She was at the top of the Canal Street stairs, the wide marble flight that came up from the street entrance into the west end of the hall, and she had stopped there in the way people stop at the edge of cold water. She was small, the top of her head as high as James's collarbone, in a camel-colored coat that had been good once, a plaid scarf, and a little round hat with a pin in it that caught the light. And she was trying to get a suitcase up the last three steps, a suitcase that must have been made before James's father was born: hard-sided, powder blue, with rounded corners and two brass latches and a leather handle that had been mended with electrical tape. It did not have wheels. It had never heard of wheels. She would lift it with both hands to the next step, set it down, breathe, climb up beside it, and look at the next step as though it had personally disappointed her.
People went around her. They were not cruel. They were in a hurry, and she was a stone in a river, and rivers do what rivers do.
James was at the bottom of his ladder by then. He glanced toward Ruby. Ruby had stopped drawing and was watching the old woman too, with an odd, alert stillness, her pencil held off the page. He held up one finger to her, the universal sign for one minute, and she nodded without looking at him, and he crossed the hall.
"Ma'am," he said, coming down two steps so that he was below her and could take the weight. "Let me get that for you."
She looked up at him.
He would think about that look many times afterward, lying awake at two in the morning with the radiator knocking. He had expected gratitude, or the affronted pride of the old. This was not that. This was the look of someone who has been standing on a platform for a very long time watching train after train come in and empty out, and then sees the face. Her eyes were very pale blue, the irises gone milky at the edges, and they filled. Her mouth trembled and then steadied. She put one gloved hand flat on his chest, over his heart, as if to make sure he was solid.
"There you are," she said. "Oh, there you are. I thought I had the wrong day."
"Ma'am—"
"James," she said. "I wore it. Look. I wore it like you said." She lifted her scarf with two fingers. It was plaid, green and navy and a thread of yellow. There was no red in it anywhere. "So you could find me."
He went cold all down his arms. She had said his name. For one untethered second he thought she must be somebody he ought to know, a neighbor from the old building on Damen, one of his mother's church friends, someone who remembered him perfectly while he could not remember her at all. He searched her face and found nothing he recognized. Just a soft, lined, powdered face with a little lipstick put on slightly crooked, and those wet blue eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said carefully. "Have we met?"