Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “And if he doesn’t? And why would he?” He waved Chloe down the road. “Chloe, hurry, go with him. I’ll catch up.”

  “Mason, it’s 5:18.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He couldn’t look at her. “Let me run. Maybe the train will be late.”

  “They usually are. But seriously, hurry, dude,” said Johnny. “We’ll slow them down as much as we can. We’ll spill the contents of Chloe’s bag.”

  Mason hurried. Picking up the two suitcases, he sprinted down the road as if he were running a mile for sadistic Clemente.

  Johnny and Chloe glanced at each other. “We’re all going to miss the train if we wait another second,” he said to her. “We’ve got ten minutes, I’m going to run. Can you try to keep up?”

  He picked up her suitcase, his own duffel, and they ran.

  Mason

  The disorder inside me and the chaos in my life is because I haven’t been punished enough. I broke all kinds of laws and received no justice. My soul has been paying the price. And now my life pays the price.

  How could I forget it? Johnny knew I was lying, I don’t know how, like he’s got a sixth sense or something. As long as Chloe believed me, I don’t care. Dudes know when other dudes are lying. Of course I had my passport with me. What I didn’t have with me was the little fake-gold statue I had left on the table on the porch, a statue of a ballplayer in a batting stance with the words, “World’s Best Hitter” engraved on the pedestal. I know I should’ve just let it go, but I couldn’t. I can’t.

  Blake was shocked to see me. Hannah was still at the table, finishing a buttered roll, and Blake was coaxing her up.

  When I walked in the door, he immediately looked behind me. “Where are they, outside?”

  “I forgot something …” I trailed off and, before I could lie to him, too, ran to the porch, grabbed the souvenir, stuffed it quickly into my bag and said a little prayer begging for forgiveness. In the kitchen, Hannah was wobbling to her feet and Blake was helping her, pulling her and her red suitcase out of the dining room.

  “Where are they?” Blake repeated.

  “Holding the train for us,” I said, looking past him to Hannah. “Hannah, you think you can walk?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “I’m one hundred percent. Let’s do it.”

  With Varda and Carmen clucking, coming in for one last hug, with Blake seething, we finally left for good, I hoped. I pulled two suitcases; Blake pulled Hannah’s, his other arm wrapped around her. I could hear him muttering, hurry, hurry and damn it, damn it.

  But no matter how we hurried, damn it, there was no way we could traverse a mile with Hannah stumbling like a newborn foal. We did pretty well. It took us twenty-three minutes. The ticket seller said the train had been fifteen minutes delayed. Some girl had dropped the contents of her backpack onto the platform. Such carelessness. Train just left. Five minutes ago.

  I tried to console Blake. It’s all right. We’ll catch the next one.

  Without speaking to me or Hannah, Blake paced up and down the platform, perhaps hoping that Chloe had let Johnny go on his own and was waiting for us. Hannah and I stood dumbly.

  “You think he’s mad?” she said. “He looks mad.”

  “Not at you.” I sighed. “You couldn’t help it.”

  My brother stopped and stood at the other end of the platform from us, staring onto the train tracks. We had another forty minutes to wait until the next train. There was no hurry. I should’ve left Hannah, walked over to him, talked him down, but you know what happens when you’re guilty? You’re fucked. You can’t figure out the right thing to say. Every word that comes out of your mouth condemns you. Every word that doesn’t come out of your mouth condemns you.

  Hannah and I sat down on a bench.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Light-headed, but better,” she replied. “The bread helped.”

  “Bread always does.”

  She looked pasty, a little shell-shocked.

  For over twenty minutes, Hannah and I were at one end of the platform and Blake was at the other. Finally he made his way back to us, grabbed a water bottle, drank from it. It was a mild, cloudy morning, quiet and warm. There should’ve been nothing wrong. So we missed a train. So what.

  “Why did you leave them?” Blake said to me. “I can’t believe Chloe got on the train without us. But why did you leave them?”

  “I told you, I forgot something. Dude, it’s fine. It’ll be fine. They’ll either be waiting for us in Riga or—”

  “How could you let her go?”

