The door behind my older self opened farther, and the light fell across a row of empty seats upholstered in green. A little water ran over the threshold, although the boards of the passage were dry, and in it I could see the reflection of a hand gripping the carriage rail. My older self stepped aside, keeping the folded ticket out of the conductor’s reach, and the boy beside my father gave a small cry. On the nearest seat lay a blue coat with one sleeve turned inside out, just as his was. “I came back for him,” my older self said, and the boy pressed the broken graphite into his palm until a dark line appeared between his fingers.

My father asked why the boy’s coat was in the carriage when the boy had been waiting beneath our floor. “Because you left it there,” my older self answered, looking at him rather than at the child. He touched the boy’s shoulder, and the boy flinched before allowing the hand to rest there. The conductor opened his watch again, but its face had clouded, and he rubbed it with his thumb without making it clear. From the little room the woman rose with the smallest mitten in her hand, leaving her ticket on the table beside the saucer. “If he goes back for the coat,” she asked, “does he have to stay?” The conductor did not answer her, and my older self held the ticket closer to the lamp.

There were now two names on it, mine and my father’s, the second written in a thin, uneven hand. My father reached for the paper, but the boy caught his sleeve and said he did not want the coat; he only wanted the pencil, which my mother still held. She gave it to him, and he went into the passage before any of us could stop him, walking past my older self to the carriage door. The conductor followed, his watch swinging against his waistcoat, and I ran after them, close enough to smell the wet wool of the coat as the boy lifted it from the seat. Underneath it was a notebook, swollen at the edges, with a torn page caught in its binding. The boy fitted his broken piece of graphite to the pencil and wrote something on the page, shielding it from us with his arm.

The bell rang so sharply that I put my hands over my ears, and when I lowered them the conductor had caught the boy by the wrist. My father pulled him free, while my older self laid the ticket on the seat and held the carriage door open against a sudden gust of damp air. The boy tucked the notebook under his coat and stumbled back into the passage with us; behind him, the door closed softly, leaving the ticket inside. We stood listening as the wheels began to move, though through the shop window the second carriage still appeared to be standing at the far end of the platform. My father knelt and asked the boy what he had written, but the page had torn loose during the struggle and remained on the carriage seat. The boy opened the notebook to show us the ragged edge, and from the other side of the wall came the slow scrape of a chair being drawn up to a table.

I put my ear to the wall where the boy had been listening, and at first the plaster felt so cold that I pulled away. Then, beneath the hiss of rain, I heard my name spoken once, followed by a quick shuffling sound. My father came to stand behind me, but when he called out, the voice did not answer him. The boy traced the seam of the wall with the broken graphite, leaving a thin black line that bent around the corner and ran down behind the counter. We moved the counter together, its feet dragging through the wet dust, until a second narrow door appeared beneath the warped board we had lifted. There was no keyhole in it, only a shallow slot at the height of my hand.

The conductor stooped to look, and I saw the reflection of the slot in his watch before he snapped it shut. “The ticket,” he said, holding out his hand again. I kept it, and my mother crouched beside me, her younger self leaning against her shoulder with the two blue mittens pressed together. From the little room, the woman said that the slot had once been used for letters; she had meant to open them, she added, but there had always been another train to meet. The older man unfolded her ticket again and laid it beside the mitten in her lap, though she did not look down at it. When the voice behind the door called my name a second time, my father reached for the pencil, then stopped and let me take it from him.

I slid my ticket halfway into the slot, leaving enough outside to hold, and felt a gentle pull from the other side. My father caught my wrist, but I could see his younger self watching us, the graphite still pinched between his fingers, and after a moment my father loosened his grip. The ticket slipped away; a latch lifted, and the narrow door opened onto a passage lit by a single lamp. A person stood at the far end with their back to us, wearing my coat, its hem dark with rain. I called out, and they turned just enough for me to see my own face, older than it was now, with a pale mark across one cheek. “Don’t give him the ticket,” they said, and raised their hand to show me the damp square of paper.

The conductor stepped forward, but my mother put herself between him and the door, keeping one arm around the child. “You told us the carriage would take her to the address,” she said, and he answered that he had told us only where it was going. Outside, the far bell rang twice, close enough now to make the tins on the floor tremble, and the older man went to the shop door to look. My father asked the figure in the passage how they had come there, but they were watching the conductor, folding the ticket small between their fingers. “I took the first carriage,” they said, “and I came back for the one who didn’t.” Behind them, another door began to open, letting in a strip of pale carriage light.

The second carriage stood so far down the platform that its wheels were lost in the rain, but the light in its windows reached us in pale strips across the boards. My father held my ticket close to the lamp and read the address aloud, stumbling over the number that was not ours. The older man’s sister took it from him and turned it toward the shop, as if she could compare the writing with the faded numbers above the door. “There was a shop next to yours,” she said to my mother, “before the wall came down.” My mother looked at the counter, then at the narrow space between it and the plaster, where the water had disappeared. The boy moved beside her and put his ear against the wall, his pencil still clutched in his hand; after a moment he beckoned me over.

At first I heard only the train and the rain drumming on its roof, but when the whistle faded there was a faint scraping on the other side, followed by the sound of something set carefully on wood. The boy said he had heard it while he was waiting beneath the floor, although he had thought it was someone working in our shop. My father pressed his shoulder against the plaster, then stepped back and ran his fingers along a seam half-hidden behind a shelf. Together we shifted the shelf, spilling a row of old tins that rolled and rang against the boards, and uncovered a door no wider than my shoulders. The conductor came in when he heard the noise, his watch open in his hand, and told us that the second carriage would not wait long. My mother took the pencil from the boy and pushed its point into the keyhole; something clicked, and the door swung inward a few inches.

