And anybody just might have killed five people.
And anybody just might have drowned a cat.

Barely audible at first, a woman on the train few had noticed began queerly and abruptly a conversation with all the hundred-odd passengers, one-on-one, as the train approached Chicago’s Union Station. Had I heard her right? She certainly had my attention: twilight made a mirror of my window, and I stared out blankly past a corner of my face back across the aisle and watched her where she sat alone. I’d seen her back in New York at Grand Central Station, a silver-haired woman in her late fifties, prim and proper. Her clothes, though from another era, seemed new, as if her beige woolen coat and pillbox hat had been pulled from storage only the day before.  

I might have lived here all my life, you know.
I never wanted to be anywhere else.

The woman obviously had, though, as she spoke with a distinctly Bronx accent. Her faint ramblings grew bolder until her voice rose above the steady rumble and clack of train wheels and screeching brakes. Our Amtrak lumbered toward the station through a corridor of tracks and switches passing through a blighted back alley of the city, recipient of sand piles, gravel heaps, and an overflow of public works equipment. Intimately close-up from a train window, this less-than-magnificent stretch of tumbledown, pollution-stained office buildings and warehouses blotted out Chicago’s glossier skyline.

On a spot just like that, we used to have picnics in spring.
Oh, they were a big to-do back in the day.

Gaining confidence in public speaking, she grew bold, stood, and leaned an elbow against the seat in front of hers, striking a self-assured pose, looking to meet anyone in the eye, anxious to connect. Passengers all feigned not to hear, not to see. Wary, each tried to connect knowing glances with anyone else but her, or stared out windows, hard-pressed to imagine picnicking amongst such shambles.

I’m educated you know, graduated Cum Laude.
Oh, I come from money. Cakes they called us back then.

Indignant that no one listened, defensive we might regard her as mad, her face turned to a leathery-red scowl. Pugnacious and wild-eyed, she began to shout each word followed by relentless dry spittle.

I could have married a doctor you know: Dr. M. J. Sterling.
Oh, he would have been a catch. Mother said I was first choice, but well . . .

The train rounded a curve, hunkered to the track, applied brakes, and jolted her back into her seat – and the hat off her head. Disheveled, disoriented, the woman stared out the window for a time at passing rail signage – and perhaps at passing memories.

He left me at the altar if you must know.
Well, I had to leave town after that, of course.

She fell to mumbling until she caught my stare in her mirror window. She pulled the hat into her lap, stroked its wool as if she’d held a cat, before turning to dead-eye me with contempt.

I’ve been married five times since then.
Attended funerals for every one of the bastards.

The woman turned back to her window and stared at herself. She seemed to weep, nostalgic, fond, proud for a place that tormented, fragmented and abandoned her still. Then she found the full of her voice for one last outburst.

I’m back now for that doctor’s funeral if you must know.
Won’t that be a big to-do?

She wiped to dry her eyes with the wool of her hat as if tears had formed, though none had, and then held the hat in her lap again, twisting at it, wringing it – or perhaps her cat – tighter and tighter.

– John Haymaker