The Secret World of Maya Alexander

Chapter 29

Jackie held onto her hope through the silence of an early uneaten breakfast and the first leg of their train journey into Arth-Goldau where they finally boarded the train that was famed to provide one of the most scenic and picturesque rail journeys in the world. Surely being so close to such vast natural beauty, as they spiralled unfathomable mountains faraway from busy cities, would breathe some life into her pale faced daughter. Jackie had found herself providing Stephen with reassuring updates of their journey. She would take pictures of the things they had seen and this seemed to encourage punctual and happy responses from a husband seeking to share in their travels. She reported each message to her daughter as she typed, as though in doing so Maya had become co-author of the regular dispatches. Jackie wondered if through the long silences Maya was actually imagining what it would have been like if her husband was with her. She had after all planned to take the trip with him. 

Sometimes, Jackie would feel a sense of guilt that she had taken Stephen's place and that this could have been the source of Maya's current decline. But somehow that feeling seemed to become so much bigger than that as she began to turn it around and examine it in her head. Maya's silences gave Jackie more time for thinking than she was used to. She was used to filling her time and her head with real things, not thoughts that seemed to go in circles. When she had agreed to the trip she had thought of it as a tangible way of finally offering support to her daughter. A daughter who had seemed to be reaching out to her. Perhaps she thought it would make up for the times when she had been less available. Sometimes Maya's silences hit Jackie hard and she wished she had never burdened herself with the trip. Perhaps this was the true origin of her guilt. The times when she felt as though she may as well have not bothered. The moments she felt like shouting at her daughter or even shaking her, to make her take notice. But Jackie was not the kind of person to shout or shake. She was more the kind of person to just keep on. Patiently taking each day as it came. So why was it so hard to stay hopeful? Why did she feel like giving up?

Jackie had not managed to read any of the books she had brought with her for the trip. Just like the trips with her once teenage girls, she had found herself stuck on loop reading the same pages over and over as she failed to reach out to her middle daughter and shake her from her silent state. Before she left, she had told herself this trip would be different. She hoped the silence would not reappear but she assured herself that this time she would not simply accept it. As she sat watching her daughter's eyes flicker at the moving images beyond the window, she wondered what it was that she was doing wrong. How was she failing? She thought of Alice and how she could always manage to stir Maya from her silence, even if only a little.

She felt ashamed as she watched other happy travellers, but she did not know if she was ashamed of herself or her daughter. Shame leads to cocealement. Phonecalls and messages home which told of a trip of a lifetime. Was she protecting Maya or was she protecting herself? Whose secret was she keeping?

Outside of the window, it was as though they had entered a new world. Vast mountains stood grey and ominous beside them as they wove through steep inclines and intangible bridges. Where greys were suddenly met with dense greens of vibrant life, determined to flourish against the backdrop of ancient rocks. Where the middle of nowhere suddenly emerged as somewhere with a collection of wooden houses, a church and a gathering of sheep . Then back to nowhere with its green carpets, at the foot of giant precipice, which were speckled with tiny white flowers bobbing their heads to interrupt the pastoral, clinging on before autumn took hold and ended their quiet yet determined existence.

Maya was transfixed. Her eyes may have looked empty and unreachable, but they were wide open and awake.  Her mind, though distant from the company of her mother, had been roused by the world beyond the window. There were no words to accompany the thoughts and feelings that pulsed from her eyes to her mind and into her heart. It was a warmth. An awakening. A belonging. An awe. It seemed to tell her she was a part of something big. She did not quite understand it, so she simply stared even more intensely out into the world with a relentless notion that if she kept her eyes open long enough, if she could drink it all in, there would be a message for her. And she would finally understand.