Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

“Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, cracking a grin. “Ex-boyfriends?”

  Mae gives him a look.

  “As assistant director, my job is to get the most thorough interview possible.”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to be interviewing you?”

  “Are you really not going to tell me?”

  “Honestly,” she says, “there’s not much to tell. I was dating someone over the summer, but it wasn’t anything serious. It wasn’t anything like—”

  She stops, embarrassed. But Hugo’s face lights up so quickly and so brightly that she can’t help smiling too.

  “There were a few others before that,” she continues, still distracted by the high beam of his gaze. “But none of them meant anything. I guess maybe they did at the time, but not anymore. They were just fun.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “And this?”

  “This is no fun at all,” she says. It’s intended as a joke, but Hugo gives her a pained look, and it takes a few seconds for the meaning to settle over Mae too.

  This is no fun at all, she realizes, because it’s about to come to an end.

  It was too dark to film the interview last night. By the time they finished talking, the sun had slipped behind the mountains completely, turning the square of window a deep purple.

  “If I had even one proper light with me,” Mae muttered as she tried to find a good angle with the camera. But after a while, she gave up, and they spent the last hours before total darkness—as the train crawled through the barren Utah landscape—lying together in the bottom bunk and watching an Italian film called Cinema Paradiso on Mae’s phone.

  “Is it sad or happy?” he asked as they settled in.

  “Both,” she said, and she was right.

  During the kissing montage, Hugo looked over to see that she was crying. “Are you okay?” he whispered, and she nodded.

  “This is my grandmother’s favorite part.”

  “Mine too,” he said, pulling her closer, and they fell asleep like that.

  But now it’s morning, which means it’s time. They’ve already had breakfast, and their beds have been folded back into seats—the last time their compartment will perform this sort of magic trick—and they’re somewhere near the top of Nevada now. Everything out the window is a bright dusty-orange, a color Hugo has never seen before, with the occasional ridged mountain rising out of the dirt. The sun is still climbing, and the light—according to Mae—is now perfect.

  “Just a minute,” she says, and Hugo sits back, content to watch her work, thinking about what a lovely thing this is, to be interviewed by her. And how there will now be other, less joyful interviews ahead of him, where he’ll sit down with reporters ranging from the student newspaper to the Sunday Times and give them the uncomplicated version of himself, the one who is simply grateful for the scholarship and thrilled to be with his siblings and excited about all that’s ahead.

  It won’t be a lie, because he feels all those things.

  But it won’t exactly be the truth either.

  When Mae is finally ready—the camera stabilized on a makeshift tripod constructed out of a pair of trainers and a hairbrush—she sits forward and looks him right in the eye. “So.”

  “So,” he says, “you probably want to know how someone could possibly be this good-looking.”

  She laughs. “Not exactly.”

  “How someone could be this charming, then?”

  “I want to know what your biggest dream is,” she says, glancing down at the camera, and Hugo uses the moment to gather himself.

  “Right,” he says. “Well, you already sort of know.”

  Mae looks at him like he’s thick. “Yeah, but now there’s a camera.”

  “Yes. Right. Okay.” He swallows hard and eyes the lens. “Well, I never really had one before. Everything was laid out for me a certain way, and it never occurred to me that things could be different. But then I got on this train and everything changed.” He glances out the window at the sunbaked dirt. “It’s like I’d been living on a map my whole life and have only now realized the world is actually a globe. And even though I have to go back, I know that now. And I can’t unknow it.”

  Mae flicks her eyes up to meet his, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m starting to realize that a lot of people don’t put much stock in dreams. They think of them like these faraway planets they never really expect to reach. I was only supposed to step out of my life for a week, but that’s another thing nobody tells you: that once you get there, it’s never enough. There are always more planets to see.” He smiles and gives his head a little shake. “This makes it sound like my dream is to be an astronaut, doesn’t it?”

  She smiles at him. “I hope you get to see them one day.”

  “Me too,” Hugo says.

  “So what’s your biggest fear?” she asks, and he feels his heart jerk as if someone has tugged it with a rope.

  He has many fears. Too many to count.

  But right now—right in this moment—the biggest one is saying goodbye to her.

  Instead, he says, “Sharks.”

  Mae rolls her eyes at him. “Come on. How many sharks have you ever come across in England? Give me something real.”

  He thinks about this, his heart still jittery.

  “I worry that I’m not enough on my own,” he says eventually. “I love being a sextuplet—I do. It can be nice being part of a pack, always having someone around, knowing we’re there for each other no matter what, sharing a lifetime of experiences. It’s unusual, I think. To be known that well. And it can be really lovely. But I don’t want to just be one-sixth of something my whole life either. That’s why this week has meant so much. And why I wish it didn’t have to end.”

  He closes his mouth, not sure what else to say. It’s strange, talking to Mae and the camera at once; he doesn’t know where the interview stops and the conversation between them begins, which parts are public and which are private.

