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  Derailed

  Siegel, James

  Advertising director Charles Schine is just another New York commuter, regularly catching the 8.43 to work. But the day he misses his train is the day that changes his life. Catching the 9.05 instead, he can't help but be drawn by the sight of the person opposite. Charles has never cheated on his wife in eighteen years of marriage. But then Charles has never met anyone like Lucinda Harris before. Charming, beautiful and a seductively good listener, Charles finds himself instantly attracted. And though Lucinda is married too, it is immediately apparent that the feeling is mutual. Their journeys into work become lunch dates, which become cocktails and eventually lead to a rented room in a seedy hotel. They both know the risks they are taking, but not in their worst nightmares could they foresee what is to follow. Suddenly their temptation turns horrifically sour, and their illicit liaison becomes caught up in something bigger, more dangerous, more brutally violent. Unable to talk to his partner or the police, Charles finds himself trapped in a world of dark conspiracy and psychological games. Somehow he's got to find a way to fight back, or his entire life will be spectacularly derailed for good.

  DERAILED

  BY

  JAMES SIEGEL

  © 2003

  To Mindy, who tends to her family as she tends to her garden — with great love, ceaseless devotion, and unflagging enthusiasm.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank both Sara Ann and just plain Sarah for their immense help in structuring this story, Larry for believing in it, and, of course, Richard, for unapologetically championing it.

  ATTICA

  I spend five days a week teaching English at East Bennington High and two nights a week teaching English at Attica State Prison. Which is to say, I spend my time conjugating verbs for delinquents and dangling participles for convicts. One class feeling like they’re in prison and the other class actually being in one.

  On the Attica evenings, I eat an early dinner with my wife and two children. I kiss my wife and teenage daughter good-bye and give my four-year-old son a piggyback ride to the front door. I gently put him down, kiss his soft brow, and promise to look in on him when I get home.

  I enter my eight-year-old Dodge Neon still surrounded in a halo of emotional well-being.

  By the time I pass through the metal detector at Attica Prison, it’s gone.

  Maybe it’s the brass plaque prominently displayed on the wall of the visitors room. “Dedicated to the Correction Officers who died in the Attica riots,” it says. There is no plaque for the prisoners who died.

  I have only recently begun teaching there, and I can’t quite decide who’s scarier — the Attica prisoners or the corrections officers who guard them. Possibly the corrections officers.

  It’s clear they don’t like me much. They consider me a luxury item, like cable TV, something the prisoners did nothing to deserve. The brainchild of some liberal in Albany, who’s never had a shiv stuck in his ribs or feces thrown in his face, who’s never had to peel a tattooed carcass off a blood-soaked floor swimming with AIDS.

  They greet me with barely disguised contempt. It’s the PHD, they mumble. “Pathetic Homo Douchebag,” one of them scrawled on the wall of the visitors bathroom.

  I forgive them.

  They are the outnumbered occupiers of an enslaved population seething with hatred. To survive this hate, they must hate back. They are not allowed to carry guns, so they arm themselves with attitude.

  As for the prisoners who attend my class, they are strangely docile. Many of them the unfortunate victims of the draconian Rockefeller drug laws that treat small purchases of cocaine like violent felonies. They mostly look bewildered.

  Now and then, I give them writing assignments. Write something, I say. Anything. Anything that interests you.

  I used to have them read their work in class. Until one convict, a sloe-eyed black named Benjamin Washington, read what sounded like gibberish. It was gibberish, and the other convicts laughed at him. Benjamin took offense at this and later knifed one of them in the back over a breakfast of watery scrambled eggs and burnt toast.

  I decided on anonymity there and then.

  They write what interests them and send it up to the desk unsigned. I read it out loud and nobody knows who wrote what. The writer knows; that’s good enough.

  One day, though, I asked them to write something that would interest me. The story of them. How they got here, for instance, to Mr. Widdoes’s English class in the rec room at Attica State Prison. If they wanted to be writers, I told them, start with the writer.

  It might be enlightening, I thought, maybe even cathartic. It might be more interesting than the story “Tiny the Butterfly,” a recent effort from . . . well, I don’t know, do I? Tiny brought color and beauty to a weed-strewn lot in the projects until he was, unfortunately, crushed like a bug by the local crank dealer. Tiny, it was explained at the bottom of the page, was cymbollic.

  I gave out the assignment on Thursday; by next Tuesday the papers were scattered across my desk. I read them aloud in no particular order. The first story about an innocent man being framed for armed robbery. The second story about an innocent man being framed for possession of illegal narcotics. The third story about an innocent man being framed . . .

  So maybe it wasn’t that enlightening.

  But then.

  Another story. Hardly a story at all (although it had a title); a kind of introduction to a story. An invitation to one, really.

  About another innocent man.

  Who walked on the train one day to go to work.

  When something happened.

  ONE

  The morning Charles met Lucinda, it took him several moments after he first opened his eyes to remember why he liked keeping them closed.

  Then his daughter, Anna, called him from the hallway and he thought: Oh yeah.

  She needed lunch money, a note for the gym teacher, and help with a book report that was due yesterday.

