"I'm right here," James said, kneeling down fast, trying to get back into her eyeline, trying to find the door again. "Bird, I'm right here. Look at me."
She looked at him. And the terrible thing was that she saw him. Not the James she had been waiting for, but the other one, the real one, a stranger of thirty-seven in a navy blue work jacket with a station facilities patch on the shoulder and a crescent wrench in his back pocket. He saw her see it. He saw the year 1961 go out of her face like a light going out in a window.
"You're not him," she said. "You're old. You're—who are you? Who are all you people?" Her voice climbed. "Where's my suitcase? I had a suitcase. Somebody's taken my suitcase."
"It's right here, ma'am," said Officer Akers, reaching for it, meaning to help, and Iris saw a strange man in a uniform with a gun on his hip reach for the suitcase that held everything she had packed for the love of her life, and she screamed.
It was not a long scream. It didn't need to be. In the Great Hall of Union Station a scream goes up into the vault and spreads out and comes back down from everywhere at once, from the skylight, from the columns, from the stone faces of Day and Night on their high walls, and for one second the whole crowded room went silent, a hundred heads turning. In that second Iris Vesely got up off the bench with a speed James would not have believed possible, pushed past the young officer's outstretched arm, and was gone.
She went the wrong way, not back toward the Canal Street stairs and home but toward the passage that ran under Canal Street to the concourse, where the tracks were. And she went into the crowd at the precise moment it started moving again, just as a Metra train from Aurora emptied out and a youth choir of sixty children in green sweaters and reindeer antlers was herded through the hall, singing, and a family of eleven with two luggage carts tried to go the other way. Iris was small. Iris was in camel and beige. Iris was the exact color of the floor and the walls and the winter. She went into all of that, and she disappeared.
"Bird!" Petra was already running. "Bird, wait—"
"Ma'am! Ma'am, stop!" Officer Akers had his hand on his radio, already calling it in, his young face white. "I've got an elderly female, eighty-plus, tan coat, fleeing on foot toward the concourse—"
"James." Ron had him by the arm. Ron's grip was surprisingly strong. "James, stop. Let the police handle it. You're on the clock, and you've got your kid here, and so help me—"
"She doesn't know where she is, Ron."
"That's what police are for."