The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology Page 5

  3:14.

  Sarah killed the engine and just sat there for a few seconds, hands on the steering wheel, listening to the car cool and tick and settle. If she gripped the wheel hard enough, her hands wouldn’t shake. She felt her throat closing and her eyes brimming and she bit down on her lip.

  Go home. Stupid girl. There’s nothing for you out here.

  Of course there wasn’t. Why had she really come here? What did she expect, racing across town in the middle of the night, chasing ghosts? You’re losing it, kid, she thought, grinning in the dark enclosure of the car. Just losing it.

  But that was bullshit, too. She’d lost it the day Jonah died, and had never gotten it back. Trying to pretend otherwise had been her sole occupation ever since.

  With a shaky laugh she took the keys from the ignition and popped the door. The night wind gusted, whipping her hair across her face, crisp with the rich scent of autumn. From somewhere came the smell of a wood-burning stove, carried on the breeze, and it made her realise that she was not the only one awake. Not alone in the dark.

  She slipped the keys into her pocket and shut the car door, then started walking toward the tracks. How many minutes left? Just a couple. Sarah stepped onto the tracks and looked in both directions. The moonlight only dispersed so many shadows, but enough to see that nothing about the tracks had changed. They were overgrown and unused, nearly buried in some places.

  Closing her eyes, she raised her arms, imagining the 3:18 coming. Would it pass right through her, or run her down? Or might it, instead, pick her up and carry her away? Her eyes snapped open and she crumbled inward, wrapping her arms around herself. With a deep breath, she stepped off the tracks, beginning to rub her thumb across the bandage on her wrist where she’d cut too deeply. Last night she’d almost been brave enough to join Jonah.

  A long minute passed, and then another. Sarah glanced back and forth along the tracks, and then put her face in her hands, aware of how seriously she had deluded herself . . . of just how lost she had become.

  Then she heard the whistle. It came softly at first, a distant, mournful cry. She caught her breath. It was the same sound she had heard night after night as she lay in bed, unable to sleep. Sarah pulled her hands away from her face. Barely able to breathe, she turned to the left, staring along the tracks.

  The whistle sounded again, moving closer, so much louder. Louder than she’d ever heard it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, shaking.

  Unblinking, she stared along the tracks, but there was no sign of any train. She stood just at the edge, where the metal rail was sunk into the pavement. The whistle came again, this time so close that she winced at the sound. She could see nothing, but now she could hear the chugging of the train.

  Mouth agape, Sarah took a step back.

  The whistle blew, and the scream was so loud she covered her ears. Then the wind struck her, the hot blast of air displaced by the passing locomotive. Eyes wide, she stared at the place where it ought to have been, but saw only the road on the other side of the tracks and the trees on the riverbank beyond.

  And maybe something else. The night air seemed to ripple, to have texture, just a hint of substance. Sarah glimpsed a face through a window. She blinked and other faces flashed by in the zoetrope flicker of passenger car windows. They streaked across the darkness in the space of seconds. Still there was no train, nothing but the night and echoes and the chuff and clank of a machine she could not see.

  One of the faces was Jonah’s.

  A blink, only. There and gone in the fraction of a moment. The strength of her hope and grief could have summoned his image. But Sarah knew. She’d seen him.

  ‘My baby,’ she said. And then she cried. ‘My baby!’

  She fell to her knees beside the tracks as the wind from the passing train diminished and then subsided entirely, the whistle growing distant. After a while she crawled forward and put her fingers on the old rail. The metal was so cold. Sarah lay down there in the road for a while, body across the tracks. A car might have come and run her down. The thought occurred to her, but she thought that wouldn’t have been so bad.

  Sometime before four o’clock, she staggered back to the Jeep.

