"Who is Conor?" she had asked the first night, and the old man had said, without looking at her, "Not involved."
The train stopped at Scarsdale and Hartsdale and White Plains, where the woman in scrubs got off, and then North White Plains, where the yard was, rows of dark trains parked side by side under the floodlights like cattle asleep in a field. After North White Plains the stops were farther apart. Valhalla. Mount Pleasant. Hawthorne. The houses back from the tracks got bigger and further from each other and finally disappeared into trees. Pleasantville. Chappaqua. Mount Kisco, where the boy with the backpack woke with a start, lunged for the doors just as they closed, and turned and saw Solange watching him and laughed, embarrassed. "Next one," he said. "I'll call my dad."
She looked out the window. There was nothing out the window now but her own face and, behind it, the long black shapes of trees going by and once in a while a lit window up on a hill, a single yellow square, somebody awake.
She thought of the engraving on the back of the watch. She had read it the first week, when he had handed the watch to her from the chair and made a winding motion with the fingers of his left hand and said, "Thirty. Turns. Not more," and she had wound it for him, thirty turns, counting under her breath, and turned it over before she gave it back and seen the letters cut into the gold in a slanting script, worn soft now by the years.
D. S. — Brewster to Grand Central, 1966.
Bring them all home.
— P.
"Who is P?" she had asked.
"Peggy," he said. "My wife. First run I made. As engineer." He had held his left hand out flat, and she had put the watch in it, and he had closed his fingers over it the way you would close your hand over a bird. "She said. That's the job. Bring them home. All of them. The drunks. The kids. Everybody." He had looked out the window then, down the hill. "Thirty-eight years. I did."
Then in August, on a hot afternoon with the windows open and the cicadas going like a dentist's drill in the oaks, his hand had let go of it. He had been holding it at the kitchen table, the way he held it whenever he was thinking, and the hand had simply opened, the way it sometimes did now, on its own, as if the hand had remembered something more important somewhere else. The watch had hit the edge of the table and then the tile floor and the crystal had cracked straight across and the second hand had stopped at forty-one.