which was cheaper to buy than bottled water and alleviated hunger), but eventually the morning arrived with no incidents and I watched the sun rise over the city, turning the streets from dark blue to miasma gray.
I had a few more hours to kill before I left for Poland, so I bought a roll and a cup of coffee somewhere. Afterward, as I was crossing the street near Wenceslas Square, someone hobbled and brushed past me, turned the corner, and then disappeared before I could get a closer look.
Prague was filled with pickpockets, and instinctively I touched the butt of my pants before remembering my wallet was in my backpack. At the time, I had always prided myself on being rather aware of my surroundings, but I hadn’t heard him approach at all. I was startled and my heart was racing. I felt hot and flushed, and the ground beneath my feet felt spongy as if I were standing in mud. The street was quiet like the waking moments after your name is called in a nightmare, and I felt an intense desire to track whatever startled me and see where he was going. Since I had arrived in this land of cheap beer, beautiful women, schizophrenic architecture, dark fairy tales, and eerie-looking marionettes, I had been told, strangely enough by a number of travelers from Australia, to follow the thread. The world, they said, is a dark labyrinth and in order to find your way in life you have to follow the thread.
That was why I was there. I’d lost my way, was struggling with my faith, and as I looked around, these words flickered like an old movie reel in my mind. Standing there in the street, I felt the windows of the buildings staring at me with suspicious eyes and I became fully aware of how lonely and hungry I was. All I wanted to do was go home—my real home in New York—but that wasn’t happening any time soon. My plane ticket back to the States was nonrefundable and I couldn’t make any changes, plus I was supposed to meet a friend in Paris in two weeks and I couldn’t just leave her high and dry. Since my train to Poland didn’t leave until around noon and with nothing else in particular to do that morning, I decided I would follow whatever it was that had incarnated itself in front of me. “Follow the thread,” I said to myself, and turned the corner.
I soon saw a man in what looked like a ragged, headless bear suit, just some inebriated, limping circus performer who I was sure was on his way home to an angry, tired wife with a sharp pair of garden shears in her hands. I followed him for a couple of blocks until he unexpectedly turned into a church, its façade blackened by years of Communism, soot, and dirty rain.
“What are you doing? You must be really bored to be following some old drunk,” I said to myself and began to walk away when that still small voice in my head—which had gotten me into considerable trouble over the years—said I should go inside.
What the hell. So I did.
Ascending the stone steps, I opened the thick wooden door, entered, and stood in the nave. The church was quiet and dark, and a strong smell like burnt cabbage soup hung in the air. I heard faint tapping noises, the sound of heating pipes waking from hibernation. The man was nowhere to be seen. I was alone and, since I’m a sucker for old churches, I walked down the main aisle toward the altar, staring at the dark statues and the gold-colored buttresses and the stained glass. I listened to the sound of my footsteps echoing off the plastered walls and wooden pews and when I was just about underneath the hanging crucifix, I felt something touch my back.
I turned around expecting to see the man I followed into the church. But no one was there and I felt a strange heat break over me. I was all pins and needles and I looked down, thinking I had stepped on an exposed extension cord, but there was nothing beneath my feet except cold marble. Every nerve of my body was on high alert and my skin exploded into gooseflesh.
“Je-sus Chriiiiist,” I said out loud, “what is that?”
And just like that, the feeling disappeared.
I turned around now and looked up at the ceiling and the colored windows and saw a figure of Saint Michael in the glass, looking ready to kick some ass, wings unfurled, sword drawn, crushing the body of a demon. Then my eyes fixed on the large crucifix hanging above the altar and I stared into the eyes of the suffering wooden Christ and then whispered, “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.”
There was no answer. Then something fell to the right of the sacristy. The crash scared the bejesus out of me and, not wanting to know what it was, I ran back up the aisle, out the door, and into the bright sunlight of morning.
Outside I looked around and saw no one. The street was empty and I instantly felt embarrassed and stupid. I also felt spooked and didn’t know why. “Follow the thread, my ass,” I said to myself. I quickly walked a few blocks, adjusted my backpack, and looked at my watch. Maybe I could get an earlier train, I thought and, dropping the proverbial thread in the street, I made my way across the city toward the train station.
Chapter 1
On a brittle winter evening in March 2007, I went to my three-year-old son Eddie’s bedroom to get him a pair of socks. The night was cold and the room was dark except for a small night-light that cast a soft puddle of stars on the wall. Action figures and plastic toy blocks were scattered on the floor, and the bed was covered with folded laundry that needed to be put away. Wind was rapping the windows, and outside I heard a number of car doors slam almost simultaneously. This was not unusual. Our house is close to church, school, and municipal parking lots and there’s always someone getting in or out of a car. That night, for some reason, I pulled the curtain aside and looked out the window. Across the street and down the block the lights of Macken Mortuary, with its ornate Victorian-style gabled roof, burned brightly against an aubergine sky. I saw a small group of people in winter coats walking slowly to the corner, their bodies close together, their heads tucked low like pigeons warming themselves over a sewer grate.
