The Lake Shore Limited (37 page)

Apparently she hadn't heard this before. She smiled in childish delight. After a minute, she said, "My aunt is pretty crazy, actually. She has Alzheimer's disease."

"I'm sorry."

"No, it's not so bad. She thinks she's doing a lot of neat stuff. She said she was glad I arrived when I did because she'd just gotten back from her trip down the Nile." She laughed, and he did, too, in response to her amusement, but also to the prettiness of her laugh.

"I've always wanted to go to the Nile," Sam said after a moment. "Maybe that's the way I'll finally get there."

"Oh,
you're
not old," she said.

"Not yet," he agreed. It was getting colder. He might want to get his coat out of his car pretty soon.

Her face had become earnest. "Do you believe in signs?" she asked him.

"Portents, you mean?"

She looked as if she didn't understand the word.

"What kind of signs?"

"No, what month you're born.
Those
signs."

"Oh. No. No, I don't."

"Oh." She sounded disappointed.

"You do?" he asked after a moment.

"Yeah. Sorta." She leaned back. She seemed suddenly exhausted. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them fiercely wide and licked her lips, as though willing herself to alertness. "I mean, my horoscope today said I should stay close to home."

"There you have it," Sam said. "All the proof you need."

She looked at him. After a few seconds, she said, "I know you're kidding me. You don't think ... that's real." She seemed embarrassed and a little sad, and Sam felt bad. She was shuddering a bit from time to time, too. He got out of the car again and went up the hill for his coat. When he came back to the car, he put it around her shoulders. He buttoned it under her chin. She was protesting, but she let him do it.

"There," he said when he was done arranging it. "Better?"

"Yes," she said. After a minute: "You're really nice. To do that, and to stay here with me."

"Anyone would," he said.

"No, that's not true," she said. After a moment, she said, "Where were
you
going? Are you going to be late for something?"

"Oh." Sam smiled ruefully. "I was going to meet my own true love."

"Honestly?" She sounded impressed.

"In a manner of speaking.
She
might not agree." And then, because they needed to pass the time, because the temperature in the car was dropping steadily, the engine ticking as it did, he told her about Leslie, a shortened, edited version of the story--he left Charley out, he left out his own feelings of emptiness and failure. When he was done, he said, "So, do you think she'll come away with me?" He smiled at her. "Would you?"

"Well, it's very romantic," she said hesitantly.

"Thank you." When she didn't look at him, he said, "I
think
, thank you."

"Well, she is married. To someone else."

"To the wrong man, obviously." Sam was joking--half joking--but he was aware, suddenly, of how he might sound to her. Like someone dangerous. Like a stalker.

They sat silently for a moment. The wet snow hissed gently outside as it landed on the trees. She said, "But I don't think you ..." She was looking at him, worry in her plain face. "Maybe she really, really loves him, did you ever think of that?"

"I have thought of it. Often. But I think I still have to do this."

"Well, I hope it ... I hope it's all okay."

There was something so genuinely concerned in this, so sweetly generous, that he said, "Oh, it will be okay. No matter what. Just as you will be okay, right?" He dabbed again at the blood still pumping, but slowly now, from her head.

"Yeah, I'm gonna be fine," she said.

They talked a little more--she was studying to be a licensed practical nurse, she was living with her mother, a widow--and then, in the distance, they heard the sirens. Sam got out of the car and went up the hill to the road again. They pulled up, two police cars and a fire emergency truck, and he led the five or six men down the slope. He stood back while they got her out--four or five of them pushed the car backward and then were able to open her door. They put her on a stretcher and carried her up the hill. Sam walked beside her, trying to speak to her, to reassure her through the busyness of the EMTs. He told her she'd be okay now, though before they covered her, he'd seen that her leg, the leg that had been wedged in by the crushed door, had a long gash. She must have been losing blood from there, too, while they had their polite conversation--much more blood than she was losing from the cut on her head.

