• “Without a doubt, Harrison was tough. As an employee, if you didn’t get with the program, you were gone. You got a chance to mend your ways, but only one. If you were dragging down the team, he believed, the consequences for the company could be a disastrous spiral that would be bad for everybody. But this was a man for whom an efficiently operating railroad was like the performance of a Mozart symphony by one of the world’s great orchestras. It’s what he loved and what accounted for his peerless skills. That love, however, made him vulnerable to emotional wounds, as it frequently does to true believers who throw every ounce of their being into what they do.”

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• “No matter how hard she tries to only look at her notebook, the dying children’s parents always start to talk with Amy. Sometimes she’s even doing Kumon. But the parents of the dying children interrupt her and tell her she looks just like a little doll. Everyone says the same thing, that she looks like a doll. Amy feels funny when they say it, a little sick to her stomach. She doesn’t really know what they mean. Why would she look like a doll when she’s a person? Or do they just mean she doesn’t have any scratches on her skin like the dying kids do? She doesn’t ask their mom because their mom seems annoyed when people say it when she’s there. From this she deduces that she is right to feel uncomfortable.Their mom takes her to see the babies and tells her about when she was born. Amy was born early because their mom stepped on a snake in the garage and got scared, and that induced the labor. Because of the snake Amy had to stay in the hospital a little bit longer, in a cradle just like these ones. Amy asks if the snake got away, hoping the answer is yes. The answer is no. Amy, liberated by a snake that died, feels guilty and important. Their mom takes her to the cafeteria for lunch but gets mad at her in the middle and goes back down to the pediatric ward without her. She doesn’t give Amy any instructions on what to do next, so Amy decides to find the maternity ward by herself. She remembers never eat soggy waffles, and anyway, she remembers where it is. She stands at the window for a long time, watching the babies sleep. She fogs the glass up with her breath. She draws a tiny heart in the mist with her fingertip, and she loves the squeaking sound this makes, so she moves a little to the left and fogs up the glass again, on purpose, and draws a slightly bigger heart. Then she gets in trouble for disappearing, but it is worth it.”
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