Marianne stared out the window on the Long Island Rail Road train that she had been in forever.
     Her book, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, a gift from her grandfather, was open on her lap. She tried to fall into the poem, Nick and the Candlestick, and it almost worked except she kept catching her eye on her own reflection, a freeze frame of time and motion against the shaking carriage and hushed buzz of private conversations.
     As the train pulled into Jamaica station, a woman with three children and a suitcase struggled on board, knocking into an unattractive ginger haired man in his late forties, who hardly stopped making out with his teenage girlfriend as they embarked. Marianne held back her nausea and tried not to look.
     The train went tickety tickety whir whir whir. It was like a mantra that repeated its rhythm in her head. She imagined an orchestration behind it, with the conductor in the front box. She closed her eyes and slept for a few minutes until the train came to a halt. She woke with the line 'You are the baby in the barn' in her head.
     "Penn Station, last stop."
     Disembarking into the unseasonable cold, Marianne felt the wind, tunneled into harshness by the city's buildings, and wondered when it would finally feel like spring. She took the subway downtown, heading to her favorite reading spot in Washington Square Park. Her fingers were numb beneath black leather gloves. She stood under the arch reading her book

     If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.

     "Both of you are great light borrowers," she repeated out loud, wondering how the moon could be considered annihilating. Then she heard the melancholy, high pitched whine of several harmonicas at once. It was hard to distinguish it at first from the crying babies and hum of conversation - the whirl of life around her - but as the sound grew she looked up and saw the musician.
     He was beautiful, with pale skin, long, dark hair, high cheekbones and sad eyes watering from the cold and the effort of his blowing. Harmonicas, held together by a heavy harness, hung thickly around his neck. The harmonicas looked too bulky for his gaunt frame, which was set off by tight black Levis, pointy cowboy boots and a leather jacket.
     Marianne found herself staring, the poetry she was reading lost in the melody and construction of this man, who couldn't have been much older than she was, maybe twenty. She held her breath for a moment, focused her attention, and listened. Each song he played was a story.
     She watched the scenes unfold like a film inside the musician's head. The music sounded of lonely nights in a hotel room, of long journeys ending nowhere and leading nowhere, of endless pain throbbing in the multilayered pitches of his harps which moved through her body, raising the hairs on her arms and legs until she felt herself slowly vibrating. She let out her breath, lost in the heady combination of strange music mingled with the lonely and delicate appearance of this man, who she imagined in a variety of disparate lives.
     The musician noticed her staring and came over after he finished his set, all lanky drawl and full lips. "That book any good?"
     She lent forward, took off her glove and put out her hand, smiling. "I've been having trouble focusing on it. I'm Marianne."
     He smiled back and she noticed that under his thick, black hair he had green eyes like a cat. "Marianne. Nice name. Mine's Miles. Miles Hartley."
     He handed her a card with his name and the words "Harpist Extraordinaire" printed on it. There was no address or phone number and she smiled at his audacity. He didn't appear to be a poseur. Marianne moved closer.
     "You look cold, beautiful. Can I get you a drink?"
     She followed him, laughing quietly as he lugged his instruments, while trying simultaneously to fill his pockets with the loose change he'd made.
     Dropping her glove, she left it, forgotten on the stone fountain as they walked west to Seventh Avenue towards Le Figaro, a coffeehouse she'd visited many times. Miles gallantly opened the café door for her and they made their way past the steaming silver cappuccino machine, busy waitresses and groups of students to a quiet corner. Smoke drifted past their table as they sat, both looking out the window past their whipped cream topped coffees.
     "Look over there at that crazy woman who walks round and round in circles. See her shopping bag?" Marianne winked at him. "Filled with hundred dollar bills. She's actually a millionaire."
     Miles' eyes widened for a moment, believing her story, as if she knew something he didn't, and Marianne laughed. She felt happy and warm for the first time in months.
     "You're not from New York are you, Miles?"
     "Been here a few weeks. On the road before that. Here and there you know - nothing much to speak of. I'm a travelling man. Grew up in Chicago. The Windy City. Taught myself blues harp when I was eight or so … Born in Chicago, 1941 ..." he sang.
     "1941? You look very young for your age."
     "Ha-ha. That's Butterfield. You know Paul Butterfield?" She shook her head, though the name sounded familiar.
     "Should I?" She never paid much attention to anything other than classical music. Her grandfather had a superb record collection and she also knew opera, but almost nothing about popular music or rock and roll. Lily would know. Russell too. Both of them prided themselves on their musical knowledge.
     "You really don't know Paul Butterfield? He's a blues god. Anyway I might stick around a while here and see what happens. See if I can turn something around for myself, get the music thing going again."
     His eyes darkened as he looked away and Marianne wondered what he was hiding.
