The Haunted Traveler December 2017 Edition

150
Black Swan On the Water Side
Con Chapman
We had never taken the train to New York together, my wife and I, and other than the
incessant chatter of the two entrepreneurs a few seats ahead of us—they had apparently
invented the next big thing—the trip was turning out to be a pleasant one.
I knew to sit on the left-hand side of the train on the way down from Boston—that
way you got the water view. “I even saw a black swan one time,” I told my wife, and she
was duly impressed. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen it in the company of an old girlfriend
many years ago, on our way to her house in Old Lyme for Thanksgiving.
“Swans mate for life, you know,” she said, as she snuggled into me. I leaned over and
gave her a kiss on the forehead. We were at a good point in our marriage, after ups and
downs a couple is apt to go through when they have adolescent children. The kids were
out of the house and almost out of college now, and in a year (we hoped) both would
have jobs, we could downsize and start to enjoy life.
She was an innocent, and the woman I needed to be with after a long and tumultfilled
relationship with the girlfriend from Connecticut, Marcie. We had lived together
for nearly five years, then I moved out but couldn’t seem to get her out of my life. We’d
get back together, quarrel as if we were still living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment
on Beacon Hill, stay away from each other for a time, then reconcile as former lovers
sometimes do; sweetly, forgiving of the latest slight or quibble, hoping to get things
right by trying again.
Then Marci left Boston to go back home, I had heard, and I didn’t see her again.
Every now and then I’d have a dream in which we’d encounter each other on the street,