“Then tell us where to take him,” Minnie said, holding the watch so that its face caught the pale light. The man on the platform looked at its moving hands and slipped his own into the pockets of the child’s coat, which hung strangely from his shoulders, neither too large nor too small. “It isn’t a place you can reach with that,” he said. Behind him, the train gave a long metallic shudder, and in its bright windows the empty seats began to fill with coats, each folded as though someone had just risen and left it there. The boy stepped over the threshold before the older man could stop him, his split sole clicking against the stone. “You said you’d come back for me,” he told the man, who lowered his eyes to the shoe and did not answer at once.

“I did come back,” the man said finally, “but I found you grown, and you wouldn’t remember which of us had stayed.” The figure beside me drew its bandaged hand away from the wall, leaving a damp print on the plaster, and asked whether the voice at the door had been his. He nodded, then looked past it to the bell hanging above the bench. “I could hear you waiting,” he said, “but each time I called, the train carried you farther away.” My double set the lamp on the floor and offered him the bell he had been holding since we came downstairs, but the man shook his head. Instead he beckoned the boy closer and crouched to examine the broken sole, putting one finger through the split and withdrawing it with a bead of black water on the tip.

Minnie’s watch stopped, and from the train came the sound of a key turning, carriage door after carriage door, though none of them opened. The conductor caught the boy by the shoulder, but the boy pulled away and stood beside the man, who had taken off the coat and spread it on the platform between them. “There was another shoe,” the man said to me, and I felt the button warm against the circle in my palm. I remembered reaching beneath a seat in the dark, finding leather, and then hearing the bell before my fingers could close around it. When I told him, he held out his hand, and I gave him the button; he pressed it into the split sole, where it disappeared without leaving a mark. The train lurched, the locks fell silent, and the boy took a step without the shoe dragging behind him.

The man rose with difficulty, using the boy’s shoulder to steady himself, and the older man came through the doorway to take the boy’s other hand. For a moment the three stood together in the thin morning light, while rain tapped on the boards above us and the smell of coal drifted out of the room beneath the house. Minnie opened the watch again; its hands moved forward once, then stopped at a time I recognized from the photograph, scratched faintly along its torn edge. “Can we go home now?” the boy asked, and the man with my older face looked toward the far end of the platform, where a station sign was slowly emerging from the mist. Before he could answer, a voice called my name from inside the nearest carriage, and the child tightened his grip on both men’s hands. In the window above us, someone was pressing a bare foot against the glass.

The key turned until it met resistance, and the cord went slack in my hand. The conductor lifted the shelter lamp from the sill and knelt at the threshold, where a narrow iron ring lay hidden beneath the wet boards. He pulled it up with some difficulty, bringing a square of flooring with it, and a smell of old coal and standing water rose into the room. Below was a flight of wooden steps, steep enough that the lamplight reached only the first three. The boy edged forward in his single shoe, but the older man held him back, his burned hand resting lightly against the child’s chest. From beneath the house came another ring, so faint that I felt it through the cord before I heard it.

My double took the lamp, and I followed him down, carrying the child’s coat over one arm. The figure came behind us, its bandaged hand against the wall, while Minnie remained above with the boy and the watch; the conductor stood at the foot of the open door, listening to the rain. At the bottom of the stairs we found a low room with a railway bench against one wall and a locked door set into the other. A small bell hung from a nail above the bench, its handle tied to the blue cord, which had wound itself around a key in the lock. On the floor beneath it lay the rest of the photograph, curled at the edges and dry despite the damp. I fitted the corner from the shoe against the torn edge and saw the older man seated on the bench, his face turned toward the boy beside him, while behind them stood a man with his hand on the child’s shoulder. The man was me, though the white circle in his palm had been covered by a brass button sewn to the outside of his glove.

The figure took the photograph from me and ran a finger over that small image. “You came back,” it said, and when I looked at it, the face beneath the wet hair seemed suddenly less like mine than like a face I had worn a long time ago. It told me that it had waited beside the carriage after the bell rang, listening to the man call from within, until someone opened the door from the other side. “He sent me ahead with the boy,” it said, “and gave me the button so I would know you.” My double turned the key, but the lock resisted; only when I pressed the button into the white circle on my palm did the bolt slide back. The door opened onto a stretch of railway platform under a pale morning sky, and a train stood there with its doors shut, its windows bright and empty. From upstairs the boy called my name, and I saw him at the top of the steps, Minnie just behind him with the watch open in her hand.

