A train, a gun and the best lesson I ever learned about loneliness
It’s nearly midnight on December 7, 1993. I’m lying in bed in my apartment. I can’t sleep, but at least I’m alive. That’s not the case for the dying people who’ve been brought to the hospital across the street, just outside my window.
I can’t stop thinking about them, and about everyone whose lives have irreparably changed tonight.
The blinds on my bedroom windows are closed, but the light from the emergency room parking lot across the street is so bright that it seeps through the blinds. It paints a dozen thin white lines across the ceiling above me.
I lie there, staring up at that light. The hospital is so close. So incredibly close.
But somehow, tonight, it was way too far for the man who lies next to me, sleeping deeply — the man who’s been my husband for just three months.
When I look back on that night, my memory always serves up that moment — me lying absolutely still in the dark. That stillness seems so out of place, because my life back then was spent in perpetual motion.
I was an actress with a full-time day job in New York City, racing out on my lunch hour each day to auditions, fueled by hope and ambition and coffee. I needed a steady job to keep our rent paid. But I was determined to do as much acting as possible, and things were beginning to happen. I’d begun using vacation days from my job to do extra work on “Law & Order” and make brief appearances in indie films.
I’d even managed to get hired at a repertory theater out on Long Island, where I’d grown up and was still living. I only earned a few dollars per show, but it didn’t matter: They were actually paying me to act, practically every night of the week.
Every Wednesday through Sunday, I was on stage performing in their current show. And nearly every Monday and Tuesday, I was out there rehearsing whatever show would be opening next. Big parts, small parts — I didn’t care. I was working as an actress.
But I had to move fast to keep this intricate balancing act going.
Every weeknight, I had to sprint out of my office in midtown Manhattan at exactly 5 p.m., then race through the tourist-filled concourse under Rockefeller Center to get to the subway. I’d ride it two stops downtown, pop out at 34th Street, run a full block and hurry down the escalator into Penn Station, grabbing a seat on the 5:33 train.
I couldn’t miss that train. If I did, I’d never make it to the theater on time.
And I couldn’t just catch that train. I had to sit in the third car — the one that would pull up at the exact spot on the platform where the stairs led down to the street. Because when the train arrived I would have just enough time to jump out, hurry down those stairs, run three blocks to my parents’ house, borrow their car and get on the road to the theater.
If I sat in any other train car, I’d get there and step out into a crowd of tired commuters shuffling along the platform at the end of their day. I could lose precious minutes walking down the platform to the stairs, and if traffic was bad on the highway heading to the theater, I might not skid into the dressing room before the house manager came looking for me.
Some nights, even when it all went smoothly, I was still zipping my dress as I hurried out on stage when the show began. But my system worked — as long as I made the 5:33 train, sat in the third car, and got up just before the train approached my station and stood ready near the doorway as we arrived.
Night after night, month after month, that was my routine: day job and auditions during the day in New York City and theater out on Long Island at night.
Just a few times a year, though, I got a break. Once in a great while, I didn’t have a rehearsal on a Monday or Tuesday night. On those rare nights, I could walk away from my day job at 5 p.m. and not rush out to the theater.
Even when those days happened, I usually took the 5:33 out of habit. But at least I didn’t have to worry about the Jenga tower of my life crashing down if I missed it.
Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1993 was one of those rare nights. I didn’t have a rehearsal. So on this particular evening, with Christmas shopping on my mind and a sense that I’d been going hard all year, I didn’t have to run.
I deviated from my ironclad routine. I didn’t board the 5:33 train out of Penn Station. But a man with a loaded 9mm handgun did.
And for reasons never explained at his circus of a trial, he walked into that same car that I always rode in, just as the train was approaching my station, Merillon Avenue. He killed six people and wounded many more that night — people he could see, because they were standing up exactly where I would have been standing, where I should have been standing.
I had no idea any of this was happening. I’d caught the next train, the 6:06, and when I stepped off to change trains at Jamaica station in Queens, I was baffled to hear the announcement: No trains were going any further east because the line had been shut down. No one was explaining why.
I could hear people complaining, assuming it was some kind of mechanical problem and cursing the railroad. It was 1993 — no internet, no phones in anyone’s pockets.
