She is reading a decent-sized book but it looks worn: the pages are stained yellow on the sides, the binding is broken up by wrinkles and white lines from the color fading, the hardback is missing the bottom corner and the paper cover was obviously long gone. It is the same book almost every time he sees her — it must be a favorite. Eddie wishes he could know what book it is. She obviously loves it so much that she is not interested in buying a new copy despite how the current one is slowly falling apart from frequent use and improper storage. Her face is hidden by the book, held in one hand just low enough that if she needs to use her peripheral vision she can. He can see the top of her glasses, black square frames with rounded corners (Eddie likes how they are too big for her face, just like his daughter Abby’s) and her eyebrows are furrowed in concentration as if she has not read the story probably a hundred times. Her hair is split down the middle, curled, with her dark roots reaching almost to her ears to tell the world that the natural looking red is not real. Eddie has speculated why she let it grow out so much. Maybe it is too expensive for her to fix. Maybe she is over the red but does not know what to change it to. Maybe she wants her natural hair to take back over and start a new era.
In between her legs is one of those big metal tumblers that looks like it could fit three cups of coffee. He used to think she drank chocolate coffees, iced, because it seemed to fit her. Then he thought it was water because she does not sip on it often enough to be coffee. Now he thinks it might be hot tea because she sometimes blows on it when she opens the lid. But he has only seen her take a sip once or twice so it could really be anything: coffee, water, tea, maybe even an Irish coffee. No, she does not seem to be a day drinker. She looks too put together to fit that stereotype. The tumbler is covered in stickers but most of them have faded or have been almost scratched off, though Eddie does not think she cared enough to remove them. Instead, he thinks that she has had the cup for so long that the memories of putting them on were probably as faded as the stickers themselves.
Her nails are painted white and cut short and they tap on the metal cup in her lap to no particular rhythm, much to the annoyance of those seated next to her, but Eddie hears the song she is trying to create. It is not a song he would hear on the radio at work or covered by a broke yet talented musician on the New York subway platform while he waits; it is a song of her own creation to a beat only in her head. When the tapping would speed up, he always thinks it is because she is at a pivotal point in her book — the hero has been stabbed, the main couple of the love story has broken up, all hope is lost — and she is so into it that it affects her song.
The tapping stops when she goes to turn the page and he looks away; he is not trying to stare, or be a creep, or scare her. He is just so interested in her, creating details about her from what he can see. It is how he passes the time. He used to look at his phone, attempt to scroll through the Internet, or do a crossword puzzle, but those would make his eyes hurt. Something about her has captivated him, got his creative wheels turning every time he smells her flowery perfume enter the subway train. By the time the car screeches to a not-so-gentle halt at her station, he has already had his coffee and read the morning news updates in the free paper so he is awake and ready to observe. Today she is wearing light green jeans with a long sleeve black and white polka dot blouse tucked into the waistband and her usual black flats. Always the same black flats with the peeling material and faded color. Maybe they are a requirement for her job. Maybe they are just comfy. Eddie thinks that she probably does a lot of standing or walking throughout her day. He hears the tapping resume and dares a peek just in time to see the woman sitting next to her glare at the rapping hand as if that would make her fingers stop moving to an unheard song but she never notices. She is too engrossed in her book, though he could safely assume she already knows how it ends. What makes that book so special that she is brought back to it over and over? Is it sentimental? Is it written so skillfully that it is impossible not to feel a desire to reread? He loves that she is a reader, just like Abby. It makes it easier to think about what she might be like.
She holds the book in front of her face instead of in her lap, giving him the impression that she does not want to be seen or spoken to on her morning commute. He is fine with that; Eddie does not want to talk and he does not want her to talk and ruin the idea of her that he has built in his mind (but he has considered that he just trying to ignore how unlike Abby this is). Eddie thinks she must wake up earlier than really necessary every morning to do her hair and cover her under-eye bags with makeup. Normally, he would use this as an argument that her job is very important to her, but sometimes he thinks it just makes her feel good. Behind her novel, she hides her finished look that is professional and (though Eddie is not sure he wants to say it because it feels like it is crossing the line of being a creep) pretty. She looks pretty. An innocent kind of pretty that you can take home to mom and dad and introduce with pride because you know you would not see any judgments on their faces or hear any uncertainty in their questions.
