The Railroad by Neil Douglas Newton Page A

driving, I silently dubbed my guests The Invaders . They had brought complexity to my simple existence and I was pissed. Still, I kept reminding myself that I’d taken on this burden and that these two were only irritating because they’d been traumatized, something I could identify with, at least in the abstract. I vowed to keep reminding myself of that when things became tense.
    Once I got back to the house, I found it hard to keep my vow. Breakfast was only a bit better than dinner had been. Eileen dropped her Egg McMuffin on the dining room table and Megan began to laugh. As she watched her mother try to gather the remains of her breakfast with what dignity she could, her face kept crumbling into fits of laughter. Looking at the pitiful job she’d done reassembling her sandwich Eileen gave up and threw it in the air; it landed in several little heaps on the table. This set Megan off for a good five minutes.
    What fun , I thought, trying to keep the disgust off my face. I’d rather be watching TV.
     
    *
     
    That night Eileen made her “call” from my phone in the bedroom. She gave me an explanation of The Railroad much like Elena’s; security was tight and she had to call a certain number to find out if and when she could go to her next destination.
     
    She came out, her eyes dead and tired. “Oh god, Mike. I can’t go yet. Something happened. I think maybe someone got arrested, but I’m not sure. I just know that I have to call in three weeks. If I had no place to stay they’d move us tonight. But there are other people who need help now; they have nowhere to go.” She hung her head for a second. “Damn Mike. I don’t know what to say. If you want we can leave and go to a motel.”
    My heart sank. “No”, I heard myself say. “It’ll force you to be outside all the time, just to get food. I can’t let you do that. You can stay here as long as you need to.”
    She argued with me, but her heart wasn’t in it. “We’ll take it as it comes,” I told her. And with those words I sealed my fate.
     
                   I’d thought that Megan would be happy that she wasn’t going to be forced to move somewhere else for a while. That would have been logical, but I hadn’t taken into account that she was a child and that her life was a roller coaster.
    She’d said nothing when her mother had announced that they couldn’t leave yet and I thought there would be peace for a while. But not a half an hour after the phone call Eileen tried to put her daughter to bed. I had just settled in to watch a Mork and Mindy re-run when I heard a familiar screech.
    I sat bolt upright, driven suddenly from my television half-stupor. I looked toward the guest bedroom and willed Megan to shut up and go to sleep. There was a moment of tense silence, finally broken by the sound of something ceramic hitting the floor and breaking.
    Without thinking I was up like a shot and into the bedroom, afraid of what I might find. There was Eileen staring in horror and some pink and white ceramic shards on the floor beside the bed. Megan had put her head under the covers and showed no sign of coming out.
    Eileen looked up at me and shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Mike. I hope it wasn’t something valuable.”
     
    It wasn’t. Years ago, Barbara had bought me a ceramic pig to underscore her criticism of the month: that I was an insensitive pig. She had an excellent way of combining ball-busting and humor; I’d always suggested she become a copywriter but she’d taken it as an insult which it certainly was. I’d left the pig conspicuously in the guest bedroom in a show of fake apathy which had the desired effect; it had driven her crazy.
    I didn’t mourn the loss of the pig but I did feel a chill of foreboding at what this experience implied for however long the two of them were in my house. Eileen seemed to pick up on my thoughts. “Oh god, I promise I can control her. She’s just been bounced around a lot lately