When someone dies, there are a lot of things that need doing.
Marty pushed it all aside and escaped to his room. His safe zone. But even here he wasn’t safe, was he? Right in the middle of his desk sat the star-shaped pin Dad had given him the day before. No matter where he went, he couldn’t escape reality, couldn’t escape the memories.
Yet . . . Marty realized he didn’t want to escape. He picked up the pin and clutched it in his hand, adding it to the three pins he’d brought back from the train. There was no jacket to affix them to. There was no Echo popping up from any of these objects. But that didn’t keep the memories away. They would always be there; they were part of him, after all.
Marty closed his eyes and let himself find his own way to the past.
* * *
• • •
By the time night came, the house had settled a bit. The first wave of relatives wouldn’t arrive until the next morning. Two long-faced men in suits had taken his dad’s body.
His dad’s body. How had it come to that?
Unable to sleep, Marty paced back and forth across his room. He had set the pins on the windowsill and he looked at them now, from one to the other to the other. If not for those three he’d brought back . . . no, he couldn’t doubt the truth of his adventure. He knew it had really happened.
The eggwhistle had stayed with his dad. It would go into his casket.
Dad would have wanted it that way.
Marty rested both hands on the sill and flung the window wide open. He leaned out, tilting back his head and leaning his face to the night sky. The tree outside his window was bare. Sometime in the last few hours, every last leaf had fallen off. It looked dead. But Marty knew it wasn’t. Not really.
“I wish . . .”
He didn’t get any farther. Because right then, a sound cut the night in two. A single sound: just one. It wasn’t repeated, but that sound would echo in Marty’s mind long over the decades to come, reliving the moment when he heard, just above his house, the sound of the long, low horn of a train.
And after it, so faint you might almost have missed it if you weren’t listening with every cell in your body, the sharp trill of a whistle.
The sort of call made by a conductor, hanging off the back of a train.
A conductor blowing on an eggwhistle.
EPILOGUE
Marty was at dinner when he heard the doorbell ring. Ten days had passed since he’d said goodbye to his dad for the last time. Ten days that felt like forever and yet seemed to pass in a single eye’s blink.
For the first time, the house was quiet again, and empty.
So empty.
The last of the relatives had gone home. The hospice people had cleared out the medical equipment from the den.
Nobody went in the den now. Not ever.
Marty and his mom sat at the kitchen counter, picking at wontons and fried noodles. Into the silence came a zinging sound: the buzz of a phone on silent mode (Fake-silent, Marty always thought—why did they say silent when it was so not?). Frowning, Marty squinted at the screen. He didn’t recognize the number, but the message made him sit up fast.
Hey! Marty? Finally got up the nerve to text. Tell me all that really happened!
With a half laugh, half sob, Marty tapped a reply. It was Dina!
its me. hv been thinking same thing
So if I'm texting you and you're texting back, then . . .
We should get ice cream sometime
yeah
Meet at the park tomorrow after school?
For the first time since he’d been home, Marty felt his whole body relax into a smile. It didn’t last, though. Because the second he put his phone down, reality came rushing back to him. The train really had happened (he hadn’t doubted it, honestly, but it felt good to have proof).
That didn’t actually change anything.
His dad was still gone. And he was still the kid who had gone all the way into the sky on a magical train, and had managed to fail at what he set out to do. Whatever good spin he tried to put on it, those were the facts. That was the thing about being a finder: There was no halfway win. You either found what you were looking for, or you didn’t.
* * *
• • •
That was when the doorbell rang.
* * *
• • •
Lifting his head, Marty looked at his mom’s slumped shoulders. They weren’t expecting anybody to come over, but these days you never knew. People dropped by all the time, for no particular reason, and then you had to smile and nod and make small talk when all you wanted to do was be alone with the quiet.
Alone to think. Alone to remember.
His mom evidently felt the same, because she didn’t move a muscle. Or maybe she didn’t hear the bell; she looked like her mind was miles away.
Marty almost decided to ignore it, too. But the ring came again, and it had a certain something. He couldn’t have said what, but whatever it was hoisted him off the stool, across the floor, down the hall.
He flung open the front door.
There was no one there.
Marty blinked at the empty landing outside, and only then did he notice a square box resting on the top step, right in front of the door. A curling tendril of fog licked up and over its surface.
The mail? At this hour?
It didn’t seem likely, but there was the box, and . . . that was his name scrawled on it in black marker: Marty Torphil.
Puzzled, Marty tucked the package under his arm and shut the door behind him.
For no reason he could explain, he didn’t go back into the kitchen, but carried the box up to his room. He put it in the center of his bed, then sat down facing it, tucking his legs crosswise in front of him.
He took a deep breath.
The flaps were tucked under each other to keep it shut. There was no tape.
There was no address.
Just Marty’s name shouting out from the top.
Marty picked up the box. “Heavier than a boiled egg,” he whispered, his heart in his throat. “Lighter than a laptop.” He shook it. Nothing . . .
