Restoring Harmony (3 page)

4

MY BOW DRAGGED TO A HALT ACROSS THE STRINGS.

“I said step out here,” the man repeated.

“Coming,” I managed to say.

This was bad. There was a man in the women’s washroom. I must be in big trouble! When I bent over to put Jewels into her case, I saw about thirty pairs of feet, shoes of every color, and a pair of black boots standing right outside the stall. I snapped the case closed, grabbed my pack, and opened the door slowly.

A scrawny man in a burgundy uniform stood over me, glowering. He had the bushiest eyebrows I’d ever seen. Behind him was a sea of shiny, smiling faces. The women who had gathered in the washroom, presumably to listen to me play, broke into applause.

“Quiet!” the man yelled. “Come with me.” He took me by the arm and pushed his way through the crowd.

“Your music was beautiful!” said a woman in a faded denim dress.

“Leave her alone,” someone else shouted. “We liked her playing.”

“Yeah!”

“I’m in charge here,” he said.

An elderly lady with a long white braid attached herself to my other arm. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “He’s all bluster, and I’ll soon sort him out.”

In the hallway, the man led me up to a wall where a sign hung that said
NO BUSKING!
He pointed at it. “Can’t you read?”

“Busking? You mean like playing for money?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“But I wasn’t. I was just practicing.”

He looked confused for a second, his eyebrows scrunching together. “Well, no playing instruments in the train station,” he finally said. “If you practice, then other people will want to, and the next thing you know . . . mayhem!”

“I didn’t mean to break the rules,” I protested. Tears welled up in my eyes and I swiped at them. “I’m really sorry.”

“You just leave her alone,” the elderly lady said. “Haven’t you got better things to do, like worry about pickpockets? Your mother would be ashamed of you! Didn’t you see all those ladies in there enjoying that little concert?”

“Well . . . yes, ma’am. . . .”

“And what were you doing in the women’s bathroom anyway?” she demanded, drawing herself up to her full height, which wasn’t even as tall as me. “I could sue you for sexual harassment.”

“Well . . . I, uh . . . well-”

“That’s a deep subject, mister!” she said. “Maybe we should talk it over with your supervisor?”

“No, I, uh . . . oh, never mind.” He strode off like he had somewhere important to be. I think it was just as far away from me and this tiny tornado as he could get.

“Don’t you cry,” she said to me, leading me back into the main waiting area. “That was a beautiful concert.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Jane,” she said.

“Molly.”

“How do you do?”

“Better now,” I said, smiling.

I spent the rest of the evening chatting with Jane. It turned out that she not only loved Canada, but she’d even been to my island back in the “good old days” when people traveled for their holidays and the ferries ran all day, every day.

Talking to her about the island, even though she didn’t really remember much about it because it’d been forty years since she’d visited, helped ease the homesickness that had taken root in my gut.

I knew it was weird, but I had to sort of look over Jane’s shoulder when we talked because her face was so fascinating, I couldn’t help staring. Her skin looked like paper that had been folded over and over again and then smoothed out. The largest wrinkles had smaller ones right over the top of them, branching out, like the roads on the Seattle maps hanging in the station’s hallway.

Jane and I shared our food with each other. I gave her a sandwich, and she made me take half a dozen oatmeal cookies that the sister she’d been visiting had baked. Around ten fifteen that night, the train rumbled into the station. Nothing happened for almost another hour, but then they opened the big doors and we all swarmed out onto the platform. Jane and I managed to get seats in the first car and collapsed into them. I sat there with my eyes shut, resting my chin on the end of my fiddle case, my pack clutched between my feet.

Within minutes of our departure, the rocking of the car lulled Jane to sleep. I stared out into the darkness, thinking how odd it was that I had come this far. Only a handful of people I knew had ever left the island, and most of them had come back saying it was paradise on Earth.

The tall fir trees, the ocean crashing up onto the sandstone rocks, the eagles flying overhead . . . I hadn’t thought about it being anything special until, well, right now. I’d always thought it was my family that made me feel happy and content to live there. And the farmwork. Growing our own food, working the fields, raising chickens for eggs kept us too busy to think about the real world much. But tonight, as the train carried me further from home, I longed to be back where there was silence and room to breathe. And where there were people who loved me.

Would the grandpa I didn’t know, the one who had cut Mom off when she switched from premed to agriculture, be glad to see me? Mom said we’d met once when I was three, but I didn’t remember. Katie had told me that my grandparents had complained about the farm the whole time they visited. And they thought the well water tasted disgusting. That’s about all I knew of them.

The train jerked, snapping my head forward, making me realize that I’d dozed off. I tried to shake myself awake. The only light in the car was a kerosene lamp hung on a hook near the front. In the dim glow, I saw that Jane was awake and knitting.

