Dragonfly Girl

by Marti Leimbach

  “How long have you been watching that sunset?” I say.

  If you go far enough north the sun never entirely disappears at the end of the day. I wait as Will figures out what I’m suggesting. “It could be Scandinavia,” he says finally. “They get white nights, too.”

  “Maybe. But look at the lettering here.” I point at the sticker.

  He squints down to where I’m pointing.

  “Can’t you be wrong?” he says, his voice rising. “Just once in your life, can’t you please be wrong?” He swipes his hair out of his eyes, balls his hands into fists, and springs for the door, pounding it.

  Nobody comes. It’s as though we’re traveling on a ghost train, running along tracks without anyone else aboard. If I think about it too much, I could convince myself we’ll eventually jump the tracks and crash.

  After some time, we pass a body of water so large it might be an ocean.

  “Russia is landlocked,” Will says. “So you’re wrong after all.”

  “Not to the north, it isn’t.”

  “Oh,” he laughs dryly. “So you think that’s the Arctic Ocean, do you?”

  “I think it’s Lake Baikal.” Lake Baikal is the largest single source of fresh water on earth. They must have flown us west from San Francisco. “I bet we’re heading farther west across land, toward Moscow or St. Petersburg.”

  “And you know this how?”

  It was Lauren who told me of Lake Baikal. Imagine what she’d think if she knew I was staring out the window at it now. “I have a friend who loves birds. If you go to Lake Baikal at the right time of year, you can see up to two hundred species in a week.”

  “Oh, jolly good. I’ll book a holiday,” he says, and flops onto the bunk, his arm over his eyes. Every once in a while he says “dammit,” then goes silent again.

  The night carries on, the sky dimming. Blue light appears in the room, not from lamps but from spindly fluorescent tubes that glow at the edges of the ceiling. They give our skin a ghostly hue like we’re already dead. I’m terrified and curious in turns. Sometimes I stare out the window, unseeing. Other times, I notice the landscape. When I spot a mass of legs and fur moving like a cloud through the blue-gray darkness, I say, “Will, look! A whole herd of deer!”

  But he remains in the bunk, unmoving.

  “I believe you,” he says.

  There’s nothing to do. Not just now, but for hours to come, and hours after that. We don’t know what time it is. We don’t know what day it is. We sit on bench seats by the window, our heads propped up on our elbows. I knead the spot on my arm where they injected me in the parking lot outside Will’s apartment, a hard lump that throbs beneath my fingers.

  Will says, “I used to like Russian history. We did it in school. Do you want to hear about Napoleon’s failed invasion?”

  “When did it happen?”

  “1812.”

  “Then no.”

  “What about Ivan the Terrible?”

  “I think the name sums it up.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Go dancing,” I say, and he bursts out laughing.

  But then we get a little hope. We see lights in the distance, way out behind a hillside. The lights grow brighter, larger. And now, like a miracle, buildings come into view, so tiny they might be from a doll’s house. But they are buildings nonetheless.

  Will grabs me with excitement, saying, “We need a way of drawing attention!”

  The window is locked shut and its thick glass would not be easy to break, even if we had something heavy to bash it with, which we don’t. Will tries kicking it out, but that doesn’t work for a number of reasons, one of which is that they’ve taken our shoes. There’s nothing to write on and nothing to write with. If we had a bar of soap we could scrawl on the window with that. But the bathroom dispenser’s thin foam won’t form letters.

  But then we remember the cheese sandwiches. Will tears through the packaging and comes up with a wedge of yellow cheese. We smear the word SOS across the glass. If we pound the window hard enough at the station we might attract the attention of travelers on the platform outside, and maybe, by some miracle, someone will tell the police that there are people trapped in here.

  A few minutes later, the train rumbles toward the brightly lit station with big, Russian lettering above a wooden facade. It slows and slows as we pound the glass. But instead of stopping it continues, passing gently through the station along an outer track until, at last, the station is left behind.

  We are left standing at the window, our palms against the glass, as the buildings grow smaller and the city light fades. Once again, we are returned to the darkness of the rural countryside and the enormous, starry sky. I feel even worse for having hoped, emptied out, like someone has carved into me and taken out all the stuffing. My eyes fill with tears of anger and frustration. I want to lash out, but there’s nothing to hit.

  “There’ll be another one,” Will says.

  The train climbs, then dips, clacking along the tracks. I step up to what is now my bunk, more weary than tired, and pull the blanket over the thin fabric of my dress. I wish I had a phone, a Tylenol, an escape plan.

  “What city was that, do you think?” Will asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Siberian capital.”

  “I doubt it. Maybe it’s Novosibirsk,” he says. “I only know that because it was a major supply source for the Red Army during the war. My father and all my uncles were in the British Army. My family has an apparently endless interest in military trivia.”

  “I thought your father was a scientist.”

  “He is. But my grandfather acted as though the Second World War ended last Tuesday. He’s dead now, of course.”

  I shift in the bunk. I think of my mother back in our little house in California. I remember how she’d looked as Will and I set off for the restaurant, her face soft and sad and full of longing. I wish I could run back home now, hug her close, and tell her everything will be okay. All my life, my mother has done that for me. Told me it would be okay. And now it appears that for the first time this will not be the case.

