Love and Other Train Wrecks

by Leah Konen

  I look at Noah. The sleeve of his coat is also torn, and his face is red.

  He catches my eyes, and for a second, we both just smile. Well, I force myself to smile because if I don’t, I fear I might cry. I’d bet a kajillion bucks he’s doing the same thing.

  “Didn’t think you’d be outrunning gunshots on your trip up to New York, did you?” he says.

  I laugh weakly. “I definitely did not.”

  There’s a pause, and he just looks at me, and I want to know what he’s thinking, if he’s as worried as I am. “So what do we do?” I ask finally.

  He shows me the map. There’s no service again—what is it with upstate New York, really?—but he has it pulled up from before. “We went exactly the wrong way,” he says, his finger, which already has a bluish tint, pointing the way. “So we have to go toward the train to get back. Once we’re there, if the train looks like it’s at all ready to go, we can just get on. And if it’s not, we walk to the actual bus. The next one was at three, and again at three thirty. You’ll be late, but it’s better than nothing.”

  I shrug. At least I’ll have tried. And I can still toast my dad and Sophie without having to witness their sure-to-be-nauseating vows. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. “What else is there to do?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrug again. “It’s okay.”

  He leads the way back, and it’s not really that hard to follow our tracks because we were in the middle of nowhere, and so we can see our footprints in the inch or so of snow in the clearing, already half covered up from the flakes that fell while we were pondering trespassing and potentially losing our lives. A tiny, quickly disappearing trail through the woods.

  It’s weird how you can make these tracks, and then it can all be near wiped out so quickly. Undone. I wish life were like that. I wish my dad’s wanderings were just clunky footprints in the snow, ones that got filled in, erased, over time.

  When we reach the second patch of woods, Noah, a gentleman (even if he’s a gentleman who has no sense of direction, half-cocked travel ideas that could very well lead to frostbite or exposure, and a frustrating understanding of gender roles), insists on carrying my rolling suitcase, even though he has a decently large backpack on his back, too. This time, I don’t protest, because although I do hate that gender norm, he kind of owes me, and it’s too windy and cold out here to try and stand up for my ideals right now.

  We keep a steady pace, because we have at least another twenty minutes or so of walking to get to the train and then another leg going in the opposite direction, which, Lord willing, will lead to the bus. We’re quite obviously going to miss the three o’clock, but we should be fine for the three thirty—I hope.

  “Should we play Questions?” I ask, needing something to pass the time, distract me from the bitter cold, from just how much my face already hurts.

  “Questions?”

  “It’s this game that my friends and I used to play. It’s really easy. I ask a question, and we both answer. And then you ask a question, and we both answer. That’s it.”

  He laughs. “So, like a conversation?”

  I huff. “If you want to put it that way, sure. But we don’t have to think of any transitions or whatever. We just ask our questions and move on. It’s fun, trust me. Like Truth or Dare. Without the dares. And we both have to answer every truth. Plus, we don’t have anything else to do right now.”

  Plus plus, it always helped me feel better when I was upset. A round or two with Dara and Simone, and it’s like I could step out of my own world, just for a little bit, and walk into theirs instead.

  “All right, all right,” he says. “You start, though.”

  “Okay, what do you like better, Twizzlers or Red Vines?”

  Noah laughs. “That’s your question?”

  “I didn’t say they had to be serious, end-of-the-world questions.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Twizzlers, of course.”

  I shake my head. “You’re missing out. Red Vines are so much better.”

  “Well, I’d kill for either of them right about now,” he says.

  I laugh. “Me too.”

  “All right,” he says. “No more food questions. What’s your favorite book. You know, of all time?”

  I take a big step and my foot lands in a mixture of snow-sludge and damp dirt. I shake it off and keep going. “Probably Anna Karenina. I like that it’s like a soap opera and all dramatic and stuff but then totally smart, and Tolstoy makes all these awesome observations.”

