They had to buzz him in. From the hallway outside he could wave to the nurses’ station through a little window criss-crossed with metal thread.

Amelia was watching TV in the middle of a blank-looking group of teenagers. It was easy to pick her out because her hair was the color of a candy-corn stripe, or an overripe pumpkin. In a baggy t-shirt and jeans, she looked like a half-folded coat rack.

“Dad!” she said when she noticed Al standing there. She moved to get up, then fell back in her chair.

He sat down beside her on the ratty couch. She put her arms around him, touched his back with bone-white hands.

“Hey,” he said, “are they being good to you here?”

There was a long pause before she whispered, “Yeah.” Her eyes were wide and focused on the distance, as if she were watching a movie from the last row back.

Al said, “Don’t worry, the doctors are going to have you all better in a couple of days.”

She turned to him and whispered, “Dad?”
“Yes?”

“Am I crying?”

“Honey, no.”

“But I am,” she said, and touched her dry cheeks. “Look.” She held out her dry fingertips and touched them to his cheek, cold fingers smelling of disinfectant. “I’ve been crying all day.”

His daughter’s medical chart was littered with common diagnoses: anorexic, bipolar, depressed, schizo-affective. She had been in the hospital for the past month, following a semester-long bender of wrecked cars, pregnancy scares, failing grades, and a final expulsion from college for something drug-related. The doctors gave Al progress reports over the phone. “She’s eating again,” they’d say, or “She took a shower without being asked.” She had just been moved from the second floor to the first, where visitors were allowed to show up unannounced and where her fellow patients looked occasionally sane.

At 7:13  that evening the train back to Connecticut rolled into the station, spitting sparks. Al stood with his toes at the edge of the platform, his body inches from the body of the train. The concrete floor trembled.

At the tip of his toe a 4-inch gap ran between the platform and the train cars. He let his toe creep closer until it was almost touching the moving wall of steel.

If I were to fall, he thought, and his spine tingled.

At his apartment, two cats met him at the door. He fed them, then fed himself. The fork in his hand was light as a piece of paper, and just as flimsy. At any moment he could have taken an end in each hand and crushed the delicate shape with only the strength of his fists. Now, he thought, now. He set the fork down on his plate and moved to wash the dishes.

*

The following day, Saturday, he went into the office. Lately he’d been working Saturdays, not because he had too much to do, really, but because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his house. With his wife gone and Amelia in the clinic, the cats had only him to stare at. They watched him read, or iron his shirts, with a bored, green look. At the office, at least, the hum of the HVAC kept him company, and the gray walls of the cubicle made a mild womb around him as he answered emails. He always signed them, “Best regards.” His boss always shortened this signature to just “Best,” which conveyed a certain importance, a sense of hurry that prevented the typing of the second word. “All the best,” signed Angela in the Art department, but Angela was over-effusive. “Best regards,” typed Al. And, “going forward,” and “brand-driven” and “first quarter net increase.” The copy machine whirred into action somewhere down the hall. In his nose: a scent that was dust and cleaning detergent, fancy shoe leather and cheap ink cartridges. Here at his plastic desk he felt padded on every side, like a child that had not yet been born.

When Al left the office that night the train came in harder than usual. It was a minute late. Al thought it would pass by, but it braked at the last moment in a roar of metal on metal. The raw mechanized power rattled in his teeth and hair, and Al saw his hand at his side, trembling.

*

On Sunday Amelia turned her dry eyes to her father and said, “Why doesn’t she ever come with you to see me?”

“You’re forgetting.”
“When is she coming to see me?”

He put his arms around her, careful not to squeeze too hard. “You know the answer to that question.”

“I’m going to scream,” said Amelia. She stood up. “Quick, I’m going to scream.” Beads of sweat appeared on her nose. Her eyes were huge. “I’m going to die!”

She collapsed on the ground. All the veins in her arms stood out, a blue and red map of her body.

“Get up, said Al, “You’re not going to die.”

