I.
Her foot had slipped, that was all.
Now, suddenly, she was surrounded by the gun metal and rocks and the hollowed out space that the trains ran through. Throngs of people moved forward to see, wrenching their necks. Then there was the sound of the next train, flat and clear, not quite here, but close, barreling.
In the moment before you die, is it true that everything flashes before you? For her, it was her husband Jack’s black socks, lying in the drawer, unused; airing the wrinkled wet laundry, out on the balcony to dry in the breeze, without her son’s white t-shirts; the half eaten muffin on the counter that either of them would have finished if they had been here, always having better appetites than hers. Now: the cold tracks beneath her, eyes staring forward, her body poked by the unyielding metal. When Anton grabbed her from the tracks, she was surprised, almost startled; an animal caught and captured, eyes glazed and surrendered.
“What are you doing, ma’am?” he had said, with the urgency of fear and concern. “That’s not a place for you—let’s get you up. “ He had leaped over the crowd and through it, like a knife, sensing something and then seeing it: her small crumpled body in the flat hollow of the tracks below the platform, unmoving. He pulled her up, carrying her in his arms laying her flat the platform. Then he heaved himself out of the cavernous tracks to kneel beside her.
II.
“Oh, you’re prickly daddy,” his daughter Emily had said this morning, leaping onto
Anton, asleep on the floor in the hallway in the half light; the other, Anne, poking his eye with
her finger, while she leaned her face against his until he could smell her soft breath, sweet with
fruit and biscuits.
Last night: the way his hand and arm moved, filled with electric rage, a rubber band released. What had he been angry about? Some suspicion, that Sarah no longer loved him; she’d been late coming back with the girls.
In the still of the strike, Sarah had no words, holding her eye with her hand, stumbling backwards. The tide of shame rose in Anton’s gut like blood. The thing already done, nothing to take back; his arm like a trapped animal that had recoiled, then sprung loose.
“You’ll wake the children,” she said, voice shaking. “Leave, just leave.”
Anton alone in the dark night, his stone stunned feet heavy on gravel until he stumbled home, everyone asleep. And how the house had become still in its own peace, gathering itself, without him.
III.
The throng had cleared, and made way like a wave, retreating from shore; then had fallen into the twittering of relieved whispering, admiration, curiosity.
Anton, kneeling next to the woman, grabbed her hand, as if to break the spell. She was still mute, staring, the sky bright and blank above her, blue and cloudless.
“We’ve got to get you up,” he said again practically. “Are you feeling OK to stand?”
She was not. But he held her hand, still with his right, gripping it, and put his left hand
behind her upper back, hoisting her up into seating, so that she could see the platform like a
regular person would: the receding crowd, the stopped train now gathering passengers, others
moving back to their own movements and timetables, back to buying tickets and organizing
luggage.
“You’re OK,“ he said.
“I am,” she said, uncertain. And then she began to weep. It was not polite; it shook her whole body. So that the throng grew further distant, and turned away, the way that people do when confronted with something true, but uncomfortable.
“Here, here, let’s get you up, “ Anton said, not ignoring the weeping, but staying connected to the next thing, the next action. She bent her knees, following direction, like a child, and felt him now pulling her up to stand. She wobbled slightly and leaned into him, but his grip was firm and unwavering.
“I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to do that,“ she said.
“I know,” Anton said, not knowing why. “Let’s get you settled,“ he said, pulling her toward the station.
There, he left her unattended to find the stationmaster; and while she sat on the bench, quivering, she took in their stares: a young boy, with a stuffed bear, curious and slightly aghast with a furrow in his brow; a tall businessman in a blue suit, narrow mouth, looking at her, just below her eyes, then looking away.
That’s when the images came, like a stream of river over rocks, more of them: her cheek leaning into Sam, his scratchy mud green uniform, before he left; her husband’s veined and freckled hand on hers when Sam died; the aching quiet in the house afterward, trailing them like a lost dog.
How Jack would shake his head when about to cry, like shaking something off, his grief deep buried and unfathomable. When they held the photo of Sam with his regiment—squinting black eyes, so thin and unprepared—Jack turned his face away and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Weeks later, when Jack had not made it back from the lumberyard where he worked, she waited until the dark cloak of early evening, the sound of crickets and the cool air. Then finally, irreversibly, a knock on the door and two men fidgeting in the doorway, hats in their still dirty hands, to say Jack had died of a heart attack. “He just dropped to the ground ma’am,” said the older one, his hands trembling as if he would be blamed. “Ain’t nothing we could have done.”
