Ben had, of course, been to New Jersey, but he’d never taken the train. Now, in the marble well of New Jersey Transit at Penn Station, he stood, like the other commuters (not many; it was 9 A.M. on Tuesday; almost everyone was going the opposite way) with chins tilted up expectantly, watching the big, black, surprisingly old-fashioned sign overhead to find out which track his train was on. Rockwell, on the Essex County line, was scheduled to leave in ten minutes.
Flip, flip flip—Track 2.
About half a dozen people in the large vestibule now turned, as one, in the same direction. Ben was reminded of how he’d felt traveling in Europe—the unfamiliar rituals, the secret language of commuters, the customs that appeared to be second nature to everyone else. So he did now what he’d always done abroad: he identified the person who seemed most at ease—in this case, a woman with a severe haircut talking into a wireless earpiece—and followed her surreptitiously.
The escalator to the trains wasn’t working, so everyone walked down the ribbed steps, strangely unfamiliar in stasis. Trains on both sides. Which one? There was no conductor in sight. Ben followed the wireless woman to the right and up to the front of the train.
Earlier, he had packed his leather satchel with the Times, a current New Yorker, a bottle of water, an apple. The toy store on his route to the subway was closed, so he’d ducked into Rite Aid and bought shamelessly crowd-pleasing presents for Annie and Noah: Day-Glo lollipops as big as saucers, a Dora the Explorer coloring book for Annie (a wild stab—what did little girls want? He had no idea), a froglike stuffed animal for Noah that apparently came with a code for access to some no-doubt addictive Web site. Charlie and Alison would almost certainly disapprove. Then again, Ben supposed, they had bigger things on their minds.
On the phone, when Ben had asked what he could do and Charlie said, “Really—nothing,” Ben realized that he would have to answer that question himself. What he could do was come to them. Claire had left for her book tour yesterday afternoon, as planned—of course she had to go; it would have been unreasonable not to—and Ben had gone into work, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t belong there. That he should somehow do more.
There was no clear etiquette for this. After all, he didn’t know (thank God) the child who had died. And it truly appeared that it wasn’t Alison’s fault. It was a terrible tragedy, but it wasn’t his tragedy—it wasn’t even their tragedy, exactly. So why did he feel compelled to take a day off work and come to Rockwell? How could it possibly help? He thought of Claire’s justifications: there’s nothing we can do. It’s a horrible situation, but really it’s no one’s fault; nobody should be taking this on themselves. Yes, yes, she was right. Rationally, this was none of his business. But instinctively he felt that coming to see Alison was the right thing to do.
The train was a bit dingy, and altogether too fluorescent—a poor relation to Metro North, the Westchester line that Ben occasionally took to see a client, filled with prosperous mortgage brokers and lawyers talking on cell phones and reading the Wall Street Journal. The people around him now seemed comparatively down-market: secretary types, men with shiny, buzzed hair in cheap inky suits; beleaguered mothers with unwieldy strollers. Was it the time of day? It was, to be honest, a little depressing.
The train lurched slightly as it left the station. Ben looked at his watch: 9:37. As he settled into his hard maroon vinyl seat, he was reminded of the many times, as a boy, he had gone with his mother to visit her father in a rest home in upstate New York, an hour from their home. He’d liked those trips—his mother, faced with nothing to do for an hour, relaxed and even seemed to enjoy it, chatting above the steady hum with an intimacy that was rare when they were home. They played card games and read books and talked. Ben liked looking out the window and watching the world glide by. He liked knowing that it might be this easy to leave one place for another. You got on a train, and then you were somewhere else. He particularly liked reading novels on the train; it felt doubly transporting.
For a long time, while Ben was growing up, the world outside his head held little interest. Outside his head, his mother was bustling around in the kitchen, fixing a family dinner his father wouldn’t show up for. The dinner would get cold as they sat there, Ben and his mother and his younger brother, Justin, and then his mother would say, in a strained, careful voice, “Well, you two go ahead,” and push her own plate away. Ben would struggle to eat the chicken and peas that tasted like dog food in his mouth. His mother would watch them silently for a few minutes, then rise abruptly and start clearing up around them, an angry clatter of dishes reverberating in the still room.
Ben could read anywhere. He read waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus, walking into school. He read at recess and before orchestra. He read at night in the room he shared with his brother after his mother had turned off the overhead light, squinting to see the words by the eerie glow of the night-light in the socket beside his bed. In his world the wizard Merlin was as real as Jim Townsend and Tyler Green, two boys who lived on his block and threw gravel at him when he walked by, hiding in the stairwells of their split-levels. Ben rode the trains with the Boxcar Children; he stepped through a wardrobe into a land where a great lion saved children from an evil witch. He was three inches tall, navigating the perilous terrain behind his house, where sparrows were airplanes and rain puddles lakes. At home Ben often felt helpless, at school he was invisible, but in his head he was a fearless traveler, a brilliant inventor, a hero.
Before Ben knew what an affair was, he sensed that his father was having one. The distraction and irritation, the careless lies—Ben could see that he was tearing away from the family, as slowly and painfully as an animal caught in a steel trap chewing off its own limb. To Ben it made no sense: they were a family, in a house with a yard—a tiny, scrubby patch of yard, but a yard nonetheless—in a neighborhood filled with families, mothers and fathers and kids. The only thing he could fathom was that his father must have another, better, family somewhere else. Later Ben would learn that, essentially, he did. Across town, in a small, second-floor apartment, a mistress and a baby were waiting.
At school, where he got As without even trying, Ben felt like a fraud. He couldn’t articulate what he really thought or felt or saw, so mostly he stayed quiet. By the time he was in ninth grade he was drifting through his classes, smoking pot with the stoners behind the school between periods. He joined the chess club, won every match, and then quit; he discovered Nietzsche and shaved his head. It was at this particularly confused point in his midteens that a high school guidance counselor stepped in. Handing Ben a stack of prep-school brochures, he’d given him a thirty-minute seminar on the ins and outs of scholarships and financial aid. A year later, Ben was at a small school in New Hampshire where there were so many smarter, weirder kids that he seemed fairly normal, even ordinary, by comparison.
When, in April of his senior year, he called his mother to tell her that he’d gotten into Harvard, she squeaked and started to cry. He was standing at a pay phone in the student center, using the phone card she’d given him for his birthday. All around him, other kids were opening their college letters, the contents telegraphed by the size of the envelopes. As his mother carried on he watched the faces register a flickering range of emotion. Ben had kept his application to Harvard a secret. There were kids in his class, legacies of legacies, for whom getting in seemed as inevitable as getting a driver’s license. He hadn’t wanted to set himself up for almost certain humiliation, so he told no one but the college counselor and the teachers he’d asked for references.
“Benjamin,” his mother breathed. “This will set you up for life.”
His mother’s elation was nearly matched by his father’s wariness when Ben called him a few days later. “So how’s this gonna work? You got a scholarship or something?”
“They’re offering me a package,” Ben said. “Some money outright, work study, loans—”
“Because I gotta tell you, Ben, I’d like to help you out, but it’s not a real good time. I got debts like you wouldn’t believe.” His father sighed. “Listen, I know you can do this. I had to work my way through school—”
“Dad, you dropped out.”
Ben could hear the static on the line between them. “You’re a smart kid, Benjamin. Smarter than I was, I guess. Right? I didn’t get into fucking Harvard. With that degree you can get any job you want, go into investment banking and make a killing. Jesus. A kid of mine, going to Harvard. I’m starting to like the sound of that.”
STEPPING DOWN FROM the train, Ben looked around, trying to get his bearings. The station was located in Rockwell village, across from a bagel shop that Ben recognized and the requisite small-town strip of dry cleaner, post office, bookstore, and coffee shop. Farther down the street were a nail salon and—of course; he should have guessed—a tasteful toy shop with educational wooden toys displayed in the window. It was a lovely day, mild and sunny, and despite the purpose of his visit, Ben felt strangely at peace. This was such a pretty town, Rockwell. Ben could imagine that one day he and Claire might move here, when they had a child, perhaps. It felt quite far from New York, more than the fourteen miles he had traveled to get here.
He went down the steps from the platform to the sidewalk and crossed the street. Bagels—no one would object to that. In the shop he began to order: everything, garlic, pumpernickel, onion—then remembered a time a year or so ago when he and Claire had come out to Rockwell for brunch, bearing smoked sturgeon and lox from Barney Greengrass, to find that Charlie had purchased only plain and, good lord, cinnamon crunch bagels. “Kids,” Charlie had said and smiled apologetically.
“Do you have cinnamon crunch?” Ben asked now.
