THE TRAINed LADY

[Reconstructed from: private journal, N.S., entry headed "W."; statement, W. McKay; statement, T. Ruiz, café attendant, Amtrak Cascades]

The rain at Pacific Central that morning was the kind nobody bothered with an umbrella for. People carried them anyway, half open, half shut, and gave up on them somewhere between the taxi rank and the doors.

Nadia came through the crowd in the brown herringbone coat, belted, buttoned to the top, collar down. An overnight bag rode on one shoulder and her handbag on the other. She had made this walk often enough that she no longer read the signs. She read the people under them.

An old man had stopped dead in front of the departures board with a suitcase gripped in both hands. He held a printed itinerary close to his face and moved his lips over it. People flowed around him the way water goes around a post.

She didn't break stride so much as bend it.

"Platform's this way," she said. "I'm headed there myself."

He looked up, relieved and a little ashamed of the relief. "I don't do this often. Trains."

"Nobody does. That's why they make the signs so confusing. Job security for people like me who've memorized them."

He laughed and fell into step with her, and she walked him all the way down, past the gate and the man who checked tickets without looking at faces, and only peeled away once he had his car number and his bearings. By then she was already scanning for the next thing.

The train was warm and smelled of wet wool. She took her window seat in the second car back, the one with the small tear in the fabric above the armrest that nobody had reported, and laid a folded newspaper on the tray table. She didn't open it. She never did.

Three rows up, a man sat alone with his face to the window. Late sixties. Good coat, badly kept. He had the stillness of somebody with nowhere particular to arrive.

She gathered her bag.

"Is this taken? Everywhere else smells like someone's tuna sandwich."

"Be my guest."

She sat, and let the quiet go on a little longer than politeness needed, until it belonged to both of them.

"Vancouver to Seattle," she said, "or somewhere in between?"

"Seattle. Visiting my daughter." He paused. "First time since my wife."

"I'm sorry."

"Forty-one years."

She turned in the seat and looked at him properly. "What was she like?"

Walter McKay told me this part in his kitchen in Burnaby, in February, with four tomato plants in yogurt pots on the windowsill behind him. He said nobody had asked him that question in six months. He said it twice, as if I might not have heard the first time. I want to be clear that I didn't prompt him on any of what follows. He had been waiting to tell it to someone and I happened to be the second person who asked.

He talked for a long time. About her garden, and the tomatoes she was stubborn about, and the sound of her laugh, which he did badly and then apologized for. Nadia didn't interrupt. She asked short questions at the places where he slowed down, and he sped up again.

"She used to say the tomatoes knew when I was in a bad mood," he said. "Wouldn't grow right if I'd had a hard week. I told her that was nonsense. She was probably right."

"Did you believe her?"

"Every word. Forty-one years, you believe every word, even the nonsense. Especially the nonsense."

"What do you do with a belief like that," Nadia said, "once there's no one left to hold up their end of it?"

He took his time with that one. Outside, the yards of Burnaby went past in the rain, fences and trampolines and somebody's blue tarp.

"I bought tomato plants in April," he said. "Haven't told anyone that. They're dying on my balcony as we speak."

"They're not dying. They're adjusting."

He laughed out loud, surprised into it. "You don't know a thing about tomatoes."

"Not one thing. But I know adjusting when I see it."

He looked at her sideways. "What's your excuse, then? For riding this thing every week same as me."

"Nobody's ever asked me that on the first ride."

"I'm not most people."

"No," she said. "You're really not."

She didn't answer him, and he didn't push. He told me, in February, that he noticed at the time that she hadn't answered, and that he liked her better for it.

Somewhere after the border, with the inspection behind them and the car settling back into its own noise, he got onto work.

"Thirty-one years at the border and you'd think I'd seen everything," he said. "People will tell you anything if you ask nice enough."

"Sounds like a good instinct to have."

"You'd be amazed what goes through a checkpoint on a quiet afternoon. When the shift's thin and everybody just wants to go home."

He said it the way men say the old stories, lightly, for the pleasure of having been there. Nadia had been looking at him. She went on looking at him. Her face didn't change, and her hands stayed where they were on her knees.

