February Fever (7 page)

Thirteen

The lemon dill cod
was not great, but because Mrs. Berns was watching me with her know-it-all face, I swallowed every last bite. Terry held his own in the conversation, maintaining a friendly/evasive style of chatter. I didn't mind, and even Mrs. Berns seemed to warm up to him toward the end. She and I were on our second helping of free ice cream, the cutest little cups of Häagen-Dazs with a wooden spoon magically included as part of the lid, when he excused himself.

“You're not going to the Valentine's dance?” Mrs. Berns asked as he pushed in his chair.

He shook his head. “I'm no Fred Astaire under the best of circumstances. I don't think I should try on a train.”

I watched him walk away, his bulk dominating the aisle, the ice cream expanding in my throat. “I'm also not a Fred Astaire. What's this Valentine's hoedown of which you speak?”

Mrs. Berns refilled my glass of merlot from the hobo half-bottle we'd ordered. We'd both commented that we should have simply brought the free champagne from our car. Next time.

“Not a ‘hoedown,' though that'd be a hoot. Just a Valentine's dance. Jed, you coming?”

He stretched long, like a cat. “I say nay. It's been a long day, and I'm ready to hit the hay.” His eyes lit up. “Did you hear that? I rhymed! Maybe I should learn to rap.”

“Maybe,” I said, accepting his goodnight hug. “Sleep tight. You know where our room is if you need anything.” I dropped a generous tip for Reed on the table—the least I could do considering Mrs. Berns was currently paying for everything else—and waited impatiently for her to finish her ice cream.

“For someone who didn't want to go to a dance, you sure are antsy about getting there.”

I pointed behind her. “Do you see that long line still waiting to eat? I want to give them a chance.”

“Fine, but from where I'm sitting, it sure looks like you want to get your dance on.” She stood, wiggling her hips suggestively. “Hey, speaking of a
hoedown
, you know what another weird word is?” Before I could speak, she answered her own question. “
Boy howdy
. That's something a woman should never say.”

The train lurched as I stood. I grabbed my chair for balance. That's when I realized I was more than a little tipsy. My cutback on alcohol the last year was making me a definite lightweight.

“You're absolutely right,” I said, following her down the narrow aisle. She was swaying as much as I was, and it wasn't all the train's fault. “You wanna hear something else weird? Why is swearing so bad? It's just words. It's like, you can't wear your bra and underwear outside, but call it a bikini, and it's just fine.”

She put her hand out and grabbed onto a bald man's head for support. “You're right!”

I nodded even though she couldn't see me. “I know.”

We continued to pinball our way down the aisle, past the line of hungry-looking people still waiting for their spot in the dining car, and all the way to Car 6, one ahead of the viewing car. Mrs. Berns entered first. It was full of coach seats, almost all of them taken, some of them holding sleeping passengers.

“Where's the party?” she asked, a little bit too loudly.

“One down,” a woman in a nearby aisle seat said, placing her finger in the page of the book she was reading. “Can't you hear the music?”

I couldn't hear it
exactly, but I could feel it. A bass-thumping was faintly massaging our feet.

“You wanna go party with us?” Mrs. Berns asked the woman. She was maybe in her mid-fifties, hair pulled back in a messy bun, an AmeriTrain-issued blanket pulled over her lap.

The woman held up her book. I recognized the cover of a bestseller that had been on the waiting list at the library since its release three months earlier. “No thanks. I've got a good read. Besides, I'm not really a mingling sort of person.”

I was really beginning to like train people. They were a sensible lot on the whole. And then there was Mrs. Berns. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the stairs.

And that's where we descended into the seventh level of hell.

Fourteen

The bottom level of
Car 6 must have been used for storage on regular routes. On the Valentine Train, however, it was home to swirling disco balls, heart cut-outs, karaoke, a set-up bar, and sweaty bodies either trying to dance or to stand upright. It's hard to tell the difference on a moving train.

Mrs. Berns didn't hesitate. She strode to the center of the car, clearing a path like Moses through the Red Sea, and proceeded to drop it like it was hot. The dancers surrounding her, average age twenty-four, made room.

Someone hollered into my ear. “Would you like to dance?”

