Vista Dome

Yes. Now she understood what he meant. She took his hands in hers and looked at him.

He turned, looked at her. He couldn't read what was in her eyes, but the warmth of her skin on his was pure electricity, and he couldn't see where Rebecca ended, and Clair began.

"John. Go slow tonight. Don't force anything, don't jump to any conclusions. Okay?" She squeezed his hand, then let go abruptly and left the compartment. He didn't see the tears forming in her eyes, and quite possibly he'd not have been able to see them through his own.

+++++

Polk called dinner a few minutes before five, and Crossfield walked forward to the dining car. He entered and noted that this car, too, had a "Vista Dome", and that whatever was being cooked in the kitchen smelled just like his idea of home. Roast chicken, potatoes, spinach...all filled the air with an infinite warmth, but then again, just about everything about this train was like a trip into some sort of weird, collective past, like the hopes and dreams of an entire continent had crossed the land on these silver rails. And his hopes and dreams? Hadn't they too been borne along these very same rails?

But that was yesterday.

What lay ahead?

Well, it certainly didn't hurt that Rebecca St Cloud was standing beside the stairs that led up to the dome. She was really quite attractive, he saw, stunning in her wild, cinnamon-haired way, and he looked into her gray-green eyes attentively, looking for some signal of what might lie ahead.

"They're upstairs, John. Go on up," she said. She was a short, thin beauty, not as stunning as Clair - but somehow more wholesome looking. But where Clair was now deep and sternly calculating, Rebecca was openly, disarmingly empathic.

"Right," he said with his most engaging grin. He moved forward toward the curved stairway when the word 'they're' snapped into consciousness. He stopped, turned, looked at Rebecca, and almost fell away from the penetrating stare that met his eyes. He felt his world shudder and reached out to hold onto the smooth stainless rail that led upstairs, and his head tilted quizzically when he tried to read what was in Rebecca's eyes.

She pointed up the stairs and silently mouthed the words 'Go ahead'.

He pursed his lips and nodded, felt the way ahead was along the razor's edge of a most uncertain future.

'They' were already seated at the forward end of the dome, with their backs to him, so he walked carefully to their table, holding onto grab rails as the car swayed over a switch. The little girl beside Clair was, he guessed, maybe five or six, but then he saw the characteristic rolls on the back of the girl's short neck, the too large ears, and his heart began to sink. He approached the table, and put his hand on Clair's shoulder; she gave a little start, then turned and looked up at him.

John Crossfield swayed to another quick sideways motion of the train, then sat and looked at Clair, and at the little girl by her side.

Yes. Down Syndrome. Unmistakeable.

"Hello, John," Clair said tentatively, her eyes trained on his.

"Well, hello. And who have we here?"

"Yes. John, this is my daughter, Mary Madeleine St Cloud."

On hearing Tetsuko's Christian name, Crossfield took in a deep, very sharp breath. He felt gut-punched, but looked at the little girl, held out his hand, and said "It's very nice to meet you, Mary," as gallantly as he could. He could feel Clair's eyes measuring his every move, gauging the qualities of his reaction to the girl.

Yes, he felt he was being measured, as if for a fine suit. And it was unnerving.

Crossfield's eyes danced between the two 'girls' across the table, yet he felt a sense of hesitance when his eyes met Clair's. What was she afraid of?

Of his reaction?

Or of her own?

Yet there across the table was a disarming, wide-eyed innocence in Mary's eyes.

And an eternity hung in the air, apparent. Suddenly all he could think of was his very nearly continuous exposure to low level radiation all around Hiroshima over the months before he met Clair, and the possible implications of that exposure. Could it be...?

"Are you Captain John?" Mary asked. "Mom tells me about Captain John all the time!"

Crossfield hesitated, looked at Clair, noted the subtle nod of her head.

"Well Mary, yes, I guess I am."

She beamed, her pleasure spilling over and filling the dome, then she slipped out of her chair and came to Crossfield and hugged him.

His tears came out of the blue, and he wrapped an arm around the girl, pulled her close while he struggled with the sudden shifts his life was taking.

He looked up out of the Vista Dome into the swirling snow as he came to grips with his emotions, but all he saw was the inky darkness beyond the glass, and in time he looked across the table to Clair.

Her hands were steepled over her nose; a single tear welled in her right eye and spilled down onto the starched white tablecloth. The teardrop spread out slowly, not quite like a ripple across a pond, more like the tumbling crash of emotions cascading through his mind. As Crossfield watched, she took in a sudden sharp breath through her fingers, but she did not break eye contact. Now, however, he could feel a million questions in her eyes.

Or was it just an answer he saw forming in her blue pools. One single answer.

Mary pulled away and looked at her mother, then to Crossfield. "Mom cries a lot, Captain John. Don't you think crying's silly?"

"Sometime's it is, Mary, but sometime it's the right thing to do, too."

She regarded him wide-eyed, as if he'd just sprouted a second nose. "Really?"

"Really." She had her mother's penetrating eyes, he noted. Or, were they his?

And then, without missing a beat, she asked: "Do you like macaroni and cheese?"

"Love it. What about you?"

Mary nodded, said "Yup!", then looked back at her mother, but Crossfield regarded Mary more closely as she looked away, then suddenly - almost instinctively - he was looking at her more professionally than felt comfortable. Her lips were blueish, her fingernails too, and without thinking he took her right hand in his and pressed on a fingernail and watched as blood too slowly rebounded into the nail bed. Now she was looking back at him, regarding him quizzically, suspiciously, and then she stepped away warily and went back to her seat, taking her mother's hand in one fluid, natural motion.

Crossfield looked from Mary to Clair, saw her look away.

Of course he knew that many Down Syndrome kids were born with congenital heart defects, but treatment options were limited, and as suddenly he could better understand the quiet questions in Clair's eyes. She was, after all, a nurse. Or had been, once upon a time.

But now...she was a poet?

A poet?

Where had that come from? What kind of war had Clair waged in her own heart?

+++++

In his compartment two hours later, he was lost in thought, going over in his mind all that had happened over dinner... How Clair had led the conversation ever so gently to his paternity, how she'd let Mary come to her own understanding of who Captain John really was, and what that might mean for all of them in the years ahead.

He'd marveled at the austere purity of her words, been entranced by the elaborate traceries she wove with her fingers under the dome of the night, and he'd suddenly understood how Clair could be a poet. Outside, bitter cold winds swept the prairies of Kansas, and somewhere in the night Colorado's Rockies lay ahead, yet Clair St Cloud was the master of this moment. She was the concerned mother one moment, measuring and assessing his suitability as a father the next, and then she was the wild, unbroken spirit he'd met ten years ago.

The nurse, and the free-spirited poet. As impossible to reconcile as the cold winter storm raging outside with the warmth in her eyes. The contradictions were overwhelming, too. She would ask a question, brighten at his response, then collapse into poses of domineering certainty the next. Mindful of his thoughts and feelings one moment, then dismissive of them within the span of a single heartbeat, subordinating his role within a series of utilitarian calculations.

Now, sitting in his darkened compartment, he'd grown increasingly angry. Clair was, it now seemed to him, unilaterally mapping out a future for Mary that now included him, and it was as if she would countenance no other outcome to this unplanned reunion. She believed, he presumed, in la forza del destino, the impossibility of chance encounters. Everything was written in the stars - if one had but the simple grace to see. And John Crossfield had better get with program...or else!

A gentle knock on his compartment door, and Polk stuck his head in.

"Can I make up your bed, Cap'n?"

"No, Polk, I think I may just sit up for a while."

"Awright, Cap'n. I'll be by to check in a bit."

Polk closed the door; Crossfield turned and looked at his reflection in the pale blue-green night light and drifted away into the night. Then, while lost in the frosted glass, he saw the compartment door open again and a most feminine form slipped in. He turned, expecting a confrontation with Clair to materialize from the ether, but there was Rebecca St Cloud, the wise-beyond-her-years, the all-knowing, all-seeing kid sister.

She held a drink in her hand, and placed it in his.

"You look like you could use this," she said.

"And this is?"

"Drambuie. On the rocks."

He took the drink, placed it on the little table under the window.

She took in his evasiveness, almost decided to retreat, but pressed on. "Doesn't do much good if you don't give it a chance, John."

He picked up the drink, sniffed it tentatively, then took a sip and rankled his nose.

"Sorry. Not much of a drinker."

"I'd have never guessed," she said through a bubbly chuckle. "So, how did it go tonight?"

"I was going to ask you," he replied. "Quite a surprise."