Hi wife had moved to California the year before, leaving a note, the house, a daughter. Amerlia’s eating disorder had been bad then—she used to hide her food in her pockets and forget about it, so her mother was always finding mashed up sandwiches and bits of steak in the washing machine. Al’s wife had been raised by a single mom. She had worked her way through highschool, and then college, then law school. What could she do with a girl who would rather count calories than study, who collapsed on the couch after a half day of work at the coffee shop.

“You can’t just leave,” Al had said, when she finally picked up her cell phone. But  of course she could. She sent him alimony checks, big ones, signed with her signature: a giant T. T for Teresa, for Traitor. He felt like a hole had been blown through his chest, and everyone could look right through him. It was not just the pain; it was terror that crept in through the hole, terror for the day when his daughter would return from the hospital and they’d be left alone together.

At first he felt Teresa’s leaving with every cell in his body. But then, after a few weeks, the hole closed up. One day he woke up and felt nothing at all.

That evening he arrived at the station early enough to see the 8:03 pull out. The fat cable line that ran above the tracks dragged the train forward, slowly at first, and the wheels followed. Click-click went the wheels on the tracks, and Al’s heart seemed to beat in a matching one-two rhythm. As the last car passed, he reached out to touch the skin of the beast. His toe slipped past the yellow line. He reached—for nothing. His heart caught. Al hit the ground hard on his back, head beside the tracks. Through swimming vision, he watched the last car disappear into the tunnel, around the bend.

The railroad ties pressed like dinosaur ribs against the bones of his back. Twin lines of track ran forward to a point in the distance, a study in parallel lines. The air and walls of the pit smelled of oil and engines. For a moment he though, It got me, and he was thrilled to imagine his whole heart, flattened under the wheels.

“There’s a man down there,” a woman screamed. Strong hands pulled him up to the platform, and a man in uniform told him, “You gotta be careful buddy. What the hell were you doing?”

“Sorry,” said Al. He squeezed his fists together and looked up just in time to

see the last car disappear in the distance.

“I’m not going to live forever,” he had told Amelia once, and regretted it right away.

“You’re not going to eat ever?” she had asked, incredulous, her whole wasted body a question mark. She was always making mistakes – she had misheard  “blanket” as “bread”, “music” as “cupcake”, and “goodnight” as “chocolate milk”. The doctors told him, “Mental acuity will improve over time with increased caloric intake.” But for now she wore tubes in her arms, and had her pockets checked after every meal. “

“Was it the Barbies?” Al asked the doctors. “She had an awful lot of those as a kid.”

No, they told him. Anorexia nervosa in a complicated and little understood disease.

After his Sunday visit to the hospital Al decided to go into the office, just for a few hours. He’d caught up on his emails, but there was still that budget fiasco that would be good to finish before Monday.

The air filtration system whirred. He ate a chocolate bar from his desk, re-tallied last year’s numbers. He adjusted for inflation, that tax hike, temporary help for the month of December.

Jeanette, the saleswoman from down the hall, popped her head into cubicle.

“Hey, Al. Shouldn’t you be home today?”

“Shouldn’t you?”

She smiled guiltily. “Well, you know. Sometimes I feel better just getting it done.”

“I know. It’s not worth taking the whole weekend if Monday’s just gonna be hell.”

“It’s true.” She stood there, arm rested on his cubicle wall, coffee cup in hand.

Al shifted in his chair. She should leave now, he thought.

Jeanette leaned her shoulder against the cubicle wall and cross her right ankle over her left.  “Hey Al, we’ve all been worried, but no one wants to ask. How’s she doing?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and she caught it – a flicker. Then he smiled. “You know,” he said, “She’s doing better. Bit by, bit, you know. It’s a hard thing.”

“Oh good,” said Jeanette. “I remember when you used to bring her for the Halloween parties at the old office. She was just a little munchkin. She must be so big now.”

Al thought for a minute to make a joke, a cruel joke, but changed his mind. “She is,” he said. “She’s all grown up, almost.”

