The Arsonist (43 page)

A
BOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES
outside New Haven, the train stopped.

“Oh,
God
,” Frankie’s seatmate said in a weary tone, as though this were all too familiar, or somehow a personal insult.

They sat for ten minutes or so, and slowly, throughout the car, people began to talk, to ask one another questions.
What was it? What could it be? What the hell? What time was the connection to New York again? To Boston? Jesus Christ! Well, here we go again
.

The conductor came into the car. He was perhaps in his forties, slightly overweight and genial-looking. He was in shirtsleeves. His uniform pants were shiny. He stood at the front of the car and loudly announced that the train coming into New Haven ahead of them had lost power somehow. They would have to wait here until someone figured out how to repair it or until they brought a new engine out for it. Frankie heard a woman behind her cry out softly, “Oh, no!”

He’d keep them informed, the conductor said.

As he passed through the car, people had questions. He raised his hands as if to ward them all off; he kept walking and saying loudly, “That’s all I know, folks. I’ve told you all I know.”

He went into the next car, and Frankie could hear his braying voice conveying the same news there; and then the same answering hubbub of questions and conversation.

In her car a number of people began calling on cell phones; you could hear them scattered among the seats, most of their voices pitched louder than the conversations between people that had also begun. Those on the phones were explaining over and over, all of them in almost exactly the same terms, that the train was delayed, that it wasn’t clear they’d
make the connection in New Haven to Boston or New York or Washington or wherever it was they were headed. Frankie had a friend in Africa with a parrot who was good at imitating the telephone sounds of one-sided conversations, and she thought of the parrot now—Helen was her name—saying “Un-
hunh
, un-
hunh
, un-
hunh
, okay, okay, okay, okay, yeah. Un-
hunh
, okay, okay, okay,
bye! Bye!
Bye! Bye! Okay, okay. Bye.”

But behind her she could hear a woman saying something else, something real. Saying, “Please, if you get this message, wait. Don’t go.” Her voice was urgent, passionate, and Frankie was drawn by it, she strained to listen in spite of herself. “The train is late, but I’m coming, and we have to talk. We have to work this out. Please, please, stay. I
am
coming. I’ll tell you as soon as I know when I’ll get there. I love you. It’s crazy to let go of that. I love you. I’m coming, even if I’m late. Please, please, wait.”

A little while later, when Frankie got up to stretch, to walk to the café car, she glanced at this woman. She was in her twenties and pretty in an understated way. Willowy. She looked like a ballet dancer—the long neck, the long hair pulled back severely in a low ponytail. She had a high rounded forehead, which was tilted against the window, outside of which were shrubs, trees, their colors at their wildest now, these weeks after fall had come to the woods and fields in Pomeroy.

The woman wasn’t looking at any of this. Her eyes were unfocused and tragic. Her face, worried. Her hand rested in her lap, turned up helplessly, the phone lying in it.

In the café car, Frankie ordered tea and stood sipping it at the little Formica counter there, looking out at the graffiti on the cracked concrete wall that ran along one side of the tracks.
Suck my dick. Ronnie L is mine forever, Antwan Visroy King
. There were a couple of stylized wild designs sprayed on the wall, too, what she thought she remembered were called tags. She liked them, their cartoonish quality, their mysteriousness.

Other people came in and out of the car, some to get food to carry back to their seats in little cardboard trays, some to linger, to talk. One or two people asked her about her destination, her timing, and she answered politely, but not in a way that encouraged the conversation to continue. Others, though, seemed eager to share information on where they had to be, and why, and when. On whether they thought they’d make it. There
were four or five people talking together in the car at one point, while Frankie, turned away to look out the window, listened. Some of them were resigned, even amused. Others were furious. One man kept saying, “
Fucking
Amtrak,” to whomever he was talking to. He was handsome, his hair smoothed darkly to his head. He was wearing what she took to be expensive clothing.