  But she just nods and moves on to the next question: “What do you love most about the world?”

  “I love…,” he says, feeling dangerously close to adding the word you. He’s distracted by the warmth of her eyes and the way she’s looking at him, by the still-rising sun out the window, by the impossibility of being here—in Nevada, of all places—with this girl he’s known for such a short time but whom he can’t bear to think of losing.

  “I love…,” he begins again, then raps his knuckles against the window. “This.”

  “The train?”

  “Yes,” Hugo says. “And the window. And the view. It’s mind boggling, isn’t it? To be so far away from your real life. To see so many entirely new things.” He shakes his head in wonder. “I love my parents, even when I don’t. And I love my brothers and sisters, even when it feels like there are too many of them. I love my friends from school and my ex-girlfriend and my teachers, even the ones who used to tell me off for daydreaming. I love my room at home, even when Alfie comes back from rugby and his feet smell like shite. I love my mum’s books, even though they’re mortifying. I love this trip, and the way it came together, and that I get to be here with you. I love what it’s made me realize about myself. And what it’s sparked in me. But mostly I love this.”

  Mae follows his eyes to the window again; then she switches off the camera. “Listen, you have to write that letter, okay?”

  “I already told you—”

  “It doesn’t matter. You need to tell them all that.”

  They’ve left the desert behind now, and the train has slowed as it climbs up into the mountains. Soon there are thick forests of pine trees and, in the distance, patches of clinging snow. An announcement comes over the speaker: they’ve crossed into California.

  Which means they’re almost there.

 
“You didn’t ask me the last question,” Hugo says, and Mae smiles at him, but she doesn’t turn the camera back on.

  “I figured you were just going to say ‘pizza.’ ”

  “Who in the world would compare love to a pizza?” he asks, expecting her to laugh.

  But instead she looks at him seriously. “Someone who doesn’t know very much about it.”

  In the hallway, the family staying in the compartment next door trundles past, the voices of the younger kids bouncing around the train. When they’re gone, Hugo leans forward, resting his elbows on the wobbly table between them.

  “In fact,” he says, grinning at her, “I was going to say ‘pizza.’ ”

  She tosses a pen at him, and he ducks. “You were not.”

  “I was,” he says, though this isn’t quite true. The question has been on his mind all week, through every interview and the hours spent with Mae in between, but he hasn’t been able to come up with something that captures it. The truth is, love isn’t just one word. At least not to him. It’s different things for different people.

  With Margaret, love was like a blanket, mostly warm and comforting, but occasionally itchy and, toward the end, a bit frayed too.

  His parents don’t have a word at all. Instead, when he thinks of them, what he pictures is the doorframe in the kitchen where they mark off their heights each year. It’s so crowded with scratches and initials that most visitors assume it was something that the children scribbled on when they were younger. To Hugo, though, it measures something more than simply their heights.

  For Alfie, the word is friend, which is somehow bigger than any of the others that might fit too: brother, sibling, family. Isla is comfort, and George is steadiness, the twin guardians of their little pack. For Poppy, who is always the brightest, it’s laughter. And Oscar would hate having a word. He’d much prefer some line of code that nobody else can understand.

  The six of them taken together would have to be a different word entirely, of course, and there have certainly been enough used to describe them over the years. But they don’t always have to be taken together. Hugo understands that now more than ever.

  He doesn’t have a word for Mae yet. Her very nearness makes it impossible to think of any words at all sometimes. Right now she’s more of a feeling, but even that is impossible to describe.

  “Pizza,” he says again. “Definitely pizza.”

  She shakes her head in mock exasperation. “Okay, fine. Then why?”

  “Because,” he says with a shrug, “it’s warm and gooey.”

  This makes her laugh. “Right. Can’t argue with that. What else?”

  “And it’s always delicious.”

  “And?”

  “There are loads of choices. Everyone can have their own version of it.”

  “And?”

  He pauses for a moment, thinking. “And I always thought it was amazing,” he says, laughter bubbling up inside him for no reason other than that he’s happy right now, so happy it feels too big to contain. “But if I’m being honest, I didn’t know how amazing it could be until this week.”

  A few seconds later, there’s a knock, and when Azar pokes her head in to ask about lunch reservations, they’re both still sitting like that, beaming at each other, lost in a universe all their own. It almost feels to Hugo like he’s been underwater, and when he turns to the door, everything seems dreamy and slow.

  “Last meal,” says Azar, which makes Hugo laugh.

  “Will there be pizza?”

  “Not in the dining car,” she says. “But I think they have those frozen ones at the snack bar. They’re probably not too bad.”

  “No such thing as a bad pizza,” Hugo says. “What do you say?”

  Mae is grinning at him, which is a relief. Because right now Hugo has no interest in the dining car. He doesn’t want to make small talk with strangers or interview anyone else. He doesn’t want to chat about the weather or listen to people’s plans for their time in the Bay Area.

  He just wants to sit with Mae, alone in their own corner of the train.

