Everyone On the Train
Stephanie Noll‘s odyssey through grief in search of understanding is featured as the Editor’s Choice for nonfiction in this Summer’s edition of The Ocotillo Review. If you enjoy this selection you can find more at your local independent bookstore or order your copy here.
Everyone On the Train
a true story by Stephanie Noll
In April, our five-year old nephew Jonah died from a type of pediatric cancer that affects one in 7,000 children, and during the two years that he was sick, we all wondered about odds and chances, luck, prayer, randomness. My husband and our two sons, ages eight and six, traveled from Austin to Kansas City for the funeral; the days we spent there felt without beginning and end, just one long stretch of sorrow, and I found it hard to be a good mother. My sons were grieving in ways that children grieve—quiet and then perfectly boisterous, excited to be with their aunts and uncles and grandparents whom they love. One moment, silently observing their favorite people crying and hugging; the next, begging to go swim in the hotel pool. The time came when we had to go back to Austin and try to make sense of things, and we did. Somewhere in north Texas, on the drive home, I booked a two-night beach stay for me and my boys. I picked a couple days during their first full week of summer vacation, a way to mark an end and a beginning. It seemed so far off in the future , when I booked it, impossible to imagine a vacation, days without work or school or grief. But time passed, like it does, quicker than you think it should.
*
Some Sundays, I volunteer at the men’s homeless shelter in downtown Austin. Usually I help serve dinner; mostly, I obsess about making eye contact and asking every man who walks through the line about their day. On a recent Sunday I took meal tickets at the door, which offered a little more time for me to observe the men in the dining hall, to think about who they were. Every now and then, I would look out, watch as they ate, and become overwhelmed. Over and over again, I thought, this is the very least we can do. We need to feed people. And then a young man walked in, and he could have been any of the guys I’ve called friend in the past twenty years . He was tall and good-looking and probably younger than he appeared. He wore a tee shirt and jeans, as if dressed for a concert. Watching him, I felt as though I’d break open. All these Sundays and just now I thought, they have nowhere to go. This is where they go. I wanted to know why and that’s none of my damn business and me knowing won’t do a thing.
When the young guy went to leave, I said, “Take care of yourself this week.”
He told me okay, left, and then came back.
“I promise I will,” he said.
*
The drive to the beach took longer than it should because Austin traffic is terrible. I texted my husband: we should leave this place. But then south of San Antonio, my favorite part of the drive began, flat grasslands, some rough-looking fields of corn. We stopped for gas and treats and were delighted by the discovery of caramel M and M’s and, unlike so many things these days, they did not disappoint.
When I was a kid, it was my mother who loved the beach and made sure to take me and my sister every summer. Some years, my father would accompany us, but as we got older and he became busier, just the three of us would go. Money was always tight, and the summer when I was twelve, this was particularly true. My sister and I stopped receiving allowance; for summer clothes, my mother took us to Goodwill instead of JC Penny. She was determined to take us to the beach and found a place that only charged $25 a night.
“Mrs. Ahearn’s Cottages,” she said, delighted with herself. “They’re a mile to the beach, but walks are nice. No AC or TV and we’ll have to eat TV dinners.” My sister and I agreed that it sounded great, and the place was like going back in time: in the kitchen there was a yellow metal bread box and a percolator instead of a coffee pot. We ate our Salisbury steak and fried chicken Hungry Man meals at a chrome and Formica table. The bathroom had a black and white checkered tiled floor that I would remember ten years later when I rented my first apartment in Houston, that kind of flooring a selling point, according to my leasing agent. The cottage was nothing fancy, just a place to eat and sleep and play hands of rummy to pass the mornings and evenings.
I don’t think of any of this until we arrive at Camp Coyoacan in Port Aransas, a place with yurts and tent bungalows instead of hotel rooms. We have a bungalow with a queen bed for the boys to share, a single for me. There is an AC unit and a small refrigerator for juice pouches and the smallest box of wine you can buy. There are communal bathrooms and outside showers and a small but perfect swimming pool. It is not fancy and it is just what we want, need.
*
I wrote a novel that I love, and I have an agent who is interested. I revised the novel, and I love it even more, but I am waiting to hear if that love is mutual. I have carefully fixed hopes and dreams on it, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, which is a fool’s mistake. My husband is a writer also, and he, too, is in limbo. I often joke that I should be playing the lottery as well as writing—the chances for a payout seem equal in either endeavor. It is the life we chose, he says, by way of consolation.
“We’re building something,” he says. And he is right; there is forward momentum. I struggle with the pace; I threaten to go back to school so I can get a job as a school principal, a way to make more money, insure our future. I am always thinking ahead too far, worrying. When you wait and wait with no news, hoping for the best and fearing the worst, your brain cycles through everything you’ve been told about waiting: good things come to those who do this; a watched pot never boils. What’s meant to be will be. I think of the years I’ve spent writing and rewriting and dreaming; I worry about what else I might have done with that time. Still, I read wise words from Buddhists; I have an app on my phone for meditating. But It is hard to stay present when you are waiting and waiting and waiting.