I asked Walter whether anything about her shifted when he said that. He thought about it longer than I expected. Then he said no, nothing shifted, that was the thing. He said in thirty-one years he'd learned that most people move a little when you say the word checkpoint, even innocent people, especially innocent people. She didn't move at all. He said he only thought about it afterward, on the platform, and then not again until I asked.

I don't say that to be dramatic. A man who spent three decades watching faces at a border remembered a face that did nothing. I wrote it down.

"I'll take your word for it," she said, easily, and he laughed, and whatever had passed went on past.

"You ever get tired of it?" he asked. "Talking to strangers all day?"

"You're not a stranger anymore, Walter. You've told me about the tomatoes."

"Fair point."

The café car was two cars forward. She waited her turn behind a man buying three bags of pretzels. The attendant was young, mid-twenties, with a name tag that said TEO and a pen behind each ear, and he was already reaching for a particular cup before she got to the counter.

"Clam chowder?"

She smiled. "You remember."

"Ivar's. Same order every trip. I could set my watch by you."

"Is that a compliment or a diagnosis?"

"Bit of both, honestly," he said, and ladled.

She carried the cup back down the aisle with both hands, as you carry something you've been trusted with.

Teo Ruiz has worked the Cascades café car for four years. He was specific that the librarian took the cup in both hands, every time, and he was specific that he only noticed this because somebody else did it too. That's a later chapter. I mention it here because he mentioned it here, unprompted, on the second page of his statement.

Halfway back to her seat she slowed beside a man in a suit with a laptop open in front of him. He wasn't typing. His jaw was set hard enough that you could see it from the aisle.

She sat down across from him.

"Rough morning, or rough month?"

"I'm working," he said, without looking up.

"Of course. I'll let you get back to it."

She stayed where she was a moment longer, in case. He glanced up then, not unkind, only final.

"I appreciate it. I do. I'm just not in the market today."

"Fair enough."

She went back to her window and set the chowder down on the newspaper. For a second, no more, her mouth pulled at one corner. Then she unfolded the paper she wasn't going to read and held it up in front of her.

At Bellingham the train slowed and stopped, the way it did at every scheduled station whether anyone needed it to or not. A few passengers got off. Nobody got on. Beyond the platform a man was unloading crab pots from the bed of a pickup, and gulls worked the water behind a boat on its way out. A girl on the platform was waiting for someone who hadn't come, checking her phone, then the road, then her phone. The doors closed. The train pulled out on time.

A few rows back, a couple in their thirties were having an argument at the volume of people who don't want to be overheard. Nadia's eyes went to them once. A held jaw. A hand that started toward the other one's arm and was taken back before it got there.

She watched a moment longer. Then she turned to her window, where the town was giving way to trees, and let them be.

At King Street the train came in under the clock tower. Walter stopped at her row with his coat over his arm.

"This is me."

"Give your daughter my best. Well, don't. She doesn't know me. Give her yours."

He smiled at that, a real one. "Same time next week?"

"I'll save you the window, for once."

She watched him go up the platform until the crowd took him, and then a moment more. Then she picked up her own bag and followed everyone out.

#

Her apartment in Seattle had one place setting on the table and one hook by the door, and the coat went on the hook with its belt still fastened. She filled the kettle and forgot it. She lit the lamp and sat down at the laptop, and logged into a page with nothing on it but a white field and a cursor.

She typed:

W. 31 yrs at the border. Widower. Still sharp. Still misses being needed.

She sat back. Then she leaned in again and added:

It's strange, the things people hand you if you sit still long enough. I collect them like Walter collects nothing now. I don't know what I do with them. I just don't want to lose the day.

She read it over once, her lips moving on the last line, and left it as it was.

When she got up to turn off the lamp, her hand passed the ring on her left hand and turned it, once. She stopped and looked down at it for a while, as you look at something you've stopped seeing.

That entry is the first one in the file I took from her apartment. It's dated the second Tuesday in September. I've read it more times than I've read anything else she wrote, and I can tell you exactly what's on that page and next to nothing about why.