THE BACK OF the 7:55 p.m. Mid-State Cruiser from Omaha’s downtown station to Chicago Union was empty.
It was a different model of train, smaller, with no observation or dining car, just a small desk for snacks at the front of the coach section. The train only ran between Omaha and Chicago, and made the trip twice every day. The station at boarding had been so quiet, with one attendant at one door taking tickets, it was as if the train snuck into Omaha itself and stole us away in the darkness.
“Looks like we’re in the clear.” Mara collapsed into the seat next to me and dropped a postcard with a photo of downtown Omaha in front of her, sizing it up and clicking a pen with conviction. “Just one couple, about fifteen rows ahead, and they don’t look like they’d give us much of a fight.”
I watched her carefully trace a British address into the “Deliver To” section and begin to doodle around the edges of the card, small stars and hearts and wavy lines connecting them. I wasn’t sure how to feel about her now that she’d left and come back again, inadvertently showing me the best and worst of her.
“Dear Dad.” She spoke as she wrote. “In Omaha, and I’ve taken up work with . . . a library conservation unit.”
She smiled to herself. I was confused by her motivations, confused by her patterns and mannerisms, confused by her convictions, certain only of the mystery that surrounded her. It was a mystery she chose and reveled in, but the pieces I had discovered felt altogether incomplete and inconsistent. Why leave and then come back? Why throw something away, then risk everything to save it?
“You’d love Omaha; it’s cold and wide and exceptionally American, but just dreary enough for your depressing British heart.”
Looking at her, the Mara I knew felt like a postcard herself: a carefully selected image, representing a much more complicated thing; a thing so overwhelming that it preferred to be understood only by carefully edited still frames, observed at a distance.
“I’ve made a friend. I think you’d like him. Love, your daughter.”
“Why did you come back?” I asked as she signed her name in swooping cursive. “Why help me, instead of them?”
“I told you, because you want this for your grandfather, and they want it for themselves.”
“Yeah, but—you know them. You are them, remember? You had a future with them. And you decided to throw that away, for . . . what? Honor, or something?”
Mara turned the postcard over in her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t like questions like that.”
I waited.
She shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve been with them for three years. Because of Leila, of course. I grew up with all of her ideas, and her anger, and her love of American protest culture and your grandpa and . . . she didn’t fit in Somerset, neither of us did, so we were always scheming these ways to get out, or things we would do if we were in the real world. ‘If you want to do something important, you’ve got to do something for everyone,’ that was what she said. Actually I think your grandpa might have said that.
“So it seemed so obvious, three years ago, that this is what I was meant to do. Follow her to America, follow her into this big, beautiful, righteous, communal, revolutionary . . . thing. And I’ve stuck it out, through all of the shitty jobs, and grunt work, and relegations to Nevada, and—still, I don’t think anyone ever looked at me seriously enough to think I was a real part of it.
“So when I found you, and the journals, I thought—I guess I figured it was some kind of magic that would inspire everyone again, and give us this new purpose, and it would all make sense, and I’d be the one—I know it’s selfish to say out loud, but I thought I’d be the one who would be in charge of it, and get to feel good about it. Like I’d actually done something, rather than just . . . been there. But I guess I didn’t really think that all the way through.”
“What happened?”
“It wasn’t like that.” She shrugged. “Jack took them, and immediately began acting as though they were his, and they were some kind of sign to him. I told him I thought that I should be the one holding on to them, for safekeeping, and he said that my sister would be disgusted if she could see how selfish I was being.”
“Where is your sister, anyway?” I interrupted. “Couldn’t she just . . .”
Mara looked up at me, small and questioning and almost smiling.
“Oh . . . oh, right.”
“Yeah.” She fidgeted. “Two years ago. She tried to drive her car drunk.”
I nodded for a long time, afraid to look up. “I’m sorry.”
Mara shrugged, fiddling with the corners of the postcard in her hands. “It’s okay. That place doesn’t even feel like her anymore.
“That’s the other thing. I thought your grandpa’s journals might remind Jack of what we were doing this for, but they just did the opposite. Leila only wanted to inspire people to advocacy, building something for everyone, you know? Jack wants to make noise. He puts his friends’ lives at risk for basically no reason, just to make people pay attention. He’ll say he doesn’t have anything personal to gain, and that he’s just answering the call or whatever. I think he just wants to be famous.”
I watched her continue to trace circles on the postcard in front of her, far away from where we were. “What do you want?”
She didn’t respond right away. “I want to do something important,” she said, settling on staring out the window.
I nodded again. It all made sense, the best and worst parts of her, and it made it impossible to find the animosity I felt toward her.
“Your turn,” she said, turning back to me. “Kaitlin Lewis.”
“Mara—”
“Did you see me save you from that library?”
I sighed. “She cheated on me. With my best friend since like kindergarten. We all worked together, I told him everything about her, and then one day—bam. She said she’d slept with somebody else, and I didn’t even have to ask who it was. Turns out, it was a bunch of people, and he was just one of them. And when she told me, I lost it. I hit a wall in her room, and she said I was trying to hit her, and I guess I might as well have been, for all that I could control myself. If I couldn’t stop her from fucking Mason, I couldn’t really control anything.”
