There was also Ruby's drawing.
James didn't know it was there until the HR woman turned her laptop around. Ron had scanned it. Ron had scanned it and put it in the file, on top, the four of them under the owl, in gray and red.
"I said I'd say what I saw," Ron said, to nobody, looking at the table.
They didn't fire him. It was close; he could feel how close, in the long pauses, in the way the HR woman typed. Unauthorized platform access stood. Lying to the gate agent stood. The minor on the platform stood, though the lieutenant noted that she had been transported there by an Amtrak employee in an Amtrak vehicle. He got a final written warning, which would sit in his file for two years like a stone in a shoe, and was told that if Ruby was ever again found unattended on Amtrak property during his shift, he would be cleaning out his locker. And when the March bids came, he was told, he should not expect the Saturday day shift.
"That's fair," James said, and meant it, and felt like he'd been hit by a bus, and walked out of the annex at a quarter to eleven into a gray, bitter December morning with no idea at all who would watch his daughter on Saturdays.
He walked back to the station because he didn't know where else to go. He went in through the Canal Street doors and up the wide marble stairs, past the brass rail, to the place at the top where he had first seen her, the small old woman with the blue suitcase looking at the last three steps as if they had disappointed her. He stopped there and looked across the Great Hall.
There was a woman sitting on the bench under the owl.
She was wearing a green coat.
It was a dark green wool coat, the green of a fir tree, with a gray scarf and gray gloves and no hat at all, and her brown hair was loose, and for a second he honestly didn't know her. His eyes went across her and kept going, looking for red, and found nothing, and came back. And then she lifted her head and saw him, at the top of the stairs, all the way across the room. He saw her see him. She stood up.
He crossed the hall. It seemed to take a long time. People went around him the way water goes around a stone, and up on their high walls Day held her rooster and Night held her owl, and neither of them, he thought, had ever had to decide anything.
"Hi," Petra said.