by Dianne Drake
“But you’re still going after full custody of Tyler, aren’t you?” Dinah asked.
“It’s in the works. My investigator finally located Shelly, so the legal papers were served and now we’re waiting to see if the court gets a response from her.” He’d wanted to celebrate that next step with Fallon, but she’d turned him down. Told him to celebrate with his son.
“And?” Dinah pushed.
“Nothing, so far. The judge has given her another week to respond then we’re moving forward with or without her.” With or without Fallon, too. Truth was, he was happy about almost everything. Not having Fallon part of his happiness with Tyler dampened the mood, but didn’t ruin it. He wasn’t going to let that happen. However, this should have been the best time of his life, and in ways it was. Still, part of him was holding back. He knew that, and couldn’t get past it because hoping for Fallon to change her mind was dragging him down. Nonetheless, this was about Tyler, now. Meaning he had to move on and hope Fallon followed someday. Or, learn to live without her if she didn’t.
“Well, if there’s anything Eric and I can do to help you, please don’t hesitate to ask. Our daughters are infatuated with your son…” She pointed to the seat across the aisle where the three of them had their faces plastered to the glass, looking at all the magical Christmas decorations outside. Lights formed in images of ice skaters, and palaces, and dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs… Just like Matty Brower had promised. It was time to shake off the glum mood and enjoy the ride with his son. “I appreciate the offer, but so far Tyler and I are doing fine. He’s still up and down with the behavioral issues, but even those seem to be evening out.” Evening out like Fallon had said they would. Damn, he wished she’d come on this trip. If ever anybody needed a flashing red Christmas dinosaur to brighten her life, it was Fallon.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around tongue depressors. Not today, not any more. The job was nice to have, it gave her a sense of purpose, but it was also filling her with such longing to return to nursing. This evening, she was particularly restless. She’d wanted to go on the Christmas train but, truly, she didn’t belong there. It was for the children, and their parents or grandparents. She wasn’t a parent. She didn’t have a child, didn’t want to sit on a train full of parents who had their children. It would have hurt so much. More than that, she would be losing Tyler, soon. And James. So much loss for her Christmas, she just couldn’t put on the act tonight. Not even for Tyler’s sake. This was the way it was meant to be but she’d never counted on it hurting so much. Never counted on feeling so empty.
Well, she’d made her choices. The ones in the past, the ones now. Her choices. That’s what she’d have to keep telling herself. Because James…what he’d said. She did want to believe that, did want, with all her heart, to trust that. “But it’s what you wanted,” she reminded herself as she stared at the Christmas tree, trying to forget. Yet she couldn’t. Because the harder she tried, the more she thought about James, about the things he’d said. There’d been times these past days when she’d been on the verge of convincing herself that he was totally wrong about everything, telling her she was afraid to let someone help her, that she found it easier to be alone than have someone there to help her. At those times she almost believed he had been lashing out at her because he’d been hurt. Then she’d think about James, remember the reasons she’d fallen in love with him so quickly, so deeply, and realize that he never lashed out unfairly at anyone. And that he had deep, thoughtful perception. When she let herself remember that, the thoughts that always followed were how he was right. Right about everything. Then her gut would knot, knowing how wrong she’d been.
But making it right? It scared her to death. She didn’t know how. Didn’t want to feel the excruciating pain again.
So tonight she was alone, staring at the tree. A beautiful tree. Tyler had been adding ornaments daily, some he’d bought, others he’d made. She loved these days with him, wanted more. Hoped that James would allow her some visitations, too. In fact, she was positioning a few of Tyler’s hand-made ornaments front and center when the phone rang. It was Emoline Putters, in a panic.
“Don’t know what to do,” she cried. “We’ve got Dr. McGinnis on call, and she can’t leave the hospital…”
“Slow down,” Fallon said. “Take a deep breath. Start at the beginning.”
Emoline’s deep breath was audible over the phone. “It’s the train,” she finally said. Then paused.
In that pause, a million bad scenarios passed through Fallon’s mind. She held her breath, trying not to leap ahead, trying hard to hold to the moment. “What about the train?” she asked the older woman.
“They turned the bend at Hubbard’s Creek, started up the incline there. You know how it gets steep for a while then levels off before it gets steep again. They got to the part that levels off, and…”
Fallon shut her eyes, pictured the terrain. Steep rock face to the right, a small shoulder to the left then a drop-off into the river. Most of the ride was on even ground, but this was one of two places where the lay of the land was a little dicey. Probably not so much for a modern locomotive, but for the antiquated Christmas train…
“Anyway, they started up the second incline…”
She pictured that incline. Not too steep, but steep enough to slow down the train.
“Avalanche off Daphne’s Pointe. Hit part of the train. Buried it.”
Emoline’s voice trailed off. Or maybe it was Fallon’s mind, already on course for something else. “Did it stay on the tracks?” she asked pointedly. “Did the train stay on the tracks?” Worst case scenario, it had been shoved off the tracks and toppled over the edge. Maybe all the way down into the river.
“Don’t know,” Emoline said. “It just happened a minute ago. I called you first.”
“Any communication from anyone on the train?” Unlikely, due to all the mountains.