Mara smiled, strangely satisfied. “You can’t,” she said. “But at least we’re all gonna burn up and die someday, right?”
I pushed it—all of it, the journals and the purpose and the gun on the table—as far from my brain as possible, counting streetlights as they passed, and when tunnels came, counting graffiti. I’d always wondered about the people who drew it; was it some kind of rush, knowing you were doing something illegal? Or was it a desperate attempt at making something permanent, so they could be remembered, however faintly?
“Why does he spell words wrong?”
Mara was looking over the first clue under the narrow beam of the reading light. “See, sometimes he uses an ‘a’ where there shouldn’t be an ‘a,’” she continued, as if noticing it for the first time. “‘Dask’ . . . oh, look here, ‘angals.’ Why is that?”
“Can we not talk about this?”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.
I knew exactly why I didn’t want to talk about it: talking about my grandfather meant thinking about my grandfather, and thinking about my grandfather meant thinking about whether he was alive or not, whether he’d tricked my family or not, whether he was trying to communicate with me or not. It meant letting myself entertain the kind of hope that makes possible the kind of disappointment that you don’t come back from.
“Can you at least tell me why he spells the words wrong?” She shifted in her seat, pulling her legs up underneath her. “Come on, I’ve just told you my sister died. That doesn’t buy me at least a few questions?”
“Yeah, alright.” I shook my head. “It’s an Alzheimer’s thing.”
“The letter ‘a’?”
“Phonetic spelling.”
“Phonetic spelling is a symptom of Alzheimer’s?”
“No. Phonetic misspelling. Spelling and grammar are nuanced, and tough to hold on to when your brain stops storing information. And when your brain loses its ability to remember spellings, it chooses to write out words however they sound in your head. Which for my grandfather meant using a lot of a’s.”
“Oh?” She turned on her seat toward me. “What about these random sentences: ‘jagged line burning orange lite’?”
“It’s a memory device.” I turned toward her. “His doctor taught him. When he didn’t understand where he was or what was going on, he was just supposed to start calling out the things that he saw, or the parts that he didn’t understand. If you think it’s weird on paper, try hearing it in person.”
“Wait,” Mara said, her fingers dancing down the page. “So do you think he really saw a greyhound? Or all these waves?”
“No, no.” I winced, remembering all of the times that my family had been fooled, overly excited or extremely confused by this particular habit. “Sometimes he would see the world in metaphor. You’ve gotta watch out for that.”
She smiled sideways at me in the window reflection, eager to test this new trick she’d learned. “Alright,” she continued. “Why his name? Why does he say ‘Arthur’ so often?”
“Self-awareness.” I heard his voice, booming out my name, my father’s name, his own name, just enough to throw the entire household into confusion. “The doctor said as long as he could remember his own name, he could tether to it. He would do it at home, too, and he said—” The words caught in my throat. “He said he was just reminding himself who the, the narrator of the story was.”
Mara watched me, hearing my voice break, and I carefully turned back to the window. “What about this, the date?” she asked. “Why the 2010? Why not just 2010? Some kind of weird contrarian thing?”
“No, he, uh, he did that on purpose.”
“Why?”
I spoke to the window glass. “Because he, he said it made him remember what that number, the number of the year, what it actually means. ‘The 2010th year’ since Jesus, or, as far as he was concerned, since human beings started to understand what it meant to be conscious. He said before he started writing, he always wanted to remind himself that he was the product of two thousand and ten years of conscious evolution. He’s a part of the two thousand and tenth try.”
Mara was silent for a long moment. “I think,” she said, slowly at first, “that he had a pretty limited scope of evolution if he thought that—”
“I know. That’s just what he thought. He was . . . He liked God. A lot.” I leaned my head back onto the seat and let it fall against the headrest.
“Okay. So what do you think he—”
“Mara,” I said, closing my eyes. “Can we . . . can we not talk about my grandpa?”
“Just one more question?”
“Mara—”
“You do know him,” she said, pursing her lips in earnest and leaning them toward me, so I couldn’t forget it. “I asked you, how well you even . . . you did know him. You do know him.”
I made a noise between a sigh and a grunt. “One more question.”
“Do you think—your grandfather—do you think he knew how old he was? Or what year it was?”
“No,” I said quietly, without looking at her. “I think he had his own world. And in that world, it was 1970, and he was twenty, and he was happy.”
Mara sighed and reclined her seat, her head resting a few inches from mine. “It just seems absurd, doesn’t it? To remember something for that long, even when you forget everything else? To feel something so strong that it never goes away? Like that woman, Sue, stuck saying good-bye to her husband over and over again.” The train hummed under her as she spoke. “I guess we really do keep love somewhere much deeper than the rest of it, huh?”
I didn’t answer, pretending to sleep, and before too long, the real thing found me.