On the Train From Chicago to San Francisco, the Woman in the Seat Next to Me Was Taking the Same Trip My Late Wife and I Planned for 30 Years and Never Took. She Was Doing It for the Same Reason

We were stuck at Donner Pass for five hours.

It was the best five hours of the trip.

The train was dark and quiet. Outside, the snow on the granite was blue in the moonlight. Most of the passengers were asleep. We talked in whispers, the way you talk in a library, which Ruth said she’d been doing professionally for thirty years and was very good at.

Around three in the morning, she said, “Edmund. Can I tell you something embarrassing?”

“Please.”

“I haven’t been this happy in fourteen months,” she whispered. “And I feel terrible about it.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

“Maggie would laugh at me,” I said. “She told me, at the end, in the hospital. She said, ‘Eddie, don’t you dare sit in that house and wait to die. Take the train.'”

Ruth wiped her eyes.

“Walt would have liked you,” she said. “He’d have hated your driving. But he’d have liked you.”

“Maggie would have liked you, too. She’d have made you join her book club.”

“I’d have joined.”

The train started moving again at dawn.

We came down out of the Sierra into the green valley of Sacramento, and then the flat water of the Bay, and then, at 4:10 in the afternoon, the little station at Emeryville, California. End of the line.

We stood together on the platform with our suitcases.

Neither of us moved.

The German honeymooners waved goodbye from the taxi line.

“Point Reyes,” Ruth said. “Where your wife wanted to go.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Is it far?”

“About an hour and a half.”

She looked down at her suitcase. Then up at me.

“My flight to Milwaukee isn’t until Thursday,” she said. “I could change it. The travel insurance covers a change fee. I read the whole policy. I’m a librarian.”

“You’d change your flight?”

“I’d like to see the ocean,” she said. “With someone who knows how to sit beside a window.”

The sun was going down over the Bay. The light was gold on the water.

I picked up her suitcase.

“Window seat for Ruth,” I said.

She laughed, and took my arm, and we walked out of the station together, into California.