The Violet Hour: A Novel (35 page)

Toby looked out the window at the platform, but the glare from the lights inside made it difficult to see anything beyond the fluttering
shadows of people moving like moths in a yard. The hairs on Toby’s arms stood up and he wasn’t sure if it was because the air-conditioned car was so cold or because he’d just narrowly missed being slugged.

And then the man was before him again, glowering by the nearest pole. The smell of whiskey was overpowering. Beside him, Elizabeth sat very still. Toby said nothing, as though silence and stillness would save them.

“Why’re you laughing?” he asked Elizabeth through the pitiful plastic divider.

“I’m not,” she whispered.

“You’re not,” he taunted. “You’re not.” Her words seemed to take on frightening new meanings each time he repeated them back. “What the fuck is good, then? What the
fuck
is good?”

The few nearby passengers had become aware of the confrontation and were moving to the other end of the car.

“It’s cool, man,” Toby said inanely. “It’s cool.”

The man kicked an empty seat. “Show me what’s cool!” he shouted. “George fucking Bush? Your fucking cop brother, your fucking girl? What the fuck is good, huh? What the
fuck
is good.”

Elizabeth knew it was nonsense. The man was raving; he wasn’t even talking to them, not really. But it was nonsense of the variety that sometimes made sense. A cylinder rolled around beneath her seat, knocking against her ankles as the train slowed to enter the next station. They had only made it one stop. The doors opened, and everyone else escaped. The man waved his hat and shouted after them. “Get off! Get the fuck off this motherfucking train!” Quickly, Elizabeth ducked down and grasped the cylinder. An empty glass bottle. What luck. She straightened up again, holding it under her legs, then calmly passed it to Toby.

“Only if,” she said, barely audible.

The train was moving again and the man whirled around once more. “What’s so funny?” he asked again, as fresh passengers scuttled away. “You got something you wanna say to me? You wanna tell
me about fucking Afghanistan? Fucking Katrina? My fucking,
fucking
ex-wife?”

He dropped the hat and slammed his hands against the partition. “Don’t smile at me!” She bit her lip. “Tell your girl to stop fucking smiling!”

“Just leave us alone, man,” Toby said. “We’re sorry.”

“Damn right you’re sorry. Damn
right
.” He slammed the partition again.

“Okay!” Toby sat back, hands up, to show he was unarmed. Elizabeth glanced at the ground, where the glass bottle stood upright between his feet. Surely, someone had alerted the Metro police by now. Even so, Elizabeth felt her desperation rise. She wanted Toby to use the bottle. She wanted to see Toby shatter the glass on their aggressor’s head, wanted to watch a trickle of blood run down his skull and around his ear before he face-planted, unconscious, before them.

He swooped toward them again, hunching down, like an angry moviegoer ordering tickets. Nothing was stopping him from coming around the partition, and yet, each time, he stopped just short. He hovered there, only inches from her face, his lip curled and his eyes lowered as he prepared himself to speak. Elizabeth sucked in her breath. It was as though he were about to break character and at last say something real—a deep and complicated secret she’d always wanted to know. A drop of spit glistened deliriously on his lip. The truth was in there, she thought, delirious herself, if she could only just wipe it off.

Before he could make another move, Elizabeth got her wish. Toby stood and flung something small and hard into the man’s stomach, with the same motion he would’ve used if he were skipping a stone on a lake. The man doubled over and in that instant, Toby brought the bottle straight down on his skull. Shattered glass landed everywhere. Stupefied, the man staggered backward, holding his head in his hands. He sat down on the floor in front of an empty seat, knees akimbo, spine hunched, looking all too much like a beggar on the street.

Elizabeth rushed to him. “Are you bleeding?” she asked, looking down at the top of his head. There weren’t any obvious shards, but a sticky pool was already matting his uncut, gray-streaked hair. Still, it was less blood than she would’ve expected from a laceration to the head. Toby was next to her, breathing heavily.

“Do you have a handkerchief?” she asked the man, who gave her a bewildered look. She looked around for people carrying shopping bags, or wearing more than one shirt, but Toby was already offering his. It had a design on it, and it seemed too special to be sullied with a stranger’s blood.