Their house was easy to find. Clutching the warm, lumpy paper sack of bagels in one hand, the rustling plastic bag of gaudy presents in the other, with his satchel slung over his shoulder, Ben set off into the neighborhood. Though the ground seemed dry, clumps of snow, like errant tufts of cotton, dotted the dead curbside grass. Through the naked trees that lined the sidewalks, the houses along the way were starkly visible. A front porch here, a picture window there, hanging planters, a child’s bike: every home contained promise and mystery. As he used to do when he was a child, Ben fantasized about the lives behind each door, ascribing to each a glowing fire, a simmering soup, burbling children—idealized tableaus of domestic tranquility.
Nearing the Granvilles’ front walk, Ben slowed. He lingered before the gate of their white picket fence (really! A suburban cliché come to apparently unironic life), wanting to postpone the inevitable rush of feeling. For the first time, he considered the obligation that his presence would impose on Charlie to host him, the sadness and shame that Alison would be forced to express in response to his own unfiltered emotions (Alison—who loved children, who devoted her life to children), the patronizing futility of his sympathy.
He was, he realized in that moment, there for himself, not for them.
Claire was right. He was too myopic to see it until now. He was here to assuage his own guilt, to make himself feel better. To put his own mind at ease. What did he possibly have to say to a woman who’d just been in a fatal accident, to two confused small children, to a friend with whom he had fallen out of touch? What foolish posturing. The Zabar’s basket was one thing. Showing up on their doorstep with bagels and cheap toys was quite another.
And yet here he was. He unlatched the gate.
Charlie opened the door as Ben was mounting the steps. “Hey, man,” he said, extending his hand for a shake and clapping Ben on the shoulder at the same time, the kind of half-hug Ben associated with pro athletes. “Really appreciate your coming out. How was the train?”
“Oh, fine. Easy,” Ben said, following Charlie inside. “How—how is she?”
Charlie nodded, hands on hips. “She’s in the kitchen,” he said, as if that were an answer. “Al, Ben’s here,” he called out. “Just go on in,” he told Ben. “I’ve got to get out an e-mail, but I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ben was surprised to find Alison sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and making a puzzle with Noah. Then he chided himself. What had he expected, that she’d be crumpled in a ball on the floor?
She looked up and smiled, and it was then that he saw the dark circles under her eyes. He went over to her, and she half rose.
“No, no, don’t get up,” he said.
“I want to.” She reached over and hugged him awkwardly, the corner of the table between them. “I can’t believe you came out. And on a weekday.”
“Oh, goodness, no,” he said senselessly, at a loss for words. He ruffled Noah’s hair like a jocular uncle. “What are you making here?”
“Lion King,” Noah said without looking up. “We’re finding the straight edges first.”
“That’s the way to do it,” Ben said, flashing back to his own obsessive puzzle-making days. All those straight edges! “Simba,” he said, pulling the knowledge up like a bucket out of some pop-culture well in his brain.
“And Nala. And Mufasa. The picture’s on the cover of the box,” Noah said, motioning to an upside-down box top at the end of the table. “But Mommy and I don’t want to look. That’s cheating.”
“Oh. Right. Well, you’re doing a great job without it. Where’s your sister?”
“She’s at school, silly. It’s Tuesday.”
“ ’Course it is. Silly me.”
Alison was watching Ben with her steady brown eyes. He caught her eye and smiled, and she, seemingly startled, smiled back.
“Hey, monkey,” she said, putting her hand on Noah’s shoulder. “Think you can handle this on your own for a few minutes?”
“Why?”
“Ben needs a cup of coffee. Right?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Sure—no, whatever,” Ben sputtered. “Don’t go to any—”
She waved her hand at him and went over to the coffeemaker.
“I can’t do this without you, Mommy,” Noah said.
“Just do as much as you can. Or you can take a break.”
“Can I watch TV?”
She sighed. “Sure.”
“Cartoon Network?”
“PBS.”
“But—”
“Oh, all right, but only for half an—”
Before the words were out of her mouth, Noah had slid off his chair and slipped out of the room.
Ben shrugged the leather satchel off his shoulder and set the bag of bagels on the counter. “I wasn’t sure what to bring, so I just got these. And here are some godawful things for the kids, from a drugstore, of all places—”
But when he turned back to Alison she was collapsed in a chair, her shoulders heaving, her hands covering her face.
“Oh my God,” he said, “Alison.” He went over and knelt beside her, stroking her back.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Alison. I’m so sorry.”