Day 8 - The Mistake

By Monday morning, Elliot had decided he had spent enough time thinking about fictional trains.

This was not denial.

It was proportion.

People were allowed hobbies.

People were allowed curiosities.

People were also expected to show up to work and remember whether the fire doors had been ordered.

At 7:45 a.m., Elliot stood in the temporary jobsite trailer with a cup of coffee in one hand and a set of plans in the other.

“Doors?” he asked.

Marcus looked up from his laptop.

“What about them?”

“Fire doors. Level three.”

Marcus kept looking at him.

“What?”

“You approved them Friday.”

Elliot frowned.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I reviewed the submittal.”

“You approved it.”

“I would remember.”

Marcus turned the laptop around.

On the screen was Elliot’s approval.

Date.

Time.

Initials.

Friday, 3:18 p.m.

He stared at it.

The signature was his.

The note beneath it was his.

Proceed. Confirm hardware set 4B before release.

He remembered writing that sentence.

Sort of.

Not writing it exactly.

Remembered the shape of writing it.

The email window.

The drawings open beside it.

Marcus’s voice somewhere outside his office.

And something else.

A woman asking:

Do you ever wonder if you would recognize someone in another life?

Elliot looked away from the screen.

“Okay.”

Marcus closed the laptop halfway.

“You good?”

“Yes.”

“You just argued with your own email.”

“I’ve argued with worse people.”

“True.”

Marcus waited.

Elliot reached for the plans again.

“I’m fine.”

Marcus nodded once.

He did not say he believed him.

That was one of the reasons Elliot liked him.

Elliot looked back at the approval on the screen one more time.

The problem was not that he had made a mistake.

He hadn’t.

The problem was that he had done the work correctly and somehow failed to remember doing it.

That bothered him more.

Elliot trusted systems because systems created records.

Dates.

Initials.

Decisions.

Proof that something had happened.

He trusted himself for much the same reason.

He remembered details.

Followed sequences.

Kept track.

Being unable to retrieve a moment from Friday should have been insignificant.

Instead, it felt like discovering one loose screw in something he had always assumed was solid.

He handed the laptop back.

“Hardware set 4B?”

“Already confirmed.”

“Good.”

Marcus looked at him for another second.

Then reopened the screen.

At 8:30 a.m., the superintendent wanted an answer about framing.

At 10:00 a.m., the owner’s rep wanted a revised budget.

At 11:17 a.m., Elliot stood in a hallway that did not yet have walls and listened to three men disagree about where a wall was supposed to be.

Normally, this kind of problem sharpened him.

Today, his mind kept splitting.

One part stayed on the jobsite.

The other kept returning to Megan’s handwritten note.

keep the question

He hated that phrase.

Not because it was dramatic.

Because it was incomplete.

Keep what question?

The obvious one?

Would you recognize someone in another life?

Or another one hidden underneath it?

Why did she keep writing them?

Why trains?

Why the same types of people?

Why twelve years?

And why had he known so little about any of it?

“Elliot?”

He looked up.

The superintendent was waiting.

“Sorry. Say that again.”

All three men went quiet.

That almost never happened.

Elliot felt the heat rise along the back of his neck.

Not embarrassment exactly.

Something closer to alarm.

He did not ask people to repeat themselves because he had been somewhere else.

People asked him.

The superintendent repeated the question.

Elliot answered immediately.

Correctly.

Everyone moved on.

He did not.

For the next several minutes, he overcompensated.

Repeated dimensions back.

Checked a note twice.

Asked for confirmation on something he already understood.

By the time they finished, he had solved the problem and irritated himself.

The train stories were not affecting his work.

He refused that conclusion.

Not because it was impossible.

Because it was disproportionate.

He had been distracted for a few seconds.

People got distracted.

Normal people.

Competent people.

He looked at the rough framing around him.

Then at the plans.

And forced himself back into the room.

At lunch, he sat in his truck instead of the trailer.

He told himself he wanted quiet.

That was only partly true.

He pulled out his phone.

Opened the photo he had taken Sunday of Megan’s legal-pad note.

Not the manuscript.

His own note.

recognition language increasing?

He zoomed in.

Then immediately felt foolish.

There was nothing to discover in his own handwriting.

He put the phone down.

Outside the windshield, two laborers crossed the lot carrying a sheet of plywood between them.

One was walking backward.

The other was directing him around a stack of material.

“Left.”

“Your left or mine?”

“Mine.”

“That’s not helpful.”

Their voices drifted through the glass.

Elliot watched them maneuver the plywood around the obstacle.

A simple problem.

Shared information.

Clear direction.

Eventually the board ended up where it belonged.

He looked at the dashboard clock.

12:24.

Megan would have hated how much meaning he was apparently capable of assigning to people moving plywood.