Eddie imagines her to be very sweet. The kind of person who would be late to the train to help a woman who dropped all her paperwork on the sidewalk and is having trouble keeping it from being blown away by the people walking by. He refuses to believe she is not the type of coworker who would stop what she’s doing to teach you how to use the new program downloaded by IT overnight because you lied on your resume. He believes her jokes are not really that funny but the fact that she thinks they are hilarious makes them comedy special material. Eddie assumes that before she gets to the punch line, a laugh from the heavens comes from the back of her throat, soft and quiet, muffled by her hand covering her mouth to hide her amazing smile from the person who still has not heard the whole joke. He wonders if her laugh sounds the same as Abby’s.
The train squeals to an unscheduled stop; Eddie lurches, the overhead handrail keeping him from falling completely. She grips her cup with her hand to keep it from tipping over, lowering the book just long enough for him to notice her makeup does not look how it normally does. Her mascara left little black dots under her eyes and her pink lipstick is a faded pastel. Those beautiful green eyes look at everyone with a suspicion he has only seen on one other person before, his Abby. When she gets to him, he looks away because he knows that if he ever makes contact with them he will not be able to look away. Once her face becomes blocked by her old novel, he takes her in again. Her nails are moving more frequently, the song sped up beyond even his recognition. After a moment he realizes the notes do not seem to follow her reading; they follow her eyes. When she looks up the movement stops, when she looks back down her public annoyance ensues. Her neighbor sighs loudly, a hot, dramatic puff of air that seems to go unnoticed except for her head turning so slightly that Eddie barely catches it. She looks in his general direction again as the train begins to move and he involuntarily leans back, his eyes following the movement to study the ceiling. Eddie is not looking at her but he can feel the mistrust he saw earlier digging into his face, memorizing every detail from his uncombed graying hair to the permanent bend in his nose to the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he can see her gathering her items into her arms right before the automated announcement plays for her destination. As she exits the subway car, she glances at him one last time, her face scrunched up in distrust and uncertainty.
***
Usually, in the mornings, Eddie gets up late and still takes his time. He lays in bed, glances at his missed calls, slowly but lazily does a cursory walk though of his personal hygiene, before putting on a slightly different variation of the outfit he wore yesterday. Sometimes, if he is not feeling tormented enough, he might listen to Abby’s voicemails while walking to get the coffee he needs to keep him going on his even longer walk to the subway station. Eddie goes to the same place every morning, not because it has the best pick-me-up in the neighborhood, but because the barista Claudia is kind and might give him a discount if her manager is not looking. Every day she greets him by name — “Eddie!” with an exclamation point — and every day she has a new joke or pun. When she tells them she is always so proud and when he laughs, her smile always reaches behind her thick glasses to her big brown eyes in the form of tiny crow’s feet. Sometimes he does not get them but he laughs anyway because he does not want to disappoint her. He is painfully aware that she probably retells the joke all day, pitifully aware that she knows his name because he is giving her money to write it on a cheap paper cup, but he tries to forget those parts.
Today, though, Eddie’s fingers are gripping his tie too tight, tripping over themselves as he starts over for the tenth time. This has never been his forte. Mirror, no mirror. Rhyme, no rhyme. Quick, or slow. It always ended up looking like a knot in a shoelace on a little kid’s sneakers and trying to start over would become more trouble than it was worth. Eventually, Eddie always gave up, disappointed, and too embarrassed to look at himself in the mirror. At times like this, he realizes how much Abby would do for him. She was always there to fix things even if he did not want to ask for her help. He had quit wearing a tie shortly after she put her packed bags into the taxi, frustrated with himself, and angry at her.
It is on the thirteenth try did he finally get the tie to look decent enough. It is a little sloppy, the tail is too short and slightly off to the side, but it is the best attempt by far and he does not want to press his luck. He grabs his wallet, locks the door, and leaves.
As he steps inside the café he hears her say, “Eddie!” before the door has even closed. Claudia tells him her Joke of the Day while she makes his usual. She looks disappointed when he does not sit for their chat, so he offers a weak explanation of being late that fell flat onto the counter with his change. Eddie tries to console his own hurting heart by reminding himself that she is probably going to tell the next customer everything she would have told him. The first sip burns his tongue but he still drinks about half of it while he walks before he feels the caffeine’s anxiety start to set in and causes him to throw it into the nearest trashcan. Eddie cannot afford accidentally spilling some on his tie today, an almost inevitable factor of walking on a crowded sidewalk down into a slightly less crowded subway platform during rush hour. Abby needs to see how much he tried. He also does not want to run the danger of too much of the caffeine being swallowed by the butterflies in his stomach, sending their little wings into overdrive, splashing around in his stomach acid with such a force that he became nauseated. In that case, Eddie would be forced to go home before he even arrived.
He uses his extra time from speeding through his coffee shop trip to look around a flower shop. It is only slightly out of the way — two turns, left then right. The bell above the door gives a quiet ring and a faint voice calls from the back,
“I’ll be out in a minute!”