“Well I’ll keep her in my prayers,” said Jeanette.

“Thanks,” said Al.

It was true and it wasn’t, what he’d said to Jeanette. Bit by bit, Amelia was doing better. But each bit was so small he’d miss it if the doctors weren’t there to point it out. She’d started washing her hair again, for example. And now they wanted him to bring her home.

“I can’t,” he’d told the doctors just the other day. “I can’t do the pocket-checking thing.”

Okay, they said, and nodded, and noted on their clipboards. It was his money that was running out, his deductibles the insurance company was refusing to pay.

What Al wanted to say to their objective, intelligent faces was, I won’t treat her like an animal. He wanted to scream it! But he understood that visitors who scream in the mental health clinic are worse than no visitors at all.

On the evening train he considered Jeanette’s prescription, a prayer. His image of God was big and fluffy, with a face that looked persistently like his own father’s, no matter how hard he tried to shake the idea.

The train rushed through the evening darkness and cast a moving shadow with its lights. Under the shadows the houses and trees looked crouched and alive, like deformed creatures raising their arms against the light.

Al looked up at the ceiling of the train, as if it would help him compose a prayer. Twin eyes of chewing gum stared back. With his mouth he whispered, “Blessed father,  watch over my daughter.” But with his head he thought, I am an old fool.

The train leaped forward under him. Al pressed his hand to the window and felt its strength.

At home that night, he couldn’t sleep. The cats made snuffling noises at the foot of his bed. The house shifted and settled. It was almost two hundred years old, and its walls housed colonies of mice, he was certain. When Amelia was little she’d loved the mice, made him set special traps that didn’t kill, made him deposit the mice in an empty barn they’d found miles down the street. He’d caught a mouse every day for a long time, probably because they’d kept coming back. After a while, he’d given up.

As with many old New England houses, this one had been used, ages and ages ago, as part of the underground railroad. Escaped slaves had hid in a secret room behind a fake fireplace – the previous owners had told Al all about it. It was the Quakers, they said, who hid the slaves. He hadn’t thought about it much since they’d bought the house almost twenty years ago, but tonight he remembered so old boxes his wife has stashed there. Toys and such. She’d been such a great kid, Amelia.

The bedside clock read 3 am. He rolled and unrolled in his blankets, but he couldn’t sleep. She had to come home. The money was gone. And what was she doing in that place, anyway, with its sterile walls and terrifying patients?  He get up, wrapped in a blanket, and padded down the stairs.

He poured a glass of milk and wandered into the living room. With a touch to the  remote the television might spring to life. Or the overhead light might illuminate itself at just the tiniest flick of a switch. But Al sat in darkness.

Behind the TV, beneath the mantle of the fake fireplace, was a secret handle. It was tucked cleverly into the wood molding, hinged at the base. In front of all this, the TV  rested with an impotent gray glow. Al reached for the remote, then put it back. He stood.  Dropping the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Al groped behind the TV for the secret handle tucked under the mantle. The back of the fireplace swung open.

one more thing about Al’s house. It was small and cluttered. Every wallspace was hung with pictures or bookshelves; every corner with chairs or storage trunks. The attic overflowed with childhood costumes, his wife’s artwork, Al’s own boxes full of books and records he’d never had the heart to throw away. So he wasn’t surprised, just a little disappointed, to find the secret room filled as well. His wife had been using it for storage.

Plastic legs like fat toothpicks stuck out at every angle from boxes and wooden containers. Or hocks, rather, and fetlocks. They were the legs of horses. Plastic horses from Amelia’s girlhood, when she’d been so horse crazy she wore riding breeches to school. She’d had a whole farm of horses set up in the living room, with cut grass from the yard as hay, and a chopped up birdhouse for a stable. Horseville, that was what she’d called it. She had put a lot of thought into its planning.

