HARD CANDY

The woman in white planted her boots firmly onto the studded yellow safety line of the Kitchewan Landing train station platform. She leaned over the edge to take a good look north. The approaching train was visible, maybe half a mile away and moving slowly. At that speed it would arrive in a couple of minutes, three at most. The train car interior would be warm and cozy and fine if a little dirty from the winter slush coming off boots and shoes. New York City was always going to be a couple of degrees warmer than upstate. They called it an urban heat island.

But the woman in white was wrong and the approaching train wasn’t warm.

* * *

The conductor was freezing in her little booth. Huddled tight and rubbing her gloved hands together. The heater had failed just after Beacon. Now they were pulling in to Kitchewan Landing, which in addition to being a regular stop was also the principal maintenance facility for the Hudson line. The tracks multiplied on the approach, fanning out to covered repair depots and cleaning huts. The train limped in to the station and the wheels ground to a halt beside the platform.

She leaned forward and pushed the button on the address system with a gloved forefinger. “Kitchewan Landing, final stop on this train. All change at Kitchewan. You gotta get off here folks. The waiting room’s warm and comfortable and the next train’s coming down the track.”

The conductor was cold but relatively happy. She lived in Kitchewan Landing, so this was the end of her day. There might be a few frustrated passengers, but they’d get where they were going, eventually. She looked out the window at the parking lot. Her Jeep Cherokee was parked in the back behind the depot near the trestle, but all she could see was a huge pile of salt, brown and dirty and currently being loaded into the backs of two municipal dump trucks. Equipped with blinking yellow lights and salt sprayers, the trucks were all ready to disperse their loads on the roads once the incoming blizzard hit.

The conductor exited her booth, locked it, and came through the aisle, speaking to the first passenger she saw. “All change here, sir. Train’s going into the depot. Once you get up in the waiting room they’ll have the schedule.” She wasn’t apologetic, just delivering information.

The man looked at her evenly and she felt the tug of attraction. He said, “No problem.”

The conductor tugged at her zipper and smoothed away any gaps in her protective layers. There was no vanity in her choice of outfit; it was simply a matter of urgent practicalities. Underneath her parka she wore a Metro-North uniform. The name tag was in gold and read, “DeValla.”

* * *

Tom Keeler watched the conductor move to the doors. He’d been looking at that river for hours now.

Keeler had been on the train since five in the morning, not just this train, a sequence of trains and waiting rooms and coffee kiosks starting out in a remote part of Ontario, Canada, and scheduled to end in less than an hour at Grand Central Station, New York City. It was 4:51 in the afternoon, and Keeler could have used a cup of coffee and a buttered bagel— not that he required these things. They just occurred to him as a desirable mental image over the darkening wastes of the Hudson. Bagels were just one of the things he was looking forward to in New York City.

The doors hissed open. Keeler could see a woman wrapped in a white down coat standing out on the platform and another figure behind her in a black coat. The conductor stepped off the train, arms wide to prevent the waiting passengers from boarding. She spoke, but Keeler could only make out the tone and see the vapor from her open mouth. The tone was informational, tinged with a small amount of performative regret. The woman in white moved uncertainly, first left and then right and was subsumed in the flow of passengers moving off the train and up the platform.

Keeler stood and pulled his backpack from the overhead rack. He exited the car and joined the stream of passengers moving. A small traffic jam was formed by the tight U-turn up the stairs. Keeler shuffled up with everyone else, one stair at a time. He was patient and content, not bothered either by the delay or the cold. He followed the person in front of him, trudging up the covered stairwell. A grimy plexiglass window gave a view onto the platform below. The woman in white was seated on the ground as if she had slipped on ice.

Up in the waiting area, the passengers gathered beneath a set of information screens. The next train was scheduled in twenty minutes. It would be the express service to Grand Central Station with only three stops. Keeler moved in the direction of a kiosk. He could smell the coffee and had already spotted the individually wrapped bagels.

A couple of minutes later, Keeler finished his buttered bagel. It had become dark out. Since it was elevated, the waiting room had a good view of the surrounding terrain. A police car mounted a rise at the entrance to the parking lot and came down toward the station, lights on and sirens blaring. Slush and mud and ice and dirt sprayed from the tires. An ambulance followed in the cruiser’s wake, likewise screaming and blaring with light and sound.

Keeler observed the passengers in the waiting area: maybe thirty total, plus the two people working the kiosk, what looked like an elderly couple. No Metro-North personnel in sight. He moved to the side that overlooked the tracks. Keeler could just about see down to the platform. A tight knot of Metro-North uniforms had gathered around a fallen figure. The woman in white wasn’t sitting anymore. She’d crumpled to the platform, lying face up on the frozen cement.

The first fat snowflakes drifted through the vapor lights. The incoming police strobes bounced off the woman’s face, reflecting in sightless eyes trained on the underside of the stairwell.