She shrugged. "They're locked in their compartment. Light's off."

"Indeed."

"I wasn't sure she should break it to you...I wasn't sure this was the best way..."

"I'm not sure there could ever be a good way," Crossfield said. "I wouldn't know how to, so I certainly can't fault her."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You're not mad?"

"Mad? No, not really. Perplexed, more than anything else, I suppose." He sighed, still trying to fathom the evening's cascading implications. "I guess I still can't understand why she just left... Oh, I forgot. That's not the official party line, is it?"

"I suppose not," she said. "What did happen?"

Crossfield spend an hour recounting his time with Clair ten years ago, and he was surprised how easy it was to talk with Clair's "kid sister". He spoke briefly, hesitantly, about his assignment in Hiroshima, the hastily planned mission to D.C., and then he talked about Tetsuko-san and his personal recollections of surveying the human wreckage in and around the shattered city of Hiroshima.

And as suddenly he expressed his deepest fear.

"The first thing that ran through my mind when I saw Mary," he began professorially, "was that some sort of radiation induced mutation might have caused her condition. There are no definitive statistics to warrant such a conclusion, but then again, I've turned away from that area of study."

"Do you think it's worth looking into?" she asked.

"Why? There's not anything that can be done about it at this point, and any kind of concrete interpretation is probably, well, decades away. I'll end up feeling responsible one way or the other, no matter what the current literature says..."

"Responsible? As in, guilty?"

"I...that was...is my gut feeling. Yes."

She reached out, took his hand. "Don't, John. Don't do that to yourself. You didn't...it's not your fault."

"It's not that easy..."

"Yes, John, it is. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that she bolted from you, either. That's always the way she's reacted to...

"To what? Commitment?"

Rebecca chuckled again. "Wow. She really got to you tonight, didn't she?"

Even in the darkened compartment he felt her eyes boring in. "I've not been...well, yes. Meeting her all those years ago was, as I said, one of the most important things that ever happened in my life. And I finally managed to stop thinking about her just a few years back..."

"So tonight was more than just a shock?"

"You could say that."

"And Clair? Did you get a sense that..."

"That she's going to run away again?"

"Well, no, but I was going to say that's the way she's always reacted to serious events in her life. We were all surprised how she rallied around Mary. I think my mom expected her to put Mary up for adoption."

"Oh? What would you have done?"

"This isn't about me, John. Still, when Clair told me she was pregnant I was still in nursing school. I moved in with her, stayed when she went back to school for her master's, then her PhD."

"Really? Where's she teaching?"

"Berkeley."

"You all still live together?"

"With my travel schedule, and her teaching, it works out."

"So you've been there, with Clair and Mary..."

"Yes. The whole time."

"Mary's heart? What's going on with that?"

"Not sure. Just that Clair has taken her to a clinic recently. Do you think something's wrong? I mean, something serious?"

"That would be my guess, yes, but that's just a hunch at this point."

She nodded her head, looked away, yet she still had a firm grasp on his hand, and he found himself wondering why. More curious still, he found himself comfortably adrift in the perfumed aires of the moment. His eyes moved slowly across the line of her face, her patrician nose, then slowly down the line of her arm, eventually lingering on the curves of her thigh. Yes, he was taking in all of Rebecca St Cloud, and very confused because he was liking what he saw, and felt. He was, in the heady mists of the moment, quite surprised to conclude that she was as pretty as Clair - in a most subtle way - and she certainly appeared the more level-headed. As his eyes settled on her legs he thought how goddamn inappropriate these thoughts were becoming, and shook his head, tried to clear his thinking.

Then he was aware that she was looking at him, and he grew acutely mindful that he was still staring at the line of her legs, yet her hand never left his.

He felt her other hand caress his cheek, and he looked up, into her eyes.

He saw concern there, compassion, empathy. Perhaps the whisper of a tear forming.

He felt more than saw a tremor pass through her, then she leaned forward and kissed him gently.

He responded.

Her lips parted.

He placed his hands on either side of her face, ran fingers lightly across the nape of her neck, felt the impossible lightness of her tongue on his.

'What am I doing?' he asked himself. 'Where can this possibly go?'

She pulled away. "I'm sorry, John. I really am. I had no intention..."

"I understand."

"This must be the most confusing..."

A gentle knock on the door.

