"Hi, Bird," said Petra. Her voice was perfectly steady. James did not know how. "I came to take you home."
"I can't go home." Iris's hands twisted. "I can't. If I go home and he comes, I won't be there. He'll be standing there looking at all the faces and he won't find me, and he gets so scared in crowds, he told me, he gets so scared—" She was crying again now, the dry, terrible crying of the very old, without much water left in it. "I can't remember where. He told me where and I can't remember."
Ruby let go of Petra's hand.
She came down the aisle of the lounge car past the empty swivel chairs, past the boy with the headphones, who had taken them off entirely now and was holding them in his lap, and she stopped in front of Iris and opened her sketchbook. She turned the pages fast. James caught glimpses as they flipped by: the Christmas tree, a pigeon, a man asleep on a bench, Mr. Winnick on a ladder from below with his glasses dangling, a woman in red, a woman in red, a woman in red, in pencil, again and again, sitting and walking and bending down to talk to a small old woman on a bench. And then Ruby found the page she wanted and stopped and held the book out flat in front of Iris, the way you'd show a picture to a much younger child.
It was the east wall of the Great Hall. Ruby had drawn it carefully, the columns and the high stone niche and the robed woman standing in it with her stone owl tucked against her side, the owl's round eyes done with two careful circles and a dot in each. And below the statue, small, at the bottom of the page, sitting on a bench with a suitcase at her feet, was a little old woman in a round hat. Ruby had drawn her in pencil, like everything else. But the old woman's coat she had colored in, with a red colored pencil, pressing hard, back and forth, so that the coat was the brightest thing on the page.
"You told me," Ruby said. "The first time. You said he wrote in the letter, wear red so I can find you, I'll be under the lady with the owl. And you said you wore your red coat, the one with the black buttons, and you were so nervous you sat under the owl for two whole hours before the train came. So I drew you. I made your coat red because you said." Ruby's voice wobbled, just slightly, and steadied. "If you go on the train, he won't know where you are. You have to be under the owl. That's where he said."
Iris looked at the drawing for a long time.
She put out one gloved finger and touched the little red coat at the bottom of the page.
"I did wear it," she said softly. "Didn't I. With the black buttons. My mother said I looked like a fire engine." She laughed, a small wet laugh. "He said he saw me from the top of the stairs. He said he saw me from all the way across the room."
"Under the owl," said Ruby.
"Under the owl." Iris looked up from the drawing, at Ruby, and her pale eyes were clear for a moment, clearer than James had seen them all afternoon. "Well, what am I doing on a train, then? What a silly old woman. Somebody help me up."