  I feel myself starting to cry, and I don’t care about anything so trivial as whether Will hears me.

  “Don’t panic,” Will says, his voice gentle.

  But I can’t help it. “That guy you talked to about post-death recovery, let me guess, he was Russian, wasn’t he? With thinning red hair?”

  “Sounds a bit like that,” he says. “I haven’t revealed a single detail of the procedure, if that is what you’re asking.”

  But that’s not what I’m asking.

  The train is noisy and slow, clattering endlessly through the night. Occasionally I drift to sleep, but it never lasts long. Sometime in the early hours Will gets up and goes to the sink. He takes his shirt off and I can see his naked back, the long hollow between his back muscles. He washes his shirt in the sink, his head bent in concentration. He looks like a young man away on a vacation, traveling the trains from one side of Europe to another. When he turns, I see his broad shoulders, the hair that thickens across his chest. He returns to his bunk and I hear the sheets as he stretches out. The noises are reassuring. I try to imagine we are going on a trip together, just a trip.

  In the morning, there’s a brown paper bag inside the compartment, placed there as though by magic.

  “Look,” I say, waking Will.

  The bag holds four packaged sandwiches, wedges of cheese, two apples, two packets of small cookies, and some unripe pears. It isn’t much for a day’s food, but the miracle is the water. Three liters of a brand called Berjomi, with a picture of snowcapped mountains on the bottles.

  “How did they know when we were asleep?” I say.

  “Or that we wanted water,” Will says. He’s still missing his shirt, and it feels a bit too intimate in this tiny compartment.

  “There has to be a camera. Or at least a listening device,” I say.

  We search the cabin, every corner a
nd ceiling tile and light, but come up with nothing. Through the window, I see the sun peeking through low clouds. It would be a nice day, if you could get outside.

  Into the air Will calls, “Hey, can we have some vodka as well?”

  “They might not know English.”

  “They know the word vodka.”

  The hours pass slowly. We gaze out the window at the countryside: green hills, woodlands, long stretches of grasslands studded with wildflowers. Whenever the train slows we think it is finally coming to a station, but then it rounds a bend, or climbs a hill, or slides noisily through a tunnel. We stop once about a half mile outside a station, and for a moment I think the journey is over. We hear some noise outside but can’t tell what’s happening.

  “Perhaps they’re picking up other prisoners,” jokes Will.

  “For someone who is grumpy in normal life, you’ve evolved into a remarkably cheerful captive,” I say.

  “Cheerfulness is a military value. My father taught me that. He’s always best when there is a foot of snow on the ground, blocked roads, and a power outage. Meanwhile, someone has suffered a minor fracture. In such circumstances, he’s a gem. Otherwise, he stalks the house like an angry spirit looking for something to rattle.”

  “That was you back at Mellin,” I say. “I was almost afraid of you.”

  “Are you afraid of me now?”

  I realize all of a sudden that I’m not. It seems there are two Wills. The bully back at Mellin and this one, in his bare feet and messed-up hair, his beard growing daily.

  “Do you hate me?” he says.

  I shake my head. I don’t hate him, but I want to hate something right now and he’s here in front of me.

  “Well, I do,” he says. “I hate me.”

  You’d think I’d stay terrified the whole time but, strangely, I don’t. For minutes, then hours, I forget to worry. The train rumbles at a snail’s pace as we play tic-tac-toe on the glass window.

  “I’d do a lot for a steak right now,” Will says.

  The bag which we discover by the door every morning, is always full of the worst food imaginable. I take it now, empty the sandwiches (some kind of meat on a bed of cabbage), then tear the paper into something approximating squares.

  “Look,” I say. “Place mats.”

  “Let me know when you get to the finger bowls,” Will says.

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “We have to do something.”

  We drink water from plastic bottles, eat with our hands. We arrange some cookies in a circle and play games with them. First dominoes, then checkers. That gets us through many hours until, at last, the sun begins to wane once more and the sky glows yellow and orange.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say. “I’ve never appreciated sky so much.”

  “It looks like a Turner painting,” Will says.

  I have no idea who Turner is. A famous painter, I guess.

  Will says, “I look outside and I just want to walk around, you know? I want to run up a hill. When I was a boy, I used to take long walks with school. Do you know what the Munros are? Mountains in Scotland. We were a bunch of schoolboys terribly underdressed for the weather. We slept in mildewed canvas tents. But we loved it.”

  I can imagine him on a long walk up a rainy Scottish mountain. He’s vain and spoiled, but he’s also practical and determined. He probably led the way.

  “I wish I had my glasses so I could see properly,” I say. No glasses, dirty hair, skin breaking out, and teeth I’d do anything to brush. I’m jealous that Will is now in a clean shirt while I’m in a dress that needs laundering. “I wonder if you could do me a favor. I wonder if you could—” I can barely bring myself to say it. “I need to wash my dress,” I blurt out finally. “I’ve been wearing it for days. I smell.”

  “You’ll find it difficult to change clothes in there,” he says, gesturing toward the bathroom. “Not enough room. Why don’t I step into the WC and you slip out of your dress and wrap yourself in a sheet like a toga?”

