Page 37 of The New Couple in 5B

I stare at Max, who lifts both palms. “I’m just saying. Remember the whole train thing?”

Of course I remember.

We were editorial assistants working at Pinnacle, a small but prestigious imprint of Vantam Pryce, one of the largest publishing companies in the world. Max worked for Margaret Graul, an iconic editor who had a stable of bestselling and award-winning writers, and who had taken a particular shine to Max. I was struggling to please the imprint’s founder and publisher, Peter Mittlemark, who seemed to think my job was to read his mind and anticipate his every mood. While Max was learning how to spot talent, to edit respectfully, to manage big, creative personalities, I was fetching coffee, wrestling with the ancient copy machine, sending out rejection letters and spending all my evenings in the slush pile, trying to find a pearl in the oysters.

Max and I left late together one night; it was our habit to walk to the train together. I was exhausted—worn down from the job, still in therapy, struggling with insomnia and plagued by vivid nightmares when Icouldsleep. I was staying awake on a steady diet of sugar and caffeine.

We chatted as we walked toward the subway platform, the night balmy and busy as the theaters just blocks away were letting out their crowds. The air had a strange smell to it, like something burning. I had my arm looped through Max’s and he was doing his best Peter Mittlemark impersonation, complete with the fake British accent that the old man occasionally put on.

Laughing at Max’s act, I put my hand on the railing to head down into the station.

And suddenly, I was somewhere else—transported to the platform down below, a train screeching into the station.

A young woman in a red coat with long blond hair was falling away from me, and I was screamingnooooooas I reached for her. She’d been shoved by a shuffling, muttering man pushing a shopping cart piled high with garbage. And she was stumbling, slow motion but inexorably, back toward the track. I felt the buttons of her coat on my fingertips as she fell, eyes wide with horror, hands outstretched to me, and then midair she was struck by the train—the horn wailing, people screaming in horror, me on my knees, my right hand still reaching.

Then I was back on the stairs with Max.

“Rosie?”

I snapped back quickly, eager to leave this type of thing behind me forever. Dr. Black said that I had been so gaslit by my family, that I had learned to give myself over to things that for other people might be nothing more than a passing thought.

We all have dark thoughts, Rosie. We all imagine the worst things happening. But most of us know that they’re just fantasies that we must push away in favor of the real world that’s right in front of us.

“Nothing,” I lied, shaking it off. “I’m fine. Just a little dizzy, I guess. I need some sleep.”

And that might have been the end of it, except five minutes later, the exact scene played out in front of both of our eyes. We both watched a young woman get pushed onto the tracks, as I reached for her coat—that was blue, not red. Her hair was black, not blond. But everything else—from her terrified scream, the touch of my fingertips to the buttons of her coat, the odor of the man who shoved her—was the same.

I still go back to that crowded platform in my dreams some nights. Max and I were laughing about something; I don’t remember what. The platform was crowded, hot. I remember the smell; I caught the whiff of body odor and garbage, turned to see its origin, and the tall, limping man pushing the cart was moving toward us.

The young woman was on her phone, deep in conversation, too close to the edge, her tote pressed to her body. I started to move toward her. But it all happened so fast, the coming train, the man shoving her with his cart, her lost balance. I almost caught her. Ialmostcaught her coat. If I had, I could have yanked her back. But the momentum of her fall was too powerful.

Camille Ford. A young magazine editor, new to the city. Gone. Just gone.

That night, crying with my head in Max’s lap in his apartment, I told him about my vision, about my parents, about all the things I was struggling to leave behind. He soothed me, heard me.

“It’s been in the news so much,” Max offered.

It was true, there had been a spate of subway deaths. A suicide, another violent assault that led to a young man being pushed to the tracks. “Maybe you were just thinking about that as we went down.”

“Maybe.”

Dr. Black calls it confabulation, when the mind takes knowledge and details from other experiences and uses them to make a fantasy more real. But itwasreal—the screech of the train, the smell of urine and filth, voices screaming, the harsh white light.

“Or, I mean—is it possible?” said Max. “You know, that youaretapped into something? There’s so much we don’t understand about the brain.”

“No,” I said, sitting up fast. “It’s not possible.”

“Okay,” he said, putting a hand to my shoulder. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

And that night was the one and only time Max and I were ever together. It started innocently as a kiss and turned into something more. I lost myself in the comfort of his body that night, slept in his arms. In the morning, he apologized for taking advantage of me when I was vulnerable—which was not the whole truth of it. Still, we agreed that our friendship was so important that we didn’t want to risk it by introducing sex into the equation. I think the truth of it was that I took advantage ofhim, his warmth, his solidity, knowing that I didn’t feel for him what I suspected he felt for me.

We haven’t talked about that night—any of it—since.

“So IimaginedAbi putting the box in the trunk?” I say now. “No.”

The waiter comes with Max’s sparkling water and we both place our orders—penne for Max, pizza for me. The usual.

“Maybe it was a—prediction? Kind of like that night. I think about it sometimes, what happened. How you saw the girl falling before she fell.”

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