Page 1 of These Summer Storms

Chapter

1

There was something abouttrains.

If she marked the minutes of her life, Alice Storm would not be surprised to discover that she’d spent nearly a third of them in transit:

The shiny crimson bicycle that had been her seventh-birthday present and most prized possession, until her brother had sent it flying into Narragansett Bay, never to be recovered.

The white rowboat her father had captained into that same salty sea every Saturday in July for her entire childhood, because he insisted onfacing nature as God intended.

The endless line of nondescript black town cars with silent drivers that ferried her from private school to private art classes to the Storm family’s Park Avenue penthouse, New York City muffled and dim beyond the window.

The skateboard she’d ridden into a tree one Sunday morning during her first year at Amherst—determined to prove herself a completely ordinary eighteen-year-old—resulting in an arm broken in three places.

The helicopter that airlifted her to Boston to be pinned back together and returned her to school in time for a ninea.m.Art History midterm, before her classmates could discover there was nothing ordinary about her.

The private jets that took her around the globe whenever her father issued an international summons on a whim.

The commercial jet that had taken her to Prague eighteen months earlier, diamond ring tucked into her boyfriend’s carry-on bag.

The subway car she’d been on that afternoon when her phone had rung and stolen her breath—Incoming call…Elisabeth Storm(neverMom)—all beige walls and harsh lights and advertisements for clear skin and uncluttered apartments and that one William Carlos Williams poem about plums and iceboxes and forgiveness and the parts of us that will never change.

And still, there was something about trains.

Probably because she’d discovered those herself. All the other ways she’d traveled through the world had belonged to someone else. Were shared with someone else. But trains…they were her secret.

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