That truth, like a heavy blanket, impossible.
IV.
Here now: relief, breath, early morning sun. She could feel the cold on her skin, the way the clouds formed in the sky, high and white; life’s inevitability.
Anton brought coffee and the stationmaster, mustached and anxious, his body bursting from his uniform with an aggravated buoyancy.
“Now what do we have here,“ the stationmaster said, with the guilt of someone who should already have been there. Should he have been reading his paper and enjoying his coffee quite so much, while a woman had thrown herself onto the tracks, and only the presence of this man had saved her?
“What were you thinking, ma’am?” he said nervously.
She looked back mutely, tears smudging her face. She could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“We’ll have to file a report,“ he said, panting. “Come with me.”
She ambulated herself, finding her legs and standing. She nodded to Anton, as if to say she no longer needed his help. But he followed the stationmaster with her anyway, into the small room with windows, the abandoned cup of coffee and a half eaten apple on his desk.
“What were you thinking?” the stationmaster asked again. He meant it as a real question, but it sounded like an interrogation, with the air of his fear behind it. She didn’t know how to answer now; nothing made sense. She had crossed some line from an old land into a new one, the map gone, her former choices foreign to her, as if made by someone else.
“I wasn’t,” she blurted, then sensing that might not be enough, added: “It just happened.”
The stationmaster looked at Anton, as if for more information.“You found her on the tracks?”
“Yes, just lying there, seemed a bit disoriented I would think. Just staring. But then, I
don’t really know, I just moved fast to grab her.“
“Thank you,“ the stationmaster said curtly, naming in that shortness some unspoken gratitude. A glance was exchanged between them. “You can go,“ he said to Anton. “You’ve got a job to go to? Do you need me to write you a note or something?“
“No, no, just doing what was right. I’m in no rush, want to make sure she’s OK.“ Anton said and half-smiled, then cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. How did he feel guilt now, even now, when the same instinctual fire that had rippled him with hurt last night had now save a life? The room was quiet, the way stillness allows for the falling in of things, a settling.
“You’ve been so kind to me,” the woman said, an offering to the silence. And then the tears came again, heaving her whole body. The two men watched, paralyzed with the discomfort of emotion, the way one watches an accident, something about to go off the tracks. There was absolutely nothing to do. She began to speak and was not stopping herself.
“I thought he’d come home, I thought they’d both come home,“ she said. All the images in her head dumped out like rocks. As she spoke, there was nothing to say: you don’t interrupt a grieving woman, unburdening herself.
Each man at times looked at her, then at the floor. The stationmaster cleared his throat from time to time, as if marking the story with some sound would make it stop. He wanted a drink.
V.
The stationmaster was also thinking: he didn’t know how to file the report. It was easier if it was an accident, not a suicide, but he just couldn’t be sure yet. Suicides required a mental health investigation, the local team to come—a spectacled doctor, and his wife, with a black suitcase and a stethoscope—to ask questions, determine if someone needed to be sent away to the sanitarium. It took longer, and would probably mean he would miss his lunch break.
Accidents were easier; meant filling out a form, explaining clearly what had happened, and taking the names and dates of birth. Of course, it was better that nothing had actually happened. For this, he thanked the sweating man standing in his office with him.
The stationmaster’s friend had had a completed suicide a few weeks ago, the track splattered with blood and bone. “You don’t get it out of your head, easy,” his friend had said, his head bent over the beer at the pub.
He had wanted to stop the train in time, his friend had lamented, and it was on you to do it, except that it’s impossible, past a certain point, the burning of the steel on the tracks cannot slow it down in time, the screeching and sparks, and then the collision. “You don’t want to know that smell, when the heat of the train has hit the body, and there’s nothing you could have done. You smell that smell for days, can’t wash it out of you.”
His friend had taken a three week leave of absence and gone up to the countryside, and looked at the ocean and eaten fish and chips. The stationmaster couldn’t afford that, not in his boarding house, barely getting back on his feet after the divorce from Jan and the alcohol. He was almost finished. The egg salad sandwich from his landlady today was something to look forward to, in his bag like buried treasure, he could almost taste the dill and mustard, his stomach grumbling.
VI.
“Don’t look at me like you don’t know anything,” Jan had said those months ago. He still remembered her: wrinkle-faced, teeth clenched. He’d hidden the bottles in the trash, under a brown woolen blanket they’d thrown out, mottled with moth holes. Her face was ugly in its growling, the slant of her eyes as they stood outside at dusk.
