Ticket Home: Strangers on a Train Read online

  No.

  Safely ensconced several cars down under the watchful eye of her new protector, Amy gazed out the window as her heartbeat steadied. The train ran express from here into the city, gathering speed and pouring itself along the rail until its rhythms synchronized with hers. She felt its hum in her bloodstream and in the soles of her shoes, and she watched the landscape change like video in fast forward, scraggly growth on the embankment giving way to an industrial landscape and then to the open plains that surrounded Co-op City, the buildings like quadrangular tumors.

  The train began its elevated journey over the tops of the multifamily units in the Bronx, and she played the game she always played, trying to imagine the families that crammed into those boxy, exposed houses—the mothers who hung their underwear out for the commuters to see, the children who played on those balconies and back porches, some of which should have been condemned.

  He had not followed her, and she breathed more easily.

  They stopped at the 125th Street station. Here, the city finally began to edge in close to the tracks, and buildings crouched, blocking out the world. The train was packed now. A heavy woman with a frayed backpack sat down beside Amy. The woman and the backpack crowded her, but she didn’t mind. If anything, she felt safer.

  Then they were underground. Inside the tunnel, features flickered into and out of existence, advertisements and station signs rushing past as Metro-North’s route merged with the New York City subway. She was almost there. He had not followed her. She prayed he’d given up.

  Chapter Two

  He was waiting for her on the platform at the end of the day, leaning on a pillar, a study in male nonchalance.

  Her insides got tangled as her heart tried to leap at the same time her stomach tried to sink, and then she knew half of her had hoped he’d go back to Seattle while the other half had been hoping just as hard he’d be here, on the train.

  Stupid workaholic Jeff with his stupid phone.

  As she stepped through the sliding doors, he pushed himself up off the pillar, an uncoiling of muscle, and closed the distance between them. Aligning himself at her side, matching her stride.

  She sped up, ran for the train, and he chased her, bounding on behind her and following her up the aisle.

  There was, of course, no place to go. No way to get away from him. Unless—

  There was a conductor at the end of the car, and she started toward him, but Jeff caught her wrist again and spun her around to face him. He was very close, so close she could see the circles under his eyes and the brown stubble on his jaw. So close she could remember the exact feel of that well-formed lower lip.

  “No more games.”

  It was a command. It was a growl. She felt it, everywhere.

  “Do you know what I spent my morning doing?”

  She shook her head. From behind her, someone said, “Excuse me,” and Jeff sat abruptly in an empty seat and tugged her down to sit beside him. A group of passengers went by and distributed themselves into the seats beyond.

  She tried to get up, but he held her firm.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  He released her instantly, and she rubbed the place where his fingers had dug into her.

  “Your little stunt this morning with the conductor got me detained by the transit police for questioning. Apparently they take ‘See something, say something’ very seriously in the year of the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.”

  “Oh God.”

  “It’s okay. It turns out I don’t have a police record or obvious links with terrorist organizations, and I haven’t traveled out of the country in the last couple of years.”

  “Jeff, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well. You can make it up to me by not running away. Okay? Just talk to me.”

  She shouldn’t have sicced the MTA police on him, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be trapped here with him. It didn’t mean she wanted to rehash bits of their relationship better left behind. And it definitely didn’t mean she wanted his body a few inches from hers, tension rolling off him like fog off the early-morning Pacific Ocean. If she let her eyes flicker sideways, she could see that his thigh was tensed, the muscle straining the wool of his dress slacks.

  “I’m not playing games,” she said. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to fix things up. I want you to get off the train and leave me alone. It’s over.”

  “And I want you to come home with me.”

  He said it so simply, it stopped her dead. She eyed his soft, wavy hair, the lean strength in his neck, the rough line of his shoulder under his dress shirt, and she couldn’t move.

  The train began to pull out of the station, gathering speed in the dark tunnel. Her own mind started moving with it.

  It was too late to put him off the train. He was going to ride with her now, and no matter where she ran, she wouldn’t be able to get away from him.

  I want you to come home with me. Of course he did. He’d said as much this morning. But there was something about having it spelled out for her that made it more real.

  “I’m not coming home. There is no home. There was, but there isn’t anymore.”

  He turned his body more fully toward hers, his knees almost touching her thigh. His expression was earnest. “I had a lot of time to think today. And I decided something.”

  For a brief, giddy moment, she imagined he was going to say what she’d always dreamed he would. I want to spend more time with you. I’ve been spending too much time on work stuff. I’m turning over a new leaf.

  “I’m not going home without you.”

  It took her a few seconds to recover from her shock. “What, are you going to just ride the train back and forth with me until you wear me down?” As she said it, she felt a flash of panic. If that’s what he decided, there’d be virtually nothing she could do to escape him. She didn’t have the option of driving to work. She didn’t have a car.

  “I don’t want to wear you down. I want to talk to you. About what happened.”

  If he had any idea how easy it would be to overcome her resolve, she’d never get him off the train. “No, Jeff. No. It’s not an option.”

