2
Wyatt
The train station outside was black, and the train window had frost on it. End of the line, or almost. I dug my fingernails into the seat. The wind howled in a way I wasn’t used to, would never get used to, almost like a human voice. If I tried, I could probably decipher the shapes of things I’d seen on a childhood trip upstate. Back then, Mom had been with me, pointing things out: mountains, a cute farmhouse. Now, I was alone, and outside the train there was nothing. Mom had suggested I come here. I didn’t know why. Or I did know why, but I wasn’t sure it made sense. For the past twenty miles or more, I had stared at my own reflection, my dark hair fading into the darker background of the wilderness.
It wasn’t that I missed home. I hadn’t been away long enough for that, just a few hours on the train. Or maybe I’d been away longer than I thought. “Emotional distance,” the school psychologist would call it, had called it the three times I had been brought in to “discuss things.” Maybe the rest of my life would be like this, a series of train stations, none more meaningful than the others. Maybe that would be better, to be disconnected from everyone, so no one could hurt me—or be hurt by me either.
But probably, any train station would be better than this. Slakkill, New York, sounded more like a crime than a town. Since leaving Penn Station, with its bright lights, Christmas music, and bustling tourists, the stations had become steadily bleaker until this one: unmanned, freezing, nothing but a platform in the middle of the grim, Adirondack wilderness.
My copy of Wuthering Heights (required reading for my online virtual school class) had fallen onto the floor when I’d dozed off. I scooped it into my backpack and pulled my duffel bag from the overhead bin. The only other people exiting at Slakkill were a mother with a little girl, staring straight ahead. No one was waiting for me on the snow-covered platform. I used my coat collar to protect my face against the bitter cold.
Suddenly, the little girl began to scream. “Mommy! Mommy!”
“Quiet!” the woman said.
“But I forgot my bunny! My bunny!”
“What? Then, it’s gone. The train’s leaving.”
The little girl was crying. The door was still open, and I was closer to it. I dropped my duffel bag on the ground and ran inside the train, not even knowing why I was doing it. The bunny, frayed and more gray than white, was in the middle of the floor. I grabbed it and ran out, nearly slipping on the icy platform. The mother and daughter had already started to leave, though the little girl was struggling and bridging up the way toddlers do when they’re angry. I ran after them. “Here.” I shoved it into the girl’s hands.
If I’d expected a thank-you, I got none. I said, “Hey, do you know if there’s a pay phone?”
Maybe the woman didn’t hear me, but I thought she did. In any case, she shielded her daughter’s face with her hands and kept walking to the stairs. Nice. I could have been stuck on the train if the door had closed, stuck and bound for someplace even farther north and colder than Slakkill. At least the little girl had stopped crying.
I returned to my duffel bag and checked my phone. No bars. No surprise. Once we got out of the Catskills, reception had been patchy from a combination of too many mountains and trees, too few cell phone towers. The Adirondacks were worse. What kind of animals were these people? Occasionally, you could send a text, but I hadn’t because there was no one I wanted to text. They’d all forgotten me, my friends. Maybe I hoped they would. Anyway, now, there were no bars at all.
But cell phones were a necessity of life, especially when someone was supposed to pick you up at the train station at midnight in the middle of nowhere. I had a name, Celeste Greenwood, the mother of my mom’s childhood friend, and a phone number. Without a phone to call from, though, those facts were useless. Tomorrow’s commuters (if there even were any) would be greeted by the pathetic sight of my preserved, frozen body when they arrived the next morning.
I tried the number anyway. Sure enough, the phone flashed, “No service.”
The sound of the train’s wheels echoed in my head, the lights getting smaller in the distance as it sped away, blending with the way too many stars, which would have been pretty if they hadn’t been so lonely. There was nothing here, no lights or people, only darkness and stars and one train platform in the wilderness.
I shivered and looked for a pay phone.
“You Wyatt?” a voice asked.
I started. The guy—if it was a guy under all the layers of coats and scarves—had sneaked up on me, making me once again consider my mortality in this place. It was a campfire story waiting to happen. . . . And then, the claw-handed man grabbed the teenager and he was never heard from again.
I looked down at the stranger’s hands. No claws. “What?” I said. Then, I didn’t know why. My name was, in fact, Wyatt, a name that my mom, who’d been nineteen when I was born, had gotten from a soap opera. It was a Long Island name, a name that didn’t belong to me anymore, as I didn’t belong to Long Island anymore. “Yeah, I’m Wyatt.”