The older man came down after them, one stocking torn at the heel, and stopped when he saw the platform. The boy squeezed past him and took the coat from my arm, then carried it to the threshold and laid it carefully on the ground outside. For a moment nothing happened; then a hand appeared from beneath the nearest carriage, drawing the coat toward it inch by inch. The older man started forward, but the conductor caught his sleeve and pointed to the watch, whose hands had begun to move backward. A door opened farther along the train, and the man with my older face stepped down onto the platform, buttoning the coat as though he had never been without it. He looked at the boy, then at the open doorway beneath the house, and said, “You’ve brought him to the wrong station.”

The figure held the button so tightly that the loose end of its bandage darkened around its fingers. At the door, the voice asked again for the coat, and this time I heard the scrape of a palm against the wood. “Which coat?” Minnie called, keeping the watch cupped in both hands. There was a pause, and then the voice said, “The one I gave him to keep him warm.” The older man touched the smaller of the two coats on the table, but the boy caught his wrist and shook his head. In the window the carriage had returned, dim as breath on glass, and the man on its far seat was still bent beneath the coat, though his mouth was moving with the words at the door.

The conductor drew back the latch only far enough to admit a blade of cold air. No one stood on the step, but a wet handprint appeared against the opening, its fingers curled as if gripping the edge of the door. My double lifted the bell, and the figure stopped him by laying its bandaged hand over his. “He helped me down,” it said, looking at the handprint rather than at us. “I heard him calling after I shut the carriage door, but the bell had already rung, and I was afraid to open it again.” The older man took the child’s coat from the table and held it out, though his burned fingers trembled under its weight; the hand at the door did not reach for it.

I took the coat from him and found that its lining was warm, sheltered from the damp that had soaked everything else. Inside the collar, written in blue thread so faded I had missed it before, was my name in a hand I remembered from the labels my mother had sewn into my clothes. The boy came close and put his cheek against the sleeve, then looked up at me. “He gave it to me,” he said, “when I couldn’t find the other shoe.” I carried it to the door and held it through the narrow opening, but the hand slipped past the cloth and closed around my wrist, its grip so cold that I could feel each finger long after it loosened. Behind us, the watch began to tick faster, and Minnie shut it with a snap. The hand withdrew, leaving a white circle on my palm, and the figure pressed the brass button into its center.

The man in the window rose, the coat falling from his shoulders to the carriage floor, and for an instant I saw him clearly: my own face, lined with years I had not lived, watching the boy beside the hearth. Then the remaining mark vanished from the ticket, and the lamps in the glass went out one by one. The conductor opened the door fully upon the empty, rain-washed boards, where the shelter lamp burned beneath the window and a length of blue cord lay coiled beside it. The boy reached for the cord, but the older man picked it up first, following it with his eyes to where it disappeared beneath the threshold. I pulled gently on the end, and something answered from under the house: a small, dry ring, followed by the slow turning of a key.

The person carrying the shelter lamp came as far as the window and stopped, lifting it so that its light fell upon the glass. It was the conductor, though the man beside the table had not moved; rain shone on the brim of the one outside, and his other hand held a length of blue cord. The child at the pane drew back, and the carriage lamps grew faint behind him, leaving his small face suspended between our reflections. Minnie went to the door, but the conductor inside put his watch in her hand and asked her to keep it closed. “If he asks for it, don’t give it to him,” he said, and the figure with my face tightened its hold on the bell. Outside, the other conductor set the lamp on the sill, and the four streaks on the inside of the glass began to run downward like tears.

He knocked once, then held up the cord for us to see. At its end hung a brass button, dulled by rain, with a scrap of dark cloth still caught beneath its rim. The older man searched the coat on the table and found the button I had pressed into its cuff still in place, the blue stain spreading slowly around it. “That one was mine,” he said, looking at the button outside, and he drew the boy close enough to feel through his wet shirt. The conductor at the window spoke, but the glass let through only the shape of his mouth; the conductor inside watched him and said, “He wants the child’s shoe.” I set it down beside the ticket, keeping my hand over it, and the child in the glass lifted one bare foot as though the floor beneath him had turned cold.

