“Shit,” Carmen muttered. She would have felt guilty about cursing near children, but they were the ones who should have felt guilty. “Shit,” she said again. Her mind raced for possible solutions. Whom could she whine to? Whom could she bribe? Whom could she charm?
No one. She was down to zeroes and ones, and they really didn’t care about her. She loved her phone, but her phone did not love her back.
She thought of Tibby with a feeling of pique. Some gift this was. And then she felt horrified. How could she be irritated at Tibby, who was dead?
She realized she was sweating. Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t call anyone! She couldn’t text anyone! She couldn’t read the script! She needed desperately to call Jones and tell him she couldn’t call him.
She looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the darkness, at the billows of dark steamy pollution, at the grim lights of industrial New Jersey or Delaware or wherever she was. She couldn’t spend thirty-two more hours on this train with no one to talk to and nothing to do. She couldn’t.
You can’t kill yourself over a phone, a sane voice in her head pointed out. Oh, yes, you can, a less sane voice answered.
She laid her head back on her pillow and tried to breathe deeply. She tried to steady her heart. Every little trick she had for self-comfort hit a wall. Call her mother? No. Check the weather? No. Update her Facebook status? No. Google her rivals? No. Find her horoscope? No.
Like a drug addict, she felt the itches and the tremors that made her want to claw her own skin. Like a drug addict, she found herself grasping at any fix no matter how self-destructive: she could get off in Baltimore and buy a new phone—who cared if she missed her meeting! She could offer a thousand dollars to anyone on the train who would sell her theirs! Better, she could steal one! Who cared that it wouldn’t have her mail or her contacts? Who cared that the only numbers she knew by heart were Lena’s, Bee’s, and Tibby’s?
Like a drug addict, Carmen felt waves of nausea and despair throughout the night. She might have seen hallucinations of spiders, she wasn’t sure.
At some point in her misery, she realized that the baby had gone quiet and the mother still hadn’t come back.
Not knowing
when the dawn will come
I open every door.
—Emily Dickinson
Throughout the early morning Carmen got several cups of coffee from the dinette. She flipped through the awful train magazine.
She spent a little time talking to Coach Attendant Kevin, who was from a town called Goose Creek, just west of Charleston, but had not heard of the street where her father lived.
Carmen went back to the dinette and got some walnuts in a bag. She begged the lady behind the counter, Inez, for reading material, but Inez had nothing. She had a pack of cards. Finally, Inez rooted through her own bag and handed Carmen the very issue of People magazine that Carmen had spent a full ninety minutes reading on the way to the airport.
Carmen trudged back to her seat. She had never in her adult life gone this long without checking her email, Facebook, or Twitter or making a call.
What had people done before they had phones? It was a serious question. She needed to know. What had she herself done, before she had a phone? She remembered the long car rides to Bethany Beach or the really long car rides to Fort Myers, Florida, to see her great-aunt and great-uncle. What had she done? She hadn’t read—not even magazines. It made her carsick.
Carmen knew what she’d done. It seemed hard to fathom right now, but she did know. The younger, phone-free Carmen had looked out the window and thought about things.
Carmen wondered about that. She was too tired to be huffy and indignant any longer, so she wondered about it honestly. Did she even have thoughts anymore?
She looked out the window. She tried to think of where in the world she was. She thought she’d heard the conductor announce a stop in North Carolina not too long ago. She observed how the trees were getting fuzzier and greener as they went. In New York, the trees were still mostly gaunt and bare, but here, they were budding and blossoming like mad. As the train rumbled south they plunged into spring, passing through whole weeks in a matter of hours.
It made her feel a little homesick, because of the blossoms, the cherries and dogwoods and magnolias and those pink ones, whatever they were called. These were the flowers that burst out all over her old neighborhood growing up, that would drop into her hair like spring snow. They probably had them in New York too, maybe in the park, but she never saw any.
