The Five-Fifteen Schedule

Martina didn't move from the spot. She slid her gloved hand into her coat pocket and pressed the paper against the lining until the sharp edges of the triangle dug into her palm.

Three meters away, on the damp gravel of the tracks, Bruno Llorens spat out the piece of tobacco that had stuck to the corner of his lip. He looked toward the tunnel's curve with his hands buried in his corduroy jacket, shrugging each time the wind swept down from the mountain.

"If it doesn't clear the track before seven-twenty, we're going to eat the freight crossing," Bruno said without looking at her. "And that junker doesn't brake until the valley."

"I know."

"My uncle used to say coal is in a hurry because if it gets cold it's no good for anything. Nonsense. Nobody gives a damn about coal."

Martina readjusted her scarf with a sharp tug.

"It'll clear by seven-twenty," she murmured.

"I hope you're right, because I'm losing the feeling in my toes."

The metal of the bronze bell vibrated way back there, next to the stationmaster's booth, a dull, rusted clang that cut through the vapor suspended in the air. It wasn't the passenger train. The rumble in the rails was coming in too heavy, dragging that thick stench of overheated creosote and old diesel that sticks to your molars all day long. The coal convoy swept past, snuffing a gust that rattled the sheet-metal signs and lifted the cigarette butts off the ground.

Martina didn't look at the train. She looked at the third plank of the wooden bench where the varnish was peeling off like an old scab.

Someone knew about the red wool. Someone had watched her open the dresser drawer in the dark so as not to wake Ernesto.

She is nine years old and Ernesto is teaching her to clean anchovies at the stone sink. The water comes out so freezing from the well that her hands hurt after five minutes, but Ernesto won't let her step away. He holds her wrists with rough fingers, stained with coarse salt and dry scales, and tells her that if she doesn't pull the whole entrail out in a single yank, the fish tastes bitter. 'Slowly,' he tells her, with that thick voice he uses when he thinks he has control of the house. 'If you do it with disgust, it breaks in your fingers.'

Ernesto didn't have the patience for anchovies, but he forced her to stand there on a fruit crate to reach the faucet.

Guilt.

Now the kitchen was empty and the coffeepot was still warm on the iron stove. Ernesto pushed the pewter mug with the base of his thumb, leaving a greasy mark on the white enamel. He had gone up to Martina's room because the university application forms had been sitting on the sideboard for three days without a single signature, accumulating the yellowish dust blowing in from the embankment.

The room smelled of stale lavender and wet wool.

The blue canvas school backpack rested against the bedpost, sagging like a sack of flour. Ernesto bent down. His knees cracked with a dry snap that in the empty house sounded like broken wood. He pulled the metal zipper, which jammed halfway on the worn-out teeth.

"Damn the fabric," he growled, shoving his fingers into the lining.

The applications weren't there. There was no trace of the enrollment forms that the high school secretary had handed her in person on Friday.

Instead of the official documents, at the bottom of the inner pocket of the school uniform—the navy blue jacket with the frayed crest that Martina was no longer supposed to wear—his fingers brushed against a compact ball of ninety-gram paper. It was a draft crumpled with rage, folded and unfolded so many times that the corners had turned into white lint.

Ernesto smoothed it out against his thigh with his open palm.

It was written in that olive-green ink Martina kept in the heavy crystal inkwell, the one she let no one touch. It wasn't a letter. They were loose lines, sentences crossed out with thick strokes that nearly tore the paper, calligraphy exercises that seemed to hunt for a stranger's voice.

I am not going to sign the transfer fee. Obedience is a station where no one steps down by their own free will.

And below, in a graphite-stained corner, a single line that wasn't crossed out:

If you look me in the face when the five-o'clock passes, I'll know it's you.

Ernesto stood very still. The second hand of the kitchen wall clock downstairs beat with a heavy, mushy rhythm. He ran his thumb pad over the dry ink, feeling the rough relief of the nib over the fibers.

It wasn't a lie, or not entirely: it was worse. It was a secret fermenting in his own pantry.

At ten past five in the afternoon, the light doesn't fade; it simply gets dirty.

The flagstop smelled of rain that wouldn't quite fall and the monotonous hum of the shelter's transformer, which flickered over the cobblestones covered in rotted leaves. Martina arrived with the red scarf tucked inside the lapels of her coat so it wouldn't show. Her fingers were numb and she had a dull ache in her back from standing for three hours in front of the Restoration School display windows, staring at prints she couldn't afford.

Bruno was no longer there. The canteen had its metal shutter half pulled down.

Martina sat on the pine bench. The cold of the wood soaked right through her skirt. She looked to the sides: no one on the opposite platform, no one behind the frosted glass of the ticket window. Only the distant echo of a bell warning of the imminent passage of a heavy engine.

She slid two fingers under the bottom edge of the middle plank, right into the corner where the woodworm had left a blind groove.

There was another paper.

She pulled it out with a sharp movement, masking the gesture by bending her knees to adjust the buckle of her leather boot. The paper was damp from the afternoon mist, thin, almost transparent at the folds.

She opened it in her lap, shielding it beneath the sweep of the wool.

The five-fifteen doesn't make a stop. The engine enters at sixty an hour and the wind is going to rip the strands of hair from your forehead. If you really aren't going to get on your brother's train, stay seated on this bench while the engine crosses. Don't look down. Look me in the eye on the other side of the tracks when the last car passes.

A long, metallic whistle slashed the air from the mouth of the gorge.

The shelter's transformer gave an electrical click and the bulb shuddered, leaving the platform plunged in an ash-gray gloom. Martina pressed her hands against her knees. She didn't get up.

In the downstairs kitchen, Ernesto dropped a spoonful of lard into the boiling skillet, and the sizzling of the oil drowned out the sound of the door opening.