  “What was I going to do? They said they would hold the train. And they tried. You heard the man. Train was delayed. We just couldn’t get here fast enough.”

  “Oh, so it’s our fault.”

  “I didn’t say it was anyone’s fault.” We didn’t look at Hannah, and she didn’t look at us. I certainly didn’t look at Blake. And he didn’t look at me.

  “Oh, it’s somebody’s fault, all right,” Blake said. He wouldn’t sit down. The three of us stared straight ahead, him, me, Hannah, all staring at the tracks. “Whatever it was you forgot, why didn’t you just leave it?”

  “I couldn’t.” I was about to open my mouth and lie to my brother, but he spared me the fraud by his frustrated coldness. He turned his face away before I could lie. I didn’t know what he was most angry about. That I would let her go without me. That she would go. That Hannah fainted. Why choose, he might say if I asked him. I didn’t ask him.

  We missed the train by exactly the time Hannah’s fainting delayed us.

  Except for the fact that Chloe wasn’t with us and, granted, that was a big except, there should’ve been not that much wrong. At that point five minutes seemed so minor, especially to deal with something as important as fainting. Blake and I spared Hannah a probing inquiry into what caused her to faint in the first place.

  Okay, Hannah had fainted. It couldn’t be helped. And, sure, I’d forgotten my golden idol. It couldn’t be helped. And, yes, Johnny and Chloe were on the train without us. It couldn’t be helped.

  The next train was twenty minutes late and took another fifteen to leave Carnikava station. It then crawled along the track, taking an hour and fifteen instead of fifty minutes to get into Riga. We didn’t get there until nearly 8:30. So five minutes of fainting became two hours of obstruction. Here it was, Johnny’s chaos theory in action, showing us its fanged true face. And that was just to get to Riga. Because the vaunted bus to Vilnius was, of course, sold out for the nine o’clock and the noon. There were no seats available until after three.

  We looked for Chloe and Johnny at the bus station, but anemically. We knew they wouldn’t be there.

  We had a six-hour wait. Done with Riga, I wished I could go to sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about all the things I’d done wrong. Yes, I’d left Chloe, but I knew I would’ve felt just as guilty if I’d left Hannah and Blake behind. I almost felt better I was with my brother, although judging by his severe lack of goodwill, he didn’t agree.

  We tried waiting it out in the bus station, but it was unbearably hot, so we stashed our suitcases in lockers and wandered over to the air-conditioned Latvian Museum. We sat on a bench in the cool air in the lobby. Blake said that this might be a good time for me to go look inside St. Peter’s church, since I wouldn’t get another chance. He shook his head when I asked if he would come with me.

  “So you want to split more of us up, is that it?”

  He didn’t reply. I didn’t go. Even though I could’ve used a visit to a church. We went and bought more sandwiches and drinks for the bus. What could we do? Hannah hadn’t meant to faint. It just happened. Five minutes. Forty-five minutes. Six hours.

  And then Blake said, “And what do you think will happen to our Warsaw train connection when we get to Vilnius at eight at night?”

  No one had an answer. No one at the Riga bus station knew anything about the timetable for the trains from Vilnius. Some lady who overheard an
d almost spoke English suggested that we go to Minsk first and from Minsk to Warsaw. But that couldn’t be right. We didn’t even know where Minsk was. She said the trip took twenty-seven hours. That could not be right! That’s not what Johnny had told us. We tried to find an Internet café, but couldn’t locate one close to the station and didn’t want to risk missing the 3:15.

  “Blake,” I said to him, when Hannah had gone to the ladies’ room and we had a moment to ourselves, “come on. Don’t be sour. It’s going to work out. We’re a few hours behind them. We’re all going to the same place. We know the name of our hostel in Warsaw. We have a room booked. We’ll meet them there.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s all going to work out,” he said.

  “You want to know what I think?” I said. “I think that if you let it affect everything, it’s going to own everything.”

  “Ah,” my brother said. “Which it exactly are you referring to? There seem to be so many its that affect fucking everything.”