Rebecca stood, moved to the door. She opened it, and Crossfield could see Clair St Cloud standing in the brightly lit corridor. He could see the surprise of bitter recognition on Clair's face, in her eyes, and he saw her spin and walk away. Rebecca took off after her, leaving the swinging door to Crossfield's compartment beating to the heartbeat of another lifetime, the heartbeat of another family's presumed dysfunction.

He wondered what the devil had just happened, but something else hit him within the crystalline air of that moment: he found himself staring at echoes of Clair's eyes and wondering if this was the first time Rebecca St Cloud had come between Clair and her destiny, and if so, had the last few hours all been just a game.

And of more importance, on the brink of so many momentous decisions, why had he let this happen?

Deep in the night, unexpected thoughts of Thomas Jefferson filled Crossfield's mind; he saw Jefferson's letter to Maria Cosway in his mind's eye, and Clair's haunted eyes reading the letter. Jefferson's 'Dialogue of the Head versus the Heart'. Lost in love for her, feeling better suited to death than continuing on among the living, Jefferson rationalized his choice to leave Cosway and return to America, even as he recognized the choice to live without her love was to embrace death.

Sometime in the night sleep came for him, and he fell into a dream.

All was darkness, everywhere. Cool, damp darkness, and water.

He was standing on a rocky shore. In the darkness of his dreams.

He saw a boat, a small boat, paddling his way. A single boatman rowed.

Ah, the River Styx.

"I'm dead," he said into the night. "It's about time!"

The boat drew near, he heard the hollow collision as the boat hit the rocky shore, and the boatman beckoned wordlessly. As soon as he was aboard the little boat, the boatman pushed off and he steered back across the river. As his eyes got used to the darkness he thought he recognized Thomas Jefferson rowing the boat.

Soon he could just make out a single point of light ahead, then a distant shore.

The air, he noticed, was warmer.

The hard outline of an opposing shoreline appeared ahead. Rocks, sharp, jagged rocks loomed in shifting mists, illuminated by the single point of light. Deep shadows lay between the rocks, and rough shapes suddenly emerged - and as quickly disappeared into dark shadows.

The shoreline loomed, he felt the bottom of the boat grinding across sand and rocks, and he stood as the boat stopped. Jefferson looked sad, resigned to his fate, and not at all sympathetic.

Crossfield turned, looked at the bright white light ahead, and clambered out of the boat and started to walk as a moth to the flame. After what felt like hours he came to a deep pit and he walked to the edge and looked down.

The were seven rough concentric levels spread out below, and scenes of unimaginable carnage of worsening severity on each deepening level, and only then did he notice Jefferson was still by his side. The old man seemed mesmerized by the tortured souls writhing below, and then by the brilliant light hovering above the pit.

Yet he could recognize the light for what it truly was: the spark of destruction that man had unleashed above Hiroshima, and deep within the light, the madly spinning form of Clair St Cloud...

He woke with a start, felt sweat running down his neck, and he looked out the window. The city of Denver crawled by slowly, then, as the Zephyr wound it's way through foothills and canyons, the train began the arduous climb up into the Rockies. As mountains rose into the early morning sky, his reflection in the glass kept him company, but in his eyes he saw Clair St Cloud spinning in the light and Thomas Jefferson regarding his letter to Maria Cosway, and Crossfield found himself wondering if he was not better suited to death.

+++++

Crossfield packed his belongings as the Zephyr made it's way slowly down the Feather River Canyon, and on into Sacramento, California, and as the train approached Oakland and the bay beyond, Crossfield found himself lost within the icy grip of the deepest despair he'd ever known. Neither Clair nor Rebecca had returned to his compartment that first night or since, nor had he chanced to venture out into the train, aside from one short walk up into the shocking winter light under the Vista Dome.

It was odd, too, how he found it so easy to think up there, looking out on the world as it slipped by. There seemed to be one rhythm of life "here" on the train, and another, syncopated beat outside - though this was just barely visible to Crossfield. People walking in towns, doing their daily business and barely looking up at his passing train, and then all those cars moving along winding roads that paralleled the tracks from time to time. This layering of worlds, visible as sedimentary strata of realities, all moved to other rhythms, and at more than one point it felt to Crossfield that his life, his reality, was now held in abeyance - as long as he remained on this train. If only he could stay onboard forever, he told himself, things would be fine.