The train lurched and began to move. The lights of the lower level went sliding past, the numbered tracks, the yellow caution stripes, the men in orange vests standing aside with their flashlights pointed at the ground, and then they were in the long dark of the Park Avenue tunnel with the windows black and her own face looking back at her out of the glass.
She was fifty-six. She had been told she looked younger, mostly by men who wanted something, and she did not believe them. Her face in the train window looked like her mother's face had looked at fifty-six, which was to say tired in a dignified way, with the cheekbones high and the mouth set and a little permanent crease between the eyebrows from forty years of reading small print: medicine labels, then insurance forms, then immigration forms, then medicine labels again. She wore her hair short and natural, going white at the temples in two neat wings. She wore a wool coat the color of wet slate, a dark green church dress under it, and the thick-soled black lace-up shoes she wore for work, because her good shoes pinched. On the lapel of the coat she wore a small gold pin in the shape of a dove, which had been her mother's, and which she touched sometimes without knowing it.
She took her phone out of her coat pocket. The screen said 6 percent, and under the percentage there was a text from Fabiola that had come in at 10:41, while she was still underground somewhere beneath Union Square.
So sorry Solange my son has fever 103 I have to go. I left at 10:30. Mr. D had his 9pm pills, he is in his chair, he says GO GO he is fine he will wait up for the train. Door is locked, I left porch light on. So sorry.
Solange read it twice. Then she typed with her thumb, It's all right, take care of your boy, and watched the little bar crawl across and the word Delivered appear underneath, and she turned the phone off entirely to save what was left, and she put it back in her pocket, and she looked at her own face in the window and thought about Dermot Sheehan alone in that house.
He would be in the chair. The chair was a brown leather recliner with a lever on the side that he could no longer work with his right hand, and it sat in the front room by the window that looked down the hill to Quarry Lane, and from that chair, when the trees were bare, which they almost were now, he could see a piece of the railroad embankment a mile off through the gap in the ridge, and the crossing at Bedford Road with its red lights. He would not be asleep. He would be sitting with the television on and the sound off and a blanket over his knees that he had probably kicked half onto the floor, and he would be listening for the train. He always listened for the train. He had told her the first week she worked for him, four years ago, in the slow, effortful, careful speech that the stroke had left him, every word set down like a man setting down a heavy box: I don't need. A clock. In this house. I got the railroad.
He had driven trains for thirty-eight years. New York Central, then Penn Central when that came and went like a bad marriage, then Conrail, then Metro-North when the state took the commuter lines over in 1983, and he had retired off the Harlem Line in 2001 with a plaque and a cake. He had driven this train. Not this particular one, these new silver cars with the blue stripe were long after his time, but this run, the late one up out of the city on a Sunday, the one he used to call the Sweeper, because it swept up everybody who was left. He knew every crossing on the line by its horn. Two longs, a short, a long. He could lie in bed with his eyes shut and tell you where the train was to the quarter mile, and he could tell you if the engineer was a good one or a lazy one by the way he leaned on it, and he would, if you let him, and on the nights when his breath was bad and he could not sleep, Solange let him.
The train came up out of the tunnel at Ninety-seventh Street into the raised light of Harlem, the rooftops and the water towers and the lit windows, and then the bridge over the river and the Bronx, and the stations came one by one in their yellow light. Melrose. Tremont. Fordham. At Fordham a woman in scrubs got on with a rolling bag and sat across the aisle and closed her eyes before the doors had shut. Botanical Garden, with the trees black against the sky. Williams Bridge. Woodlawn, where the cemetery went on and on beside the tracks under the streetlights, the stones pale as teeth.
Mr. Gerrity came through after Woodlawn. He was the Sunday conductor more often than not, a heavy, slow-moving man with a gray mustache trimmed like a hedge. She knew his name from the brass plate on his chest. He knew her from the seat.
"Evening," he said. He held out his hand and she gave him her ticket, the paper off-peak one-way from the machine in the main concourse, Grand Central to Wickham Falls, and he punched it twice with two different shapes and stuck it in the slot on the seat back in front of her. "Late one tonight."