The Commute
Every weekday at seven forty, the subway pulled into a station whose street entrance had collapsed eleven years earlier. Its doors opened beside a platform littered with broken tile and remained open for forty seconds. Then they closed, and the subway continued downtown with its lights on and nobody in the seats.
People used its arrival to set their watches. The woman who sold boiled water near the surviving stairwell began filling her cups when she heard it, and the men reinforcing the ceiling took their first break after it left. Children were warned away from the doors, although most lost interest once they understood that the subway did the same thing every morning. On Saturdays and Sundays, the empty tracks seemed no more remarkable than they had before.
Paul boarded on a Thursday, six days after he buried his wife.
He had not planned to go anywhere. He was carrying two water bottles and a sack of metal fittings he hoped to trade for flour. His daughter had stayed at their shelter to mend a split in the stovepipe. Before he left, she asked him to find wire if he could, and he promised he would be back by noon.
When the subway arrived, he could see the seat he used to take. It was halfway down the second car, beside the window. The molded blue plastic had the same scuff marks he remembered, and a folded newspaper lay on the seat opposite. He stepped inside to look at the date. By the time he thought to put a foot between the doors, they had closed.
For the first few minutes he stood with his bottles hanging from one hand. The subway passed through the tunnel and climbed onto the elevated tracks beyond the river. He expected to see the burned shopping center, but the windows filled with parked cars and the back wall of a grocery store. A delivery driver was pulling a hand truck toward an open loading dock.
Paul sat down without deciding to. He watched backyards pass, then apartment buildings with laundry hanging from their balconies. At the next station a man waited beneath an advertisement for car insurance, looking at his phone. Nobody boarded, and Paul could not make himself get up before the doors closed again.
His office was six stops farther on. He knew the walk from the station well enough to make it while looking almost entirely at the sidewalk. Outside the building, someone had replaced the cracked planter beside the revolving door. He remembered complaining about it, although he could not remember to whom.
The receptionist looked up and smiled. “Paul, it’s good to see you. They said you might be coming in.”
He tried to ask who had said that, but she was already reaching beneath the desk for a temporary badge. His photograph was clipped to its plastic sleeve. He accepted it and crossed to the elevators, holding his sack of fittings close to his leg so it would not scrape the polished wall.
On the fourth floor, his manager came out of a conference room and shook his hand. Colin had put on weight, or perhaps Paul had forgotten how people looked when they ate every day. He seemed sincerely pleased, though careful not to make too much of the occasion.
“We’ll ease you back in,” Colin said. “Your desk is where it was. Get settled and I’ll bring you up to speed.”
Paul looked past him at the rows of monitors. “How long have I been away?”
“Eleven years, according to the system. I know it must feel longer.” Colin touched his shoulder before turning toward the break room. “You still take cream, right?”
His desk stood beside the windows, with a gray sweater hanging from the chair. There was a photograph of his wife and daughter beside the monitor. Hannah was seven in it, wearing a paper crown from a restaurant. Her mother had one arm around her and was laughing at something outside the frame.
Paul put the water bottles beneath the desk. His hands looked wrong against the keyboard, the nails thick and broken, a strip of dirty cloth wrapped around his thumb. He had cut it while digging through rubble for stones to place over his wife’s grave.
When Colin brought his coffee, Paul asked him what had happened outside.
Colin glanced toward the windows. “They’re still working on the intersection. Traffic’s been a mess for months.”
“I mean the fires. Everything that happened afterward.”
His manager pulled over a chair. He listened while Paul described the shelters and the water lines, nodding occasionally without interrupting. Paul left out his wife’s burial because he could see her photograph beside Colin’s elbow and did not want him looking at it.
“That sounds exhausting,” Colin said when he finished. “You don’t have to explain your absence to me. We’ve kept you down as out sick, and your job is still yours.”
On his monitor, the attendance calendar opened to a succession of pale green squares. Paul scrolled through month after month. Every weekday bore the same designation, with holidays left blank. He stopped when he reached the week his wife had died, although he was no longer certain he had the date right.
The coffee was hot enough to hurt his teeth. Someone brought him a toasted bagel, and he ate it while a woman from accounting explained a change to the purchasing system. He recognized her voice before he remembered her name. She seemed older, which reassured him for reasons he could not quite explain.
