Mae
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.”
“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?”
Ida blinks at her. “Oh. Well. I guess I’d probably say peace.”
The word snags at something inside Mae, small and thorny as a burr. Peace. To her, it seems like an awful lot to ask of love. But still she finds herself jotting it down in the margin of her notebook, eager to capture it.
“That’s a fair bit better than pizza, anyway,” Hugo says, but Mae ignores this, switching off the camera and turning back to Ida.
“Thank you,” she says. “That was beautiful. All of it.”
“Thank you,” Ida says as she reaches for her purse. “Now I’m going to go freshen up before lunch. You can keep Roy, though, if you want.”
Roy twists around in his seat. “I’m all yours,” he says. “And I was barely listening, so it doesn’t count as cheating or anything.”
This interview is shorter. Roy insists on opening with a joke (“Why was the train engine humming? Because it didn’t know the words!”), then spends most of the rest of the time talking about fishing, which—incidentally—is the word he’d choose to describe love.
“But if Ida asks,” he says with a wink, “tell her I said it was her.”
Afterward, Ashwin is overcome by curiosity too. He sits across from them in his uniform, hands folded as he talks about visiting his grandmother in Mumbai when he was a kid and learning to make samosas. One day he hopes to open a restaurant where he can use her recipe.
“That’s love,” he says. “An old woman making something for one person, and then years later, even after she’s gone, feeding all these different people on the other side of the world.”
It’s more than one word, but Mae doesn’t mind.
Not long after that, Ida returns with a middle-aged Asian couple in tow. “These are our neighbors,” she says, introducing them to Mae and Hugo. “Not in real life. Just on the train. I told them about your project.”
And so they interview the Chens, and then Marcus, their waiter from last night, and then a family of four from Iowa who stop to ask what they’re doing.
By the time lunch starts and Ashwin needs the booth, Mae feels dizzy from all these stories, all the different lives she’s been allowed to glimpse, and she has a list of words to describe love that ranges from togetherness to joy to a 1962 Mustang convertible.
She and Hugo are halfway back to their cabin when they run into Ludovic.
“I heard a rumor that you’re making a movie,” he says, looking at them expectantly, and so they duck into the open area near the doors, and Ludovic puts on his cap and straightens his tie, and Hugo holds the microphone close so they can hear over the rattling of metal on metal.
Later, after they’ve done several more interviews and had lunch and returned to their compartment, Hugo sinks down into his seat with a happy sigh. “So is it my turn now?”
Mae is busy fidgeting with the settings on the camera. “For what?”
“For an interview.”
“I don’t need to interview you. I already know you.
” It takes her a second to realize exactly what she said.
She lifts her eyes to see that he’s looking at her with amusement.
She doesn’t know him; of course she doesn’t.
She only meant that he isn’t a stranger, and even that is only marginally true.
She gives her head a little shake. “The point is to interview strangers.”
“I thought the point was to interview people on trains,” he says with a good-natured smile. He spreads his arms wide. “And here I am. On a train.”
Mae gives him a long look, her heartbeat quickening at the thought of sitting him down for an interview, listening closely as he tells her about his dreams and his fears, about what love means to him.
She wants to know what he would say. All morning as he’s sat beside her, she’s wanted to know.
But something is holding her back. A week ago, she was with Garrett, and Hugo had a girlfriend so serious that they were planning to take this trip together.
A week from now, she’ll be in Los Angeles and he’ll be back in England, almost six thousand miles apart.
“Maybe after Chicago,” she says, putting her camera away.