He stopped at a bright and expensive bakery he’d always eyed but never entered and bought a glossy chocolate pastry on his way to the streetcar. If this was to be his last day, he might as well enjoy himself. In the park, his first customer was a mother with twins, a boy and a girl, age five. The children sat very still, stern as two miniature titans of industry. He considered telling the mother he had a twin sister but decided he didn’t have the heart for the inevitable follow-up questions. Were they dear friends? They used to be. Weren’t they exceptionally close, though? He hadn’t written home once. He had no idea what Marian was doing, what dark bargains she had struck with Barclay Macqueen.
After several hours, just when he was about to give up on Seattle entirely, when he had almost started to relish the idea of a long, self-pitying rail journey, Sarah Fahey came hurrying along the path beside the lake. “I am so, so, so sorry we didn’t pay,” she said, breathless. “Gloria sometimes forgets the offers she makes, and we were all so in love with our own images that we couldn’t think of anything else. We didn’t realize until later, and we were absolutely horrified. Here.” She held out a folded dollar bill.
He hesitated. “I don’t want to take it.”
“Why not? Of course you have to take it.”
“But I’d like to ask you to take a walk with me, and if you’ve just given me a dollar, you might feel strange about it.”
She lowered her arm a little. “A walk?”
“Just along the lake. If we have nothing to say, you can turn back.”
* * *
—
They walked up the shore of Green Lake, falling into a comfortable stride. She asked how old he was. She was three months older, already seventeen. He asked how she knew Gloria and Hazel, and she said she’d always known them. Their mothers had been friends first. “Don’t you have friends like that?” she asked. “Ones you played with when you were in diapers?”
“Maybe you’d count my friend Caleb, though I doubt he ever wore diapers. He lives nearby, and we just sort of came across each other, him and me and my sister. His mother didn’t know my mother. I didn’t even know my mother.”
“What do you mean? What happened to her? Oh.” She stopped, appalled, covering her mouth with a hand. “I’m sorry. I am so horribly nosy. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”
“No, it’s all right.” He tried, as best he could, to explain his family. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about himself, but when he tried to skip ahead or gloss over details, she interrupted, prompted him to expand. He realized, as he talked, how little he’d said to anyone since he’d left Missoula. In a new city, anonymity fostered silence.
She listened with her head tipped toward him and her eyelashes lowered like when he’d first seen her. She had heard of the Josephina Eterna, and she said she thought it had been the right thing for his father to get in the lifeboat but cruel of him to come to Montana at all if he was only going to run off. She asked what it was like to have a twin, and what Marian was like （he told her about the flying but made no mention of Barclay Macqueen）。 She wanted him to describe his school and his dogs and Wallace. So Wallace had taught him to be an artist? No, he said. Not really. When Jamie was little, Wallace used to seem amused by his drawings, to praise them, but he’d become discouraging, even disdainful.
“Maybe he’s started to see you as a rival,” Sarah said, and Jamie felt a righteous gratitude to her for articulating a suspicion he had long tried to suppress. But all he could say, without getting into the drinking and gambling or acknowledging the resentment that had saturated Wallace along with the liquor, was, “I don’t see why he should be. He’s a very good painter.”
He told her about the evening he’d decided to leave, how he’d sat on the kitchen floor with the dogs milling around him, saying goodbye to each in turn before he slipped out the kitchen door and walked in the dark to the tracks. He’d run alongside the first westbound train and grabbed onto the irons, feeling the fearsome heaviness of the train, the irresistible pull of it. For a while he’d lain on the coal-blacked bottom of an empty gondola car, his rucksack serving as a pillow, looking at the stars and shivering with exhilaration and terror. Periodically a tunnel enveloped him with a smoky whoosh, as though he’d been inhaled by a dragon.
“Weren’t you afraid?” said Sarah.
“Very.”
At dawn, somewhere in Idaho, he’d been woken by a sharp pain across his shins, the thwack of the rail-yard bull’s billy stick. “You’re lucky,” the bull said. “Sometimes they don’t look before they dump in the coal.” He’d gone through Jamie’s rucksack, taken five dollars from his paltry roll of bills, sent him walking along the tracks out of town, told him he should be grateful, and he was. Jamie had hidden in the bushes until nightfall, hopped a train that took him to Spokane. The tramps had pointed out a Seattle train, advised him about the tunnel, about tapping the cinders.