Gracefully, lithely, the brunette arches her back and stretches her slender arms towards the autumn sky, pulling her sweatshirt with her, exposing the raw, ashen skin of her lower back. She tip toes and pirouettes in front of the blocky LOVE sign. Spray from the fountain spackles her face, forcing her luminous and unusually cerulean eyes shut. She moves with an uncanny sureness for her age. She is tall; taller and prettier than her two friends, and too tall for a gymnast, but I am sure she must have been one in her youth. Although, she has not yet exited her youth. The three girls are young, perhaps two-thirds my twenty four years. No older than my sister. Barely old enough for me to watch them so intently.

The other two girls - a sapling thin blonde and a stocky, busty little box with pimiento curls and fading freckles - watch their friend much in the way I do: with a strangely mesmerized uncertainty, not quite sure of how to take it all in. Without warning, the blonde, who has been awkwardly crouched not quite unlike a cat stalking a canary, pounces onto her friend as she twirls back towards them. The boxy girl springs to life, albeit slowly and without much verve, and together in a fit of cackling, the two less spectacular girls break up their beautiful companion’s twisting and turning, dropping her to her knees. Instead of springing back upwards, the fallen brunette lingers on her hands and knees. She looks up, directly at me. I’m not quite smiling. Then, she curls her beautiful, straight hair behind her neck, away from her almost unnoticeable peck of a nose and those searing, jewel eyes, and slowly, dramatically, she stands. I watch the whole thing, her legs tensing beneath her thin jeans, the faint line of pink beneath her waistband exposed, and the way she seems to imperceptibly bow while towering over her two friends. I can’t help but think it’s all been a private minuet for me.

Behind her, the city of Philadelphia applauds in a cacophony of car engines, subway rumbles, and thousands of hurried voices. The skyline is darkened in late afternoon shade, cool blue glass facades reflecting the world back onto itself. Blocks away, the new Comcast tower, a hulk of steel and glass not unlike the boxy girl in its gracelessness, nears completion, an army of cranes dotting the very top of the city.

Back on street level, Love Park is cool and damp. The worn, dirtied concrete steps and ramps, currently swarmed with skateboards clamoring and rattling, seem particularly dour. Dead leaves and yellowed newspapers skitter across the open expanse of concrete, carried by a stiff October wind that toys, lasciviously, with the blonde girl’s skirt. While the sky above is clear but for a waft of thin, ruffled clouds, and City Hall is bathed in amber sunlight, the world around me is deep in shade.

The girls temporarily disperse, jauntily bouncing towards different corners of the park. The brunette prances elegantly, covering wide swaths of ground with each stride. Then, suddenly, they re-conglomerate in a sprint, embracing in a fit of laughter. I smile. Philadelphia. I know you inherently, the way one knows the intricacies of an old lover. Sara had that fit of cellulite where her left thigh met her ass that I used to caress during sex; Philadelphia has a graveyard of corroded limestone headstones on her inner thigh, Fifth and Pine, where I used to take girls on first dates. Joanna has a conglomeration of freckles slightly above and to the left of her canyon of a belly button that I kiss before going down on her; Philadelphia has a Greek diner hidden in Fairmount where I used to drink black coffee and write sometimes back when I wanted to be a writer. And, it has a stoop somewhere on her eastern hip where I once sat with my little sister and shared a cigarette. I have no sexual memory to equal that.

Despite all this, and much like an old lover, Philadelphia seems intimately distant, too. New, yet the same. Changed, but not more than superficially. The hulking Comcast Tower jarred me on first view, an intrusion on my skyline, but already it has seamlessly intertwined with the Philadelphia of my memory, as if it were always dominating Center City. Remembered, even loved, but not quite known. It makes sense to me. My memory of places seems to play in generalities more than specifics. And after two years apart, Philadelphia- generalities and specifics, inner thighs and freckles, new towers and dancing brunettes- stands in front of me again, viciously, startlingly alive. Like encountering a jilted lover, I feel somewhat exposed.
Still watching the girls, I refocus. The brunette has begun dancing again. She skips, arms spread open, fingers pointed outwards like the dials of a compass. Like Sara, she must have been a ballerina in her earlier youth. And yes, I must admit, it is partly Sara and my nostalgia that draw me to this ghastly skinned beauty. She reminds me of Sara, who once vividly danced in front of me on the Parkway, deftly balancing in her stilettos, her chest pressed tightly, threatening to burst out of a vivacious black dress. She’s drunk, we’re drunk, sweaty beneath a half July moon three summers ago, dancing amongst the homeless in Logan Square. It sounds overly romantic, and a little saccharin, but at the time it seemed normal and matter of fact. We were dressed up in gowns and ties, there was music from somewhere, and she wanted to dance. I guess it gains that sucrose quality over time (doesn‘t most of life?). Then, it was merely dancing. I think about Sara and smile and ache deep in my stomach. We nearly had a child together.