He thought to ask her name just as they got to the emergency vehicle. Melanie, she said. Melanie Gruber. He asked the cops where they were taking her. He told her he'd call, he'd find out how she was, but that she was going to be fine now that help was here. She smiled at him weakly and then waved as they lifted her into the back of the red truck.

One of the policemen stayed to talk to him about what had happened. Sam said no, he hadn't got the license of the first car, but said that he didn't think whoever was driving it had been aware of what was going on behind him. The cop took his car phone number, "just in case," he said, and he left, too.

Sam was alone by the side of the road. He went back down to Melanie's car and retrieved his coat from where the EMTs had thrown it. He saw that there was a wide dark stain of blood at its hem.

He started his car, and continued on his way to Gorton.

Where he saw Leslie and Pierce in their house, in their life together. And though he
didn't
believe in signs, not even in portents, he nonetheless felt that this was the scene he'd been brought all this way, on this exact day--a day with exactly the events of this day--to see. And that all of it was connected, somehow--his sadness over Charley, his sense of being lost in his own life, the difficulty of the drive up. The accident, and then Melanie Gruber's ... sweetness, he supposed. At that moment he couldn't have articulated the connection, but he felt it. He felt it, along with a lifting, a release, that he also couldn't have explained clearly to anyone else.

Driving back in the direction of Hanover, he hadn't been sure what he wanted to do. He was exhausted, suddenly. The lighted houses in the fields or nestled close to the road were like a call to go home, but the notion of the long drive back to Boston through the snow, through the rain, seemed impossible to consider in the state he was in.

He drove into town. He checked in at the Hanover Inn. After he'd scrubbed his teeth with a washcloth and washed his face, he went downstairs to the restaurant and had a hamburger and a beer, still in the state of lightness that had washed over him at Leslie's. The hamburger seemed to him a great hamburger, an extraordinary hamburger. He had another beer, which he drank slowly, feeling a sense of happiness, of grace, in everything he saw and touched and tasted. When he was done, he signed the bill and went back to his room. He called down and asked for a toothbrush and toothpaste from housekeeping. While he was waiting for them to be delivered, he telephoned the hospital where they'd taken Melanie Gruber. He was hoping, he realized, to be able to talk to her, to hear her musical voice, maybe even to tell her he hadn't done it, hadn't tried to claim Leslie.

She was sleeping, they said. They couldn't give him any information about her beyond that.

"Sleeping" sounded good, he thought. Sounded safe.

A young man arrived at the door with the toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. Sam brushed his teeth; he got into bed and fell asleep almost instantly. He slept deeply, dreamlessly, until sunlight moved slantwise across the bed and woke him.

And when he woke, he immediately thought of the girl again. Actually not her as a person so much as meeting her, what he saw in some crazy sense as the miracle of it, the way it altered how he saw everything in its aftermath. She, she was the sign, the portent, the
emblem
--of possibility, of chance, of fate.
Things arrived in your life
. They descended upon you. It was like falling in love, Sam thought, but in this case without the emotion at the center. Just the aura of it, the sense of blessedness, of great luck.

He called the hospital again and got passed around from extension to extension. Finally someone came on and said, "Who is it you're trying to find?"

He said her name.

"Oh, yes," the woman said. "She's been released. She's gone home."

He had laughed aloud on the phone, these words seemed so perfect.

Now as Sam sits in his living room, holding the Christmas letter from Emma, thinking of Melanie Gruber, he realizes that he's called her up in part because he feels the same way about Billy, about the accident of Billy's arrival in his life--exactly that surprised. That lifted up.

Clearly it had been a mistake on Leslie's part, introducing them. It shouldn't have worked. He remembers realizing from the look on her face at that moment that she was in some sense
presenting
him to Billy; he remembers being at once irritated and moved, there was something so presumptuous and yet kindhearted in this. He remembers thinking quickly about how he'd manage the end of the evening with Billy, if he got stuck with her.

But then there was the unlooked-for connection they'd made, the sense of possibility he'd felt in her presence and her clear responsiveness to him--though it was also clear that for some reason she struggled with that. Something, he thinks now, that they never had a chance to talk about. That they ought to talk about.

