The Girl on the Train

Friday, July 12, 2013. Rachel, hungover and exhausted, rides the train to London. As the train stops at the signal, Rachel looks out the window for Jess and Jason. She is shocked when she sees Jess in the yard kissing another man. Rachel feels pained and disappointed, as if she’s the one who’s been cheated on—again. She remembers finding an illicit email on Tom’s computer from a woman named Anna, and discovering a cache of steamy love letters they’d been sending back and forth for months. Rachel wishes she could scratch Jess’s eyes out.

That evening, the 5:56 train is twice as full as it usually is. Rachel feels hot and sick. She reflects on her miserable day: after running into some of her old coworkers at a coffee shop and enduring their pitying looks, Rachel received an unexpected voicemail from Anna, begging her to stop calling the house at night. To cope with the shock, Rachel drank four gin and tonics in a row. She begins thinking terrible thoughts about Anna and Tom, who still live in the house that Tom and Rachel bought as newlyweds years ago. Rachel falls asleep—when she wakes up at the signal, she looks out the window for Jess and Jason but cannot see either of them. 

Saturday, July 13, 2013. Rachel wakes to the sounds of Cathy cleaning the apartment, as she does each Saturday morning. Rachel dreads the day stretching ahead of her. She recalls how she used to spend Saturdays with Tom having lazy morning sex and making breakfast, and she feels pained. After wasting the day away in her bedroom, Rachel gets slightly buzzed in the evening and goes out to take the train to London and back just so she can try to spot Jason. As she passes number 15, she spies two figures on the porch but cannot make them out. She drunkenly decides to get off at the Witney stop. As she does, she notices a redheaded man smiling—or sneering—from the opposite end of the carriage. 

Sunday, July 14, 2013. Rachel wakes up hungover and in pain. Her fingernails are dirty, and her mouth tastes like blood. She remembers that something bad happened at Blenheim Road but can’t recall any specifics. When she gets out of bed and examines herself in the mirror, she finds that she is naked and covered in bruises and cuts. When she exits her bedroom, she finds that her jeans and underwear are on the floor; they smell of urine. Rachel becomes nauseated and vomits on the stairs.

Rachel retrieves her phone from her pocket, takes it up to her bedroom, and plugs it in. She has two voicemails: one from Cathy asking where she is, and another from Tom scolding her for frightening Anna and hanging around their home. Rachel has no idea what she did last night. As she gets back into bed and pulls the covers over her head, she has a mental image of jerking Anna to the floor by her long blond hair.

Rachel wakes to the sound of Cathy screaming at her for vomiting on the stairs. Rachel pulls on some clothes and goes downstairs to apologize, and Cathy is alarmed by Rachel’s appearance. Rachel insists that she’s been sick, but Cathy calls Rachel out for being drunk. Cathy tells Rachel that she has four weeks to find a new apartment, and then Cathy goes to her bedroom and slams the door. Rachel cleans up, goes back to her own room, and begins writing an email to Rachel’s mother to ask for some financial help. Rachel notices a new message on her phone from Tom and listens to it: he apologizes for yelling in his previous message as well as for the night before, when things got “heated.” Rachel, crying, crawls back into bed and goes to sleep once more.