     "What do you do with yourself when you aren't reading poetry in the park, torturing buskers with your big dark eyes?"
     Miles drummed his hands on the table. His coffee cup was empty and he was moving slightly, his body buzzing to the rhythm of the café.
     "Oh me - I don't do much. I'm, um, a student at NYU. I haven't really decided what I'm going to be when I grow up though. You know, I go out to Long Island and hang around the beach. Walk about. Nothing really."
     "C'mon then, let's get out of here," Miles said, smiling again as he grabbed her arm. "You're over eighteen aren't you?"
     "Oh yeah. Sure. Absolutely. You're safe with me." She winked at him.
     Miles grabbed Marianne's hand and they ran, harmonicas clanking against his neck, out of the café. He knocked the elbow of a woman pushing a baby stroller and then pushed between two waiters, one of whom spilled hot coffee onto himself, while a woman dressed in Middle Eastern clothing, leaned over to help the cursing waiter.
     "Hey!" she heard the waiter yell, "stop them!"
     "They didn't pay!" hollered the stubby woman behind the counter, her barking voice drowned behind the slammed door and street noises as they escaped.
     Marianne giggled, hiccupping and protesting, "we can't," as they pulled each other down Bleeker Street, not stopping until they reached Lafayette station where Miles snatched two tokens from his tight jeans and they got onto a subway just arriving.
     "Lucky break," Miles said as they sat down simultaneously on the graffiti-filled seats - Jews out of Palestine! - still holding hands.
     "I'll never be able to drink coffee in there again! This may be a passing visit for you but that was my coffeehouse you stiffed. I loved that place." Marianne looked at Miles' cheeky grin and smiled.
     "You're beautiful when you're angry," Miles said, rubbing her fingers with his.
     "Where are we going anyway?" Marianne wasn't sure she wanted to know. She felt light, as though she were waiting in the surf for the next wave, the white foam and gentle arc disguising its force.
     "The 1 train to South Ferry and the R to Whitehall."
     She was no wiser, but Miles was still grinning so widely that she reached out and brushed a lock of hair off his left eye.
     The subway was busy and they were lucky to have seats. A group of Asian tourists stood next to them, holding a small pop-out map and talking at a speed Marianne wouldn't have been able to follow even if she spoke their language. The tourists were dressed neatly in matching tracksuits of purple and green and a boy held a large Mickey Mouse doll. Nearby was a professional-looking couple dressed in quality suits and shiny shoes.
     Marianne caught her reflection in the subway mirror and saw that she was her usual mess; frizzy hair sticking out, nails bitten, black jeans ripped on the edge of the pocket and her shirt in need of an iron. She felt Miles looking at her, and pushed her hair behind her ear self-consciously while he started to play softly on one of his smaller harmonicas.
     As they changed to the 'R' line, Marianne was still unsure of where Miles was taking her. "Are we going to the South Street Seaport?"
     "Nah. C'mon, it should be obvious by now. Are you sure you grew up here? Maybe it's too obvious. Like the nose on your face, you can't quite see it."
     "Give me a hint."
     " Have you ever been on the Staten Island Ferry? You know, it used to cost twenty five cents in 1817 to cross the Harbor on the first steam ferry - the Nautilus. Then it went down to five cents in 1897. Now it's only ten. My treat. I owe you one for the coffee. I think it's within my means."
     "The Staten Island Ferry?"
     "That's the one. I've done this a few times now. You can't beat the price, or the view."
     They walked out of the subway towards the glass ferry terminal at Battery Park. Miles held Marianne's hand, sweating from the contact despite the cold wind. They climbed onto the large orange ramp of the John F. Kennedy and walked to the back, huddling together against the bitter wind lifting off the water.
     The New York City skyline widened as they moved away from shore. The twin towers of the World Trade Center loomed together above the other buildings, crowding supplicants below it. Marianne felt like a big kid riding at the back of her grandfather's boat, and she relaxed, leaning against Miles. She could just see the Statue of Liberty in the distance and wondered why she never did this on her own. She couldn't even recall visiting the Statue as a young school kid, although surely there must have been trips with her class or a trip with Eric.
     "Nice, isn't it?" Miles said, whispering into her ear, emphasising the sibilance of the words. Marianne arched her back slightly in response.
     As they moved closer to the statue, she could see its large, green, copper-clad body standing tall on a granite pedestal which extended into a star on the ground below. "Don't put me on a pedestal," her mother used to say to Russell, before he well and truly stopped, leaving her desperate for respect. Now Marianne was looking at the ultimate woman on a pedestal, holding a tablet July 4th, 1776 and torch.
     "Liberty Island," Miles said, pointing ahead.
     It was an excellent view. Marianne breathed in and on the outward breath said: "Beautiful."
