The Train of Lost Things

by Ammi-Joan Paquette

  Marty sank into the seat next to her. “How’s the train doing?”

  “You’re driving this thing?” Dina asked skeptically, turning to look.

  Star snorted. “Not likely! Remember that whole wild-horse-slash-dragon thing?” She rounded her back and lightly knocked her forehead against the front screen. “I’ve been going over and over the settings. There should be some manual override or something, right? The bucking and spinning stuff is getting worse. It’s driving me up a wall. Like the expression but also, you know, in real life.” She groaned. “Am I failing? I’m failing. Every sunrise, when the pull comes, I feel like it’s better that I’m on the train than off it. So I stay. But sometimes I don’t know if that’s even true.”

  The three of them stared glumly out at the night sky, while Star’s words hung in the silence.

  Then Dina asked, “How do you stay on the train, if all the kids who come on board are pulled off with the sunrise? You’re a special case, you said. What does that mean? How come you’re allowed to stay on?”

  Marty perked up. This was important information he would need, if he was going to stick to his new plan.

  At first Star looked like she wasn’t going to answer. Then she shrugged. “I found out by accident the first time. I passed through the cars pretty quick, since I wasn’t really looking for a thing, you know? I was glad to be here at all.” Marty nodded, and she went on. “Then I found the engine. The driver, she wasn’t in here. I didn’t talk to her till later. But I found the engine. I sat down, strapped myself in, and was chilling up here, I guess.”

  Marty pondered this. Would he be bold enough to stumble into the engine of a magical train and strap right in to the driver’s seat? Star might be young and kind of quiet, but she had guts.

  “I wasn’t touching anything, just enjoying the ride. Maybe pretending to be in charge, a little bit.” Her eyes took on a wistful, faraway look. “And right then I saw the sunrise through the window. This whole . . . wind tornado, sort of? It blew through the train. A great big vacuumy thing, but cool, and super bright. I don’t know if a wind can even be bright, but this one was. I could feel it tugging at me, like at the core of me—I know, weird, right?—not only my hair and clothes and stuff. But it didn’t pull me out, and then it was gone. I didn’t think about it much more until after, when I met the driver. She was pretty surprised to see me here, I’ll tell you that! She liked to stay out of sight when the kids come on board, let them do their thing on their own. But there I was, still on the train. She kind of took me under her wing after that.”

  “So then you could just stay on?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, every sunrise that same wind tries to yank me off. But as long as I’m sitting in the chair”—she tilted her chin at the driver’s seat—“and strapped in, it can’t get me.”

  Marty thought about this. Far away, the distant horizon was starting to put out the very palest of shimmers. It wasn’t sunrise, not yet, but Marty could tell it wasn’t that far away. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. 4:49 A.M. A little over two hours to go.

  “The last driver said that the right person would come along, that they’d know what to do.” Star narrowed her eyes at them suddenly.

  “Don’t look at us like that,” snapped Dina. “We’re not the driver.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking at all. You’re here to get your lost stuff. That’s totally different.” She perked up. “Speaking of lost stuff, did you . . .”

  Apparently she could read the answer clearly in Marty’s face, because she spun to face Dina, whose hand moved up to her throat. Dina tugged the locket out from under her shirt and cradled it lovingly.

  To both of their surprise, Star leaped out of her seat, releasing the seat belt with a click. “Hey! What do you have there?”

  Dina took a step back. “It’s my locket—my lost thing I came looking for. I found it a few cars back.”

  “No, wait—that’s not your locket. That’s mine!”

  “What are you talking about? It was wedged into some crack on the ground, all—” Dina froze.

  Marty finished her thought as he, too, realized. “All tangled up in Star’s orange scarf.”

  Star reached out to grab the necklace from Dina’s neck, but Marty jumped in her way. “Wait, Star! It might have been with your scarf, but—I saw the memory. It’s Dina’s for sure.”

  At this, Star paused. She looked Dina up and down. Then her eyes widened. She took a step back and collapsed into the driver’s seat. “Oh, man,” she said. “No way. Oh, man. You’d better look at this.”

  She turned to a screen in front of the driver’s seat. She tapped the screen a few times, pulling up menus and choosing options. She selected a button called HISTORY, then clicked on CREW. There was a list of names, with start and end dates. Star selected the last name on the list.

  “Here she is,” said Star quietly, “the one I was telling you about before. The last driver.”

  A picture popped up onto the screen. Marty heard a gasp behind him. The image showed the same woman he had seen in the memory from the locket.

  The last driver of the Train of Lost Things . . .

  . . . was Dina’s mother.

  18

  THE TRICKS FINDERS USE

  I had no idea,” Star said, shaking her head. The last few minutes had been swallowed up by exclamations of shock and confusion. Marty tried to put himself in Dina’s place: She hadn’t seen her mother in over six years; now it was like she’d come into a room only to find that the woman had just left by a different door. It didn’t seem at all fair.

  “Where did she go? And why?” Dina said now, not for the first time.

  “She said it was her time to go. But before she left, she gave me that locket. She said—” Star swallowed. “She said I should keep it until the right person came. That I’d know who it was.”