Trains filled with commuters kept arriving from Manhattan, but they couldn’t go any further. A half-hour passed, then an hour. Rumors started flying. Was it really something mechanical, or had someone jumped in front of a train further east?
I stood on that freezing train platform in the December wind, finally giving up waiting on an endless line for the only not-broken pay phone I could find. If I’d just taken my normal train, I kept thinking, I’d be home by now.
And that was the thing — I should have been home by then.
Eventually, we were told that trains would finally begin leaving the station. I managed to squeeze aboard.
A conductor checking tickets quietly began explaining what happened. You’ll be coming in on the westbound track when we get to Merillon Avenue, he told us. And he explained why: The train on the eastbound track — the 5:33 — was still there. It was now a crime scene. Bodies had been removed and the injured had been taken to the nearest hospitals, including the level-one trauma center located across the street from my apartment. But the train itself remained in place.
My head was spinning. I thought of the people I sat next to on that train every night. I didn’t know their names, but I knew their faces. I knew the coats they wore. I knew who fell asleep on the ride home each night and who got up like I did right as the train arrived at the station. Were they still alive?
And my husband — he must be worried sick. I was one of the hundreds of people who hadn’t come home, either because they were caught in these massive delays or because they’d been shot.
He knew my normal schedule. Hours had passed. And I’d had no way to call him. So he must have been sure that I’d been in the middle of that massacre.
Finally, I approached home. I saw the hospital parking lot, crowded with TV news crews and people milling around. I walked into our apartment. The TV was on. The screen showed a phone number people could call to find out whether their loved ones were being treated for gunshot wounds at the hospital or were just stuck in the massive train delays.
I looked at my husband and out our living room window at the chaos beyond. “Did you call the number?” I asked him. “Or did you just go across the street and ask if I was there?”
He stared at me.
“I couldn’t deal with the idea that you were dead. So I just stayed here. I figured you’d be fine even if you were on the train. I figured you’d get here eventually. And you did.”
Then he puttered in the kitchen for a bit and changed the channel to see what was on ESPN.
You want to think that your partner is the one person who has your back no matter what — the person who will show up, who will help you when it’s hard. The person who will run at breakneck speed across an emergency room parking lot to make sure you’re not dying alone of a gunshot wound when all signs suggest that you are.
But that doesn’t always happen.
It took 14 months to convict the gunman, Colin Ferguson, on six counts of murder and 22 counts of attempted murder. It took me four years longer and plenty of moments of being quietly ignored before I realized: I’d rather be alone on my own than alone in a relationship. And by some twisted serendipity, it was another train ride that helped me find the courage.
By this point, I’d left that little Long Island theater and I’d begun working on stage in New York. I’d finally landed my first real off-Broadway contract, with the lead role in a sweet little romantic comedy that I hoped would mean I could quit my day job.
But the show had been produced on a shoestring. And though the producer hoped some eager investor would see it, love it, and move us for a long run at a larger theater, that hadn’t happened. After six weeks of good reviews and friendly crowds, the play was already closing.
My husband had seen the show once, about two weeks into the run. When he didn’t make it to opening night or any of the first performances, I asked why.
“I don’t need to see it,” he said. “I know how good you are.”
But now we were closing. The producer had invited the cast and crew for one last dinner together after the final Sunday matinee, where we’d all dress up and raise a glass to celebrate our work and wish each other well. It was to be a fancy celebration, full of heartbreak.
It was time to catch the train into the city. My husband was sitting on the couch watching TV, wearing a pair of worn khakis and an old sweater my mother had given him for Christmas years before, way back when we’d first started dating. He knew all about the plans for the party. He knew I needed someone by my side that night. But he hadn’t said anything.
I was running out of time. So though I felt silly asking, I did. “Are you planning to come with me?”
He looked at me, then he kind of glanced around the room.
“I guess,” he said. Then he paused. It wasn’t a brief pause.
“I’ll go. But do I have to change my clothes?”
I heard my voice before I realized I was speaking.
“No,” I said. “You don’t have to get changed. You look really comfortable. Don’t get changed. Don’t take the train with me.
“I can do this alone. I’ve got this.”
I shared this story live on stage at City of Asylum’s performance space during a StoryClub PGH event on Nov. 15, 2022.
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