Love and Other Train Wrecks

by Leah Konen

  I was afraid that her very essence would wrap me up like a burlap sack, a messed-up cocoon turning me into something different altogether. I was afraid I’d lose my dad completely, that he’d never forgive me for missing his ceremony, that I’d lose all chance at normalcy, even if it was fake normalcy created out of something really, really bad that he did.

  But I can’t tell her that.

  “I’m going to get off the phone now, Mom,” I say.

  “You can’t do this; stop, Ammy, just stop—”

  “Mom, I’m okay, I really am, but I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

  “Like what, like your father who left us and then had the nerve to do this—”

  “Mom, I’m going to hang up.”

  My voice is calm like that of the family therapist my dad said we should go to after he broke the news that he was leaving us for a woman he’d met on—I kid you not—an REI hiking trip to the Adirondacks. (As if you could pay for five sessions of family therapy and then everything would be okay.)

  “You can’t just hang up on me, you can’t just do that, you can’t hang—”

  I end the call. The therapist told me, in one of our solo sessions, that when my mom’s anxiety is through the roof, the best thing to do is to disengage.

  Well, I didn’t just disengage. I got on a train.

  Noah is staring at me. He looks worried, his eyes are all crinkly at the edges, and then I see something even worse—pity.

  I open my mouth to say something—anything—but I can’t find my voice. All I feel is the bitter heat of tears coming on. I roll up the sleeves of my sweater, suddenly warm.

  I don’t want to cry, sitting here on a train in front of a total stranger.

  I want to be up in Hudson, pretending to care about Sophie’s dress, with Kat and Bea and the promise of regular-ness around me, my mom and everything that comes with her hundreds of miles away.

  I know it’s not fair to her—she’s not the one who destroyed our family—but it’s true.

  “Uh, that sounded rough,” Noah says.

  And that’s what does it. I feel the first tear begin to well. Shit.

  I breathe deep, like I can make it all go away if I just get enough air. But the oxygen comes slow and shallow, like there’s not enough to go around in this stuffy, stupid train.

  I feel another tear come, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand.

  “I need some air,” I say suddenly, my breaths already starting to come in gasps. “I really need some air.”

  NOAH

  1:31 P.M.

  THEY TOLD US NOT TO LEAVE THE TRAIN.

  That’s what the first announcement said, at least.

  Apparently even when the train is stopped like this, they won’t let you go. It’s some kind of liability thing. So it’s not like we can up and go outside. But we can get close.

  “Come with me,” I say, standing up.

  She gets up to follow. Her eyes are watery, and I look away, giving her a moment to wipe them again. Then I head down the aisle, turning to glance back once at the door to the next car to make sure she’s still behind me. She’s even taller than I thought, I realize, now that we’re both standing up together. Almost as tall as I am. So much taller than Rina.

  I push the button and head down the length of the car, push the button again and breeze through the dining car, too.

  I push it one last time, and she follows me into the very back of the train. The doors shut behind us, closing us into this little metal room, the last car on the train, the caboose.

  “It’s cooler here, in the very back,” I say. “It’s not heated.”

  She nods. “Are we supposed to be back here, though?” She points to a sign that informs us, very clearly, that we are not.

  “Probably not.” I laugh, lean against the door, and try to stay calm and relaxed. When my dad would get upset after he and my mom split, it’s what always worked best.

  Ammy takes a deep breath, and I can see already that she’s starting to calm down.

  In seconds, there are goose bumps on her arms. She tugs on the cuffs of her sweater, pulling them down. We probably should have brought our coats, but after whatever kind of awful fight she just had with her mom, she obviously needed to get away from that car as quickly as she could. I wasn’t really thinking about proper preparations.

  Her breaths make frost in the air, and as her breathing slows, the clouds of frost get longer. Through the side windows, there is nothing but trees. Through the back, I see train tracks, stretching into the horizon. There’s a sign—“Doors May Be Pulled Open Manually If Power Fails”—and I have that fleeting feeling again, of wanting to escape, get lost. The kind of feeling that Rina was always trying to get me to have. The one that I only got after I lost her, when it was too late.

  Ammy looks up at me. Her makeup is a little smudged. She doesn’t say anything, just stares.

  “I can get out of your hair . . . ,” I say, my voice trailing off. I take a step back, toward the door.

  She shrugs. “I’m sure you heard most of it. It doesn’t really matter, anyway.”

  I shove my hands in my pockets. “Uh, do you want to talk about it?”

  She shakes her head quickly. “No. I don’t.”

  “Okay,” I say, shifting my weight from foot to foot. I don’t know quite what to say to make it better, but I don’t want to leave her alone, either. I heard the way her mom was yelling at her. Neither of my parents have ever talked that way to me. I know she’s just a stranger, and I have other things to worry about today, but still, she’s a person. And whatever she’s going through, it doesn’t sound good.

  She exhales. Her breath comes out long and slow like a plume of smoke. I realize that I’m pretty cold. Forget whatever they tell you about being a guy and grinning and bearing it; a penis doesn’t make you magically warmer in situations like these.

  But I don’t move for the door. I don’t want to leave her.

