Specimen Days

Penn Station was mostly businesspeople, this early. It was the minor movers and shakers (the big ones flew) off to Boston or Washington, doing deals, standing now in the bright nowhere of the station, sipping Starbucks, talking on cell phones, guarding their briefcases against thieves, heads full of flowcharts and cost analyses; men in decent if unspectacular suits, women with impeccable hair and heavy makeup, working their pieces of it, lining up lunches, phoning in last-minute questions to bosses or instructions to spouses, maintaining their accounts, soliciting new business, keeping it going, moving it along.

And here she was, holding the hand of an impaired child, with two sacks of groceries, a pipe bomb, and a copy of Leaves of Grass. The others made a little extra room for her, unconsciously, the way New Yorkers do when they sense the presence of someone strange. Black woman with a compromised white child. Crazy. Or so luckless, so dispossessed, as to be crazy by default. Here, then, was the beginning of her strange new life.

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Their train was announced, and they got on. She found two seats, gave the kid the window. As the train pulled out, he pressed his moon face to the glass.

"Here we go," he said. "Yes. Here we go."

She was terrified and elated. She couldn't be too optimistic about their prospects it was hard to vanish, and she was already down to eight hundred and seventy-some dollars, after paying for the cab and the train tickets. Most likely she was only delaying the inevitable, and it would not go well for her if they were caught. She'd do time. Pete would intervene on her behalf. That would help. A lawyer would argue that she'd lost her own child and had collapsed under the stress of her job. Maybe they'd go easy on her. Maybe not.

And maybe, just maybe, she and the kid would get away. It happened. People disappeared. Maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to get a job waitressing or tending bar in Sarasota or Galveston or Santa Rosa. She'd keep them out of the cities. Maybe she'd be able to rent them a little apartment close to a beach, get a simple job, give the kid books to read, get him a dog. They'd probably have to keep moving. People would get curious. People would want to know why the kid wasn't in school, and telling them that he wasn't right, that she educated him at home, would hold up for only so long. But if they kept moving, if they lived in enough places, then maybe they could manage to eradicate their pasts, become just another woman with a child, trying to survive in the big, difficult world. There were so many people out there living anonymously. It was possible, it was not impossible, that they could join them.

The train pulled out of the long darkness of the tunnel into the marshland of New Jersey. The boy gasped at the sight, though it was only cattails and scummy little pools of dark green water.

"You like it?" she asked. "Uh-huh."

"You know what we need to do? We need to give you a name."

"I like Smokey. I do."

"Smokey's not a good name for a boy."

"Luke?"

"Oh, I don't think so."

"I know your other boy has that name. But I could have it, too, don't you think?"

"I don't know. I think you should have a name all your own."

"I like Luke."

He returned to the window, enraptured. Although the field of cattails was interrupted periodically by asphalt tundras full of empty delivery trucks, and was studded with utility poles and smokestacks, Cat had to admit that there was something… wild about it, if not exactly beautiful. Even here, this close to the city, were brief passages of land that had probably looked just this way before the first tree was felled to build the first farmhouse. It was a brilliant morning, building toward a hot, cloudless afternoon. Early sun gilded the marsh, glittered on the brackish water.

They were going, then. They were on their way someplace; there was no telling what would happen to them. It was morning everywhere. It was morning in Dayton and Denver and Seattle. It was morning on the beaches and in the forests, where the nocturnal hunters had returned to their dens and the timorous daylight animals, the ones meant to be eaten, were out browsing for food. It was morning on the tin roofs of factories and on the mountain peaks, morning in the fields and parking lots, morning in the rented rooms where women with no money did what they could to keep their children alive and healthy where they hoped, given what they had to work with, to make them happy, at least some of the time.

A seagull, almost painfully white, dipped down and for a moment kept abreast of the train. Cat could see the black bead of its eye, the spot of brilliant orange on the underside of its beak.

She took a quick look inside her bag. Yes, the bomb was still there. Her cell was blinking. Someone had left a message. She clicked the phone off.