Subway Love (12 page)

Jonas stepped inside, expecting exactly what he found: Laura sitting, waiting, just as she said she would be.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Laura told him.

Jonas lifted his brow. “So, how long?” It was Saturday morning now. It had been seven days.

The train jerked into motion.

But for Laura it had been longer, hadn’t it?

He had figured it out. Somehow time was moving faster for her. Her kiss was still warm on his lips. He had seen her just last weekend.

He hesitated. “So, when
did
you see me last?”

“Me? See you? Don’t you remember?”

She had no way to reach him. How many days had passed for her? How many weeks? No e-mail. No texting.

For a second he was seized with self-doubt, even jealousy for a world he knew nothing about and couldn’t visit, much less control. What did she do with her time, the in-between time? But he shook off the feelings. He was so glad to see her again. Her face, her smile.

“It was two weeks ago, wasn’t it?” she asked.

Jonas didn’t answer.

Laura went on: “Yeah, as much as my mom likes to get rid of me, the bus from Kingston costs a lot and it’s a long drive from Woodstock and we only have one car and it doesn’t always start. My brother wasn’t supposed to come with me, but after what happened last time, my mother made him . . .”

Jonas was only half listening. How could this be possible? He interrupted her. “So . . .” he started slowly. “So, what year is it?”

“What year is it?” Laura echoed. “What year is it . . . when?”

“Now,” Jonas said. “What year is it now?” He knew he was taking a risk. It sounded like a question from a science-fiction movie or one of the medical shows where the guy is waking up from a head injury. Laura must have been thinking the same thing.

“You want to ask me who the president of the United States is?”

Jonas didn’t answer. He watched Laura’s face, trying not to be distracted by the dip of her collarbones, the skin that was showing at her neck.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“OK,” Laura said. She spoke more softly.

There were a few other people on the train. It was still pretty early.

“It’s nineteen seventy-three,” she began, and as she spoke, Jonas lifted his eyes and let them wander around the subway car, the greenish color of the walls, the molded plastic benches. He looked up at the print ad that decorated the top of the car, just under the rounded ceiling.

“And the president is — unfortunately still is — Richard Nixon,” Laura went on. She seemed to be watching his face carefully. She spoke slowly. “But not for you, is it?”

Jonas shook his head. They both looked around the train. A youngish mother wearing lots of eye makeup sat with a sleeping toddler sprawled across her lap, and an older couple were holding hands at the other end of the train.

“Don’t say anything,” Jonas said.

“I won’t.”

They fell silent and let the train lull them for a while. The older couple got off. A tall man in a velour jogging suit got on.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” Jonas said finally.

“Yeah,” Laura said. “But it feels right.”

IT
did. Jonas hadn’t felt this right in a long time. He had a sense of being home, right here in the subway car. And it was odd, since he had never liked being down in the subway system, being underground. When he was little, he was afraid the city would most certainly collapse on top of him. How can all those buildings and all those people and cars and buses be just eighteen feet above the tunnel? It was impossible.

“It’s fine, Jonas,” his father would say. “It’s perfectly safe. Look —” His father would take his hand and walk him down the steep concrete steps. The smell of urine and the roar of the trains would assault him.

“It’s OK. Take another step. If you just
act
like everything’s OK, it will be. Tell your body to just keep moving. Before you know it, it will feel just fine.”

It seemed impossible, but Jonas trusted his father, and wouldn’t you know it, like his father promised, the whole of New York City never collapsed into the ground. And now he was here with Laura, and it was safe again.

“So you live in Woodstock?” Jonas asked, metaphorically putting one foot in front of the other, acting as if everything was normal as Laura told him her story.

She told him about her mom and dad, about their move, about the changes, finally about Bruce. She had never told anyone about Bruce, she said. No one knew.

“You’ve got to tell someone,” Jonas said. “That’s against the law. What a sick bastard. You can’t go back there.”

“I live there,” Laura said.

“Well, you can’t.” Jonas felt a rise in his heart, a fear, maybe, an urgency, a sense of indignation, and a powerlessness all at once.

Laura suddenly looked worried. The lovely calm fled her face. “I gotta go actually. I want to be back before my dad gets home. Is this the right stop?”

Jonas looked up. He hadn’t noticed where they were. There was no electronic map on the wall above the straphangers’ bar. He had no idea where they were along the route, only that they were heading back uptown again.

“I don’t know. But you can’t go. When can I see you again?”

“We’ve been managing so far,” she said. She blushed. She actually blushed. Jonas felt his whole body rise with heat, remembering her mouth, her hands cupping his face when she kissed him.

He wanted more. This wasn’t enough. It was crazy-making. “But what if I want to call you? What if you want to call me?”

“I guess we can’t do that,” she said. “But I’ll come back. Will you?” She stood up.

His mind ran through the options: no texts, no phone, no e-mails. It was impossible to imagine. “But what if I can’t wait?”

She scrunched up her face and shrugged, and there was that smile again, and there was the subway chime. The doors hissed opened. It was no use trying to follow, that much he had already figured out.

IT
wasn’t just their mom. Laura’s dad insisted that Mitchell come into the city. He wanted to talk about something important, and he wanted to do it in person.

Laura’s dad wanted to take her brother to Europe. It would be a business trip to West Germany that June. Then, after their dad had given the lecture he had been invited to present, they would travel. Once upon a time, perhaps their dad would have traveled Europe on a rail pass and stayed in youth hostels and studied the great artists, but as an art director, he gave talks on promotions and free giveaways. Still, it was a trip to Europe. Mitchell would have to miss the last week of school, but their dad was sure he could get permission; after all, the trip would be educational. How many seventeen-year-olds got to fly to Europe?