I was on the top step, having not yet found the courage (or motivation, really) to enter the dance floor. I'd been too distracted to notice Chad of the roomette approach me. I thought that if he was a knight, that'd be his name. Chad of the Roomette. I giggled.

“People don't usually laugh when I ask them to dance,” he said, hands in pockets, yelling over the music. He smiled shyly. “Oh wait, they do.”

And there he went, playing the only card that would have worked on me: guilt. I stepped onto the floor. “Just one dance,” I said, moving close so I wouldn't have to yell. I held up my pointer finger to underscore my seriousness. “And it's just a dance. I have a boyfriend.”

“Oh.” His face fell.

“Seriously?” I asked. “How old are you? Nineteen? Twenty?”

“Twenty-one, I swear!”

“Yeah, well, I'm thirty. If you want a cougar, she's the queen.” I pointed toward Mrs. Berns, who was twerking against a very happy-looking twenty-something.

“No cougar, just some fun.” He held out his hand.

I let him lead me onto the floor. The person next in karaoke chose “It's Raining Men,” which, from any perspective, is a crap-poor song to dance to with a kid who is crushing on you while your belly is beginning to talk to you about that fish you ordered while you're on a train en route to your boyfriend in Portland. You could argue that no song works under these circumstances, to which I'd counteroffer “Dream On,” “Don't Speak,” and “Let It Be.”

I tried hard, I really did. I kept a solid four inches between us, used my best “I'm old enough to be your teacher” face, and wiggled gamely, hands in the air because it was too packed to put them anywhere else. I was actually beginning to enjoy myself a bit—dancing is good for the soul—when the train took a deeper-than-usual lurch, sending the karaoke singer and machine into the far wall and someone into my back. Except for the sudden silence caused by the music stopping, this would have been no big deal, except whoever fell into me did so at such an angle that I fell forward. And into Chad.

This also wouldn't have been terrible except that he was simultaneously unsettled by the force. Hands windmilling in the air, he shot backward as I shot forward, nothing to grab onto with my arms, the first point of contact my face.

And his crotch.

There are some things in this life you can recover from—accidentally forgetting to wear pants on the day you have to give your big speech, sneeze-farting on a first date, maybe even asking a man with a prosthetic arm if he is armed—but crotch-diving into a strange boy who is crushing on you in a bizarre pocket of silence when a train car full of people are staring at you is a bell you cannot unring.

He helped me up, the karaoke singer caught her balance, and the machine was righted. The music resumed, but it was too late. The damage was done.

“I think I need to go,” I said. My nose felt red and inflamed, and I probably I had the imprint of his jeans snap burned into my forehead like a third eye. People were clearly talking about us, laughing behind their hands and tipping their heads in our general shamed direction.

To his credit, Chad was so uncomfortable that he couldn't make eye contact. “It's fine,” he said. “I fell too.”

Really? Into someone else's pork and beans? No, you just lost your balance a little? Next.

“It's not that,” I lied. I could smell his body spray and realized it was not coming off of him, but rather was now the scent of my face. “I'm just all danced out.” Ack. I was a better liar than that, but I wanted nothing more than to return to my cabin, close the sliding door, and scrub my face in the tiny bathroom.

Mrs. Berns appeared behind me. “Time to go, sunshine.”

Thank god. I was too relieved to even ask her why she wanted to leave so early. Amateur move on my part.

“By the way, next time you need to blow … your nose, you could just ask for a tissue.” Her cackles carried her all the way up
the stairs.
“Or, if you give head”—she paused here just long enough for the hot red blush to creep to my hairline—“… 's up to me, I'll just lend you a hanky.”

She was laughing so hard she struggled to reach the top landing. I pursed my lips and asked the obvious. “I take it you saw me fall into him?”

“You surprise me.” Tears were coming down her cheeks from laughing so hard. I knew those other two jokes had just been warm-ups. I braced myself for the king zinger. “You come off as so uptight, like you don't even want to dance. Next thing I know, you're playing pin the face on the donkey. Don't get me wrong, I applaud your get-up-and-go, it's just that …”

Wait for it. Wait for it.

“Most of us peel the banana before we eat it.”

