"Can I see that?"
She held up the sketchbook. Ron looked at the page for a long time, at the four figures under the stone owl, the gray and the red. Then he cleared his throat.
"That's a good drawing," he said gruffly, and went away across the Great Hall, a big tired man in a facilities jacket, and James watched him go and saw him stop, near the Christmas tree, and look up for a while at the statue on the west wall, at Day with her rooster, as if he'd never noticed it before.
They took the 4:30 BNSF to Berwyn together, because it seemed absurd by then to do anything else.
The Metra car was old and loud and overheated, and they sat downstairs in a facing pair, Iris by the window, awake again and placid, the red coat on now, properly, buttoned to the throat with all its black buttons. Iris had smoothed the front of it with both hands and said, "There. I knew I'd worn it," and nobody had said anything to the contrary. Ruby sat next to Iris and showed her the sketchbook page by page, and Iris made appreciative noises at the pigeon and the Christmas tree and Mr. Winnick on his ladder, and when they got to the pages that were full of a woman in red, Iris looked at them a long time and said, "She's always there, isn't she. That girl," and Petra, across from her, looked out the window at the backs of the warehouses going by in the dusk and said nothing.
Cicero. LaVergne. Lights coming on in the kitchens of the two-flats along the tracks. At Berwyn they walked the six blocks to Petra's house slowly, Iris on James's arm, James carrying the suitcase, and Petra carrying nothing at all for once.
The house was a brick bungalow like ten thousand others in Berwyn, with a deep front porch and a big arched window, and in the arched window, lit by a floor lamp with a fringed shade, stood an old upright piano with a metronome on top and a stack of music books and a bowl of foil-wrapped chocolate coins for students who'd practiced. A small, anxious woman in a sari and a cardigan opened the door before they reached the steps and cried out something in Hindi and then in English, "Oh, thank God, thank God, I am so sorry, I closed my eyes one minute," and Petra put her arms around her right there on the porch and said, "It's okay, Mrs. Agarwal. It's okay. She's home."
James stood at the bottom of the steps with the suitcase.
He didn't go in. Petra took Iris inside and came back out alone and stood on the top step with the porch light behind her, and he handed the suitcase up to her. Ruby was swinging on the porch rail.
"Thursday," Petra said.
"Thursday."