The boy pulled free of the older man and came to the table, where he put his foot beside the shoe and asked me to let him try it. Minnie made room for him by the fire, and he sat on the hearthstone, working his damp toes into the leather while the older man knelt to help. It fitted, though the sole was split near the heel, and when the boy stood, the child in the window took a step too, dragging the coat away from the seated man. The man’s face was mine, but older than the face beneath the figure’s wet hair, with a white circle in the center of his palm where he gripped the coat. He looked past the child toward the room and raised that hand, not to the glass but to his mouth, as if calling for the bell. My double reached for it, then stopped and asked the figure, “Did you leave him there?” The figure nodded, and for the first time its voice failed; it gave the bell to my double and turned its face toward the fire.

My double rang, and the sound came back from the window thinner than before, followed by a heavy knock at the front door. The conductor outside had vanished, but his lamp remained on the sill, its flame burning steadily despite the rain. One of the two marks faded from the ticket, and the child in the carriage was gone; the boy stood beside the hearth in one wet shoe, holding the older man’s hand. Minnie opened the watch, and its stopped hands began to move, one minute at a time, while the conductor listened at the door without touching the latch. Another knock came, and beneath it a familiar voice asked us to return his coat. On the table, the button worked loose from the stained cuff and rolled to the very edge, where the figure caught it in its bandaged hand.

The conductor laid his watch beside the ticket, and for a moment its ticking seemed louder than the rain. The boy peered around the older man’s coat, counting under his breath as he looked from me to my double and then to the figure in the doorway. “Which two?” Minnie asked, but the conductor only turned the ticket over and rubbed his thumb across the blue crescent. My double let the curtain fall and said there were marks on the sill, though the rain had washed them almost away. When I joined him, I saw four narrow streaks in the dust on the inside of the glass, as if the knocking hand had been in the room with us. The figure touched its bandaged wrist and moved nearer the fire, leaving a dark trail of water on the boards.

The older man asked for his shoes, and the boy ran to fetch them before anyone could speak. We watched him cross the yard through the wavering light, stop beneath the window, and lift the pair by their sodden heels; when he returned, there was a third shoe hooked over his finger, a child’s, with a crescent stitched in blue at the toe. Minnie took it from him and tipped out a little water, along with a square of paper folded so tightly that she had to work it open with her nail. It was the corner of a photograph, showing a railway bench and the hem of a coat, and beside the coat a small bare foot resting on the floor. The boy put his own foot against it, though the image was too small to tell us anything. “I had shoes when we got on,” he said, looking at the older man, who bent to take the photograph but could not quite close his burned fingers around it.

The figure picked it up for him, and as it did, the lamp dimmed until the fire was the only light on our faces. In the dark glass of the window, I could see the carriage again, its tea-colored lamps passing slowly behind our reflections, though no train sounded outside. Two passengers sat together on the far seat: a child with one shoe on, and a man whose face was hidden by the coat drawn over his head. The boy made a movement toward them, but the older man caught him by the shoulder and knelt, water gathering beneath his stockings. “I thought I had left you there,” he said, and the boy turned in his grasp, staring at him with his mouth open. The figure held the photograph against the window, and the seated child lifted his head; at once the shoe in Minnie’s hand gave a wet tap against the table.

My double took the bell from the boy and offered it to the figure, which closed its fingers around the handle at last. It rang once, softly, and the child in the window slid down from the seat and came toward the glass, trailing the coat behind him; the man remained where he was. The conductor pressed his palm over the ticket, but a blue line escaped beneath his fingers and ran across the table toward the shoe. I caught it up before it could reach the edge, and the child put his hand against mine from the other side of the pane, the cold passing through the leather. The older man rose beside me and said, “There should only be one now,” but the conductor had taken his hand away from the ticket, and there were still two marks beneath the words. Outside, beyond the reflection of the carriage, someone was walking toward the house carrying the shelter lamp.