Eden
The train was only a four-hour trip, but it stopped several times along the route. Eden wouldn’t arrive in the Windy City until three PM. Aside from cutting and dyeing her hair, it was an
uneventful ride. There were only six passengers in her car, although more people would board at Galesburg. When the train chugged into the Galesburg station, passengers were encouraged to disembark for a few minutes. Eden bought an egg sandwich and coffee inside the station. Along with the remaining half of her PB&J, this might be her last meal for a long while. She spotted an abandoned newspaper on a bench in the train station and hurried over to pick it up.
It was the Galesburg newspaper, which didn’t cover news from Nauvoo. There wouldn’t be any mention of her leaving her husband and kids, but she paged through it anyway. A stab of pain ran through her when she thought of Teagan, Sariah, and Elijah. By now they’d know she had left them; she wondered what Porter had said about her. She hoped he’d explained she was just in Quincy visiting her parents, but she feared he’d told them that she was a bad mother who didn’t love them and had broken the Mormon covenant. And that she was no better than a criminal. She felt like one.
Eden—no, she had to start calling herself Patsy again. No—not Patsy, either. She needed a completely new name with no association to her past. She settled on Lisa. She’d always loved the name. She started repeating it to get used to it. “Lisa” had been to Chicago twice before. The first time was a graduation trip from her Quincy middle school. The second time was when she was a student at the University of Iowa. She and her boyfriend, Tony Mariano, had snuck into the city for a weekend.
The first time she’d seen all the sites—the Sears Tower, the Hancock, Navy Pier, the Bean in Millenium Park. They’d gone to the South Side Midway Plaisance, which, by virtue of hosting the world’s first Ferris wheel during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, drew tourists from all over the world. A bus even drove them past Wrigley Field where the Cubs played.
The second time she was in Chicago she barely left the downtown motel she and Tony checked into. Patsy was deliriously in love with Tony. He was her first lover, and now that he’d taught her about sex, she wanted to do nothing but practice. He was a talker afterwards and was full of plans. They would get married and move to Chicago where they’d eventually buy a house. He planned to become a dentist—dentists made great money, he claimed—and UIC had an excellent school. Patsy was majoring in art history, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.
After graduation, Tony enlisted in the army so the government would pay for most of dental school. After basic, he was posted to Iraq. Six months after that, he was blown up by an IED. Patsy was devastated.