Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

  She looks over at him, water dripping from her eyelashes. “Got any better ideas?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Let’s peg it.”

  And so they run, their rucksacks thumping against their backs, their trainers soggy and slipping. By the time they reach the enormous brick hostel, they’re both panting hard and laughing a little too. Once inside, they stand beside a rack of brochures about Chicago, their clothes dripping water onto the floor. Mae wrings out her hair as she peers into the lobby, which is full of ratty-looking armchairs occupied by scattered groups of teens and twentysomethings.

  “Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

  Hugo shrugs. “As long as they have a towel, I’ll be fine.”

  “I just feel bad that—”

  “I’m not fussed about where I sleep. Honestly. All I care about is getting a slice of that Chicago pizza I’ve heard so much about.”

  “That we can do.”

  Something about the we makes his heart race.

  They push open the door and squelch their way into the lobby in wet shoes. At the front desk is a guy with blue hair and a painful-looking nose ring. He doesn’t move his eyes from the computer as they approach.

  “Pardon me,” Hugo says after an uncomfortable silence. “I’m wondering if you have any beds available for the night?”

  “Forty-eight bucks for a dorm,” the guy says, sounding terrifically bored. “One thirty-eight for a single.”

  Hugo drops his rucksack on the floor and stoops beside it to unzip the front pocket, fishing around for his wallet. “Right. I’ll take a dorm, then. How many beds in each?”

  “Four to sixteen.” He finally looks up and registers Mae. “I can try to get you a shared bunk, if you want.”

  “No, it’s just for me,” Hugo says quickly. He’s still feeling around inside his rucksack, aware of Mae standing above him. He opens the main part of the bag, pulling out a jumper and a couple of pairs of trousers and a book he hasn’t started yet, but it’s not until he feels his fingers brush the bottom that the worry starts to kick in.

  “What are you looking for?” Mae asks, though she must have already guessed.

  Hugo gives her a sheepish smile. “Just my wallet. I’m sure it’s in here somewhere….” He tries the front again and finds his passport, tucked inside the smart brown case, and he tugs it free with no small amount of relief. But the wallet isn’t there.

  Maybe his mum was right.

  Maybe they all were.

  Worry starts to turn to panic as he stands up and feels around in the pockets of his jeans and his jacket; then he kneels to search the rucksack again. He knows the wallet isn’t there, but he’s not sure what else to do in the moment except to keep looking, and so he does, tossing the rest of his clothes onto the dirty floor as the blue-haired receptionist peers at him over the counter.

  This goes on until Mae kneels beside him, resting a hand gently on his shoulder, and this tiniest of gestures sends a small shock through him. “Did you take it out on the train at all?” she asks in a low voice, and he realizes for the first time that they have an audience. The people in the lounge have mostly stopped what they’re doing to stare at the array of clothes fanned out on the grimy linoleum.

  Hugo closes his eyes, trying to remember. And then his stomach lurches. “Bollocks,” he says with a groan. “I took out twenty dollars to give Ludovic just before we got off.”

  “We were supposed to tip him?” Mae asks, going pale.

  “It was for both of us. But I must not have…” He glances down at the pile of clothes in despair. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” she tells him. “We’ll call. Or go back to the station. Maybe they have a lost-and-found.”

  Hugo feels suddenly exhausted, a spreading weariness that makes his bones ache. Two days. That’s all it took for him to prove he’s not up to this.

  He sits back on the cold, wet floor and looks up at Mae. “I hate to ask,” he says miserably, “but do you think I could borrow a few quid—dollars—until this gets sorted?”

  Mae looks at Hugo as if weighing something. His mind is whirring through all that will happen if the wallet is well and truly lost: the hassle of canceling credit cards, trying to sort new ones, having to ring his parents and tell them what happened. He’s so busy with his thoughts that he’s not fully listening when Mae finally says, “No.”

  “No?” he repeats, confused. “I swear I’d pay you back….”

  “No, I mean you should just come to the hotel with me. It seems silly for you to stay here, especially now, when we were fine sharing last night.” She flushes, realizing they still have an audience, and adds, “We can ask for a cot. It was your room to begin with, and you were just trying to be nice and make sure I felt comfortable, but…”

  Hugo raises his eyebrows, waiting. He can feel a smile building inside him, but he manages to hold it back.

  “I already feel comfortable with you,” she says. “So let’s just go get some dinner, okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, letting the smile surface. He gestures at the tangle of clothes on the floor all around them. “As long as it’s on you.”

  Later, they wander the rain-slicked city, ducking into shops to stay dry. In one of them, which is full of Chicago-themed souvenirs, Hugo tries on a hat shaped like a football.

  “Do I look like an American?” he asks with a grin.

  “You look,” Mae says brightly, “like an idiot.”

  She picks out a delicate snow globe with a jagged skyline for her dads. The spotty cell reception along the route had made phone calls tricky, so they’ve been texting her constantly instead:

  Dad: My phone is broken.

  Mae: Sorry. What happened?