“But you’ll have to cut your hair,” Laura’s father said. He had ordered Chinese food, and they were eating at the table. No TV this time — a discussion was on the agenda.

Mitchell put down his chopsticks. Laura and her dad ate with good old-fashioned utensils, but Mitchell insisted on chopsticks. He’d asked for brown rice, but the restaurant only had white, so he had made his own and carried it in with him.

“I’m not cutting my hair,” Mitchell said.

Their dad put down his fork.

“What do you mean, you’re not cutting your hair?”

It was perfectly obvious to Laura, predictable. Mitchell wouldn’t cut his hair. If this conversation had occurred a few months ago, she would have been upset that her father hadn’t even considered taking her, but now she was glad. She had only one thing on her mind, and it took up every space in her waking brain. She was hardly listening to them bicker.

“I mean, I’m not cutting my hair.”

“You have to. It’s not a choice. They won’t let you into the country. You can’t get a passport photo looking like a freak.”

But Mitchell stayed oddly calm.

“Then I guess I can’t go,” he told their dad.

Oh, no. Not good. Their dad did not stay calm.

“I’ve had enough” — he raised his voice — “of this hippie crap. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re not going to miss it because of some disrespectful teenage rebellion. You’ll cut your hair.”

“You’re the one being disrespectful. This is my body, my hair. I’ll do with it what I want. You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t turn me into some square, conservative, brainless automaton like you.”

Laura pushed her chair away from the table. She wanted to hold on to the last particles of memory Jonas had left on her skin, on her lips. When the subway emptied out, on either the last or second-to-last ride from the Bronx to Midtown down toward Brooklyn and back, they had had a few moments alone. This time Jonas had pulled her toward him, reaching his arm around her waist.

She fit. Perfectly.

Into the curve of his arms and the space where his shoulder met his chest, like their bodies had once been connected. She remembered learning about the continental drift and looking at it for the first time on a map of the world. Ah, yes, of course anyone could see it, where South America would slip naturally into Africa, North America fit right under Europe, and Greenland nestled into Russia. Something had torn them apart and now they were together again.

He always acted as if he needed to know when he would see her again and couldn’t bear not knowing when.

But what if I can’t wait until next time?

If she brought her hair to her nose, Laura believed, she could smell him still nestled there.

“What the hell are you
doing
?” Mitchell asked her. Their father had left the table in a huff. Laura ignored her brother.

Next time seemed so far away, not even on the horizon, but for the time being,
next time
made all of this so much easier.

“OK,
so look her up,” Nick was saying. “Google her.”

Not like that hadn’t occurred to Jonas right away.

Nick sat with his finger poised above the keyboard. “What’s her last name?”

“Like I’m going to tell you.”

Jonas was babysitting his sister, a gift to his mother, who had a date Saturday night. An enormous gift, according to Nick, who was keeping him company. She promised to be back early. Most likely before ten, his mother said.

“Stay out, Mom,” Jonas had told her. “Have a good time.”

“Ten thirty the latest,” she promised.

Enough time to hit the subway when she got back.

“OK, then, let’s go find her. I think it’s about time I met this girl,” Nick suggested. “C’mon. Lily would love it, a little field trip.”

“Are you kidding?” Jonas was cleaning up from dinner, chicken parmesan, picking off cheese stuck to the plates, while Nick sat at the counter with the laptop.

“I’m not. Or you can give me her last name and
I
can Google her. Nineteen seventy-three? Hell, she’s probably over fifty years old now, right? Sounds hot to me.”

Jonas nearly regretted telling Nick anything — about Laura, about the strange vintage-looking subway car, the wild, colorful graffiti, and about the even stranger shift in time, how what was apparently days or even weeks for Laura could be a matter of minutes for Jonas. He had no idea.

Oddly, their time together seemed out of time completely, neither night nor day, present nor past. The subway car itself was a constant, but the way minutes passed, or hours, the way they didn’t at all, was hard to figure out and hardly mattered.

Still, telling Nick might have been a mistake.

But Nick hadn’t laughed. And he hadn’t doubted what seemed impossible.

“Sorry,” Nick said quickly. And he was sorry, again. “But we
could
Google her and maybe we’d find out where she lives, or lived. I mean, lives now. Or then. I mean — you know what I mean.”

“Forget it. The Internet is the source of all evil,” Jonas said. “E-mails can be big trouble.”

“You don’t know her last name, do you?”

“No.”

“I don’t think Googling ‘Laura, Woodstock, New York, 1973’ will give us much. Are you certain it’s New York? There’s a Woodstock in Vermont, you know.”

“I’m sure,” Jonas answered, but of course, he wasn’t. He wasn’t even sure it was still 1973 for Laura.

Nick let out a sigh. “This is clearly a no-win situation, my friend. How do you know she’s telling the truth? Honestly, I think you might be driving yourself crazy. I think your guilty brain is getting the better of you.”

“What guilty brain?” Lily walked through the living room and up to the kitchen counter.

If it was no accident that his father had left his e-mail open on the computer, it was less of an accident that Jonas had printed them out and his mother found them. But in that moment, Jonas regretted having confessed any of that to Nick. Telling on himself hadn’t made him feel better anyway. And now it was going to come back and bite him in the ass.

She said it louder. “What guilty brain?”

“Nice work,” Jonas said. Lily was a hard one to dissuade. When she got something into her skull, she rarely let go. Over the years, bribery and promises had only made it worse.

“
What
guilty brain?”