  “Like she knew I was going to come? But if she did, then she’d have stayed, right? She’d have waited for me.”

  “Maybe she hoped you would come,” said Marty. If there was one thing he knew about parents who loved their children—and those glimpses of the woman with the sad eyes and the gentle hands put her very clearly in that group—it was that they’d never give up a chance like this willingly, not if there was any way around it.

  “I think there’s only so much time anyone can stay on the train,” said Star thoughtfully. “Once enough time passes, the Other Side pulls too hard. Maybe she stayed as long as she could.”

  Marty thought about that, wondered if that made things better or worse for Dina. If she had gotten here earlier, would she have been able to see her mother, in real life, here on the train? The idea scrambled his brain. He didn’t even want to think what it was doing to Dina.

  Dina jumped up and started pacing back and forth across the narrow space behind the seats. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I’m going to stay right here on the train. Just stay here forever. This is the last place she was—it’s almost like finding her, isn’t it? That’s what she would have wanted.”

  Marty and Star exchanged a look. It was uncomfortably close to his own newly decided plan. But now that he was hearing it from Dina, he was suddenly less sure. “Do you really think so?” he asked.

  Dina slumped. “I don’t know. But I do know that you saw her, you spent time with her.” She turned a laser gaze on Star. “I want you to tell me everything about her.”

  Marty squinted out the window. The glimmer at the edge of the sky was starting to take itself seriously now, like it knew this was really happening. Sunrise couldn’t be far off. Was there still a chance he could find his jacket before the pull came? The girls leaned in close together, Dina firing questions and drinking in the answers, soaking up memories of her mother spongelike. Star was eager to give out what she knew.

  But there was too much unfinished for
Marty to sit here with them. He would have said as much if they’d asked, but neither looked in his direction.

  As he gazed outside, the train listed a bit from one side to the other—not dangerously, not this time. But evidently not fully up and running, either. There was so little time left before sunrise. Even if he tried his best to stay on, there was no guarantee he could manage it. And there was something else, too: The train needed help. Needed fixing.

  From the moment he’d first felt the train’s headlight gaze turn on him way back in the clearing, he’d felt a sort of connection (was that too wild?) with the great machine. Now his time was counting down. But Marty was a finder. He hadn’t found his jacket. He had the tiniest bit of time left. But what if he spent that time not just looking for the jacket, but also trying to find an actual solution, a way to fix the train for good? It was out there—he knew it; he could just feel it wriggling on the far edges of his mind.

  So this was his new plan: He’d find a way to fix the train. And then, in return, the train would let him stay on as long as he needed to find the jacket.

  That seemed fair, didn’t it?

  Pushing open the door, Marty stepped into the hall, then back into the first train car.

  * * *

  • • •

  Being a good finder took three important qualities: patience, persistence, and imagination. Marty had all of these. Now he put them to use. He moved patiently and steadily through each car, running his eyes across every surface and box and bin: pulling, lifting, checking. A few times he found flashing objects, which he grouped in the center of the car. He tried not to think of their Lonely Ghost owners swirling in the mist outside the window. Hopefully Star would come back in time to help some of them. Other than that, he moved efficiently along, scouring every bit of each car for the jacket, while also looking carefully for clues to help him solve the mystery of the broken engine.

  He did not let himself give up. He persisted, no matter how useless it started to feel: looking through places he’d already looked, recognizing familiar objects he’d seen on the last sweep through. (Finding nothing at all about the broken engine, but how would he know that till he saw it?) It helped a bit that he was tossing things into bins and boxes as he went. Having a tidier space made it easier to see what was out of place. And to see what clearly wasn’t there.

  No jacket. No magic train-fixing solution.

  He kept on going.

  The last quality of a finder was maybe the most important of all. You had to use your imagination, not only looking in all the regular places where you’d expect something to be. After all, if the jacket was where it was supposed to be, he’d have already found it, wouldn’t he? “Think outside the box,” his mom liked to say on the phone sometimes to her clients, and that’s what Marty felt like he was doing now. He ran his hand above the high shelves, scuffed his foot in the narrow gap under the bins, peered into dark crannies and tiny holes that couldn’t have held a doll’s jacket, much less his own.

  And that last spot was where his questing fingers hit something: not cloth, not rough jean fabric, but something else familiar. He scrabbled a bit and pulled it out: a flat, round button with a pin on the back. Marty was almost used to this by now; finding the last two buttons had sent him into a frenzy of searching everything nearby. Now, he knew he had searched every inch of this car. The jacket wasn’t in here. So he turned his attention to the pin and looked—really looked—at it. The round button face showed a grinning clown head in front of a striped circus tent. He brought it up closer to his face, soaking in every familiar detail.

  A bright pinhole popped out of the center. A button from his jacket was popping out an Echo! Marty watched, in wide-eyed astonishment, a scene that was straight from his own past.

  * * *

  • • •

  They were sitting side by side, Dad and Marty, on a bench inside the darkened tent of a circus. Cartoony music was blaring from loudspeakers, and a super-tall, goofy-looking clown turned cartwheels in the ring in front of them.

