For a second, they’re both quiet. Then Mae looks at Hugo, and he looks back at her. Beneath the table, her hand slips off his knee.
“That,” she says, “is a very good question.”
Mae wakes to stillness.The low rumble of the engine has disappeared, the train no longer moving. There’s a faint red light in the hallway, but otherwise the room is so dark that it takes her a few tries to find the curtain. She pushes it back, but all she can see is her own dim reflection.
Above her, Hugo is snoring, and she listens to the sound of it, steady and reassuring. The first night, Mae had tried to stay awake as long as she could, anxious about her own snoring, which Priyanka once compared to the sound of a dying warthog. But somewhere along the way, she drifted off. When she woke a few hours later, she heard the uneven whistle of Hugo’s snores above and realized she wasn’t the only one.
After that, she stopped worrying so much.
Now she sits up, bent low so she doesn’t hit her head, and slips on her shoes. In the hall, she pauses to look at her phone. It’s after three, the deepest part of the night. The curtains are drawn on all the other compartments, doors shut tight and locked. Mae closes theirs gently behind her, then walks toward the bathrooms, where she’s surprised to see Duncan standing against one of the main doors. His face is pressed to the window, and he’s twirling an unlit cigarette between his fingers. When he turns around, he looks startled to see her.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks, leaning a shoulder against the heavy doors. “It’s hard to get used to those beds.”
“Where are we?”
He sweeps a hand toward the window, the vast blackness beyond it. “Heaven,” he says, and when she looks at him blankly, he laughs. “Just kidding. This happened in Iowa a few weeks ago, and the joke worked a lot better there.” He raises an eyebrow. “Field of Dreams? No? Never mind. We’re in Nebraska.”
“This isn’t a station.”
He glances out at the darkness. “No.”
“Then why are we stopped?”
“Mechanical issue.”
“Is it serious?”
Duncan shrugs. “Don’t know yet.”
“Can we go outside?”
“Not now. But if it looks like we’re gonna be here for a while, they’ll probably let us get some air later. We once got stuck for eleven hours, and we ordered pizza right to the tracks. It was awesome.”
Mae glances around. It’s not exactly that she’s claustrophobic. When she was eleven, she saw a story about a director who filmed an entire movie while crouched in the backseat of a car. After that, she took to finding hiding spots, scaring the life out of her dads, who kept discovering her in closets and hampers and wardrobes. She has no problem with small spaces.
This is something different, a slight sense of unreality. Here in the middle of nowhere, stuck on the tracks in this deepest of nights, she can’t help feeling unmoored. It’s like more than just the train has paused, like time itself has stopped for the moment.
In the fluorescent light of the train, she can see the dark circles under Duncan’s eyes, and he puts a hand over his mouth to hide a yawn. She looks at him closely, realizing he can’t be much older than she is. “How long are your shifts?”
“Not too bad. I got to sleep a little earlier.”
“Are you always on this route?”
“Yup. Chicago to Emeryville. I get off, smell the bay, turn around, and come straight back. Then I sleep for three days and do it all over again.”
“You must know it well. This part of the country.”
“Only what I can see out the window,” he says with a shrug. He gives her a smile that’s meant to be charming. “So where’s your boyfriend?”
Mae doesn’t bother to correct him. She likes the sound of it:boyfriend.“He’s asleep.”
“How long have you been together?”
She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she walks to the other set of doors, across the car. Through the grimy window, the sky is thick with stars. There’s the sound of clanking outside, metal on metal, and Mae looks over at Duncan.
“That’s either a good sign,” he says, “or a bad one.”
She glances down at her phone, thinking suddenly of home. Her dads are early risers; they’re probably at the kitchen table right now, arguing about how many cups of coffee is too many. She starts to thumb over to her list of favorites, when she realizes there’s no service.
