The Mystery of Hollow Places(58)

Risking my prime spot on the bench, I hustle over to the trash can and stuff my Sugarbrook ticket inside. With that decision symbolically made, I start rehearsing my speech for Dad, hoping I get the chance to make it tonight.

Mostly, trains are great. I’ve taken the rail lots of times with Dad, because it’s even cheaper than parking in Boston, and often quicker than driving alongside M*s at rush hour. The ride is even kind of peaceful. You can sit back and watch the trees blur by, and the fields, and the lakes like big silver coins. Trains are reliable and punctual; if the schedule says you’ll be at Yawkey at 5:55 p.m., you’ll probably be swimming upstream through the sweaty, noisy, beery crowds outside Fenway by six.

Except when it’s really hot, and they slow the trains way down so the heat won’t swell the steel and make the tracks all squiggly. Then again, they sometimes run late when it rains and an important patch of track floods, so everything has to shuffle around the water. And of course, there are delays when a conductor’s out sick, or when a passenger falls down in the tiny bathroom and the whole line backs up for a medical emergency.

And when it’s been snowing steadily all day, with six more inches set to fall before the weather clears in the early morning? Sometimes the trains stop completely.

I watch the big electronic boards at North Station flash CANCELED, CANCELED, CANCELED down the list. Most unfortunately, among them is the 10:40 train on the Newburyport/Rockport line, the last one that stops in Newburyport until the 6:30 a.m. train.

Dropping down on a bench far away from the drafty track doors, I look out on the flotsam of stranded people. There’s a lot of frantic phone-calling, probably to best friends or parents or boyfriends. Some are stretching out on benches and in corners, buried deep inside the hoods of their coats, using backpacks as pillows. None of my (admittedly wobbly) plans involved spending the night in a big city train station. Even as I watch, it’s clearing out, two Dunkin’ Donuts and the Crazy Dough Pizza stand closed, McDonald’s closing, stranded passengers flushing back out into the snow. I pull my bag into my lap and hug my knees to my chest. This is just the latest of at least a dozen rules I’ve broken in the What Girls Shouldn’t Do Ever handbook. Still, I rip off my strawberry hat, pull up my hood, and settle in for a long night. It’s just like sleeping in an airport, I tell myself, except slightly stupider.

Of course, I could still head to the payphone bank and call my stepmother to come get me. She’ll never let me go to Victory Island, but I can convince her to call Officer Griffin. The police can find Dad; he could be home with us tomorrow night, everything put back the way it was.

And everything I have to say to him will have waited until I’ve lost the guts to say it, so it will never get said. We’ll go on the same way we have been, till the next bad time.

I bury my hands in my pockets. Knocking past the geode, my fingertips find the greasy metal of the hotel room key. Sidonie gave it to me before I left Windham; I told her I wanted it, and she didn’t complain.

The plain little key is light in my palm, with a yellowed plastic tag dangling from the cap. The Tiki Motel, it reads in swirly font. A silly, Hawaiian-themed motel that might be closed and condemned, for all I know. Maybe Dad’s in a Super 8 somewhere along the shore. Or Dad isn’t at Victory Island at all. Maybe he’s waiting on a bench by a random duck pond in Malden. Or, Jesus, Miami Beach.

But no. Joshua Zhi Scott, after all, is a connect-the-dots, picture-in-the-stars kind of guy.

“Now arriving at . . . Newburyport,” the pleasant, prerecorded voice over the train speakers wakes me up early on Thursday morning. Flinching in the glare of the just-risen sun, I slide upright against the cold window, toweling drool off my chin with my coat sleeve. Classy, Imogene. Pulling my gloves on, I squeeze down the aisle and spill out the doors onto the vaguely familiar concrete platform. A handful of shivering passengers shove roughly past me to get inside. I’m dead tired and hungry and cold, but I don’t blame them. At least the snow has passed and the blue-gray sky is clear over the deserted parking lots that sandwich the platform.

Lindy must be awake in Sugarbrook—according to the train schedule, it’s got to be seven thirty—but then again, I doubt she went to bed last night. She’s going to slaughter me when I find my way home. I’ve broken so many rules, girl-specific and otherwise, that I wouldn’t put it past her to have me homeschooled till graduation. Maybe home-colleged after that.

I pick my way across the messy sidewalks out onto Boston Way, where a few taxis idle. I knock on one window and ask if twenty bucks will get me to Victory Island. It will.

The lobby of the Tiki Motel is surprisingly spacious, but the brown-speckled carpeting and flowered yellow wallpaper aren’t exactly elegant. Sidonie was right; the décor is a laugh. Over the front desk is a fake thatched roof, fake tropical birds pinned in the plastic straws. Artwork hangs on the walls, pictures of the sea in every size and color frame. I’m no expert—no assistant to the curator of prints and drawings—but none of it is museum quality. Except for one familiar print by the luggage cart. Small fishermen in a small boat on inky waters. A wistful dream of plentiful food. It seems unlikely that the place hasn’t been remodeled in seventeen years, but my mother did say she knew straightaway that this was the place for them.

All of a sudden, it’s depressing that this ridiculous tourist trap, which once meant so much to my parents and, I’m hoping, still means so much to Dad, never crossed her mind, not even after she heard his message. She really did leave us in the past.