So yes, I see Sara in this girl. I see my sister, too. I suppose I see a lot of things. Mostly, I see a reason to keep missing the train that is going to take me home, out through west Philly and Penn, and the dilapidated suburbs.

I check my watch, and it is a quarter after three. The daylight is already beginning to wane. I’d forgotten how cold and short autumn is in the northeast. I loosen the blue tie around my neck, and finally decide to undo it. I lift it over my head, and place it in the upper fold of my suitcase. From my briefcase, I pull out a train schedule, and peruse it in the way one does when they want to look busier than they really are. A train leaves in twenty five minutes.

The honest truth , though, is that I don’t want to go home. My unease about this has its merits, I guess, but they would be hard for me to explain. My parents have been divorced for five years, but at my age that becomes less of a life changing event than a hazard to be navigated in my own life, a blueprint to be avoided. Besides, coming home usually brings back only the fond memories, as long as the visit is short enough: football during the fall in our backyard, decorating the Christmas tree together, teaching my sister, and only sibling, her jump shot. Why it has taken me this long to come back, I’m not quite sure. It just has. At this point I figure I might extend that time indefinitely.

This explains why I spent the afternoon meandering. My train (I’m terrified of planes) from Savannah arrived at 30th Street shortly before noon. I walked down Chestnut Street towards Center City. Then, I kept walking, and reacquainted myself with the city where I spent five years of college (Temple, regrettably), where I went to my first baseball game (the Vet, of course), where I first made love (the dorm room of a girlfriend’s older sister at U. Arts), and last saw my little sister (the train station I am presently avoiding).

I stopped at Reading Terminal Market and tried to eat a roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone while watching an old Hassidic Jew eat a bowl of motzah soup and read the old testament. We both sat alone, which seemed to me rather odd in the lunchtime rush; no one sits alone. Then I walked through Chinatown, past the markets that smell like raw fish, and the restaurant where Sara told me she was pregnant and I decided, on the spot, that I was leaving and not coming back.

I walked west from there, through City Hall, down Market Street where street crews were beginning to hang Christmas decorations. Eventually I ended up at Rittenhouse, and sat in the park for some time, smelling fallen leaves and dog shit and the faint smell of gasoline that seems to permeate the city. I ended up at the Barnes and Noble across the square from where I sat. From the bathroom, I called Joanna.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m ok,” I said.

“How is it being back?”

“A little weird. But also kind of comforting, I guess. I grew up here.”

“I know.” We didn’t talk, and I listened for people outside the door, the soft drone of piano music gentle emanating from an unseen speaker. “I wish you’d let me come with you.”

“Not this time,” I said. “Not under these circumstances. I needed to come on my own.” Deep down, I was hoping to see Sara, and I did not know how I would react if that were to happen. I might break into tears. I might hold onto her so tightly that it would break her spine. I might do nothing. Hell, I would probably do nothing but hug her gently, try to smile, and ask her how life was. “But I do miss you.”

“I miss you, too.” She waited a beat. “How are your parents?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them yet. I’m still in Philly. They’re both going to pick me up at the train station when I get home.”

“Both of them?”

“Yeah. Both of ’em.”

Neither of us knew what to say. “Why are you still in Philly?” she finally asked.

“I don’t really want to go home, I guess.”

I knew she wanted to say more, to pry, but she didn’t. That was a big part of why I was with her; she never pushed too far or asked too much. She was patient and nurturing. She was the opposite of Sara. “That makes sense. I understand why,” she said quietly. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. I’ll call you after I get home.” Then, as if on cue, someone knocked. I hung up the phone, put it in the pocket of my sport coat, and ran some water over my face. I’m going bald, I remember thinking to myself after a quick glimpse in the mirror. Just like my father. Then, I walked out and decided it was time, finally, to begin heading home.

