The train was already moving out of Richmond when the lower bunk caught my eye. Empty. Made up. The white blanket folded at a forty-five degree angle. Tyler was asleep on his feet against my arm, his tablet at three percent, and he'd been up since five because my cousin's bus leaves at six and we had to get to the station by eight.
Our tickets said upper berth. The upper berth in a Viewliner is basically a shelf with a safety net. Tyler's eight. He can't climb up there without falling. I've seen him fall off a kitchen stool reaching for the cereal.
So I lifted him onto the lower bunk, took the woman's leather tote off the foot of it, and set it up top where our stuff was. I didn't break anything. I didn't read her magazines. I just needed him to sleep.
She came back around nine. I was sitting on the edge of the bunk, watching Tyler breathe with his mouth open. She appeared in the doorway of our roomette, holding a cup of hot water and a tea bag. She was maybe sixty, gray hair in a clip, a cardigan with a small metal pin on the collar — one of those old Amtrak service pins.
"That's my bed," she said.
"He's a kid. He's done. I'm a mother."
She set the cup down on the tiny sink ledge. "I paid for the lower berth."
"I paid for a berth too."
"You paid for the upper one."
I stood up. "Listen, we can switch. Take the upper. I'll even help you up."
"I don't want the upper. I have a knee replacement scheduled for January."
"Then sit in the seat. You've got a chair."
"It folds into the lower bunk. The lower bunk is mine."
The conductor came around for tickets. I handed him mine. She handed him hers and said, "We have a situation. She put her child in my bunk."
The conductor — his nametag said Rick — looked at me. Then he looked at her. Something passed between them, like they'd done this before.
"You know her?" I said.
"We've met," Rick said, not meeting my eyes.
"Of course. So this is how Amtrak works. Regulars get treated better than a mother with a sleeping kid."
"Ma'am, nobody's treating you worse. Let's just figure out the seating."
"I'm not giving up the bunk."
Rick looked at my suitcase in the corner. It was a hard-shell roller, dark blue, with a paper tag tied to the handle. He checked the tag against his tablet.
"This bag isn't matched to your reservation," he said.
My insides dropped.
"It's mine," I said.
"I'll need to see your bag claim stub."
"I lost it."
"Then we'll need to identify the bag another way."
The woman — her name was Diane, I saw on the ticket — sat down on the seat across from the bunk. She crossed her legs. She didn't say anything. She just watched.
That's when Tyler woke up. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, seeing the conductor and the other woman. "Mom? Did we get there?"
"Go back to sleep, baby."
"Mom, that man said not to open the suitcase until we get to Savannah."
The whole roomette went still.
"Tyler," I said. "Don't talk right now."
Rick looked at me, then at the suitcase. "Ma'am, whose suitcase is this?"
"It's mine."
Tyler frowned. "But that man at the station gave it to you."
I could hear the wheels clicking over the track joints. Somewhere past the door, a kid was crying in another car. The heat had been turned up too high and the air smelled like coffee and vinyl.
"Ma'am," Rick said again, "we need to step outside for a minute."
—
The train manager came. Then a transit police officer. They didn't cuff me or read me my rights, but they did ask me to step into the service area between cars, next to the luggage racks and the maintenance closet. The suitcase stayed in the roomette with an officer standing by it.
"Tell me about the suitcase," the train manager said. His nametag read Marcus.
I had three choices: keep lying, walk it back, or tell the truth. I was tired. Tyler was scared. And that suitcase — I never opened it. I didn't know what was inside.
"It's not mine," I said. "A guy paid me to bring it to Savannah."
"How much?"
"Three hundred dollars."
"Three hundred," Marcus repeated. "To carry a suitcase you never looked inside."
"I don't ask questions."
"Start."
They contacted the passenger who'd reported a missing suitcase — a man in another car, three cars down. He'd called the conductor twenty minutes after we left Richmond. The tag on the suitcase matched his ticket.
An officer asked me to open it. I didn't have the key. The man who owned it came down with his key and opened it in front of us.
I won't write what was inside. Enough to turn a lost-luggage report into something federal. Enough to make me glad I never looked.
I sat in the service area while they took my statement. They had me write down everything I remembered about the man at the station: white guy, forties, gray puffy jacket, a phone in his hand the whole time. He'd been standing by the vending machines near Track 3, next to the newspaper stand that sells those little bags of peanuts for two dollars.
I signed the statement. My hand didn't shake, but only because I was gripping the pen too hard.
Then I unzipped my purse, took out the three hundred dollars — all twenties, folded twice with a rubber band around them — and set them on the jump seat next to the officer.
"I don't want this," I said.
The officer picked up the money. He counted it. Then he put it in a clear evidence bag and wrote something on the outside with a black marker.
"You understand this is now part of the investigation," he said.
"Yeah."
"You got all that from a guy at the station? Three hundred?"
"He said there'd be another two hundred when I got to Savannah."
"Four hundred total," the officer said. He didn't write that down. He just let it hang there.
I looked at my hands. There was a red mark on my palm from gripping the pen.
—
When they let me go back to the roomette, it was half past midnight. Diane was sitting in the fold-out chair. Tyler was on the lower bunk, awake, knees pulled up.
I stood in the doorway. "I'm sorry."
She looked at me. "For what specifically?"
That was the moment I understood: sorry wasn't one thing. It was a list.
"For putting him in your bunk. For moving your things. For yelling. For the whole… the suitcase." I swallowed. "For all of it."
She didn't answer right away. Then she said, "Okay."
Tyler got up. He walked over to Diane and stopped.
"Ma'am? Can I sit on the top bunk?"
Diane looked at him, then back at me. "If that's your seat, sure."
"It's our seat," I said.
Tyler climbed the ladder himself. He'd never done that before. From the top, he looked down and said, "This is actually cool."
I sat on the fold-out chair across from Diane. My purse was lighter by three hundred dollars. My phone had one less contact — I'd deleted the man's number in the service area, with the officer watching me do it.
The train swayed through the South Carolina low country. The wheels clicked over the track joints. The overhead light flickered for a second, then steadied.
"Krista," Diane said.
"What."
"I've ridden this line eleven years. I've seen people ask for things they didn't earn about a hundred times. You know what I've never seen?"
"What."
"Somebody hand back the cash."
She didn't say it like a compliment. She said it like a fact, like the sky outside was black and the train was on time.
Tyler was already asleep up top. I could hear his breathing, slow and deep. Diane turned the page of her paperback.
I took the copy of the statement from my pocket, unfolded it, and read my own signature. Krista Ann Levitt. It looked like someone else's name.
I set the alarm on my phone for 5:45 a.m. Savannah. That's when the train would pull in. That's when the man would be standing on the platform, waiting to pay me the other two hundred dollars. Except I'd deleted his number. And the officers had his description.
I folded the paper again, zipped it into the inside pocket of my purse, and drew the curtain across the window. The last thing I saw before the curtain closed was my own reflection, smeared from Tyler's palm print.
