Work Text:
Five Hundred Miles from Home
Hitchcock had always slept lightly, even in the Sommer penthouse, even after years of soft beds and locked doors and Viola’s voice in the hall, calling good morning as though morning had never meant anything dangerous. Sleep did not become innocent because one wished it to. The body kept old ledgers. It remembered footsteps. It remembered doors. It remembered the particular silence before someone entered a room without kindness.
So Hitchcock woke early, and when the first train moved somewhere beyond the city, low and distant under the gray, he lay still and listened until the sound had thinned into nothing.
There were trains everywhere in New York. Subway below. Commuter lines out past Queens. Long freight runs by the yards, iron calling to iron in the dark. He had not liked them when he first came to the Sommers. The sound had been too much like leaving. Too much like being carried from one place to another without having agreed.
Now, sometimes, he found the sound almost orderly.
A train knew where it was going.
He sat up carefully. His right leg was stiff. That was ordinary. He reached down and worked his hand along the old tightness around the knee, slow pressure, then release. The pain answered with its usual dull complaint and then settled.
Beyond his bedroom door, the apartment was quiet. Too early for Viola. Too early for Sigmund, unless some business matter had reached out of its proper hours and dragged him from bed. Too early even for Autobiography, who preferred his dawns civilized and his suffering aesthetic.
Hitchcock put his feet on the floor.
For a moment he remained there, bent forward, hand against his thigh, listening to the building breathe. Radiators clicked somewhere in the wall. Far below, traffic made a wet sound against the avenue. A door shut softly in another apartment, then another. New York waking by degrees.
He had been afraid of this place once.
The height. The mirrors. The doorman who knew his name before Hitchcock knew whether he was allowed to have one. The way Viola had shown him his room and said, with perfect calm, “This is yours,” as though rooms could belong to boys like him simply because she had decided it.
He had stood in the doorway, too thin, too silent, his bag in his hand, expecting the joke to reveal itself.
Viola had not rushed him. She had only said, “There are fresh towels in the cabinet. If you dislike the curtains, we’ll change them. Sigmund insists they are tasteful, but he has been wrong before.”
Behind her, Sigmund had said, “Rarely.”
“Frequently,” Viola corrected, and smiled at Hitchcock as if the disagreement was a gift being offered to him. A household sound. Safe enough to witness.
He had not understood that kind of gentleness then. He had suspected it. Most starved things suspect food the first time it is placed in their hands.
Now the room was familiar in the dark.
The chair by the window. The folded sweater over its back. The small framed photograph on the dresser: Autobiography pretending not to enjoy Viola adjusting his tie; Sigmund behind them with one hand on Hitchcock’s shoulder; Hitchcock looking as if he had been startled into existing.
He dressed neatly.
White shirt. Dark trousers. Green scarf because Viola said the color suited him and because refusing small kindnesses had begun, over the years, to feel less like dignity and more like waste. He brushed his hair, checked his cuffs, then checked them again because his hands wanted something precise to do.
There was a pressure under his collarbone when he straightened.
He paused.
It was not pain in the ordinary sense. More like a deep finger pressed from the inside, brief and private. He breathed once, waited, and it faded.
He had lived too long with bodies to be frightened by every complaint. At the track, everyone hurt somewhere. Ankles, backs, ribs, hands, old injuries, fresh bruises, nerves sharpened by cold. Work did not wait because flesh made an argument.
He opened his door.
Autobiography’s room was shut. From inside came no sound. He would sleep another half hour, perhaps more, unless his vanity woke him to prepare some elaborate expression of indifference for breakfast.
Hitchcock moved down the hall.
The kitchen light was already on.
This meant Pancho.
Sure enough, Frank Martin stood at the counter with a mug of coffee in one hand and a Cuban cigar already cut between his fingers, hat low, coat still buttoned as though he had entered the apartment by force of weather and stubbornness. He looked up when Hitchcock came in and grunted.
“You walk like old priest,” he said.
Hitchcock went to the cabinet for a cup. “Good morning.”
“Don’t ‘good morning’ me. You hear me? Is cold, is too early, and Knightly is going to make me crazy before sun come up.”
“Then it is a normal morning.”
Pancho narrowed his eyes. “Everybody in this house get mouth now.”
Hitchcock poured coffee. “Only because you train us so well.”
