When Mae laughs at this, he feels a rush of pleasure. Behind them, a bald man with a handlebar mustache turns around in his seat. “Did you say you’re a sextuplet?”
Hugo nods, realizing how many people are staring at him. The booths are small and pressed close together, a whole dining room shoved into a train car.
“My cousin has triplets,” the man says, “and I thought that was a lot of work.”
A woman a couple of tables over cranes her neck to look at Hugo. “I’m a twin,” she says in a low voice, sounding shy about it.
Hugo realizes that half the people on the train are staring at him now. He’s used to this sort of thing back home, where the six of them are fairly well known—though even there, it’s rare for someone to recognize him when he’s not with his siblings. Once when he was in London with Margaret, a group of young girls stopped to ask if he was one of the Surrey Six. They fell into giggles when he said he was, and asked him to autograph two receipts, a phone case, and even someone’s forearm. But usually it takes the whole gaggle of them to elicit any sort of attention.
Here in America, it’s different. The books aren’t published on this side of the ocean, and there aren’t many readers of the blog in this country either. Americans have their own sets of famous multiples. So he’s chalked up most of the stares he’s gotten to the color of his skin or the fact that he’s traveling with a white girl. Or maybe, if he’s being generous, to his height.
But now, once again, he’s no longer just Hugo. He’s one-sixth of something bigger.
And even amid the general merriment of this train car—the curious questions and eager faces—this feels like a kind of loss.
Their waiter arrives, shaking his head as he sets down their plates. “Man, I’ve got five brothers and sisters, too, but I can’t imagine dealing with all of us at the same time. Your mom is a damn hero.”
“How many sextuplets are there in the world?” asks Karen as she begins to slice up her chicken. “There can’t be that many.”
“I’m not really sure,” Hugo says around a forkful of lettuce. “I haven’t met any others.”
“Are you famous, then?”
He shrugs, not wanting to get into it. “Mostly just in our town.”
“Is it hard to remember all their names?” Trish wants to know.
“I’ve got them pretty well down at this stage.”
“Do you all get along?” asks the man behind them. “Did you guys fight a lot?”
“Never,” Hugo says, and around him, there’s a ripple of laughter. “Not once.”
“Do you have a favorite?”
“Yeah. Me.”
“Do your parents have a favorite?”
“Yeah. Me.”
“Are you all going off to college together?” asks Trish, and Hugo feels the air around him deflate again. He blinks, trying to come up with an answer, then takes a bite of his steak and chews it slowly.
Mae watches him for a second, then puts a hand on his knee, which he didn’t even realize was bobbing underneath the table. “I think it’s still to be decided,” she says, and Hugo looks over at her in surprise. It’s like she’s managed to look straight into his head, and he wonders if maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s not so decided after all.
Across the table, Trish takes a swig of wine, and Karen’s attention moves to the window, and the man behind them turns around again. Slowly the dining car returns to its usual noises as the world outside slips into darkness.
Trish tilts her head at Mae. “So if you live here,” she says, her eyes tracking over to Hugo, “and he lives there, how does this work?”
Hugo doesn’t even have a chance to revel in the fact that she assumes he and Mae are a couple. The question hits him square in the chest, knocking the breath right out of him.
“Yeah,” Karen says, “what happens when you two get off the train?”
For a second, they’re both quiet. Then Mae looks at Hugo, and he looks back at her. Beneath the table, her hand slips off his knee.
“That,” she says, “is a very good question.”
Mae wakes to stillness. The low rumble of the engine has disappeared, the train no longer moving. There’s a faint red light in the hallway, but otherwise the room is so dark that it takes her a few tries to find the curtain. She pushes it back, but all she can see is her own dim reflection.
Above her, Hugo is snoring, and she listens to the sound of it, steady and reassuring. The first night, Mae had tried to stay awake as long as she could, anxious about her own snoring, which Priyanka once compared to the sound of a dying warthog. But somewhere along the way, she drifted off. When she woke a few hours later, she heard the uneven whistle of Hugo’s snores above and realized she wasn’t the only one.
After that, she stopped worrying so much.
Now she sits up, bent low so she doesn’t hit her head, and slips on her shoes. In the hall, she pauses to look at her phone. It’s after three, the deepest part of the night. The curtains are drawn on all the other compartments, doors shut tight and locked. Mae closes theirs gently behind her, then walks toward the bathrooms, where she’s surprised to see Duncan standing against one of the main doors. His face is pressed to the window, and he’s twirling an unlit cigarette between his fingers. When he turns around, he looks startled to see her.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks, leaning a shoulder against the heavy doors. “It’s hard to get used to those beds.”
“Where are we?”
He sweeps a hand toward the window, the vast blackness beyond it. “Heaven,” he says, and when she looks at him blankly, he laughs. “Just kidding. This happened in Iowa a few weeks ago, and the joke worked a lot better there.” He raises an eyebrow. “Field of Dreams? No? Never mind. We’re in Nebraska.”
“This isn’t a station.”
He glances out at the darkness. “No.”
“Then why are we stopped?”
“Mechanical issue.”
“Is it serious?”
Duncan shrugs. “Don’t know yet.”
“Can we go outside?”
“Not now. But if it looks like we’re gonna be here for a while, they’ll probably let us get some air later. We once got stuck for eleven hours, and we ordered pizza right to the tracks. It was awesome.”
Mae glances around. It’s not exactly that she’s claustrophobic. When she was eleven, she saw a story about a director who filmed an entire movie while crouched in the backseat of a car. After that, she took to finding hiding spots, scaring the life out of her dads, who kept discovering her in closets and hampers and wardrobes. She has no problem with small spaces.
This is something different, a slight sense of unreality. Here in the middle of nowhere, stuck on the tracks in this deepest of nights, she can’t help feeling unmoored. It’s like more than just the train has paused, like time itself has stopped for the moment.
In the fluorescent light of the train, she can see the dark circles under Duncan’s eyes, and he puts a hand over his mouth to hide a yawn. She looks at him closely, realizing he can’t be much older than she is. “How long are your shifts?”
“Not too bad. I got to sleep a little earlier.”
“Are you always on this route?”
“Yup. Chicago to Emeryville. I get off, smell the bay, turn around, and come straight back. Then I sleep for three days and do it all over again.”
“You must know it well. This part of the country.”
“Only what I can see out the window,” he says with a shrug. He gives her a smile that’s meant to be charming. “So where’s your boyfriend?”
Mae doesn’t bother to correct him. She likes the sound of it: boyfriend. “He’s asleep.”
“How long have you been together?”
She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she walks to the other set of doors, across the car. Through the grimy window, the sky is thick with stars. There’s the sound of clanking outside, metal on metal, and Mae looks over at Duncan.