IN THE MORNING, AT THE RISK of being late for chapel, I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a large hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a chocolate cake donut with red, white, and blue sprinkles. We had just over one month of school left. One more month at Academy of the Sacred Heart. We still didn’t know what was going to happen to the building, but we’d all noticed that the nuns had been holding closed-door meetings with various groups of business-looking people in black pinstripe suits. We didn’t bother asking our teachers who they were because we knew they would never tell us. I’d already received my schedule from Lincoln High School. Instead of plain old English IV, I had been placed in AP Language and Composition—a class ASH didn’t even offer, a class that might give me college credit and save me money in college tuition, a class that Tino—I couldn’t help myself from hoping—might sign up for, too. In place of Topics in Catholic Social Justice, I had signed up for Introduction to Ceramics and Wheel Throwing, which made me feel both excited and sad at the same time.
Still, I was feeling pretty good. My mom had let me borrow her car, and compared to Red Rocket, her Toyota Camry was like driving to school in a luxury vehicle. Alexis didn’t hate me anymore. My tattoo was healing. I was free of Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily. And Catherine Barkley and Lieutenant Henry had escaped to Switzerland in a rowboat. I was sitting in a pink plastic booth, waiting for my hot chocolate to brew and watching the sleepy-looking construction workers and teachers who stood in line for their early morning coffee when my phone rang.
“Wendy?”
Over the course of a person’s lifetime, you hear your mother say your name thousands, maybe millions of times. And each time there is a tone—of love, annoyance, impatience, affection, disappointment. But there’s a special tone that all mothers reserve for the worst things, and even though, if you’re lucky, she only has to use it once or twice, you still know it immediately when you hear it. Up until that phone call at the Dunkin’ Donuts, I’d only heard it once before: when my mom sat down at the kitchen table with Stevie Junior and me to tell us that our dad’s arrest hadn’t been a mistake. She didn’t even use it when my grandma died, because my grandma had had cancer for a long time and we’d been expecting it.
“Wendy,” my mother said again. There was a rustling on the other end of the phone, as if she was wiping her nose. “There’s been an accident.”
I couldn’t say anything. I was struck dumb by that tone. I waited.
“At the train crossing.”
She told me, then, as I sat in a booth at the Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting for my hot chocolate and my donut with patriotic sprinkles, about the thunderstorm. About how it had knocked out the city power grid, so that last night, when Alexis was walking home from her violin lesson, there was no red flash of warning lights and no guard rail going down. There was only the urgent, hysterical clang of the 9:45 freight train bound for Kettleman City, California, washed out by the soaring beauty of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor blasting out of her headphones. About how this train, weighted with its thousands of tons of coal, had struck her clean out of her jacket and shoes and thrown her into a nearby ditch of scrub grass scattered with beer bottles and dotted with mud puddles. About how her body had remained in that ditch for over an hour, eyes open and collecting rain, oblivious to the wind and the cold and the airplanes that descended one by one onto the runways of O’Hare Airport. About her violin case, which the police found lying in the middle of Avondale Avenue a few feet from her body. About how, eventually, the head beam of another approaching train illuminated her and the driver of a car waiting at the crossing saw the slash of her dark hair in the white lights, saw her leg that was turned at that horrible angle, an angle that made him tell his son to wait in the car because he knew that whatever was down there in that ditch was something that he didn’t want his child to see.
Accidents. Coincidences. Miracles. Tragedies. Signs. The train lights had been down, I would later learn, for three minutes and twenty-two seconds—a length of time shorter than a high school passing period.
It’s nothing. It’s everything.
I don’t remember what I said to my mom before I hung up the phone. The pink and brown walls in the Dunkin’ Donuts blurred together and I felt like I was walking through a tunnel that just got narrower and darker the farther you walked in it and the Dunkin’ Donuts lady had to yell at me three times before I heard her and went over to the counter to collect the breakfast I could no longer eat.
I stepped out into the drizzle, which continued to fall like a hangover from the previous night’s storm, and walked across the parking lot. I climbed into my mom’s car, turned on the ignition, and just sat there, not exactly crying, but breathing in this uneven, gasping way.
I’d gotten home last night just before the credits of Teen Mom 2, which ended at 10:00.
Alexis had been killed by the 9:45 freight train.
I was the last person to see Alexis alive.
Or was I? After all, I didn’t know the exact time I had run into her on the sidewalk. Probably 9:30 or 9:35. But what if it was 9:46? Or 9:50? Or 9:55? What had Aunt Kathy once said? That you can believe in God and ghosts at the same time? Alexis had been walking alone down that dark street, and when we had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to talk, there was nobody else around. The cold spots—I’d shivered—the cold spots. Maybe, when she’d looked at me with those wide, true brown eyes of hers and said, I know it was you, maybe the train had already struck and she was now crossing to the other side, her waving hand a final sign of farewell before she vanished forever into the company of all the rest of our invisible saints.