The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

slightly. She was frustrated. He was irritating in his chilliness. Leslie didn't get him either.
    "I don't see that it matters, now."
    "God!" She spun away. "I see why Alex gets so infuriated." She picked up her glass and took a quick swallow.
    "Good."
    "Good! Why?"
    "Because Alex needs you to see that. He needs you on his side. And I don't, my dear."
    She was suddenly angry. "No, you don't need anyone on your side."
    "That's right."
    "Not even Elizabeth."
    "I would be in trouble if I needed Elizabeth on my side. She's not. She hasn't been for a good long while."
    "So it doesn't matter to you if Elizabeth is dead, it doesn't matter to you."
    Leslie saw that Alex had come to stand in the doorway to the living room. He stopped there. Neither of the other two had noticed him.
    "It would matter enormously to me. Enormously. But it might not change my life--what would have been my life." He paused for a moment, then said, "It might not change my theoretical life, let's say."
    Alex stepped forward. "That's the only kind of life you have, Dad--theoretical."
    Gabriel started, and turned to him. He smiled, sadly this time. "This would be your mother's perspective, too."
    The younger man snorted, began to talk again, but the woman interrupted, wanted to know what he'd learned.
    He turned to her. He said they'd started pulling out the dead and seriously injured, that more people had arrived at hospitals, either in ambulances or on their own, that they weren't releasing names. They'd set up an information center for the families.
    Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Gabriel went to the back of the stage and turned on a small television set wedged into the bookshelves. There was a man talking, interviewing someone you couldn't see. The voices were speaking of who might have done this. The younger couple moved back and stood watching too. They listened for a few moments to the speculation. There had already been several claims of responsibility.
    "Imagine wanting credit for it," the young woman said. She shook her head. "What a world."
    Alex began to talk about their intention, their motivation. Trains, the Midwest: new territory, new methods. "Fuckers," he said.
    "But perhaps this is how it's going to be," Gabriel said. He turned the television off. "It will be something that just happens from time to time." He brought up John Kerry, he said maybe he had been right when he said during his failed campaign that terrorism was like crime, something ineradicable, something to be managed, rather than eliminated. He described being in Paris with Elizabeth the fall after the Metro bombings. "We traveled everywhere together by subway--by Metro." He paused for a moment, and Leslie thought that he must have been remembering Elizabeth as she was then--perhaps even tenderly, it seemed for a half moment; but then he cleared his throat and went on to say that 9/11 wasn't different from that, really, except in scale. Alex and he began to talk about it in the abstract, theorizing about the likelihood that these terrorists had actually intended to blow up the station, too, the possibility of their being from Morocco, like the Madrid bombers, and the reasons for that; or Pakistani. Or Al Qaeda. There was something comical in this easy turn to theorizing on the part of the men, and the audience seemed to recognize this--there was mild laughter here and there.
    While they were speaking this way, the woman was walking slowly back and forth across the stage, her face full of reaction to each of them, now bitter amusement, now disgust. She sometimes tried to interrupt with a phrase or two, but they paid her no real attention. They had moved to the front of the stage as they talked, facing each other for the most part, and she claimed the back of the stage, watching them. Finally she came to a halt, dead center, in front of the big stage window. "For God's sake!" she shrilled, hands on her hips. They both fell silent and turned to her. "This is Elizabeth we're