The Station They Left Me Behind

The train was white, and that was the first thing I remember thinking, that it was too white for something that had just carried us out of a dead valley. It wasn't cloth or metal. It was light pretending to be a train, long and humming, and it glided on rails I couldn't see beneath us. I was twelve. I had been twelve for four days, but the birthday didn't count anymore because there had been no cake and no candles, only the sound the ground made when it opened. Everyone from our town had died. That was what the conductor told us, in the gentle recorded voice that came through the speakers, in every language at once, the way you'd hear a flight attendant explain oxygen masks. The quake took the whole valley in the space of ninety seconds. Houses, school, church, the diner where my mother worked doubles because we needed the money. All of it folded into the earth. And then the earth folded us out again, if that makes sense, because we woke up in the grass on the other side, and the train was waiting, and a woman in a gray uniform gave me a small blue ticket with my name printed on it. Yara Bell. Seat 14C. My parents were still with me. I remember holding my father's hand at the door, and how warm it was, and how I kept checking that he was real, touching the cuff of his sleeve. My mother stood behind him with her purse over her arm like she had somewhere to be. The dead don't have luggage, but my mother carried her purse anyway. That should have been the warning. The car we sat in had wide windows. Purple hills moved past outside, then rivers and fields, then a low golden sky that never changed and never set. There were other families in the seats around us, other pale faces, other people from the valley, all of them speaking in the low and shocked way you speak when something impossible has just gone right, or wrong, or somewhere in between. There was also Lin — I mean Lila. Lila Naughton. That was her real name. I need to be honest about that, because it matters. She was seventeen, our neighbor, and she had held me on her hip when I was small. Her hair was black and long, and she was wearing a white dress that she had not died in because nothing about that train cared what you had worn the moment you stopped existing. She had a cloth doll in her lap, the old kind, stitched with a face that someone had embroidered into a permanent, curious smile. I remember the doll. That doll came with us the whole way. In the end, it mattered more than I did. We rode for hours. There was food, if you wanted it, and daylight, and the soft recorded voice would come on every so often to announce cities you'd never heard of, no city names you would recognize, all of them with the same two syllables, as if the dead were meant to keep traveling. My mother slept. My father stared out the window. Lila braided and unbraided her hair and cried quietly, and I understood that, because I wanted to cry too but couldn't find the crying. Then the conductor announced the stop. Our stop. The recording said a word like Threshold, and the doors slid open on a platform made of the same pale light, and people began to stand. My mother was awake instantly. She stood and smoothed her skirt. She took my father's arm. She looked at Lila. My father put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Come on, Yara, this is us." And I looked at him, and I believed him. I had no reason not to. I turned to reach for my coat. It slid off the seat onto the floor. I bent to pick it up. The doors began to close. I heard them close. I stood. The window was between me and the platform. Through it I could see my father, my mother, and Lila walking away down the light. Lila was carrying the doll. My mother's hand was on Lila's back, guiding her gently, the way she used to guide me through the mall when I was small and the store was crowded. And around Lila's neck hung a thin cord with a small card on it. My card. My blue ticket. My name. Yara Bell. Seat 14C. It swung against her chest as she walked. I pressed both hands flat against the window. My father turned his head. He saw me through the glass. I saw the exact moment his face changed, the way it flinched, the way he did the thing he does when he is caught doing something wrong, which is not to look at me directly but to look just past me. He said something to my mother. I couldn't hear it. The train started to glide. The platform began to slide backward. My father took a step toward the window and raised his hands. I saw his mouth shape two words that I will hear for as long as there is an as long as. "Jump down." The train was moving now. The platform was moving away no faster than a slow walk, but the gap under the door had grown into something with no floor beneath it, just a long pale drop into nothing, into a light that somehow went down instead of up. I stood at the window and I did not move. Because the doors were sealed. Because I am not brave, or maybe because I am, in a way that has nothing to do with jumping. Because the card with my name was around Lila's neck, and the recorded voice was already announcing the next stop, in a tone so gentle it made me want to scream. The speaker said, "Next stop. The gate below." My father was running along the platform now, keeping up with the window. My mother stood still, one hand to her mouth. Lila had stopped and turned. She looked at me with wide blank eyes, and then she touched the card at her throat, and something in her face changed. Not fear. Recognition. My father pressed his hand to the glass, palm out, like he could reach through it. His mouth was working. I watched him say, "Okay. Okay. So we'll just, you'll get off at the next stop, and Mom and I will be there. We'll meet you there, Yara. It's fine. It's going to be fine." Next to him, my mother was already putting her purse over her shoulder and turning to look for the sign that pointed to the exit. The window closed nothing. It was just light and glass and the sound of the train beginning to move faster, and my father running, and then not running, and then standing still, and then getting smaller. I watched him until I could not tell which small shape was him anymore. Then I sat down in seat 14C, alone, and the purple hills turned into something darker, and the light in the train began, very gradually, to dim. The recorded voice came on one more time, calmly, kindly, in a tone that sounded like my mother used to sound when I was small and terrified of the dark. "Our next stop is the gate below," it said. "Please have your name ready." I looked down at my hands. I didn't have my name anymore. I had watched it walk away down a platform, swinging on a cord against another girl's chest, and I had watched the two people who should have counted above everything let it happen and then plan my schedule around it. The train rattled softly. The light outside went gray. I was not twelve anymore, not really. By the time the gate came, I would be something else. I could feel it starting. I could feel the cold of it moving up from my hands into my arms, like being pulled, slowly and gently, toward whatever my father had not been able to see when he told me to jump down into a place with no floor. Down there, they would have my name. Down there, I might not. I pressed my forehead against the window and watched the light go.