  She steps back, away from the window, and runs her hands up the sides of her arms, staying warm. I step toward it, taking in the weirdly perfect view of snow, trees, and sky. It’s like a painting, like this crappy old steel vestibule is our private museum.

  “So what’s your plan?” she asks, leaning back against the opposite wall.

  “My plan?”

  “To get your girlfriend back. Tell me you have some sort of plan besides just showing up with flowers.”

  I tug at the collar of my jersey. “The plan is flowers and a poem and to invite her to this restaurant she was always begging me to go to. I have reservations. . . .” I wait for a response, but she doesn’t offer one.

  After a moment, I say: “Pretty cheesy, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She’s not one to pour her heart out, that’s for sure. She keeps it all in. Even something so small as her opinion on whether a stranger’s plan to get his girlfriend back is up to snuff. Still, I can see in her eyes that she does think it’s cheesy. That she probably thinks I’m pretty cheesy myself.

  “So why are you on this train?” I ask.

  She raises her eyebrows. “For the worst kind of drama.”

  “What’s that?”

  Ammy tugs at a peeling sticker on the closed window, then resticks it before looking back at me. “Family,” she says, and her eyes go blank, like she’s looking at a point in the distance, like she’s remembering something not so great. It’s not exactly shocking, given the little bits I overheard between her and her mom. “Let’s just say that I really need to get to Hudson tonight is all,” she says finally.

  My ears perk at the sound of my hometown coming from her lips. So she’s not going to Bard, after all. I wonder what she’s got going on in Hudson. The area is small enough that I’m pretty sure I’d know her if she grew up there, that I would have seen her at Hudson High. “You’re not from there, are you?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “I’m going to Hudson, too,” I sa
y. “And I also have a time crunch. When do you need to be there?”

  “Five,” she says. “At the latest.”

  I nod. “Same for me.” I step just the slightest bit closer to her, conserving our body heat in this freezing car. She does the same, and for a second, I think she’s going to open up, tell me why she’s going, what she needs to do there.

  But then she looks back down at her feet, and we both hear a muffled voice overhead.

  “An announcement,” I say, momentarily forgetting about our respective destinations. I touch the door-open button as fast as I can and step into the next car, reveling in the instant splash of heat from inside. She follows.

  “. . . is not related to weather . . . a mechanical error causing delays . . . hope to be up and running as soon as possible, but it could be a few hours before the mechanic arrives . . . there are several other issues in the area . . . we appreciate your patience . . .”

  “Did he just say a few hours?” she asks, looking at me frantically as grumbling and yelling erupt around us, as even the woman selling beers seems peeved.

  Ammy looks at me like somehow I can change this.

  I’m screwed. My reservation is at seven sharp, and I was planning on getting to Rina’s house by six, reading my poem and making my case, and still giving her enough time to get ready. Plus, I need to go to my house first and shower and change and all that. I can’t very well show up to win back her heart in an old Steelers jersey that I know for a fact she hates. Another couple of hours’ delay, and we could miss the reservation completely. I’d show up like an asshole in the dark with smushed flowers and a bunch of crappy explanations about how I had this all planned out, but none of it worked.

  Why does everything you do have to be so difficult?

  “This is not good,” I say. “This is not good at all.”

  AMMY

  1:43 P.M.

  NOAH IMMERSES HIMSELF IN HIS PHONE WHILE I DO the mental math and try to warm up from the brief jet into the windy vestibule sans coats. If it could be a few hours, it could be almost five o’ freaking clock before we even start going. Which would put me in Hudson right in the middle of the ceremony, and there’s no way Kat would be able to pick me up then. Even if I managed to get a cab, am I going to show up halfway into it, all Surprise! I’m here? Sophie chose this fancy Italian restaurant to have the ceremony in—I can’t exactly arrive with my hair all a mess from traveling, in a dress that hasn’t even been ironed. As Noah made clear, this is bad.

  Everyone around us is freaking out, too. Calling the people they were supposed to meet. Checking their phones as if there’s an answer in there. Plaguing the poor Amtrak guy with questions he definitely can’t answer.

  I’m going to miss my dad’s commitment ceremony. I’m going to break my mom’s heart for nothing.

  Noah looks up from his phone and turns to me. He’s stuffed his arms into his puffy jacket, wearing the thing like a blanket instead of bothering to put it on properly. He looks like an electric-orange marshmallow man. “One of my hall mates was on a train that got stuck for nine hours once,” he says quietly, almost like he’s worried about freaking out the other passengers.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you really think that could happen?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and he turns back to his phone, where he’s messing with the maps.

  I look out the window. The snow continues to fall. Even if they do get the train running, by that time, what if the whole track is blocked? I take out my phone, pull up my maps. From here to Hudson, it’s an hour and forty-five minutes by car. Even if Kat left right this moment, round-trip would put her well into the ceremony time. I really am screwed.

  I open my messages to text Kat.

  I’m not sure if I’m going to make it

  As soon as I hit send, I see another text from my mom.

  When do you get in? You let me know right now or I’m calling your dad.

  I briefly think about telling her the truth, that we’re stuck, but I know it will only make her more upset and anxious.