A sound came from Pancho that was almost a laugh and almost the beginning of an insult. He lit the cigar despite the fact that Viola had told him not to smoke in the kitchen at least two hundred times. The smoke curled up blue and stubborn.
“Where is the princess?” Pancho asked.
“Sham?”
“No, Queen Elizabeth. Yes, Sham.”
“Still asleep, I think.”
“She better wake up. She say she come rail, she come rail. I don’t need her crying later that nobody tell her nothing.”
“She will come.”
Pancho took a swallow of coffee and looked at Hitchcock over the rim. His face changed by very little. With Pancho, concern rarely entered by the front door. It came sideways, disguised as irritation.
“You feel all right?”
Hitchcock set his cup down. “Ja.”
“Don’t ‘ja’ if you mean no.”
“I mean yes.”
“You look tired.”
“I woke early.”
“Why?”
Hitchcock gave him a mild look. “Because you were in the kitchen breaking Mrs. Sommer’s rules.”
Pancho jabbed the cigar toward him. “Careful. I put you with Knightly all week, now you think you are funny.”
“I know I am not funny. That is why it surprises people.”
This time Pancho did laugh, short and rough, smoke caught in it.
Then footsteps came quick down the hall, light but not quiet enough to belong to Viola.
Sham appeared in the kitchen doorway with her hair half-pinned and her sweater crooked at one shoulder, still young enough to look betrayed by mornings as a concept. She blinked at the cigar smoke, then at Pancho.
“Viola is going to kill you.”
“She has to catch me first.”
“She always catches you.”
“That is because everybody in this house is informer.”
Sham slid into a chair and reached toward the toast plate Pancho had clearly made for himself. He slapped her hand away without force.
“That mine.”
“You always say food has to be eaten when it’s hot.”
“I say that to make you eat, not to make you steal.”
She took a slice anyway and bit into it. Pancho muttered something in Spanish under his breath. Hitchcock did not understand it, but knew it wasn’t for him anyways.
For a few minutes the kitchen was almost pleasant.
Coffee. Toast. Cigar smoke. Sham complaining that the track would be freezing. Pancho telling her cold built character and she had too much character already. Hitchcock listening more than speaking, which was the role he preferred. It was easier to love people from a slight distance. Safer too, though safety had become a less urgent word than it used to be.
Another train sounded somewhere far off.
Sham glanced toward the dark window. “That one’s loud.”
“Freight,” Pancho said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know everything.”
Hitchcock looked at them both and felt, without warning, the oddest tenderness. It arrived so sharply he almost disliked it. The kitchen, the bad coffee, Pancho smoking where he should not, Sham still waking up, the day waiting outside cold and clean. Nothing grand. Nothing anyone would frame as memory while living it.
Those were usually the things that stayed.
At the track, Knightly Dawn was already awake in every possible direction. He came down the shedrow with his coat open, hair damp from having been pushed back without patience, and a grin too large for the hour.
“Hitch,” he called, as though Hitchcock were across a field instead of twenty feet away. “Tomorrow.”
Hitchcock was checking the sheet. “Good morning to you also.”
“Yeah, yeah, good morning. But tomorrow.”
“I am aware of the date.”
Knightly fell into step beside him, too close, all restless heat and bright nerves. “I’m just saying, this is probably my last day as an ordinary person, so if there’s anything you want signed, you should ask now before my price goes up.”
Hitchcock folded the page once. “You would have to learn to write your name consistently first.”
Knightly barked a laugh and nearly collided with a passing groom, who cursed at him without slowing. Knightly spun around, apologized too cheerfully, then turned back to Hitchcock as if nothing in his life had ever required shame. That was the difficulty with him. He did not resist correction because he was lazy. He resisted because the world delighted him and he kept trying to answer it all at once. Every sound invited him. Every open space became a stage. Every instruction had to compete with the applause he imagined before it existed.
He was impossible. He was also young.
Eighteen, yes, but age did not settle evenly in horses. Some were born old and then spent years learning childhood in secret. Some remained ridiculous because nobody had broken the ridiculousness out of them, and perhaps that was not always a failure.
Hitchcock had been many things at eighteen. Ridiculous had not been one of them.
“Listen to me,” he said, stopping near the open doors where the morning light came in pale and low. “Tomorrow is not won today. Today is only work.”
“I know.”
“You say that very quickly.”
“Because I know quickly.”