But first I stumbled upon these girls. Leaving them, for nostalgic purposes, is beginning to bring me physical pain. I can feel my stomach welling up towards my throat. It takes a considerable amount of courage to bring my legs to life, and I stand against my better intentions and wishes. I pick up my briefcase, and then my suitcase, and sling them both over my weary right shoulder. My body, I realize, has begun to sag noticeably to this, my strong side. I walk, slowly at first, then with surprisingly alacrity, past the girls, glancing briefly over my shoulder at the brunette who, I swear, smiles and maybe even winks. Oy vey.

I circumnavigate the fountain, scowl at the skateboarders, and find myself looking down the Parkway towards the museum, looming at the end like the acropolis. Now that my momentum is going, I don’t want to stop it. If the brunette had said something to me, I might never have left. I cross 16th Street, moving towards the entrance to Suburban Station.

Just before exiting street level, I falter momentarily, trying to peer back across the park, past the fountain and skateboarders. I catch a glimpse of the girls, bodies indistinguishable and huddled together. Only their heads can be told apart: maple, wheat, pimiento. And as I reluctantly disappear below ground, the smell of stale piss and cigarettes engulfing me - a smell so viscous and ancient it seems to have festered in this stairwell for centuries - this is how I file the girls into some corner of memory: Maple, wheat, and pimiento, between Liberty One and Two, gracing the skyline. Philadelphia.

I follow a long, concrete corridor towards Suburban Station. Bright, obnoxious florescent lights blink iridescently on the worn floor; graffiti, and layers of paint covering graffiti, line the long, white walls. My footsteps echo behind me as I walk, and twice I look over my shoulder, expecting to see someone closing fast behind me. There’s no one there.

At the end of the graffiti tunnel, I step out into the open expanse of suburban station, the smell of piss giving way to something more medicinal and sterile: piss scrubbed away with bleach. Late on a Saturday afternoon, the station is nearly empty. I head towards the ticket window in the middle of the concourse (it’s new, or I don’t remember it). On the far wall a series of fast food restaurants are gated, closed. A few benches on the outskirts of the station are occupied by sleeping homeless, and one close to the ticket window is filled with a group of black girls in plaid skirts eating McDonald’s.

There is no line for tickets. No one is trying to escape the city on a day like this. I step up, and peer down at an old woman sitting behind the window. It takes me coughing for her to look up from her book.

“Yes?” she says in the curt way I imagine I would respond if someone were to interrupt my reading.

“Hi,” I say, forcing a smile.

“Can I help you?” she asks, her grey hair slipping out of its bun and wrapping around her wrinkled, veiny ears.

“One way to Swarthmore, please.” She looks around and finally grabs a piece of paper.

“You know it’s cheaper if you buy round trip?” she says gruffly.

“I know.”

She nods, stamps the ticket. “Three seventy-five.”

I scour my pockets for a crumpled five dollar bill. Slightly embarrassed, I try to unfold it before quickly giving up and sliding it through the window. She hands me a dollar and a quarter, and before I can say thank you has already opened her book and commenced reading.

“Thank you,” I say, and don’t even get a nod in response.

I turn from the counter, and make my way across the desolate station. I arrive at the stairwell for the R3 train to Elwyn. It’s on time, according to the electronic board hanging above the stairs. I descend further and walk through a set of double doors. The platform, too, is almost empty. On the far end an older couple waits, standing, the man wearing a black wool cap and holding his wife’s hand. Closer to me is a woman of considerable girth, bulbous and looking like a Christmas light in a red Mickey mouse sweatshirt. She also stands, and a long row of deep green, iron laced benches sit empty. These benches, like so much of this city, cause my breath to shorten in the uncertainty of memory. I seem to remember slouching on one, some bitterly cold March night in one of the many bitterly cold winter nights of my college years, my feet sore with the pleasant pain of walking too much in the hopes of keeping a night from ending. Sara had her head in my lap, her legs crossed at the ankles and dangling off the bench. There’s my sister, too, stepping onto a train, gaunt, in sweatpants and a tank top, looking over her shoulder and smiling with a half wave we both stole from our mother. This, I realize, is the last place I saw her.