  Noah smiles. “You gotta love Anna. Such a good book.”

  “Right?” I say. “Okay, what’s yours? Dare I say The Hunger Games?”

  “Hey now,” Noah says as he gives my suitcase another big tug. “I am carrying your stuff. Be nice.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, laughing. “What is it, then?”

  He turns to me and smiles. “Beloved. Best ghost story of all time and also probably just best story of all time.”

  And I have to hand it to him, though I don’t hand it to him, not out loud at least—it’s a good choice. A really good choice.

  We keep walking, still protected from the majority of the snow by the canopy of trees.

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I ask.

  “That’s an easy one,” Noah says. “Nope. Just me.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Me too. Did you like it growing up?”

  Noah shakes his head. “I was always dying for a little brother. Someone to really drive nuts, you know?”

  I don’t know, because I always liked my lot in life. Our little family.

  I always liked it until recently. Until my dad did what he did.

  “Okay,” he says, after a minute or so. “So when was your first kiss?”

  I pause, heart beating fast, feeling myself turn red, and not from the wind chapping my skin, because my answer is embarrassing. Just last year, with one of Dara’s cousins, who wasn’t even that cute.

  But he doesn’t even wait for me to respond. “Mine was when I was eight with this girl named Cora who lived down the block. But she kissed another boy the same day, and then I felt kind of shitty.”

  That sends me laughing. And when I don’t offer my own answer, Noah doesn’t push. I think he gets it—in this game, you’re not supposed to push. That’s the whole point.

  As the snow continues to fall, eking its way through the canopy of trees, and I try to keep Kat’s room in my mind, the promise of Friends reruns and a full dishing session about everything that went on today, the conversation changes, and the questions get a tad more serious.

  He asks me where I see myself in ten years. I tell him that I have no earthly idea, because I don’t.

  I tell him that that’s a really weird question for an eighteen-year-old to ask.

  I don’t tell him that right now I’m only worried about getting through this year. That I refuse to think that far ahead because I refuse to believe, ever again, that everything will just “work out.” Ten years is a long way off, and so much can happen between then and now. So much has happened even in the last year for me. So much that I never thought possible—and not in a good way.

  He expands on his comparative lit tenure-track plan, and it’s laughable how much detail he’s thought out. He’s so different from me in every way. I don’t even know what colleges I’m going to apply to—though I’m going to have to pick a few soon—much less what I’m going to study, what the hell I want to do.

  There’s a pause in our conversation, and that’s when I ask him what Dara and Simone and I always used to ask one another: “What’s your biggest regret?”

  He stops for a second, turning to me. There are snowflakes in his hair, and we’re in a tiny clearing—a half clearing, if you will, not big like the one from before—and for a second, it’s like a whole little world, just for us. “I don’t believe in regrets.”

  I laugh. “Come on,” I say. “Everyone has regrets.”
r />   “I really don’t think it’s good to dwell in the past.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Hallmark.” I shrug. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But no need to get all philosophical on me.”

  He turns away then, stepping out of our mini world. But even though he projects his voice forward, like he’s talking to the trees, I can still hear him.

  “Fine,” he says. “I don’t believe in regrets. I really don’t. I think it’s a crappy way to live, thinking like that. Can I say something I wish I’d done differently?”

  I laugh. “Er, that’s the same exact thing, dude.”

  “It’s not, though. Regret is all about sadness and mourning. It doesn’t do anything. Wishing you hadn’t done something—that’s about learning.” He pauses. Then: “I wish I hadn’t broken up with Rina.”

  He walks a bit faster, and I pick up the pace.

  “Was it all your fault?” I ask.

  He turns his head to me. “That’s two questions.”

  My mind starts to spin, trying to fill in the gaps, wondering what exactly happened between them, but I don’t have time, because Noah stops then, turns to me, head tilted to the side. “So what’s yours? What do you wish you hadn’t done?”