“No. You answer quickly. Knowing is slower.”
Knightly made a face, but he stayed.
That was new.
A week ago he would have complained louder, turned the lecture into theatre, found Sham and demanded she witness his oppression. Now he stood there, scuffing one shoe against the floor, ears flicking in irritation he was trying to pretend was boredom.
Hitchcock softened his tone a little. “You have speed. No one doubts this.”
“I mean, some people could say it more often.”
“Do you want to win, or do you want people to talk about how fast you lost?”
Knightly’s mouth opened. Closed. He looked personally offended by the effectiveness of the question.
Hitchcock waited.
“I want to win,” Knightly said at last.
“Then do less.”
“Do less,” Knightly repeated, suspicious.
“Less performing. Less announcing. Less deciding the race before you have listened to it. You break. You settle. You let the first part happen without spending everything you own trying to prove you belong there.”
Knightly’s eyes slid away. Under the swagger, the words had found the tender place. Hitchcock saw it and did not press. One learned, eventually, that young pride needed exits.
“So,” Knightly said, “basically you want me to become boring.”
“I want you to become dangerous.”
That pleased him. He tried not to show how much. Failed.
From the tack trunk, Sham said, “Careful, Hitch. You say things like that and his head gets worse.”
“My head is perfect,” Knightly said.
“Your head has tenants.”
“Your face has tenants.”
Sham stared at him. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means I’m focused on tomorrow and don’t have time to be clever every second.”
Hitchcock glanced at her. “You see? Improvement. He admits there are seconds when he is not clever.”
Knightly looked betrayed. “You’re both awful.”
Sham swung her feet once, pleased. “Pre-famous and persecuted. Tragic.”
Pancho entered then, and the shedrow altered around him. He carried coffee in one hand, stopwatch in the other, cigar locked in the corner of his mouth like punctuation. He looked at Knightly’s open coat, at Sham on the trunk, at Hitchcock holding the sheet, and seemed immediately exhausted by all three.
“You done talking? Or I come back later when you finish society?”
Knightly straightened too fast. “Ready.”
Pancho snorted. “Now he ready. Miracle of God.”
He gave Hitchcock the plan in quick, practical pieces. One easy work. Let Knightly open enough to feel the engine, shut him down before he made a religion out of it. No nonsense at the break. No fight if he wanted to creep. Correct him early. Keep the piece clean.
Hitchcock listened.
The pressure under his collarbone returned while Pancho spoke. This time it climbed faintly toward his neck, a narrow line of discomfort. He shifted his shoulder once. It eased enough to ignore.
Pancho saw the movement anyway. Of course he did.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I hate this word.”
“It is stiffness.”
“Where?”
“Neck.”
Pancho’s eyes narrowed. “You go warm up slow.”
“I always warm up slow.”
“Slower, then.”
Knightly glanced between them. For the first time that morning, worry cut through his brightness. “You good?”
Hitchcock almost smiled. “If I say no, will you behave better?”
Knightly hesitated. “Maybe.”
“Then I am dying.”
“Don’t say that.” It came out too fast. The words hung for half a second longer than they should have.
Hitchcock regretted the joke at once. Some jokes did not know what room they were entering until it was too late. He touched Knightly’s shoulder lightly, because apology in public embarrassed them both. “I am fine. Come.”
Knightly swallowed whatever answer he had been about to make and followed.
Outside, October had sharpened everything. The air held that metallic cold that made breath visible and tempers shorter. The track lay dark from watering, packed and clean under the morning. Men stood at the rail with coffee. Horses moved in sets, their bodies steaming faintly. The sound of hooves carried hard in the cold.
Hitchcock had never loved racing the way some of them did. He respected it. That was different. Racing was procedure, pressure, risk, timing, vanity, money, weather, blood, habit, fear dressed up in silk colors and public language. It could be beautiful. It could also ask for too much and then act surprised when the bill arrived.
Still, there were mornings when the work itself became almost peaceful. Not the noise around it. Not the men shouting. Not the crowd, when there was one. The work. A body finding rhythm. Breath lining up with ground. The brief interval when thought narrowed to what mattered: pace, balance, space, the feel of another horse beside you, the distance between wanting and asking.
Knightly bounced once at his side.
Hitchcock looked at him.
Knightly stopped bouncing.
“Sorry.”
“You are not.”