Sitting on the bench from which I watched my sister leave is a beautiful woman modestly wearing a grey, long sleeve shirt and faded, tattered jeans. She seems to be my age, and has her legs crossed, a pad of paper in her lap. Her hair, slightly oily and in the harsh florescent light almost lavender, is pulled back in a pony tail. She is drawing something on the pad of paper, although I cannot see what. She leans forward, turning her back to me. It’s strange but there is something jarringly sexual about the back of a woman: the way her hair splays out on her shoulders, the curvature of her back, the slight indent at the end of her spine and the way her hips widen, the soft flesh of her thighs pushed out beneath her weight.

Hanging onto this woman’s arm, and standing next to her, is a young girl with a thin tangle of blonde hair already beginning to darken. She is thin and plays with her hair, pulling and twisting it. She wears pink sweats and a flowered shirt. She’s no older than four, likely younger. Presently, she is jumping up and down, occasionally using the bench railing and the woman’s forearm for leverage. She’s singing, at the top of her lungs, “Yesterday.” She doesn’t so much sing it, of course, as she belts it out, screeching almost, her voice bouncing up and down with her tiny body. I smile. My sister sang like this. I remember very specifically a funeral for a great aunt I never knew when, during the eulogy and to the horror of my parents (not yet divorced or even separated), my sister burst into song.

“She has a nice voice,” I say.

The woman looks up from her drawing and smiles, politely, her brown eyes and pale, callow cheeks rising in an almost laugh.

“Thank you.”

“Is she your daughter?”

“Yes,” she says, looking over at the girl.

I smile at them both. “She has your eyes.”

“Thank you,” she says again, very politely, and then, as if I were not there, she kisses her daughter on the crown of her head and turns back to her drawing. Mercifully, the low growl of a train rumbles towards us, hissing as it slows, and finally brakes in front of the woman, myself, and her daughter. The doors jolt open. A crowd of people has seemingly formed, like a phantasm, out of nowhere.

I step onto the train, and make my way towards the last car. Near the back of the cab, I find an empty seat and throw my suitcase onto the rack above me. I sit down heavily, reluctantly. Down the aisle, the woman holds her daughter’s hand, and they walk towards me. I try to smile, but they don’t see. She sits down in the seat diagonally across from me, and I feel grateful for some reason.

The doors click shut, and slowly but consistently we begin to move forward. I am headed home, finally. The train is half full, and eerily silent. Outside the window, the lights of Suburban Station woosh past, fading, and we enter a tunnel of vast blackness. Intermittently, red warning lights flicker like candles outside, giving me a sense of bearing. I close my eyes, but don’t intend to sleep.

I’m not quite sure what to feel. I suppose I feel presently like I feel about my life on a whole: that I’m somehow between things, and am stranded on some threshold, not yet able to move to what lies ahead. Although, I’ve felt this way for sometime now, perhaps since I left Sara and home and everything.

The lights on the walls of the tunnel begin to blur as we accelerate. Soon, we’re emerging from the depths. Philadelphia is once again around us, the towers of Center City giving way to the condos along the Schuylkill. I can’t stop myself smiling. There is a parking lot, somewhere along a retaining wall of the river, where I sat with Sara shortly before leaving. I felt her belly while she held my hand, and I cried with fright. It’s because of this I feel my heart cinch in my chest when I enter a parking lot, or feel my throat burn at the edge of a river.

We cross the Schuylkill. The Cira Center glimmers victoriously over Thirtieth Street Station’s gothic columns. Slowly, we glide to a gentle halt. A mass of people waits on the platform, conglomerated yet separate. The balding father with his husky, awkward son. The girls, bedraggled and hung over, nursing coffees. The middle aged couple doing cross words. I find myself watching people the way one views a Renoit painting.

Once more, we begin to move. We pull away, past the rail yards and the highway, curving towards the suburbs. The stone buildings of Penn whiz into focus, and I remember, briefly, a Jewish girl I think I loved who had dark black hair and obsidian eyes. We paused once for coffee at Penn, between me searching for the spaces between her thighs. She still goes there, and I still love her, I think. I wonder though, at times, if this woman was even real, or if I have constructed her in my own memories. Was she real, or constructed? I wonder this about Sara, too. Mostly, I think it doesn’t matter.

City slowly fades into suburb. The dilapidated row homes of West Philly become projects, then brick two bedrooms with front yards. Water ice joints and pizza shops disappear in favor of Burger King’s and McDonald’s. We eventually pass through vast swaths of woods. I feel I’ve made this trip before, but also that it was many lives ago and I recall it, now, only the way one recalls life before consciousness.

