But at home all that awaited her was the museum of sorrow, the constant reminders. Her co-workers’ sympathy made work little better, but at least she could find distraction there.
Sarah found a parking spot near the front of the building and climbed out. She dropped her keys, then swore as she bent to retrieve them and slammed the door. With her purse over her shoulder and her coffee in hand, she hurried up the walk to the front doors. Inside the glass and chrome lobby, Martin stood at his security post, one ear bud of his iPod in place and the other hanging loose. When he looked up and saw her, his face blossomed into a warm smile. The young guard seemed to be the only person at Sterling who could be genuinely happy to see her without his warmth devolving into pity.
‘Morning, Sarah.’
‘Hi, Martin.’
Behind the reception desk, a secretary named Laura Rossi gave her a grim look. Ellie had obviously shanghaied her to substitute until Sarah showed up, and the wide-bottomed, curly-haired woman did not bother trying to hide her displeasure. Sarah was almost glad that Laura didn’t tiptoe around her.
‘Let me guess – car trouble?’
‘I’m sorry, Laura. The last time, I swear.’
The woman got up from the reception desk and sighed, rolling her eyes, but she waved the apology away as though Sarah’s tardiness was no big deal.
‘It’s fine. Martin’s good company.’
Martin grinned broadly. ‘I was serenading her.’
Sarah managed a thin smile. Martin liked to sing, but softly, mostly to himself. She never minded, but she suspected that someone as generally uptight as Laura would be driven near madness by the man’s musical mutterings.
The phone began to ring. Laura shot it a dark look, then turned her back and went through the door into the main offices. Sarah hurried over and picked up.
‘Sterling Software. Can you hold, please?’ She put on her headset, then took the caller off hold and transferred him to the north-eastern sales manager.
‘Some people can’t seem to figure out how to use an electronic directory,’ Martin said.
Sarah nodded, but broke into a yawn.
‘Don’t do that,’ Martin protested, yawning in reply. ‘It’s contagious. No fair.’
‘Sorry, just didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night.’
‘Pretty much every night, isn’t it?’
His face and voice were kind. The question wasn’t an intrusion. Martin never intruded on her grief. If she didn’t want to answer, he would not mind. But Sarah found him warm and easy to talk to.
‘I fall asleep all right,’ she said, pushing her hair away from her face to meet his gaze. ‘But I wake up in the middle of the night and then it takes me an hour or so to drift off again. It’s weird what you hear at night, though, y’know?’
Martin removed the ear bud and held the cord in his hand. ‘I do. The quietest noise seems much louder in the middle of the night.’
‘Yes!’ Sarah said. ‘During the day I can’t even hear the clock ticking, but at night it’s so loud. And now I hear the train every night. I almost listen for it.’
The security guard gave a soft laugh and a shake of his head. ‘Now you’re just fooling with me. That’s not nice, Sarah.’
She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on. The Three-Eighteen? I’m not falling for that old story. Didn’t believe it when my grandmother told it, either.’
A tractor-trailer growled as it pulled into the parking lot and continued around past the building, heading for the loading dock in back. It distracted them both for a moment. When Sarah looked back at Martin, he was studying her curiously. She sat forward in her chair.
‘What’s the Three-Eighteen?’
His eyes became narrow slits in his dark face a moment and then widened with sudden realisation. ‘You didn’t grow up around here, did you? I forget sometimes.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Nope. My family comes from upstate New York. I moved here with my father when I was thirteen.’
‘Right, right. You’ve told me. Sorry. He worked at the mill, right?’
‘Worked and died there,’ she said. ‘So, what’s this train thing?’
‘Just a local ghost story. Most towns have a house all the kids think is haunted and I’m guessing we do, too. But the story that always gave me the creeps was about the Three-Eighteen. My grandmother used to talk about it and the counsellors at camp used to tell it around the fire, along with the ones about Hatchet Mary and the Hook and that kind of thing.’
