Throughout the early morning Carmen got several cups of coffee from the dinette. She flipped through the awful train magazine.

She spent a little time talking to Coach Attendant Kevin, who was from a town called Goose Creek, just west of Charleston, but had not heard of the street where her father lived.

Carmen went back to the dinette and got some walnuts in a bag. She begged the lady behind the counter, Inez, for reading material, but Inez had nothing. She had a pack of cards. Finally, Inez rooted through her own bag and handed Carmen the very issue of People magazine that Carmen had spent a full ninety minutes reading on the way to the airport.

Carmen trudged back to her seat. She had never in her adult life gone this long without checking her email, Facebook, or Twitter or making a call.

What had people done before they had phones? It was a serious question. She needed to know. What had she herself done, before she had a phone? She remembered the long car rides to Bethany Beach or the really long car rides to Fort Myers, Florida, to see her great-aunt and great-uncle. What had she done? She hadn’t read—not even magazines. It made her carsick.

Carmen knew what she’d done. It seemed hard to fathom right now, but she did know. The younger, phone-free Carmen had looked out the window and thought about things.

Carmen wondered about that. She was too tired to be huffy and indignant any longer, so she wondered about it honestly. Did she even have thoughts anymore?

She looked out the window. She tried to think of where in the world she was. She thought she’d heard the conductor announce a stop in North Carolina not too long ago. She observed how the trees were getting fuzzier and greener as they went. In New York, the trees were still mostly gaunt and bare, but here, they were budding and blossoming like mad. As the train rumbled south they plunged into spring, passing through whole weeks in a matter of hours.

It made her feel a little homesick, because of the blossoms, the cherries and dogwoods and magnolias and those pink ones, whatever they were called. These were the flowers that burst out all over her old neighborhood growing up, that would drop into her hair like spring snow. They probably had them in New York too, maybe in the park, but she never saw any.

If the train was in North Carolina now, then South Carolina would be next. That gave her a pang of nostalgia too. If she’d been in a plane and flown over these places, she wouldn’t have thought a single thing of it, but now she was going to be passing through the state where her dad had lived since she was six. It was the place she’d visited, fantasized about, been disappointed in, and grown up some in. It was the place where she’d met her stepbrother, Paul. And his sister, Krista, too, but Paul loomed larger here. He gave the whole state the stalwart suffering feeling that he had, even though she knew he didn’t mean to. It was the place where Lydia and her dad had gotten married and where Lydia had been sick and died. It seemed sad to go through the state and not reach out to any of them.

When she heard the baby shout she looked up. She felt an ache in her throat, and wondered if she felt sadder about Lydia than she’d realized, or if the phone carried a contagion of sadness sent over from Tibby.

The baby wasn’t crying, for once, but smiling and trying to say something. They were wordlike utterances that weren’t actually words. The baby was a girl, Carmen observed. She had olive skin and very large dark eyes. Her hair made shiny delicate dark curls. But you wait, Carmen thought. My hair looked like that too when I was your age.

Carmen observed that the mother of the family had not, in fact, been in the bathroom for the last ten hours as she had thought, but was apparently not on the train at all. Carmen looked at the rumpled father and took pity on him. It was awfully bold of him to take two small children on this ride by himself. Had you no other options? she couldn’t help wondering.

And Carmen couldn’t stop herself from staring at them a little. Rumpled though he was, the father had a certain dignity you rarely saw in parents of young children. He wore dark twill pants and a faded jean jacket over a gray T-shirt. Carmen had noticed as she’d padded around the aisles that everybody’s shoes had come off by this point, but his hadn’t. He wore pointed brown leather shoes. They were well worn but elegant. The kind that well-dressed businessmen wore.

She could tell he wasn’t Puerto Rican. She assumed he was Mexican, for some reason, but he was rather tall for a Mexican. She wished he would say something, so she would be able to guess from his accent. She hadn’t been paying attention before, and now she felt immensely curious.

He had straight, longish, slightly feathery black hair. She thought of Ralph Macchio in the original Karate Kid, and then she felt the need to suppress a giggle. She’d had a huge crush on Ralph Macchio. The next thing she thought of was Jones and his shaved head.

