"The subway," she said.
"Always the subway." He looked at the box on her lap. "Somebody's birthday?"
"No," she said. "A repair."
"Ah." He nodded as if this explained everything, and went on down the aisle, punching, saying evening, evening, evening, and the train rocked and went on, and the doors opened and closed at Wakefield and Mount Vernon West and Fleetwood with a soft double chime, and every station there were fewer people.
It was a strange thing, to ride a train away from a city at night. It was a slow subtraction. One by one the people got up and went to the doors and stepped off into their own particular darkness, and the car got larger and quieter around you until it was only you and the woman in the scrubs and a boy asleep against his own backpack and the hum of the motors under the floor, and you began to feel that the train was taking you somewhere no one else was going.
Solange had not grown up with trains. In Jacmel, where she was born, there had been a road to Port-au-Prince that went over the mountains in long switchbacks, and buses on the road painted every color God had made and some He had not, with names across the windshields in hand lettering, Grace de Dieu and Patience and Merci Jésus,. She had come to New York at twenty-three, with a nursing diploma from the school in Port-au-Prince that the state of New York had looked at and set aside like a letter in a language it could not read, and she had gone to work as a home attendant in the Bronx the second week, and she had been going to work as one in one form or another ever since. She had worked for a man in Riverdale who threw his dinner at the wall every night for a year and then, one night, did not, and asked her what her name was, and after that called her by it until he died. She had buried more people than she had ever counted, and she did not count, on purpose, because counting made it a number.
Four years ago the agency had called and said there was a live-in up in Westchester, in one of the rich towns, a widower, eighty, stroke, right-side weakness, speech affected but not gone, heart failure, stubborn. "Very stubborn," the woman from the agency had said, which in the language of agencies meant that two other aides had already quit. "The daughter's in Arizona. She pays. Pays well. Six days, you get Sundays. There's a room."
"What about the son?" Solange had said, because the woman had said the daughter, and when they said the daughter and not the children, there was usually a son somewhere, and the son was usually the trouble.
The woman from the agency had hesitated. "There's a son," she said. "Local, I think. He's not involved."
That was the phrase. Not involved. Solange had thought about the phrase on the train up for her interview, and she had thought about it in the house, standing in the front hall with her bag while the old man looked at her from the recliner with his half-working face and his blue eyes like two chips of ice that had decided against melting. She had thought about it when he showed her the room she would sleep in, at the top of the stairs on the left, a narrow room with a slanted ceiling and a single bed and a window over the backyard and a closet with a door whose frame had pencil marks on it, a ladder of pencil marks climbing up the white paint, each one with a date and a name in a woman's handwriting. CONOR 6/81. CONOR 6/82. CONOR 6/83. And up and up, until the last one, in a different pen, CONOR 6/95, just under six feet.