Sarah frowned. ‘So, it’s a ghost train?’
‘That’s the story. Passes by every night at 3:18 a.m. ‘Carrying the ghosts of the ones folks can’t let go of,’ my Gram used to say. And it’s only those folks, and people near dying themselves, who can . . .’
The words trailed off.
Breathless, Sarah stared at him. ‘Who can what?’
Martin gave her a sheepish grin. ‘Who can hear it. That’s how all those old stories go, y’know? Supposed to creep us all out. That way if you hear a train whistle after dark or something that even sounds like one, you’re supposed to think it’s the Three-Eighteen come to collect you.’
She dropped her gaze and stared at the marble tile beneath her chair.
‘Sarah?’
His voice made her flinch. She looked up. ‘I hear the whistle every night.’
Martin laughed and came over to her desk. He splayed one strong hand on the counter where people laid out their ID to be allowed inside.
‘Sarah, come on. It’s just a story. Whatever you’re hearing, it’s something else. Got to be some late night road works, smoke venting from the damn sneaker factory or something. But it’s not a train, and it sure as hell ain’t the Three-Eighteen.’
She took a long breath and let it out with a small, self-deprecating laugh. Of course, Martin was right. Sarah felt nauseous just thinking about the few moments she’d spent seriously considering the campfire tale as truth. Every town had local folklore.
‘You okay?’ Martin prodded. His wide eyes were full of concern. ‘I shouldn’t even have mentioned it, but you brought up the train whistle and I just figured you were teasing me. This isn’t the kind of thing you ought to be thinking about.’
‘I’m okay,’ she promised. How to explain the numbness inside and the gulf between herself and her husband? How to explain that the word ‘okay’ had entirely lost its meaning for her. Paul had always liked grim novels about the destruction of human society or the ecosystem or worse; he called it post-apocalyptic fiction. But Sarah was living a post-apocalyptic life. People who hadn’t been through it couldn’t possibly understand.
‘You sure? It’s only that you never seem like you’re all here, if you don’t mind my saying. Ellie Poole’s been bitching about you coming in late and, well, looking kind of run down.’
Sarah couldn’t believe it. Ellie, who’d been so nice, was sniping behind her back after what she’d been through?
‘Bitch,’ she whispered, glancing around at the doors that led into the main offices, just in case the bitch in question might walk in and overhear her. ‘Am I in trouble, Martin?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. I’d have told you. But that could change.’
Sarah nodded. Of course it could change. The second Ellie figured that Sarah had had enough time to mourn Jonah’s death that she couldn’t file a wrongful termination law suit, the witch would come gunning for her.
With a sigh, Sarah sipped from her cooling coffee. ‘Guess this is the last late morning for me.’
A Mercedes slid through the parking lot and into a space. Martin put the single ear bud back in place. He and Sarah both watched as a man stepped out of the Mercedes and started for the front door.
‘Y’know, if sleep’s the issue, you oughta get your doc to prescribe something,’ Martin
said. ‘I took that one with the butterfly once. You know, the one in the TV ad. Worked like a charm.’
Sarah straightened her top and smoothed her skirt, trying to look as professional as she could in spite of her state of mind. As the dark-suited man from the Mercedes opened the door, she glanced at Martin.
‘I tried pills. They just make me more tired in the morning,’ she said.
Then she smiled at the visitor. ‘Good morning, sir. How can I help you?’
The man spoke and she barely listened, her thoughts still on Martin’s suggestion. Sleeping pills would have been such a blessing, a respite from restless nights. But the few times she had taken them, they had interfered with her dreaming. And her dreams were the only time she could be with Jonah.
Nothing mattered more than that, including her job. Ellie Poole could go to Hell.
*
‘Have you ever heard of the Three-Eighteen?’
Paul looked up from his plate – he’d made them a risotto that had once been a favourite for both of them, but now tasted bland to Sarah. Everything tasted bland to her now.
