Subway Love (2 page)

As always when a babysitter was coming over, Laura’s parents were going out with the Hanssens, and so five kids — three Hanssens plus Laura and Mitchell — were dumped together in one apartment or the other. This time it was Laura and Mitchell’s apartment, which is why Mitchell got the couch.

The grown-ups were busy chatting about the film they were about to see. Mitchell and John were arguing about who should get the prime real estate on the couch so he could stretch his legs. The two Hanssen sisters were clutching each other while the creepy six-fingered hand rose out of the ground and the deep, wavy voice announced the start of the show. Laura stood by the window and felt a secret kinship with the music no one else seemed interested in or even able to hear.

She didn’t know exactly where the song was coming from, or who was singing. At that moment, Laura’s mother walked into the living room wearing a plain sheath and flat shoes, with her hair in a neat bob — a veritable, fashionable, and very conservative take on Jackie Kennedy.

“Hey, sweetie,” her mother said. “Why aren’t you watching television with everyone else?” She ran her hand over Laura’s head gently.

“I will,” Laura answered. She turned away from the window. The episode was starting, “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” She needed to find space for herself on the floor next to Julie or Lizzy Hanssen, far away from the boys.

Then Laura caught the look on her mother’s face as she heard the song. The desperate, urging music that leaked randomly from someone’s open window would somehow have the power to change all their lives, but no one knew it then.

Jonas sat down on the bench and waited for the next train. He might not be going to school, but he sure wasn’t going back home. The platform was crowded with commuters, everyone vying for personal space: an angry businesswoman in a blue suit bumping into an earbudded kid in pants belted around his butt; a future famous movie star on her way to a waitress gig alongside a corporate ad executive who didn’t lift his eyes from his BlackBerry. And they all had the same goal — to cram into the next train and get where they needed to be in as little time and with as little acknowledgment of one another as possible.

Jonas stayed seated, letting five trains come and go, watching hundreds of people pouring out and hundreds more getting sucked inside and being whisked away, and eventually the crowd thinned out altogether.

A pretty girl wearing those large headphones, the thick, padded kind that shut out the whole world, sat down next to him. She swayed ever so slightly to music that must have been thunderously loud, since the beat was audible three feet away. Jonas hadn’t seen her walk over, so he had no way of determining how tall or short she was. He never tried talking to a girl who was taller than he was, no matter how pretty, and it seemed each year his choices were diminishing. Her audio technology precluded that from happening anyway. Maybe that was her point.

When the next train stopped, she got up and hopped on. Jonas could see her, silently dancing, as she held on to the metal pole inside. He smiled to himself. The doors hissed shut and the whole image was gone. Girls, or getting girls, had not been his strong suit, not since third grade, which he now considered the height of his romantic life, when he and James Michelson duked it out during recess to see who would get Sabrina Branch to be his girlfriend. James pushed him twice, Jonas pushed him back once, before the playground monitor broke it up, giving them both detention, and by that time Sabrina had changed her mind about her potential relationship status.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend,” she announced, and she ran off to the basketball courts.

Last time he checked, Sabrina had updated herself as “in a relationship” with Caroline Fein and posted ridiculously provocative webcam photos of the two of them hugging and kissing. Photos had become so meaningless. Anyone could take one, anytime, anywhere, and everyone did, all the time. They took pictures with digital cameras, digital video cameras, with cell phones, with their computers. There was a picture of everything.

If 9/11 had happened today, there would be hundreds of videos, the more graphic the better, getting millions of hits all over YouTube. In fact, 9/11 was probably the last major event in human history not to be recorded, posted, tweeted, retweeted, and viewed over and over and over for all time.

Jonas preferred real photography, the kind that took skill and still had meaning, even if he had discovered it by accident. He had found the old film camera in the back of his parents’ closet. His dad must have missed it, or left it on purpose, knowing it was useless, like, apparently, his family was. It was heavy, a Canon AE-1. When Jonas picked it up by its thin black strap, the whole thing tipped forward and he nearly banged it against the dresser. “Whoa.”

“Jonas, what are you doing in there?” He could tell by Lily’s thick mucusy voice that she had been crying, when the last thing he needed was more crying.

“Nothing. Go find Mom,” he called out. He waited for the footsteps, but his sister didn’t move. He could hear her breathing behind the closed bedroom door. “OK, Lily, come in. But shut the door behind you and be real quiet.”

Lily had burst into the room, throwing herself down onto the carpet next to her brother. Jonas furrowed his brow at her.

“Oh, right.” She jumped up and closed the door with a bang.

His sister was eight, six years younger than he was. She didn’t understand what was happening. She kept asking when Daddy was coming home from the hospital.

“Lily,” their mother would try to explain, “your daddy’s been out of the hospital for weeks. It was just a kidney stone, sweetie. Daddy’s fine. He lives in his own apartment now.”

And Lily would answer with “Yeah, but when will he be home?”

She plopped back down on the floor next to her brother. “What’s that?”

“A camera,” Jonas told her. He turned it over in his hands. There was a long lens and lots of dials with tiny numbers. He clicked open the back, where the film would drop inside.

“Mommy’s being mean to me. Again,” Lily said.

“No, she’s not, Lily. And I know you know Daddy moved out. We saw his new apartment last week. You can’t get what you want just by wanting it bad enough.”

Jonas watched Lily’s eyes filling up. “Lily, I’m here. It’s OK. It’s going to be OK. Nobody stays married anymore. I mean, seriously, who do you know whose parents are married?”

He put down the camera and wrapped his arm around his sister. “And look on the bright side: We get double presents on our birthdays.”

“Is that a present?” she asked.

Jonas picked up the camera again. “It is now,” he said.

And he really hadn’t gone many places without it since. Another train rolled to a stop at the platform and the doors flew open. It had been two years since his dad moved out. It took Jonas a moment to notice the smattering of loopy red lettering covering the side of the subway car. At first he thought it might be promotional graffiti, the kind in the shuttle trains when the Yankees won the World Series or the Rangers the Stanley Cup. But no, this didn’t look commercial. It was just good old-fashioned messy graffiti.

You never saw that anymore in New York.

Maybe it was a MoMA retrospective: New York Subway Art, the Lost Era.

Of course, it would have been easier to flip open a phone, press the power button on a digital camera, point and click, and snap two or four or five pictures, but Jonas reached for his Canon AE-1. This meant unscrewing the lens cap, checking the light meter, twisting the aperture, and setting the shutter speed, and by the time he did all that, the subway was picking up speed. The photo would be blurry. It might not even be recognizable, but Jonas was pretty certain he had captured the image.

VISITING
her dad was usually a good thing. This week they skipped school Friday and headed into New York first thing in the morning. Mitchell didn’t care since he rarely went to school anyway, but Laura worried about what she was missing. Still, there was plenty to look forward to at her dad’s, like eating.

The best part of being there would be the food. Or maybe it was getting to watch TV, since part of their mom’s rejection of the Establishment was to get rid of the television set. When they moved from Brooklyn to Woodstock three years ago, neither her father nor the TV came with them.

The worst part was traveling on the bus from Kingston to Port Authority with her brother. It wasn’t just the long bus ride; if Mitchell wasn’t in a good mood, he would sit by himself, and when they got to the city, he would walk ahead, briskly. Laura needed to know her way around the New York subway system or keep up.

“Mitchell, wait for me,” she said, mostly to her brother’s backpack.

It was an army surplus bag that he wore over his shoulders. It matched his army surplus field jacket. Mitchell had sewn a peace-sign patch on the breast pocket, right over the original owner’s name.

“Hurry up, then.”

Laura quickened her step, trying to keep a slightly slower than running pace and managing a sort of half skip. Mitchell would make a show of it for their dad, looking like the good older brother, then within half an hour, he’d be hogging the television
and
the couch
and
the Chinese food, and making faces at her when their dad wasn’t looking. It was as if he held his sister responsible for his fragmented travels back and forth every other weekend or so. Clearly he wished he could just stay home with their mom and her new boyfriend, Bruce, because when the winds of change swallowed up half the world, it took their mother with it, and Mitchell followed more than willingly. It was now three against one.

Mitchell was heading down the steep steps underground, dodging people coming up and avoiding people who wanted to get quickly down. Laura was right behind him.

“Look, we just missed it,” Mitchell said. The last car of the subway was pulled around the bend and was gone. The platform was empty. Mitchell plopped down on the wooden bench and let his legs stretch out in front, his feet balanced on the heel of his work boots. “Nice work, Laura.”

Maybe if she wasn’t so tired from the bus ride, or out of breath from running, she might have responded, but there wasn’t much her brother didn’t hold her responsible for. Laura saved her energy to concentrate on her surroundings. The fact that Mitchell was constantly high didn’t exactly promote security. Best she stay alert.

Sometimes Laura tried to imagine her life had her parents not gotten divorced and had they all stayed in New York City. She’d be an urban kid, hopping subways, maybe jumping on the back of city buses and holding on for dear life. She had a vague memory of sitting in the last row of a crosstown bus with her mom, seeing the faces of daredevil teenagers hanging outside the rear window, staring in, laughing. Of course, a few short months later, her mother would have been exulting in their anticapitalist method of travel, but that day she just explained that the teenagers were avoiding the bus fare.

Laura figured that if her parents had stayed married, she’d know her way around the city without having to look up every block at each street sign and calculate the avenues. She probably wouldn’t be afraid, the way she was now, in this dank underground that smelled like urine and was littered with garbage and graffiti. At least it was empty.

“I think I hear the train,” Laura said. She took a look to each side and behind her, to make sure no one was around, then leaned over and peered into the tunnel. The tracks headed off into the darkness, and there was more garbage down there, what might be a colorful candy wrapper, a soda can, but mostly all was black, just different shapes and degrees of black.

“It’s not the right one,” Mitchell said without looking up.

“How do you know?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were locked in an unfocused stare. He was probably still high from smoking with Bruce. With that thought, Laura felt a shiver run down her spine, as if she were bracing herself, as if Bruce were right behind her. Her body reacted before her mind could assure her that Bruce was far away, back in Woodstock, doing whatever it was he did during the day.

Maybe Mitchell wasn’t high from smoking. Maybe he had taken acid again.

What if we miss this train?
Laura wished her father would meet them at the bus terminal.

The sound of the train got louder. Laura stepped back. She could feel the heat forcing its way ahead of the vibrations. There was always the momentary panic as the subway train pulled up. How would they know if this was the right one? Where was it heading? When would it stop next? How would they know when to get off? Laura turned back to look at her brother, realizing she relied on him completely and he had no concern for her at all. That combination didn’t make for a good outcome.

“Maybe it
is
our train.” The roar threatened to drown her out completely. Laura had to shout.

“So, if you think it’s ours, you can get on it,” Mitchell said. The train thundered, and spit and screeched, straining to stop. Car after car flew by until slowly the double doors presented themselves and hissed apart.