  Dad: Wait—never mind! There’s been a miracle!

  Mae: Huh?

  Dad: My phone—it’s working again!

  Mae: Clearly.

  Dad: I just figured it must be broken, since I hadn’t heard from you AT ALL today.

  Mae: Bravo. Well played.

  Dad: Thanks. Was the miracle thing too over the top?

  Mae: Nope. You really sold it.

  And:

  Pop: I just emailed you an article about the Pennsylvania Dutch.

  Mae: Great, thanks!

  Pop: Are you still there?

  Mae: Like…on the phone?

  Pop: No, in Pennsylvania.

  Mae: We’re actually in Ohio now.

  Pop: Okay, then I have another article for you, about the steel industry in Cleveland.

  Mae: Can’t wait.

  But now that she’s in Chicago, Mae knows she owes them a call.

  Eventually, she and Hugo get tired of wandering and find a narrow pizza restaurant with steamy windows. Inside, there’s a line to be seated, and they wait behind a family of three—a mom, a dad, and a girl of about twelve, all of them black. When they step up to the hostess, who is white, she grabs four menus.

  “Actually,” the father says, “we’re just three.”

  The hostess glances around him at Hugo, then at Mae, and it takes a long moment for her to register the kind of mistake she’s just made. A look of embarrassment passes over her face, and she hastily returns one of the menus.

  “Sorry,” she says quickly. “Right this way.”

  The mother gives Hugo a rueful look before following her husband and daughter, and he smiles back at her, but the moment they’re gone, it falls away.

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it,” Mae says, trying to catch his eye. But he won’t look at her.

  “Yeah,” he says, his jaw tight. “I’m sure.”

  At the table, they both study their menus, but Mae finds she can’t concentrate on food, not when Hugo is so clearly out of sorts.

  “Hey,” she says, he
r voice gentle. “Does that kind of thing happen a lot?”

  He shrugs. “Sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, thinking about all the waiters and flight attendants and hotel clerks who have looked from her to Pop to Dad over the years, their foreheads wrinkled like they’re trying to work out a particularly hard puzzle. This is different, of course. But she can still recognize the oddly blank expression on his face, a calm surface to hide all that’s churning underneath. “I should’ve been more—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says, snapping the menu shut. But when he looks up at Mae, his face softens a little. “It’s just…I’m used to having people around who get it. You should see Alfie when stuff like that happens. Even Margaret. So without them…I don’t know. I guess it just made me feel a bit lonely.”

  Mae’s heart twists at this, and she feels such a pang of regret that she wishes she could reach across the table and take his hand. But instead, she just nods. “I get that,” she says, her throat a little tight, and they both sit there quietly for a moment, watching each other across the table. Then Hugo’s stomach lets out a loud growl.

  “And hungry,” he says with a sheepish smile. “Apparently.”

  “Apparently,” she says, and they pick up the menus again.

  When they get to the hotel later, the storm has picked up, and they stand at the window and watch as scribbles of lightning flash over the lake. Every few minutes, thunder rattles the glass, but neither of them moves, mesmerized by the fireworks.

  Mae looks sideways at Hugo, realizing just how aware of him she is: the dimples when he smiles and the shape of his nose and the way his shirt rises slightly as he stretches, revealing a stripe of brown skin above his jeans. They’re standing only inches apart, and the space between them feels important right now, like it’s the only thing that might keep this whole situation afloat.

  “It’s like magic, isn’t it?” he says, his eyes still on the window.

  “The lightning?”

  “Just…all of it.”

  Mae isn’t entirely sure what he means, but she likes watching his face, the way his eyes flicker in the light, the way every inch of him seems so alive right now.

  “We hardly ever get storms like this at home,” he says as a flare of lightning splits the darkness wide open. For a second, it looks like the world has been turned inside out, then it rights itself again. “Do you ever feel like what’s happening at this moment will never happen again? Like you could never repeat it, no matter how hard you tried?”

  Mae smiles, but the question doesn’t seem to require a response. There’s another crack of thunder, and the space between them mysteriously shrinks until his arm brushes against hers.

  Her stomach does a little jig, and the reminders go ticking through her head:

  He just broke up with someone, and technically so did she.

  They won’t see each other again after this week.

  He lives on the other side of an ocean.

  This whole thing is strictly business.

  She has more important things to think about.

  (It’s just that right now it’s hard to remember what they are.)

  “So,” she says, trying and failing to sound casual, “any word about your wallet?”

  Hugo slips his phone from his back pocket, tearing his gaze from the window to look. His shoulders sag. “Nothing.”

  They went back to the station earlier, but nobody had turned in a missing wallet. Afterward Hugo had emailed his parents to borrow money. “The only good thing,” he said grimly, “is that it’s late there. So there’s very little chance of them ringing back till tomorrow.”

  Mae thinks again of her own parents and her promise to call them. But she hadn’t been counting on sharing a room with Hugo, and she feels a wave of exhaustion at the thought of lying to them. Again. So instead she sends another text, promising to try them in the morning.