  Not in that order.

  In a dazzling feat of juggling, he managed all three between showering, shaving, and getting dressed. He had to. His wife, Deanna, had already left for her job at P.S. 183, leaving him solely in charge.

  When he made it downstairs he noticed Anna’s blood meter and a used syringe on the kitchen counter.

  Anna had made him late.

  When he got to the station, his train had already left — he could hear a faint rumble as it retreated into the distance.

  By the time the next train pulled in, the platform had been repopulated by an entirely new cast of commuters. He knew most of the 8:43 crowd by sight, but this was the 9:05, so he was in alien territory.

  He found a seat all by himself and immediately dived into the sports pages.

  It was November. Baseball had slipped away with another championship for the home team. Basketball was just revving up, football already promising a year of abject misery.

  This is the way he remained for the next twenty minutes or so: head down, eyes forward, brain dead — awash in meaningless stats he could reel off like his Social Security number, numbers he could recite in his sleep, and sometimes did, if only to keep himself from reciting other numbers.

  Which numbers were those?

  Well, the numbers on Anna’s blood meter, for example.

  Numbers that were increasingly and alarmingly sky high.

  Anna had suffered with juvenile diabetes for over eight years.

  Anna wasn’t doing well.

  So all things being equal, he preferred a number like 3.25. Roger-the-Rocket-Clemens’s league-leading ERA this past season.

  Or twenty-two — there was a good round number. Latrell Sprewell’s current points per game, accumulated, dreadlocks flying, for the New York Knicks.


  Numbers he could look at without once feeling sick.

  The train lurched, stopped.

  They were somewhere between stations — dun-colored ranch houses on either side of the track. It suddenly occurred to him that even though he’d ridden this train more times than he cared to remember, he couldn’t describe a single neighborhood it passed through. Somewhere along the way to middle age, he’d stopped looking out windows.

  He burrowed back into the newspaper.

  It was at that exact moment, somewhere between Steve Serby’s column on the state of the instant replay rule and Michael Strahan’s lamentation on his diminishing sack total, that it happened.

  Later he would wonder what exactly had made him look up again at that precise moment in time.

  He would ask himself over and over what would have happened if he hadn’t. He would torture himself with all the permutations, the what ifs and what thens and what nows.

  But he did look up.

  The 9:05 from Babylon to Penn Station kept going. Merrick to Freeport to Baldwin to Rockville Centre. Lynbrook to Jamaica to Forest Hills to Penn.

  But Charles clearly and spectacularly derailed.

  ATTICA

  Two nights later after dinner, my four-year-old climbed onto my lap and demanded I do treasure hunt on his back.

  “We’re going on a treasure hunt,” I whispered as I traced little steps up and down his spine. “Xmarks the spot . . .” as he squirmed and giggled. He smelled of shampoo and candy and Play-Doh, the scent that was clearly and uniquely him.

  “To get to the treasure, you take big steps and little steps,” I murmured, and when I finished he asked me where this treasure was exactly, and I answered him on cue. This, after all, was our routine.

  “Right here,” I said. And hugged him.

  My wife smiled at us from the other side of the table.

  When I kissed them all good-bye, I lingered before stepping out into the driveway. As if I were attempting to soak up enough good vibes to last me through the night, straight through the redbrick archway of Attica and into the fetid rec room. Like a magic aura that might protect me from harm.

  “Be careful,” my wife said from the front door.

  When I went through the metal detector, it went off like an air raid siren.

  I’d forgotten to take my house keys out of my pocket.

  “Hey, Yobwoc,” the CO said while patting me down. “Keys are like . . . metal.” Yobwoc was Cowboy backward and stood for Young Obnoxious Bastard We Often Con.

  PHD was just one of my monikers here.

  “Sorry,” I said, “forgot.”

  As soon as I entered the classroom, I could see there was another piece of the story waiting for me at my desk. Eleven pages, neatly printed.

  Yes, I thought. The story is just getting started.

  Other sections soon followed like clockwork.

  From that first day on, there would be another piece of the story waiting for me every time I entered the classroom.

  Sometimes just a page or two — sometimes what would constitute several chapters. Placed flat on my desk and all, like the first one, unsigned. The story unfolding piecemeal, like a daytime serial you just can’t pull your eyes away from. After all, it would end up containing all the staples of soap opera — sex, lies, and tragedy.

  I didn’t read these installments to my class. I understood they were solely for me now. Me and, of course, the writer.

  Speaking of which.

  There were twenty-nine students in my class.

  Eighteen blacks, six Hispanics, five pale-as-ghosts Caucasians.

  I was reasonably sure that none of them had ever ridden the 9:05 to Pennsylvania Station.

  So where was he?

  TWO

  An expanse of thigh — that’s all at first.

  But not just any thigh. A thigh taut, smooth, and toned, a thigh that had obviously spent some time on the treadmill, sheathed by a fashionably short skirt made even shorter by the position of the legs. Casually crossed at the knees. All in all, a skirt length that he’d have to say fell somewhere between sexiness and sluttiness, not exactly one or the other, therefore both.

  This is what Charles saw when he looked up.

