He thought about it, honestly, because she deserved an honest answer. "You stood up," he said. "Before I'd even started walking. You were already standing up."
She looked at him then the way Iris had looked at him at the top of the Canal Street stairs, as though she had been watching trains come in and empty out for a very long time and then had seen the face, and he understood that she was not going to be the one to close the distance, that she had run across enough rooms for other people, and so he did. He put one hand on the side of her face, cold from the walk and warm underneath, and he kissed her, there under the owl, in the middle of the Great Hall of Union Station at five minutes to eleven on a Thursday morning, while the trains breathed under the floor and a man with a gallon of milk went by and did not look at them at all.
When it was done, she kept her forehead against his for a moment.
"That was very unprofessional," she whispered. "You're on final warning."
"I'm on suspension till noon."
"Oh. Well. That's all right, then."
On the second Saturday in January, at a quarter to four in the afternoon, James Fitzhugh rang the bell of a brick bungalow in Berwyn after his shift with snow on his shoulders and his toolbag in his hand. Through the arched window he could see the lamp with the fringed shade and the upright piano and his daughter on the bench in front of it, her purple hat on the floor, frowning at a page of Clementi while Petra sat beside her in a red sweater, her twelfth, he suspected, counting under her breath. The metronome swung. At the dining room table behind them Iris was sitting with her hands folded on the lid of the blue suitcase, which she had packed again that morning, Petra had told him on the phone, with the gray sweater and the razor and the letters, though not the coat; the coat she was wearing, buttoned to the throat, all its black buttons shining.
She was the one who saw him first. She lifted her head and looked out through the arched window at a man standing on the porch in the snow, and he watched her face, and he did not know, would never know, from one Saturday to the next, who she would see there. An electrician. A stranger. A soldier home from Berlin. Some nights Petra said she still called out for James in her sleep, and Petra did not know either which one she meant. There would come a day, he knew, when red would not be enough, when the girl in red would come and Iris would not know to go with her. Petra knew it too. They had talked about it, late, on the phone. Neither of them pretended it wasn't coming.
But not this Saturday. This Saturday Iris Vesely got up from the dining room table in her red coat, slowly, one hand on the back of the chair, and came to the front door before anyone else could get to it, and opened it, and stood there looking up at him with her pale blue eyes in the cold blue January dusk, and smiled.
"There you are," she said. "I knew you'd find me."
"I always will, Bird," James said, which was not true, and was the truest thing he knew, and he stamped the snow off his boots and went in.