No, something.
A slight shifting, and a faint scratch, like something hard brushing the edges of the box.
Throwing ritual aside, Marty tore open the flaps.
Into his lap fell the jacket.
His jacket. The very one he’d lost.
He laid it out on the bed, pushing the box off the edge so the jacket’s sleeves could lie flat. He ran his hands lightly over each of the pins, the badges, and the sewn-on patch. They were all there—all except the three missing ones. He grabbed those from his windowsill, the screen and the duck and the circus clown (and the new star, too). He pinned each of them into place.
He found a special place for the star, right in the front.
And then, from inside the box, something rattled.
He tilted the box and tipped it over. A single pin fell out onto the floor.
Marty picked it up, and immediately he frowned. He didn’t recognize this at all; it wasn’t one of his pins.
Then what was it?
He moved under the lamp so he could study the image in careful detail. As he did, his eyes widened.
The oval pin was the length of his index finger, and the backdrop gleamed silver in the light. The image showed a long, winding train, sleek as a bullet, and next to it, a tall conductor, smiling into the night.
The conductor was wearing a black backpack with tiny purple zipper pulls.
Marty’s fingers trembled as he moved the pin to the collar of the jacket and pinned it in place. Tears filled his eyes. He could hear the words in his mind, as clear as if Dad were standing in the room next to him. “Stick it on anywhere you like, Scooter.”
Marty smiled and spoke
aloud the words Dad had said to him so long ago: “That’s how you capture today and keep it forever.”
Marty put his arms into the jacket.
He did up the buttons and went downstairs. His mom was still slumped at the kitchen counter, her untouched noodles congealing in their pool of sauce in her bowl. He came up behind her and put one hand on her shoulder.
Mom looked up, bleary-eyed. She frowned at him. “Where did you—hey! Isn’t that the jacket you lost?”
Marty smiled (a bit damply, true, but it was a real smile). “Mom. Have I got some stuff to tell you!”
* * *
• • •
Late at night, that’s when the magic was strongest. When stories swirled like fog and trembled like dreams made real. When heartbreak and tears and hugs made the world a little better than it was before.
That was tonight.
Tomorrow there would be ice cream with a new friend.
And after that? Living. Something he wanted to start doing a lot more of. He thought Jax might just understand if Marty told him the whole story. Might want to give their friendship another try.
Yeah, there was a whole lot of living ahead. New memories to make.
Marty stuffed his hands into his jacket pocket and started his story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I suppose I have the Paris airport security to thank for this book. Several years ago, we experienced a family vacation trip that was essentially one long string of disasters. (It makes for a fascinating story, but unfortunately, the combined sum of events would be far too unrealistic for fiction!) As the last straw on this debacle of a trip, my teen daughter’s jean jacket—with its long-standing and lovingly collected pins and badges—disappeared after our trip through security. Coming as it did on the tail of everything else, it just felt like one thing too much.
But it also got me thinking: about lost things, how precious they can be, how powerless we are when they go astray. I’ve always felt that pull for things I’ve lost, to where I think back on certain objects years later, and always with that gut pang of longing. Standing in my office that day, feeling bad for my daughter, was when the first story seed idea came my way.
What if there was a way to reclaim those lost things? What if . . . ?
The second factor that contributed to this book was my mother’s battle with lung cancer: brief, fierce, and fatal. This amazing woman lived just four months after her out-of-the-blue diagnosis, before passing away in 2003. Her death was the catalyst that first pushed me to take my writing seriously, but not until now have I felt up to probing the experience of losing her. Of course, this is not her story, nor is it mine. But it is a story that comes from my heart, and as such, I hope that wherever she is, she knows that I am thinking of her. That she has never lost a moment of my heart’s time.
I have so many others to thank for their role in bringing this book to life: Jill Santopolo, Talia Benamy, Michael Green, and the whole Philomel team. Erin Murphy, Dennis Stephens, and the EMLA gang. My amazing clients, who are so patient when I am slower than I ought to be. Jaime Zollars and Theresa Evangelista for gorgeous cover artistry. Julie Berry, Debbie Kovacs, Natalie Lorenzi, Julie Phillipps, Nancy Werlin, and Kip Wilson for being A+ critique partners. Sarah Azibo and Kirsten Cappy for all you do. And last but not least, to my family: Zack, Lauren, and most especially, Kim—your jacket is gone but not forgotten.
© Andrei Ivanov
Ammi-Joan Paquette has spent much of her life with her nose in a book—whether reading or writing. She is the author of several books for young readers, including the Princess Juniper series, Two Truths and a Lie, Nowhere Girl, Rules for Ghosting, and The Tiptoe Guide to Tracking Fairies. She lives near Boston with her husband and two daughters.
You can visit Ammi-Joan Paquette at ajpaquette.com
and follow her on Twitter @joanpaq
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