The guy was tall, taller than me, even though I was six feet. He moved his scarf down a bit so I could see his face enough to tell he was about my age, about seventeen. “I’m Josh. That all you have?” He pointed to the duffel and the backpack that held what were now all my worldly possessions.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Don’t be sure. It gets cold here, much colder than Long Island.” He said “Long Island” with the same kind of scorn people in Long Island used to talk about “the sticks.”
As if on cue, I shivered again. “There’s always online shopping.” I cursed my teeth for chattering. I looked like a wuss.
“If Old Lady Greenwood even has the internet.” He gestured for me to follow him. The platform was slippery, and I had to step carefully, so for a minute, we didn’t talk.
“How old is she?” I finally asked.
Josh shrugged. “A hundred or so. I didn’t know she even knew anyone. We live up the road from her, and my mom makes me check on her sometimes. She says it’s to be neighborly, but really, I think it’s to make sure she hasn’t dropped dead. Around here, they might not notice for months.” He laughed.
I laughed too, even though I didn’t really think it was funny. A chill wind whistled down the tracks.
“Anyway, I’ve never seen anyone around there.”
We reached the staircase. It was even icier than the platform, and I struggled to pull the duffel bag down it. I slid and grabbed the railing. Stupid. Josh could see I obviously didn’t have much experience with the elements. He just waited, watching me, beside a beat-up red pickup. Walking to that was no easier, so we didn’t speak again until I’d reached it—Josh had left it running—and until my teeth had stopped chattering.
“My mom was friends with her daughter,” I said.
Silence. We pulled onto a road that was nothing but pine trees, no gas stations, nothing else in sight. Finally, Josh said, “I heard she had a daughter who disappeared.”
My mother had said something similar, that Danielle had gone wild, apparently, after my mother’s family had moved to Long Island. Then, she disappeared, probably ran away. “Yeah, my mother told me something about that. She didn’t really know what happened.”
Josh didn’t answer, and the wind whipped through the trees. The night was moonless, black. Finally, he said, “Dunno. It happened a while ago. My dad says he doesn’t remember much, except he said the police didn’t look very hard when she disappeared. He figures the girl ran away. Lots of people do.”
“That’s understandable.”
“How so?”
Awkward. “Well, I mean, it doesn’t seem real exciting here. Maybe she wanted to go to the city or something.”
“So you think all we do around here is hang out at Stewart’s all weekend?”
I knew Stewart’s was like a 7-Eleven, and if I’d thought about it, that would have been what I’d thought. But I said, “No, of course not.”
He grinned. Now that it was warm, I could see his face, a sort of goofy face that suited the jock he obviously was. He looked like the type of guy I’d have hung with at home.
Home.
“Actually, that sort of is what we do on weekends. I was just messing with you.”
I laughed. Nervously. “Oh, okay.”
“You should come sometime. It might not be much, but it’s all we’ve got.”
I nodded. “Maybe so.” I thought about what he’d said, Lots of people do. Do what? Run away? Or disappear? How many people was lots?
“Are you starting school here after vacation?” Josh asked.
“No. I’m taking these online classes, so I guess she’ll have to get internet.”
The questions hung between us. Why had I moved? Why here? Why wasn’t I going to school? I huddled in my coat, willing my teeth to chatter, letting the cold serve as an excuse for why I wasn’t volunteering the information. But Josh wasn’t asking, and for that, I was glad. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to get involved with people here. New people I’d only disappoint. The creepy old lady and her missing daughter, who my mom said had probably ended up in a ditch—they sounded more my speed.
We drove in silence another mile or so. At one point, I checked Josh’s speedometer. He was going ninety. No one noticed or cared. That seemed to describe a lot of things around here. Finally, he slowed at a mailbox with no name on it, just the number 18. He turned and drove down a private drive that was maybe another quarter mile long. At the end of it was a house, two stories high with dark windows. Even with just the porch light, I could see it was in disrepair, a shade of gray that was more neglect than paint. Josh took a key from the cup holder. “She said let yourself in.”
I stumbled from the car. The frigid wind hit me worse than before, and inside my gloves, my fingers felt like stiff wires, making it almost impossible to pull my bag from the bed of Josh’s pickup. Finally, I wrested it out. I started to wave good-bye to Josh.
He rolled down the window. “Wyatt?”
“Yeah?” I stopped. The wind rolled under my hat and through my ears. I could only see his outline in the shadowy truck.
“Good luck, man.”