deaf with traffic, blinded by glass. Exhaust settled into my skin. Pedestrians brushed past too close and their shirtsleeves nipped me like mosquitoes. The scissors switch of businessmen’s slacks, the chalkboard squeal of a police siren, some sort of subterranean moan: all sounded to me like blood rushing through my ears. Blood, yes, it is important, Claire, and this is mine, all around me.
Janelle and Thaddeus were the type of parents who hugged kids, any kids, whenever the opportunity arose. Their hugs hurt. When they’d had their fill, I turned to Boris and shrugged, and he gave me a hug, too, but just for posterity. What mattered was the handshake. His hand, frailer and bonier than even my own, clamped hard and shook with reckless assurance, and I experienced a surprising certainty that we would never see each other again. He would recede into the human morass of the train station, then the tangled skein of the city. Then it happened: they walked away and up an escalator. Alone for the first time since I had stood above my mother’s open casket, I thought again of the spider that had watched her from the funeral home ceiling. I imagined it swinging down on gossamer and catching a lucky breeze. I saw it dancing over her folded hands, racing past her necklace, and defying gravity to scale her upturned chin before disappearing inside her, where it would live out its life. We were all disappearing: the spider, my mother, Boris, me. The wind whips, even down here in the cellar of the city, and we swing from our invisible strings. The strings break and we land, and where we land is called home.
4.
EACH TOWN DWINDLED. FIRST, city suburbs with clean parks molded carefully from surrounding concrete. Then other towns, smaller, but with train stations painted a reassuring summer-camp yellow. Rust was next, abandoned tractors, followed by shirtless children who didn’t look up at the train. Finally, spoil: ancient barns swallowing themselves, paved roads crumbled, a bald man on a seatless bike listening to the radio duct-taped to his handlebars. Never in my life had there been no tall buildings to impede the view; the silos made but weak notches in the infinite blue. I peeled my neck from the brown vinyl of my coach seat and let the quaking train rattle me down the narrow steps toward the exit as one might shake a glass to settle a tower of ice.
The train stopped at Bloughton for no more than five seconds. The attendant nearly pushed me out the door. On solid ground again, I swayed beneath the pressure of multiple shoulder straps and felt the square shape of my trumpet case knock against my knee. The station appeared deserted. On one side of the tracks was a small park, mostly barren of trees and rubbed to the dirt. The remains of a swing set sprouted against the late-day sun like the claws of a demolished building. A squirrel nosed at an overturned trash can, flinching each time the breeze snapped the inserted Hefty. On the other side of the tracks, an electrical cage and, beyond that, a light blue trailer home with a sunflower pinwheel spinning implausibly fast. Nothing else in this town, I was certain, moved with such speed.
With each gravel crunch beneath my shoes, I expected him. Ten paces away, nine, eight. He would step from the interior of the one-room train station, the roof’s shadow slipping away like a robe lifted from above. Seven paces, six. He would not look like I expected; I expected that. Five paces, four. There would be shyness, possibly faked camaraderie. Three paces, two. Almost certainly a handshake, though I was willing to accept a hug.
My last step hit cement and then I was inside the station. Two empty wooden benches contemplated each other. There was a snack machine with a yellowed OUT OF ORDER sign applied over the coin slot with masking tape. I turned toward the drone of an electric fan and crossed the room to the ticket window. There was an old man inside and I knocked on the glass. He looked up from his book of word jumbles. He wore thick glasses and had a bandage on his forehead.
“You Joey?” he said.
My heart skipped. I felt myself nod.
“Got something for you,” he said. He set down his book, his eyes lingering on the puzzle for several seconds more, and then retrieved a piece of paper and pushed it through