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.
