Chương 3
He was doing that now.
She had mistaken it for patience for years.
He left.
The door closed.
The attendant waited until his footsteps disappeared into the corridor.
“Would you like me to document the injuries?”
Lena sat down.
The answer should have been easy.
Instead, she looked at Richard.
A decorated colonel.
A man who still carried himself as if problems became manageable once someone senior entered the room.
Then she looked at Martha, who had crossed a storm-soaked train to tell a stranger she had the birthmark of a dead baby.
“Yes,” Lena said. “Photograph everything.”
Richard glanced toward the window.
It was the first time Lena saw him look old.
The attendant introduced herself as Denise Kwan and asked permission before touching Lena’s arm. She photographed the bruises with a company-issued tablet, then Lena’s shin, then the scrape on her ankle. Lena explained the argument in their compartment in short pieces. She did not improve Ethan’s behavior, but she did not make it worse either.
He had grabbed both wrists when she reached the vestibule.
She had kicked backward and hit the brass corner of a luggage rack.
He had pulled her into the compartment.
She had slapped him.
He had locked the door from the outside.
Eight minutes later he returned.
During those eight minutes Lena had searched his open travel case for her phone and found instead a velvet pouch containing a gold bracelet and a photocopied hospital form with her birth date printed beside a different mother’s name.
That was when Ethan came back.
That was when the bracelet broke.
“That blood?” Denise asked.
“Mine.”
“You cut yourself then?”
Lena nodded.
Denise finished the photographs.
“I’ll make an incident report. We don’t have reliable cellular service in this section of the pass, and the track obstruction has us stopped between emergency access points. I can notify transportation police as soon as we regain a connection.”
Richard said, “That won’t be necessary.”
Denise looked at him.
Lena looked at him too.
Richard’s face tightened.
He corrected himself.
“That is not my decision.”
“No,” Lena said. “It isn’t.”
He nodded.
“I apologize.”
It was not a grand apology. He did not decorate it.
That helped.
Denise cleaned Lena’s finger and wrapped it with a narrow strip of gauze.
Martha watched every movement.
When Denise finished, Lena noticed her staring at the birthmark again.
“Please stop.”
Martha blinked.
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep looking at me like I’ve come back from the dead.”
Martha’s face went still.
Richard sat across from her.
“Maybe she has.”
Lena turned on him.
“No.”
The force in her own voice surprised her.
Richard straightened.
“You don’t get to do that either.”
He said nothing.
“I had parents. I had a mother who packed orange slices in my lunch until I was fourteen because she thought I would get scurvy. I had a father who called every appliance larger than a toaster ‘the machinery.’ I had a home. Whatever this is, I did not spend twenty-eight years missing from your life.”
Richard’s gaze fell.
Martha looked toward the rain.
Lena’s adoptive father had died when she was nineteen. Her mother, Carol Mercer, had died eleven months earlier after four years of congestive heart failure. The last six months of Carol’s life had been mostly appointments, pill organizers, a plastic shower chair, and arguments about salt.
Lena had been there for all of it.
That counted.
No bracelet could erase it.
Denise packed the first-aid kit.
“I’ll have your phone brought here. We’ve got a service compartment two cars back if you want somewhere more private.”
Lena shook her head.
“I need the conductor.”
“I’ll send him when he’s free. Track crew just reported a small rockslide ahead, so he’s busy.”
“Tell him I need the cabinet opened.”
Denise glanced at the walnut cabinet.
“What’s inside?”
Lena looked at Richard.
“Apparently my life.”
Denise did not ask another question.
After she left, none of them spoke for nearly a minute.
The train had become oddly domestic despite the storm. A lamp glowed over the folded blankets. One of the crystal glasses had rolled under a seat and stopped against the carpet with its stem angled upward. Somewhere behind the wall, a coffee machine hissed as backup power returned.
Martha removed her wet shoes.
She placed them neatly beside her chair.
Lena almost resented the normality of it.
Richard said, “May I ask you something?”
“No.”
He nodded.
Thirty seconds later Lena said, “What?”
He looked at her.
“The birthmark. Has it always been that shape?”
She gave him an exhausted stare.
“How would I know?”
Martha answered instead.
“It gets lighter at the upper edge when the skin is cold.”
Lena looked down.
The lounge was chilly from the storm.
The upper edge was lighter.
Something shifted in Richard’s face.
Martha saw it.
“Don’t,” she told him.
He turned toward her.
“You remembered that.”
“Of course I remembered that.”
“You told me she died before you held her.”
Martha’s hands stopped.
Lena felt the room change again.
Richard stared at Martha.
“You told me you never held her.”
Martha slowly bent to adjust the heel of one wet shoe even though there was nothing wrong with it.
Lena understood before Richard did.
“You held the baby.”
Martha sat back.
Outside, lightning moved behind the clouds without striking.
Richard’s voice was quiet.
“Martha.”
She looked at him.
There was no panic in her face now.
Only fatigue.
“I held her for eleven hours.”
Richard stood so quickly his chair struck the wall.
Lena flinched.
He saw it and immediately stopped moving.
Martha’s eyes filled, but she did not cry.
“You were in Panama.”
“I came home.”
“Three days later.”
“You told me she was dead.”
“I know what I told you.”
“You sent me a telegram.”
“I know.”
Richard’s hand closed around the edge of the table.
“Was she alive?”
Martha looked at Lena.
Lena hated that answer before it arrived.
May you like
“Yes.”
Richard sat down.
