The train vented it's steam, spitting out sudden hissing bursts without warning, sounding impatient to begin. The conductors stood by the doorways of the passenger cars, checking tickets and directing the people to the right or the left as they helped them find their seats or compartments. Workmen loaded up the freight cars with crates and bags of parcels heading east.
The young girl held her mother's hand as they walked out of the station house and towards the train. At twelve years of age, she was beginning to carry herself as a young woman, holding her mother's hand as a companion rather than a dependent. Her father was dead, having contracted something which the doctors could not diagnose but which appeared to be a chronic flu, difficult to shake, but seeming harmless until the night his lungs filled with fluid and he died choking and laboring for breath. Unable to speak, his frightened eyes said good-bye as his wife and daughter wept over him.
That was six months ago, and it had taken this long for Liza to sell the property and dispose of other business so that she could return with her daughter to the place of her childhood. Sophie sat in the car, staring out of the train window and thinking that she was really leaving, and would she ever return, and mostly about her father, Dadin.... As a young child Aidan and Daddy had somehow become confused, sounding the same to her ears and so she had mixed them together, calling out to him as Dadin, whenever he would come through the door or call to her from the fields where he was working as she would walk out to him with her mother, bringing a picnic basket with lunch to be eaten in the shade of the tractor, since there were few trees to sit under.
The sun was magnified through the glass of the train window, burning her face. She didn't shift her position though, or pull the shade, she welcomed the burn allowing it to remind her of the very hot days of summer when the noon sun was just too fierce to labor under, and Dadin would stop his work and, placing her on his shoulders would walk down to the small pond at the corner of their property. They would splash and play, her father throwing her in the air and catching her again, always gentle, watching her reaction and careful not to let her head slip under the water unless she asked. They would play until he would stop and say "That's enough now, I have to get back to work. Got to take advantage of the time, I won't live forever you know" Oh, Dadin, how did you know?
The memories came over and over through that long ride back to the place she had never been before, and a young girl stuggled, as she had so many times since her father's death, with questions which had no answer. Deep questions of cause and effect, of mysteries unknowable. Questions of trust and courage and fear, of anger and outrage and acceptance. Questions too heavy for a young heart to carry, too knotted for even an old heart to unravel. Questions which would follow her even to this new place.
