A Nickel for the Ferryman

The air in the Church Avenue station was thick enough to drink, a humid cocktail of hot metal, stale perfume, and something vaguely like burnt sugar. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a jaundiced glare on the grimy tiles and making the heat feel somehow more substantial. Jamie leaned against a tiled pillar, the cool ceramic a temporary relief against his sweat-damp t-shirt, checking his phone for the tenth time in five minutes.

No new messages. The last one, from twenty minutes ago, was Ben’s curt ‘5 mins out’. Five minutes ago, or five minutes from now? With Ben, you never knew. It was part of his charm, his breezy disregard for things like time and planning. At least, it used to be part of his charm. Lately, it just felt like a disregard for Jamie.

He thumbed back through their message history, a masochistic ritual. The blue and grey bubbles charted the slow erosion of their relationship, from multi-paragraph declarations a month ago to the clipped, functional exchanges of the last week. The latest fight, a stupid thing about a party he hadn't been invited to, still hung between them, unspoken and heavy.

A loud rattle broke his concentration. Down the platform, a woman was wrestling a shopping cart down the ramp, its wheels squealing in protest. The cart was piled high with black bin bags, a precarious tower of possessions lashed together with bungee cords and fraying rope. She was a fixture of the neighbourhood, a ghost in a floral headscarf who haunted the benches along Ocean Parkway. Jamie had seen her a hundred times, but never this close.

She navigated the cart with surprising dexterity, parking it next to a bin not five feet from him. She moved with a slow, deliberate economy, every motion honed by years of practice. She wore layers of mismatched cardigans despite the oppressive heat, and her face was a roadmap of wrinkles, her eyes small and bright like a bird's. She began to rummage in one of the bags, the plastic crinkling loudly in the relative quiet of the waiting platform.

Jamie tried to look busy, focusing intently on a peeling poster advertising a personal injury lawyer. Don't make eye contact. Don't engage. That was the rule.

“Waiting on someone is a special kind of hell, isn’t it?”

The voice was gravelly, like stones being ground together. Jamie flinched. The woman was looking right at him, a crooked, toothless smile on her face. He gave a tight, noncommittal nod, hoping that would be the end of it.

It wasn't.

“You hold your breath,” she continued, pulling a half-eaten apple from her bag and examining it. “Every time the tunnel rumbles, you think, ‘this is it’. Your whole body gets tight, ready. And when it’s not the one, it’s like all the air goes out of you. A little death, each time.”

She took a bite of the apple, the crunch echoing off the tiles. Jamie stared at her, his urban survival instincts warring with a stunned surprise at her accuracy. That was exactly it. That was the tightening in his chest every time he heard the distant roar of an approaching train.

“I’m just waiting for my friend,” he mumbled, the words feeling flimsy and untrue.

“Friend,” she rasped, savouring the word as if it were an exotic flavour. “That’s a nice word for it. A safe word. But it ain’t the right one, is it, son? Your shoulders are all hunched up. Your thumb’s rubbing a hole in the side of your phone. That’s not friend-waiting posture. That’s ‘my-whole-world-is-balanced-on-the-point-of-a-pin’ posture.”

Jamie’s mouth went dry. He felt transparent, as if the grimy station tiles and humming lights had melted away, leaving him exposed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The woman chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. “Course you do. You’re holding on so tight, you’re strangling the poor thing. Love ain’t a bird you can keep in a cage. You gotta leave the door open. If it’s meant to be, it’ll stay and sing. If it ain’t, it’ll fly off. Either way, the cage just ends up empty.”

Her gaze was sharp, cutting through his carefully constructed teenage nonchalance. He felt a flush of anger, of violation. Who was this woman? What right did she have to sit there, smelling of rain and old fabric, and dissect his life with such casual precision?

“You don’t know anything about me,” he said, his voice sharper than he intended.

“I know the look,” she said, unfazed. She finished her apple, tossing the core perfectly into the bin beside her. “Seen it on a thousand faces on a thousand platforms. This city is full of people waiting for trains that are never gonna take them where they want to go. The trick is knowing when to stop waiting and find a different platform.”

She rummaged in her pocket, her hand emerging as a fist. She opened it, revealing a dull, tarnished nickel in her palm. It was old, the buffalo on it worn almost smooth.

“Here,” she said, holding it out. “For the ferryman.”

Jamie stared at the coin. “I don’t have any money.”

“It’s not for me, you daft boy. It’s for you. For the next part of the journey. You’re gonna need it.” Her eyes held his, and for a moment, they didn’t seem old and clouded, but ancient and clear, like deep water.

He didn’t know why, but he took it. The metal was strangely warm against his skin. It felt heavy, weighted with more than just its own substance. He closed his hand around it.

Just then, the roar he’d been waiting for crescendoed, and a graffiti-covered F train screeched into the station, its brakes screaming. The doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss. And there, in the first car, was Ben. His hair was messy, his headphones were around his neck, and he was laughing at something on his phone. He looked up, his eyes scanning the platform.

“Jamie!” he called out, a bright, easy smile spreading across his face, the same smile that had made Jamie’s stomach do a backflip the first time he’d seen it.

For a second, the tightness in Jamie’s chest eased. It was just Ben. Everything was fine. He was just being paranoid. He smiled back, a real smile this time, and took a step towards the train.

He glanced back to where the old woman had been sitting. The spot was empty. Her and her rattling cart were gone. Not down the platform, not up the ramp. Just… gone. As if she’d been a mirage created by the heat and his own anxiety.

But the nickel was still in his hand, solid and warm. Ben was beckoning him onto the train, his smile starting to fade into impatience. The doors began to chime their warning.

Jamie looked from Ben’s face to the coin in his palm, and for the first time, he wasn’t sure which platform he was supposed to be on.