  The bus was hard. Hannah didn’t look good. Blake kept his arm around her and stared out the window. I sat behind them, my remorse blinding me to the green outside. It was all my fault. We are guilty about everything in front of everybody and everyone, I kept repeating to myself.

  Blake

  Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. I wanted to take notes, make observations, chat, eat, but I couldn’t even eat. Me, losing my appetite. That’s how bad things are.

  It’s a conspiracy against me. Mason is right—I have to find a way to get past this. Because right now it owns everything. Except I’m still living it, and getting past something you’re in the middle of is hard. What do the philosophers have to say about that? Take it on the chin? Grin? Bear it? Oh, I’m grinning. I’m bearing.

  The 3:15 bus. Can we just talk about this for a second? Bus! This is our European adventure with our $500 Eurail tickets that are no good on Latvian or Lithuanian trains, and I’m on a Communist Greyhound, cramped next to Hannah who first needs the window, then needs the aisle and then needs the bathroom every half-hour and yet there is no bathroom on this luxury bus, because the luxury version was sold out, and this is the economy version. “Oh, it’s better, it’s cheaper. It only costs thirteen latu, sir.” I would’ve gladly paid double so Hannah could actually go to the bathroom instead of repeating, ad nauseam, I need the bathroom. Blake, what do I do, I need the bathroom. She asked the driver to stop three times. The third time, the driver, suddenly finding his English, said, “People who are sick should not be traveling. They should be home. In bed.”

  “Hey, leave the girl alone,” I said.

  “I’m not sick,” Hannah said to the driver. “I’m just not feeling well.”

  Ah. Yes. A fine difference indeed.

  Mason sat behind me next to a woman who was too big for her seat, and I wanted to tell the driver that maybe people who take up two seats shouldn’t be traveling either, but I didn’t. Mason had his eyes closed, listening to his brand-new iPod, a graduation gift from Mom and Dad, mouthing along inaudibly, and I wanted to sit next to him and ask him again what he was thinking, letting Chloe go by herself, but what’s he going to tell me that I don’t already know?

  To write was impossible: the bus had no suspension. A healthy person would puke. We were being thrown up and down and sideways for hours. The bus was supposed to arrive in Vilnius around eight at night, but of course, there was traffic or an accident or roadwork, there was Hannah asking the driver to stop the bus so she could throw up by the side of the road because there were no well-appointed restrooms in the countryside. The fourth and last time we stopped, about twenty miles from the Lithuanian border in Daugavpils, there were some proper facilities. We all took a pit stop. It was around seven, almost the hour we were supposed to be in Vilnius. I asked the bus driver how much longer. He said usually another three hours but it depends how many times your friend makes me stop the bus. Mase and I stomped away and walked around the bus station, waiting for Hannah.

  After thirty minutes the bus driver found us and said that if the lady wasn’t on his bus in exactly five minutes, he was leaving without us.

  Those damn five minutes again!

  “You can’t leave without us,” I said. “We have a ticket.”

  “I rip up your ticket. Go try to get refund. Five minutes, I said. Everybody waiting. They ready to kill me. I ready to kill me. It not right. People will miss their connections.”

  Yes. People like us. I knocked on the bathroom door in a panic, but Hannah didn’t answer. “Hannah, please,” I said. “They’re going to leave without us.”

  No answer.

  I knocked louder. She flung the door open, her eyes manic.

  “What do you want me to do?” she said. “I feel horrible.”

  “He said he’ll leave if we’re not on the bus in five minutes.”

  “So go. Get on that bus.”

  “Hannah …”

  “I can’t go like this. I’ve never felt this bad. It must be motion sickness.”

  She slammed the door. Mason and I stared at each other.

  The bus left without us.

  We had no choice but to stay overnight in Daugavpils. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I didn’t even try. Daugavpils instead of Vilnius!

  We would have to wake very early the next morning to make sure we were on the 5:30 train to Vilnius. We might have a little time there before the train for Warsaw left at 11:20. That’s what I was reduced to. Being grateful that I might eke out an hour in Vilnius.

  I didn’t want to be testy with Hannah. It wasn’t fair to her. I loathed most of all not her fainting, not her vomiting, not her holding us up, or even making us miss our bus, but Johnny being right.