  So I lie.

  Already here

  At Dad’s now

  Sorry

  For a second, she doesn’t say anything back, and I think maybe she’ll let up now that she knows there’s nothing she can do to stop me.

  But then I see the dots that show she’s typing.

  The dots disappear. She has nothing to say to me.

  In a flash, I see my mom last night, the half-drunk bottle of wine, the face she made when I told her I didn’t want to talk about Dad anymore. That I was tired of always complaining about Dad.

  Her eyes got bigger, and she looked at me as if I’d betrayed her just because I no longer wanted to bitch about my own father.

  Her sentences had been looping around in circles for days. . . . “But can you believe he actually has the nerve to have a ceremony with her . . . after all I did for him . . . I can’t believe he would do that to you, Ammy. Can you believe he would do that to you . . . to us?”

  I push the thought aside, exit out of the convo with my mom, and check for any texts from Kat. Nothing.

  I click into Kat’s Facebook, seeing if there are any recent updates—any posts of them getting ready, but there’s nothing. Just photos of Kat hiking and brunching and doing Kat things—all from a couple of days ago. There’s nothing about the wedding non-wedding at all.

  I wonder, for a second, if she really cares as much as she says she does whether I’m there or not. We’ve only been in each other’s company for ten days, after all.

  I was completely ready to hate Kat. Just like I hated Sophie, her mom, the woman who’d torn my family apart and could—according to my dad—do a very impressive headstand in the yoga classes she led on weekday mornings. I was ready to hate Kat and Bea, these two blonde, tiny, sure-to-be insufferable stepsisters who were being pushed on me. I didn’t even want to go visit my dad. In fact, I was just about ready to never talk to him again, which my mom was fully in support of. It was my best friends, Dara and Simone, who convinced me to take the trip. They said I could probably even squeeze in a couple of days in New York City before meeting my new “family.”

  My dad drove from Hudson down to the city to meet me, and we spent the weekend hitting up Times Square and the new World Trade Center building, shopping at Macy’s and walking around Central Park, while I kept all conversation to one-word sentences and he shuffled around apologies. By the time we drove to his real home, in Hudson, I was fully dreading it. I didn’t think I could handle another one of his weak apologies.

  It was Kat who made it better. Kat who opened the front door to their old farmhouse in Hudson and embraced me with a bony-armed hug. I met Sophie only briefly before Kat dragged me out of the house to hit up her favorite brunch spot before picking up Bea from her community theater rehearsal.

  We weren’t in the car two minutes before Kat said, “I told my mom not to get involved with a married man, but she can be totally selfish when she wants to be. So that makes both of us the children of assholes. I guess we have that in common, at least.”

  I think I fell a little bit in love with her right then and there. Not in a weird, step-incesty sort of way. But I just loved how she could see things so clearly, how she was able to put into words what I didn’t have the guts to, even when I’d watched my dad pack up his things and leave us. Even when I’d seethed with anger as I found out my mom was freaking driving him to the airport.

  Through it all, I never had the nerve to really say what was constantly on my mind: that maybe he wasn’t the person I thought he was. I knew that he’d abandoned us, that he’d fallen in “love” with another woman, that he’d messed up all we had, but I still couldn’t manage to really see it in twenty-twenty or whatever. He’d been my dad for my entire life, after all.

  And then Kat just said it. Asshole.

  And it’s a strange realization to have about someone
you’ve loved all your life—that they’re not that good of a person.

  But what was stranger still was just how much I enjoyed that week and a half. I was still mad at my dad—I am still mad at my dad—but it was so much easier to be mad when we were eating Sophie’s fresh kale salads and lemon-roasted chicken. When we were playing Boggle after dinner while Dad and Sophie split a bottle of Pinot Noir. It was infuriating, sure, that he’d been the one to screw everything up, and now he looked like he was having the time of his life.

  But it was enchanting, all the same.

  My family had never been like that, like a normal family.

  I’d thought that made us special, but I started to wonder. I started to be just a little bit, teensy bit jealous of my dad.

  Because he didn’t have to hold my mom together anymore. That was left only to me.

  I sigh, tapping out of Kat’s Facebook, put my phone away, and look over at Noah. He’s still messing around on his phone’s maps.

  “Finding us an alternate route?” I joke.

  He pauses and looks my way. I notice freckles on the tip of his nose that I didn’t see there before. He tugs at the collar of his jersey and shrugs out of his jacket.

  “This is going to sound nuts . . .” He runs a hand through his hair, scratching his head like he’s a cartoon character trying to solve a problem or something. How will I trap the Road Runner this time?

  “Oh boy,” I say.

  “Hear me out.” He raises a hand in protest, and he reminds me, just the tiniest bit, of Kat. It was her signature move when she was about to make a point. “There may or may not be a bus station only about a mile from here. See?” He points to the map.

  “So?” I ask.

  “Well, over fall break, all the economy Amtrak tickets sold out, and I had to take this bus line. It’s random, I hadn’t even heard of it before. It’s called the Hudson Express. It goes right there. I live in a town just north of there, so I’ll probably take a cab. Is your place in town?”