  *

  Paul let her sleep in. By the time Sarah rolled out of bed on Saturday, it was after ten o’clock. She took her time showering and getting dressed, then went downstairs and had a glass of orange juice. It had been a dreamless sleep, and when she’d woken it had taken a minute or so for the mist to clear from her mind. When the events of the previous night came back to her, Sarah felt herself suffused with a profound contentment. Her soul had been empty for so long, but now it began to fill up again.

  Jonah was gone from this house – from the world, even. But he was not out of reach.

  The front door was open. Sarah went out onto the steps and saw Paul raking leaves in jeans and a New England Patriots sweatshirt. He looked so much like the old Paul, the one who’d loved her before he started hating himself. If only she could have stepped down onto the grass and by doing so enter the time before Jonah, when he would have welcomed an embrace on the lawn, when Paul had been playful and his eyes bright with possibility.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said.

  Her husband looked up. For a moment he smiled as though he’d forgotten all the loss and resentment, but then she saw it draw like a veil across his face. The illusion shattered.

  ‘Morning, sleepy head,’ he said. Sarah appreciated the effort to be cordial. ‘You must’ve been up all night.’

  ‘Pretty much. After I woke up, around two, I couldn’t get back to sleep until it started to get light.’

  He leaned on his rake, real concern in his eyes. ‘Honey, I’m sorry. You sure you don’t want to start taking those pills?’

  Sarah smiled. ‘It’s Saturday. No law against sleeping in. Listen, I was thinking I’d make some chicken salad with the leftovers from last night. Some onions and celery. Sound good for lunch?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul replied, still studying her. ‘Sounds great.’

  She still loved him, and she pitied him, and she hated him, just a little. Sarah did not really blame Paul for what happened to Jonah – that had been nobody’s fault. But she wished that they could have found solace in each other. If only he could find peace in himself, he could stop pretending his heart had not been torn apart. He could have held her and cried, let her feel it was all right to cry with him.

  But that time was past.

  After lunch, she told Paul she had some errands to run, and went to the cemetery. The leaves eddied on the breeze and rustled in whispers along the grass, red and yellow and orange. She parked her car on a narrow, paved path that separated the modern part of the cemetery from the earliest graves, which dated back to before the Civil War.

  Sarah got out of the car and shut the door. Quiet and peaceful, the cemetery was beautiful to her. The sky hung bright blue above the rolling lawns and the trees full of autumn colours. Some of the crypts were marble and others granite, while a handful of the older graves were marked by statues of angels.

  She took a deep breath and started across the lawn. Tree roots bulged under the soil like raised veins. Sarah brushed a hand against an old oak as she passed. On her way to Jonah’s grave she made a small detour, stopping by the granite block that marked her parents’ resting place. Her mother had been killed in a car accident when Sarah was very young, leaving her father to raise her. He’d been her whole world, until Jonah came along.

  The family name – her maiden name – was engraved on the front in large letters. KOSKOV. On the back, both of her parents were listed, with their dates of birth and death.

  Eli Josef Koskov

  Teresa Annalise Koskov

  Sarah ran her fingers across the engraved letters. ‘Hi, Daddy.’ She kissed the tips of her fingers and touched them to his first name.
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br />   Three rows further along she came to another. The cut of the stone differed, and instead of granite it had been fashioned of a blue-tinted marble. This one said COOPER. Sarah didn’t walk around to the back. She had stared too long, too often, at the letters that spelled out her son’s name.

  She sat on the grass just to one side of the grave and sang to him the songs she had always soothed him with when he had trouble falling asleep. Billy Joel’s Lullaby. Harry Connick’s Recipe for Love. Melissa Etheridge’s Baby, You Can Sleep While I Drive.

  Sarah had visited Jonah without her husband many times. But that afternoon was the first time she did not cry.

  *

  After dinner – a chicken cacciatore Paul had put together while she was out – Sarah cleaned the house. It started with the dishes, but afterward she could not stop herself. Compelled to continue, she moved into the living room and dining room, then upstairs into the bedroom to wash the bathrooms and put away a week’s worth of laundry that had lingered, folded, in baskets. Paul watched television on the sofa the whole time, calling to her every half hour or so to come and sit with him, to relax.