“I can barely knit in the daylight,” I said, impressed.

“When you’ve been at it as long as I have, you could do it with your eyes closed.”

“Oh. I can now; it just doesn’t look like anything,” I joked, and she laughed. “How long have we been going?”

“Nearly four hours.”

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been asleep a lot longer than I’d realized. A rush of nerves washed over me. We must be getting close. “Do you know where we are?” I asked.

“Just south of Tacoma.”

“That’s it? I thought we’d be almost to Portland!”

“Takes a lot longer these days.”

“Maybe I should go back to sleep,” I said.

“Why not?”

The train began to move again and Jane’s clicking needles soothed me. I was bone tired, but I was too awake now to sleep again. After a while, the train slowed and eventually squealed to a stop. A scratchy voice sounded over the speaker. The more he repeated himself, the more people drowned it out with, “What? What did he say? Did you hear what he said? What’s going on?”

When nothing happened, the passengers began to doze off and then the crackling voice made another announcement that woke everyone up, and the mutterings started all over again. Eventually a door slid open at the end of the car and a conductor stepped into the crowded aisle.

“Sorry, folks,” she yelled. “Everyone off the train! You’re going to have to walk!”

5

July 11th-Moon phase: waxing gibbous
-
two days past a full moon

WHEN NOBODY MOVED, THE CONDUCTOR SHOUTED again for us all to debark. She was wearing the same burgundy uniform as the security guard in the station, and her long blond ponytail caught the light from the kerosene lantern, glowing like gold.

“Come on, people!” she shouted, frustrated. “Let’s move!”

“Why? What’s the deal?” a man bellowed from somewhere in the dark.

“Track’s washed out by a mudslide,” she said. “You’re all going to have to hoof it the two miles to Olympia. If you hurry, you can make the train going south from there.”

I did a quick calculation in my head. Two miles was just over three kilometers. In shoes that would be a breeze, but could I walk it barefoot?

“Is there really a train to take us to Portland?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “And I have to walk it myself, so will you all please get off the train!”

Jane shrugged and got up. “What can you do?” she asked me.

The others resigned themselves to hiking too, and we shuffled down the stairs into the cool summer night. The weather was just like at home. Hot during the day but cold as soon as the sun went down, and I shivered when a breeze rustled through the woods surrounding us. I pulled my sweater out of my pack, and my hand touched a small bundle in a zippered pouch.

“Wait a sec, Jane,” I said.

We stepped out of the way of the passengers and I pulled a Crank Light flashlight out of the emergency supply pouch Dad had given me as a travel gift. I twisted the end of it around and around, and it made a satisfying clicking noise as the beam of light grew brighter and brighter.

“It doesn’t do much in vast darkness like this,” I said. “But we’ve got the moon too.”

“Yep. Almost full tonight. You better go on ahead,” Jane said. “I’ll just slow you down.”

“I doubt it. I don’t have any shoes.”

“None at all? I thought you just weren’t wearing them because they pinched or something.”

“Nope. I lost them.”

“Well, then, I guess we stay together.”

She sounded cheered by the thought, and I was too. The train track was in a little ravine, and we had to climb up and walk along a path that bordered the woods because the slide area was unstable. On our left, a forest of fir trees melted into the darkness; below us on the right were the tracks.

“Why do you think there’s a path up here?” I asked Jane.

“Probably for the maintenance crew. These trains and the track are so bad that they’re always having to work on them.”

The damp earth soothed my blistered feet, but unfortunately, just when I would relax, a sharp stone would find the tender part of my arch, making me wince in pain.

“This used to be a great train line,” Jane told me. “I think it was about 2015 or so that they extended it down to Mexico and up to Vancouver.”

My heart beat faster at the mention of Vancouver. Maybe when I traveled back with my grandpa, we could just take the train all the way up there and then get a ferry home! Jane caught her foot on something, and I reached out to steady her.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, but she locked her hand in mine and we guided each other along. Her dry skin felt smooth against my rough palm.

As we walked, Jane told me about her little house in a place called Kelso. “It’s just a cottage, really. My late husband and I bought it back in nineteen seventy-four.”

“Nineteen seventy-four! How old are you?” I exclaimed. She laughed. “I’m sorry . . . that was rude. . . .”

“You shouldn’t ask a thirty-year-old woman how old she is, but I’m past worrying about that. I was born in fifty-two,” she said proudly.

“So you’re . . . eighty-nine?”

“Last April the thirtieth,” she said.

“Wow.”

It’s not like eighty-nine is ancient exactly. We had a few old-timers on the island. But they mostly sat around and gossiped. I didn’t think any of them could walk two miles.

“Are you as shocked by the U.S. as you are by my age?” Jane asked. I could hear the smile in her voice.

“It’s different than home, that’s for sure,” I said. “We’re kind of insulated from the rest of the world because they cut back ferry service years before the Collapse. That forced us to form a self-sufficient community.”

“No bread lines?” Jane asked.

“What’s that?”

She laughed. “It’s an old term, like soup kitchens. A place where hungry people can get a meal.”

“Oh, we have poor people on the island, but the church makes sure they have enough to eat. We’re almost all farmers or fishermen, so food’s not really an issue.”

“Are there many fish?” Jane asked, surprised. “I thought they’d been pretty much cleaned out by commercial fishing.”

“After the Collapse, the big boats couldn’t get any fuel,” I explained. “So they stopped fishing. It’ll never be like it was because of all the pollution, but the fish have come back in surprising numbers. My family still doesn’t eat them, though, because my parents are worried about mercury.”

“Yeah,” Jane agreed. “There’s a boy in my neighborhood who catches them and every once in a while he’ll bring me one. At my age, I’m not that worried about mercury. As long as it doesn’t have two heads, I fry that sucker up and enjoy it.”

Jane cracked me up! We talked more about my home, and I told her about the men in suits in Seattle and how they’d pulled that man into the car. Jane explained that the police had ignored it because it probably had to do with illegal gambling.

“But if it’s illegal, why didn’t they stop them?” I asked, confused.

“Because the police are on the take-bribes,” she said, “to look the other way.”

“Oh.”

That didn’t really make me feel any better about what happened, but at least I didn’t have to worry about men jumping out of cars and grabbing me. At least, not if what Jane said was true. We fell silent, shuffling along the path. A burst of wind whipped a branch and the tips of the needles brushed my face; the smell of pine floated around me.

Eventually, faint streaks of light began to turn the edges of the sky a dull gray. “Dawn already,” Jane said. “Boy, will I be glad to get home.”

“Me too. But that won’t be for a while.”

Only a few stragglers were behind us now, and as the sky lightened, a pinkish hue showed me that Jane’s mouth was hanging open, and her cheeks were flushed. Even with bare feet I’d been walking too fast. I immediately slowed down.

“No, keep going,” she said. “You’ll miss your train.”

“It’ll wait.”

“I doubt it,” she argued. “You better hurry on ahead. You need to get off your feet.”

My soles were caked with mud, and they were so cold I couldn’t feel a thing. I didn’t want to miss it, but I couldn’t leave Jane behind either.

“Look,” she said, pointing. “You can see the train. You go and I’ll probably make it anyway.”

“I don’t-”

“Just go.”

She gave me a smile and a shove, and I hugged her quickly and lumbered off as best as I could on my frozen feet. My hand felt empty and alone without her warm one enclosed in it, and my heart ached for home. Ahead of me there was a long platform crowded with people, and a tiny station with a cracked sign hanging at an angle that said
OLYMPIA.

The maintenance path sloped down to a concrete platform, and I hurried across it, hoping to get a seat. There were new passengers streaming through the station doors too, so the already-crowded train would be packed. I slipped my wiry frame through the crowd and placed myself by the door to one of the cars so I could jump on if I had to but I could also see if Jane was coming.

I watched a man in a horrendous plaid suit struggle out the doors of the station and make his way through the crowd with a woman in a wheelchair. Her skirt was made of the same yellow plaid. I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them because I’d never seen anything so ugly. When he got to the train, he lifted the woman out and handed her to a conductor whose knees buckled under her weight.

“My wife can’t manage herself,” he told the conductor, who carried her aboard.

I stood on my tiptoes, trying to see if any of the last few people coming down the path were Jane. Where was she? If we sat here for even ten more minutes, she’d probably make it. I watched the plaid man fight the wheelchair, trying to collapse it so he could take it on board.

Of course! I turned to him. “Can I use your wheelchair?” His plaid jacket was even more blinding close up.

“What? No! Of course not.”

“I’ll bring it right back. Please? My friend, I mean, my grandmother, my
great
-grandmother is going to miss the train if I don’t borrow it.”

“And if you don’t make it back, then what will I do for a wheelchair?”

“Please? Please?”

The man grimaced and held on tightly to the handles. I fished around in my pocket for what was left of my money. “Here! Take this as security. I’ll bring your chair back. I promise.”

“It’s worth a lot more than that,” he said, grumbling but eyeing the money. He grabbed the bills and shoved the chair towards me.

From further down the platform, I heard a conductor shout, “Two minutes! All aboard!”

I raced across the concrete, pushing the wheelchair. I had to get Jane, no matter what!