By ten thirty he had approved three invoices and corrected a supplier address. The work required very little thought, and it was pleasant to finish something without discovering another problem underneath it. He washed his hands in a restroom with hot water, then washed them again because there was still dirt around his nails. When he returned to his desk, the cloth around his thumb looked unnecessarily dirty, so he took it off.
There was no cut beneath it. He stood examining his hand until someone asked whether he needed help with the printer. Paul said he was all right and sat down. The photograph beside his monitor had slipped sideways. He straightened it, smiling at Hannah’s crown, and remembered that she was expecting him home.
For a moment he could not think why that mattered before the end of the workday. Then he saw the stovepipe as clearly as if it were lying across his desk, its rusted seam open beneath her fingers. Hannah was eighteen now. She wore her mother’s boots with cloth stuffed into the toes, and there was a pale scar through one eyebrow where a roofing nail had caught her.
He reached beneath the desk for his sack. The fittings were gone, replaced by a lunch box and the folded newspaper from the subway. Paul got up and walked toward the elevators. Colin caught him near the break room and asked whether he had eaten.
“My daughter is waiting for me,” Paul said.
“Of course she is. You can call her from here.” Colin led him to an empty conference room and placed a telephone in front of him. Paul knew his old home number without having to think. He dialed it and listened to three rings before his wife answered.
“Hey, honey. How’s your first day going?”
He gripped the receiver so tightly that his thumb ached. He had forgotten the ordinary sound of her voice, the slight distraction of speaking while doing something else. In the background, a cabinet closed.
“I buried you,” he said. “I couldn’t get you warm, and then you stopped breathing.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You’ve had a terrible time. Come home tonight and we’ll talk about it.”
He asked to speak to Hannah. His wife called her name, and he heard the quick footsteps of a child running across the kitchen. When his daughter came on the line, her voice was high and impatient.
“Dad, can you bring those pens from your office? Mom says you have to ask first.”
He almost agreed. He could picture the package in the supply closet and the pleasure of giving it to her over dinner. Then he looked down at his hand and tried to remember what the other Hannah had asked him to bring. He knew there had been something besides flour, something needed for a repair.
“I have to go,” he told the child, and hung up before she answered.
Outside the conference room, the office had grown busier. People were discussing lunch orders. A printer was producing a report someone would have to read. Paul recognized nearly everyone and found himself wanting to stop at their desks, to learn who had married and who had moved away. He could scarcely remember the route back to the station.
Colin followed him to his desk. “You don’t have to take on everything today. There’s no reason to rush.”
Paul picked up the family photograph. He remembered Hannah at seven, asleep against his shoulder on a bus. The memory of her carrying stones to her mother’s grave was harder to hold. He turned the frame over and wrote on its cardboard back with a pen from his drawer.
Hannah is eighteen. She is waiting at the pump station. She needs wire.
He read it twice before showing Colin. “There’s a child in that house,” Paul said. “I don’t know who she is. My daughter is still outside.”
His manager studied the writing. “You were very sick for a long time. It might be better to let someone help you decide what’s real.”
Paul looked toward the windows. The traffic below moved through a green light, and a cyclist raised one hand to thank a driver. He had wanted so badly to see people doing ordinary things again. He put the photograph in his coat, took a coil of wire from the supply closet, and walked to the stairs because he no longer trusted himself to wait for an elevator.
At each landing he read the back of the frame. By the lobby, the pump station seemed like somewhere he had visited in a dream. He kept his thumb over Hannah’s face so he would not look at the photograph.
Cold air struck him as he pushed through the outer door. The sidewalk was broken, and the office windows above him were black. He bent beside the empty planter and vomited until there was nothing left of the bagel. When he could stand, he found the wire still in his hand.
It took him most of the afternoon to walk back. Hannah met him beyond the station carrying a length of pipe, angry enough that she began shouting before she reached him. He let her finish, then showed her the wire and tried to explain where he had been.
She listened while they walked. At the shelter, she held the photograph by its edges and studied her mother’s face. Paul had expected her to ask whether they could go back together, and he had been trying to prepare an answer, but she only asked if she could keep it. He helped her fasten it above her bed, then held the stovepipe steady while she wound the wire around its split seam.