The Reunion

The train station had not changed. Same green-painted iron pillars, same smell of diesel and rain-soaked concrete, same announcement board clicking through its endless procession of arrivals and departures. Mara stood at the entrance with her bag across one shoulder and her heart somewhere near her knees.

She had not been back to Caldwell in four years. She had not planned to return at all, actually, until her mother's voice on the phone had carried that particular weight that meant there was no argument to be made.

The platform was crowded for a Tuesday. She moved through the bodies with her eyes down, reading the floor tiles, counting the cracks — an old habit she had developed as a teenager when she needed something to do with her attention besides think.

She heard him before she saw him.

"Mara."

One word. Her name. But she knew the voice the way you know a song you have not heard in years — immediately, completely, with a kind of ache that lives somewhere between recognition and loss.

Elliot Hale was standing by the coffee kiosk with a paper cup in one hand and a slightly bewildered expression on his face, as though he had been expecting anyone in the world except her.

She stopped walking.

He was taller than she remembered, or maybe she had simply forgotten the exact dimensions of him — the way he stood, slightly tilted forward, like he was always about to say something important. His hair was shorter now. There were small lines at the corners of his eyes that had not been there when they were seventeen.

"Elliot," she said.

The name felt strange in her mouth. She had not said it aloud in a very long time.

He looked at her for a moment that stretched too long. Then he smiled — that same slightly lopsided smile she had spent most of her teenage years pretending not to notice — and said, "You look exactly the same."

She did not say what she was thinking, which was that he did too, and that this was somehow the most devastating thing that had happened to her all year.

"I doubt that," she said instead, and adjusted the strap of her bag, and tried to remember how to be a person who was not deeply unsettled by Elliot Hale.

"It's good to see you," he said, and he sounded like he meant it, which was somehow worse."You too," she said, because it was true, and because she had not yet figured out how to be dishonest with him. That had always been the problem.

The announcement board clicked. A train was arriving on platform three. Around them, the crowd shifted and moved, and Mara stood still in the middle of it, looking at the boy she had spent four years trying to forget, and thought: of course. Of course it would be the train station.

Of course it would be a Tuesday.

"Are you staying long?" he asked."A week, maybe two." She paused. "My mother needs help with some things."

He nodded slowly, the way people do when they are filing information away. "I'm here until the end of the month,"he said. "Work project. Consulting thing." "Right." She did not know what else to say. "That sounds..."

"Boring," he said, and smiled again. "It is, mostly."

The awkwardness between them was not hostile. It was something softer and more complicated than that — the awkwardness of people who had once known each other completely and were now standing on opposite sides of a gap they had both helped to build.

"I should find a taxi," she said. "I'll walk you out," he said, immediately, and then looked as though he was slightly surprised by himself.

She thought about saying no. She thought about it very carefully for approximately one second.

"Okay," she said.

They walked through the station together, not quite close enough to touch, and Mara looked at the floor tiles and counted the cracks and told herself that this was fine, that she was fine, that four years was long enough to make a person into someone new.

She was almost convinced.