‘You mean that old story about the ghost train?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugged. Even his indifference had sharp edges, cutting her with disdain. ‘Sure. When I was a kid we’d all talk about it. Go out to the tracks. One time I camped out down there all night with Jimmy Pryce – remember Jimmy?’
Sarah shook her head. She didn’t. Paul was two years older than she was. She’d only been in high school with him for his senior year and then he’d graduated. But he’d lost touch with most of his old friends over the years. Whoever this Jimmy Pryce was, he hadn’t sent them a card or flowers when Jonah died. The parade of faces at the funeral were a blur to her – she couldn’t remember who had been there or not – but the cards and flowers she recalled perfectly.
‘No? Jimmy thought you were pretty hot when you transferred in from New York.’ He smiled, and perhaps for a moment there was a glimmer of hope and life in his eyes, of happier times. It dimmed, as it always would, forever after.
‘Anyway, we camped out down by the tracks one night. Spent the whole time scaring the crap out of each other with flashlights and telling ghost stories. When you’re a kid you believe that stuff, deep down, even though you’ve gotta act like you’re too mature to believe it, and too tough to be scared by it.’
Sarah pretended to smile – a peace offering. Then she went back to the flavourless risotto with Paul studying her closely. Their conversations had been infrequent in the past few weeks, and often tense. They talked around and above things and never addressed what lurked below.
Jonah would never hear the story of the Three-Eighteen. He would never camp out by the train tracks and tell ghost stories, never go trick-or-treating or have a friend like Jimmy Pryce, whose antics he would look back on fondly when fatherhood and dreaded maturity came along and the hard climb toward forty had begun.
Forty. At thirty-two, Sarah felt ancient. Sometimes she thought about what it would be like to be truly old and abandoned, stashed in some nursing home, all her passions diminished or taken away, waiting for it all to end. Waiting to die. This didn’t feel much different.
‘Why do you ask?’
The tone of the question, the awkwardness in his voice, put a chill between them. It should’ve had the opposite effect. Here he was, trying to have a civil conversation about something more than the weather or perfunctory work-related trivia, but it felt so forced that Sarah only tensed up further.
‘No reason. I heard someone talking about it today and was surprised I’d never heard it before.’
‘You were fifteen by the time you moved here. Probably too old for ghost stories.’
Again she forced a smile.
Paul took another bite of risotto and they descended into the sort of funereal silence to which they had become hideously accustomed.
Jonah had had his father’s eyes.
Sarah managed a few more bites and then endured several minutes more at the table before allowing herself to rise and bring her dish to the sink. ‘I’ll clean up later. I’ve been wanting a bath all day.’
She’d been taking a great many baths of late. Paul had remarked on it only once, two weeks earlier, and she had told him tersely that she needed the alone time. He’d had no response for that. Once she might have confided in him, told him what she really did during those long evening baths with the radio playing up on the shelf – that sometimes she touched herself and tried to remember what it was like to be alive and in love and full of lust, and sometimes she used the edge of a razor blade or her tiny scissors to scratch and lightly cut her flesh, trying to discover if she had the courage to cut deeper and let herself bleed.
Either way, whether searching for passion or pain, she cried. With the water hot and steam rising, sometimes she even pretended to herself that there were no tears.
*
Her eyes snapped open and she inhaled sharply. Something had woken her, tonight. It took a moment for her mind to make sense of the thumping bass coming from a car passing by at the end of the street. God, that was loud. Some kind of post-modern blues-funk like Amy Winehouse, and it wasn’t drifting off the way it should have been. The car had stopped for some reason.
Rubbing her eyes, Sarah slipped from beneath the covers and went to the window. She pulled the curtain aside and tried to peer out into the dark toward the end of the street. Not much breeze, but the night pulsed with the beat of that song. There came a laugh, the slam of a door, and then the car roared away. Some mischief going on down there – the kind of thing she and Paul might have gotten up to, once upon a time.
