Field Notes on Love(63)

But instead she looks at him seriously. “Someone who doesn’t know very much about it.”

In the hallway, the family staying in the compartment next door trundles past, the voices of the younger kids bouncing around the train. When they’re gone, Hugo leans forward, resting his elbows on the wobbly table between them.

“In fact,” he says, grinning at her, “I was going to say ‘pizza.’?”

She tosses a pen at him, and he ducks. “You were not.”

“I was,” he says, though this isn’t quite true. The question has been on his mind all week, through every interview and the hours spent with Mae in between, but he hasn’t been able to come up with something that captures it. The truth is, love isn’t just one word. At least not to him. It’s different things for different people.

With Margaret, love was like a blanket, mostly warm and comforting, but occasionally itchy and, toward the end, a bit frayed too.

His parents don’t have a word at all. Instead, when he thinks of them, what he pictures is the doorframe in the kitchen where they mark off their heights each year. It’s so crowded with scratches and initials that most visitors assume it was something that the children scribbled on when they were younger. To Hugo, though, it measures something more than simply their heights.

    For Alfie, the word is friend, which is somehow bigger than any of the others that might fit too: brother, sibling, family. Isla is comfort, and George is steadiness, the twin guardians of their little pack. For Poppy, who is always the brightest, it’s laughter. And Oscar would hate having a word. He’d much prefer some line of code that nobody else can understand.

The six of them taken together would have to be a different word entirely, of course, and there have certainly been enough used to describe them over the years. But they don’t always have to be taken together. Hugo understands that now more than ever.

He doesn’t have a word for Mae yet. Her very nearness makes it impossible to think of any words at all sometimes. Right now she’s more of a feeling, but even that is impossible to describe.

“Pizza,” he says again. “Definitely pizza.”

She shakes her head in mock exasperation. “Okay, fine. Then why?”

“Because,” he says with a shrug, “it’s warm and gooey.”

This makes her laugh. “Right. Can’t argue with that. What else?”

“And it’s always delicious.”

“And?”

“There are loads of choices. Everyone can have their own version of it.”

“And?”

He pauses for a moment, thinking. “And I always thought it was amazing,” he says, laughter bubbling up inside him for no reason other than that he’s happy right now, so happy it feels too big to contain. “But if I’m being honest, I didn’t know how amazing it could be until this week.”

    A few seconds later, there’s a knock, and when Azar pokes her head in to ask about lunch reservations, they’re both still sitting like that, beaming at each other, lost in a universe all their own. It almost feels to Hugo like he’s been underwater, and when he turns to the door, everything seems dreamy and slow.

“Last meal,” says Azar, which makes Hugo laugh.

“Will there be pizza?”

“Not in the dining car,” she says. “But I think they have those frozen ones at the snack bar. They’re probably not too bad.”

“No such thing as a bad pizza,” Hugo says. “What do you say?”

Mae is grinning at him, which is a relief. Because right now Hugo has no interest in the dining car. He doesn’t want to make small talk with strangers or interview anyone else. He doesn’t want to chat about the weather or listen to people’s plans for their time in the Bay Area.

He just wants to sit with Mae, alone in their own corner of the train.

“Pizza it is,” she says, her eyes glittering.

They eat out of little cardboard trays in front of the huge sloping windows of the observation car. At one end, there’s a historian giving a lecture about the Donner party, and at the other, a group of women are in stitches over something, their scattered bursts of laughter giving the whole car a cheery feel.

“So,” Mae says when she’s finished with her pizza. Her trainers are propped on the ledge beneath the window, her knees drawn up nearly to her chest. Below them, the green-tipped mountains have tumbled away, and the canyon makes it feel like they too could topple off the edge at any minute. It should be frightening, but it’s not.

    It’s electrifying, being on the edge of all that stillness.

“So,” he says.

“Are you going to see her?”

Hugo doesn’t pretend not to know whom she’s talking about. “I think so,” he says without looking over. “I think maybe we still have things to say to each other.”

“That makes sense,” Mae says, and there’s no malice in her voice. No hint of annoyance or jealousy. “I think you should.”

They reach out at the same time, their hands brushing against each other in the gap between the seats, fumbling for a second before they manage to grab hold.

“Hey, how’d they decide which surname you got?” Hugo asks. “Your dads.”