"What time?"
"Nine. Why?"
She didn't answer that. She looked at him for a long moment from the top step, so that for once she was taller than he was, and then she reached into her pocket and took out a pencil stub and a crumpled piece of sheet music, a page of what looked like Clementi, and wrote her phone number on the back of it, and folded it in half and handed it down to him.
"So you have the actual number," she said. "Not the bracelet."
He put it in his inside pocket, next to the badge.
He spent the next four days at home on suspension with pay, which turned out to be an almost unbearable kind of vacation. He fixed the drip in the bathroom sink and the closet door that had not closed since the Obama administration. He walked Ruby to school and back and sat at the kitchen table in between with a legal pad, writing down what he'd say on Thursday and crossing it out. On Tuesday he called the number on the back of the Clementi.
They talked for an hour and forty minutes. Iris, some: her bad night on Sunday and her good day on Monday, when she'd played "Moonlight in Vermont" on the upright from memory, every note, and then could not remember having done it. Ruby. Jen, a little; how she'd left for Tucson when Ruby was two and sent birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them, and lately sometimes not. Petra's mother, Della, Iris's only child, who had died on the Eisenhower in an ice storm when Petra was fourteen, and how Iris had come to get her from the hospital that night in that same camel coat and never once since let her feel anything but wanted. Whether owls were really wise or just looked it. At the end of it, at nearly midnight, Petra said, "I should let you sleep, you've got a big week, you're unemployed," and he laughed so loud he heard Ruby turn over in the next room.
On Thursday morning at nine he sat in a windowless conference room in the station office annex beside his union rep, a weary, decent man named Dobson who smelled of menthol cough drops, across from Ron, a woman from Amtrak HR with a laptop, and a lieutenant from Amtrak Police with a thick folder. In the folder, James learned as the lieutenant read through it in a flat, careful voice, were three statements.
One was from a conductor named S. Dobrev, emailed at 5:12 the previous Sunday morning from the station in Emeryville, California, at the end of her run. It was four sentences long. The third sentence was: "In twenty-six years I have seen a lot of people run down that platform, and he is the only one I ever saw slow down at the door so he wouldn't scare her." The fourth was: "Train made up the six minutes by Galesburg."
One was from a Red Cap named Sumner, handwritten, two pages, in pencil, and James did not hear all of it because something had gone wrong with his throat.
And one was from Officer T. Akers, Amtrak Police, who wrote that the subject had become distressed after "my own questioning, which I now believe was not appropriate to the subject's condition," and that "the facilities employee's actions in my opinion likely prevented injury," and that he had requested additional training in dementia-related encounters and would respectfully ask that it be made available to all officers.