  Little Marty couldn’t have been more than four years old. Watching this now, Marty had a weird double-take feeling: He was older Marty, seeing this chubby little kid on an outing with his dad. But he could also distinctly remember how that tiny kid had felt. Could remember being there, in the hot, loud, bustling tent. He could see all those feelings on his tiny long-ago face: The kid was petrified.

  Dad glanced down and saw Marty’s expression. “Hey,” Dad whispered. “You scared? What’s the matter, little guy? Does that clown worry you?”

  “Scary clown,” Little Marty said, shaking his head.

  The clown stopped cartwheeling, and of all things—oh, Marty remembered this so well!—came to stand right in front of their seat. The brightly painted giant unfurled his hand to show a wrapped lollipop. “For you, my man!” boomed the clown. And then he stood there, waiting, hand outstretched.

  Marty was paralyzed with fright. He didn’t know why he was afraid, except that some of his friends had told him clowns were super scary, and after that he’d never looked at clowns the same way.

  Dad brought his brows together like he was thinking. The clown just stood there, waiting. Behind his painted makeup face, his eyes looked kind. And also, maybe, a tiny bit sad.

  “How about this?” Dad said. He hoisted Marty up onto his shoulders, grasped him firmly around the legs, then tilted his own head to look up at Marty. He winked. Up that high, Marty felt a thrill of power. He could look down at everyone in the audience, many of whom were staring at him and clapping or laughing. He could look down on the clown, who looked small and actually kind of funny from up here. And he could look down at Dad’s face, strong, smiling, and now whispering: “I’ll be right here with you. If you want to reach out, you can. I won’t let anything happen. I’ll always be right here.”

  Little Marty’s chubby hand reached toward the lollipop.

  19

  ALL THOSE CONNECTIONS ADD UP TO . . . WHAT?

  The Echo pop dissolved and Marty was alone in the rocking train car. That lollipop had lasted for the whole afternoon, and he remembered it as one of his top candy experiences ever.

  He’d also gone from hating clowns to being obsessed with them, so Mom had to hire two separate clowns for his birthday party that year. Marty smiled to himself. This was a pin to remember! He carefully stashed it in his pocket, alongside the screened car and the duck.

  Then he turned and trudged through the connector toward the next car, turning things over in his mind as he went. That made three pins that he’d found, but the jacket remained stubbornly lost. Obviously, the jacket wasn’t hiding from him deliberately, but it kind of helped to think of it that way. That it wasn’t something Marty was doing wrong, but the scheme of a sneaky object.

  Or, perhaps, a sneaky train?

  According to Star, the train had its own will and consciousness. He pictured again how the giant headlights had turned to gaze at him back when they’d first gotten to the park. What if it was the train keeping the jacket hidden? Could it really do that? And . . . would it?

  Just like that, every thought Marty had of picking stuff up as he went, of trying to help and fix the train, all of that went jetting right out the window. What had he been thinking? He had to put his own needs first here. He had to think of Dad!

  The jacket had to be here somewhere. He would find it.

  He leaped into the new car, his only focus on finding that jacket. Moving in a frenzy, Marty yanked things off shelves. He turned bins upside down. He scrabbled through heap after heap of stuff. By the time he got to the end of the car, his chest was heaving and his breath came in sharp spurts.

  Right then the far door opened, framing Dina and Star in the entryway. Their mouths dropped open. Like waking out of a dream, Marty looked back at them from across the swamp of scattered stuff. He had searched his way clear across to the opposite doo
rway, and now he realized that he could no longer see the floor. The shelves were empty. Every box was overturned. The place looked like it had been through a hurricane, worse even than the last round of the train’s loop-de-loop.

  “Yikes,” said Dina. But she wasn’t the one who was going to be left with the mess.

  Marty felt suddenly ashamed of himself.

  “Are you kidding me?!” said Star.

  “I’m sorry!” said Marty, turning around and starting to grab stuff and shovel it into the nearest box. “It’s just, the pins, the jacket—it was here. But . . . it’s not actually here.” He stopped, a baseball glove in one hand and an anatomically correct frog in the other. He dropped them and reached into his pocket, squeezing the three pins as hard as he could.

  “ARGH!” yelled Star, and Dina shook her head in sympathy.

  Marty felt tears sting the edges of his eyes. The window outside was distinctly bright now, and Marty knew sunrise couldn’t be more than a half hour away. Where was the jacket? Why couldn’t he find it? He was squeezing the pins so tight that they made little round dents in his hand. It felt good, having something so real and harsh right there in his grasp. Something he could actually control. For a change.

  Dina was still looking at him, but Star scurried around, picking up stuff and straightening boxes. She gave a loud huff of exasperation. “This is going to take me hours to sort out,” she grumbled. “Thanks a lot! Like it wasn’t bad enough in here already.”

  Marty didn’t bother saying that he’d left the first four cars a whole lot better than he’d found them. Because she was right—he’d really messed this one up. But he couldn’t entirely regret it. At least he knew for sure the jacket wasn’t in this car. There was that, right?

  So what happened now?

  A soft wind was starting to blow down the center of the car, in the windows, up through the floor.