The doors between the cars flung apart and a man emerged, homeless, shuffling into the subway car on grimy bare feet. His hair was matted into a coarse helmet, and his clothes—she couldn’t look too closely at his clothes. He lumbered unsteadily through the car. His smell was like a force field, repelling everything in its path; when the subway finally stopped and the doors opened, new people stepped in with one foot and turned right back around to go to another car. Most of the people already in the car left in droves.
Some stayed put, though. Decided to bear it out. They were too tired to get up or too distracted by their handheld devices or they didn’t want to give up their seats. Their stops were coming up soon. And anyway, that was the car they’d picked, the hand they’d been dealt, this time around. They looked carefully away from him; they were afraid to draw his attention.
She was the only one looking in his general direction, so he walked right up to her. He stood there, swaying in front of her, his smell making her eyes water. He didn’t have a jar or anything. He held out a dirty palm.
She pulled three quarters from her pocket and placed them on his palm, and as she did so, her fingers brushed against his hand, and she looked up. His eyes were a caramel color, bright around the pupils and darker at the edges, and peering into them was like looking into a double eclipse. He had thick lashes, brushed with soot. He blinked.
“Hey, thanks, sister,” he said.
“You’re welcome.” His face seemed to spring forward, his needs and hopes etched clearly there, as if he had been waiting all this time for her to notice him.
*
Paul lost twenty pounds that first year. He got shuffled around the prison as if he was a piece of paper on the ground being stepped on with muddy boots. He couldn’t sleep; he’d lie there in the top bunk breathing in the smell of urine from the toilet in the corner and listening to the prison sounds of dripping and snoring and yelling. He didn’t know if the yelling was the other inmates screaming in their sleep or if they were pushed into wakefulness by their own misery, as he was. And underneath it all, the never-ending echo of Tommy Crawford calling him from the bottom of the well. He had long ago stopped trying not to think of Tommy Crawford; what he’d done was in the threads of his prison clothes and the grout between the cement bricks and the cat piss smell that permeated everything. Sometimes he still wished he could go back and do it all differently, but he couldn’t. Other times he wondered why life was like that: you did stupid things and couldn’t take them back no matter how much you wanted to; there were no second chances. He had said that to his lawyer once and the woman had pursed her lips, looking at him across the table like somebody’s sad mother. She was a woman in her fifties, thin, with bushy gray-blond hair tied back with a rubber band and blue eyes that always looked as if she’d been up all night worrying about him. He didn’t know why she would do a thing like that, when he wasn’t even related to her, but he was grateful for her services, and that he would get out of prison someday, though he would be almost thirty by then.
One day after a year or so had passed, they told him that he had a visitor.
He thought it must be his lawyer or his mom.
The guard brought him down the long hallway and into the room where the tables were.
When he saw who it was, he wanted to back up out of the room, but it was too late. She was sitting there, waiting for him. Her hair was grayer now than it had been in the hearing, but her face was the same, and her eyes turning to him looked like Tommy Crawford’s eyes when he was trying to decide whether or not he should go with him into the woods to practice shooting.
He wished he could hide under the table.
She picked up the phone on the other side of the heavy scuffed glass, so he did, too. “I got your letter,” she said.
He looked at her. He couldn’t think of any words to say.
He had written a letter about how sorry he was about what happened to Tommy. How he had liked Tommy and wished that Tommy was alive and he was dead. Everything he wrote was true. His lawyer had thought it might help if they went to court, but then they had plea-bargained, and he had sent the letter anyway, thinking the parents would never respond. Why would they?
“You said in the letter that you’re an alcoholic.” Her voice was low. She didn’t meet his gaze through the glass. “Is this true?”
“Mmm,” he mumbled. Then forced himself to say it. “Yes.” He was used to admitting it now, after all those AA meetings in prison.
“But you’re sober now?”
He nodded, then realized there was no way she could see him with her head bent down like that. “Yes.”
“Is that why it happened? Because you were drunk?” She was looking at her hands on the table in front of her.
He swallowed. His throat was dry. There was no water here. “No.”
“Then why?” She glanced up. Her eyes were sad, but they had no anger in them.