  He could just make out a black high-heeled pump jutting out into the aisle, barely swinging with the motion of the train. He was directly facing her, his seat backward to the city-bound direction of the train car. But she was blocked by the front page of The New York Times, and even if she wasn’t blocked by the day’s alarming if familiar headline — MID-EAST BURNING — he hadn’t yet looked up toward her face, only peripherally. Instead he was focusing on that thigh and hoping against hope she wouldn’t turn out to be beautiful.

  She was.

  He’d been debating his next move: whether to turn back to his sports stats, for instance, whether to stare out the grime-streaked window, or scan the bank and airline ads lining each side of the car, when he simply threw caution to the wind and peeked. Just as The New York Times strategically lowered, finally revealing the face he’d been so hesitant to look at.

  Yes, she was beautiful.

  Her eyes.

  They were kind of spectacular. Wide and doe shaped and the very definition of tenderness. Full, pouting lips she was ever so slightly biting down on. Her hair? Soft enough to cocoon himself in and never, ever, come out.

  He’d been hoping she’d be homely or interesting or simply cute. Not a chance. She was undeniably magnificent.

  And that was a problem, because he was kind of vulnerable these days. Dreaming of a kind of alternate universe.

  In this alternate universe, he wasn’t married and his kid wasn’t sick, because he didn’t have any kids. Things were always looking up there; the world was his oyster.

  So he didn’t want the woman reading The New York Times to be beautiful. Because that was like peeking into the doorway of this alternate universe of his, at the hostess beckoning him to come inside and put his feet up on the couch, and everyone knew alternate universes were for kids and sci-fi nuts.

  They didn’t exist.

  “Ticket.” The conductor was standing over him and demanding something. What did he want? Couldn’t he see he was busy defining the limitations of his life?

  “Ticket,” he repeated.

  It was Monday, and Charles had forgotten to actually walk into the station and purchase his weekly ticket. The time change had thrown him off, and here he was, ticketless in front of strangers.

  “Forgot to buy one,” he said.

  “Okay,” the conductor said.

  “See, I didn’t realize it was Monday.”

  “Fine.”

  Another thing had just occurred to Charles. On Mondays he stopped at the station ATM to take out money he then used to purchase the weekly ticket. Money he also used to get through the week. Money he didn’t, at the moment, have.

  “That’s nine dollars,” the conductor said.

  Like most couples these days, Charles and Deanna lived on the ATM plan, which doled out cash like a trust fund lawyer — a bit at a time. Charles’s wallet had been in its usual Monday morning location, opened on the kitchen counter, where Deanna had no doubt scoured it for loose cash before going off to work. There was nothing in it.

  “Nine dollars,” the conductor said, this time impatiently. No doubt about it; the man was getting antsy.

  Charles looked through his wallet anyway. There was always the chance he was wrong, that somewhere in there was a forgotten twenty tucked away between business cards and six-year-old photos. Besides, looking through your wallet was what you were supposed to do when someone was asking you for money.

  Which someone was. Repeatedly.

  “Look, you’re holding up the whole train,” he said. “Nine dollars.”

  “I don’t seem . . .” continuing the facade, sifting through slips of wrinkled receipts and trying not to show his embarrassment at being caught penniless in a train of well-to-do commuters.


  “You got it or don’t you?” the conductor said.

  “If you just give me a minute . . .”

  “Here,” someone said. “I’ll pay for him.”

  It was her.

  Holding up a ten-dollar bill and showing him a smile that completely threatened his equilibrium.

  THREE

  Of all the things they talked about — and they talked about all sorts of things — there was one thing they didn’t talk about.

  Commuting to work? Yes.

  I was thinking the other day, she said, that if the U.S. government was run like the Long Island Rail Road, we’d all be in trouble. And then I realized that maybe it is, and we are.

  The weather? Of course.

  Fall’s my favorite season, she said. But where did it go?

  Baltimore, Charles answered.

  Jobs? Absolutely.

  I write commercials, Charles said. I'm a creative director.

  I cheat clients, she said. I'm a broker. After which she added: Just kidding.

  Restaurants dined in . . . colleges attended . . . favorite movies. All spoken of, discussed, mentioned.

  Just not marriages.

  Marriages, the plural, because she wore a wedding band on her left ring finger.

  Maybe marriage wasn’t considered an appropriate topic when flirting. If flirting was what they were doing, of course. Charles wasn’t sure; he was kind of rusty at it and had never been particularly at ease with women to begin with.

  But as soon as she’d pressed the ten-dollar bill into the conductor’s hand, Charles protesting all the while — Don’t be silly, you don’t have to do that — as soon as the conductor gave her one dollar in return, Charles still protesting — No, really, this is totally unnecessary — he’d gotten up and sat in the empty seat next to her. Why not — wasn’t it the polite thing to do when someone helped you out? Even someone who looked like her?

  Her thighs shifted to accommodate him. Even with his eyes glued to her heartbreaking face, he’d managed to notice the movement of her legs, a memory that stayed with him as he spoke to her about the banal, trivial, and superfluous — a good name, he thought, for a law firm specializing in personal injury suits.