I Let the Escort Take My Place

The coffee in the galley was always burnt, but on that first morning back I smelled it before I opened my eyes, and my stomach turned with a fear that had no business being in a woman who, as far as anyone else knew, had never died. I sat up in the narrow bunk of the crew car and pressed my palm flat against my abdomen. Whole. Unmarked. I pulled up the hem of my shirt and looked. Nothing there but the pale line of my waist and the small silver scar from an appendectomy when I was nineteen. No puncture. No blood. No train carpet soaking up the last of me. The window showed the outskirts of Harborcrest sliding by under a sky the color of wet newspaper. Same sky. Same October. The clock on the wall read 6:14 a.m. That was the hour I had died. I sat there with my hands shaking and I made myself list what was true. My name is Elena Voss. I am twenty-nine years old. I have worked the Meridian Coast Line for six years. I am married to Grant Halloway, the train's senior conductor, the man everyone on the crew called steady. And two weeks from now, a man named Calvin Deke was going to take a knife off a fruit tray in Compartment Six and push it into my body. Except that was not what had happened. I had been replaying the last four seconds of that night for what felt like a year, and the picture never changed. Deke had lunged. Bridget Tobin, the new attendant Grant had asked me to watch, had screamed and thrown herself sideways. Only she had not been throwing herself away from the knife. She had put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me into it. I remembered the surprise on her face as much as the blade, as if she had expected me to move and I had not, as if my death were a calculation that had come out slightly wrong. I got dressed and went to the dining car. Grant was there with his clipboard, tall and clean in his navy uniform, the gold bars on his shoulders catching the first light. He looked up and smiled, and for one second I loved him all over again, which made me hate myself more than any knife could. "You're up early," he said. "Good. Listen, there's something you need to know about the new girl." "Bridget." "Bridget." He said the name the way a doctor says a diagnosis. "She's eager. Too eager. We've got a prisoner in six, plainclothes officers riding along from Westbrook to the terminal. I need you to keep her away from that car. She's got this idea she's supposed to serve everybody on the train, and I don't want her handing coffee to a man who'll take the cup and her hand with it." He handed me a manifest. Car six, berth two. Deke, Calvin. Transport detail, two officers. "They're not in uniform," Grant said. "That's why I'm telling you. If she sees a man in handcuffs she'll go to pieces, and if she doesn't see the cuffs she'll try to make his bed. Either way I need you between her and him. Can you do that for me?" I took the manifest and said yes, because that was what I had said the first time, and my mouth still knew the shape of it. "Good girl," he said, and kissed my hair, and went to check the platform. I stood there holding the paper and watched him walk away, and I thought about a detail I had never let myself look at straight on. Grant had never told me who the officers were. He had never told me what Deke was being transported for, only that he was dangerous. And on the first night of the trip, when Bridget had asked him whether the passenger in six needed dinner service, Grant had said no, and then one hour later he had sent her straight to that door with a fruit tray and no explanation. I took out my phone and wrote the date at the top of a note. October 3. Trip one of two. Then I wrote the four words I would need later: Find out who lies. The crew meeting was at seven in the small office behind the galley. Bridget was already there when I walked in, and she stood up fast, young and blond and so bright it hurt to look at her. Twenty-two, three weeks on the line, still wearing her cap even inside. "You're Elena," she said, like she had been told to memorize me. "I'm Bridget. Grant says you're the one to follow." "Grant says a lot of things." She laughed, uncertain. I watched her hands. They were steady. They had been steady on the first trip too, right up until they were not. "Car six is off limits," I said. "No service, no water, no eye contact. If a passenger from six asks you for anything, you bring me." "Why?" "Because I'm telling you." Her smile flickered. "Okay. You're the boss." She was not the boss, and neither was I. Grant was the boss. That was the shape of the whole train, and it had taken dying to make me see it. I spent that first day doing exactly what I had done the first time. I walked behind Bridget like a shadow. When she filled a pitcher, I took it from her. When she carried a plate of melon down the corridor, I stepped in front of her and said I would handle it. When she hovered outside car six with a folded napkin in her hands, I took her elbow and turned her around. By evening she was tired of me. "Did I do something to you?" she asked. "No." "Then why are you following me like I'm a criminal?" "Because the man in six is one." She looked at the closed door at the end of the car, and something moved across her face that I could not name. It was not fear. It was close to the look a person gets when they recognize a song they did not know they knew. "Okay," she said quietly. She did not fight me. That was the first difference. On the first trip she had fought me constantly. She had ducked around me three times a day. She had complained to Grant about me. Tonight she just went to her bunk and closed the curtain, and I stood in the corridor with my back to the wall and understood that this time she was waiting for me to make a mistake instead of trying to make one of her own. I found out the first truth at midnight. Grant kept the passenger manifest and the transport paperwork in the office safe, and I had known the code for four years because I did his paperwork when he was too tired to do it. I waited until the crew car was dark and quiet, and then I knelt in front of the safe and turned the dial with fingers that would not stop sweating. The transport order was on top. Two officers, Deputy Marshal R. Cohn and Deputy Marshal A. Reyes, carrying one prisoner from the Westbrook County holding facility to the terminal at Halloran Bay. I read it twice because the destination was wrong. The train did not stop at Halloran Bay. The line ran straight through to the coastal terminal at Saint Ives, and from there the prisoner would be transferred to federal custody in the morning. Halloran Bay was a dead platform, closed for repairs since the spring. I photographed the page with my phone, put it back exactly as I had found it, and locked the safe. Then I sat on the floor in the dark and made myself breathe. Halloran Bay was not a stop. So either Grant had told me a story he did not check, or he had told me a story he had written himself. On the first trip I had died before the train ever reached a stop, so I had never learned which one. I laid my head against the cold wall of the office and, for the first time since I woke up, I let myself think about the knife rather than the push. Deke had not lunged at me. Deke had been in his seat with his wrists cuffed to the rail when Bridget walked in with the fruit tray and the paring knife. He had asked her to cut the apple. She had set the tray on the table and stepped back, and then she had not stepped back far enough, or she had stepped back exactly far enough, and somehow the knife had ended up in his hand and I had ended up in front of it. The two officers had been in the corridor. Both of them. At the same time. Neither of them had gone for the prisoner until after I was on the floor. I wrote that down too. Both officers absent. One push. One blade. Then I went to bed, because tomorrow I had a train to run, and a husband to watch, and a girl to keep alive whether she wanted me to or not.