It’s nearly midnight on December 7, 1993. I’m lying in bed in my Long Island apartment. I can’t sleep, but at least I’m alive. That’s not the case for the dying who’ve been brought to the hospital just outside my window.
My bedroom blinds are closed, but the light from the emergency room parking lot across the street is so bright that it paints dozens of thin white lines across the ceiling above me. I can’t stop staring at that light, a physical reminder of just how close the hospital is to our home.
And yet somehow, tonight it was too far to travel for the man who lies next to me, sleeping soundly. The man who’s been my husband for just three months.
When I think back now, it seems almost crazy that I was lying still at that moment. My life back then was spent in perpetual motion, especially at night.
I was an actress with a full-time day job, racing out on my lunch hour for auditions all over New York City. I’d also managed to get hired at a theater on Long Island that was actually paying me to act nearly every night of the week. I spent every Wednesday through Sunday night performing on their stage, and every Monday and Tuesday rehearsing the show that would open next.
It was exhausting, but it worked if I moved fast. I would sprint out of my midtown office at exactly 5 p.m. each night, race through the tourist-filled concourse under Rockefeller Center, jump on the subway, then pop out at 34th Street and run a full block to hurry down the escalator into Penn Station and grab a seat on the 5:33 train.
But I couldn’t grab just any seat. I had to sit in the train car that would pull up exactly where the stairs led down to the street from the platform at my stop. Because I had just enough time to jump out of the train, 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 have to weave my way along the platform once we got there, stuck amid tired commuters shuffling along at the end of their day. I’d lose precious minutes. Then, if traffic was bad heading to the theater, I’d barely skid into the dressing room before the house manager came looking for me.
Some nights I was still zipping my dress as I hurried out on stage.
But it was worth it. I was chasing my dream. And my system worked, as long as I made the 5:33, sat in the right car, and got up as the train approached my station, so I could bolt out the door as soon as we reached my stop.
It was almost Christmas and I’d been running hard all year. For once, I didn’t want to run.
Once or twice a year, the theater did a show with no part for me. So I’d be appearing in the current show five nights a week, but I wouldn’t have to trek out to the theater on Mondays and Tuesdays because I wasn’t rehearsing the upcoming show. You’d think I’d be relieved. But honestly I just wanted to be performing, even if it meant keeping up this breakneck schedule.
I usually took the 5:33 on those rare nights off. Habits die hard. But at least on those nights, I knew the Jenga tower of my professional life wouldn’t collapse if I missed the train.
December 7, 1993, was one of those unexpected Tuesday nights off, and I decided to deviate from my ironclad routine for once. It was almost Christmas and I’d been running hard all year. For once, I didn’t want to run.
So I didn’t board the 5:33 train out of Penn Station. But a man with a loaded 9-millimeter handgun did. For reasons that were never explained at the circus that was his trial, he walked into the same train car that I always rode in and just as the train was approaching my station he killed six people and wounded many more. People who were standing right where I would have been standing, right where I should have been standing that night.
I had caught the next train, the 6:06, and when that train got held at Jamaica Station in Queens, I had no idea why. Crowded trains kept arriving from Manhattan, but the whole line had been shut down with no explanation. People were complaining, assuming it was some kind of mechanical problem. A half-hour passed, then an hour. Rumors started flying, but this was long before the age of smartphones. I remember standing on that freezing platform in the December wind in a thin, faux leather jacket, and finally giving up the endless line for the only working pay phone I could find.
I kept wishing I’d taken my normal train. I’d be home by now.
And that was the thing: I should have been home by then.
Hours later, when we were told that trains would finally begin leaving Queens, I managed to squeeze aboard one. A conductor passed through taking tickets; he announced what had happened. People who’d been grumbling and jostling for space moments before fell silent.
My head was spinning. All I could think was that my husband must be worried sick. I wished I stayed on that pay phone line and called home. He must have been thinking that the only reason he hadn’t heard from me in all these hours was that I’d been on that train, just like I was every other night.
When I finally got home, he’d been watching the news. Victims had been taken to the hospital right across from our apartment in Mineola. The emergency room parking lot, visible from our living room window, was filled with news trucks and a sea of people milling about.
On the screen there was a phone number for people to 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 that followed. This massacre at rush-hour had shut down a major artery that brings home thousands of people each night. For excruciating hours, people didn’t know whether they’d lost someone they loved dearly.
“Did you call the number,” I asked my husband, “or did you just go across the street and ask if I was there?”
He stared at me for a moment with a silence that confused me. Then he spoke.
“Oh,” he said. “I couldn’t deal with the idea that you were dead. So I just stayed here. I figured you’d get here eventually. And you did.”
He puttered in the kitchen for a moment. Then he changed the channel to see what was on ESPN.
It’s strange, the things we assume when we marry someone, the conversations we don’t ever think we’d need to have, the confidence we have that we’ll receive all the consideration that we’re so eagerly and instinctively giving.
It’s easy to believe that your partner is the one person who will have your back no matter what. This is the person who will show up when you need them, even when it's hard. The person who will run at breakneck speed out the door and across an emergency room parking lot to make sure you’re not dying alone of a gunshot wound when all signs point to the likelihood that you are.
But that doesn't always happen.
It took 14 months to convict the gunman on six counts of murder and 19 counts of attempted murder. It took me five years and a slew of other big and small moments being quietly ignored to realize that I deserved better than a partner who’d stay on the couch on a night like that.
Thirty years later, I’m still not sure whether my choice to take a different train was divine intervention or simply dumb luck. But I’m grateful that eventually, after more hard lessons than I should have needed, I discovered that being on my own was a whole lot more satisfying than being alone with someone else. And I’m determined to spend however much more time I’m granted in this world encouraging other women to acknowledge their own value and set their own bars just as high as they wish.