That's it. She was lost in a sea of hilarity. It took until we passed through the top floor of Car 6 and into the viewing car before she had herself under control. Whereas the upper floor of Car 6 had been trying to wind down for the night despite the bass-thumping happening underfoot, Car 7 was alive with the sound of too many bodies.

Since all the other cars were sleepers, it made sense that people would congregate in the viewing car for after-hours fun. Not only was it the only place to buy food and drinks outside of the dining car, which closed at 9:30, but also it didn't follow the 10:00 mandatory quiet time like the coach class and sleeper cars did.

“It's as full as a tick in here,” a woman nearby grumbled.

I glanced over at her and nodded in agreement. The car was standing-room only, and there was barely that. When the train rocked, as it was wont to do, we all lurched together like a big sardine wave.

“Outta my way,” Mrs. Berns hollered over the mass of people standing between us and the other end of the car. It was no use. Her voice melded with the chatter, and we were left inching through the breath and scents of a motley group.

We'd gone all of four inches when the color green caught my eye. I stood on my tippy-toes to see around or over most of the warm bodies; my gaze landed on the man wearing army fatigues, the same fellow who had been suspiciously watchful of others at the Fargo train station. (Of course, I'd also been watching him, but I
knew
me, so that made it okay.)

Fatigues was maybe six people away and to my right, and he made me even more uncomfortable up close. He wasn't talking to anyone, just leaning against the glass and holding a plastic cup of what looked like beer next to his cheek. It was the look in his eyes that sent my radar beeping. They were dark and deepset, with a chilling, happy light in them—the creepy joy you see in the face of a sick kid who thinks it's funny to set off firecrackers in a live frog's mouth or squeeze a cat into a microwave.

I found myself leaning in his direction, searching for some identifying feature—a last name on the front of the uniform, a unique necklace or ring on the hand holding the beer—when he glanced up, locking eyes with me. My neck grew instantly cold, and I knew what it felt like to be a fly in the palm of that sick boy's hand. His expression didn't change. If anything, it intensified, and a smile began to form on his thin lips.

“Move,” I grunted to Mrs. Berns.

“You sure you wouldn't rather have me fly? Or possibly lay an egg? Because either of those would be easier at this point.” She turned, probably to swat me, and saw my face. “What's wrong with you? You sick?”

Now that she mentioned it, my tummy gurgles were getting … oilier. Dang fish. But that wasn't the reason for my current discomfort. The train lurched again, and just like that, my eye contact with Fatigues was broken. “There's a creepy guy over by the window,” I whispered, as if my voice could have been heard above the thrum of thirty different conversations.

“Yeah, there's a bunch of 'em,” Mrs. Berns said. “It's the Valentine Train.”

“This one is extra ishy.” I gave her a nudge at the same time two people in front of her miraculously found room to squeeze to the side, and we moved forward nearly twelve inches.

“Noel!”

“What?” Mrs. Berns tried to follow my gaze, but she was too short. It wouldn't have mattered because my story would have made little sense. Ahead, standing in line at the snack counter, stood the woman who'd bumped into me at the Detroit Lakes train station, the girl with the Velveteen Rabbit perched on her hip. Both of them appeared like they'd just been released from the gulag, their faces drawn, eyes drooping. The little girl had tear tracks down her cheeks.

We moved forward another fourteen inches as the mom made it to the counter.

“Do you have warm milk?” Her voice was soft, but I was close enough now to hear her request.

The server behind the counter shook his head. “Afraid not, but I can sell you the milk, and you can bring it downstairs and heat it in the public microwave.”

She nodded gratefully.

The server must have noticed the same pitiful expression I'd observed, because he offered her a glass of ice water while he rummaged in the mini-fridge behind him for milk. She accepted the water, barely sipped from it, and slid him a five-dollar bill when he handed her the small carton.

She didn't wait for the change.

“Ma'am?” he called after her. “Ma'am, the milk was only a dollar.”

But she was better at slipping through the crowd than me and Mrs. Berns, even with a child on her hip, and she disappeared.

That's when the weirdest thing happened. Reed, my temporary porter and waiter, appeared from behind the server who'd just sold the milk.

He grabbed the water glass that the woman had taken a sip out of and disappeared from sight.