I turned away, closed the curtain, reached into the dresser drawer, and felt something strange behind me, as if someone had been hiding in the shadows. There were only three people in the house at the time—me, my wife, Grace, and my son—and two of them were downstairs in the living room. I was startled, to say the least, as if I had been standing alone in a forest and heard a branch break behind me. My head jerked to the side and I quickly turned around, but there was no one there. I looked around the room, saw nothing unusual, shrugged it off, grabbed the socks, and as I was walking to the doorway I experienced something quite out of the ordinary—sort of like an electric hand rubbing the length of my back. I stopped and couldn’t move, not because I was stuck but for the simple reason that the feeling was so strange. What the hell is that? The sensation then changed and I felt like I was being pressed like a grape, that something was coursing through my body like blood in my veins. Then the pressure seemed to break apart and for a brief moment I felt like I had a million little bugs crawling all over my back and neck. I raised my shoulders to my ears and tried to shake it off, and within seconds everything was back to normal. “Weird,” I said out loud as I left the room and walked downstairs. And while what happened had been odd enough for me to take notice, by the time I handed the socks to Grace my mind was on other things. Namely, her.
TWO DAYS BEFORE, I had been at work when, by early afternoon, I suddenly felt like I was coming down with the flu. At the time I was editor-in-chief of Quality Paperback Book Club, a division of Book-of-the-Month Club, whose offices at One Penn Plaza sat above the netherworld known as New York Penn’s Station—one of the busiest, and, with its bad lighting and cramped surroundings, most claustrophobic transportation hubs in the United States. I had been in meetings most
of the morning and when I was in my office the phone was ringing off the hook. We were on deadline, and normally I would have just sucked it up and finished out the day, but I felt dizzy and feverish and, after talking to my boss in her office, I decided to leave early. I promised her I would make up some work from home that evening and went back to my desk, switched off my computer, and saw that the message light on my phone was blinking red. I ignored it. I walked downstairs in a bit of a daze to the train terminals, past midday travelers, the Andean flute player with a penchant for Celine Dion songs, and Tracks, an all-day-and-night purgatorial watering hole for commuters in various stages of weariness. I looked up at the digital departure board and saw I had two minutes to catch the next train. I made a run for it, my head pounding with each step. I descended to the platform, checked my cell phone, noticed I had a message but switched it off anyway, settled in on the train, and within a few minutes fell asleep during the forty-minute ride to Rockville Centre, a Long Island suburb twenty miles east of Manhattan and a place I’ve called home for most of my life.
MY GRANDFATHER used to say that every town and every rail line is haunted by tragedy. Rockville Centre and the Long Island Rail Road are no exceptions.
Charted in 1834, the Long Island Rail Road is one of the oldest rail systems in the United States. Today it is the busiest commuter railroad in North America, spanning approximately one hundred miles and stretching from as far west as Manhattan to as far east as Montauk. It serves, on average, eighty million passengers annually and the station at Rockville Centre is, like all stations on the Babylon Branch, on elevated tracks supported by a series of reinforced concrete pylons two stories high and two feet in diameter. This wasn’t always the case.
After World War II, the population of the suburbs outside big cities like New York exploded with an influx of returning veterans. Grade-level rail lines, like the one in Rockville Centre during those years, ran flat to the ground and were seen not just as dangerous, but also as causes of congestion and traffic. In 1947, the decision was made to elevate the tracks on some of the branches, allowing cars and trucks to move freely across town. Temporary track lines were created during construction. On February 17, 1950, five months before the new platform was to be opened in Rockville Centre, a loaded east-bound train from New York, traveling on one of the temporary tracks, blew through a stop signal one block west of the station, colliding with a train traveling toward New York. The impact, which occurred at 10:43 p.m., sounded like a bomb going off, and when rescuers arrived at the scene they saw broken, bloodied bodies, sometimes piled five high, amidst broken glass and twisted metal. The impact was so powerful, the head cars that collided were literally torn in two. Thirty-seven people died and 158 were injured. Doctors were forced to perform an amputation on one of the passengers in one of the destroyed trains. Local residents flooded the area in an effort to help the injured and to see if any of their loved ones were victims, but many were turned away by police because of the danger of the situation. Some just stood back and watched, others cried in the streets. Some walked to St. Agnes Church on Quealy Place a few blocks away and held vigil outside, offering prayers for the living and the dead being pulled from the wreckage.
My grandfather, who was obsessed with death, was the first person to tell me the story of the crash. A broad-chested, strong-armed, big-bellied grave digger, with skin the color of autumn maple leaves, Harry George Powell worked for thirty years at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens, New York. He was a quiet man, with a macabre sense of humor when he spoke, and kept an unmarked tombstone by the head of his bed as a reminder that death was always inches away. Sometimes during the summer months, before I became a teenager, he and I would walk under the elevated tracks after we had bought a can of gas for the lawn mower he loved more than life itself and listen to the trains rumble overhead. In the heat of August, the great overpass would offer shade and, no matter how hot it was, there was always a cool breeze that would blow across your arms and neck. He had told me that when he first moved here in the 1960s, he would walk through this concrete alley and sometimes hear something like crying in the wind. During our excursions, we would stop and be very quiet and listen to the air, but I never heard anything myself. Years later, after I watched him die of a massive heart attack on the kitchen floor of his home while paramedics worked in vain to revive him, I would return to this area, hoping he might visit me there. As far as I know he never did.