She’d started throwing the bottles, the smashed glass in shards, pulling everything out of the trash and hurling it on the ground. A light went on next door. He stared, then moved like a hit animal, cowering, back toward the house and into their bedroom where he hauled a suitcase from the closet onto the blue-flowered spread, slowly packing a bag.
It was the last time: he knew it like the slow warm melt of drink in his chest. She said she’d give him one more chance and this was it. Their marriage, three years old and childless, flat as a stillborn, was over.
First he went to his stout and Catholic mother, shaming and angry: her dark curtained home, doillied tables, mass each morning. His mother dragged him like a heavy stone to go, naming his sins. On the weekends, his brother Clint visiting with Christine and Ethan and Joe, the two young boys jumping on him in the morning on the sofa, poking his face like hungry birds, waking him from sleep.
Caged, caught, the boarding house—even with its loud and questionable neighbors—was some breath of independence: no hiding of things. Sound and squalor were everywhere. But it was his.
VII.
Now the woman had paused, and the air was still and pregnant. She looked down at her feet, and the stationmaster felt obligated this time to break the silence.
“I’m afraid I need to ask you ma’am. Did you mean to do it?”
At first when he asked, she felt nothing, didn’t know how to answer exactly. And then something came up out of her, a kind of confused rage.
“Does anyone mean to do anything,” she said. “Does anyone mean to? Did my husband and my son mean to die, did they? And you, did you mean to have that drink this morning, the one I could smell on your breath?” She looked him straight in the eye.
“And did this man here”—she pointed at Anton—“mean to save me, mean to risk his life to take some sad woman off the tracks before the next train came?”
Both men reddened slightly at being called out. The stationmaster met Anton’s stare with a raised eyebrow, then looked away. It was not the words he had expected or needed; he could lose his job for this, and he could feel his mind still wondering how to interpret them. He tapped his foot, in spite of himself, not wanting to give his nerves away.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, more definitely, as if sensing his need for an answer. “I don’t
know if anyone does.”
VIII.
Outside, the air was still cool, the station settled into its usual routine, the way life returns to itself like blood to a wound. Anton held the woman’s frail hand. She lived close, and he would walk her home before he tried again to return to work. She had moved on, like a child after a tantrum, or like clouds in the sky, opening to sun, to telling him about all the other things.
“We met when we were just children,” she said. “His face was red as a bug’s, telling me he liked me. He pulled my braids. I brought him lunch every day for a year in school.“ As she prattled, her footsteps grew stronger, and Anton could feel her loosening her tight grip on his arm, almost playful.
When they arrived at her house, she didn’t invite him in, which surprised him, but also relieved him. He wouldn’t have been able to leave her otherwise. Instead, she looked him straight in the eye and said, unwavering, “Thank-you. You have seen me. You have heard me. And the worst thing in life is not to be seen or heard.”
Then she moved, quietly and resolutely, to her door, fumbling with a key, opened it up, and closed it behind her, disappearing as quickly as she had come.
XIX.
Anton paused for a moment unmoving. A squirrel climbed up the tree to the right of the house, its clawed feet making a scratching sound on the bark. For a moment, he had lost all track of time. He could not go back to work.
He decided to go home instead, to call in sick, or maybe come late, and do his best to make up the difference. He would think of something, he would have to. He would go and give Sarah a hug, surprise her and the girls, maybe find a wildflower, or a dandelion or two in the road, to bring as a gift. The girls would like that, to make a wish. How to make these urges permanent, a part of him and steady, not just a scared and desperate impulse—grabbed at like a choking man at air—to repair a shameful act?
Inside her home, the woman made tea. She had never cared much for coffee. Falling asleep briefly on the couch, she was startled by the kettle’s sound. She went to fill the pot with water, and returned to the window, staring out at the moving men and trucks, doing their work.
Yes: tomorrow, she would go again to her son’s and husband’s graves, that solemn and inevitable procession. What was it that felt different now about the choice to go, having almost removed it forever from herself?
The stationmaster, eating his egg salad sandwich now, thought it had been hours that the woman had been talking, but he clocked only 25 minutes from when he had brought her into the office, to after he had let her go. When she left, she had given him a hug, and he had received it, stiffening.
He opened the drawer where the bottle lay, then closed it, locked it. He was relieved to feel she might not press any charges for his negligence. He sat back in his chair, finishing his sandwich, and took awhile to write anything at all about the incident.
X.
Out on the tracks, the train beckoned and bellowed, finally screeching to a halt. Then it opened its doors to the next line of passengers, waiting to ascend.
Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash
