Read Online Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka - Free Book Online

accustomed to assuming that representation confers meaning. That meaning is there, somewhere, to be conferred.
    A map of the scene in the
Connecticut Post,
complete with a box showing a train with an arrow bearing down on a group of five black dots, suggested the full depth of the failure. Emergency workers arriving at the point on the map where the dots and the arrow met had been “sickened by the carnage,” according to New York’s
Daily News.
The train’s steel snout, with its red, white, and blue stripes, was splashed with blood. Scattered over a wide area were the children’s shoes, their torn backpacks, a bloody Bible, and the Sesame Street dolls the older boys had packed for the journey. No, no number of facts would suffice. The “what” was not enough. We wanted a “why.” Better still, a “who.”
    Blame for the tragedy circled the scene, then settled tentatively on the father. Carlos Urgiles had been abusive, Julia Justiliano, a crossing guard, told the
Post.
He had threatened to kill his wife, she said. A year earlier, just before abandoning his family, he had had to be forcibly removed from the property of Luis Muñoz Marin School after attempting to steal his own children. The conclusion was obvious, even welcome: Julia Toledo was on the tracks with her family that night because she was running from her husband. Because she was afraid.
    This narrative began to crumble when reporters in Ecuador located Urgiles himself—dark-haired, thin, with the boot-leather body and the premature stoop of a lifelong laborer—in the small Andean town of Cojitambo, penniless and three thousand miles from Bridgeport. Shattered by the news, he told reporters that his Catholicism had caused tensions with his in-laws (former Catholics converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and that they had forced him to leave the country. They had hidden his children before he left. He had gone to Luis Muñoz Marin School out of desperation, he said, not to steal his sons but to try to say good-bye to them. “I have a great pain in my chest,” he sobbed during an interview with a TV station in Quito.
    The crosshairs now shifted to Toledo’s sister, Maria, who owned the Shelton Street house in which Julia and her sons had rented an apartment. Toledo’s family, growing tired of the burden Julia and her children imposed on them, reportedly had refused to help with the babysitting. From that point on, the angle of decline steepened. Unable to afford child care, Toledo was forced to quit her job cleaning rooms at Fairfield University. Relations between the sisters deteriorated. Forced to the wall, Julia Toledo moved her family into the shelter.
    But blaming Maria and her relations availed us nothing. Even if, as neighbors claimed, Maria had ordered her sister to leave her apartment, had forced Julia, in effect, into the homeless shelter, the fact remained that she had not forced her to leave that night or to climb with her children onto the tracks. We might not like Maria Toledo, might even accuse her, with some justification, of heartlessness, but to blame her would be absurd. Another narrative, straining for closure, ended in midsentence.
    As did all the others. Toxicology reports determined that drugs did not play a role. The train was traveling below the speed limit for the area. The engineer was sober, devastated, blameless. Suicide? Maria Toledo’s claim that her sister had been unstable was refuted by all who had known Julia in the weeks before she died. The composite portrait that emerged from their descriptions showed a woman full of hope, a survivor, a devoted mother capable of bringing a sense of play and possibility into a life of considerable hardship. All at Caroline House remembered Toledo triumphantly marching in to the Christmas party with a turkey on a platter, her four boys behind her. “Despite her poverty and the problems she had,” Sister Maureen told reporters, “she would make a game out of