GRACE, EDDIE, AND I were living in the house I grew up in, which was a half-mile from the scene of that accident, and on that winter afternoon in March as I walked underneath the train trellis on my way home from work—my head cloudy, my body chilled—all I could think about was getting into bed and going to sleep. As I neared our block, I could see my wife’s car in the driveway. Grace, who was thirty years old at the time, was nearly two months pregnant and had been experiencing morning sickness the last couple of days. Her first pregnancy had gone without a hitch, and Grace—a strongwilled, fiery brunette who studied dance for years and rarely ever got sick—wasn’t used to her body feeling the way it did. I hadn’t talked to her since I left for work that morning, but she had told me that if she continued feeling nauseous she was going to call in sick.
During most weeks, Grace stayed home with our son in the mornings and worked afternoons at a local public school. Usually by this time of day, around 2:20 p.m., she would have been dropping Eddie off at his sitter’s and then would have driven to her job. I felt guilty for not having called her and assumed she decided to stay home and rest. I opened the front door and heard a muffled call from inside. I walked into the living room and saw her lying on the couch, a small blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her arms tense and tight between her legs. She had been crying.
“What happened?” I had asked.
“Where were you? Why didn’t you answer your phone?” She was angry.
Feeling like I was going to pass out, I apologized and told her I thought I was getting sick and asked if she was okay. She shook her head.
“No,” she had said. “I lost the baby.”
MY WIFE GRACE grew up in a tight-knit, Catholic, Italian-American home in West Hempstead, New York, a middle-class neighborhood five miles north of Rockville Centre. Her father, Bert—whose interests ranged from physics and Greek mythology to collecting carburetors and watching 1950s B-movies—was an engineer, mechanic, and car enthusiast. On weekends he would restore old Fords and GTOs, and one of Grace’s first memories is using an old air filter from her mother’s 1969 metallic blue hardtop Mercury Cougar as a Frisbee. For most of her young life she lived with her mother and father, brother and sister, her aunt, her two cousins, and her native Sicilian grandparents in a split-level house. With ten people under one roof and daily visits from a contingent of relatives that all lived within minutes of one another, there was very little privacy and the place was never quiet. No one left home before they were married, and if you went to college you did so locally. But that suited everyone just fine. Family, more than anything else, was more important than personal freedom, individuality, or having a room of one’s own.
But that family suffered a traumatic blow when, two weeks after her twenty-first birthday, Grace’s father suffered a massive heart attack while at work at Con Edison, one of the largest energy companies in the United States, and one that supplies gas, electric, and steam service to New York City and Westchester County. He was forty-eight years old and was seen by all who knew him not just as an ideal father and husband, but as a generous, self-sacrificing man who embodied the ideal of serving others.
The family was, to say the least, devastated. Grace and I had been dating for a little over three years at the time and you could see in everyone’s face shock mixed with despair and confusion. During those early days family members had the tearful expressions of refugees exiled from their homeland.
Hundreds of people attended the wake and even more showed up for the funeral, which was held at St. Thomas the Apostle Chur
ch, a few blocks from their home. I was sitting with Grace in the pew during the Mass. She was crying, as was everyone around us, but at a certain point I looked at her and saw her eyes wide and clear. She was staring at the coffin that lay before the altar as the priest intoned prayers for the deceased and walked around blessing the area with a smoking thurible, a gold vessel suspended by a chain that contained incense. I followed her gaze and didn’t see anything unusual. I thought she was just recollecting a fond memory or mentally shaking a fist at God for having let this happen to her and her family.
Later that day, she would tell everyone that she saw her father, as alive as the day, standing next to his coffin. He had stared at her and smiled and he looked like he did when she was seven years old and made her first Holy Communion: a full head of dark hair, tall and lanky with a thick mustache, and thick Coke-bottle eyeglasses. She couldn’t believe her eyes and looked away for a brief second. When she looked back he was gone. To this day, she still regrets looking away.
Three days after the miscarriage, Grace was retelling that story to her mother and sister, who were sitting around the dining room table talking over tea and Dunkin’ Donuts. I could hear her as I ascended the stairs to the second floor in search of Eddie’s favorite book, Goodnight Moon, which had gone missing. It had been a long couple of days; I still felt sick and I was tired. I walked into my son’s room, shuffled through Eddie’s bookshelf, and felt the same strange feeling I experienced the night before crash over me like a heavy wave. My body felt like one giant electric surge. I tried to shake it off, but this time it lingered for about half a minute before disappearing as quickly as it came. “Seriously, what the hell is that?” I said out loud. I thought maybe it was chills brought on from a fever. I walked over and placed my hand on the radiator. It was lukewarm, so I bent down and opened the valve a half-turn. I went back to the shelf and eventually found the book, which had fallen behind a stack of old Hardy Boys mysteries. I went to the bathroom, took my temperature—it was slightly higher than normal—and walked downstairs, reciting to myself an altered version of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic bedtime story: