Subway Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Laura was quiet.

  “If I could do something, shit, if I could do anything — but I’m stuck. It’s crazy. I love you. You can’t go back to that house. You have to tell your dad.” Jonas tried to sit up, but the bench was too narrow. He put his feet on the floor and stood. “You have to promise me, right here and right now.”

  Laura started to cry.

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry.” Jonas got on his knees. “Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Oh, God. I would never . . .”

  “No,” Laura told him. “It’s not that. I’ve just never felt like this before. I feel your love,” she said. “It’s like I can really feel it.”

  Jonas was so relieved. He smiled. “C’mon. You’ll catch a cold. We have to get dressed.” Jonas handed Laura her clothes. “You need to tell your dad. Can you promise me?”

  “What if he doesn’t care?”

  Jonas wrapped his arms around her. “Is that what’s stopping you from telling him? Are you afraid he won’t do anything about it?”

  Laura nodded. “Maybe.”

  “You can’t protect him from the chance to protect you,” Jonas told her. “Please promise me you’ll tell him.”

  “That’s a lot of promises for one night,” Laura said.

  Jonas remembered his commitment to Max. “Oh, shit. Right. We have to get up to the El.”

  They dressed silently, shyly, and made their way out of the car, holding hands.

  The sun was rising outside; tiny slivers of light made their way through cracks in the ceiling and the dusty grate above. The trains would leave the yard by six thirty in the morning. It had to be nearly that now.

  Jonas gathered Max’s camera equipment, and took Laura’s hand. “Look, if we get out there and we’re all alone again, if one of us disappears, or we both do, we’ll meet back at the station. I’ll be there every Saturday night until you show up. OK? OK?”

  They stepped out onto the platform between the cars and headed back through the tunnel.

  “He’ll make me live with him,” Laura said. “My dad. He’ll make me leave there.”

  Morning was making itself known, the closer they got to the fencing. They would have to climb up and make their way across the platform. They could hear voices in the distance, the conductors checking their cars.

  “I know,” Jonas said. “That’s what I’m counting on.” He boosted her up.

  “You’ll really wait for me?” Laura asked. She looked down toward him.

  “Laura,” Jonas said. “Look, no matter what happens, you have to take care of yourself. I don’t matter, and we don’t even matter. You matter to me and you have to matter to yourself. Promise me you’ll tell him about Bruce. And then we’ll meet again at the station when you get back. At Fifty-ninth.”

  “I will. I love you,” she said.

  “I know. I feel your love,” he told her. “I can actually feel it.”

  It would bring them together again. He was certain of it.

  A tripod would have helped immensely, Jonas thought as he set up the camera. He made a makeshift stand out of a cardboard box and a piece of wood that he found on the platform. He checked the light and the film. With a few tester shots, he made sure the battery was attached and working. Just as Max had predicted, the train came out of the tunnel. It was magnificent, like a magical dragon from a fiery pit. The burner, Max’s piece, was five cars of a twelve-car train; the entire surface of all five cars, including the windows, was backwashed in baby blue, like a perfect summer sky, and dotted with white clouds so light and puffy they looked like the whole train might melt into the sky. The M was outlined in black, so deep and solid it seemed to be cut right into the steel of the train, and it was filled with green fading into orange into yellow. The A was the same, followed by the X. MAX. He had used his real name. Off to the right side, mostly on the fifth car, he had painted a three-dimensional tear, with cracks stemming from the edges, as if the whole train were about to break into pieces.

  Know how to live with the time that is given you, was written in luminous deep purple coming from inside the three-dimensional painted crack.

  Jonas turned to say something to Laura, to grab her around the waist and laugh with her, but he knew she was already gone. He had lost sight of her as soon as they pulled themselves from the tracks and touched the pavement.

  The camera clicked away — thirty-six shots in fifteen seconds — capturing the whole train, frame by frame. Steel had turned to sky. The masterpiece flew across the top of the city. Jonas imagined a crowd gathered on the platform, early-morning commuters on their way into the city. He could see businessmen, nurses, teachers, cleaning women, kids on their way to school. He could almost hear one person clapping, then another, and another, until everyone on the platform was applauding. Even below, down on the street, people stopped what they were doing, stopped their conversations, stopped their cars, to witness this incredible piece of art, this majesty of style, before it rushed by and was gone.

  “Toss it to me!”

  “What the hell —?” Jonas spun around.

  “Toss it to me, just the film,” Max said. “Not the camera. They’ll notice the camera.”

  “Who?” Jonas asked.

  “Just toss it!”

  Jonas wound the film in the camera until it was safely back inside its cassette, then opened up the back of the camera and tipped it out. He tossed the film over to Max.

  “I can develop it,” Jonas told him.

  “So can I,” Max said. He was moving fast. “But, hey, thanks, man. I owe you one.”

  NICK had tried for two full months to get his friend to come out on a Saturday night. He’d even agreed to hang out on the subway with him a few times. One Saturday they rode back and forth on the 4, 5, and 6 trains until two in the morning. Now Nick was following Jonas down his block.