“Not so far.”
“Is the train completely covered with snow, or is any of it visible?”
“Don’t know anything yet. Except we need you here. Need you to be in charge. You’re the only one, Fallon…”
She didn’t even hesitate when she responded. Because, yes, James was right. People depended on her. “Put out all the normal calls. Get all the rescue crews we have mobilized, call everyone who’s not on shift back to the hospital. I’m on my way.” For the next ten minutes, trying to keep her mind on the road as she maneuvered through all the icy turns and curves, she caught her thoughts drifting off to James, and Tyler. They were on that train! Trapped, maybe hurt. Maybe… “Dear God,” she whispered, forcing her concentration back on the road. “Take care of them. Please, take care of them.”
The lights were out, and the little pot-bellied stove at the rear of the train car had long since been extinguished for fear that fumes could back up into the train car, cause carbon monoxide poisoning without proper ventilation. There was no way of knowing if this was the only car trapped or if the entire train had been buried. Naturally, his cellphone didn’t work, but James kept trying for a signal anyway. Punching in Fallon’s number, over and over. Finding some comfort in knowing that even though she wasn’t answering, she was out there, somewhere. Or maybe it was simply that the glow from his phone was reassuring. Presently it, along with the glows from other phones, was the only thing that kept them from sitting in pitch blackness.
“When can we get off?” Tyler whined.
“In a while,” he answered. Same answer for the last hour. Same answer all the parents were giving their children.
“But I’m cold. And I want some hot chocolate.”
Me too, James thought as he pulled Tyler closer to him, fully prepared to have Tyler push him away. Which was what he always did when he was grumpy. But this time he wasn’t pushing away. If anything, he seemed to be clinging harder and harder. “When we get off the train, you can have a gallon of hot chocolate. Two gallons, if you can hold that much.”
“What�
�s a gallon?” Tyler asked.
Paige and Pippa, sitting on the other side of the aisle with their parents, both giggled. “It’s like what the milk comes in,” their united voices rang out. “That’s a gallon.”
“Is it?” Tyler asked James.
“The ladies are right,” James responded, once again flipping open his cellphone. Still no bars. Still no contact. But a little light was good and he dialed her number anyway.
Once again, nothing connected, so he settled back into his seat, staring into that light for a few moments. By now the rescue operation would have been called. Of course, all those in charge of mountain rescue were right here on the train with him. But that didn’t bother him so much because by now Fallon would be in charge. And here he was, depending on that strength in her he’d come so close to criticizing.
“I need to get up and have a look at the scene,” Fallon told Jess Weldon, one of the locals, who owned a helicopter. “Need to see what we’re dealing with before we do anything.” It was dark, no one had any idea as to the extent of the damage. But she couldn’t put any kind of plan into action until she made the proper assessments and that, it seemed, was what everybody expected her to do.
“It’s waiting for you,” Jess said. “Any time you’re ready.”
“I know,” she said, fighting against the panic welling up in her. She was perfectly content to never fly again. Walking, driving, taking a bus…all fine and dandy. But not lifting up off the ground. “Is there a road up there?”
“There is, but it will take you an hour, if you can even get through. It’s probably not been cleared since the last hard snow, and I’m betting you’ll probably come across a tree or two down on the road.”
“So flying’s the only way,” she said, not to Jess but to convince herself.
“Unless you want to waste half the night, it is.”
“Then all I have to do is…” Her hands started shaking. “Is get into the helicopter, fasten myself in, and…” And think of James and Tyler. And all her friends. They were counting on her now. Everybody in White Elk was counting on her, and here she was, working on a good case of nausea. She shut her eyes for a moment, trying to steady her unraveling nerves, but in the darkness behind her eyes she could see James and Tyler very clearly. “All I have to do is get in,” she said resolutely. And that’s exactly what she did. She marched to the helicopter, climbed into the seat, fastened herself in, and folded her hands in her lap as it lifted off into the darknight. Forcing herself to breathe. Forcing herself to concentrate on what had to be done.
Five minutes later, five minutes that felt like an eternity to Fallon, Jess was hovering over Daphne’s Pointe, shining his spotlight down on the train. Or what should have been a train. The old locomotive and the first two cars were not visible at all, and only the tail end of the caboose could be seen. Those who’d been riding in the caboose were standing on the tracks, waving. Somehow the caboose had separated from the rest of the train and they’d managed to get out safely. That was a blessing.
The second blessing came when she saw that the rest of the train was on the tracks. Good news she radioed immediately to the hospital.
“Can I have a look at the side of the rock?” she asked after she was sure that the entire train was still upright. “Because what concerns me is that if we bring in crews to dig out the train, we might put them at risk from another avalanche.”
“First avalanche we’ve had in these parts for fifty years,” Jess said, bringing the helicopter round to a better spot. Once there, he turned his spotlight on the side of the mountain looming directly above the train. “Damned shame it had to happen just as the Christmas train was passing through.”
