"I hear it, dear."
The headlight came around the bend. The long silver body slid out from behind the bluff. The brakes exhaled. The doors opened, and the cello girl got off, and the nurse in purple scrubs, and two men arguing about the Yankees, and then a tall man in a canvas jacket stepped down from the third car with a duffel bag in his left hand.
Lila didn't run. She walked to him, fast, with great dignity, and then for the last four steps she forgot to have dignity and ran anyway, and he caught her, and swung her up, and set her down.
"Check your pocket," she said.
He dug into his jacket and came out with something. A brass shackle pin from the tug, small and heavy and worn smooth. She examined it with a jeweler's attention and put it in her coat.
Then she did the thing she had started doing in January, the thing nobody had told her to do. She turned around and faced the train. The doors were closing. The conductor was leaning out of the vestibule, looking down the platform. Lila stood at the yellow line, not on it, and put her hands around her mouth and said, too quietly for anyone but the three of them to hear:
"Last stop?"
And then she answered herself, in a lower voice, a voice she was doing for someone. "Lila Station."
"Everybody off?"
"Nobody off. Everybody stays."
The 5:52 pulled out north toward Beacon and Poughkeepsie with its windows lit. Lila watched it until it was gone around the far bend. Nora stood beside her with a hand on her shoulder and didn't say anything, and neither did Tom, who had taken a step back to give them room. He always took a step back for that one.
When the train was gone Lila turned around. Her cheeks were pink with cold. She took Nora's hand on one side, and then she reached up without looking and took Tom's on the other, his left hand, his correct hand, and the three of them started down the stairs toward Ferry Street and macaroni.
Halfway down, Tom said, "Hey, Lila."
"What."
"Which way is the river going?"
Lila looked out past the parking lot, past the riprap and the little stony beach, at the wide gray water sliding north with the tide, carrying a last few plates of ice back up toward the mountains where it had come from, where it would turn, in a few hours, and come back down.
"Both ways," she said.