SMALL DROPLETS OF rain started to pelt the windows as I felt my way to the back of the Zephyr. The sky was dark with heavy clouds; the lights of the cabin flickered.
It didn’t surprise me that my grandfather chose the train for his escape. When he turned up in Ohio, that was the one speculation we all agreed on. The train was as much a part of my family’s DNA as he was—my great-grandfather helped build it, my grandfather helped maintain it, and now my dad and I were among the last people still using it. Every school trip, every family vacation when I was a kid, every summer to tennis camp with Mason—every time, we used the Amtrak, even though every trip took two or three or ten times as long as the world’s slowest airplane.
But really, I didn’t mind it. For all the traditions I hated—the Christmas photos in matching button-ups, the cabin, the ham loaf and mandarin orange Jell-O—the train I could tolerate. Something about it did feel nostalgic, and valuable, and possible. The train can’t turn around, she’d said.
I could understand my grandfather’s awe. There was a time in his life when the possibility of the train had to feel otherworldly, like a magic carpet ride to a far-off kingdom called Cincinnati. The Amtrak was the blood in the veins of an adolescent and growing country. But now, it looked more like an abandoned amusement park. The exterior was cold, gray, bulky, and uninviting. The chairs were ripped, logo paint chipped, and the rough, Braille-like plastic on the walls had been smoothed down from years and years of children sliding their hands along it for balance.
It wasn’t a ghost town today. For whatever reason, the train headed east from Truckee was packed. Old couples read newspapers, families watched Kung Fu Panda on first-generation iPads, and Amish people stared at the backs of the seats in front of them. The only empty seats—one of which belonged to me—had become beds, or terrains for children’s action figures. When I reached the back of the train, I turned around and began to feel my way forward, holding tightly to the plastic seats on both sides and stumbling as the train banked around the bends of the mountains.
“You’re not even going to tell anyone where you’re going?”
The voice came from nowhere, light and airy and inviting and seductive and dangerous, cutting through the low rumble of the tracks. I took a measured breath to balance myself against it.
“You’re just going to go?” Kaitlin walked in front of me, beckoning me forward, like always.
“I’ll tell them once I get there.”
“Arthur, don’t do this. You don’t even realize—”
“I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“Why would I be happy for you?”
“Because I’m doing something.”
“The only thing you’re doing is manipulating people.”
“No, I’m proving that—”
“Proving that you’re not getting better. Arthur, you can’t be out here by yourself.”
“Well, that’s weird, because I am.”
“You’re not hearing me.” She waved her hand, her ring, in front of my face. “This is what you do. You don’t even realize that you’re out of control.”
“Well, you’re not even—”
My voice caught in my throat as the door slid open to the observation car, and Kaitlin disappeared with it. There was only one other person reading in a booth at the opposite end—a girl.
She had short brown hair, carelessly layered all around her head, bobbing and curling at the bottom. Her skin was light brown but looked almost gold in the yellow light of the observation car. A black beanie was propped up on the top of her head, and she had small holes in her earlobes, the gauges Kaitlin had always wanted but never gotten.
Without intending it, I’d stopped my progress toward the snack area, too busy noticing her to move. She looked sad, like she was disappointed in the book, or so busy considering what she was reading she couldn’t be bothered to think about what her face was doing. One of her fingers bounced on the page, keeping time as she read. I had to know what she was reading, or why she was sitting there alone this early in the morning, but I couldn’t ask. She was too confident and cool for the train, and definitely too confident and cool to talk to—
She looked up from her book. It was too abrupt, I couldn’t look away in time, and our eyes locked. The harder I tried to break it, the worse it got, and instead of avoiding her gaze, I doubled down and stared straight back into it. She raised her eyebrows, so I raised mine. She squinted, so I squinted. She must have decided I was tweaking, or looking past her, because she lowered her head back into the book, and I ducked down the stairs, away from her, squeezing my finger for letting myself think about another girl.
My ring always helped me remember. “Promise rings,” Kaitlin told me when she gave them to me, lying backward, her body curling perfectly into mine, her ass pushing intentionally against my upper thigh, staring out the window above the headboard. “Kaitlin,” I tried to correct her. “We’ve had sex. You can’t promise your virginity to someone after you’ve already had sex with them, it doesn’t work like that,” but that wasn’t what she meant. “No, idiot, I know,” and I remember distinctly that she’d smiled down at her hands, because the image is burned into my brain. “Promising everything else, though. Promising . . . each other.” I had smiled, too, and I slid the ring onto my finger. It hadn’t come off for four years. But recent events had forced it to switch hands.