*
It was easier to be present at the beach. It was easier because I had to be in the water at all times with the boys. They can swim but that’s not enough. They smiled so hard while riding waves, and I positioned myself between them, vigilant but trying to let go, to give them space to float and get picked up by the water. In spite of my worry, I smiled, too, so much so that my cheeks hurt long after we left the water. In Texas, you can drive on the beach, practically pull up and park next to your towels and blankets and coolers. There was a time when I found that horrific, a part of all that was wrong with the state. But when the boys and I packed up and walked ten feet to the car, I thought, how convenient. What once seemed lawless, now a gift.
I have no memories of my mother swimming in the ocean with us. She would position her aluminum beach chair with its plastic webbing at the place where the sand met the surf. Somehow, her cigarettes stayed dry. She often wore a visor or a ball cap and smeared zinc oxide on her nose. She could sit like that for hours, not minding when the tide came in and washed water and salt all over her calves. My sister and I would go out farther than we should and the waves would pull us in one direction or another, but my mother and her chair never drifted.
*
My mother loved the beach but spent her last two years near Phoenix, Arizona. While she lived there, she spent countless days at one of the million nearby pools. She would dunk herself in the water to cool off, step outside the facilities to smoke a cigarette, and return to a lounge chair to brown her skin. Dunk, smoke, lay, repeat. Unlike her neighbors, she was not retired and did not have other leisure activities: no bridge or golf or canasta. She claimed to be happy, but I didn’t believe her. She seemed alone and lonely, even more so once she was diagnosed with lung cancer. A month before she died, she said to me, tearfully, “I’ve always wanted to go to San Diego. Should I go? Should we go?” I had no answer at the time, and the next morning she asked me to forget that we’d had that conversation .
*
At the end of the Texas legislative session, the governor disparaged Austin, the city where I live. In the past few months, people have died at the hands of sad humans with hate in their heart , people with nowhere to go. My youngest son asks devastating questions about Jonah every other day: Did he know he was going to die? That’s the one that hurts the most. I never wondered, but now, I too, live with that question.
It’s endless, the wave of grief, the anger, frustration, anxiety. My husband tells me I haven’t been myself since the months leading up to the election , when I became news obsessed and wondered, “Would this be the controversy that knocks out Trump?” In Kansas, where my husband is from, rich people from California are building luxury bunkers, in case the world goes exactly where its handbasket seems headed. I make a to do list every day, a way to mark small accomplishments :. Drink eight glasses of water. Walk. Swim. Take the boys to flag football. Have lunch with _____. It’s a way to see through another day, a reminder that I lived it.
*
In our bungalow, we played epic games of UNO and stayed up too late. In the morning, I fed the boys sugary cereal and hot dogs that I cooked on a camp stove. We swam in the gulf and they rolled around in the sand and built castles. When it became too warm, we returned to the pool, which we had all to ourselves, perfect for games of monkey in the middle and Marco Polo. We went out for ice cream, played more UNO. There were hard moments: arguments over whether to play checkers or even more UNO, debates over who would get the last box of Frosted Flakes. We are three humans bumping up against each other, just trying to get what we need.
*
I try not to let this one headline get me, to have it be one more thing, but how can it not. There was a young man riding the train in Portland who stood up to another man who was harassing two Muslim girls. The harasser turned his anger on the defender, and the attack was fatal. In his dying moments, the young man wanted everyone to know he loved them. Not his mom and dad, though maybe he loved them, too. But after he did what he could to be a decent human, he needed to say that he loved everyone on the train . I read these dying words in a news article that someone, everyone, was sharing on Facebook, and I joined in the communal horror at this story and felt the things we feel when kindness and violence combine. Shouldn’t we all live like this young man, isn’t life short, shouldn’t be embrace the present moment and forget hate and bigotry?
But those are memes. There’s an impossibility inherent in an aphorism like “live in the moment.” This moment isn’t all we have, really. Our memories create stories we tell ourselves, both true and not; they craft regrets as well as tenets by which we live. And there is the world of what ifs, the anxieties that we carefully build over time, like adding stones to cairns, also meant to mark our way. We will place another stone, we will think we’ve learned a lesson, we might pat ourselves on the back, affirming our right decisions, our new understandings. But deep down, we know. We know there will be a shift: a death, an election, a heartbreak, a disappointment. And we’ll go looking for new stones, thinking: this time, I’ll get it right.
Stephanie Noll is a writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in MOTHERWELL and MODERN LOSS. She is currently at work on a novel about a standardized test cheating scandal at a high needs school in Houston, Texas.