  He was right to bolt as he did. In my head, I mocked and re-mocked his parting words to us. “While you’re waiting for your connections, watching your whole trip melt away like ice in the tropics, just remember your ninth-grade physics, especially the definition of chaos theory,” he said. Bastard. I don’t give a shit about his theory. When I asked Mason about it, he said cryptically, “Everything unravels.” That’s all he said.

  I wish I could stay mad at Mason. But I can’t. He’s my brother. I know he’s doing his best, even if he is constantly screwing up.

  “Blake, please don’t be mad at me,” Hannah said in Daugavpils when she finally left the bathroom. “I can’t help that I feel all funky.”

  I might have patted her for reassurance; I don’t know. It was an accident, I said. Shit happens. An unfortunate thing. People hurt themselves, faint in response to pain. It’s normal. And then throw up for six hours straight. I’m sure that’s normal, too. I probably didn’t come off as one hundred percent sincere.

  “So we stay in Daugavpils instead of Vilnius,” Hannah said. She didn’t look good. She was crazy pale. “What’s the big deal? After we missed our train this morning, we knew we’d have to stay overnight somewhere.”

  I stared at her coldly, warily, as if she were about to sting me. “No big deal?” I said. “Hannah, I’m not mad at you for feeling sick, but please, don’t piss me off by not understanding why I would want to stay in Vilnius, not Daugavpils. I explained it to you enough times. It makes me feel as if you’re not listening to me. Vilnius was my only consolation for this day of disaster. Vilnius is one of the cities you want to visit before you die. Vilnius is a historic capital, beautiful, full of rivers, and museums, and war. And restaurants. If we had time, I’d want to stay in Vilnius for a week. You do see a difference, don’t you, between this one-horse border town and one of the cultural centers of Europe, a Jerusalem of the north?”

  Hannah was left unimpressed by my soliloquy, which in turn left me unimpressed with Hannah. “Who told you this?” she said. “Frommer’s?”

  “National Geographic, if you must know,” I said.

  “So clearly you already know everything you need to about Vilnius,” she said. “You’ve read all about it, my little armchair traveler.” She
ruffled my hair. “Why go see it?”

  “Why see anything?” I said, pulling away from her hand. “Why see Treblinka, or Krakow, or even Barcelona, or the Alps? We can just read about them.”

  “Oh, I heartily agree with you about Treblinka.”

  I had to drop it, because although I wanted to provoke her, I didn’t want to have a fight. It’s not a fair contest to fight with a girl who at any moment might blow chunks. And I was being mean to Daugavpils. It was actually shockingly big for a tiny city. It had boulevards and parks, long streets and outdoor cafés, and graffiti on tenement walls. I looked it up in Frommer’s. It’s the second largest city in Latvia. One-horse town indeed. It’s twenty times bigger than North Conway. It is two hundred times bigger than Fryeburg. It just wasn’t Vilnius.

  The three hostels we found in Daugavpils were full. “How can they be full?” I said. “There are no people here.” A narrow, rundown, Bolshevik joint, advertising itself as three-star accommodation and serving mostly commuters, wanted a hundred latu from us, nearly two hundred dollars. Even Mason became agitated. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel that expensive. Scratch that. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel, period. With our vats of knowledge gleaned from skimming Chloe and Hannah’s celebrity magazines, we thought the Ritz-Carlton on the French Riviera commanded those kinds of prices, not a fleabag on the wrong side of the tracks in a provincial town. (Which is where people like us lived, Chloe would say, if she were here. But she wasn’t.) We had two choices. Cough up or look for another place.

  “Or sleep on the piss-soaked bench at the station,” offered Mason. Then, seeing Hannah’s glare, he added, “Just kidding.” But who was he kidding? We three knew he would’ve preferred to sleep on that bench than pay two hundred dollars for a room. Mason was nothing if not frugal.

  We paid two hundred dollars for the room. It came out of our money—the money we had worked for and saved—not Moody’s money, which was all with Chloe. After paying, the three of us became stunningly bad-tempered.

  Across from our luxury palace we found a cheap café.