She didn't want to think about what that meant, so she put the coin in the pocket tin on Lila's dresser, very quietly, in the dark, among the paper clips and sugar packets and the brass wing nut, and she went to bed and lay awake until the 11:14 went through without stopping.
* * *
The Riverview Motor Lodge sat on Route 9D a mile north of the station, a single row of doors facing a parking lot and, beyond the parking lot, a guardrail and a slope of sumac and then the tracks and then the river. Tom had taken room eleven for the week, cash, and the woman at the desk had looked at him over her reading glasses and said, "Business or pleasure?" and he had not been able to think of an answer.
He sat on the end of the bed now with his boots still on and his phone in his hand.
Two hundred and seventy-eight days. The app on his phone counted them for him, a little green number in the corner of the screen. He didn't need it. He knew exactly how many it had been, the way you know how many steps there are on the staircase in the house where you grew up.
He'd given away the nine-month coin. He kept feeling for it in his right pocket anyway, the way you feel for a tooth that's been pulled.
The little girl's hand had gone into the pocket so fast. Like she owned it. Like she had done it so many times that the pocket was hers, and the coat was hers, and the man inside the coat was hers. And for one second, before she saw his face up close, before she heard his voice, he had felt what it would be like to be that man.
He scrolled to the voicemail. He didn't play it; he could hear it without pressing anything. It was saved in the phone and written out, word for word, on an index card in his wallet, in case all the machines in the world failed at once.
Fourteen months ago, on the second of August, nineteen days before the end of everything, his brother had called him. Tom had been on the Miss Corinne, pushing thirty barges of soybeans up past Donaldsonville, and he'd felt the phone buzz in his pocket and seen the name and let it go. Not because he was busy. Because it was nine at night and he'd been off watch for two hours and he was most of the way down a pint of Old Crow in the head, with the door locked and the exhaust fan running, and he'd known that if he answered he would say something he couldn't take back. He'd listened to the message the next morning, sick and shaking, on the back deck in the fog. He had meant to call back. Every day he'd meant it, and every day it had seemed slightly more impossible, the gap getting wider, the way a barge drifts from the bank so slowly you don't notice until there is too much water to jump.
Nineteen days later his brother was dead, and Tom hadn't known. He hadn't known for four months. His cousin Marcy had been calling a number he'd let go dead, and when she finally reached him, through the towing company, he was lying on a mattress in a room above a bar in Port Allen at two in the afternoon. She'd said, "Tommy, are you sitting down." And then she'd told him.
The obituary was still up on the funeral home's website. Daniel James Hale, 36, of Marlow Landing, New York. Beloved husband of Nora. Adoring father of Lila. Son of the late Ruth and Walter Hale of Two Harbors, Minnesota. He is also survived by his brother.
He is also survived by his brother. Four words. Somebody had decided to put him in. Nora, probably. He'd read those four words until they stopped being words.
He'd gone out that night and drunk until a man he didn't know drove him to the emergency room. That was the last time. January the fourth. The next morning a nurse with a long gray braid had sat on the edge of his gurney and said, "You want to keep doing this or you want to stop," and he had said, "I don't know," and she had said, "That's a better answer than most people give me," and handed him a pamphlet. Ray Thibodeaux had been the second person he called from the number on it. The first person hadn't picked up.
Now he was here.
He hadn't planned to come to the house. That was the truth, though he didn't expect Nora to believe it. He'd planned to do what Danny had asked. Get on the train. That was all. Ride the 5:52 from Grand Central up along the river, the way his brother had done every working day for four years, and get off at Marlow Landing and stand on the platform for one minute where Danny had stood and see what that looked like. Then he would get back on the next southbound, and maybe someday, when he had more than a nine-month coin to his name, he would write to Nora.
He hadn't thought the little girl would still be there. Fourteen months. Who meets a train for fourteen months?
He knew the answer. Somebody who hasn't been told anything she can believe.
His phone buzzed. Ray. Tom answered.