Tom had turned around at the sound of his brother's voice. He was standing with his back against the door and his hand over his mouth.
"He was going to tell me," Nora said. Her voice came out very strange and very calm. "He was going to tell me that night."
"I'm sorry," said Tom, through his hand. "Nora. I'm so sorry."
"I know you are." She looked at him. "So am I. About the parking lot. About everything I said. You told me you hadn't opened it, and I decided you were my father. You're not my father." She wiped her face with the cuff of her coat. "You're not Daniel either."
"No."
"You're just Tom."
"Yeah," he said. "I'm working on it."
Upstairs, small feet hit the floor. A door banged. "MAMA. Mama, is the power back? Is Uncle Tom still here? Did the river go both ways?"
Nora looked at Tom, and Tom looked at the ceiling, and something happened to his face that she had never seen happen to Daniel's, because Daniel had never had to wait this long for anything.
"Ask her," he said. "She'll tell you."
* * *
In March the ice went out on the Hudson in long gray plates that ground and turned against one another as they slid down past the station, and the first red-winged blackbirds came back to the cattails along Marlow Creek, and on Fridays Lila Hale went down to the 5:52.
Not every Friday. Most. The frog boots had been replaced by purple ones, a size bigger.
Tom had gone back to the Miss Corinne in December, the way he'd said he would, and called every Sunday at four, and on the second Sunday in January he had called a little late, and his voice had been strange, and he'd said, "Hey, Lila, guess what I got today," and held up a new coin to the camera on his phone, blurry and shining, with a Roman numeral one. In February he'd taken a job with a towing outfit out of Kingston, pushing fuel barges up and down the Hudson, seven days on and seven off, and found an apartment above a bike shop in Beacon, two stops south. He said the Hudson was a strange little river after the Mississippi. He said it was the first river he'd ever worked that went both ways.
On his off weeks, he took the train up from Beacon on Friday nights. It was two stops. It took nine minutes. He could have driven. He did not drive.
They stood on the platform now, Nora and Lila, in the cold blue end of the afternoon, with the bluff turning gold above them and the river flat and pewter-colored and running north on the flood. The carpet man came down the stairs behind them and saw them and nodded, an actual nod, and Nora nodded back.
"It's coming," Lila said.