The father looked over at her, seeming to sense she was looking at them. She smiled, a peace offering of sorts for all the mean looks and cursing during her phone-withdrawal phase. His face altered slightly, but she didn’t think you could call it smiling.

In her mind she begged the little boy to say something to his father, and at last he did. He told his father he had to go to the bathroom. She couldn’t tell anything from the boy’s accent, so she waited eagerly for the father’s response, but the father was remarkably economical with words, she’d noticed. He simply nodded. He was like the Latin version of Paul. But when he stood up he did something quite surprising. He turned directly to Carmen.

“Excuse me. You could—could you … take for me … the baby?” His English faltered appealingly and she realized he had absolutely no idea she was a Spanish speaker.

She was too surprised to do anything but accept the baby. He figured she was a woman, maybe a mother herself. He figured she’d know what to do. He didn’t realize she was an actress.

“We come back soon,” he told her, leading the wriggling, dancing boy to the bathroom at the front of the car.

So Carmen held the baby. She was anxious at first. She tried to think back to her early days with Ryan. But truth be told, she’d been eighteen at the time, and hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to hold him. Tibby, his godmother, had probably held him three times for every one time Carmen had.

Carmen tried to bring the baby into her body a little, not hold her out as if she were a disease. She rested the baby’s considerable diaper on her lap. The baby stared at her with her giant eyes. She didn’t express a point of view, she just stared.

“Hi, sweet pea,” Carmen said. She smiled, and to her gratification, the baby smiled back. She bounced her a few times. The baby smiled bigger. Carmen had to wonder: Who else in the world would make friends with you so quickly?

“Hey, poopie,” Carmen said in a cooing voice.

The baby took this as a compliment and smiled more. She tried to grab Carmen’s face in her hand, but Carmen pulled back.

Carmen was just explaining to the baby about hair, when the father and brother returned.

The father gave Carmen a real smile this time. He took the baby from her gratefully, but the baby appeared not to want to go. She leaned and reached for Carmen as she got pulled away. She started to make the barking sound.

Carmen felt as flattered as she had ever been in her life. More flattered than when Bobbi Brown told her she had good bones. “It’s okay, I can hold her for a bit longer,” Carmen offered. It wasn’t like she had a lot of other things to do.

“You … no mind?” the father asked.

“No, not at all,” Carmen said. She took the baby and bounced her a bit more. She arranged the baby’s dress and diaper and smoothed her hair. “You are a very pretty girl,” Carmen told her. She turned to the father. “What’s her name?”

“Clara,” he said.

“Oh. That’s beautiful,” Carmen replied.

As she talked to the baby, she wondered why she wasn’t talking to them in Spanish. And moreover, why the father didn’t know she was Latin. Although her hair was highlighted and her accent was as polished as that of any New York actress, she still expected people to know what she was. Wasn’t it obvious?

When she was with Jones, she felt it was obvious. Here he is with his Latin girlfriend, she would think. Jones is cool, he’s going to marry his Puerto Rican girlfriend, she would imagine his friends and colleagues thinking. And for his benefit, she tried to tamp it down. She didn’t gab and hoot with her mother in Spanish the way she used to. She kept her hair ironed and small. She kept her grandmother and various aunts and uncles and cousins at arm’s length to keep him feeling comfortable, to keep the Puerto Ricans picturesque.

She remembered her agent and her manager saying on so many occasions: Now, we don’t want to pigeonhole you. You can play anything. Let’s not go the Latin route. That can be limiting. She remembered her publicist turning down a feature in Latina magazine. Let’s see what else we get. It could rule out other things, she’d explained.

And now she wondered, what had happened to her? What would Big Carmen think? Had she tamped herself down so far, she wasn’t even who she was anymore?

Clara pulled her hair gleefully and Carmen spent a while trying to extract each strand from Clara’s sticky fist. When Clara started to turn up the volume, the father offered a bottle to Carmen, and Carmen gratefully took it. She settled Clara into her lap and tried to figure out how to best administer a bottle. Clara seemed to know what to do, but she allowed Carmen to feel competent nonetheless. She offered Carmen a couple of smiles around the nipple of the bottle. You could see the smile in Clara’s eyes most markedly, and Carmen found it pretty sweet, the baby’s basic desire to connect. Do we all start out like that? she wondered.

