“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, “Iwasgoing 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 isfriend,which is somehow bigger than any of the others that might fit too:brother, sibling, family.Isla iscomfort,and George issteadiness,the twin guardians of their little pack. For Poppy, who is always the brightest, it’slaughter.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?”