  Sarah couldn’t relax. She could barely stand still.

  At bedtime, she slid beneath the sheets, bathed in the blue, flickering light of the television. Paul liked to have the news on while he fell asleep. He took comfort in the chatter, the monotonous drone of the voices. Sarah tried to tune them out. The news held no interest for her; it was nothing but a parade of tragedy. When Paul touched her hip, she thought he might want to make love. The idea startled her; it had been so long. But he only looked into her eyes.

  ‘You all right?’

  The question made her want to laugh and scream in equal proportion. Hadn’t they both agreed that it was the most foolish question anyone ever asked someone who’d suffered a terrible loss? Of course she wasn’t all right.

  ‘Just tired,’ she said.

  ‘Hope you get some real sleep tonight.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  But his eyelids were heavy. Already, Paul was drifting off, and Sarah didn’t know if he’d even heard her.

  As soon as he had slipped into a deep enough sleep, she got up again. The clock on the nightstand read 11:49. Pulling the covers up to make sure he wouldn’t feel any draft, she left the bedroom. For an hour or so, she sat on Jonah’s bed, surrounded by his things, holding a plush raccoon that had been his favourite – it had come with the name Sticky Fingers, but Jonah had mispronounced it as ‘Tikki’, and afterward they had never referred to it any other way. She held Tikki close, rubbing it under her chin.

  Sometime before one o’clock she went back into her room and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. She’d never taken off her socks. After a visit to the bathroom, she carried Tikki downstairs and turned on the television, volume down so low she could barely hear it. Not that it mattered – she’d put on Cartoon Network and it was the visuals, not the sounds, that comforted her. Jonah loved any cartoon, no matter how old or how lame the animation. They had often curled up together and Sarah had stolen catnaps while Jonah watched. Tonight, Tikki watched with her, but there was no chance of Sarah falling asleep.

  At two o’clock she set Tikki on the coffee table and turned off the TV. She laced up her sneakers and went out to the driveway. She’d left her own car out of the garage this afternoon. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, to take Paul’s Cherokee.

  *

  The razor cut deep. Blood slid out over the palms of her hands, filling the lines first and then dripping from her fingers. In the chilly October night, the cuts felt like burns, yet she shuddered as she dropped the razor to the tracks.

  Sarah grimaced, a strange satisfaction filling her. She let her arms dangle at her sides as she knelt on a wooden railroad tie, right in the middle of the tracks. She had half an hour or so before the 3:18 was due, so she had chosen a spot away from the road. On the off chance that a car came by, she didn’t want to get run over. What terrible irony that would have been.

  She let her head loll back and she stared at the stars. If she closed her eyes, she thought she might have been able to fall asleep. What lovely irony. It felt as if she’d been holding her breath ever since Jonah’s death, and tonight, at last, she could exhale.

  So she waited, and she bled. As the minutes ticked past she began to grow colder, not just on her skin but down deep in her bones. Her eyes fluttered.

  It might have been that she closed them for a while.

  The whistle startled her. Sarah blinked and caught her breath, staring along the tracks, searching for some sign of the train. That mournful cry came again, much closer than she would have thought. A terrible ache filled her and she felt weak from the loss of blood. Her body’s instinct was to rise, to get out of the way, but that sluggishness gave her a moment to consider, and instead she stayed just where she was, content to wait in the path of the 3:18.

  She stared down the tracks, narrowing her eyes. A light had appeared in the darkness. The more she focused, the more distinct it became, until Sarah realised that tonight, circumstances had changed.

  The 3:18 was coming, and she could see it. The shape of the train hurtled toward her, just a hint of steam blurring the night above the engine. The sound filled the night, then – the whistle, the clank of metal, the chuffing effort of the furnace.

  She smiled and her eyes moistened with tears.

