“Hugo.”
“Okay, okay. I’d need to think about it more. Especially if I’m going to come up with something better than pizza.”
“You have to say it quick. The first thing that pops into your head.”
Hugo’s first thought, for some reason, is of their conversation last night, how easy it had been to talk to her in the darkness. But that’s not a word, and they’re not in love, so he turns his mind to Margaret instead, flipping through the pages of their years together, trying to find something that might sum it all up. But his mind goes entirely blank.
“This isn’t really my style,” he says with a frown. “I prefer to think things through.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You know what might help?”
“What?”
“Pizza,” he says, and when she rolls her eyes, he laughs. “Only joking. I meant coffee.”
They decide to skip the more formal breakfast in the dining car. Instead they buy a box of doughnuts in the lounge car and then find an open table to themselves. Behind them, a couple of the assistant conductors are sorting through tickets, and there’s an old man playing solitaire with a deck of Chicago Cubs cards. Otherwise it’s mostly quiet at this hour.
“So why love?” Hugo asks as he opens the box of doughnuts.
“It might be a little too early for big philosophical questions,” Mae says, raising her cup of coffee.
“No, it’s just…I understand the train part, obviously. But why love stories?”
“Because,” she says, her eyes flashing, “what could be more personal than that?” Hugo is still trying to figure this one out when she goes on. “Also, I’ve never had a chance like this before. All my films have been really small because my life has been really small. I think that was part of the problem. I mean, I once made a short about a squirrel that got stuck in our heating vents, and honestly, that squirrel was only a marginally worse actor than the drama club kids I usually put in my films. Most of them were set at the grocery store or the high school or the gas station, because there was really nowhere else. And now here I am on a train full of all these different people from all these different places, and they must have a million stories to tell.”
He considers this a moment. “So you’re taking field notes.”
“I mean, it’s not super scientific or anything, but…yeah.” She licks some powdered sugar off her finger. “I guess I am.”
“Field notes on love,” Hugo says, glancing out the window, where the world is moving by too fast.
Mae nods. “And trains.”
“Do you remember that video you did for me?” he asks, turning back to face her, and she raises her eyebrows. “Sorry. Not for me. For this trip.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, it didn’t feel small to me at all. In fact, the moment I saw it, I knew—”
She cracks a smile. “That you wanted to invite an eighty-four-year-old instead?”
He shakes his head, eager to be understood. “No. I knew there was something interesting about you. Something that made me want to meet you. And all that happened in just a couple of minutes. It was short. But you managed to say so much.”
“You asked good questions.”
“Maybe. But your answers—they meant something.” He feels his face grow warm. “Or maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But it certainly felt that way.”
Out the window, there’s a blur of houses and trees and highways. For a while, Mae stares at the telephone lines as they zip past. Finally she turns back to him with an unreadable expression. “You’re right.”
“About what?”
“Those questions, my answers…they did mean something. They meant a lot, actually.” She smiles at him, and it’s the kind of smile that feels like a beginning—though the beginning of what, he isn’t entirely sure. “I think we should see if it might be the same for anyone else.”
They start with Ida, who tears up at the very first question.
“My biggest dream?” she says. “I know this will sound awfully old-fashioned to you, but my dream was always to marry Roy. We met when we were twelve. He bought me an ice cream and was the only boy who didn’t laugh when I spilled it on my dress. It sounds small. But there was such kindness in that. I knew right then. I’ve always known.”
Mae tries to imagine what it would be like to be that sure of someone. She’s spent the last six years watching Priyanka and Alex write love notes and hold hands and make impossible promises, and to Mae it’s always felt like witnessing some unfamiliar custom. But listening to Ida now is like fast-forwarding to the end of this particular movie. And to Mae’s surprise, it doesn’t seem like such a bad one.
At the bar, Ashwin—the head dining attendant, who agreed to let them use one of the tables—is restocking cans of soda. But Mae can tell by the way his head is tilted in their direction that he’s listening too. Same with Roy, who insisted on waiting a couple of tables away. “For privacy,” he said, but his ears have gone bright red at Ida’s answer.
Hugo is sitting next to Mae in the booth. She put him in charge of the external microphone and warned him not to talk. But they’re one question in, and already he can’t help himself. “That’s so lovely,” he says to Ida, and Mae leans back from the camera to give him a sharp look. He holds up his hands. “Sorry, sorry.”
“It’s okay. We can edit you out.”
“If only it were always that easy to get rid of me,” he jokes.
“And what’s your biggest fear?” Mae asks Ida, who looks completely at ease in front of the camera. Even more than that, she looks happy. Mae gets the impression that for as much talking as she does, there aren’t always many listeners.
“Oh,” she says. “I don’t…um…well, I don’t really like snakes, but that’s probably not exactly what you’re looking for, is it?”
Mae gives her a reassuring smile. “We’re just looking for honesty.”
“Honesty. Well.” Ida turns to the window. “I suppose my biggest fear is never seeing my son again. You don’t know what happiness is—what it really means—until it’s taken away from you. Then you realize the world will never be as bright as it was.”
Across the room, Roy puts his head in his hands. Mae leans away from the camera and stares at his broad back, stricken. Then she takes a deep breath and returns to the shot.
Ida dabs at her eyes. “But my greatest hope is just the opposite,” she says. “That somehow I’ll see him again one day.”
Hugo reaches across the table and takes her hand, and the gesture is so thoughtful, so sweet, that Mae can’t bring herself to scold him for ruining her shot. The truth is, she wants to do the same. But instead she just says, “I’m sure you will.”
“I hope so,” Ida says, then lets out a laugh as Mae pans in closer. “Probably won’t have to wait too long either. Right, Roy?”
Roy half turns; his eyes are rimmed with red, but he’s grinning. “I don’t know, hon. Every year we say it’ll be our last train ride. But we’re still rolling along somehow.”
“We sure are,” she says, and they smile at each other from across the tables.
Mae glances down at her notebook. Those first two questions had been Hugo’s, pulled straight from the email that had started all of this. But these last two—these are Mae’s.
“What do you love most about the world?”
Ida smiles. “I love that every generation thinks they’ve invented it. They think they’re the first ones to fall in love and get their hearts broken, to feel loss and passion and pain. And in a way, they are. We’ve been there before, of course. But for young people, that doesn’t matter. Everything is new. Which I love, because it means everything is always beginning again. It’s hopeful, I think. At least to me.”
When Mae leans back from the camera, she sees that Hugo’s eyes are shiny, and she’s surprised by how much she wants to ask him the same question. But she doesn’t. Instead she turns back to Ida. “Last one,” she says. “If you had to describe love in one word, what would it be?”