     "Like you. Tell me, beautiful girl, did your parents emigrate here from somewhere else? Did they come in on a ferry like this one, spying that big French woman and wonder what their lives would be?"
     "My great-grandparents on my mother's side came from Wales, I think. I never met them and I don't think they would have come into Ellis Island as immigrants. I never thought to ask, and now it's too late."
     She took her hand from his and grabbed onto the mesh metal railing. "I feel completely distanced from my origins. That's what divorce does to kids. What about you?"
     "Mine's one of those English sounding names they give migrants whose surnames are too hard to pronounce. Harovsky or something. I could ask my mother, though I doubt she'd know, or care."
     They stood crowded together, pressed up against railing for twenty-five minutes that felt like one minute, looking at the clouds moving above Manhattan's skyline. The buildings appeared bunched together and Marianne thought that if she could just stand still enough, she could stop the progression of time. She felt her small hand completely enclosed by Miles' large one, secure in the face of the cold lifting off New York Harbor.

"It's no easier for me than it is for you, Mari. He's dead. You have to face it. Life isn't always nice. I'm sorry, but that's the reality. I could use some help here."
     Lily was packing up Eric's room, throwing a lifetime's accumulation of work and thought into neatly labeled boxes.
     Marianne sat on Eric's bed, sniffing.
     "I know it's hard for you to sympathize. You're normally the one crying. But Grandpa was a father to me, which is more than I can say for the real thing. You're all so self-centered, your generation; you, dad, Russell. You do what you want without worrying about responsibility. Grandpa was always there for me, no matter how busy he was."
     "I was always here for you too, Mari. I'm here now. Don't lump me into the same category as your father. He left me too, not just you. As for Grandpa, you know I loved him. Dammit, he was my father, not just your grandfather."
     Lily kept moving, pulling dusty books from shelves and throwing them into boxes. "He wasn't there for me the way he was for you. And you don't need to hurt me. I'm already hurting."
     She picked up a pile of papers from Eric's desk and put them in a folder. "I still want his approval. Even now, I feel like he's looking down on me, shaking his head. His good opinion meant everything to me. So stop acting like you had a monopoly on loving him."
     "No, there were hundreds of students who loved him too. And Grandma when she was alive. And the people who read his books."
     "I loved him, Mari. More than I've ever loved anyone - except you, of course." Lily brushed the top of her head with her hand, creating a black line of dirt across her forehead.
     "How do we know he wouldn't have woke? Even the doctor admitted they don't know how the brain functions. How do we know that all of his brain cells were gone? Maybe some of the surviving ones could take the place of those that died. Maybe new ones could grow to replace the dead ones. If we can build cells inside our brain why can't we repair dead ones? Grandpa was strong. He was a fighter, Mom - a fighter. He might have come back to us."
     Marianne's voice echoed through the room and she wiped her nose on her sleeve, ineffectively. She took out one of Eric's own books from the box and began to read out loud: "Are we really to think that if a man a) thinks that he ought not to cause needless suffering and b) is distressed by the fact or prospect of his causing needless suffering, then a and b are just two separate facts about him? Surely b can be one expression of a, and a one root of b?"
     "I could never understand a word of his books. Anyway, you're wrong." Lily spoke softly in contrast to Marianne as she sat on the bed, removing the book from Marianne's hand. "He wouldn't have come back. The dead don't come back. I know you want to believe that he was still alive, but he wasn't. He was brain dead. His brain cells wouldn't have regenerated. The doctor was very clear about it, and Russell and I discussed it with you."
     "Yeah, Russell. And where is Russell now? Like he really had a stake in this. Like he could care less if Grandpa lived or died. Grandpa was just another thorn in Russell's side, like me. But you go ahead and tell yourself we didn't kill him. Tell yourself he was already dead. That makes it easier doesn't it? To make what was a purely economic decision."
     Marianne stood up. "That was the real motivation wasn't it? Let the insurers decide."
     "You're not being reasonable." Lily's voice increased in pitch as she began moving around the room again, chaotically.
     "And don't say you discussed it with me. You didn't talk to me about anything. I never would have consented to you killing him. He looked after me when no one else - yes, no one else - was there. I didn't win a piano prize for him. He didn't see me start college. I just let him die without thanking him."
     "Oh, Mari." Lily sat back down on the bed. She reached for Marianne's hand, but Marianne pulled it sharply away.
     "I was jealous of your relationship with Grandpa, but I was glad about it too. You needed a male figure in your life and Grandpa was the perfect mentor. It was a relief for me to see you getting that. And it gave me pleasure to see you do so well in school and with your music. It's okay to grieve, honey."
     Lily sighed and looked up, mascara running down her otherwise perfect skin.