The store is small but well-stocked. Smells of the flowers dance into his nose and distract the butterflies, some of whom were making their way slowly to his brain. The colors are bright and all the flowers are beautiful, some big, some small, some already wrapped in a bouquet with a ribbon, most free-standing to make your own lovely arrangement. At the back is the retail counter with a glass display of different ribbons offered, where he makes his way to wait.
Sharp pain on Eddie’s right hand makes him realize he is picking at his skin, scratching with his nails until a small piece of hangnail becomes a big gaping wound. Blood slowly pours out. He puts his hands in his pockets, embarrassed at his inability to not fidget, and listens to the sounds of the worker moving about behind the makeshift curtain door.
“Sorry about the wait. Do you know what kind of flowers you’d like?” A man older than Eddie comes from the curtain, his white hair receding and thinning, hands shaking as he sets them on the counter. Abby used to tease him that his hair would be white before he was sixty. He is five years shy of sixty and the brown had started to fade around the same time she decided she was ready to go. He hates to admit it, but she was right.
“Not sure. They are a gift.”
Eddie’s phone starts to ring with that song she loves. She had made it her ringtone when had to set the device up and show him how to use it the day he bought it. No matter how hard she tried, it did not help him dislike the phone any less. He does not understand it and that makes him feel so old. He used to love the song because it made her drop everything — her homework, her book her paintbrush, whatever — she was doing to dance. At first she did not know how; she was awkward and the room was too small for her wide twirls and big steps, but he had rearranged the whole living room to give her as much space as she needed. This was the song she always played when she needed courage. She played it before her first recital and even though she said she was not nervous, he could see it in the dried blood next to the chipped nail polished that she begged for (and that was one of the few times Eddie saw himself in her). She played it the first time they dyed her hair at home because neither of them felt as confident as they were both pretending to be. She would sing it in the shower, hum it while she read, tap it on the table when she was trying to think. It was hard to hate it when it made her so happy but he started to. Over the years, she began dancing to other songs; most of them were okay, some he did not understand, and some he hated. At times he felt she enjoyed the ones he hated the most.
On the screen, Abby is smiling and he can see the reflection of the phone in her light pink square glasses. She took the photo a few days after she dyed her hair red on her own while he was at work a couple weeks before she left. Eddie did not think it looked good because it was patchy and the color did not want to come out of her clothes, but she liked it and that was what mattered. He never hangs up on her, he could never do that, just like how he could not bring himself to learn how to change the ringtone, but hearing her voice still hurts so he mutes the call and puts the phone back in his pocket. It already feels heavier with the voicemail he knows she will leave. Eddie is glad she cannot see if he has listened to them.
“For the missus? She looks kinda young.” The clerk raises an eyebrow, nodding towards the phone. “We have plenty of beautiful red roses — ”
Eddie shakes his head, smiling. He does not need the romance of a red rose. “Not the missus, although I do need something that says, ‘I am sorry.’”
“But not a dozen red roses?” The man wipes his hands on his apron, his eyes moving around the store. He looks the kind of tired where he might have heard his own version Eddie’s voicemails when he opened his mail yesterday, rereading it this morning with his orange juice to see if it still hurt as much.
“Not a dozen red roses.”
He leads Eddie over to bunches of daisies with different colors. The pale white daisies catch his eye, the simplicity of it appealing. A plain daisy could mean anything. What is he even trying to say with these flowers? He had not planned that far ahead. An apology might best and even expected, but Eddie is unsure if he even wants to apologize. Still, when the girl on the train had looked at him like that yesterday, it hurt. It reminded him so much of how she looked at him on the day she moved out he could not stand it. He had thought about that expression for the rest of the day. Eddie has tried really hard to adjust without her — empty nest syndrome getting the best of him most days — by trying to delete her anger from memory, but the subway girl pulled that moment out of the basement of his mind and dusted it off.
Once at the subway platform, Eddie stands with his feet toeing the yellow line. He is hoping to get an actual seat to minimize the chance of his flowers being crushed by someone who does not want to hold the handrail, falsely thinking that the train would come to a smooth stop. The flowers are held together with a thin silver ribbon and a clear plastic wrapping that crinkles with every move he makes. The wet stems are staining underneath his fingernails as he picks at the diagonal cuts on the bottom. In the end, Eddie settled on the white daisies and some yellow roses. Eddie has no idea what kind of flowers she would like. It was not ever something he would buy her. One time in high school, a boy brought Abby some flowers and she pressed one in a book and kept the rest until they died. That flower was her bookmark for a little over a year and she cried when she threw it away. Eddie tried to get her to keep it but she told him that he did not understand.