  “I’m organizing an intervention. Just thought I’d tell you,” Nick said.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to tell the person. I thought the element of surprise was an important part of an intervention.” Jonas untwisted the leashes, hand under hand, when the two dogs stopped to sniff at the same trash cans. “Is that why you’re stalking me?”

  “Well, it’s not officially organized yet,” Nick answered. “And I’m not stalking you. I’m coming along for the ride . . . or the walk, as the case may be.”

  Jonas made twenty bucks a day per dog whenever someone in his building went away and wanted his services.

  “Maybe you want to weigh in during the planning stage,” Nick said.

  “Don’t worry so much about me.” Jonas stopped when the dogs stopped. He reached in his pocket for his plastic scooper bags, but the dogs kept walking. “False alarm.”

  Nick followed. “I’m not so much worried about you as terrified. You can’t keep waiting for her. She either isn’t coming or never did.”

  Jonas stopped. “You still think I’m crazy.”

  “Kind of. Maybe it’s all the weed.”

  Not likely.

  All four stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Casper, a whitish Shar-Pei–Lab mix sat down on the curb; as soon as he did that, Jengo, an overweight boxer, sat down next to him.

  “Oh, crap. They hate to move. C’mon, guys. Let’s go.” The white walk light came on.

  “I’m not crazy, Nick, but I don’t know. It’s so long ago, I’m forgetting. Maybe you’re right.”

  An older woman with a severe face-lift rushed up from behind with her dog, some kind of poodle, and passed by. As if on cue, both Casper and Jengo got up and started walking again.

  “Look, I tried searching everything. Google, WhitePages. I plugged every spelling of her name, first and last, into Facebook and Classmates.com and whatever that Linked-on thing is. There’s nothing. Or nothing that’s her. Nothing that fits.”

  Nick listened. They were almost at the dog park on Riverside. “Well, did you try that microfiche or microfilm at the public library?”


  “What’s that?”

  “You know, those rolls of teeny, tiny print from, like, a hundred years ago — records and documents and newspapers from everywhere. You have to go downstairs and use this huge machine, but I think it’s got stuff that never made it onto the Internet.”

  “No,” Jonas said. “Should I?”

  “If you want to find out once and for all. . . . I mean, I think maybe this is a way.” Nick slowed his steps and his voice. “I mean, I don’t get any of this, Jonas. But if you can find some peace, I really wish you would, and if I can help, I will.”

  “Thanks,” Jonas said. He unfastened the leashes inside the fenced-in area, and they watched both dogs bound off about four or five feet with their new and sudden freedom, then sit back down in the grass and wait.

  “YOU’RE going to the library?”

  “Is that so strange?” Jonas didn’t feel like explaining, not to his mother.

  “You don’t have to be nasty. Just a straight answer would do. It’s not too much to ask for. I’m not trying to control you, just be a part of your life.”

  Jonas didn’t answer, though he thought his mother had had a little more oomph lately, and that was a good thing. He grabbed his backpack, the one he hadn’t used since middle school but found in the bottom of his closet, his camera bag, and his keys.

  “Sorry, Mom.” He stood at the door. “I’ve just got to do something, and I don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “Well, at least that sounds honest,” she said. She smiled, which made Jonas feel worse. He should have understood how she felt about anything that sounded cryptic or secretive. He had been both, for quite a few months.

  “I’ll be back by dinner,” he told her. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, something he hadn’t felt like doing for a long time. “Tell Lily I’ll pick up some good books for her.”

  Jonas’s mother looked like she was going to cry. “That would be real nice,” she said, and Jonas slipped out the door, into the hall.

  “That’s downstairs,” the librarian informed him. “You do have a current New York Public Library card?”

  Jonas thought about lying, but that didn’t make much sense if he needed it to access the microfilm. Playing dumb was the next best thing.

  “Uh, no, actually. Do I need one?”

  The librarian didn’t appear to be buying his act or didn’t care. “You can use a temporary card for today or maybe you’d like to get a real library card. We still have some things here you can’t get online.”

  “I’m counting on just that.”

  Another librarian showed Jonas how to search for microfilm and how to load the microfilm reader.

  “You can search a town, but you might want to narrow down the year and probably the month. You said you were doing research on the nineteen seventies in upstate New York? What part?”

  “Woodstock.” Jonas figured there was no harm in answering.

  The librarian laughed. “Well, that’s not exactly upstate. Have you looked at a map of New York State lately?”

  Jonas didn’t like this woman at all.

  “Are you researching the music festival?”

  Some librarian; she didn’t even know Woodstock wasn’t at Woodstock.

  “Because then you’d need to go to Bethel, New York,” she went on. Jonas really wanted her to leave him alone.

  “I got it,” Jonas told her. “Thanks.” He felt his phone buzz in his pocket.

  “I’m over there if you need me.” She looked back. “And please, no cell phones.”

  He decided not to ask her if texting was allowed; he was going to do it anyway. It was Nick, asking where he was.

  Library.

  Which one?

  The one with the lions.

  The Ghostbuster one?

  Yeah.

  I’ll be right over.

