Sitting on his bed in his pajamas, Jack anxiously pried open the frame that held his mother’s photo. The night before he had stashed the map inscribed with her name there. But in the morning light, he suddenly doubted that the map had been real. He was sure the whole night—the ice storm, the stranger, his leap out the window, the piece of paper he’d left behind, even the sounds of his father crying just before he fell asleep—had been a dream. But when he pulled open the velvety back of the frame, he found the map still lodged inside.
A knock sounded on his door. “Jack? Are you up?”
Jack quickly put the frame back together. His father opened the door and watched him fiddle with the metal tabs. “I’m just straightening Mom’s photo,” Jack said.
From the way his father was glumly staring at the photo, Jack was pretty sure that he hadn’t seen the map. There was an embarrassed silence between them. “How did you sleep?” his father asked.
Jack shrugged. “All right.”
“You seemed jumpy last night.” His father sat down on the bed and studied the maps on his wall. “After you went to bed I called Dr. Lyons.”
Jack put down the photo. “Doctor who?” He’d never heard of a Dr. Lyons before.
“He’s an old friend, a doctor in New York. He wants to take a look at you.”
Jack thought of the strange man jumping out of the window and frowned. “Does he think there’s something wrong with me?”
His father waved a hand dismissively. “No. But I want him to see you, to give a second opinion. So I’m sending you to New York.”
Jack was worried. Perhaps Dr. Lyons really did think there was something wrong with him. But then a larger realization dawned on him: he was finally visiting New York. He’d always wanted to go there, but his father had always found some excuse not to take him. It was the place where his mother had died. “Are you coming too?” he asked.
His father shifted uncomfortably. “You need to go yourself. We’ll just put you on the train to Grand Central and you’ll take a cab to Dr. Lyons’s office. When you’re done, you’ll take the train back home. You’ll be fine.”
“It doesn’t sound like a big deal,” said Jack, although he very much felt the opposite. He had flown alone to Greece to meet his father on a dig the previous summer, but there was something special about going to New York, his mother’s city, by himself. He tried to think of a way to say this to his father, but instead he just ended up staring at his mother’s photo. His last memory of New York was one of her. He remembered standing in front of a snow-covered fountain, holding the cord to his sled in one mittened hand and her hand in the other. They had sledded in the park all afternoon, and his cheeks stung. But when he tugged his mother’s arm to go home, she didn’t move. “Come on, Mom,” he said. But she didn’t seem to hear him, and when Jack looked around, he realized it was getting dark and that they were alone. “Mom!” he shouted. She immediately crouched down and smiled at him. “What?” He knew then that it was okay.
But after she died, it was the moment when she wouldn’t answer him that he thought about most.
After lunch, Jack and his father took a taxi to Union Station. As they stood on the platform waiting for the train, Jack opened up the
Metamorphoses
and reread the passage about the
auspicium
, or omen, that foreshadows Eurydice’s snakebite. During the wedding ceremony, a torch carried by Hymen, the god of marriage, begins to sputter and smoke. This was considered a bad omen, an
auspicium gravius
, but all omens weren’t necessarily bad. In fact, Jack reminded himself,
auspicium
was the root of the English word “auspicious.”
As the train chugged toward them, his father handed Jack his cell phone, Dr. Lyons’s address, and four twenties. “Call to let me know what train you’re coming back on,” he said. “And be careful.”
There was something about the way his father’s face softened that made Jack suddenly think he could ask him about his mom. Not something big, like why his father never talked about her, but something small, like whether she had liked living in New York or what had made her laugh or whether she had any irrational fears. But as swiftly as the softness had come over it, his father’s face reassembled into its usual stern expression. After an awkward, silent hug, Jack boarded the train.
Five minutes later Jack was on his way to New York. He took out the Viele map and began charting his route from the train station to Dr. Lyons’s office. But it was hard to trace it on the map. The street numbers were small and he couldn’t decipher the mazy blue lines that branched and looped through Manhattan. He leaned his head up against his backpack and looked out the window at backyards filled with old car parts and washing machines, empty parking lots, the occasional patch of field, yellow and crackled with frost. The sun wafted in and out behind the clouds, illuminating the ice-covered branches of the trees. Birds swooped overhead, landing on the electric wires, fluttering off. Jack’s head bobbed.