Paul had left the window open wide and Sarah backed away and hugged herself tightly, shuddering. Even without a breeze, the night was cold. The weather had shifted again, but New England was always like that.
With a frown, she realised she had been unconsciously rubbing the bandage on her forearm. She had gotten a bit carried away with the scissors in the bath tub. That’s one way to look at it, she thought, sleep still clouding her mind. Her arm ached where she’d cut it, and she hoped it had not become infected. If Paul noticed, that would be difficult to explain. Of course that was an enormous ‘if’. He barely saw her any more. She might as well be made of glass – a window where a woman used to be.
The clock ticked loudly on the nightstand. Once they had kept a baby monitor there and the sound of Jonah turning restlessly had kept her alert. But now there was only the clock and the soft breathing of the automaton who had taken the place of her husband.
Sarah watched Paul sleeping. He had mastered the emotionless mask that he wore during the day, but could not control his unconscious mind. His features were tight with sorrow and consternation. His dreams brought him the nightmares he spent the days attempting to evade.
Beyond him, the clock on the nightstand read 2:13 a.m. Sarah blinked and stared at it and the display clicked over to 2:14. She turned toward the window. The gauzy curtain seemed like a veil, now, but though she could not see as far as the Kenyon River from here, she did not want to look out across the town.
She climbed back into bed, sliding deep beneath the covers. On her side, she pressed her eyes closed and slid one hand under her pillow, an exaggerated pantomime, as though she could fool her body into thinking it was capable of falling right back to sleep. But experience had taught her better.
For fifteen or twenty minutes she lay there, stubbornly persistent. When she surrendered to the inevitability of her insomnia, she opened her eyes at last and glanced around at the moonlit glow of her bedroom. Paul breathed softly beside her.
Sarah wanted to scream. If only her sleeplessness could have been made incarnate, turned into something she could kick and punch and claw. But it could not be fought. Especially tonight. Just as she had been pretending to herself that it would be possible to simply
fall back to sleep, she had also avoided acknowledging the conversation she and Martin had had in the foyer of Sterling Software that morning.
Again, she glanced at the clock: 2:37, and Paul still sleeping, so peacefully.
Sarah slid from bed and grabbed her blue jeans, pulled them on. She’d been sleeping in a light blue T-shirt she sometimes wore to the gym and didn’t bother with a bra, just pulling a fuzzy red sweater on over it. With another glance at Paul, she took a pair of socks from the drawer in her nightstand and went quietly downstairs.
She paused only once, while tying her sneakers, to wonder what exactly she hoped to accomplish. Her chest tightened with anticipation, a kind of giddy excitement that might have been hysteria. Then she went out the front door and pulled it quietly closed behind her. Her car was parked inside the garage and the automatic door opener made a lot of noise, so she took Paul’s Cherokee.
As she pulled out of the driveway, her hands were trembling. She didn’t click the headlights on until she reached the end of the street and turned onto the main road. The dashboard lights cast an industrial gloom inside the car and the radio played low as she drove away from home, following the same course she took on her way to work.
The clock on the dash read 2:49.
Sarah hit the gas and the car lurched forward, speeding up. She couldn’t be late.
She travelled as though she herself were a dream, gliding through the sleeping town in the small hours when night seemed darkest. Nothing else moved but the wind. In that surreal landscape, anything seemed possible.
At 3:11, her headlights picked out the old bridge over the Kenyon River. Sarah slowed as the car shuddered across the bridge, black water rushing past below. When she hit the pavement on the far side, she turned left and gunned it, tyres squealing. All through the drive she’d managed a zen calm, complete with steady breathing and a quick but even pulse. The sound of the tires broke her focus. Her face flushed with heat and she felt her heart pounding in her chest as she sped along the road that curved beside the river.
Without a railroad crossing sign or any other warning, she came up on the abandoned tracks too fast to stop. She rocketed over the tracks before hitting the brakes and skidding to a halt on the shoulder of the road.
The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology Page 4