  “Pizza it is,” she says, her eyes glittering.

  They eat out of little cardboard trays in front of the huge sloping windows of the observation car. At one end, there’s a historian giving a lecture about the Donner party, and at the other, a group of women are in stitches over something, their scattered bursts of laughter giving the whole car a cheery feel.

  “So,” Mae says when she’s finished with her pizza. Her trainers are propped on the ledge beneath the window, her knees drawn up nearly to her chest. Below them, the green-tipped mountains have tumbled away, and the canyon makes it feel like they too could topple off the edge at any minute. It should be frightening, but it’s not.

  It’s electrifying, being on the edge of all that stillness.

  “So,” he says.

  “Are you going to see her?”

  Hugo doesn’t pretend not to know whom she’s talking about. “I think so,” he says without looking over. “I think maybe we still have things to say to each other.”

  “That makes sense,” Mae says, and there’s no malice in her voice. No hint of annoyance or jealousy. “I think you should.”

  They reach out at the same time, their hands brushing against each other in the gap between the seats, fumbling for a second before they manage to grab hold.

  “Hey, how’d they decide which surname you got?” Hugo asks. “Your dads.”

  Mae looks at him in surprise. “They flipped a coin. They weren’t into the whole hyphenated thing for some reason. Why?”

  “Because I was just thinking,” he says, “that if the coin had landed the other way, we never would’ve met.”

  She smiles and squeezes his hand a little tighter. “I guess that’s true.”

  “Anyway,” he says, his eyes returning to the window.

  “Anyway.”

  “Only a couple more hours now.”

  “And then sixteen in San Francisco. What should we do?”

  “Well, I’ve heard there’s this bridge….”

  This makes her laugh. “And our hotel is right by Fisherman’s Wharf. So we have to go there.”

  “Oh yeah. Let’s definitely go say hello to the sea lions.”

  “And eat some seafood too.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “But not with the sea lions.”

  “No, I think a restaurant.”

  “And then what?” he asks, because they’re in a tunnel now, and everything is dark, and it seems like the right time to finally ask the question.

  “And then I go to LA,” she says, her voice sounding very small. “And you go…”

  “Home,” he says softly, and the word seems to hang between them for a moment, a gut punch, a reminder, a ticking clock. All at once the light comes rushing back, and he looks down at their knotted hands. “And this?”

  She bites her lip, searching for an answer. “Honestly,” she says after a few beats, “I don’t know.”

  The pine trees out the window are a blur of green, the world rushing by too fast. “I don’t either,” Hugo admits, and they’re both quiet for a long time after that.

  “Cookies,” Mae says eventually. “I think we need cookies, don’t you?”

  Hugo watches her head down the stairs that lead to the café before he returns his gaze to the window, unsettled. They’re not far from Emeryville now, and then there’s the bus ride into San Francisco, and then what? He decides he’ll meet up with Margaret tomorrow, once Mae is on her way down the coast. He doesn’t want to waste any of the time they have left, doesn’t want the two things to be muddled at all. He and Mae will eat clam chowder by the bay and walk the hills and see the sights. And then they’ll spend one last night together before saying goodbye.

  Her phone begins to buzz from the led
ge, and Hugo reaches for it so it doesn’t topple off. It’s a call from home, and he stares at the screen until it goes dark again. But a second later, there’s another call. And then another. And one more.

  He holds the phone in his hand, his nerves vibrating just as fast.

  A minute later, a text from Mae’s dad pops onto the screen:

  Call us as soon as you can. xx

  Hugo’s heart falls, because nobody rings that many times if everything is okay. For a brief, insane moment, he wishes he didn’t have to tell Mae. He wishes he could hide the phone, throw it off the side of the train, let it get buried at the bottom of this mountain. He wishes he could protect her from whatever this news turns out to be.

  Which sounds noble, even though it’s actually selfish.

  Because mostly he knows that the minute she talks to her dads, something new will be set in motion, and he’ll be that much closer to losing her.

  He stares at the phone in his hand, his mind desperate and scrabbling. Should he put it back on the ledge and pretend he never saw the message? Should he just hand it to her when she returns and let her read the text herself? He looks around the busy train car at the other passengers, all of them talking and laughing and pointing out the window, and his stomach lurches at what’s about to happen.

  And then, before he has more time to think about how ill equipped he is to handle this, she’s back.

  “Here,” she says, tossing him a box of chocolate chip cookies, which he barely manages to catch. As he does, the phone falls out of his hand and onto the floor.

  Mae looks at it, then back at him, and her smile slips.

  Hugo realizes then that it doesn’t matter how she finds out.

  It’s clear she already knows.

  Mae’s head is swimming as she steps off the train for the last time.

  Her phone is clutched in her hand, the news still rattling around inside her: that Nana had another stroke this morning, this one much worse. And that she’s gone.

  It seems impossible, but it’s true. Her brain knows this. It’s just that her heart hasn’t quite caught up yet.