She laughed. It was a girl's laugh, startling out of that small old body. "Have we met. Fifty years and he says have we met." She patted his chest twice, briskly, and then took her hand back and folded both hands on the handle of the blue suitcase like a woman at a bus stop folding her hands on her purse. "Well, you can carry this, since you're here. I packed you a sweater. It gets cold on the lake, you said, you forgot how cold. And your razor, the good one, not the one from the army. You'll want a shave before you see your mother. She'll say you look like a tramp."
James lifted the suitcase. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, and something inside it shifted with a soft papery slither. He brought it up the last two steps and set it down on the floor of the hall, and the old woman came up after it, one hand on the brass rail, and when she reached the top she took his arm. She took it the way women took men's arms in old movies, her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, and settled her weight there as if she had done it ten thousand times.
"The four-ten," she said. "You said the four-ten. I came early. I always come early, you know me." She looked up at the skylight, and her face went soft and wondering, like a child's. "Isn't it something. I never get over it. Every time I come in here I think, they built this for us. Just for us. Isn't that silly."
"It's not silly," James said, because it was the only true thing he could find to say.
He was thinking fast now, with the part of his brain that read schematics. She was confused; she thought it was some other year. She was waiting for a James, and he had walked up, and he happened to be one. Half the guys on his high school baseball team had been named James. It was a coincidence of the kind that made you believe in nothing and everything.
She would have a name somewhere. Somebody would be looking for her. He looked down at her wrist, where the sleeve of the camel coat had ridden up, and there it was: a steel medical bracelet on a flexible band, the kind with the red caduceus on the front. He tilted his head to read it without being obvious.
IRIS VESELY, it said. MEMORY IMPAIRED. And under that, a phone number with a 708 area code, and the words CALL PETRA.
"Iris," he said gently, testing.
She smiled up at him, pleased, the way you smile when someone you love says your name in a crowd. "You never call me that. You always call me Bird."
"Bird," he said.
"That's better."