There was something about trains.
If she marked the minutes of her life, Alice Storm would not be surprised to discover that she'd spent nearly a third of them in transit:
The shiny crimson bicycle that had been her seventh-birthday present and most prized possession, until her brother had sent it flying into Narragansett Bay, never to be recovered.
The white rowboat her father had captained into that same salty sea every Saturday in July for her entire childhood, because he insisted on facing nature as God intended.
The endless line of nondescript black town cars with silent drivers that ferried her from private school to private art classes to the Storm family's Park Avenue penthouse, New York City muffled and dim beyond the window.
The skateboard she’d ridden into a tree one Sunday morning during her first year at Amherst—determined to prove herself a completely ordinary eighteen-year-old—resulting in an arm broken in three places.
The helicopter that airlifted her to Boston to be pinned back together and returned her to school in time for a nine A.M. Art History midterm, before her classmates could discover there was nothing ordinary about her.
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 them. Maybe they were in that gorgeous moment in life when there was no such thing as the dark. Instead, it was all daytime, full of promise and empty of fear.
Behind them, a freckle-faced, redheaded family of five, a teenager in hoodie and headphones, twin girls no older than ten, and their parents, loaded down with suitcases and backpacks and a Paris Review tote that might have once been for literary cachet, but was now for stainless steel water bottles and organic snacks.
A middle-aged Black woman in flowing linen, her tiny silver roller bag the only evidence that she was traveling. A tall, stern-faced white man in his thirties, leather duffel in hand, backpack slung over his shoulder. An elderly, ruddy-cheeked man in a cream-colored windbreaker, pushed in a wheelchair by an Amtrak employee in a trademark red cap.
One by one, they piled onto the train.
Alice had been wrong; the train wouldn’t be empty. Instead, it would be packed full—laden with a few hundred New Yorkers headed north for a weekend of cobalt skies and gray-green ocean during the most magical time of year in New England, when the rest of the world was back to school and work and Northeasterners were spoiled with one last week of sun-soaked seclusion, clinging to the promise of endless summer.
She’d forgotten it was Labor Day weekend.