  She had not expected this of him. Not the grand gesture of showing up on the train in the first place, not the willingness to stick it out after she’d sicced security on him. And definitely not the stubborn look he gave her now. This Jeff—this grand and stubborn Jeff—was a complete stranger to her, despite months of living with him in Seattle.

  Yet now that she thought about it, she had known at some level that he had a stubborn streak. It was stubbornness, in fact, that defined his relationship with work. He insisted to himself that things couldn’t function without him, that the company that had so desperately required his nurture in its early days still needed him like a newborn needs its mother.

  Ego, that’s what it was.

  “I won’t change my mind,” she said again.

  “I’ll change your mind.”

  Ego.

  “How will you do that?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m going to ride this train until I do.”

  They were coming to the end of the tunnel, daylight visible ahead.

  “What will you do about Streamline?”

  Streamline was his company, his baby. The other woman at the distant end of the phone.

  “I can work remotely. I’ll phone in.” He patted his pocket, where she could see the outline of his iPhone like a futuristic implant under the tight pull of his pants. And then, as if reflexively, he pulled the phone out of his pocket, swiped a finger across the screen, and glanced down.

  “You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?” she asked.

  It took a long time, the slow motion of a train-wreck disaster sequence, before he dragged his eyes off the screen and back to her face. There was a slight daze of concentration on his features as he asked, with absolutely no irony, “The slightest idea of what?”

  Wednesday morning Jeff
woke in his hotel room in New York City before his alarm went off, so eager to see her, a mess of nerves. He rode the train outbound, got off, crossed the tracks, and rode inbound to her stop, watching out the window as she boarded, tall and remote and beautiful. She chose a forward-facing seat, a two-seater. Today she wore a ruffled cranberry-colored blouse with a deep V-neck and cloth-covered buttons. Her hair was pulled back, the whole dark mass of it anchored in a low ponytail under crisscrossing black elastics. He wanted to tug it loose and bury his face in it.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked instead.

  “You? Or you and your phone?”

  After he’d taken out his phone yesterday, she’d refused to talk to him. He’d been unable to draw her out, unable to get her to so much as shrug her acknowledgement.

  “Me.”

  “Sure. Right.”

  She was very angry. He deserved her anger, but he hated being the object of it. The way she had softened toward him yesterday—he had felt hopeful. A lightening of a darkness he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying with him. For the first time since he’d boarded the plane to New York, he’d believed his grand gesture might work after all. Then he’d checked his phone. And the shutters had closed, the gates banged down.

  “I’m not going to talk on the phone.”

  “Are you going to check your voice mail? Your email? Your texts? Twitter?”

  He shook his head.

  “What if it’s an ‘emergency’?” Her voice was laced with sarcasm.

  “Even then.”

  “I think this is the part where I’m supposed to feel grateful.”

  He kept being surprised by these gusts of anger. He’d been such an idiot to think that flying across the country would be enough to win her back. After what he’d done. After what he hadn’t done.

  “Sit.”

  Startled, he looked down at her. The hard lines around her mouth had softened just a little. He had always loved to kiss those lines. He had loved being able to distract her from the thing that made her angry.

  Now he was that thing.

  “Just sit,” she repeated. “You can’t hang out in the aisle forever.”

  He noticed she didn’t shrink into the corner as she had yesterday morning. You could consider that progress, even if she was staring straight ahead, refusing to meet his eyes.

  “How’s the job?” he asked her. “Still enjoying stealing from the rich and giving to the poor?”

  She looked startled, like she hadn’t expected him to remember. “It’s good. I love being a director. I feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report with the fancy computer, fingers on everything, moving all the pieces around, seeing things come together.”

  The job was the reason he was here, stalking her commute. She’d been doing financial aid at the University of Washington, going along perfectly happily, until someone at NYU had gotten the bright idea to recruit her. Then he’d pulled his medieval act, and here they were.

  “The food is great. A catering company does lunch every day.”

  “Intensifying the impression that you’re the Prince of Thieves?”

  She didn’t quite smile, but the corner of her mouth quirked. “Yesterday it was sloppy joes. On the softest egg rolls I’ve ever eaten.” She bounced a little on her seat, something she did when she was excited about a song on the radio or chewy chocolate chip cookies. A habit of hers he had always loved, because it was like watching her enthusiasm burst out at the seams. That big Amy life force, the vibrant, buoyant essence of her. Of course she would love what she was doing. It was who she was. You could plant her anywhere and she would thrive, leaf and flower and, before long, grow roots.

  Roots that would keep her from coming back to him. The thought made him queasy.

  “How’s…” she appeared to be struggling for a topic to keep the conversation going, “…your sister?”

  “Good,” he said. “Jake’s nine months. So cute. Not walking yet. Going back to work was stressful for her, but I think she’s pretty happy with her balance now.”

  They were talking. It was so much better than the fighting had been.

  “How are Sasha and Porter?”

