Since Ms. Chit-chat was in a sleeper car, she’d boarded the train with me in Chicago, at the lofty-arched and elegant Union Station, where the roasty smell of the Nuts on Clark mixed with fragrant coffee and wafts of yeast-pungent beer from happy travelers in the Great Hall. We’d all trooped down the chilly dank platform, pulling our black roller bags and tote bags. A few travelers had been lugging pillows, which I had thought, at the time, was odd. Now I know why they had them. Which passenger was in the room beside mine? Our heads together, Pyramus and Thisbe, without her knowing?
Should I ring for the porter? Ask him to intervene on behalf of sleepy passengers everywhere?
Maybe I should pretend to call someone, speaking really loudly, and then when she hears me, she’ll put two and two together, realize I can hear her, and shut up.
Or I could simply tap on her door and warn her. “I can hear everything you say,” I’d sheepishly reveal. Or maybe I could just indicate how I could kind of hear, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed, but so that she would stop the hell talking. We’d arrive in Boston’s South Station at 9:50 am.
She’d probably still be talking.
“My firm intuition, my firm intuition, is that come next week, after she walks across that stage, that’s the last we’ll hear of her.”
The last we’ll hear of her. And after that line, I counted my blessings that I did not have to deal with someone like this in my own office. I had one assistant, the woefully underpaid Hadley who could find anything on the computer, break any password, track down any elusive source, get a reporter’s private cell number or a police detective’s home address. Hadley, unfortunately, was on vacation in some paradise with white sand and no internet. And probably good pillows. People said provocative stuff like that, though, without meaning it. I’m going insane, I’m going to blow this place up, I’m gonna kill you. Hyperbole. Exaggeration for effect. Everyone on the planet does it.
I heard brittle laughter through our wall. “Bye bye, Shayla Miller, right, sweetie? And then the next steps are ours. And I know you are, my dear. I do know. And I cannot wait to hear all about it. Sure, I’ll hold on.”
If I sat up in bed, put my feet on the ground and twisted my shoulder a bit, I could plant my ear flat up against the wall. I felt the ridged wallpaper, the chill of what the wallpaper covered — metal? drywall? — and heard my new friend continue her conversation. She hadn’t — that I’d heard at least — apologized for the late hour, which told me she was the alpha in the convo, or her listener was in a different time zone. Or was just as invested in “getting it done” and “bye bye Shayla” as she was.
With a sigh and a glance heavenward, I gave up. I grabbed my little red notebook from my totebag, and scribbled down what I remembered. Rotherwood. Shayla Miller. Pattillo with 2 T’s, she’d said. The board doesn’t know. The board of Rotherwood? Doesn’t know. Doesn’t know — someone is a lush. Well, welcome to the real world.
Too bad this Shayla doesn’t have me to help her. Next week, I wrote. What this woman was planning would come to fruition next week. But no one can fix everything, I thought, closing my notebook and snapping the red elastic to keep it closed, and the stories of our lives have their own tracks. Separate tracks. I hope Shayla deserved it, whatever ‘it’ was, because it certainly was coming.
I guess Cruella, as I’d decided to call her, was still on hold, or had paced to the other side of her roomette, because I could no longer hear her. I settled back in, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine Shayla. What had she done, poor innocent thing, to incur the wrath of this viper next door? Was it an All About Eve thing, where Cru was worried the gorgeous and duplicitous Shayla was angling to take her place? I pictured Bette Davis, and who was the ingenue? Anne Baxter.
Or was Shayla a big shot? Even nastier than Cru, maybe, demanding and unreasonable, and covering up for her protector, the secret-drinking lush? Maybe Cruella was a good person, good with an unfortunate voice, but simply trying to make her way in the cutthroat world of academia where there were knives out around every corner. Maybe Shayla had it out for her, too.
I was only hearing one side of the story.
Damn it.
I grabbed my phone, googled Shayla Miller Rotherwood. Nothing. Shayla Miller Boston. Nothing. Shae Miller, nope. Shay Miller. About a million women are named Shay Miller. So much for that idea. Shay Pattillo? I rolled my eyes at myself for doing this, an insane example of spiraling curiosity that even if it went somewhere, would never go anywhere. There weren’t any helpful listings, anyway. My phone battery was on the verge of being under fifty percent, which makes me terrified, so I unplugged the lamp to make room and plugged it into the wall outlet. You’d think they’d have more plugs in these roomettes.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania, I figured, as the green numbers on the bedside clock radio thing reorganized their little lines into two zero zero. If I had simply flown, like a normal person, I’d be home, long ago, with Dickens snuffling for food and in my comfy slippers and watching the last episode of the new Stephen King. But no, I wanted an adventure, a time to think and plan and be by myself. I’d told people I’d be off the grid, which is absurd, you never really are, but it was meant to be an excuse for why I wasn’t answering texts and emails.
The light changed outside, not that it got lighter, but somehow — darker. Wrapping my blue bathrobe more tightly around me, I got up to consult the framed route map displayed on the roomette’s wall. Lake Erie? Which might have been fun to see in the daylight. Which was approaching more and more quickly.
Cruella was talking again. Ooh. Better than Stephen King. I hustled back to my listening spot on the bed, ear to the wall.
“My mother-in-law is dying, thanks for asking,” she was saying. “But that’s a sidebar. Otherwise, life is good.”
“Well lovely,” I muttered to myself. “There’s an interesting life attitude.” But then I thought — mother-in-law. She’s married. Somehow it had to be that she was the bad guy, and Shayla the target. Well, Shayla was the target, for sure. But did she deserve targeting?
“Dud, dun, duuh,” I said out loud, imitating an old-time radio show.
The train lurched, with a yank and a stutter and a grabbing of the brakes on the rails so intense I felt my entire body clench in response. The clackety sound of the wheels stopped, a silence as intense as the noise had been only seconds before. Maybe we’d pulled into a station, my brain reassured me, maybe we were in Erie, like the dot on the map indicated, and maybe I’d be able to see if anyone was looking in. I peered out the window — but there was only darkness.
And then there was noise. Earsplitting, shrieking noise, like the scraping of ten million fingernails on ten million blackboards, the kind of high-pitched piercing whistle that had me clamping my hands over my ears and leaping up so fast I almost hit my head on the bottom of the upper bunk again.
“This is a fire alarm,” a weird disembodied robo-voice announced over a scratchy public address system. “Message 524. This is a fire alarm. All passengers must evacuate. All passengers must follow the signs to the closest fire exit.”
Kidding me? I thought. I sniffed, without thinking, as the voice continued to bellow instructions, and smelled nothing, and again rued my impetuous decision to take the train. How many false alarms must there be? When we had them in office buildings where I’d worked, first we’d always ignored it, figuring since it was surely a false alarm and the darn thing would stop, we’d think, so we’d amble our way toward the exit, dragging our feet, muttering about how annoying it was to have our work interrupted. I’d always take my laptop and phone, though, and handbag, just in case.