I’ve tried talking to them. I picked up a little bit of Cantonese in the nineties. Barely enough to hold a conversation, but enough to ask a few questions. They look right at me, open their mouths, and scream. I’m just another fucking gwáilóu as far as they’re concerned. Five hundred white guys loot your neighborhood and hang you from a lamppost, I wouldn’t trust me, either.

I’m not sure why I pass through here to Union Station. I certainly don’t enjoy it. It just feels important to remember that no matter what monsters are out there, there’s nothing more dangerous than just plain people.

Union Station’s always open. Most of the passenger trains are done for the night, but some of the non-stops run through, and there’s always cargo. Stepping through the doors is like stepping into the 1930s. There’s a pristine ticketing area to one side that they don’t use anymore except as a movie set, but the waiting area, the main concourse, is huge and well used.

A peaked ceiling with hand-painted tiles, forty-foot windows on either side, rows of wide, Art Deco mahogany chairs with leather cushions. Not a lot of people come to Union Station this late at night. Before I left L.A. you’d find at least some of the seats occupied by homeless people trying to take a nap somewhere they wouldn’t get shanked. But now the station’s cleared them out.

But even with the hour, I would expect to see more than one old woman sitting in one of the chairs near the end of the hall. She sits ramrod straight, a cane held in front of her. Skin marked with the deep crevasses of age, hair white and falling down her shoulders, eyes that are bright and alert. As I get close enough she looks me up and down and her eyes go a little distant.

I sit down in the chair opposite her, lean forward to get a better look. The wide aisles between rows were designed with people carrying 1930s luggage in mind, not for convenient conversation.

“You’re Miriam, I take it.”

“Miriam Dawson,” she says. “I knew your grandfather, Robert. And your parents.”

“Funny, they never mentioned you,” I say.

“I doubt they mentioned that your grandfather was still alive until you were fifteen, either. The Carters and their secrets.” Hearing that is like a punch in the chest.

“My grandfather died after getting back from World War II with my grandmother in a car accident. My dad was an orphan.”