Five(71)
The cars in front of her stop. “Ugh,” she groans again, as she runs her forefinger over the smooth red gel on her thumbnail, an unconscious habit she adopts when she’s stressed, or bored, or both. She will forget to cancel her next nail appointment three weeks from now, as by that time she will be locked in battle with Elizabeth the First and Trisha and their children over funeral arrangements and, of course, Liam’s estate.
While still in the chaos of grief and greed, she will get into Liam’s email and his phone records but keep them to herself. She will have no idea who the last email is from or what it means, so she will ignore it and forget it. She will be relieved that there is no email or record of a call from that woman, the thin strange blonde he used to fuck.
Five years later, when the two young people Liam was convinced had a life-changing, world-saving idea are arrested for committing fraud on a global scale, the stock plummets, and Danny loses almost everything, as does Emma, and Gideon is pulled out of his school and starts setting fires. Because no matter what anyone did or didn’t do, or how the story is told, Gideon becomes who he is meant to be.
At the train station and afterward in the hospital, the police ask Gideon only a few questions because they don’t want to inflict more trauma after an already-traumatic event. As Emma has carefully avoided the involvement of social services to this point in Gideon’s life, and because they are white and Emma’s shoes and handbag indicate affluence, and because this station is in a quiet suburb with a low crime rate and Gideon attends private school, they are not on anyone’s radar. Emma is not questioned very much about her son, or why they were at the station that morning, or why they were so close to the tracks.
Everyone who was there, except for Mrs. Worth, who does not remember much, reiterates the same story. Emma struggled with her son, her phone fell on the tracks, she went after it, then she climbed up onto the platform, there was an alarm, then Liam fell on the tracks the first time, but no one saw it happen, then Sonny saved him, then Sonny wouldn’t move, Medical Student jumped, and when it was all over, Liam was hit by the train. It happened so fast. In the blink of an eye. What more could Gideon add?
He could have added that Liam’s last word before his last words was “Danny,” but he doesn’t know who Danny is. And he won’t until he’s twenty-two and comes across an article in the prison library about how Danny, with Brendon’s help, rebuilt his former empire from scratch after losing everything, with an old photo of a young Danny with his brother, Liam, a tall, handsome man with a gap between his teeth that Gideon sees whenever he looks in a mirror.
When Gideon is paroled, he will find his Uncle Danny, much older, a recent widower, but affable, sitting in his library, sipping a Dubonnet on the rocks. He will have gained entrance to the house as the apprentice of the electrician, hired to fix the stair lift. Gideon will find Danny in the library and see in his eyes that he knows who he is right away. Of course he does.
“You were his last word, just so you know. Well, actually, Oh fuck were his last words, but you were the word before that,” Gideon will say.
Danny, with the spirit of Doreen in his glass and the second coming of the brother he loved standing in front of him, will say, “Sounds—a—bout—right.” And Gideon will smile Liam’s smile, and Danny will smile too, and something lost will be regained.
The train must be checked for damage, so its passengers are moved through a controlled evacuation procedure to Platform 2. They do not consider themselves lucky, although they should, because they weren’t on the platform, they didn’t witness the death, and they are free to think of it only as a sad detached thing that happened to an unknown person in the distance. Some of them give up on the day, go home, and consider their unexpected day off a cosmic gift, and don’t give a single thought to the person who died. Some of them give up on the day, go home, and weep for the people they’ve lost, long ago and not so long ago. But others wait and eventually board a replacement bus service which takes them to a larger urban station where they get on another train, which finally pulls into London Victoria at 12:30.
They arrive in London, exhausted, frustrated, and hungry. And late. They are late for work, and doctor’s appointments, and job interviews, and university lectures. They are late for five-star brunch reservations, and memorial services, and meetings with literary agents, and apartment viewings, and connecting trains to other destinations.
A few are relieved to have missed their appointments, as they were not looking forward to them. A few caught up on their emails and their reading while the train stood still on the track. A few got in a little nap during the delay. One or two passengers exchanged numbers with the people seated next to them who they got talking to and thought were kind of cute and thought what a good story this would be to tell someday at their wedding about how they met on a delayed train (they will skip the part about the death because it’s a downer until their tenth wedding anniversaries, when they will start to make dark jokes about it) and how the hours felt like minutes and just flew by in each other’s company on that fateful morning. They will say things like “When you know, you just know.”
The train that eventually replaced the 7:06 now stands empty on the track in Victoria. Its delayed passengers have spilled onto the platform and scattered in all directions to continue living.
A mouse, a distant cousin of the one who tended to Liam when he fell, scurries across the platform, taking advantage of the communal distraction and self-absorption of the commuters as they look down at phones and up at the arrival and departure boards. They do not notice the mouse as it sits, for a moment, on a folded, discarded newspaper that has been left under a bench next to a crumpled lottery ticket, a half-empty Coke bottle, and a half-eaten packet of mini-cheddar crackers, a real windfall for the mouse. Waiting for the platform to clear, it nibbles on a cracker and rests on the headline. It scurries off to see what lies under the next bench. The edge of the folded newspaper lifts just slightly in an air current. Another train is on its way. It will be here soon.