  He smiles. I hadn’t known he could be so nice. He really is like his father, needing a dire emergency to bring out his better side. “Then I’ll swap with you,” he continues. “And you can wash the dress in the sink.”

  It’s a good plan. While he waits in the tiny bathroom I change into a makeshift toga. Then we trade places. Of course, the dress is supposed to be dry-cleaned, but I really have no choice. I rinse out the soap and hope it will be okay.

  Later that night—it’s impossible to know the time—I wake suddenly as though from a nightmare. I’m covered in sweat, every muscle tense, feeling as though at any moment I will be pulled from bed and pushed out into the cold night. I tell myself not to be silly, but stranger things have happened. I can still feel the place on my arm where they injected the drug. And I’m still captive on a train.

  “Are you awake?” I say.

  “Hmmm?” Will murmurs. I can imagine him on his bunk, his arm over his eyes. “Do you need something?” he says sleepily.

  “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  “No, tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me too. But it will be okay,” he whispers. “You’ll see.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’re special. You were born to do something big with your life, not to die in Russia on a clanking train.”

  “What should I do when I panic?”

  “Are you panicking now?”

  “Yes.” I’m thinking of my mother, alone in the house. Not even Lauren around to help her. I’m thinking of the type of people who would kidnap a high school girl. All the things that are happening and that might happen.

  Suddenly, I feel the whole of the bed frame almost lift from the floor with Will’s shifting weight. And then he’s here, his face near mine.

  Very slowly he says, “We aren’t important enough to kill.”

  “Are you sure?” I say.

  He gives me the briefest of smiles, then touches my shoulder. I’m glad he’s close and am grateful that he doesn’t move, not for a long time, but stands in the dark with his hand on my shoulder, saying nothing.

  It helps; I don’t know why. Lately, I’ve begun thinking of him like a big brother, someone who teases me and scolds me but who also cares for me.

  “You don’t resent me anymore,” I say.

  “Shh,” he says. “Forget all that.”

  Minutes pass. The night seems dark and endless and forever.

  “Who is Turner?” I whisper.

  “A famous English painter,” he says, but he doesn’t scoff the way he usually does, as though I’m an idiot for asking.

  “Of course,” I sigh.

  “My father made us memorize British paintings, at least the most well known of them. When I looked out the window of the train today I thought immediately of Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, and Speed. It’s in the National Gallery in London. I’ll show you one day.”

  “London,” I repeat. It sounds as impossible as it is.

  “We’ll go to Knightsbridge and have lunch, then a walk through St. James’s Park. There are pelicans there, you know.”

  “Pelicans?”

  “They were a gift to King Charles the Second.”

  “Who gave him pelicans?”

  He blurts out a laugh. “The Russians,” he says.

  “Is that really true? Or are you just saying it to distract me?”

  “Both. Now sleep. Things will be better in the morning.”

  “Stay here for a little while longer,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “Until I fall asleep.”

  “Yes.”

  We develop a routine of washing, eating, playing tic-tac-toe. We have races to see who can answer fastest when multiplying four-digit numbers in our heads, we do crosswords the same way.

  “Six-letter word for brought up,” I say.

  “Is the first letter an R? Is it raised?”

  We talk while lying in our bunks,
while sitting on the floor, while splashing water on our faces at the tiny sink.

  “You mean his blackboard is just sitting there with his actual writing still on it?” I say when Will tells me about Einstein’s blackboard, one he used during a lecture on cosmology, hanging on the wall in the History of Science Museum in Oxford.

  “People came to set up individual chicken farms?” he says when I tell him how my great-grandparents came to California to be chicken farmers.

  “So, what do you do? Buy two different-size shoes?” I say when he discloses that none of the men in his family have feet that match.

  Then, late one night, Will asks gently, “What happened to your father?”

  “He was hit by a stray bullet.” It sounds better than he was shot.

  “That’s . . .” Will has no words. “Where I come from you might get the occasional stolen bicycle. Or maybe someone breaks a potted plant.”

  “My neighborhood was different back then.”

  “So it seems. Do you remember him?”

  I think for a moment. “Barely. And my mother doesn’t really talk about him.” I haven’t thought of this before, and now I realize it’s true. It’s like my father never existed. “My poor mom,” I say, thinking of how she must be feeling right now with me so far away, lost, stolen.

  “I’m hoping my parents don’t know,” says Will. “Though I must say, if my father can blame me, he will. If being kidnapped and transported across Siberia can be my fault, he’ll be sure to say so.”

  “But it is your fault,” I say.

  “Can we change the subject?”

  There’s a silence, and then I say, “Did I tell you that Rik kissed me?”

  “He did? I don’t believe it!”

  I’m about to describe that moment in the restaurant, but a thought strikes me. “Why don’t you believe it?” I say, mildly affronted.

  “Well, I just can’t imagine him putting down Munn’s briefcase long enough to do such a thing. When did this happen?”

  “At the restaurant. Just a really short . . . well, it was barely a kiss. Not what you’d call a kiss.”

  “What would I call a kiss?”

  “I don’t know. Something more.”