  The noise grew and the train hurtled closer, a phantom engine, only an intangible silhouette. But it was real. She had not imagined the whistle or the wind, and she swore to herself that she had not imagined Jonah.

  Elated, she held her hands up as though to embrace the 3:18. What would happen when it struck her, or passed through her? Sarah could not be sure. But she knew what she wanted, what she had prayed for as she opened up her wrists. The cuts had started to scab, but raising her hands tore them open again and trickles of blood ran down the insides of her arms.

  She thought of what it had felt like to hold Jonah against her, to rock him to sleep, to watch him at peace.

  Her breathing came in short gasps. She closed her eyes and threw her arms out wider.

  The train hissed loudly and a blast of cold air struck her, blowing her hair back. She heard the screech of its brakes and opened her eyes to find the enormous locomotive slowing to a halt. With a kind of gasp, it came to a stop twenty feet away. Sarah stared at the 3:18. In the darkness it looked almost real, but she could see right through it.

  An icy ripple went through her. A ghost. So close.

  But then the truth of what was happening rushed in and she felt the smile blossom on her face, so wide that it hurt. Weak as she was, she staggered to her feet. She slipped in her own blood and nearly fell, but she recovered and ran for the train.

  ‘Jonah,’ she whispered, under her breath. ‘I’m here, baby boy.’

  Sarah rushed alongside the first car, looking through the gauzy windows. Images floated within, faces that loomed up from a grey nothing beyond the glass. Some of them seemed to be in pain, while others only looked lost, their eyes vacant. The transparent figure of a little girl gazed out at Sarah with hope in her eyes. Sarah shook her head and ran on. She did not want to linger on any of those faces.

  The second car gave her no answers and so she moved on to the third, wondering if she should have tried the other side of the train – wondering how long she had before the train began to move again and whether she should just try to get on board. Had enough of her blood been left behind on the tracks for that?

  After the third car, she began to panic. Sarah ran.

  ‘Jonah!’ she called. ‘Where are you, sweetie?’

  Halfway along the fourth car, she staggered to a halt. One hand fluttered to her mouth, smearing blood on her face. She laughed into her hand.

  Jonah waved to her from the window. Then he retreated, as though getting up from his seat.


  Sarah ran to the door at the end of the car. She could see through it to the trees on the other side and the river beyond, but the train itself had substance. It pulsed and gave off a strange luminescence, which might only have been the influence of the moon. The 3:18 was a ghost in and of itself, ridden by phantoms. But Sarah had not forgotten the story that had first brought her here. Near death herself, she could see it well enough.

  Now she reached toward the handle beside the door, expecting her fingers to pass through the misty nothing of that spectre. Instead, her bloody hand gripped cold metal.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you.’

  She put a foot on the metal step below the door, and hoisted herself up into the open door at the rear of the car. Immediately, the train hissed and lurched, slowly starting forward once more. She could hear the clack of the rails and the breeze as it began to depart.

  Sarah looked up and saw Jonah standing in front of her, on the platform at the back of the car. His precious face was just as she remembered, open and smiling, eyes full of love. Jonah reached for her. A shadowed figure loomed behind him, but she paid the other ghost no mind as she put out her arms to her son.

  Strong hands snatched him backward, lifted him up and away from her.

  ‘No!’ Sarah cried.

  The ghostly figure coalesced from the shadows, and she saw the face of the man who held Jonah.

  ‘Daddy?’

  He held Jonah against his chest. The boy wrapped his arms around his grandfather’s neck, clinging to him, resting in that embrace.

  Sarah’s father stared at her, his eyes somehow more real than the rest of him, peering out at her from the grey realm of spirits.

  ‘Stop holding on to us, honey. We’re fine. The only thing that hurts us now is you not living the life we can never have. We’ll see you again, when it’s time.’

  Turning Jonah away from her, he reached out with his free hand – a gossamer thing, translucent and floating, a bit of nothing and shadow – and touched her face. He gave her a wistful smile, and then he shoved her.