There were only a few bodies around the snack car: a twentysomething man in the corner, an attendant perched on a stool, and a mess of hair and dirty cloth curled over itself and slumped against the back of the only booth. I took my seat across from the homeless man. He smelled faintly of dog.
I couldn’t sleep through the smell, so I sat awake, alternating between studying the rain-soaked Northern California mountains and studying the patrons of the train as they came down to buy their Snickers bars and cans of Coke and tiny plastic bottles of cheap wine.
I pulled my grandfather’s clue from my pocket and read it again several times.
Homes in foreclosed jungles, saints in slums of missions, sinners in sanctuaries of church street, hope in forests of elko, safety in mecca, chaos in cold, wet veins of ch, lou & sal’s tribute, a true, Great purpose.
It felt like an evolution of places and things, like reading a map in text. If I was right, and there was something “in sanctuaries of Church Street,” and that was “in the forests of Elko,” then I’d decoded two of the pieces, but now the puzzle stretched out in both directions. Did I miss something in the “slums of missions”? Should I be looking for something in Mecca?
I approached the snack counter, placing a Snickers bar in front of the balding attendant. “Three fifty,” he instructed, his eyes fixed on the journal in my hand. I gave him my card and he turned around to swipe it.
“Hey,” I asked casually. “You don’t happen to know if there’s a city called Mecca in the United States, do you?”
The man in the corner looked up.
“I’m sure there is,” the attendant said. “S E K-O-P-E-K . . .” He read from the back of the journal. “That’s gotta be Sue, then, right? Sue Cow-pek?”
“That’s nothing,” I said too quickly, crumpling the page into my pocket.
He raised an eyebrow. “You know we don’t know each other, right?”
“What? I mean, yeah, I know.”
“Okay.” The bottom of the attendant’s stool scraped the floor as he leaned forward. “So why lie to me?”
“No, it’s just—it’s just kind of private. Something my grandfather gave me. It doesn’t matter.”
The attendant wasn’t convinced. “And that’s why you’re going to Elko? Gramps gave you an address?”
I nodded.
“Well, you wanna know what I think?”
I didn’t.
“I don’t think he wrote that address.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lemme see it.” He motioned to the counter.
My better judgment told me to return to my seat, but he looked harmless. I smoothed it on the counter in front of him, holding the edges in place with my hands.
“Can I hold it?”
Slowly, I removed my hands. He held it up to the light, turning it over several times before landing on the address.
“Yep.” He pointed. “He didn’t write that.”
“What do you mean?”
The man in the corner leaned forward from his booth. “Yeah, man, that’s inverted. Must have bled through from another page, probably an envelope. Look, you can kinda see the postmark.”
“There you go,” the attendant said, beaming. “Mystery solved. Won’t even charge you for it.”
I stared at the inverted address. It took them no time at all to notice, but they must have been right. Why else would the address be positioned so strangely on the page? Why else would there be curved lines above it? Why would the handwriting be different? Because it wasn’t his. He hadn’t written the address for himself. Sue Kopek had written to him.
“So who’s the woman?”
“I’m sorry?” I looked up.
“Sue Cow-pek?”
I paused. “I—I don’t know.”
Hearing someone else ask it, the way his tongue dove when he said the word woman, the image of my grandfather blurred. I hadn’t thought to make guesses about why he might have spent the last week of his life with a woman. “I don’t know,” I repeated to myself, but my imagination filled in the obvious possibilities. A bitter taste tickled underneath my tongue as I saw my grandfather rushing to Elko, away from me, away from the memory of my grandmother, into the arms of a woman. I wondered how they’d met, how long they’d been sending letters.
“Seems important,” he said casually. “If he had a little lady in Elko—”
“I don’t think my grandfather would do that.”
“Same goes for everyone. Don’t mean they don’t do it.”
“Well, I actually mean it. My grandfather wouldn’t—couldn’t.”
“Just saying, that’s what everybody—”
“Stop.” I pulled the journal off the counter. “Please stop.”
He watched me cautiously as I fell back into my booth.
I distinctly remembered the same argument—“everyone says they would never, until they have the opportunity”—from Mason, on one of those afternoons when all three of us, Kaitlin included, were stuck inside the afternoon shift at Jesus Crust, the Christian-themed pizza place where we worked. For hours, we’d all stand there, trying to catch straws in each other’s mouths and trying to figure out why some people cheat and how they do it. I said I would never. Kaitlin said she would never. Mason said we just didn’t get it.
How long had my grandfather been hiding his writing from us, just to send it to her? I thought harder about the journal—full speed to Elko, full speed to you. It would make too much sense. I had a sudden urge to rip the page from my pocket and tear it apart.