As she sipped her tea and felt the minutes go by, it did seem increasingly unlikely that she’d make her connection. But what she remembered from calling in to ask about the schedule was that the trains to New York from New Haven seemed to leave almost every half hour, so there would be other options coming up. She’d be okay if she could make a connection by two-thirty or three. And if Diann could rearrange her schedule.

But two-thirty might be the last feasible connection, because that would get in around four. Much later than that, and she’d have trouble getting to the office before it closed.

While she was standing there, the conductor came into the café car and announced that they were going to have to wait for parts for the engine, which were coming just now out of New York. It would likely be an hour or more before these parts got to the disabled engine, and then it would take a while longer to do the repair.

The angry handsome man began to argue with the conductor. He wanted to get off the train. He pointed out that they were in a town. “There are bound to be cab stands or cars to rent, and they’re
right over there
!” His finger jabbed the air in the direction of the window. Why couldn’t the conductor just open the fucking doors and let him out? Him and others, he was sure. They could just hike across the tracks, the man said. If he asked around, probably half the people in each car would rather get out and find their way to New York on their own, forget taking
fucking Amtrak
.

The conductor, who seemed amused rather than alarmed, started to answer several times, mentioning insurance, mentioning the long drop to the tracks, but the guy had wound himself up too tight to listen.

“Why not?” he interrupted. “Why the fuck not?
Look
where we’re sitting, like stupid assholes waiting for some … rescue by a group of incompetents. All you need to do is open the fucking door …”

As he went on, Frankie picked up her empty cup and her napkin and threw them away. She left the car. She passed through the two coaches in front of the café car and entered her own. Before she took her seat, she looked again at the woman behind her. She was in almost the same position, her face a mask of sorrow.

Frankie sat down. After a few minutes had passed, she reached across the aisle and touched the sleeve of the man seated there. She asked if she could borrow his phone. He showed her how to place the call, and she got through to Diann.

Who was so gracious as to seem almost relieved, Frankie thought. “Okay,” she said when Frankie had explained to her what was happening. “Well, just call if you’re able to get here by, say, four. Four-thirty is probably too late to really have enough time. Actually, four might be. But no,” she said. “No, come. Come. Even if it is four when you get here, come.”

When Frankie got off the phone, the woman behind her was talking again. Very softly—she must be turned to the window, Frankie thought, but she didn’t look around to see. The words, the ones Frankie caught, were much the same. Please. She was coming. She didn’t know when. He had to wait. He had to. Because she loved him. She still did. It was her fault. They could work it out. Please.

The man seated next to Frankie caught her glance and rolled his eyes. Frankie smiled and turned away.

When the conductor came through again, at almost noon, Frankie stopped him to ask about the schedule. He asked when her connection was. She said 12:11. “We won’t make that,” he said, shaking his head.

“No
kid
ding,” Frankie’s seatmate said.

The conductor got a schedule out of his pocket and unfolded it. Tracing the columns of figures with his fingers, he said that the next train out of New Haven for New York was at 1:18, which would get her in at 2:45. There was another leaving at 1:45, and then at 2:18.

“What time does that one get in?”

“Three forty-five. Then there’s one at three-eighteen that gets in at four forty-five, and one at four …”

“That’s okay,” she said. “If I’m later than that, it doesn’t work anyway. Thanks,” she said.

“Thanks for nothing,” the man next to her said, when the conductor had moved on.

But Frankie was listening to the woman behind her, who’d asked the conductor to go over the schedule once more, with her. Then she got on the phone again. She said she was hoping she’d be there at 2:45. She’d call again if that changed. If he got this message, could he just stay? Could he wait? And maybe—she knew it was a lot to ask, given what she’d done—could he call her back?

By now it was harder to hear her, conversation in the car had gotten so general. There were people standing in the aisles talking, as well as the seatmates who’d fallen into deep, friendly conversations, full of personal histories, full of coincidences being remarked on. And, of course, there were people steadily on their phones. Most people in this situation apparently wanted—needed—to talk to someone else.