  Porter was his partner in Streamline, and Sasha his girlfriend. The couple were their closest friends. Before Amy had left, they’d had sushi with them almost every single Friday.

  He hesitated. This was trickier territory. Porter had bought an engagement ring and started talking about popping the question.

  “That bad?”

  Because she was staring straight ahead as she spoke to him, he had an opportunity to drink in her beauty. The sleekness of her hair, her noble forehead and regal nose, and the surprising sensuality of her mouth, which seemed out of place with the aristocratic rest of her. Watching her made him antsy and aroused, his lips and tongue craving the softness of hers, his fingers recalling the silkiness of her hair and the satin feel of her skin under his hands. “No. No. Things are good. They might get married.”

  A little hitch, as if in the regular forward motion of time, and then she laughed bitterly. “Good for them.”

  They sat without speaking, the disturbance of Sasha and Porter’s success in the face of their own failure heavy in the air. The two couples had gotten together around the same time, and Sasha and Amy had commiserated about their boyfriends’ preoccupation with Streamline’s needs.

  The train chimed and slowed to a stop in Hawthorne. Amy tapped the window. “There’s a good diner here. Sometimes when I’m too hungry to make it all the way home, I stop.”

  “I haven’t eaten anything except breakfast cereal, eggs and takeout since you left.”

  “So you do miss me.”

  Time stopped.

  Her face got pink, streaks of color on her cheekbones. She hadn’t meant to say it, he could see. “Only at breakfast,” he said lightly. “Otherwise, nah. The apartment’s a lot cleaner without you in it. Well—a lot less cluttered, anyway.”

  She smiled. That pleased her.

  What he hadn’t said was that the apartment was also a lot more bare. She had taken away the scarves and posters and cushions, the vases and tchotchkes whose names he didn’t know. Once, he had made fun of her for those things, even as he’d secretly admired the way she could take those disparate objects, those unrelated bits of girlish fluff, and turn a series of blank white boxes into rooms with personalities. Now—

  He missed it, the way the rooms breathed paisley or floral or slightly fringed, this one almost a Renaissance feel, this one firmly Pottery Barn circa 2002. All Amy.

  He sought, again, the lighthearted tone he’d been trying for. “I open the mail every day instead of once every three weeks.”

  “I opened it more than once every three weeks!”

  “Are you sure about that?” he teased. “I remember some pretty big stacks. I distinctly remember not being able to find at least one of the kitchen counters. For quite some time. It’s a good thing neither of us actually cooked.”

  She grinned, guilty as charged. “Yeah. And also that no one ever needed to get in touch with us.”

  “But think of all the Publishers Clearing House lotteries we won and missed out on.”

  “We could have been rich,” she said, in a mock-dreamy voice.

  “Yeah. I’ve been getting rich since you left. But on the downside, it’s possible the toilets haven’t been cleaned in six months.”

  “Eew!”

  “And I’m pretty sure you could do an archeological dig through the dust.”

  They were both laughing, leaning toward each other, all the anger gone.

  “Amy.”

  “What.” A statement, not a question.

  “I miss you. Nothing’s the same without you. The apartment feels big. I don’t feel like going to any of our old haunts. Nothing’s right.”

  He heard her exhale, a cross between a sigh and a sob. “Don’t do this.”

  “Amy, please. Listen. I was an idiot. I was wrong. I need you to forgive me.”
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  She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You keep saying that. Is it because of your dad?”

  She glared. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You never talk about him.”

  “Because he’s not worth wasting the breath on.”

  “So is that why you ran away?”

  “I ran away,” she said through gritted teeth, “because you were an asshole.”

  He held up a hand. “Okay. I’m sorry. Yes. I was an asshole. We both agree on that. But—your dad, he was an asshole too, right? The original asshole?”

  She smiled a little. “Yes. The original asshole.”

  “The asshole against whom all other assholes are measured?”

  Now she was definitely smiling. “You gave him a good run for his money.”

  “I did. But—” He took a deep breath. “I’m really sorry.” And then he blurted out, “Why did you leave?”

  She turned and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  “No, I mean, I know what I did was obnoxious. But why didn’t you just yell at me? Why did you leave and go all the way across the country?”

  “You were a fascist, Jeff. You acted like it was a crime against nature for me to suggest that my career might compete with yours in importance.”

  She was angry again, that tight, hard sound in her voice. The anger poured off her in waves, as if her muscles were tensed so tight they were giving off a particular UV heat spectrum.

  They’d been doing so well. He should have kept going with the niceties. But God help him, he wanted to have a real conversation with her. He wanted to know what she was thinking and what she was feeling. He wanted to crack her open and suck out all the sweetness. Or all the venom, if that’s what it would take. He could do that.

  “So you should have said, ‘You’re a fascist, Jeff.’ You should have yelled at me. Not packed up and moved out and gotten on a plane.” And there it was, plain as day—his anger. Anger he’d suspected was buried in there somewhere, but that caught him off guard anyway, the heat and depth of it.