He declined when the man offered a card to go with it, worried the words on the card would sound impersonal and insincere despite being his own.
When the train comes and the doors open, he tries to shield his flowers by stepping a little to the side of the door, squeezing past a woman and her small child who is clearly not enjoying the number of strangers he is standing next to. By the time he is able to get a seat three stops later, the crowd is beginning to thin but it still too crowded to comfortably have personal space. Even so, he has managed to keep his flowers in a relatively better condition than his nerves. The butterflies have returned and it feels as if they brought a home gym with them. The closer he gets to his stop the stronger the butterflies become. He can feel them even his throat.
The fourth stop is her stop. He is too busy trying to plan out what he is going to say that he does not notice her until the train has begun to move. Her outfit is the same as yesterday with different colors, down to the shoes. In one hand is her cup and in the other hand is her book, Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris. This book is not the same as yesterday. It is a little newer, the only wear on the outside is on the bottom, probably from being shoved in her purse. Her eyes look around the train, looking for a seat. When she gets to him, she stares at the flowers for a moment too long, panic clear in how she stiffens and grips her book a little closer. He has an empty seat next to him and there is one farther down next to the young mom whose little boy is now crying — “It’s just an announcement playing honey, there’s no one watching you!” — but he does not seem to really be hearing her. Behind her is a man younger than Eddie, standing too unnecessarily close. On her face he can see her go through the same safety questions he had taught his daughter for when she went out on her own and he could see her in the face of this stranger once again. His daughter would have held her purse close to her chest — even if it looked weird — and would have just come to terms with the fact that she just was not going to read today.
But she is not Abby. She repositions her purse so it hangs in front of her, putting her cup between the inside of her elbow and her ribcage, and opens her book. As the train moves, the man makes no effort to stop from leaning into her. Eddie almost swears he can see his fingers loosen their grip on the handrail. If she notices, she does not make any indication of it. He looks away, staring at his flowers as he tries to regain his concentration. He taught Abby to know when to speak up.
Abby, may I come in?
No, that sounds like he is going to tell someone their close relative died in a car accident.
He sees the man’s feet take two small steps, almost heel to toe. Eddie’s fingers pick faster at the stems.
Hi, Abby. I know I should have called first.
No, a negative start is probably not the best idea.
His chest is brushing against her. She does not move.
Hey, Abby, I got you some flowers. Do you like them?
No, that was almost too familiar.
He hears him begin to read to words on the page. Eddie’s foot starts to tap impatiently.
Abby, I thought I would surprise you.
Maybe. Why is she not doing anything?
Abby, I am sorry —
She turns the page. Why will she not say something?
Abby, I —
He breathes in slowly. Why is she just ignoring him?
Abby —
He audibly breathes out.
“Abby!”
Her eyes are wide, looking up at him. The man looks down at him, stepping away from her to turn to him. Eddie does not acknowledge him and moves closer to her. The car is silent except for his voice, the announcement recording a soft buzz in the background as everyone watches.
“Abby, are you not going to say something?” His voice is gentle yet firm. He taught her better than that. He knows that. Eddie blinks and she is five, standing next to broken glass on the floor. Abby’s eyes are darting between his face and his hand, twitching at his side. He asked her again.
“Are you not going to say anything?”
She says she was just dancing. It was an accident.
“You know better, right?”
She says yes. She is sorry.
“I do not know if sorry will fix this, Abby.”
His hand is faster than hers and her hand is left covering her cheek as if that would make it hurt any less. The tears in her green eyes are beginning to overflow, her voice soft when she responds, a pause in between each word to try to hide the tremble,
“My name is Sarah.”
Abby is gone.
“Of course. Sarah. I am sorry.” He tries to smile. “Is this man bothering you?”
Sarah shakes her head.
The man next to her moves in front of her, protecting her. “I think you’re the one bothering her, dude. What’s your problem?”
He sits on a bench on the platform even though he wants to walk as fast as he can to get away from not only her but also this feeling that was growing in his chest. The butterflies are gone but now his heart is attached to a yo-yo, rising from adrenaline and falling from disappointment.
The bouquet is ruined, having been smushed and squished in his escape. Eddie can feel everyone watching him as he sits, just like how he felt the stares as he exited the train as soon as the doors slid open. He starts to imagine what the passersby think of him — a lonely old man with ugly flowers — but his mind cannot get away from her. She had looked so scared of him. The way she shrank back, terrified of what he would think about her response. He was only trying to help her, trying to protect her. Why does it always go so wrong?
He jumps when his phone rings with that song. This time he cannot mute it.
