“It won’t be so bad, Hugo,” says Poppy, but before he has a chance to find out which part she’s talking about—the apology to Mae or the end of the trip, the return home or the start of uni—the video cuts out.
There’s a speck of dirt on the window, and Hugo watches it move up and down as they pass fields of horses and cattle, sheep and goats. At a crossing, a rancher leans out of his pickup truck to watch them rumble by, and beyond him a field of wildflowers ripples in the wind.
After a few minutes, he slips his phone into his pocket and stands up.
Mae is in the observation car, sitting alone at one of the tables. Her head is bent over her camera as he slides into the booth across from her.
“That’s Mr. Bernstein’s seat.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Bernstein,” she says. “We’re in the middle of an interview. He was just telling me about proposing to his wife before he went off to Vietnam.”
“For the war?”
“No, for vacation.” She looks up at him. “I’m kidding.”
“Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry about before.”
She gives him a steady look. “Which part?”
“All of it,” he says.
“You don’t have to be sorry about Margaret, you know,” she says, fiddling with the lens of her camera. “You have every right to see her. There’s a lot of history there, and—”
“I know,” he says. “But I am sorry about the film. I shouldn’t have watched it. Full stop. I betrayed your trust, which was an awful thing to do. And I’m also sorry about—”
“Hugo.”
“Look, I know I probably shouldn’t have said it like that. But I want you to know it wasn’t a mistake. That’s how I feel. I like you, Mae. A lot. This week has been incredible because of you, and I swear—” He stops abruptly, looking up at the old man in too-high trousers who is suddenly hovering over him.
“You must be the assistant director,” Mr. Bernstein says, shaking his hand. “Are you going to ask some questions too?”
Hugo finds himself nodding.
Mr. Bernstein looks pleased. “Well, what would you like to know?”
“I’d like to know,” Hugo says, then turns back to Mae, “if you feel the same way.”
“About what?” Mr. Bernstein asks, clearly confused.
But they both ignore this. Mae is staring at Hugo, whose heart has lodged itself somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. He digs his fingernails into his palm as he waits for her to say something. But her expression is impossible to read.
A year seems to go by.
Then another.
Oh god, Hugo thinks. What have I done?
Mr. Bernstein is still watching them, and Hugo can feel his face heating up. Beneath them the train sways as they move deeper into the red, jagged mountains, which rise on either side of them like the landscape of some strange and distant dream.
And maybe that’s all this is, anyway: a dream.
Maybe arriving will be no different from waking up.
With each second that passes, he becomes more and more certain this was a terrible mistake, a colossal disaster, an absolute bollocks of an idea.
But then her foot finds his beneath the table, and when he looks up at her, she’s smiling.
His heart loosens itself again, a cork coming free from a bottle, and he’s so overcome with relief that it’s all he can do to stay upright. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she nods, a movement so slight that it would be hard to catch if you weren’t looking for it.
Hugo grins back at her from across the table.
“So are we doing this or what?” Mr. Bernstein says, looking from one to the other, and Mae laughs, still looking right at Hugo.
“I guess we’re doing this,” she says.
“Your turn,” she says when they get back to their compartment after dinner. They’re in Utah now, and the sky is soft and pale, the mountains turning to silhouettes all around them. Hugo’s forehead is pressed to the window, where below them a narrow river runs placidly alongside the tracks.
He turns around in surprise. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But I thought you didn’t want me to be part of it.”
She studies him for a moment, the brown eyes and the dark hair, the way his mouth is twisted so that only one dimple shows. The collar of his shirt is messed up, and for some reason this makes her heart swell. She leans across to fix it, their faces close, her fingers brushing his neck, and then—unable to help herself—she gives him a quick kiss before sitting back again.
“I changed my mind,” she tells him.
His mouth twists in the other direction. “But why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I want to hear your answers.”
This isn’t exactly true, but it’s not exactly untrue either. And it makes him smile. “Well, Mr. Bernstein will be a tough act to follow,” he says. “Same with that teacher—June? She nearly had me in tears.”
“Nearly?” Mae asks, and Hugo reaches out to grab her around the waist, laughing as he pulls her down onto the seat with him. She’s balanced awkwardly, half on his lap and half wedged beside him, but it doesn’t matter because he’s already kissing her, this time with a kind of desperate intensity. When—after a few minutes—they break apart, both breathing heavily, he leans forward and kisses her one last time on the tip of her nose.
“So,” he says, shifting over so she can sit beside him, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on a seat meant for one. “Twenty-one hours to San Francisco.”
Mae feels the air go whistling right out of her. Suddenly that doesn’t seem like very much at all. “And then another sixteen till I leave for LA,” she says.
“And then another twenty-four till I go back to England.”
She puts her head on his shoulder, and he rests his chin on the top of her head. “It’s not enough.”
“No,” he says, his voice heavy, “it isn’t.”
She looks past him to where the last few wispy clouds are laced with gold. Utah and then Nevada and then California. She’s hardly thought about the fact that she’ll be starting college next week, that all she has to do is cross a few more states and head south along the coast and then she’s there, in the place where she’ll be spending the next four years.
“Your world is going to get so big,” Nana told her before she left, and Mae marvels at how much it already has, with Hugo here beside her and the enormous western sky rolled out ahead of them. They spent the whole day doing interviews, and now her head is filled with stories, all of them buzzing madly. She can’t wait to piece them together, all these lives that have intersected as they wind their way across the country for different reasons.
She was lying about Hugo, though.
It’s not that she’s changed her mind about interviewing him. She still doesn’t think he belongs in the film. It’s something else. Something more important than that.
It came to her earlier, when he was sitting on the other side of the table in the café car, his face nervous as he waited for the answer to a question he hadn’t even really been able to formulate. Mae realized that no matter what happens over the course of these next twenty-one hours on a train and then sixteen hours in San Francisco, they’ll have to say goodbye at the end of it.
And she’s going to miss him.
It doesn’t seem like a big enough word, but it’s all there is: she’ll miss him. Already, and improbably, it feels like a hole has started to open in her chest. So she decided she wants to take something with her. If she can’t keep all of him, she at least wants to try capturing a tiny piece.
“How does this work, then?” Hugo asks, noticing her eyes are on the camera, which is sitting on the shelf beside the opposite seat. “Do I get the same questions as everyone else? Or do I get special ones because I’m so—”
“Annoying?” she asks with a grin.
He bumps his shoulder against hers. “I was going to say charming. But sure.”
“You get the same ones as everyone else.”
“You know,” he says, “if I were interviewing you—”
“Which you’re not.”
“—I’d never ask you the standard questions.”
“What would you ask?”
He thinks about this. “I’d ask you the best advice your nana ever gave you.”
“She said I should try to meet a cute boy on the train,” she says, and Hugo lets out a laugh.
“Did she really?” he asks, incredulous.