“Final stop, Grand Central Terminal!”
Jack opened his eyes. His head throbbed and his mouth was dry and metallic-tasting. The train began to plunge into an underground tunnel. As the daylight faded into shadow, Jack’s ears began to pop. The lights in the train flickered on and off, illuminating flashes of tunnel covered with red-lettered warning signs and graffiti scrawls.
“Grand Central Terminal! Please check for your belongings before you leave the train. Thank you for riding Metro-North.” The train inched wearily to a stop. Jack folded the map and slid it into his backpack. Hoisting the backpack onto his shoulders, he stumbled onto the platform and began to follow the rushing tide of people into the station. The crowd climbed a flight of marble stairs and carryied him up a ramp and out a door. A few minutes later he was in the backseat of a cab, heading downtown to Dr. Lyons’s office.
The office, which shared the twenty-third floor with a cleaning service and a piano tuner, was much smaller than Jack expected. The waiting room was empty save for a receptionist with a blue-tinted bouffant, scribbling in a log beside an enormous stack of yellowed papers. As Jack approached, he could make out the letters atop one of the pieces of paper—
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
. It seemed as if most of Dr. Lyons’s patients hadn’t fared well at all. But before he had a chance to turn back, the receptionist looked up.
“You must be Jack,” she said. She stood up and gestured for him to follow her down a dimly lit hallway and into an office. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a worn couch. “Dr. Lyons will be with you in a minute.” As soon as he sat down, the receptionist left, closing the door behind her.
The office wasn’t much of an improvement over the waiting room. The walls were lined with rows of antique, leather-bound books, their spines sagging and titles peeling. A framed certificate to Augustus Lyons for Distinguished Alumni Service from the George Chapman School hung lopsided on a hook. The most interesting object in the room was a bookcase made out of shellacked tree limbs. It had five glass shelves; on the middle one, Jack noticed a collection of what looked like ancient coins. They were all the same dull, bronze color except for one, which flashed gold. Jack walked over to the shelf and picked it up. The shape of a “Y” was cut out of its center, and around the edges it said
GOOD FOR ONE FARE
.
Just then, the door opened, and Jack instinctively closed his fist around the coin. An obese man his father’s age, with drooping, caterpillar-size eyebrows, waddled in. “You must be Louis’s son,” he said in a cheerful baritone. “I’m Dr. Lyons.”
Jack felt his face turn red. “I’m just looking.”
“As you should. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?” Dr. Lyons joined Jack by the bookcase. “I collect artifacts from the city’s past—playbills, baseball cards, restaurant menus, World’s Fair memorabilia, subway tokens.”
Jack stood stiffly in front of the shelf, fingering the subway token nestled in his palm. He watched Dr. Lyons’s face, hoping he wouldn’t notice the token’s absence. To Jack’s relief, after a quick glance at his collection, the doctor pointed to the couch. “Why don’t you take a seat?”
Jack sat down and waited for Dr. Lyons to examine him, but the doctor just eased himself into his chair and spent a few awkward seconds doing nothing except staring at Jack. Finally he said, “I heard about your accident. You’re lucky to be alive. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” Jack chirped. He suddenly wondered whether his father’s old friend was a quack. “Are you a medical doctor?” he asked.
Dr. Lyons laughed. “Something like that. So, nothing . . . unusual?”
Jack wondered if he should tell Dr. Lyons about the man who had leaped out the window, but then he remembered the enormous pile of death certificates and decided against it. Who knew what kind of bad medicine the doctor was practicing?
“You favor your mother,” Dr. Lyons declared.
Jack leaned forward. “You knew my mother?”
The doctor laughed. “You look exactly like her.”
Jack swallowed. “My dad never talks about her. What was she—?”
“You’re a fine, healthy boy,” Dr. Lyons interrupted. He opened a drawer and rooted around in it.
“Puer fortunae bonae
.
”
A boy of good fortune. Jack smiled at the Latin words.
“I hear you’re a Classics scholar,” the doctor remarked. “Good at dead languages.”
“I’m all right, I guess.”