A little room lay beyond it, dry except for a dark patch on the floor beneath an empty chair. On the table was a saucer, and beside it a blue mitten, smaller than either of the ones the girl now wore. She reached past my mother for it, but the woman from the first carriage called out sharply, and the child stopped with her hand in the air. The woman had followed us into the shop, holding the rail of the counter as though it were still moving beneath her; she stared at the mitten and asked the older man for the ticket she had given back to him. He unfolded it, and she laid it on the table before sitting in the empty chair, her wet skirt spreading across the dry boards. “I meant to leave a place for her,” she said, looking at my mother, “but I kept waiting for someone else to bring her in.” My mother took the mitten from the table and placed it in the woman’s lap, then drew the little girl nearer without urging her across the threshold.

The bell at the far end of the platform rang again, and this time the conductor did not consult his watch. He held out his hand for my ticket, but my father stepped between us and asked where the carriage would take me. “To the address on it,” he said, though his eyes had gone to the small room, and to the woman sitting with the mitten in her lap. My father took the pencil from my mother and tried to change the number, but the point broke against the paper, leaving a black fleck on his thumb. The boy picked up the broken piece and went back to the wall, where he listened for so long that I thought the scraping had begun again. Then he turned to me, holding the graphite between his fingers, and said, “There’s another door, and someone is asking for you.”

My father put his palm flat on the floorboard, and for a moment he did not answer. The shop smelled of wet wool and the iron tang of the water drying along the counter. “Who are you waiting for?” he asked at last. Beneath his hand came a rustle, then the younger voice said, “The girl from the train,” as though my father ought to have known. My mother’s child pressed closer to her, but my mother bent and told her quietly that she could stay where she was. The older man moved the box out of the water’s path, and the pencil rolled against its side with a hollow tap.

My father found the edge of a loose board beneath the counter and worked his fingers into the seam. The conductor came in from the platform and lifted his lamp, warning him to be careful of the nails, but he made no move to help. When the board rose, a breath of cold air came through, carrying the smell of earth and old paper, and I saw a boy crouched in the shallow space below. He held one end of a blue mitten by its unraveling cuff; the child beside my mother looked down at her bare hand and then at him. “You said you’d come back for it,” he told her. My father lowered himself onto one knee and asked him how long he had been waiting, but the boy only lifted the mitten higher, his arm trembling with the effort.

The little girl took a step forward, and my mother let go of her hand. She knelt at the opening and reached for the mitten, but the boy drew it back when he saw the damp ticket in my other hand. “That’s hers,” he said, pointing at me, and my father looked from the ticket to the boy’s face. He took the pencil from the box and offered it down through the boards; after a moment the boy accepted it, laying the mitten across his knees. “I thought if I wrote it properly, she’d find us,” he said, and my father bowed his head so low that the lamplight fell across the back of his neck. The girl took her mitten then and held out her hand, and together my parents pulled the boy up into the shop.

Outside, the train gave a long, low whistle, and the woman from the carriage called for the conductor. He went to the door but stopped when he saw the boy standing beside my father, both of them staring at the ticket I held. Its torn edge had begun to darken, and a second line of writing was appearing beneath my name, letter by slow letter, as if the pencil were still moving somewhere. My father took my hand and turned the paper toward the lamp; the new line was the shop address, with one number different from our own. The woman in the chair rang her bell then, and from the far end of the platform another bell answered. Through the rain I could make out a second carriage standing beyond the first, its door open and its windows lit.

My father caught the lid before it could fall back, and we all leaned over the box. The pencil and tickets had shifted to one side, leaving a wet square of paper against the bottom; as we watched, its corner lifted and knocked three times against the wood. The child slipped from beneath my mother’s coat and reached in, but stopped when the conductor closed his watch with a sharp click. “It isn’t for you,” he said, looking at me. My mother took my hand before I could move, her fingers cold from the rain, and asked how he knew. He opened the watch again and turned its face toward us: beneath the hands, where the maker’s name should have been, was the address of our shop.

I knelt beside the box and lifted the paper by its dry edge. It was a ticket, thinner than the others, with a tear along one side and a dark thumbprint on the back; when I turned it over, I saw my name written in my father’s careful hand. He bent close enough for a drop of rain to fall from his nose onto the boards, then took the ticket from me and rubbed at the writing with his sleeve. “I haven’t written it,” he said, though he did not give it back at once. The woman on the carriage step watched him, her hand still resting on the rail, while the older man unfolded her ticket and compared the two. “There’s no address on this one,” he said, and my mother’s younger self touched the torn edge with her mitten.

The train gave a low hiss, and the conductor stepped toward the carriage, holding his watch out as if he meant to stop it with his other hand. My father passed the ticket to me then, and I felt the damp paper soften between my fingers. The woman in the chair raised her bell, but the little girl caught its rim before it could sound, leaving them both motionless at the platform’s edge. From the open carriage came the soft call my mother had heard, followed by another voice, smaller and impatient, saying that someone had been left behind. The child beside my mother looked up at her, and my mother crouched to fasten the loose blue wool around her wrist. “You don’t have to go back under there,” she said, and the child took hold of her coat.

The woman on the step turned toward the passage, then looked down at the ticket in my hand. “It brought her here once,” she said to my mother, “but it hasn’t finished the journey.” My father put his arm around my shoulders, and the conductor, after a glance at his watch, closed the little door in the platform and locked it. Inside the shop, water ran from the threshold toward the counter, leaving a narrow clean path through the dust; at its end, something knocked from beneath the floorboards. My mother rose slowly, keeping the child close, and the older man’s sister held the shop door open as we gathered around it. When my father called down through the boards, the knocking stopped, and a voice answered in his own, much younger than I had ever heard it: “Is she there yet?”