At twelve-ten he had been parked in the lot of the closed Getty station at the bottom of Ridge Road with his engine running and his headlights off, drinking the last of a cup of coffee from the Stewart's in Katonah that had gone cold an hour ago, watching the road. He did not like sitting. When he sat, his mind went places. It went, for instance, to his ex-wife's text at seven that evening saying their son would not be home from Binghamton for Thanksgiving after all, and to the twenty minutes Conor had then sat in his car outside his condo with the engine off, not thinking about anything.
It went, also, to the house on Quarry Lane.
The kitchen light had been on at eleven-fifteen. It had been on at eleven-fifty. The porch light had been on too, which it usually was not, and that had bothered him the way a crooked picture bothers you. He knew there was a woman. Kathleen had told him so, on the phone, from Tucson, four years ago, in the voice she used on him now, the very patient voice she would have used on a client at the bank who could not understand his own statement. "I found somebody really good, Con. Through an agency. She's from Haiti, she's a trained nurse, she's been doing this thirty years. He likes her. I mean, he doesn't say he likes her, but he hasn't fired her, which is a first." And Conor had said, "Good," and Kathleen had said, "You could go meet her," and Conor had said, "I gotta go, Kath, I'm at work," and he had not been at work.
He knew her name was something French. He had not asked Kathleen to repeat it. He had never seen her. He drove midnights. She would be inside, at midnights, with the old man.
Four years, and he had never once seen her, and he had never asked himself why not, because a man who asked himself that would also have to ask himself why he drove down Quarry Lane four times a night and never stopped.
At 12:21 he heard the train.
You could hear it from anywhere in the north sector on a still night. The horn at the Bedford Road crossing, two long, one short, one long. His father had taught him that when he was five years old, sitting on the hood of the old Pontiac in the station lot at Brewster in the summer twilight, waiting for the evening train to come in, and his father had said, There, hear that? That's the crossing at Main Street. That's me, telling them I'm coming. Two long, one short, one long. That's the whole railroad, Con. That's all it is. Letting people know you're coming so they can get out of the way. Conor had sat on the hood of the car with the engine ticking underneath him and thought that his father was the most important man in the world, because when his father blew the horn, the gates came down.
He had ridden in the cab with him once. Only once, when he was eight, which was against every rule there was, his father lifting him up into the locomotive at North White Plains on a Saturday when the road foreman was at a wedding, and Conor had stood at his father's elbow all the way down to Grand Central with his face against the glass and the rails pouring toward him in two silver lines, and his father had put Conor's hand on the horn lever at the Fordham crossing and his own big hand over it and pulled, and the sound had gone right through Conor's body like electricity, and his father had laughed. His father did not laugh much. Conor could count the times. That was one.
He had become a cop at twenty-eight, after four years in the Army and a bad run of jobs, and his father had not come to the academy graduation, because his father had been working, because his father was always working, because in thirty-eight years Dermot Sheehan had missed, by Conor's count, one Christmas morning, two Thanksgivings, one Little League championship game, both his children's high school graduations, his daughter's wedding rehearsal dinner, and the night his wife was taken to the emergency room at Northern Westchester with what turned out to be the first of the strokes that would take her eleven years later, and every one of those times he had said the same thing, in the same flat voice, standing in the kitchen in his work clothes with his lunch pail: Somebody's got to bring them home.
And Conor, at fourteen, at sixteen, at twenty, at thirty, had wanted to say: What about us? Who brings us home?