  And Jonas began to sift through the tiny rolls of film, scrolling them one by one through the light machine that read the film and projected it into a private viewing box. It was completely different from surfing the Net. You couldn’t search a particular word; you had to scan the whole document with your eyes, side to side, up and down. Jonas wasn’t even sure what he was looking for.

  Notices, property records, announcements, any newspaper article that might mention Laura or anyone in her family. He wished he had asked her more questions, anything. Her father’s first name, her mother’s maiden name, you know, all the regular information you get when you’re getting to know someone.

  This was impossible.

  It was near noon when Nick showed up.

  “How did you find me?” Jonas asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “You’re the only one down here under forty-five,” Nick said.

  Jonas looked around. That wasn’t exactly true; there were some people who looked like grad students, but mostly there were professor types and older people at the other machines.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not so good,” Jonas told him. Several heads were raised in disapproval. Jonas lowered his voice. “But I’m only up to Woodstock, April nineteen seventy.”

  “Are you going through every year?”

  Jonas nodded. “Well, it’s a weekly paper, and yeah, I thought I’d start in nineteen sixty-nine and work my way up.”

  Nick pulled out his wallet. “Well, I’ll start down, then, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  “You have a library card?”

  “Screw you, Goldman. I’ll be right back.”

  For the next ten minutes they worked quietly. “What year did she think it . . . say it was?” Nick asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-three. July, same month as now,” Jonas answered. He was sifting mechanically through articles, police blotters, obituaries, wedding announcements, and even advertisements. He remembered Laura mentioning a store her mom worked at stringing beads. And all the while, he was hoping she had left Woodstock and was living with her dad. New York City would be harder to search — he had already discovered there were over two hundred and fifty people in New York with the surname Duncan — but that would be next.

  “What if we do find something?” Nick leaned over and whispered. “I mean, isn’t that kind of creepy? I don’t even want to think of all the possibilities, but like . . .” And then he stopped.

  “What?” Jonas said. “What? What do you see? What did you find?”

  “You said her name was Laura Duncan and she had a brother, Mitchell?”

  Jonas nearly tipped over his chair, climbing out and looking into Nick’s screen. Heads popped up all over, but Jonas didn’t care. He looked down into the microfilm projector, and there it was, a small notice, in the Woodstock Village News, July 23, 1973:

  Tragically, Laura Duncan, of New York City, was killed by a motor car that jumped the sidewalk while she was traveling abroad with her father, Henry Duncan, also of New York City. She is survived by a brother, Mitchell Duncan, and her mother, Janis Duncan, both residing in Woodstock, New York. There will be a private memorial service. No other information has been given at this time.

  “Oh, man,” Nick let out. “I am so sorry. Oh, God. Oh, Jonas, I’m so sorry. Hey, wait for me.”

  By the time Nick cleaned everything up, returned the film, and signed them both out of the machines, Jonas was nowhere to be found.

  LAURA wished she could have killed off Mitchell too, but the way she explained it to Zan, it was just easier this way. Oddly, Zan didn’t question any of it at all. She only said she was going to miss Laura after she moved to New York City with her dad, but agreed that it was the best thing.

  We can stay best friends, Laura said. We can talk on the phone and you can visit. They hugged and promised, but of course it didn’t happen that way.

  Laura also hoped that after she talked to her dad about Bruce, nobody would bother her much about the fake notice in the paper. Heck, they might not even see the obituary she had called into the Woodstock Village News.

  It was much easier to do than La
ura had anticipated, but on another level much harder.

  “Can you spell that, please?” the woman on the phone asked. She sounded busy and as if she were making a huge effort to sound sympathetic. Laura wanted to let her know there was no need to pretend to care, since no one had really died, but that would have defeated the whole purpose, of course.

  “D-u-n-c-a-n. Henry, of New York City.”

  “Yes, I got that part. And there’s no funeral information? No place to send donations? Flowers? Cards?”

  Laura hadn’t thought of that when she made the call. “Uh, no. It’s private. The family is very private.”

  “OK, then. You will see it in next week’s obits. I am sorry for your loss,” the woman said.

  “Thank you very much.” Laura hung up and then it was hard. It was like a piece of her very soul had been torn out of her body. The very thing that could make her whole, that had filled her heart and given her meaning, she had just thrown away. There was no worse feeling, because it was her choice. It would be like a starving person denying herself food and feeling herself die. She was dying, and yet they were both just beginning to live.

  They had to live.

  It was as if imagining the impossible — like being in the Holocaust and choosing not to be liberated — because Laura knew she had to let Jonas go and she wanted to believe there truly was another world to come, where they would be together.

  Laura decided to tell her father everything on her next visit, although she made sure not to take the subway.

  “Well, I’m not walking,” Mitchell told his sister. He had gone with her this time, as it had been three months since he had been to the city and their dad was leaving for Europe in a few weeks.

  “Suit yourself,” Laura said. She turned to see Mitchell fall into step beside her. “I’m going to tell dad I want to live with him.”

  They walked together up Eighth Avenue. When they got to the next corner, Mitchell put out his hand to stop her from crossing. The light was about to turn red. It was almost like old times.