The private jets that took her around the globe whenever her
father issued an international summons on a whim.
The commercial jet that had taken her to Prague eighteen months
earlier, diamond ring tucked into her boyfriend’s carry-on bag.
The subway car she’d been on that afternoon when her phone
had rung and stolen her breath—Incoming call…Elisabeth Storm
(never Mom)—all beige walls and harsh lights and
advertisements for clear skin and uncluttered apartments and that
one William Carlos Williams poem about plums and iceboxes
and forgiveness and the parts of us that will never change.
And still, there was something about trains.
Probably because she’d discovered those herself. All the other ways
she’d traveled through the world had belonged to someone else. Were
shared with someone else. But trains…they were her secret.
They did not come with flight plans, no siblings jockeying for position
inside, no mothers calling for champagne, no fathers playing silent judge.
They did not come unmoored. Instead they remained locked into their path,
weighty and competent, unchanging. Unable to be sent over a cliff and into
the sea. A marvel of modernity that ran counter to all the technology that
came after them. Solid. Even. Stable. Constant.
Alice dropped her suitcase onto the luggage rack inside the door of the
train car and found the first empty row, tossing her worn olive green canvas
satchel onto the aisle seat and sliding over to the window, hoping that a
Wednesday night on the 9:32 P.M. Northeast Regional would reward her
with a row to herself in the last few hours of peace before what was to
come.
Before she faced the barrage of family—with one glaring, irreversible
absence.
Through the window, on the train platform beyond, a group of twenty-
somethings tumbled down the escalator, laughing and shouting, a collection
of duffels and weekender bags, bright smiles, sundresses, shorts and
sunglasses, as though night hadn’t fallen outside. And maybe it hadn’t for