“It’s just a T-shirt!” Toby said, stuffing it into her hand, his shoulder bones holding up the long, flat stretch of his torso. There were his nipples, his coiled stomach, neither of which she’d seen before. He looked like a poster that had just been unrolled.

She put the balled shirt in the man’s hand and told him to press down against the wound, then made him watch her finger, look her in the eye, and tell her his name, the day, and location. His pupils were normal, his speech and balance as good as any drunk’s. His name, or the name he gave, was James. He gripped her hand like a patient.

“On a scale of one to ten,” she asked, “how much does it hurt?”

“A five or six,” he told her. “No, seven. I’m gonna have to puke.”

Somehow, they got him off at the next stop, where he immediately threw up in a trash can. The Metro police were waiting in a pair to receive them. Walkie-talkies echoed off the barrel-vaulted, honeycombed walls. The cops had cold faces, like pennies, their arms flexed to draw weapons if required.

Instantly, Elizabeth wished she were back on the train. She didn’t think she could handle an interview of any kind, certainly not with anyone in uniform. Yet she was soon escorted to an alcove, where a female officer gave her water and prodded her for answers. Elizabeth faltered. The truth was suddenly unspeakable, like some other person’s private trouble that it wasn’t her place to tell.

“Did this man threaten you?” the cop kept asking.

“We have to get him to the ER” was all Elizabeth could say.

When they were done, she rejoined Toby, who was standing outside the station office and wearing the quilt like a cape over his naked shoulders and back. The dip of his sternum was visible as was the trail of hairs that extended from his belly button and disappeared beneath the waist of his slacks. Elizabeth could see now that his knees were stained with grass and dirt. She combed her hand through the back of her hair, finding it snarled like a nest. A half-dozen tiny red nicks were appearing on her fingertips where she’d inadvertently touched broken glass.

“You told me to,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t have had the guts otherwise.”

Inside the office, they could hear James crying. “They can’t keep us here,” she said. “He needs stitches.”

Toby squeezed her hand, and though it hurt where she’d been nicked, she let him. What a peculiar person he was: a papardelle noodle with unsuspected strength.

“He’s a veteran, isn’t he?” he said.

“Whatever he is, he’s in a lot of pain. And not just because of you.” She couldn’t help feeling a little angry with him.

He released her hand for a moment, then returned, clasping something into her palm. “Keep this,” he said. “It was for you.”

She looked down at the smooth striped stone in her hand—an actual skipping stone—and now presumably also a weapon of assault. She dropped it hastily into her bag, unable to recall ever having been given such an incriminating gift.

“We should bury it,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that it wouldn’t matter either way.

“Like your poem, you mean? Or whatever it was you wrote?”

“I wrote something?” she asked.

“At the grave.”

It was hard to get away from that—the event of the week—the shock that had, in fact, allowed her to lose herself for a bit. Toby’s hand was back in hers, and he was running his thumb along the ridge
of her knuckles. She didn’t think anyone had noticed, but as it turned out, he had. She was beginning to realize that there was actually very little he missed.

Grief made people do foolish things. So she had written something—so what? It was just one sentence, an urge to send something human into the ground with her grandpa, one of the best humans she’d ever known. It wasn’t a message for the ages, or really even a message for the day, just something she thought he would’ve liked. Of course Toby wanted to know what it said. But some sentences weren’t meant for anyone else to read.

I
N THE END
, no one pressed charges. The Metro police let them go, without paperwork, without fees, just a stern censure that Elizabeth barely heard. There was no time to question justice, to wonder if their story might’ve turned out differently had they looked less reputable and good. She was in the glass elevator before she knew it, watching the cables churn them upward toward the sky. Paramedics met them at the surface. She began to tell them what had happened, but like the police, they already knew. Brusquely, they turned to James, who’d grown contrite, a paper tracing of the bully from the train. He still held Toby’s T-shirt to his head, his gaze aimed toward the ground. They stood by while the paramedics helped him into the back of the ambulance, then watched it pull away.

A pale blue taxi appeared in front of them, and Toby opened the door for her, the quilt now slung over one shoulder, like a mountain climber carrying his rope. He’d put his dress shirt back on, half-buttoned; his tie hung loosely around his neck.

