“She’s disappeared before our very eyes.”
“Till tomorrow, dude. She can’t have lost that much weight.”
Jared called Bo, who hadn’t spoken to Larissa since the week before.
Evelyn finally picked up. “I’m bathing all five kids at once, Jared,” she said. “I can’t leave them for long. What’s up?” She hadn’t heard from Larissa since her birthday dinner the month before. This surprised Jared. Larissa always made an effort to keep in touch with Evelyn, her college friend.
Six o’clock became seven.
The kids were hungry. Jared ordered pizza from Nina’s, then sat in the kitchen with them while they ate. For some reason he didn’t feel like eating. Finally he went upstairs to get changed, put on shorts, a T-shirt; he opened the bathroom, he opened her closet. Everything was neat, orderly, put away. On the bed were seven of his white shirts, still in sheaths of dry cleaner plastic; according to the ticket, picked up for him by her just this morning. The house was quiet. He looked inside Larissa’s closet again. Peculiarly, he looked inside her jewelry box. What was he looking for? She had many beautiful things. He ambled around the bedroom. Bed was made, patted down, hospital-cornered; clothes were in the closet; shoes in their boxes; books on the shelves. Diamond earrings he gave her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, which she loved and never went anywhere special without. Everything was in its place.
Everything except Larissa.
How small of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Samuel Johnson
Chapter One
One sunny afternoon, on the dot of 12:45, from west to the east, after all the leaves had gone and the ground was frozen, into the concrete well of the Summit train station a shiny, stainless, steel-and-blue locomotive rolled in, the doors opened, and a smatter of people alighted.
Train tracks run through Summit, wind through it like the everflowing Passaic River. The station itself is brick and mortar, well kept, maintained by well-to-do people in a well-to-do town. You buy your ticket in a little office with white sash windows and red flowers on the sills, where a woman who wanted to retire ten years ago glares at you from behind the glass and her glasses as she sullenly sells you a one-way to Venice or a round trip to visit your lonely mother in Piermont.
To get to the train, you have to walk down forty concrete steps to the embankment where the train arrives and swishes open its doors for a few minutes. Neither the train nor the tracks can be seen from the road. Clearly this was the intent of the designers. Perhaps so that traffic wouldn’t crawl to a stop in a town of twenty thousand people every twenty minutes. But another reason could be that the train tracks, unlike a river, were not deemed by the architects and engineers to be aesthetically pleasing enough and were deliberately hidden below the cobblestoned street, remaining invisible to the town except for a small white-and-black RR sign on Maple Street, pointing that way. You could live your whole life in Summit, New Jersey, and not ever know your town had a train station that took people away—and brought people in.
And yet it did bring people in, every day, and this day also.
Today it discharged a friendly woman with a baby carriage, two bags and a small girl; an older woman with a wheeled suitcase whose gray unsmiling husband was tensely waiting for her on the platform, as if distressed by her arrival; a young man with a ratty duffel bag, a leather jacket, a baseball cap.
The young man strolled out clacking the pavement with the metal heels of his black riding boots, looked around, squinted, pulled down his sunglasses and whistled for the conductor to open the oversize hold compartment, from which he rolled out a motorcycle.
“Some bike you got there,” the conductor said, sliding closed the doors. “Like a stallion. But why’d you store it when you could’ve ridden it cross country?”
“Bike’d be stolen in five seconds.” The young man grinned. “And I’d be robbed and killed.” He had a crooked smile, frizzy hair, stubble.
“Robbed for what?” the conductor muttered. “After they took your bike, what would they want with you?”
“They’d have to kill me to separate me from the bike.”
“Ah.” The conductor shrugged. “But I thought you was headed to Maplewood?”
“I am. This isn’t it?”
“No. It’s Summit. D’you hear me calling it out?”
“Nah. I was sleeping. Damn.” He smiled unperturbed. “How far to Maplewood?”
“Six miles. You wanna get back on?”
The young man shook his head.
“Or two minutes on that thing if you’re going fast.” The conductor enviously tipped his cap. “All aboard!” The train slowly pulled away.
The biker was left standing on the platform, breathing in the freezing air, one hand steadying his bike, duffel between his legs. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He decided to drive around town for a few minutes, get a bite to eat, relax, and then head to Maplewood. It would’ve been better had he come in the spring, like he’d planned. Still. Fates, all kneel before ye.
He got his bike up to the street on an elevator. After driving around the sleepy subdued Summit and not finding any place he wanted to stop, he looked instead for a street where he could ride the bike a bit. It was real cold, too cold for him in the long term, but he was so happy to be out and about. He wanted a sandwich. On Route 124, he raced up to seventy for a few brief seconds before the light turned red, already out of Summit and in another bare-treed town. “WELCOME TO MADISON.” He saw a large supermarket, an empty parking lot. “Grand Opening,” the sign read, “Drive-through Pharmacy, Starbucks, Fresh Sushi Daily.” That’s the ticket, the young man thought. A box of raw tuna won’t be as good as Maui tuna, but still, a box, maybe two, five minutes in the saddle under the sun in the empty lot. He’d been on the trains too long. He needed air.
We are never alone for a moment. We are deceived into loneliness, into solitude, by our pride, by our pretensions. And yet all Che wanted was a child of her own. To never be alone again. She wanted to be renewed by child-birth, and yet it looked like that was never going to happen. Forget the clock. The boyfriend was the problem.
On the outskirts of south Manila, through the wildly populated isthmus between two warm-water bays, on the edge of a rice field in Parañaque, near Moonwalk, in a thatched hut amid a thousand other thatched huts, at the end of a long afternoon when the palm trees were still dripping from the monsoon that had drenched the huts and the mud roads and made going out difficult, near a window and a mirror, a petite Filipino woman sat at a desk dressed in hiking boots, army fatigues, a pink scarf, red lips, tattoos, ebony hair spiked up and streaked white, cigarette dangling, ash falling, and scribbled a letter.