A streak of white light and the echo of a voice in my ear: Wake up.
I’m awake. The late train rolls into the station, lights flickering, wheels cranking, passengers in the seats around me animated, alive. There’s no intercom announcement to tell us we’re here, only the passing underground platforms to show that the heart of Grand Central Terminal is within reach. The shadows in the tunnels are so clear now. When I press up against the glass, they ripple with attention. As the train rolls past, their heads lift, their forms drift closer, as if I’m burning the brightest of candles in this window, from this particular blue vinyl seat, and they need to acknowledge I’ve come.
The train reaches the end of the track and pulls into the station. It might be the same platform from that summer afternoon thirty-two days ago or a thousand, I’ve lost count. People crowd the aisle and plunge toward the doors at either end of the car, aching to get out. There are fewer passengers at night, but they’re louder. Their anticipation leaks.
A girl sitting near me is slower, and all alone. She has a small suitcase she needs to get down from the rack and a pink sleep crease on her face. Whoever she is, she steps on me while pulling the suitcase down, and doesn’t say sorry. Then she’s gone.
On the platform, bodies surge past, a stampede that sets me reeling and keeps me back. I wait for them to leave, wait for the conductor to vacate the train; then I listen. The mouth of the tunnel is quiet and filled with folds of velvety black. Nothing is coming after me.
I slip out into the main concourse, where tickets are sold and where hundreds of thousands of people cross within a single day. There, under a tall domed ceiling containing a dizzying mural of the constellations, there in the center of the grand room, is a circular information kiosk. And its pinnacle, its centermost point, is a tall four-faced clock, glossy brass and golden in the light. There can’t be any other.
Just after midnight by the clock, she’d said. I’ll be looking for you.
I’m early. Only ordinary people drift near the kiosk now. They ask questions, they plan trips. Their feet are on ground, and not one of them is the girl I’ve come to meet.
The air is gold-tinged, shimmering with the smallest particles of dust. Soot and grime cling to the edges of the room. Still, the clock’s faces shine—legend says each face is made of pure opal—and they’re telling me I still have time. Once midnight is here and gone, I’ll know for sure if I’ve missed her, but until then I can’t keep still. I circle. I have no luggage and nothing to hold me down anymore, and I might be moving faster than I should, disturbing people gathered to wait for a coming train. Sometimes they stare after me, wondering. I’m a blur at the corner of their eyes. A moving shadow, gone when they blink.
To get a better view, I rise to the platform where the two staircases meet. I see others like me on the concourse, slipping by, hoping when maybe they shouldn’t still hang on to hope, and we recognize one another well enough to keep to ourselves. I suspect that on any given day, Grand Central is teeming with us. We’re another kind of passenger.
It’s the rest of the people I search, to see if she’s among them. I pause on faces and certain bodies as I pass. Sometimes they appear as familiar as a living memory, vivid with color and taste and surges of light, but only for a moment, and only because I’m making an effort. None of them are the girl I’m seeking. Once, I think I see a face I don’t want to see, walking forward with her meager mouth pinched, her daggered eyes on the downstairs gates. But if that’s her, free after near a hundred years in the house she is said to have died in, she’s not here for me. I tell myself it could be any other angry young woman traveling through this city. There must be so many.
When I return my gaze to the center of the concourse, the clock shows it’s a minute past midnight. Then another, and one more.
She’s not coming. I took too long, and she didn’t wait.
Just then I feel a tug, and I look to a shining face of the clock one more time. The glass is milky and shifting in tone in the station light.
Then I see her.
It might be her. It could be.
She’s a shadow near the kiosk, a slippery form out of the corner of the eye, same as me. We are the same, and maybe always have been.
She has her back to me, and there’s a moment when I question myself, when her movements make her seem like someone else, and then in the next moment, it’s clearly her, it can’t be anyone else, just as I’m now someone new, with a clean slate and a second chance. Outside the house, neither of us wears a mask.
How many nights has she come here? She said she’d be looking for me, but for how long?
I’ve reached the bottom of the stairs. I’m crossing the floor now, getting closer. The details of her don’t matter. Hair color. Shoes on her feet. A dress that’s black or blue or something else entirely. Even with her back to me, I notice the cowlick sticking up in her hair, her long legs and the way she leans, and it’s infinitely what I remember.
I’m at the clock now. She’s turned away from me, facing the information screen, as if she might reach out and finger a timetable, or cause some trouble and knock a stack of them over for fun to watch them spill.
I hold back. Is she only at the information desk to make a plan to go somewhere else? Will she take the Hudson Line away from here, or another train away from here, or will she head out to the street to hail a taxi? Have I only caught her when she’s leaving, once again? I used to wonder what might happen, after. I never expected it to be a train station, littered with strangers, coiled with noise. So much had come before this moment: All the anticipation and questioning if she’d be here, and the darkness between, when the trees stood sentry over my body and the whistling rang through the vacant space between my ears. All the wondering before the flash of light took me over and put me back on the train.
Before the woods that night, I didn’t know anything about her. Now she’s real.
I tap her bare shoulder. Her skin is warm like smoke and cool like air, the exact temperature of the room. She doesn’t seem to feel me.
I shift until I’m in her sight, if only she would stop busying herself with the train schedules and turn her head, just a little.
“Monet?” My voice cracks from disuse, but it makes sound. I hear myself as if the noise bounces off the celestial ceiling straight down to where we are. Even if it’s only a whisper.
Does she hear?
She turns. A stack of timetables falls from the container in a rippling cascade. Neither of us moves to try to retrieve them. I make out her eyes from the shadows: deep brown with flecks of amber. Mine, I can’t say.
After all this time, she’s right in front of me, and it’s a few minutes after midnight, as she’d promised. I don’t know how long it’s been since she dropped from the sky outside the gate and walked away without a scratch on her. But this is her, isn’t it? I’d know her anywhere.
I only hope she knows it’s me.