  My lips part, and suddenly I’m at a loss for words. It’s something about the way he puts it. It’s so direct. When I played this game before, I never had a real biggest regret. I said I regretted not quitting gymnastics when I was eight. Or I wished I’d signed up for AP art class instead of computer science. But none of that stuff mattered. I have a real regret now, in the truest sense of the word. I believe, deep down, that if I’d done things differently last Thanksgiving—who knows, maybe I wouldn’t be here.

  “Mine’s a true regret, even if you don’t believe in them. Sometimes it’s impossible not to dwell in the past,” I say. “No matter how much you want to argue about semantics.”

  He shrugs, but he seems to take me more seriously than he did before. Like he can see I’m sharing the raw, naked truth.

  “So what is it, then?” he asks, and his words are suddenly soft.

  I take a few large steps ahead, giving myself a little space. “I’m going to skip that one for now.”

  His long legs shorten the space I’ve created between us in seconds—I may be tall, but he’s taller. “Can you do that?”

  I shrug. “It’s my game, not yours.”

  He laughs at that, but he keeps pushing. “Tell me something else, then. Tell me the reason why you’re going to Hudson. I told you mine.”

  I turn to him, and he’s grinning, one side of his mouth turned up farther than the other. He’s got a goofy smile, for sure. His teeth are all crooked, I realize, and a little too spaced out. His lips pull back too far and show his gums. It’s a physical flaw that looks strange against his strong jaw and deep-set eyes.

  But then his smile disappears, and I’m not sure quite what I’ve done, but obviously one of my certainly-not-so-perfect features has given me away. He can see that this isn’t just about a high school breakup. I curse myself for being so freaking easy to read.

  “Sorry,” he says immediately. “If you don’t feel comfortable, you don’t have to tell me anything. Really.”

  I bite my lip, and then I turn forward and pick up the pace again.

  Noah’s obviously still waiting for my answer. “It’s not a sob story or anything, okay?” I snap. “No one’s, like, dying of cancer or heart failure.”

  He’s quiet. He doesn’t ask me anything more.

  We reach another tiny clearing, and he leads the way.

  I turn back for a minute, looking at the circle of white in the absence of trees, the way the snow falls, still so delicately. It’s not hard or angry, like you’d expect from a storm. It’s gentle, slight, more like dandelion seeds. My mom always said it was her favorite kind of snow. You know, the soft kind, just like this. I reach out my gloved hand and catch a few flakes, and there’s something about the way they scatter on my glove, and suddenly, it’s like I’m back there, in my yard on my birthday when I was seven. It was two days before Thanksgiving. I’d been telling my mom and dad that all I wanted for my birthday was snow, but my parents had been adamant—in our part of Virginia, at least, snow before Christmas was a rarity.

  But I got my wish.

  At 7:00 a.m., it started falling. Slowly and softly but steadily, just like this. I abandoned my Eggo waffle and ran to the window. My dad took one look at my face and pulled out his phone, calling in sick to work.

  I threw a jacket over my pajamas, an extra pair of my mom’s warmest gloves on my hands, and snow boots over my bare feet—I couldn’t even bother with finding clean socks, and I had blisters for a week after. The three of us were outside for, I don’t know, hours. Watching it fall. Dancing around the backyard. We’d zip in for hot chocolate when we got too cold, throw our wet clothes in the dryer (eventually I did put on socks), and repeat. In the quiet moments, while we were waiting for the chocolate to warm or the drying to finish, my dad would laugh, pinch the red of my nose, and tell me I looked like Rudolph—and he would kiss my mom on the lips.

  We were all so very . . . happy.

  What the hell happened to that? To us?

  “You coming?” Noah asks.

  I nod, following him. He doesn’t ask any more questions—my cancer comment put him off, I guess. I was being dramatic, sure. And yet I think about what my therapist said. Divorce is like death. The way you grieve for it, at least.