     "But once you've grieved for him, you have to move on."
     Lily got up again, her face hardly showing the tears she'd just shed. "This stuff isn't him. Someone needs to deal with it. That's the reality. If we don't pull things together we'll be in serious shit."
     "We're already in serious shit."
     "Well, we need to fix that, don't we. Look, I'm sorry I've been so messed up. It hurt me when Russell finally left for good, but I've been through this before. I'm the woman men leave."
     Lily looked tired, her lips set in a white line across her face. "Mari, I still have you and my work, and I'm okay, and you're going to be too. I promise. Grandpa would have wanted us to be strong. So c'mon, help me with these, please."
     She handed Marianne a pile of dusty books and Marianne dropped them listlessly into one of the open boxes.

The bell rang and Marianne walked quickly out of class. The smell of teen sweat constricted her throat. The halls were crowded with blue haired punks, well groomed uptown girls and others, like her, dressed down in I-don't-care jeans and t-shirts.
     Marianne looked at them and felt a combination of attraction and repulsion. They weren't so different from her. She could love any one of them, looking directly into something shining and solid under the uniform, the attitude and the make-up. She felt a surge of loneliness, but just as suddenly, the people walking by her appeared abstracted and it was impossible for her to imagine contact. Instead she began a one-sided conversation with Eric in her head.
     "I loved her as much as I love you."
     "Of course you did, Grandpa, probably more. She was your daughter, after all."
     "Loving you was an extension of my love for her, but you were easier. She was always so angry, so wild. She saw the world differently. Your mother was always larger than life. It was easier for me to look away."
     Marianne shook her head. She could smell her own perspiration as she pulled her backpack out of her locker and walked towards gym, a class she disliked. It wasn't that physical activity bothered her; she swam well and her long legs made running easy, but she was clumsy. Her shoelaces were always untying at awkward moments and she was uncompetitive. It drove the gym teacher, Coach, wild. He threatened to fail her if she didn't try harder.
     "Go, Cotton, Go! You could have gone for home on that hit, why stop at first! Lazy, that's all it is."
     Coach dressed permanently in his gym shorts and sneakers. He was ready always to celebrate a win, agonize over a loss and unable to comprehend Marianne's indifference to softball. She deliberately missed the pitch and walked off the field, leaving Coach red faced and stammering.
     Skipping the rest of her aborted gym class, Marianne hid in music hall, tinkering with the keys on the piano. It was out of tune but she could still feel it respond under her fingers as she played Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, a soft rolling piece which made her feel better, until someone with a large radio boom box - she knew his face but not his name - came in and told her that she was really playing a French song about incest; "je t'aime je t'aime …" he squeaked in falsetto.
     "And check it out, the father sings it with his real daughter. It's actually kind of cool."
     "Thanks for sharing that. If such a thing exists, I'm sure Chopin's composition came first."
     "You play good though. You know Beethoven? I love this." He turned on his radio and it was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, turned into a pop song. The contours of the song were there but it had an electronic overlay and lots of bass to make it danceable. Marianne had heard the song before and knew it was popular. The Fifth Symphony was such a good piece of music, so rich and resonant. It sounded impossibly frivolous set to an electronic beat. Lily might like it, although she made a lot of fuss about the transience of disco, not that it had any impact on their house - no one went to discos. Both Lily and Russell were rock and roll hippies as they called it.
     Marianne remembered one day when she was trying, unsuccessfully, to play Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto, a complex and difficult piece, and her mother came in and said: "Hey, I like that song." Then she proceeded to sing a pop song about being all by myself, out of tune and too high on the scale for Lily's alto. It was obviously another bastardization, like turning Beethoven's Fifth Symphony into a dance song or Chopin into a song about incest.
     The boy, whose name she couldn't remember, was dancing happily when she left the room.

Flames were everywhere. Smoke ringed the room, leaving only small amounts of oxygen near the floor.
     As he crawled across the parquet tiles, the clock melted, its edges pouring Dali-like down the dresser, covering his clothes in liquid plastic, red and white streaks mirrored by tears which left red lines down his face.
     He reached his arms towards the door, chanting his name: Eric, Eric, Eric.
     His skin melted into his pajamas while the distorted clock continued to tick loudly.
     Marianne watched him shrink, shrivel and disappear in a haze of smoke and black ashes, powerless to help, as his chanted name continued to pierce the roar of flames.
     She tried to reach out her arms for him, as he once did for her, but her body remained motionless. She called to him, but no words came out of her mouth.
     Each "Eric" berated her; an angry bark against her inability to move forward and save him.
     "Grandpa!" she screamed, but instead, laughter, hysterical and cruel, filled the room, cutting through the smoke and coinciding with the ringing of her alarm clock.