  It’s still early, not even nine-thirty, but as soon as she sits down on the bed, Mae realizes she wants nothing more than to put on her pajamas and curl up under the covers. She’s just not exactly sure how to get from here to there. A bellhop has brought up a cot for Hugo, but it’s still sitting near the door, folded in half like an oversized taco. Their backpacks are leaning against each other outside the bathroom.

  Hugo walks toward the bed, and Mae sits up straighter. He stops on the other side of it, leaning over the ocean of white sheets between them, and smiles at her in a way that only makes her heart beat faster.

  “So,” he says, “what do you reckon we should do now?”

  The question hangs in the air for a few seconds while Mae tries to think of an appropriate response.

  “ ’Cause I was thinking,” he continues, “that maybe we get into pajamas and put on a film.”

  “Yeah?” she says, still unsure about the logistics of all this. But then he walks over to the cot and starts to wheel it into the space between the foot of the bed and the dresser, and Mae—grateful for something tangible to do—hurries over to help him set it up.

  When they’re done, they take turns changing in the bathroom, and it’s less weird than Mae thinks it will be, walking back out into the room in her pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that says The Future Is Female. Hugo gives her a friendly smile, then heads in to put on his same gray shirt and rubber-ducky pajamas from last night. He shuts the lights off before crawling onto the cot, and from where she’s propped against several pillows in the bed, Mae points the remote at the screen behind him.

  “Let’s watch something frightening,” Hugo says as the thunder crashes again. “It feels like that sort of night, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not really a scary-movie kind of person.”

  “But you’re a film buff.”

  “A film buff who also happens to be a giant chicken.”

  “Maybe a comedy, then,” he says. “Just not anything sad. We haven’t known each other long enough for you to see me cry.”

  He’s only joking, of course. But still, Mae tries to remember the last time she cried during a movie. Whenever she watches something with Nana or Priyanka or even her parents, she’s the one passing the box of tissues, and she can’t help wondering what that says about her.

  She flips through the channels, stopping when it lands on an old film.

  “Murder on the Orient Express?” Hugo says, half laughing. “I thought we already established that nobody was murdering anyone on the train this week.”

  “That’s fine with me, but Sidney Lumet would probably find your version a little boring.”

  “Who’s Sidney Lumet?”

  Mae sits up. “Network? Twelve Angry Men? Dog Day Afternoon?”

  “Nope, nope, and nope.”

  “You haven’t seen any of them?” she asks, indignant. “What movies do you like? I guess I should’ve probably asked this before I got on a train with you.”

  “Definitely seems more important than the serial-killer question,” he agrees. “I’m almost afraid to tell you this, but I’m not a huge movie person. I don’t mind going to the cinema here and there, but I’m never that fussed about what I see. I suppose I prefer to watch TV or read books.” There’s a short silence, and then he says, “Are you going to throw me out now?”

  She laughs. “I was thinking about it.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’d be delighted to watch your film.”

  “Not an option.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…,” she says, searching for an answer. “Because now that I know what we’re working with here, there are a whole lot of other movies you should see before my rejected audition film.” She turns up the volume on the TV. “Starting with Murder on the Orient Express.”

  As they watch, Hugo keeps shifting around on the cot, which creaks and groans beneath his weight. Eventually
, he sits up so that his head is blocking the entire screen.

  “Uh…,” Mae says, and he scrunches down again.

  “Sorry. It’s just…I’m too close. It’s hard to watch.”

  She glances over at the sprawling bed and the stack of pillows beside her. “You can sit up here if you want,” she says, trying to sound breezy. “Just till the end of the movie.”

  “Yeah?” he asks, sitting up again.

  Mae swallows. “Yeah.”

  The bed is so big that her half barely dips when he climbs on. There are several pillows between them, but they’re still careful to keep to the edges, both with their arms folded across their chests, eyes fixed on the TV—though Mae can no longer concentrate on the mystery unfolding on the screen, not when Hugo is so close.

  He glances over at her. “Do you still feel like you’re on a train?”

  Until that moment, she didn’t notice, but now she realizes she can feel the phantom motion beneath her too. She nods.

  “I wonder if tomorrow night we’ll feel like we’re on a hotel bed,” he says.

  She smiles. “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “Who actually uses this many pillows?” He tosses a few of them off the edge, breaking down the barrier between them. “It’s like being stuck inside a marshmallow.”

  Outside, the rain is still pinging against the window, but Mae is distracted by the newly empty space between them. She starts to run through her list of reminders again: He just broke up with his girlfriend. They won’t see each other after this week. He lives on the other side of an ocean. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this kind of vigilance is exhausting, and already her eyelids are growing heavy in the flickering dark.

  Sometime later in the night, she wakes to find their hands clasped between them.

  Though it might just as easily have been a dream.

  Hugo’s eyes flash open at the sound of his mobile.

  It’s only after he’s pulled his hand from Mae’s to silence the ringing that it registers he was holding her hand at all. He blinks, still bleary eyed, wondering when that happened.