  But I think about two years ago, when Simone’s dad got cancer. And when, six months later, he died. I remember how Simone stopped getting her monthly relaxers, because she couldn’t even stand to do something as normal as make a hair appointment. I remember how Simone’s mom lost weight, first a couple of pounds and then close to ten or fifteen, how she looped a tiny hair tie around the back of her wedding ring so it wouldn’t fall off. I remember how Cary, Simone’s older brother, who was at Vanderbilt, threw himself into classes and went from coming home every two weeks or so to hardly at all. I remember how their house became almost like a museum, the TV Guide that her dad had flipped through still sitting, dog-eared, on the end table in the family room.

  I’ve seen death, and this wasn’t it. My dad is still here. A not-so-short train ride away. What I said to Noah was true. It’s not like anyone has cancer or heart failure.

  And yet why does it still feel so bad, then?

  We reach the end of the woods, and I try to push it all out of my mind, get my head on straight.

  We’re almost to the edge, and soon we’ll be at the train, and maybe, just maybe, it will all be fixed. Maybe I’ll even make it to the ceremony almost in time.

  I follow Noah out into the sun.

  But that’s when my hopeful mood drops.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say as I look straight ahead.

  At the slats of the tracks.

  At the train, crawling away.

  Crawling away from us.

  I break into a run, leaving Noah behind.

  NOAH

  3:18 P.M.

  SHE BOLTS, RUNNING FAST AND FURIOUS, BUT IT’S not nearly fast enough.

  I watch in horror and disappointment and what feels like as many stupid emotions as there are snowflakes in the sky as the train pulls away. It chugs along like nothing was ever wrong with it.

  Leaving us out in the cold. Literally.

  Quickly turning my plans with Rina to murky slush.

  By the time Ammy stops running, the train is a small dot on the horizon. In seconds, it’s gone.

  She turns to me. She’s too far away for me to see the look on her face, but it doesn’t take much creativity to imagine it.

  Her suitcase sits beside me in the snow, abandoned like a child at the mall who got separated from its parents. I grab it, give it a tug. It somehow feels heavier than it did a minute ago.

  She doesn’t move to meet me, and the wind slaps at me brutally as I walk the fifty
feet or so toward her. The snow falls fiercely now.

  This is why I wasn’t ever adventurous, Rina. Because things never work out.

  I approach, and her hands move to her hips.

  She stares at me, waiting, but I don’t stop walking. There’s nothing else to do.

  By the time I reach her, she’s white with anger.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She shakes her head, her short hair whipping against her cheek. “You told me about your friend,” she says. “Who got stuck for hours.” Her voice cracks, and her eyes glisten. I have the strangest desire to let go of her suitcase, toss my backpack to the ground, and wrap her in the biggest, longest hug. Solve every single one of her problems, even though she won’t tell me what they are.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  She takes a deep breath. Her voice doesn’t falter when she answers. “I was supposed to—” and for a second I think she’s going to tell me why she needed to be in Hudson by five sharp. I find myself wondering who she’s meeting. Why it matters so much. What’s making her so upset. Who hurt her so bad.

  The thought of someone hurting her—boyfriend, girlfriend, friend, family, whatever—makes me weirdly furious. For a second, I forget that I’m screwed, too. That all my plans with Rina will most likely be shot.

  She bites her lip, and she doesn’t say anything. The moment passes.

  I look around me, taking it all in. The empty train track. The stretch of snow-dappled steel. The trees on either side and a big bunch of nothing in both directions. It’s not even a proper stop, so it’s not like we can cut our losses and wait here for the next train. Any train that does come, if trains are still even running in this weather, will whip right by the two teenagers idiotic enough to hop off a broken-down Amtrak to set off for the bus.

  I try to focus. I get out my phone and check the time. It’s almost three thirty. If we catch the four o’clock, I’ll definitely be rushed getting ready, and I probably won’t have time to get new, better flowers, but it will be better than nothing. Plus, what other option do we have?