PREFACE The world stops for a funeral. Everyone skips out on school or work and gathers at a funeral home or a church to honor the dead. They sing, they hug, they pray. And then, for most, the world starts spinning again. The kids go back to school, the grown-ups, back to work. Time moves on. But the ones who feel the loss the most, they can't just go back to their lives once the services are over, once the church ladies pack up the leftover sandwiches in Tupperware to send home with the family of the deceased. Even in the normal, day-to-day things, the loss drags behind them, like a heavy cloak. It doesn't let them forget, even for a second, that their world is never, ever going to be the same. The black dress Mom made me wear still sits crumpled on the floor of my room. I hate dresses on a good day, but wearing one to that made everything so much worse. Nana's picture still sits in a large frame on our dining room table back at home, along with other leftovers from the funeral, like cards with a poem and her birth and death dates on them, several vases filled with flowers, and a whole entire box filled with cards that read things like "May you find peace in the memory of those you love." I am not a fan of any of this, of the sentimental poems and the flowers stinking up my house. I want Nana . I want to sit with her at the kitchen counter eating homemade chocolate chip cookies one more time. But I can't. So I do what I do best when I need a distraction. I run , fast . I chase Nat, my fraternal twin sister, around and through the empty Victorian house Mom and Dad have labeled the Windswept Victorian, on account of how it had been damaged in a windstorm a few years back. Me and Nat's echoes ricochet down the halls as we play a game of tag, followed by hide-and-seek. We weave deftly around cameras set up on tripods, and computers, and cords--equipment our mom and dad use to film their YouTube home-renovation show, Wrecked to Decked . The renovation of the Windswept Victorian has provided us all a decent amount of distraction. We've fallen behind over the past few weeks as Nana's health took a turn, and today is our first day back on the job. And it has been my absolute favorite day of the whole entire process, Demo Day. There's something so beautiful in breaking a thing down and clearing out the old in order to make room for the new. And our family gets to be a part of that. After Demo Day, Mom and Dad always go out to pick up some delicious food from a local restaurant. Then they stretch out a dusty sheet and we all have a picnic on the floor. A moment of quiet between the before and the after, the then and the now. That's what we're waiting on, for Mom and Dad to return with the food. My stomach rumbles loudly, and I set my hand on top of it to try and stifle the sound. But it doesn't work. Nat looks at me and giggles, her eyes brighter than I've seen them in days. Then her stomach rumbles, too, even louder than mine did. And we both just crack up. We laugh until our stomachs hurt . Until we're rolling on the dusty floor, tears of laughter weaving windy paths down our dirty cheeks. When you're as close as Nat and I are, anything can become a joke. Anything can become an adventure. Even something that starts out small. We finally sprawl out and settle. I look up at the water-stained ceiling, caused by a leaky pipe, and take a deep breath in. When I'm here like this with Nat, everything feels right. "Your turn to hide," I say. Nat stands, and I stay on the floor, then close my eyes and start to count. She sneaks up the narrow stairs. I know it because I can hear the creaking. But soon, the house falls silent. "Ready or not, here I come!" I shout. Then I bound up the stairs, two or even three at a time, trying to find her. I search the second floor, with its three bedrooms and ancient bathroom with a really cool claw-foot tub. No sister. So I head to the next, smaller set of stairs. The ones that lead up to the third floor. Then I start to climb. "This is where the servants used to live," Mom said when we did our walk-through a couple of weeks back. We filmed it all for the cameras. She told us that the family who owned this house were bankers, some of the first people to invest in Hush around the turn of the century, the early 1900s. They had two daughters, but one died during childhood right inside this very house. I reach the landing on the third floor and listen closely. I listen for creaking wood, or breath, or even the stifled giggles that sometimes give my sister away. There are three doors on the right side of the hall, all closed, that lead to smaller bedrooms than the ones on the second floor. One door on the left, a bathroom. And then a small door a few feet from the stairs, no taller than the neighborhood toddler Nat and I babysit sometimes while her mom works from home. And that little door is cracked open, just a tiny bit. I shiver. The air up here is cold. A lot colder than in the rest of the house. "Come out, come out wherever you are . . ." I sing, low and slow, as I take one silent step after another toward the tiny little door. I reach out to the handle and grab hold of the cold metal. The smells of dust and mothballs and staleness seep out of the crack as the air thins all around me. It's like I can't exactly catch my breath. Like there's somehow not as much oxygen up here as there should be. I pull the door open and peer in. "Gotcha!" I say . . . or at least I start to say it, but I stop when I see my sister's face. The light from the hall shines on her. She's covered in a film of gray dust. She doesn't look excited, or startled, or giggly like she did just a few minutes ago in the downstairs hall. Her eyes are wide. She's staring at something I can't see. Her lips are pressed together in a line, and her nostrils flare with each shallow breath. She points to the corner of the crawl space, a place where the light doesn't quite reach. I think I see something move in the shadows, but then again, maybe not.I'm not sure. "That's Sarah," she says, pointing to the darkness. "She's scared. She's cold. She's been waiting a really long time for someone to find her." Excerpted from The Night Train by Lorelei Savaryn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