She hesitated. “Where are we going?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re pretty close to my house.”

Part of her wanted to go with him, to keep alive whatever they were doing just a little while longer. But equally strong was her instinct to stay on the sidewalk, where she still had control of her life.

When the cab finally pulled away, and she looked back at Toby on the sidewalk, with the gilded logos of designer boutiques hovering bubblelike all around him, she knew she had made the right decision. She’d taken enough risks that day already. She pulled her grandmother’s quilt around her shoulders and leaned her forehead against the air-conditioned glass.

A
be walked Cassandra back to her parents’ house. He’d felt expansive at the picnic table, as though a membrane encasing his head had grown elastic and roomy, a giant bubble inviting everything inside. He found himself willing to listen, even to the heaviest stuff; nothing she said could trouble him. A pleasant echo of that feeling remained with him now as he stood idling by the sauna in the yard.

“Do you want to come inside?” she asked, reaching for the door to the porch.

“Is Elizabeth there?”

“Probably. Want me to get her?”

He nodded and she went in, still holding the newspaper. Though he was sweating, he was enjoying being outside. He looked up at the overflowing brushy treetops painting the deepening, increasingly brilliant evening sky. He had forgotten that there was natural beauty here, but of course there was. He wasn’t far from Virginia, its heavy vastness, his old home of long, sleepy mountains floating on an inland ocean of green. If he turned his head he was even able to block out the office tower that rose above the Fabricant roofline. From where
he stood it was all trees, as though in this brief corridor, he was still in the wilderness, and civilization hadn’t yet arrived.

He heard the screen door again, a springy pastoral sound, and turned back to see Cassandra on the step. “I can’t find her. She must’ve gone out somewhere.” In the golden evening light her expression held shadows of concern. She folded her arms across her chest, seemed to shiver in the heat. “I’m worried about her.”

“Why?” Though he was, too. He’d always been worried about her. Even as a little girl, her ambition was sealed so tight, it seemed it would shatter at the first knock of disappointment. But time and again she proved him wrong, getting into Harvard, getting into medical school. Even when things didn’t go as planned, she’d found a way to explain them for the better.

Cassandra came down a few paces and lowered her voice. “You noticed Kyle wasn’t at the funeral.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” She rolled her head around. A light came on in the house upstairs and there was movement in the room behind. “He was here and then he left. I saw him go, and I didn’t stop him. That was Tuesday. He wouldn’t tell me why, and now she won’t talk to me. It’s excruciating.”

“She knows you—how did you put it?—didn’t stop him?” He felt odd asking her this question, as though they were talking about some other man’s daughter.

“I just wish she would talk to me about it. I have no idea how she’s feeling.”

Her face was one giant raw emotion. Perhaps she was the one he ought to worry about, but even seeing her like that felt intrusive, as though he’d barreled carelessly into her room and glimpsed her naked after all these years. He looked at his feet in the grass. “She usually talks to you about this stuff?”

She sucked the hot air through her teeth, as though it were coffee, waking her up to her new reality. “I guess not anymore.”

Taking a step closer, he placed a hand on her arm, still looking in
the direction of the ground. She flinched at first but then relaxed, her skin warm and a little sticky, her blood pulsing everywhere under his palm. It was the first time they’d really touched.

“I always thought we’d be the best of friends,” she said, crying now. “What happened to my little girl?”

“Shh,” he said. He pulled her head into his shoulder, and let the tears seep into his shirt. Compared with the air, they were cool.

A
FTER SHE WAS
done crying, she barely had the strength to stand. She withdrew from his shoulder, and he watched as she tottered across the lawn toward the house.

Back on the main road to his hotel, he passed banks and pizza shops and the occasional yoga studio. Each cross street bore new condos and offices to his left and trim rows of houses to his right. He stayed on the right side of the road. At one corner, a woman in spandex stretched her calves against a brick wall, then took off running. He went over to where she’d been and placed his hands on the wall’s hard surface, as though to slough away the feeling of Cassandra’s skin, which had lingered, achingly, in his palm.