It was almost midnight. The other four passengers were awake. The conductor wouldn’t needlessly wake the one poor bastard who was sleeping. Would she?
At least there was a chance she wouldn’t.
I waited with my eyes shut, fighting the urge to clench them tightly, trying to keep my breathing measured and regular. I didn’t want anything to call attention to me. Nothing at all.
I heard the man on the cell phone—he was talking to his wife or girlfriend, quietly telling her to please be reasonable, it wasn’t
I waited her for her to say “ID please?” to either of the people between her and me—the woman or the man on the cell phone—but she didn’t. Of course maybe she didn’t need to because they’d already had their IDs out and had handed them to her unasked. But how likely was that if they hadn’t had their tickets out?
Her footsteps came closer, stopped next to my seat.
I felt a trickle of sweat along the side of my face, by my ear. It hung there at my jaw—I could feel a droplet slowly forming. I ached to wipe it off. I didn’t move.
I heard her pick up the ticket from the seat beside me and punch it, set it back down. A moment passed—but I didn’t hear her walk on. Then she spoke. “Thank you. May I see your ID, sir?”
I couldn’t help it, I clenched my eyes tighter, like a little kid trying to convince his parents he was really asleep and not just pretending. This was it. I was on a train rocketing between two stations; even if I could somehow get away from the conductor, there was no way off the train. By the time we arrived, they’d have me in custody, and from there it would be a short ride back to the city and the Manhattan Detention Complex downtown. I’d be in jail by nightfall.
“Sir,” the conductor said again, impatience creeping into her tone, “your ID?”
I turned reluctantly, trying desperately to come up with some way to talk myself out of this situation. Maybe I’d left my driver’s license at home. I’d been mugged in the station and lost my wallet. Something. Anything.
But when I opened my eyes I saw I was facing the conductor’s back.
I put on my glasses.
The man across the aisle was putting his wallet away with an annoyed look on his face. “Thank you,” the conductor said. “Next time, have it out where I can see it.” She punched his ticket and handed it to him.
I whipped my glasses off and turned back to the window, closed my eyes again. I was breathing rapidly, my heartbeat staggering under the burden of an after-the-fact burst of adrenaline.
Not yet, I thought. They’d get me if I pressed my luck long enough. But not yet.
We drew into the station with a weary hiss. At the top of the stairs, the station’s main concourse loomed like an art deco temple, monumental columns at either end supporting a roof so far overhead it might as well have been the sky. At one end of the room a statue of an angel with upswept wings lifted a dead soldier from the ashes of a World War II battlefield. The corpse was probably meant to be stylized, but it looked painfully realistic to me, with its bare feet and slack flesh and torn clothes. Looking at it, I felt physically ill. I saw Ramos’ face; I saw Dorrie’s arms, floating limp in the water.
I hurried to the men’s room, found a sink and failed to throw up. I stood over the sink, sweating, clammy, tasting a thread of vomit at the back of my throat but unable to get it out of me. After a while, I gave up. I turned on the water, first cold, then hot. I laid out my razor and shaving cream on the sill behind the sink and went to work. I realized, as I plowed clean furrows down my cheeks, that somewhere along the way I’d stopped looking so young. My eyes had dark rings beneath them, my skin was sallow, and without hair my head looked angular and severe. With the stubble shaved off, I looked presentable. But I didn’t look well.
Well, I wasn’t. I felt sick; I felt beaten down and empty. I was here in a strange city to say goodbye to a woman who’d had a harder life than she deserved and a worse end to it. She’d been my friend and I’d been hers, and we’d clung to each other like shipwreck survivors to flotsam. With her gone, I could feel myself sinking. I couldn’t hold onto Susan, couldn’t drag her down with me, not now that she’d managed to escape her old life for a better one. And who else did I have? Michael? He wouldn’t shed a tear if someone handed him my obituary. He wasn’t built that way. Maybe that night, after the customers were gone, he’d raise a glass of whiskey to me, but that’s the most I could expect. And maybe it’s all I was worth.
I shoved the half-empty shaving cream can and the used razor into the trash, wiped my face and head with a handful of coarse paper towels, and walked out to the taxi stand.
The angel watched me go.
Greenmount was fenced in, but at various points there were gaps, places where a section of the fence had bent or fallen and not been repaired. I climbed over one of these and spent the hours before dawn wandering among the tombstones, resting on the funerary benches that dotted the grounds and looking for Dorrie’s plot. I found it finally, side by side with her sister’s, Catherine’s headstone quietly announcing the years of her birth and death,
I wished I smoked. Anything to pass the time, to keep me from spending the hours with nothing but my thoughts for company. But I didn’t. And in the dim pre-dawn light, in the chill, dry air, I sat alone watching the covered hole in the ground that had been prepared for Dorrie. One by one, ghosts sat beside me on the granite bench. One by one, they hung their heads and leaned close and whispered in voices only I could hear. Miranda was there, and Dorrie, and Julia Cortenay, and my mother. All my dead women. Ramos was there, too, and Miranda’s boss from the strip club, Wayne Lenz, with that great bloody hole in his chest. All my dead men. All on one little bench.
The wind was strong. I pulled my light jacket tighter around me, wrapped my arms around myself.
Dorrie and I had gone to the cemetery with Lane when his wife died; Dorrie had stood beside me as I dropped a handful of dirt on the coffin and heard the terrible, hollow echo when it landed. She’d been stoic throughout, but on the way back to the city she’d said to me with real anguish in her voice, “When I go, I don’t want any ceremony. No minister praying over me. Just you there. That’s all.”
Well, I couldn’t stop them from bringing a minister, and I couldn’t stop them from praying. But I was here. I could do that much.
The cemetery’s staff starting showing up around eight o’clock, big men in overalls and work gloves and heavy boots. They carried shovels over their shoulders and long, coiled hoses. They beat their hands together for warmth and exhaled little white puffs of vapor. Some of them looked my way. I nodded back toward them. None of them came close, no one asked what I was doing there.
Around nine, the first cars drove in, a hearse in the lead, a Volvo following. I stood and walked past Dorrie’s grave to a stand of trees some forty yards away. They were narrow trees and widely spaced—you couldn’t hide behind them. But they blocked the view a bit and distance did the rest. I turned so I was facing in another direction, looking at a stranger’s grave.
I didn’t dare to watch openly, but I stole glances, watched out of the corner of my eye. I saw two workmen wheel the coffin up to the grave, move it from its gurney to the straps of the machine, then stand back to let the mourners come. I recognized Eva Burke, in a heavy black coat and hat, stocky and low to the ground. There was a tall man with white hair carrying a little book with a black cover—a bible, I supposed. He put his hand on Mrs. Burke’s back, and she shook it off roughly. Two younger men stood behind them, several paces back, looking uncomfortable in their Sunday suits. Relatives, maybe, or childhood friends. And one more woman, leaning on a cane. A teacher? An aunt? God knows.
When it blew toward me, the wind carried with it the sound of the service, soft words solemnly intoned. First the man spoke, his book open in his hands, then they all spoke, repeating together some useless, ancient formula.
I looked around. The place was almost empty—other than the mourners, the workmen, and me, I only saw one other man, perhaps another forty yards away in the opposite direction, pacing slowly beside a mausoleum, looking this way from time to time and then away again. The second time he did this—looked over at me and then,