“I’m trying to become sorry.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“I know. You’ve explained sameness a lot.”
They moved toward the gap.
At the rail, Sham stood beside Pancho, wrapped against the cold, eyes already on them. Pancho had his elbows hooked over the rail. Cigar smoke dragged sideways in the wind. He looked annoyed, which meant he was hopeful and disliked being seen in the act.
Hitchcock lifted one hand briefly.
Sham lifted hers back.
Pancho shouted, “Don’t make me regret!”
Knightly called, “Which one of us?”
Pancho’s answer was immediate. “Yes!”
Knightly laughed.
Hitchcock did not, but his mouth moved.
They stepped onto the track.
The first circuit was easy. Warmth entered the body by degrees. His bad leg complained and then remembered itself. Knightly wanted to creep ahead twice; Hitchcock placed him back without speaking. The third time, Knightly corrected himself before Hitchcock moved.
Good.
“You felt that?” Hitchcock asked.
Knightly’s ears flicked back. “Yeah.”
“Again.”
The pressure in Hitchcock’s chest returned at the far turn. He breathed through it.
This was still not fear. Not yet. It was too small, too strange, and his attention belonged elsewhere. Knightly was listening. Truly listening. The rhythm under him had changed from excitement to contained force, and Hitchcock could feel the difference like a current through the air between them.
Tomorrow, if he held this, he might win.
The thought pleased Hitchcock more than he expected.
He had not made many things in his life. Not in the way others did. Autobiography made performances out of injury and pride. Sham made a family take new shape around her without knowing she had done it. Knightly made noise, trouble, affection, ridiculous hope. Hitchcock had mostly repaired. Straightened. Held. Endured.
Perhaps teaching was also a form of making.
They came around again. The track opened.
Hitchcock gave the signal. Knightly went.
For the first few strides, he was still himself: too eager, shoulders lifting as if he wanted to leap out of his own skin. Then the work caught him. He lengthened. Settled. The speed became less of a shout and more of a line.
Hitchcock stayed just off him.
There. Not crowding. Not chasing. Close enough to remind him where his mind belonged.
The cold air cut into his throat.
Halfway down the stretch, the pressure became pain.
It opened suddenly, not like a knife, not sharp enough for drama. More like something tearing deep where no hand could reach. Heat flooded his chest and then vanished, leaving a hollow so immense he could not understand how his body still had shape around it.
He missed one breath.
The ground changed.
Knightly was ahead by half a length, still clean, still listening. Hitchcock fixed his eyes on him with a concentration so fierce it felt almost angry.
Finish the piece.
Then the thought corrected itself.
No.
Stop.
He tried to say it. His mouth opened, but nothing came.
Knightly’s head turned slightly, just enough to look back. For one fragment of a second their eyes met.
Hitchcock wanted to give him an instruction. Something useful. Sit still. Do not panic. Go to Pancho. This is not yours. The body had already left the conversation.
His stride broke.
There was a terrible intimacy in falling. It allowed no dignity. One moment he belonged to motion, and the next the world tilted without asking. His knee failed first, then the shoulder. Cold air flashed along his face. Dirt rose.
Impact arrived heavy and distant.
He did not feel the pain as itself. He felt the interruption of order. Sky where track should be. Track against his cheek. The smell of damp dirt, iron rail, sweat, cigar smoke somewhere impossibly far away. A voice shouted. Maybe Pancho. Maybe someone else.
Hitchcock could not move his head.
He was lying on his side, one arm trapped beneath him. His chest no longer hurt in the same way. That frightened him more. Pain meant a body still arguing. This was quieter. This was the room after everyone had left.
Knightly stopped beside him so fast dirt struck Hitchcock’s face.
“Hitch? Hey—Hitch, look at me. What the hell, don’t—don’t do that, come on—“
He sounded young.
That was Hitchcock’s first clear thought after the fall. Not fear for himself. Annoyance almost. Grief almost. Knightly sounded far too young.
Hitchcock tried to blink. He did. Once.
Knightly leaned closer, white around the mouth, eyes wide and losing their focus. “You’re okay. You just—Pancho! Pancho, he went down!”
I know, Hitchcock wanted to say.
The words did not form.
The rail was no longer in the correct place. The sky had widened. Men were running. Their voices came in pieces, broken by wind and blood and the strange roaring inside his ears.
Then Pancho was there.