~

My sister visited me once while I was in college. She was fifteen and I was twenty two. I remember the day she was born. My parents had gone out to dinner the week before Christmas, my mother in a sleek black cocktail dress over her belly and my father in a horrific black and red plaid suit. I awoke the next morning, my babysitter crashed on the couch. My father called. I had a new sister. Her name was Marie and she had tufts of brownish-gold hair, just like me.

Seven years, though, is a lot between siblings, and the two of us had never been close. So it came as a surprise when she called me on a cool April night of my senior year of college and asked if she and two friends could come down that next weekend.

“Why?” I remember asking.

“Because, I want to visit you at college before you graduate.”

“Ok. Good luck convincing mom,” I said and then hung up the phone.

Two days later my mother called. Somehow, Marie had convinced her to let her and two of her friends stay in an apartment with myself and three other college guys for an entire weekend. I promised my mom that, no, we wouldn’t let them drink, and she pretended to believe me.
It’s a strange thing, realizing that your sister is old enough to drink and date and flirt with your twenty two year old roommates. It kind of sneaks up on you, like everything in life, I guess. You don’t really know how to act, or what to say. So you ignore it and go about your life, pretending not to notice or be too affected.

So on the last Saturday of April I sat on the front steps of my apartment and, pleasantly drunk, smoked a cigarette. Philadelphia was settling, traffic thinning, people coming home from dinner. If you looked hard enough, you could even make out a few stars through the haze about the city.
As I took a drag of my cigarette, my younger sister, surprisingly sober, sat down next to me. Her way too tight jeans stretched as she shifted her weight, throwing her head back and running her hands through her wavy brunette hair.

We sat for some time not talking, listening to the cars drive by on Market Street a few blocks away. It’s surprising, but nights in the city are remarkably quiet.

She broke the silence first. “How are you?”

“I’m ok,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m not happy,” she said, catching me off guard.

“Well, you’re fifteen. Who is happy when they’re fifteen?”

“No,” she said, throwing me a menacing looking. “It’s not that.”

I didn’t talk, because, really, I didn’t want to know.

“You know me and Brad broke up, right?”

“I didn’t know you were together.” Inside, I panicked. My fifteen year old sister was no longer a virgin, I told myself. I didn’t think I could live in a world where my little sister had had sex.

“We were. For five months.”

I smiled, remembering the time when five months was considered a legitimate accomplishment in dating.

“What happened?” I finally asked. She was looking at me in the way all women do when they want you to say something, her eyes wide and desperate.

“He broke up with me for Kristen.”

I knew from some deep recess in my memory that Kristen and my sister were once close friends.

“He ended it, and then two days later I see them holding hands after school,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, rather insincerely.

She takes my cigarette and inhales it, clearly experienced at the delicate art of smoking. She holds her wrist outward, the bone sticking out noticeably, and there’s something undeniably sexual about it.

“I don’t really want to be happy anymore,” she said. “That’s the worst part. I laugh and smile at school, but I don’t want to. I want to be miserable. And I drink by myself sometimes, on school nights.”

She looks at me again with those wide blue eyes, and I feel ashamed because I don’t know what to say that can comfort her.

“Is love this hard?” she asked.

I took my cigarette back, taking a long, deep drag. I opened my mouth to talk, but couldn’t say anything. I took another drag.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Life, I think, is just hard. Living, you know. Sometimes I’m miserable, too, like you said. Like how you don’t want to be happy.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

She nodded, and we sat in silence for a few moments, finishing my cigarette.

“Are you really going to move to Savannah?” she asked. “That’s what mom says.”

“I think so.”

“What about Sara?”

“I don’t know.” I paused. “I asked her to come with me.” She was six weeks pregnant by then and I was about to leave her.

“I like her,” Marie said. “She’s smart, independent. I really like her.”

I smiled. “Me, too.”

“She has good taste in music. I think you can tell a lot about someone from the music they life.” She rested her face in her left hand, and tilted it sideways, away from me. “You two are good for each other. I want someone like that. I’d like to find someone who likes good music, who I really like and who really likes me. You know, likes who I really am.”

I wanted to hug her. I almost started to cry. More than anything, I wanted to keep her from getting older and experiencing the pain of having to lose someone like that. Brad, I knew, was not one of those people. Marie would survive that. But one day, she might lose someone like that. I wanted to save her from the damage we all incur and inflict. Life gets the better of us eventually. I wanted desperately to keep her from that.

