She sat back down. After a while she said, without looking at him, "You told her the truth. On the train."
"I didn't know what else to do."
"It's supposed to be the worst thing you can do. Every pamphlet. Every support group. Don't correct, don't argue, enter their world, it's kinder." She turned her head and looked at him then. Up close in the gold light he could see how tired she was, a tiredness that went back months, years maybe, and also something else under it, something alive and stubborn and amused. "I think it's mostly right. I've lived by it. I've been lying to her every day for a year and a half and I'd do it again. But it gets so lonely in there, James. Being the only one who knows what year it is. Sometimes I think she gets lonely too."
"She told me I was too old," he said.
Petra laughed out loud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at Iris, who didn't stir. "You are a little old," she whispered.
"I'm thirty-seven."
"For a soldier coming home from Berlin in 1961? You're ancient. You're practically a general."
Ruby, on the floor, made a small satisfied sound and held up her sketchbook.
It was the four of them, on the bench, under the owl. Ruby had drawn the statue first, the robed stone woman and her stone bird, and below her the bench, and on the bench a small old woman asleep with her head on the shoulder of a man in a work jacket, and on the old woman's other side a woman whose face Ruby had drawn with surprising tenderness, freckles and scar and all. On the floor in front of them was a small girl in a hat with a pom-pom, drawing. Ruby had drawn herself from behind. It was an odd and rather beautiful thing to have thought of.
Everything on the page was pencil, gray and soft. Except the old woman's coat, and the woman beside her. Those Ruby had done in red.
"You're doing it backwards," James said. "Mrs. Bird's coat should be red. But Petra isn't wearing red right now. Look. She took off her hat and her scarf and her coat's open. She's mostly sweater."