A Maze
The train rocked.
“The world,” he said.
“What?” She didn’t look up from her book.
“I’ve been traveling the world.”
“Why?” She turned a page.
“Why? What?” he asked.
Out the window green and yellow fields, backed by thick forest, rolled by, kilometer after kilometer.
“Why the world? Why so big? Why not just, Italy? Or France? Or America?” She placed her finger between the pages as a bookmark, closing the covers around her hand.
He smiled into her kind, milky blue eyes. “There’s so much to see, so much to do, so much to eat, so much to drink. The world seemed to make more sense.”
“That’s because you’re so young.” She looked past him, out at the green field with its lone cow watching the train pass.
“I’m not. I’m not young at all. I’m twenty-four.”
She wanted to laugh at the boy, but only smiled. Oh, to be so young again, to still have it all to do. To think there would be time for everything — like her first son. She released her place in the book and touched her finger forgetting she’d removed the wedding band years ago. She said, “Well, you are getting on.”
“There’s chocolate in Switzerland. There’s the wall in China. The British Museum. Egypt’s pyramids and the Sphynx and…” His eyes bore into hers, on fire.
“But, there’s a lot to be said for stability. For family. For playing bridge with your best friends every Saturday night.”
He gasped in exasperation. “You don’t…” He looked into her again, his eyes pleading for her to understand.
She wanted to get back to her book. The opera singer had just won the battle over the box of music with her terrorist captors. She wanted to find out what happened next. Yet, he seemed so desperate for her to understand something.
“If you’re so comfortable at home, why are you here now, riding a train through France?”
She admired his boldness, his rudeness. She’d obviously hurt his feelings. Her son, the one who died, he was so like that, his ego so easily bruised. She wanted to reach out to this boy, to touch his hand, to make him hot chocolate, to encourage him to talk about his expectations of the world, to quell his fears, to bring reality to his expectations.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was rude. It’s just, I…I get so…”
She smiled at him through the tears in her eyes. She’d given up on crying for them all long ago. “I’m fulfilling a promise.” Did it sound as cryptic to him as it felt to her?
“I see.” His voice small, his eyes distant, directed toward the countryside.
They rocked in the train carriage. Amazing, these bullet trains, over a hundred miles an hour, hurtling through tranquil countryside.
“I think you should see it all,” she finally said.
“Really?”
“He wanted to see the world again.”
“Again?” the boy asked.
“He was here in ’43. He survived to the end of the war. He came home. He settled down. But, he never talked about it, not even to our sons…one died in Vietnam.”
“Oh — ”
“And, then our great grandson, he was hurt pretty bad in Iraq. The things they’ve done with wooden legs…”
“I don’t think….”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s mostly metal. Steel and titanium. Technology is amazing… Our son wanted to see the world. He wanted to drink a local beer in every country on the planet. We all laughed at him. I’d give just about anything to buy the first round.”
Water spilled in big drops from the young man’s fiery eyes.
“We stayed home. We…”
He touched her hand, letting his fingers rest on her’s.
“He wanted, my husband wanted his ashes spread on French soil. He wanted to come back one more time, even if it was after he died. It took a long time for me to get him here.” She patted the bag sitting in the seat next to her. “You…you should see it all. Experience the world.”
