And Cecilia, fourteen years old, with the whole bus watching, and the woman in the camel coat looking at her family as if they were something she had stepped in, felt a shame so hot and total that it seemed to rise up out of the floor. She wanted to be anywhere else. She wanted to be anyone else. She wanted, more than anything, for the woman in the camel coat to understand that she, Cecilia, was not like them.
So she reached over and took Danny's book.
"Danny, stop it," she hissed. "Stop it. People are looking."
She remembered, afterward, the woman's face. It was approval. Just a flicker of it, the faintest nod, as if to say: there, someone in this family has some sense. And Cecilia had felt, for one second, warm all the way through.
Then Danny screamed.
They had to get off the bus in Monroeville. The driver pulled onto the shoulder and opened the door and stood waiting, saying nothing, while Cecilia's mother wrestled Danny down the steps with her bad back and Cecilia came behind with the bags and the train book, which she had dropped and picked up again and which now had a torn page—page seven, the red caboose, ripped halfway across. They sat on a bench outside a gas station for two and a half hours waiting for the next bus. They missed the appointment. They never got another one.
Her mother never said a word about it. Not on the bench, not on the long ride home, not ever. That was the worst part. That night, at the kitchen table, she simply mended page seven with Scotch tape, carefully, matching the edges, while Danny sat on the linoleum beside her with his cheek pressed against her knee and hummed along with the refrigerator.
Cecilia went upstairs and lay on her bed and decided who she was going to be.
She was going to be the woman in the camel coat.
It took her twenty years. She got a scholarship to Penn State and then a job in New York and then a better one. She changed her name a little at a time: Cecilia to Celeste, Vargas to Varga, which sounded vaguely European and expensive and did not sound like a narrow brick row house in a flood town. She learned how to dress and how to speak and how to make a room go quiet just by walking into it. She learned that the most powerful thing in the world was to look as though you had never needed anything from anyone.
Her mother's back gave out for good when Danny was twenty-four, and he went to live at a group home in Altoona called Laurel House. Celeste paid for it. She paid for all of it, every month, by automatic transfer: the best room, the private aide, the van that took the residents to the lake in summer. She sent flowers on his birthday. She called the director twice a year.
She had not visited in eleven years. Their mother had died in the eighth of those years. Celeste had flown in for the funeral, stood in the front pew in a black suit that cost more than the casket, and flown out that same night. Danny had been at the back of the church with his aide. He had hummed through the whole service. She had not gone back to sit with him. She had told herself he wouldn't know the difference.