He landed on his knees in the dirt hard enough that Hitchcock felt it through the ground. His cigar was gone. His hat had tipped back. His face was close, too close, stripped of its ordinary anger. One hand went to Hitchcock’s shoulder, the other near his throat, then chest, then back again with terrifying precision.
“Hitchcock,” Pancho said. Not shouted now. Low. Commanding. “Hitchcock, you stay. You hear me? Stay right there.”
Hitchcock heard him.
Pancho pressed two fingers under his jaw, then shifted, cursing in Spanish so quietly it sounded almost like prayer.
“Look at me, viejo. Look at me.”
Old man.
Hitchcock would have objected. He was not old. Not really. Older than Sham, older than Knightly, older than Autobiography. But not old enough for this.
He looked at Pancho because Pancho had asked.
A train whistle sounded in his head.
No. Not a whistle. A memory of one.
Germany, or perhaps not Germany. It was difficult to trust images now. There had been stations in his childhood. Stone platforms. Cold benches. His hand small inside a glove too thin at the fingertips. A woman’s coat in front of him. The smell of coal and wet wool. Someone saying not to cry because people looked at boys who cried.
Then the memory slipped and became New York.
Viola’s hand on his sleeve the first week, not pulling, only asking. “You may sit with us, or you may take your plate to your room. Either is acceptable. I would prefer you not go hungry in order to make a point.”
Sigmund outside his bedroom door after a nightmare, voice calm through the wood. “I won’t come in unless you ask me to. I’ll remain here for a few minutes.”
Autobiography sitting in the hall the next morning, pretending he had not slept outside Hitchcock’s door. “You snore,” Autobiography had said, though Hitchcock had not slept enough to snore.
They had not been friends then. Not exactly. They had been two damaged things placed in proximity by rich people who believed love could be organized with enough persistence. Autobiography had resented him, fearful Hitchcock would steal the Sommers’ love. Hitchcock had resented being seen, wanting nothing to do with any of them. This made them, for a while, compatible, in an odd sense. Hitchcock trusted no one more than he trusted Autobiography.
Pancho’s hand pressed at his shoulder again. “Doctor coming,” he said. “You stay. Don’t you go making drama. You understand me? I got enough drama with the other one.”
Knightly made a choked sound.
Pancho turned on him at once. “You. Go.”
“No.”
“I said go.”
“I’m not leaving him.”
“You are in way.”
“I’m not—”
“Knightly!” Pancho’s voice cracked like a board. “Move!”
Hitchcock wanted to be grateful. He wanted to be humiliated. He wanted to tell Pancho not to be so harsh with him, because Knightly would hear that voice in his sleep for weeks.
He wanted many things. His body answered none.
Knightly hovered near Hitchcock for a moment longer. He did not touch him. Perhaps he was afraid that touching would confirm something. Perhaps he had been told, sometime in childhood, not to touch bodies after they fell. Perhaps no one had told him anything useful and he was inventing terror from nothing.
“Hitch,” Knightly whispered.
Hitchcock managed, with great effort, to move his eyes.
Knightly saw. The boy folded around that small proof of life as if it had saved him.
“There,” he said wildly, to Pancho, to himself, to the track, to God if he was in the habit of listening at racecourses. “See? He’s—he looked. He looked.”
Pancho did not answer.
That was when Hitchcock understood Pancho knew.
Not all of it. Not the medical words. Not the shape the doctor would give it later so everyone could hold something clean and factual in their mouths. A ruptured coronary vessel. Catastrophic. No warning. Nothing to be done.
Pancho knew in the older way. The way of men who had seen bodies fail too quickly to bargain with them. The way of a man who had seen this before and is doomed to see it again.
The train sound returned.
This time it was not a whistle. It was motion. Wheels over track, steady, departing.
He had been far from home before he ever crossed an ocean. That was the thing no one understood about exile. Distance began before geography. Sometimes a boy was still in the house where he was born and already hundreds of miles away from anyone who might have kept him.
Pancho’s fingers were at his throat again. Someone else knelt beside them. A doctor? No. One of the track men. Then another. Their hands came near. Pancho snapped at them. The words blurred.
Hitchcock was very tired.
It would have been easy to close his eyes, so easy that some old disciplined part of him resisted on principle. He had survived many things by refusing what seemed easy. Do not sleep when the room is unsafe. Do not cry when crying feeds them. Do not trust the first kindness because kindness can be bait. Do not fall until there is no choice.