If the train was in North Carolina now, then South Carolina would be next. That gave her a pang of nostalgia too. If she’d been in a plane and flown over these places, she wouldn’t have thought a single thing of it, but now she was going to be passing through the state where her dad had lived since she was six. It was the place she’d visited, fantasized about, been disappointed in, and grown up some in. It was the place where she’d met her stepbrother, Paul. And his sister, Krista, too, but Paul loomed larger here. He gave the whole state the stalwart suffering feeling that he had, even though she knew he didn’t mean to. It was the place where Lydia and her dad had gotten married and where Lydia had been sick and died. It seemed sad to go through the state and not reach out to any of them.
When she heard the baby shout she looked up. She felt an ache in her throat, and wondered if she felt sadder about Lydia than she’d realized, or if the phone carried a contagion of sadness sent over from Tibby.
The baby wasn’t crying, for once, but smiling and trying to say something. They were wordlike utterances that weren’t actually words. The baby was a girl, Carmen observed. She had olive skin and very large dark eyes. Her hair made shiny delicate dark curls. But you wait, Carmen thought. My hair looked like that too when I was your age.
Carmen observed that the mother of the family had not, in fact, been in the bathroom for the last ten hours as she had thought, but was apparently not on the train at all. Carmen looked at the rumpled father and took pity on him. It was awfully bold of him to take two small children on this ride by himself. Had you no other options? she couldn’t help wondering.
And Carmen couldn’t stop herself from staring at them a little. Rumpled though he was, the father had a certain dignity you rarely saw in parents of young children. He wore dark twill pants and a faded jean jacket over a gray T-shirt. Carmen had noticed as she’d padded around the aisles that everybody’s shoes had come off by this point, but his hadn’t. He wore pointed brown leather shoes. They were well worn but elegant. The kind that well-dressed businessmen wore.
She could tell he wasn’t Puerto Rican. She assumed he was Mexican, for some reason, but he was rather tall for a Mexican. She wished he would say something, so she would be able to guess from his accent. She hadn’t been paying attention before, and now she felt immensely curious.
He had straight, longish, slightly feathery black hair. She thought of Ralph Macchio in the original Karate Kid, and then she felt the need to suppress a giggle. She’d had a huge crush on Ralph Macchio. The next thing she thought of was Jones and his shaved head.
The father looked over at her, seeming to sense she was looking at them. She smiled, a peace offering of sorts for all the mean looks and cursing during her phone-withdrawal phase. His face altered slightly, but she didn’t think you could call it smiling.
In her mind she begged the little boy to say something to his father, and at last he did. He told his father he had to go to the bathroom. She couldn’t tell anything from the boy’s accent, so she waited eagerly for the father’s res
ponse, but the father was remarkably economical with words, she’d noticed. He simply nodded. He was like the Latin version of Paul. But when he stood up he did something quite surprising. He turned directly to Carmen.
“Excuse me. You could—could you … take for me … the baby?” His English faltered appealingly and she realized he had absolutely no idea she was a Spanish speaker.
She was too surprised to do anything but accept the baby. He figured she was a woman, maybe a mother herself. He figured she’d know what to do. He didn’t realize she was an actress.
“We come back soon,” he told her, leading the wriggling, dancing boy to the bathroom at the front of the car.
So Carmen held the baby. She was anxious at first. She tried to think back to her early days with Ryan. But truth be told, she’d been eighteen at the time, and hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to hold him. Tibby, his godmother, had probably held him three times for every one time Carmen had.
Carmen tried to bring the baby into her body a little, not hold her out as if she were a disease. She rested the baby’s considerable diaper on her lap. The baby stared at her with her giant eyes. She didn’t express a point of view, she just stared.
“Hi, sweet pea,” Carmen said. She smiled, and to her gratification, the baby smiled back. She bounced her a few times. The baby smiled bigger. Carmen had to wonder: Who else in the world would make friends with you so quickly?
“Hey, poopie,” Carmen said in a cooing voice.
The baby took this as a compliment and smiled more. She tried to grab Carmen’s face in her hand, but Carmen pulled back.
Carmen was just explaining to the baby about hair, when the father and brother returned.
The father gave Carmen a real smile this time. He took the baby from her gratefully, but the baby appeared not to want to go. She leaned and reached for Carmen as she got pulled away. She started to make the barking sound.