He pulled a horse from the pile, a surprisingly delicate model with a hard plastic mane but a soft tail. Its sides were scratched terribly, so the cream-colored plastic underneath the paint showed through in huge patches. Amelia used to bring the horses to the dinner table, he remembered. His wife hated it. “This is snowball,” Amelia would say. “He likes grass, hay–and french fries.” Sometimes the horses would go wild, or “loco” as Amelia liked to say, and run, bucking and kicking, through the dinner plates. He remembered one time when the horses had turned over some soup, and Amelia had gone to her room, grounded. “It’s not my fault,” she had wailed up the stairs. “Robin has spring fever!”

He shivered. It was the coldest part of the night. He pulled another horse out of the box, and another. The names started coming back to him. “Ice cream,” “Sunny,” “Shadow,” “Bob.” He couldn’t remember which was which. He removed another and another, dusting their hard plastic sides. One had a broken-off leg. That one he had stepped on Christmas morning, when he’d staggered down the stairs to find it lying on the bottom step. Oh, she had cried. Maybe it was hard to be an only child, he thought.

Al counted thirty horses, and then lost track. He set up the birdhouse in the middle of the room, arranged a network of fences from the legos and building blocks he found in the box. You old fool, he thought, as he waded into the dewy lawn for grass clippings, bound them with dental floss into hay bales. He put oatmeal oats into a teacup and placed it in the center of the field.

The he set up the horses, some in the barn, some in the pasture, playing, rolling, sleeping. He set up one so it was breaking through the fence. He set a small group at the feed bucket, the lead mare holding hungry onlookers at bay.

Gray light peeped through the open window, casting dull shadows on Al and his herd. He watched the horses as the sun moved slowly up the window pane, and he saw them playing and fighting and living. He saw the stallion at the far end of the field, jealous and threatening, his proud coat reflecting the light. He saw the lead mare pin her ears to her head and snake her neck through the lesser horses, mouth open to show blunt yellow teeth. He looked and looked, and he saw what Amelia must have seen so many years ago.  The he stood, and picked up the horses one by one. He set them back carefully in their boxes, and tucked the birdhouse and blocks and legos in between. He closed the door to the secret room. His mind still ringing with hoofbeats, Al showered and dressed.

The train that would take him to Amelia roared into the station. He shivered at the beauty of the grease-blackened wheels, the steel nose perched on a leering grill.

I am not dead yet, thought Al, and then immediately, I am sad. He gripped the metal railing of the platform, but it did not give. I am angry, he thought. He stepped inside the train and felt the mechanized hum of life under his feet. People pressed against him, shoving for seats.

They buzzed him in. Kids were filing back from the dining room. Some still held their empty lunch trays out in front of them as if food might fall. Their faces were mostly dirty, their hair snarled in halos about their heads.

Amelia was there too, her walk crooked, her feet too big. She bumped into a tray-carrier, a girl. The girl stumbled.

“Look what you made me do!” said the girl, and pushed Amelia into the wall. Al saw only a heap of legs, a sweatshirt, a tray.

For a moment he wanted to crush the tray girl’s musty face with his hands. He opened his eyes wider and could see himself beating her with both fists, moving on to the walls, the whole building, the town, cities, countries, until the whole flattened earth begged for mercy. His heart flipped. He took a step forward, and then another.

“Hey,” he said to Amelia, “c’mon.” He reached for her hand, careful of the small bones.

“Stand on my feet and pull me up.”

He put the toes of his loafers over her dirty sneakers. Everything about her was still there, he realized. The thin hands in his—he had held them so many times. He had led those little hands so many places. Her eyes were his wife’s eyes, blue and sad.

“On the count of three,” he said. “One, two, three.” He pulled, and she came up like a feather, beaming.

She stood still for a moment, hesitating, picking the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“What is it?” he said.

“Is it time for me to come home yet, Dad?”

And it was the easiest thing to say yes. It was the happiest, easiest thing in the world. He wasn’t afraid any more. “Yeah, honey,” he said. “I think maybe it’s time to go  home.”