But Frankie was listening for the woman, and thinking about her. How could it be that so much was riding on this one meeting? Why couldn’t she reach him later if they missed connections? Was he joining the army? Marrying someone else? It was hard to imagine that the timing could be so important.

But maybe the woman just liked the drama of it. She remembered Bud—Bud!—in one of their long conversations in bed, talking about Beverly, his second wife, about how she had to keep things constantly stirred up, how, without the drama of that, she seemed to collapse in on some deep fundamental sadness in herself. He had said then, “That’s why I like you, Frankie.” He was sitting propped up, pillows behind him. The sun made a bright square on the quilt they’d pulled up to their waists. “You just don’t go there. You don’t look for the theater in life.” He had pronounced it “theah-tah.”

But maybe that was a weakness, she thought now. One of her many weaknesses. Because surely the
theah-tah
was part of life. The dramatic, real sorrow of the girl—the woman—behind her. The willingness to feel that, to want someone else to know you felt it.

“You’re being awfully decent about all this,” Philip had said to her near the end, after he’d told her he was leaving, this time for good.

“What choice do I have?” she’d said.

And he’d laughed, ruefully. “None, I expect.”

But she
had
had a choice, she was thinking now. She could have behaved like the woman behind her. She could have wept and insisted. She could have said,
Please. Please
.

If she had wanted Philip as much as this woman wanted the man she kept calling.

And for all the good it would have done.

But maybe that wasn’t even the point. Maybe the point was you said what you felt, you tried for what you wanted. Maybe the point was that Frankie had taught herself how not to do that, from early on. Maybe some dynamic between her mother and herself had made her believe that’s what she had to do—teach herself that. Maybe even her work had been part of the discipline she seemed to have embraced—a kind of daily instruction in the insolubility of human problems, in the unremediability of human suffering.

Did she believe that, as Philip said he did? She didn’t know.

She didn’t know how she had ended up here.

She looked out the window. Just beyond the trees you could see the backyard of a suburban house, a worn swing set between it and the bushes at the edge of the property. No one had used the swing set for a long time. The chain on one side of one of the swings had broken, and the swing dangled vertically, moving a little every now and then in the breeze. It seemed to Frankie, suddenly, nearly tragic in its expression of desolation, of human loss. She looked away, down the aisle of the car.

Her seatmate had gotten up a little bit earlier, and now he was halfway down the car, deep in conversation with a group of three men, one of whom was seated, looking up at the others. Their faces were animated. They were enjoying their catastrophe. Frankie had a sense, suddenly, familiar and yet new, of her aloneness.

It had to do with the suspension she felt—in time, in place: the no-where-ness of being stuck here. The sense of others around her finding a way to be comfortable with it or else struggling hard against it.

While to her it felt like a sad confirmation of sorts—
You are nowhere, you belong nowhere. There is nowhere you’re going, nowhere you’re coming from
.

“You have too many choices,” her mother had said.

Over to you, Frankie
.

She saw the handsome man from the café car come in. She watched him as he spoke to several people, as he slowly drew a small group around him. He was talking intently, gesturing out the window. His plan, no doubt. She could hear the odd phrase.
Outta here. Fucking Amtrak
.

There was an argument, from her seat she could hear one of the men say, “Aw, Jesus, come
on
.” There was laughter, too. But there was also clearly some assent. After a few minutes, the man came up the aisle toward Frankie, followed by a few others—to find the conductor, probably, to talk to him again. They left the car.

It was a little before one when the conductor came back in. He announced loudly as he walked through the car that the train with the repair crew was just arriving in New Haven. That no one knew yet how long it would be, but he would let them know, “the
minute
that I do.”

The man in the seat in front of Frankie stopped him with a raised hand and said, “So we won’t make the one-eighteen train to New York.”