Now there was no choice, and still the old rules stood around him uselessly, like soldiers after a war had ended without telling them.
He looked past Pancho.
The sky was a pale, cold blue.
He thought of Viola. He refused the image of her when she would find out of this. It came anyway: Viola standing in the apartment, one hand to her throat, her composure breaking. She would ask if he had suffered. She would ask who was with him. She would ask whether he had known he was loved, because women like Viola asked the only questions that mattered and therefore the cruelest ones.
Yes, he wanted someone to say. Tell her yes.
He thought of Sigmund, who would become formal when grief struck him because form was the last useful structure left. Sigmund would speak to doctors. Sign papers. Call whoever needed calling. Protect Viola from details and then suffer because he could not protect her from the truth. Later, perhaps much later, he would stand outside Hitchcock’s room with his hand on the doorframe and find no business language for what absence did to a home.
He thought of Autobiography. That was harder to imagine.
Auto would not be dramatic at first. People who did not know him would mistake that for coldness. They always mistook him. He would retreat into language, then into silence when language failed him. He might be angry at Hitchcock for dying without permission. That would be very like him. He hated abandonment and called it by more elegant names.
I did not leave deliberately, Hitchcock wanted to tell him. But perhaps all leaving looked deliberate from the side of the one left behind.
He thought of Sham, young and fierce and too practiced already at bracing for loss. Sham, who watched rooms too closely because she had learned that happiness shifted when no one warned you. She would try to be strong for Knightly, then hate herself for needing comfort too.
And Knightly Dawn—
Knightly had finally been taken off the track.
That fact reached Hitchcock slowly, as if it had to travel through the dirt, through the noise, through whatever was left of his blood.
Hitchcock tried to turn his head toward the gap, but his body gave him nothing. The distance was not far. A stretch of track. A rail. The path back to the shedrow. The road to the city, if they had already taken him with Sham. It should have been nothing. He thought of Knightly in the stable car, too bright a horse folded into silence, dirt down one side of him, hands in his hair. He would be blaming himself already. Of course he would. Under all that noise, under all that foolish confidence, he was young enough to believe every disaster near him must somehow have come from him.
No, Hitchcock wanted to say.
The word was clear. Perfectly clear.
No.
His fingers shifted against the dirt.
Pancho saw it at once. His head came down sharply, eyes fixed on Hitchcock’s face with the brutal attention of a man refusing to miss whatever could still be understood.
“What?” he said. “You try say something?”
Hitchcock tried. Air moved wrong in his throat. Not a word. Not even close. Only a broken sound that seemed to belong to someone else.
Pancho’s face tightened. “Don’t. Save it.”
No.
Hitchcock forced his eyes toward the gap again.
Pancho followed the look. For a second he did not understand. Then something in him changed. Not softened exactly. Pancho rarely softened where anyone could see it. But the fight went out of his mouth, and his hand pressed more firmly against Hitchcock’s shoulder.
“Knightly Dawn,” he said.
Hitchcock looked at him.
Pancho drew in a breath through his nose. His jaw worked once. “He’s gone,” he said, rougher now. “I sent him with Sham. He’s not here.”
Hitchcock already knew. Hearing it still hurt, though not in the chest, not where the vessel had torn and emptied him out. This was a different pain. Smaller, cleaner, crueler. He had wanted one more instruction. One last correction. Something to put into Knightly’s hands before leaving him with the sight of the fall.
Break clean.
Listen.
Do not carry this.
He tried again. His mouth opened. Nothing useful came.
Pancho leaned closer, and now his shadow cut the sky in half. “You want me tell him?”
Hitchcock blinked.
Pancho stared at him, hard. “What? Tell him what?”
Hitchcock could not give him words. He could only look at him and hope the thing was plain enough: not comfort, not apology, not some polished deathbed wisdom. Only the necessary fact.
Not your fault.
Pancho’s expression changed in a way Hitchcock had no name for. Anger passed over his face first, because anger was the road his grief always took when it did not know where else to go. Then it broke against something heavier.
He nodded once. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
Hitchcock held his eyes.
Pancho swallowed. “I tell him,” he said, voice low and fierce. “You hear me? I tell him. This not because him. Not because the work. Not because he run wrong. I tell him until he listen.”