Dr. Lyons finally stopped staring at him and pulled out a bulky, ancient-looking camera. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
Jack shrugged.
“It’s a 1947 Polaroid,” Dr. Lyons said, as if that explained everything. “First year they made them.”
Jack gave an awkward smile as the flash momentarily blinded him.
The doctor waved the photo in the air and then, after a quick glance, slipped it into the left drawer of his desk.
“Sun sets early this time of year. We’d better get you on your way.”
Jack knew he was supposed to stand up, but he didn’t. “That’s it? Don’t you want to examine me?”
Doctor Lyons stood and opened his door. “That’s not necessary. I think we’re all squared away here.”
Jack wanted to protest—nothing seemed to be squared away at all. He was also still holding Dr. Lyons’s subway token. But there was no easy way now to explain why he had it and give it back. Jack reluctantly stood and walked out. Dr. Lyons closed the office door behind him.
Jack stood in the main hall of Grand Central Terminal, peering up at the large black boards that listed the trains’ timetables. According to the New Haven line departures, he had a half hour till the next train. It wasn’t enough time to leave the station, but it also seemed wrong to come all the way to New York and see nothing except Dr. Lyons’s ratty office and the inside of a cab. He scanned the hall, decorated with giant wreaths for the holidays, and noticed a small crowd gathered by the information booth, looking up at the cathedral-high ceiling, which was painted a robin’s-egg blue and decorated with stars. He slipped over to join them.
“The ceiling is an actual re-creation of the winter sky,” explained a gray-haired woman standing in front of the group of tourists. “But the constellations are in reverse, so that you’re seeing the heavens from a God’s-eye view.”
Jack studied the constellations and realized that the Dipper was indeed backward.
“Now I’m going to show you one of Grand Central’s many secrets. The terminal was built in 1913 and has two levels. Please follow me this way to the lower one.” The tour guide walked across the great hall and turned under an arch. Jack trailed after the group. They descended a ramp beneath large pineapple-shaped chandeliers until they reached a mezzanine. It had an arched tile roof and four marble columns. On one side was a set of glass doors leading to a tiled restaurant called The Oyster Bar. On the other side was a ramp leading to the lower level of the station. The guide pointed to the marble columns. “This is the whispering gallery,” she explained. “If you whisper into a column, those standing at the other columns will hear you. Try it. Press your ears against it.”
The tourists fanned out, eager to have a turn. Jack walked over to one of the columns. An older woman, leaning her ear into it, turned around to face him. “Do you want to give it a try?” she asked. Jack nodded and put his ear up against the column. He could hear several voices whispering. “Hey, Sarah! Sarah!” “Brian, can you hear me?” “Yoo-hoo, Christopher.” It sounded as if they were standing right next to him.
Behind him, he heard the tour guide clap her hands. “Let’s move on, now. The sun is about to set, so we’re too late to see the pinhole suns on the main concourse; but the compass rose in the subway station will help you find your way home.”
Jack lingered in front of the column. He still hadn’t whispered anything into it himself, but he couldn’t figure out what to say. “Hello,” he said in an uncertain voice. He stepped back and looked around, feeling self-conscious. The tourists were leaving the other columns and catching up to the guide. “I liked the stars best of all,” said a plump woman to a boy Jack’s age as they passed. Jack thought about how he liked the stars too—the whispering gallery wasn’t much fun if you had no one to talk to. He suddenly remembered a poem that his father used to read to him after his mother had died. It was by John Donne, the seventeenth-century English poet. Jack leaned against the column and whispered:
“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.”
Jack paused, trying to remember the next stanza. But before he could continue, he heard a high-pitched voice coming through the column.
“If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till Age snow white hairs on thee....”
Jack took a surprised step back from the column. The voice was a girl’s, one he didn’t recognize. He turned around to look for her. But as he scanned the other corners, his stomach tightened. The tour guide had left, and all the tourists were gone. Commuters were rushing through the mezzanine, but no one was standing near any of the columns.
Maybe the girl had spoken into a column and then rushed away to join the tour. But if she was gone, the whispering gallery should now be silent. Jack put his ear back to the column.
“‘Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me/All strange wonders that befell thee,’” sang the girl’s voice.
“Hello?” Jack interrupted.