He could hear her:

Congratulations. Grief has made you literary.

He laughed once through his nose.

Then stopped.

There it was again.

Her voice.

Not literally.

He knew that.

Memory was not haunting.

Memory was memory.

Still, the distinction had started to feel less important than it once did.

He did not mean that he believed she was there.

He didn’t.

What unsettled him was something less dramatic.

For months, remembering Megan had mostly meant remembering what was gone.

Her voice now sometimes did something else.

Commented.

Interrupted.

Teased.

Entered the moment.

The memories were not new.

His relationship to them was.

Elliot looked again at the men carrying the plywood.

One of them finally set it down and said something the other could not hear.

The second man laughed anyway.

Elliot looked away.

Marcus knocked against the side of the truck.

Elliot looked up.

Marcus held two sandwiches.

He opened the passenger door without waiting.

“Turkey.”

“I brought lunch.”

“You’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes not eating it.”

“That feels invasive.”

“I’m a concerned citizen.”

“You’re a nuisance.”

Marcus handed him the sandwich anyway.

For a minute, they ate without talking.

Then Marcus said, “You’ve been somewhere else all day.”

“I’m here.”

“You know what I mean.”

Elliot looked through the windshield.

A forklift reversed somewhere nearby, beeping at regular intervals.

“I found something Megan was writing.”

Marcus waited.

“She had stories.”

“Like a book?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Train stories.”

Marcus turned slightly.

“Trains.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“That reaction feels judgmental.”

“I’m trying to understand the genre.”

“There is no genre.”

“Are there murders?”

“No.”

“Robberies?”

“No.”

“Conductors with secrets?”

Elliot looked at him.

Marcus raised both hands.

“I’m narrowing.”

Elliot almost smiled.

“They’re different time periods. Different people. Same kind of…connection, I guess.”

Marcus took another bite.

“And?”

“And what?”

“You care.”

Elliot stared at him.

Marcus shrugged.

“You’ve known me fourteen years. I’ve never once heard you voluntarily describe fiction.”

“That’s insulting.”

“It’s accurate.”

Elliot looked down at the sandwich.

“I think she put us in them.”

The words sounded different outside his own head.

Less speculative.

More absurd.

More intimate.

He wished, briefly, that he had phrased it another way.

Marcus’s expression changed.

Not dramatically.

Just enough.

“You and Megan?”

“Maybe.”

“That seems like something.”

“Writers use people.”

“Sure.”

“She used everyone.”

Marcus nodded.

Elliot waited for him to say more.

He didn’t.

That helped.

No interpretation.

No careful question about what Elliot thought it meant.

No suggestion that Megan had been leaving him a message.

Just room.

Finally Elliot said, “One of the men folds things the way I do.”

Marcus looked at the folded sandwich wrapper resting neatly on Elliot’s knee.

Then at Elliot.

Elliot followed his eyes.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I really wasn’t.”

“You were.”

Marcus smiled.

Elliot looked away.

For a moment, he understood why he had told him.

Not because Marcus could explain it.

Because saying it aloud made the thing exist somewhere besides Megan’s office.

That was oddly relieving.

The afternoon went better.

Not perfectly.

Better.

He caught two issues before they became problems.

Answered fourteen emails.

Reviewed a schedule update.

Remembered the fire doors.

At 5:12 p.m., he shut down his computer.

Marcus was still at his desk.

“You leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Home?”

“That is generally where I live.”

“You reading trains?”

Elliot stopped at the door.

“No.”

Marcus nodded.

“Sure.”

Elliot walked out.

At 6:11 p.m., he was in Megan’s office.

He did not turn on the overhead light.

The desk lamp was enough.

That felt different.

The room had been hers in daylight.

At night, with the lamp on, it felt closer to how he remembered it.

Megan working.

Megan muttering.

Megan typing a sentence, deleting it, typing the same sentence again, then announcing that language had failed.

Elliot sat.

The TRAIN folder was still open on the computer.

He clicked through the files.

Observation.

Sleeper.

Mail.

Club.

He stopped at a document he had not read.

platform_2018

He opened it.

At the top:

THE PLATFORM

Boston, 1912.

Below that, Megan had written a note to herself in italics.

Five minutes should be enough if they are the right five minutes.

Elliot read the sentence.

Then looked at the clock in the corner of the screen.

6:14.

At work, five minutes meant a delay.

A missed call.

A subcontractor waiting.

An inspection running over.

Five minutes was something to recover.

Something to account for.

Something to keep from becoming ten.

Megan had apparently thought five minutes could contain an entire relationship.

Of course she had.

He scrolled down.

Rain.

A station.

A woman trying not to cry.

A man sitting beside her beneath an awning.

Elliot leaned closer.

He had told Marcus he was not going home to read trains.

Technically, that had been true when he said it.

Probably.

He started reading.