He needs to talk to her, Sam thinks. He thinks if they can just sit next to each other and talk the way they did in the waiting room of the HMO, or in her parlor, they can figure things out, they can get through whatever her hesitations, her fears, are.

He thinks of what he said to Jerry, that he was smitten with her. That seems exactly right, a word that suggests something's having
happened
to you, some agent's acting on you, whether you like it or not. He's smitten, he's been
smited
by his feelings for her. Wham! Like fate. Like an accident. An accident you watch happening to yourself in a kind of wonderment.

All this while Sam has been looking out the window at the snow falling. Early snows, this year. Global warming, no doubt. This one started in the night, and now it's piled up. There's probably more than a foot out there. Just before lunch, Sam moved the car to the bottom of the driveway so he wouldn't have to shovel himself out.

What he'll do, he's thinking, is mail the earring back. He'll write a note to send with it, he'll persuade her to see him again. He feels, not hopeful exactly--he remembers her face when she saw him in the theater, the way it shuttered itself--but excited. Excited to be acting, to be doing something.

He'll go now, he'll walk by the house and see what the number is--he's sure he'll recognize it: her desk in front of the curved tall windows, the lamp on the desk. There was a small, bare tree in the little yard at the front of the house, he remembers that, too. Maybe a dogwood.

He goes into the hall, pulls his coat off the newel post, grabs his keys. It's cold out, but the air feels soft, as it often does in a windless snowstorm.

The ride over is slow. End-of-day traffic is thick, and everyone is driving carefully, lights on, because the roads are so slippery. Sam is going slowly, too. Even so, the car fishtails several times when he's applying the brakes, and he's never entirely sure he'll come to a complete stop when he needs to. Nothing is plowed yet in the city. Probably all the trucks are out on the highways, trying to get them cleared for the commute home.

He turns onto Mass Ave by Symphony Hall, headed south. There's a policeman directing traffic at Huntington Avenue, bundled up, wearing an orange safety vest and thick mittens. When he signals for Sam to go forward, Sam feels beckoned personally, given a gift. He crosses Columbus Avenue, and then turns left on Tremont Street. The traffic is instantly easier here. He drives the width of the South End, going very slowly after the halfway point, reading the street signs. He's not quite sure how far in Union Park is.

And then he passes it, too late to turn--but it's one way in the wrong direction anyway. About a block and half beyond it, there's a parking place at a meter. He takes it. As he pulls the keys out from the ignition, he sees that Billy's earring is hooked through one of the smaller rings dangling from the big, central one. He untangles it and puts it in one of his coat pockets. He puts the keys in the other pocket and gets out of the car.

He walks back toward Union Park. He passes the restaurant where he sat with Pierce and Leslie waiting for Billy those weeks ago. It's packed with people sheltering from the storm, feeling cozy and safe and festive, no doubt, looking out the glass at the falling snow. He passes a real estate office, a cafe, less full.

As soon as he turns in to Union Park, he's in another century. It's still and silent, and the grand old Victorian brick houses seem serene, remote. The snow is falling slowly and evenly. It's almost invisible in the air, just the blur through which Sam sees everything. What lingers of the light is opalescent. The sidewalks are covered with a blanket of white, the cars humped shapelessly. The black iron fence that circles the oval park in the center of the block is traced in white. Each of the fountains has a rounded, jaunty cap.

He walks in on the left side of the park. Lights are on in some of the houses. From his pedestrian's angle, he can see the ornate ceilings, the heavy curtains held to the sides of some windows--here the back of a chair, there a piano lid, opened. Sometimes a chandelier. Somewhere a lone shoveler is prematurely at work, the metal striking the brick sidewalk with a sound that carries distantly through the windless air.

Sam's breath is loud in his ears. She was somewhere near the middle of the block, he remembers. His hands are in his pockets; he's holding the earring. He thinks he recognizes the tree a few houses ahead--the gray bark, the arching shapely branches.