As in:
“Nice going killer,” Meg had needled him, as Pierce walked passed her after getting up to grab a Pepsi.
“What?” he said in mock defensiveness. “Are you open to hearing my side of this, or you just going to believe your lying eyes?”
In the opposite seat, Beth Ann was stretched out with her head against the window and her badly scraped leg extended over the armrest into the aisle. At that moment she playfully kicked Pierce into the seat next to Meg, to a spot where he would have otherwise been too shy, or too afraid, to put himself.
“Go ahead,” Beth Ann said, “give her your best shot.”
And he did. The opportunity of a short life time, to sit next to Meg Pulliam on a mostly darkened train, bouncing along on a starry night through the rain forest along Gatun Lake. She was prettier than even he had noticed before, and she was funny, and the cool night air slipping through the half-opened window smelled like a fresh cucumber salad, with hints of mango and turpentine. He only hated the fact that the stop in Gamboa came way too soon, because from there he would only have 30 minutes left. But it was a great half hour. He’d store it in his memory like it was a small sack of golden Spanish coins.
But of the present, there was some work left to do. He was positive they’d made a connection and that he was now welcome, as the train pulled into the station in Balboa, to help lift Beth Ann down the stairs, and then wait for Meg, so he could walk with her, and get her phone number, and say goodnight in a way that he’d been rehearsing in his head since he saw the lights on the locks at Pedro Miguel.
So he stood there, on the platform, waiting for her to come down the steps. He was very aware that he was lingering in a perishable state of ease, knowing just what he’d do. But then the train began to move. And only then did he grimly and horribly realize that Meg would not be getting off at Balboa, but at the next station down, in Ancon.
His heart sank into his still-damp tennis shoes as he watched the train pull away, and all he could do, then, was stare helplessly at the reflection of the red and green taillights on the polished steel of the rails.
Years later he would still remember this as the absolute worst feeling he’d ever had in his life, a barely imaginable possibility that he thought, for sure, he’d lost forever.
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