Carmen reclined her chair and relaxed into the sucking sounds. Clara’s body got heavy and the bottle lolled to the side. She twitched a few times, and Carmen realized she had fallen asleep. Gently she took the bottle and put it on the empty seat beside her. She tucked the stray parts of Clara in, and covered them both with her blanket. Carmen turned her head to look out the window, at spring rushing on.

She thought of many things. Mainly she thought of Pennsylvania, and April 2, and the things she most regretted. But Clara was asleep on her chest. Clara trusted her enough to cede consciousness right on top of Carmen’s heart. However terrible Carmen was, she took solace from that.

“Doxie, it’s Lena,” Lena said into her cellphone.

“Lena, where are you?”

“I’m at the airport.”

“Where are you going? Oh, my dear.” She stopped and made a funny noise. “Are you going?”

“I’m going.”

“It’s not the time yet, is it?”

“I don’t want to wait anymore. I can’t. I’m going to find him in London.”

“You’re flying to London?”

“I sold a painting to my mother’s friend. It goes with her couch.”

“You sound like a different girl, my dear one.”

Lena’s fingers were shaking when she made the next call. Even in her rush of impulse this was hard.

She went immediately to Carmen’s voice mail without a single ring. She hadn’t expected that from Carmen, who manned her phone more devotedly than anyone she knew.

Lena didn’t know what to do. She finally had something to say, but no Carmen to say it to. The thing she needed to say was not the kind of thing you left on a voice mail message, but she couldn’t help it.

“Carmen, it’s Lena. I found something out. Tibby didn’t kill herself.” She heard a sob escape her throat. “She didn’t want to die. There was something wrong with her. She knew she was going to die, but not because she wanted to. I don’t know what really happened or how you explain it, but there was something she said in her letter that made me know, know, it is true.”

Lena realized she was crying openly as she talked, right in the middle of gate D7. “She’s still gone, I know, and maybe it doesn’t change anything.” She wiped her nose with her hand. “But it changes everything.”

Somewhere between Gastonia, North Carolina, and Spartanburg, South Carolina, Carmen gave Clara back to her father, and her big brother wandered over. She could tell he’d been jealous for a couple of hours that the dumb baby had made a friend and he hadn’t. She could read him like a book, and it made her wonder how far she had progressed in her life that she was perfectly in sync with the emotions of a three-year-old.

He introduced himself as Pablo on the way to the dinette. He put up his hand to hold hers as naturally as he walked. It didn’t mean anything to him, but it meant something to her.

She looked down at his up-reaching arm and she could remember, almost in her muscles, the holding-hands era of her life. Reaching up to hold her mother’s hand. Her teacher’s. She could picture herself with Bee holding hands, Bee always yanking her around the yard, but holding on to her nonetheless. She could feel the sensation of holding Tibby’s hand, which was small and squirmy. And Lena you were usually dragging. Lena was slow and distractible when it came time to get anywhere, including the ice cream truck. But they held hands anyway, sometimes three or four of them in a chain, even when it tied them down. Why was that? And when did it stop? First grade, maybe? At some point it had seemed babyish. She had probably been the last one to stop.

Pablo begged for a Snickers bar and Carmen was about to get him two, but then she stopped at the memory of how it had been with her around his age when she had a bellyful of candy. Halloweens, Christmases, and Easters were a catalog of frantic behavior followed by tears. She could picture herself crying over her pink Easter basket every single time.

She sat him on the counter and studied the menu. “Have you ever had apples and cheese?” she whispered to him in Spanish, as if it were an international secret.

He shook his head, interested.

“Separately they are good, but together, in one bite, they are so good they shouldn’t be allowed.”

This, he liked.

“Do you want me to show you?” She looked around, as though concerned somebody might catch them.

His eyebrows were raised. He nodded.

She bought two apples and a pack of cheese and crackers and grabbed a plastic knife. They settled at a table together, him standing on the seat across from her, bent over the table to watch her every move. She cut the apple into small, neat pieces. She saw him eyeing them hungrily.