“You will,” I said. “Some day.”

“I hope. I can’t find anyone who likes the same music as me.”

I laughed. “That’s because you listen to Steely Dan and the Guess Who. And you’re fifteen.”

She looked at me with the same sapphire eyes we shared and smiled, sadly. “I’ll miss you.”

“I know. I’ll miss you, too,” I said. “Maybe you can convince mom to let you come visit.”

“Not likely. She barely let me come to Philadelphia. You think she’ll let me come to Georgia?”

I laughed once more. “You never know.”

“No, I guess not.” Then she paused and smiled wryly. “Kind of like life, I suppose.”

I laughed. And for a moment, I almost stayed.

~

“So where are you headed?” a voice says, pulling me back from my own head. I look across the aisle, and the woman from the bench is leaning slightly towards me, legs still crossed. The little girl is asleep next to her, her knees curled into her chest.

“Home,” I say, and immediately wish I had said something different. It is not home, after all- nowhere is, presently- and besides, home comes with established ideas of parents, siblings, and the vaguely fond memories everyone has of home once they leave: backyard football; late night drives with friends to smoke joints; Christmas and Thanksgiving in front of a fire place, drunk on wine. Although that is never what home really is for me, it’s that way my memory of places works again, hazily nostalgic and sweepingly general.

She smiles, shyly, without showing her teeth, lowering her head momentarily. “And where is home?” she asks, looking up.

“Swarthmore. There’s a college there…” I say and try not to sound too condescending, I certainly don’t mean it that way.

“I know. I’ve been there once or twice.”

It’s my turn to smile. “Good. It’s not a bad a place.”

“It’s nice,” she says. “There’s a really good pizza place there, if I remember correctly. I mean, I haven’t been in years. Not since high school.”

I laugh. “That makes two of us.”

She narrows her eyes quizzically.

“I mean that I haven’t been to Swarthmore in years.”

“Oh,” she says, and looks back to her daughter.

“What about you? Where are you going?” I ask.

“To see my mother in Media. Erin is going to stay with her this week while I go up to New York.”

“What are you going up there for?”

“To look for work,” she says, wiping a few strands of hair away from Erin’s eyes.

“What do you do?”

“I sing.” She smiles, this time with teeth.

“Like your daughter,” I say, grinning broadly, far too pleased with myself.

She laughs. “Yeah, I guess so.” I realize the wrongness, temporally, of my remark and wave my hands in an admission of stupidity. Some people find this out about me later; it has only taken this woman a minute. “It’s ok,” she says. “She’ll be better than me someday, I hope.”

“I’m sure you sing beautifully.” And I am, too. She has a spoken grace that belies almost everything else about her: the pony tail, the tattered jeans and sweatshirt, the eyes coy and hazel that suggest a youthful mischief, and, of course, the child.

“Thank you,” she says, sighing. “We’ll see.”

I smile, but don’t know what else to say, and worry that we’ve stalled. Some where after leaving Sara, I lost the art of making small talk with people, especially women. It seemed, for a while, a well earned penance. Lately, I just wish I knew what to say.

“Why are you going home?” she asks, saving me. “Or, why haven’t you been home for years?”

I hesitate for a moment, and am unsure of what to tell her. Then I stop thinking so much. “My little sister died. And, I don’t know why I left. I guess I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.”

She covers her mouth, and gasps. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Not your fault.” I try to smile.

“No,” she says. “I am so sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“What happened?” she says. “If I can ask.”

“I don’t really know. A car crash, that’s all I’ve heard. I live in Georgia, and I found out last night. I’ve pretty much been on trains ever since. But it was a car crash. That’s all I know.”

“Are you ok?”

“Honestly?” I say “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t think I can. I put off going home all afternoon. It‘s like, if I just don‘t go back, maybe…” I fade off and, for the first time, I think I might cry. “Well, you know. I have no idea what to do.”

She smiles once again without showing her teeth, and for a moment does nothing else. It seems a strange thing to do, smiling at an almost stranger in a moment like this, but it pulls me back and
I wipe my eyes.

“I don’t know if I would know what to do either,” she finally says. “Would anyone?”

I think for a hair of a second. “Probably not.”

“Then you’re not alone, at least.”

