2

The girl stood at the next station, the scuffed toes of her mary janes grazing the abrasive yellow warning line sculpted onto the edge of the platform. She seemed to be about twenty, though she could also be sixteen or twenty-five. She had the sort of face one could project onto, a blank slate—though it was not currently visible. Her head was down, staring intently at her shoes. Either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the incoming train, she barely moved backwards as the subway’s lights slowly brightened the walls of the tunnel. She did not know how long she had waited, or if this was the first train to arrive. She did not realise she was the only person on the platform.

 

She imagined, sometimes, slipping away with a crowd of students from the University, finding her way to a lecture hall large enough to hide in. She imagined herself being jostled by the crowd, led into an auditorium for a first-year level class about the basics of Political Science or gender in Ancient Greece. The professor would flip through the presentation, oblivious to her presence—just another student in a crowd of hundreds. There, in anonymity, she’d be free to think of life past the bleak grey landscape. She could pretend, for a moment, that there was a possibility of getting out of the dead-end town she had lived in her whole life. The low buzz of a projector, the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights. She had long wondered if there was any point in continuing to go into the city, if her compulsion to leave had clouded her judgement so monstrously she could no longer make rational decisions. It was true, walking in the proximity of the campus of the University evoked a sort of feeling she had been running from since she turned eighteen. She was not where she was supposed to be, she thought. She considered every missed opportunity, every time she shouldn’t have been afraid—she was always afraid. Would she have been better if she had gone there? Would she have liked who she was? She didn’t know. She didn’t think she could bear the answer. 

 

Things will all work out, her father used to say. Things will turn around. I love you. 

 

That day, he said nothing. The car was quiet, the only sound was old rock music droning out from the too-expensive speakers. She wanted to break the silence, to shatter the barrier between them like the time she fell through the ice as a child, when all that existed around her was overwhelming blackness and shaky breath. I would have died, she wanted to say, I would have jumped too if I knew things would have been like this. But she said nothing and her father said nothing and she got out of the car as quick as she could without slamming the door. She wanted to slam the door, really. She wanted to close it so hard that it dented the obnoxious red paint, she wanted it to fall off the hinges. She wanted to, she just wasn’t strong enough. 

 

Highway 407—in all its concrete illness—stood quietly against a backdrop of grey and green and the yellow of the highway markers. She wondered what the trees had looked like before its creation, if their spirits lingered behind to see what had been erected in their rightful place. She wondered if they saw the bleakness and hated it, or if she was simply projecting again. It was a nasty habit, one she had long attempted to shake—with little success. 

 

The previous night, when she had broken up with her boyfriend of four months over text, the thought occurred to her that she was worse than her father in nearly every aspect. He, at least, had the excuse of being unfeeling. She had none of that. She felt the guilt that pooled in her stomach, she just ignored it. 

 

She scraped her shoes on the harsh concrete of the parking lot, silently delighting in another mark on her mary janes’ once perfect exterior. Good, she thought. Lived in, scratched up. A mirror into her general sentiments; regardless of that, or maybe because of it, she was something less than she could be. It was easier…to blame him, to blame circumstance or God or the doctors, than it was to blame herself, or to think of her mother in the proper tense. 

 

In the morning of that day she stood beside the track, again considering what her mother had those years ago. The urge to jump down was a murmur rather than a scream, maybe because she was better, or maybe because she had gotten used to it. Untreated depression, they’d said. Their voices full of pity and sorrow and wary of her father standing morosely in the doorway. The view from the hospital window was a highway and fall leaves and the great expanse of Lake Ontario. Variety, she’d told her father, when they’d walked into her mother’s room. You get a little of everything. 

 

He had said nothing, and she looked out the window and wanted to drown. It was a passing fancy, a guaranteed failure. She would have faded with the pollution and the fish and the feeling that life had never been worth it at all, if it had ended this way, that at least her mother’s methods had a dramatic flair. It was easy to forget how sullied the water was when she was watching it from the sixteenth floor of a concrete monster, a looming shadow over the speeding cars and the children running along the rocky beach. 

 

She hated that her father wouldn’t look in the room, that she was the only one to hold her mother’s hand when she died. Not when she took her last breath, not when she passed away. When she DIED. The grief counsellor said it was important to say the word. She had to compensate for her father, who only referred to her mother in the present tense. 

 

On the subway platform, she reached up to touch her face, surprised to feel it wet to the touch. She hadn’t realised she was crying, she hadn’t prepared for that sort of emotional response. It wasn’t to her father’s silence, she knew that much. She had been ignored so many times that it no longer felt out of the ordinary; on the days when she reminded him too much of her mother he would simply act as though she did not exist. It used to make her feel sick, back when she thought of herself as nothing more than that same child begging for attention, begging to be heard and listened to. Now it just made her angry, a ferocious feeling she could not express without making him equally upset and everything considerably worse. It was important, her counsellor had said, not to think of herself as an extension of his pain, a physical embodiment of his grief. It was not her fault that she resembled her mother, it was not her fault that her father was never able to move on.  She had told herself this enough times that the words no longer sounded real unless she said them aloud, unless she quantified them some way. 

 

I am not responsible for his grief.

 

She spoke it to the dust below the tracks and the smiling face of the insurance advertisement and the vast expanse of space that would soon be filled by the incoming train. Her voice echoed back to her, mixing with the smell of stale concrete and the hope that she didn’t sound insane. Like mother, like daughter, she supposed. Maybe the sound of her own voice would make the tears stop, something akin to turning off a leaking faucet. 

 

She had once watched someone almost die at College Station, watched them sit down on the platform and dangle their legs off the edge. Embroidered on their grey sweatpants was the University logo and her first thought—idiotic, stupid thought—was that they must not be doing too awfully, because they had somewhere to be after this. That maybe their school association would protect them, even if that school had record levels of suicides and suicide attempts.  

 

She stepped onto the train, sitting down as quickly as possible. Her dark hair curtained her face, protecting her from some unknown force. Nothing to grow from, nothing to learn. Life wasn’t supposed to be the way it was, the way it had been. As the doors closed, she imagined it would be the last time she’d ever see Highway 407. It was a nice thought.