Hitchcock’s eyes burned. Or perhaps the wind had shifted dirt against them. It was difficult to tell now.
Pancho bent closer still, his hand still there, solid and warm through the spreading cold. “He listen to you,” Pancho’s voice cracked. He was desperately trying to stay strong. “Maybe he listen to me when I say it for you.”
Knightly might not listen for a long time. He might carry it anyway, because guilt was stubborn and young horses were stupid with pain. But Pancho would tell him. Sham would tell him. Maybe Viola would hold his face in both hands and say it in the voice no one disobeyed for long.
Hitchcock let his eyes close for half a second.
Thank you.
The train was closer now.
He could feel the movement through the ground, though there was no train by the track. It came from inside memory or beyond it. The sound gathered under all the other sounds: men shouting, Pancho breathing hard, the doctor arriving too late, the rail humming, the morning continuing obscenely around them.
He opened his eyes once more.
Pancho was still there.
For all his noise, Pancho had very steady hands when the world became unsteady. Hitchcock had learned this in the first year with the Sommers, when an old injury had locked so badly he could not get from the car without help and had been ashamed enough to turn in on himself completely. Pancho had not soothed him. He had called him a stubborn son of a bitch, put one shoulder under his arm, and got him inside without letting anyone stare.
Later he had left tea outside Hitchcock’s room and pretended Viola made him do it.
“Do not die on my track,” Pancho said now, as if anger might still be useful. His voice had gone even rougher. “You hear me? I forbid.”
Hitchcock would have smiled if the body had still allowed such luxuries.
Pancho’s face blurred.
For a moment Hitchcock was not on the track.
He was in the Sommer apartment in winter. Snow against the windows. Viola on the sofa with a book open in her lap but not reading because Autobiography had taken over the conversation and was explaining, with unbearable seriousness, why a particular critic had misunderstood beauty as a concept. Sigmund at his desk, pretending not to listen. Sham asleep across the rug, too long-limbed for the position she had chosen, one ear twitching at every raised voice. Knightly visiting and eating something he had not been offered. Pancho by the balcony door with his cigar, arguing that all art looked better when a man did not have to hear about it.
Hitchcock had sat in the chair near the lamp, one bad leg stretched out, hands folded over a blanket Viola had placed there without comment.
No one had asked why he was quiet.
No one had required him to become easier to love.
That had been home.
Not Germany. Not the places before. Not any room where fear had taught him the shape of the ceiling.
This.
The train began to move.
He understood then, not in words, that one could be leaving and arriving at the same time. That perhaps death was not a station but the long stretch after, when the lights of one town fell away and the next had not yet risen.
The distance widened.
One mile.
Someone’s hand on his shoulder.
Two miles.
Pancho’s fingers locked around his.
Three miles.
Cold dirt against his cheek.
Four miles.
Viola laughing softly in the kitchen because Sigmund had mispronounced some german word from the newspaper.
Five miles.
Autobiography’s voice through the bedroom wall: “If you are awake, you may as well be awake with company.”
Ten miles.
Sham asking, “Does it ever stop? Being scared of things that already happened?”
Twenty miles.
Pancho once telling him, “Pain is information. Don’t make it religion.”
Fifty miles.
Sigmund buying him gloves without saying the old ones were worn through.
One hundred miles.
Viola knocking once and waiting, always waiting, until he gave permission.
Two hundred miles.
Knightly, yesterday, grinning in the shedrow. “When I win, you’re going to admit this was all because of your extremely inspiring mentorship.”
Three hundred miles.
The body became very light.
Four hundred miles.
Sound thinned.
Five hundred miles.
Home was behind him.
Home was below him.
Home was the hand holding his, the man cursing him not to leave, the apartment that would go quiet when they carried his name into it.
Hitchcock had once believed a person could arrive at the end with only what had been taken from him.
He had been wrong.
He had Viola’s blanket. Sigmund’s careful hand. Autobiography’s badly disguised devotion. Sham’s trust. Knightly’s ridiculous, aching hope. Pancho’s command to stay.
He had a room with curtains he had never changed.
He had been loved in a language quieter than rescue.
The last thing he felt was Pancho’s hand.
The last thing he heard was also Pancho, very far away now, saying his name like an order and a farewell at once.
“Hitchcock.”
He wanted to answer.
But for once, there was no need.
The train went on.