“Okay, but you can’t eat any yet, because that would just be apple,” she instructed him in Spanish. She cut the orange cheddar cheese into squares. “Do what I do,” she told him. She stacked a piece of cheese on a piece of apple, and he did the same. She held it up to her mouth. “Are you ready?”

He was smiling excitedly. Kids were such suckers for a little bit of ceremony. She remembered that about herself too. She’d get taken in by anything.

“Okay.” She popped hers into her mouth and he did the same. He was so excited, she wasn’t sure he was tasting anything. He was riveted on her reaction. She closed her eyes and nodded, savoring it. He did the same.

“Good, huh?” she asked in English

“Gooooooood.”

They ate about ten more each, stacking them in different ways, into sandwiches, into towers. He wanted to bring the last bits back to his father. “Is it allowed?” he asked her in Spanish.

“Sí,” she said.

His father ate them gratefully, and with a lot of instruction from Pablo. He seemed to understand it was a bite worthy of an international secret.

Carmen sat back down and watched Pablo telling his father about the whole episode, getting it all out of order. And the father listened with admirable patience.

He took it in without demanding that the facts add up. Carmen’s mother had been like that, when Carmen was little.

She wondered about Pablo’s father. He was probably not much older than she was—maybe in his early thirties—but he seemed like an adult. It seemed liked he had crossed a chasm that she hadn’t.

Jones was almost forty. Had he crossed that chasm? She thought not. Maybe it was fatherhood. Maybe it was becoming a parent, which Jones had vowed not to do.

Carmen sat back and looked out the window. Occasionally she stole glances at the little family across the aisle.

Clara napped and Pablo sat peacefully on the floor, playing for at least an hour with his father’s shoelaces. Carmen felt proud that she hadn’t just bought him the two Snickers bars.

There was something pretty different between the last time Lena had come to number twenty-eight Eaton Square and this time. The difference was that this time she was crazy.

This time she wasn’t freaked out or crushed when the fiancée/girlfriend Harriet answered the door. Lena had Bapi’s lion cuff links in the front pocket of her jeans and she was ready for anything. Kostos could have slammed the door in her face three times in a row, and she still would have rung again and said her piece. She’d come more than halfway; she would be damned if she didn’t do her part. At least I tried, she could say.

Harriet looked different this time. She was wearing jeans and flat shoes and she looked like a normal person. Not a totally normal person—she had twice as much makeup on as Lena had worn to her senior prom—but closer.

Harriet looked at Lena with vague recognition. Lena knew she looked different this time too. She was also dressed in jeans. Her hair was pulled back, her shirt was black, she felt like an adult. Last time she had worn fear. And this time she was crazy.

“Is Kostos home?” she asked politely.

There was nothing friendly about Harriet. “Did you come here before?”

No fear. “Yes. A couple months ago.”

The shape of Harriet’s eyes was changing and she seemed to be growing larger in stature. “What is your name?”

Lena cleared her throat. “Lena Kaligaris.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To find Kostos.”

“He’s not here.” Harriet took a step forward, but Lena didn’t step back.

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

Harriet looked like she was debating between shutting the door in Lena’s face and replying to the question. There was something in Harriet’s expression Lena recognized as curiosity. The sick kind of curiosity you hated yourself for having. “I have no idea when he’ll be back here. Possibly never.”

“This isn’t his house?”

“It’s his house, but he doesn’t live in it any longer. He moved out. I thought you of all people would know that.”

Lena wouldn’t shrink. She would stay right here. “I didn’t know that.”

“Aren’t you the girl he wrote all the letters to, Lena Kaligaris? I’m fairly certain you are. You’re the one who made the drawings he had all over his fucking desk and stuck to his mirror. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”

“That would likely be me,” Lena said, unintimidated, without sarcasm. Who really knew? Maybe Kostos had other pen pals. She’d had worse disappointments.

Harriet gave a mirthless laugh. “He said they were ‘friendly’ letters. Funny. You don’t stay up until two or three every morning writing ‘friendly’ letters. I thought he’d run off to you a month ago.”

Lena looked down and shook her head. “He didn’t.”

“Well, good luck finding him. Give him my regards. He’s a strange man, you know. He’s never really with you. My grandmother warned me about shagging a man who doesn’t want to marry you at all, and I should have listened. But I landed quite a good house, didn’t I?”