“No. I suppose not.” I nearly smile. Behind her, an overgrown little league field zooms by, a blur of green, beige, and a broken ear drum from a wild pitch when I was twelve. I am almost home.
She is looking at me, unsure of what to say. Her daughter, eyes still closed, reaches out with a hand for her. She’s beautiful, this woman. Her face is soft and round, her nose small. Her eyes, playful, luminescent, dart past me to the world outside us. I love this woman as much as I’ll ever love anyone. I can’t explain to you why. Maybe, if I had known her many years ago, before my sister died, before I fled to Georgia, we would have dated. Maybe not. Of course, there’s no point in working in hypotheticals. But I can’t help myself. Maybe with her, I think, I would have stayed. You never know. And I guess that’s life.

“This is my stop,” I say. I stand, and start to gather my bags. I want to say more, but I don‘t have the words. Or, the time. I don‘t even know her name. “Look,” I start. “I’m sorry. I kind of threw that on you there.”

“It’s ok,” she says.

“Good luck in New York. And tell Erin to keep singing.”

She smiles. “I will.” As I start to walk down the aisle, she sticks out her hand, just shy of my wrist. It stops me in my tracks more effectively than a wall would. “You’ll be ok,” she says.
I laugh, waiting a moment. “I hope,” I finally say. She pulls her hand back. I nod, try to smile and not to cry. I walk down the aisle, my bags bouncing off the seats behind me. We slow noticeably, pulling into the station. I look out the window, at the long promenade of Swarthmore College, the oak trees not yet turned but surely on the verge. Then, I see my parents waiting for me. They stand arm in arm, divorced for five years, their faces raw and red. My mother rests her head on my father’s shoulder.

I see them, feel the train, and remember being nine. The four of us- mom, dad, me, Marie- took a train all the way to California. We didn’t have the money to fly. The trip took three days, so we spent two nights sleeping on the train. Marie and I had to share a bunk. Before bed both nights, we’d hang a sheet over the bed and stack pillows around it to make a fort. While our parents went to the dining car, and while we were supposed to be asleep, the two of us would sit around a flashlight and I told her stories about our black lab, Cocoa (not on the train). They were horrible, I’m sure, a young kid with the inkling to one day be a failed writer making up nonsensical tales about a dog and a little girl saving the world from dragons and aliens and ghosts. But Marie loved them, and she laughed, a lot. It was the first time I remember feeling like a big brother.
That’s all I remember of the trip. I don’t remember Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon, or swimming in the ocean. I remember Marie, laughing. I remember my sister.

She visited me once while I was in college. She was fifteen and I was twenty two. I didn’t know it would be the last time I would ever see her. We talked after the visit of course; very rarely on the phone, more often online or through email. She inherited my insomnia, and some late, lonely nights we would talk through a computer screen about the mundane facts of our lives. She would tell me who she was dating, how her classes were going, where she was thinking of going to college. I promised to come home for her graduation, and she promised to visit that same summer. I never paid as much attention as I should have, and I can’t remember much else about her life before she died. I don’t know who she loved, or what subjects interested her. I know very little about my sister. Knew.

I do remember, however, that a few months before all this happened, she asked me, once again coming out of a breakup, what she had asked me on my front porch three years earlier. What exactly I was doing at the time, I don’t remember. Perhaps I was writing a story I’ll never have published, or looking at pictures of Sara and missing her more than I could imagine, or maybe searching for a job. I don’t know. But Marie asked me about love, and why it was so hard.
I thought about it for a moment. Looking back, I should have said something. I should have said something on that stoop. I should have told her that love is hard, and that so is life, but that there are moments of beauty. Sometimes, you just have to find it amidst all this loss. It’s there, I should have said. It’s there. It’s in a brunette dancing in a city you once called home. It’s in the woman I nearly had a child with. It’s in a brother and sister sharing a cigarette. It’s in those small things that stay with us, the moments that affect us in ways we can’t anticipate, those people we find who somehow move us and make life less daunting.

Instead, I told my sister the truth. I told her I didn’t know.

The train grinds to a halt. I lurch forward, and it feels like the world lurches with me. Of course, it doesn’t. In front of me, the door swings open, light pouring in with a cold October wind. I hesitate, and look back at the woman. She is looking out the window, and her daughter is now curled in her lap. I watch them, and think that maybe the three of us occupy some vague sliver of time between existence and non-existence, hanging on a precipice. We pause for a moment, peer over the edge, awash in grace.

Then I step off the train.