While she wasn’t an engineer, Fallon didn’t rule out the possibility that the train was the reason the snow had broken loose and plummeted off the mountain. They’d had unseasonably warm weather, followed by several snowfalls, then warm weather, followed by snow again. The constant changing, plus the vibration of the train, seemed as good an explanation as any for what had happened. Only thing was, any more activity was likely to set off another avalanche, cover the train even more than it already was. And already Fallon was worried about the amount of oxygen inside the train cars. She had no reason to think that there would have been injuries as a result, but every fiber of her being screamed of suffocation because the train looked sealed shut inside a white mountain!
“I need an engineer who can figure out if the rest of the mountain’s going to come down on us when we begin the rescue,” she shouted to the group of people loitering in the hospital hall, waiting for instructions on what to do. “And I need someone who can tell me about the train car…what kind of timeline we’re talking about on the oxygen situation.”
Emoline stood off to the side, her hands jittery, her eyes full of tears as she took hasty notes.
“I want the best climbers we can find in White Elk, and notify the forestry service to respond, and I need…” Strength. Dear God, she needed strength. There were so many people to rescue. If only James were here to help her through this. “Also call the avalanche center and tell them we need all the help that we can get, that we may have up to a hundred people trapped in those cars.
“How long’s it been?” she asked Emoline.
“Just over an hour. Jackie Peterson called it in. He was watching the train from the opposite ridge. Saw it happen.”
“Well, the good news is, we’ve got some people out on the tracks—they got out of the caboose. We need to get them out of there as fast as we can.”
“I’ll do that,” said one of the volunteers, Mark Anderson.
She remembered him from the restaurant.
“I’ll go with him,” George Fitzhenry volunteered. “And take my crew.” He was one of the senior members of the White Elk Mountain Rescue Team. “I’ll also see about getting a bulldozer loaded up and transported down there. Maybe get another one coming in from the opposite side.” He flipped open his phone and started dialing. “The backup engine for the Christmas train should be available, so I’ll have somebody go get it ready.”
“They won’t have much time,” Mark Anderson whispered in her ear. “A few hours. But without fresh oxygen, and with all the carbon dioxide they’re exhaling while they’re sealed in…”
“It’s going to take a miracle, isn’t it?”
“I prefer to believe in skill,” he said, quite rigidly. “Let the believers have their miracles. I’ll rely on my skills.”
“Then I hope you’ve got some mighty good skills because, at the end of the day, when they run out, we’ll all be praying for a miracle. And that will include you too, Mark.”
In the course of the next two minutes Fallon ordered out the rescue team’s emergency lights, and put out a general call through White Elk that if anyone had any kind of generator-based lighting, or kerosene or propane lighting, they needed it. She wasn’t sure yet how to get it to the scene, but she knew that this was a rescue that had to have as much light on it as they could muster. Daylight would have been good. Unfortunately, they didn’t have it. But she depended on the people here to do what was necessary. She depended on them… “James,” she whispered. “You were right about everything.
“I’ll be working from the field,” she told Emoline, as she did a mental check. “There are enough people here, in the hospital, to handle whatever comes in. And I’d feel better on the scene, directing operations from there.” She’d feel closer to James and Tyler.
“You handle what you have to, any way you have to,” Emoline said, batting away a tear. “We know you’ll take care of this. You’re the only one…”
An ominous distinction. One she didn’t want, yet one she couldn’t refuse. James was on that car. And Tyler. People she loved. People she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life without. She’d already suffered so much loss, and the most excruciating pain…the one she feared most…was the loss of even more. She knew that now. And while every available avalanche expert
and rescue team in the area converged on White Elk, she couldn’t put aside the fact that she loved James and Tyler with all her heart and she’d made a huge mistake, turning away from them. She did need them. They would make her whole again. All these months, pushing people away, pushing James away…it had always been about her. Her fears, her denials, her pain. Not about James. Now she had to tell him. He had to know she’d been wrong, and he’d been right all along. And all the time she’d wasted, trying to find ways to push him away… “We’ve got to get them, Emoline. That’s all there is to it. We’ve got to get them.” When they did, all she wanted was to collapse into James’s arms and lean on him for a while…for ever.
At the two-hour point, Fallon went back out to the field. She needed to see the scene again. Needed to see if anything had changed, needed to direct all the people now coming in to help. So she turned over hospital preparation to half the handful of doctors who’d come in, and took the other half of them with her. Along with more than a hundred other volunteers. She wasn’t sure what she would do with all that many people but if the train was declared stable enough, she’d have every one of them digging by hand, if that’s what it took.
“Don’t give up, James,” she whispered, running through the parking lot on her way back to the helicopter. “I can do this. I know I can do this.” If ever there was a time she needed to believe in herself, to trust herself, this was it.
At the three-hour point, Fallon received the news she’d been waiting for. “We think it’s an isolated incident, Miss O’Gara,” Ben Lawson from the avalanche center told her. “My engineers are up top and don’t see anything that looks like it’s going to come down. The snow load that broke loose is fairly light, so we should be able to move it off pretty quickly once we get the equipment out here. I do need to advise you that it will be a safer job for the rescuers if we wait until daylight. I commend all the people here for the way they’re trying to light up the area, but it’s not good enough, and I can’t recommend a night-time rescue. It’s too risky.”