The Station Girl

Chapter 11

That night, as Sir bandaged the small cut on my head, he told me everything he knew about his son.

David was almost thirty, and he'd loved trains the same way as I'd done when he was younger. He would come with Sir to the station every day to see them, back when the trains ran his tracks every hour on the hour instead of once a day, sometimes twice. On the days where Sir needed to stay overnight, David would beg and plead with him to let him stay with him until he got his way.

David's mother wasn't thrilled about it though.

On particularly bad days, she would storm to the station and drag David away from it, yelling at him to not be like his father. Eventually, it got to the point where Sir and her never met any more, leaving David to fend for himself in the growing abyss between the two.

But David never minded. Even with his parents separated, he was still happy. The situation had even benefited him somewhat to where he could spend the day with his father without his mother coming to snatch him away. The towns people loved him dearly, and made sure he got home safe every night if they needed to.

And then one day, David stopped coming to the station. At first, Sir had thought nothing of it. It wasn't the first time that David went days, even a week or so on occasion, without coming to the station. But ss the days turned into weeks, and weeks into a month, Sir became increasingly worried. He decided that it was time to pay his wife a visit, the first in a long while, to find out what she'd done to David this time.

She wasn't there, and neither was David.

The house was locked up with no furniture to be seen from the windows. The plants that Sir's wife had once tenderly cared for were left to their own devices, and were riddled with weeds. When he asked the neighbors what had happened, they said she left without warning, taking little David with her despite the tears he cried or the fists he threw.

The wooden train set I owned was the only thing left behind, forgotten on the ground when David had thrown his tantrum. They'd picked it up, hoping to hold onto it in case one of the two came back for. Neither came back, and so they'd given in to Sir in the hopes that he'd one day be able to pass it on to his son the next time he saw him.

Sir never saw his wife or his son again. Not until that rainy day when David showed up at our train station.

That first night he'd shown up, David told his father much of what had happened in the years he was gone. It was his own fault that he'd made his mother take him away he claimed. She'd forbidden him to see his father or the train station and he forced her hand as he disobeyed her time after time.

They had moved into a small house in a town not too far from this one. From the very first day, his mother had bombarded him with her hate of trains. With no trains around, they had reached the town by carriage, David soon began to believe her every word. He, too, started to hate trains for tearing his family apart.

Other than his hate for trains, David had grown up with a relatively happy and normal life away from his father. At times, the kids in his class would pick on him for not having a father at home. From time to time, David tried to fight them, but more often than not, he ran away crying. Out of all the students, there was one girl in particular that never teased him, and the two of them grew up together. A childhood and puppy dog love Sir had called it.

They were married and moved in together by the time they were twenty. At first, the marriage was everything they thought it'd be and more. Blissful evenings, cheerful bantering, eating meals together... But she was willful and stubborn when it came to one thing: she wanted to travel, and he didn't. As time passed, she became bitter and stubborn to the end about even the smallest of things. The more they fought, the more David responded with violence.