“I see my new h-house,” the boy said.
“Yes!” said the woman. “And do you see your new family? What do they look like?”
“Little, from way up here.”
The woman laughed at that, and there was relief in the sound. The boy could still make a joke.
“There,” said the man, finally getting the suitcase in as far as it would go.
“Can you get out, Donny?” Sarah asked. “Move very slowly.” If he had any injuries, she did not want them to be made worse.
It took a minute for him to slide from the confining space into the woman’s arms. From her comments about the little boy’s “new family,” Sarah figured she was not his mother, after all. But she certainly was relieved to have the child safe in her embrace. She wept, holding on to him, and Sarah put her arm around her.
“I’m a nurse,” Sarah said. “Let’s make sure he’s all right, shall we?”
“Oh, yes, thank you.”
The faint light made examining him difficult, but Donny appeared to have come through the ordeal unscathed, at least physically. As Sarah examined the boy, the man tried the doors at either end of the car.
“They’re jammed shut, both of them,” he called to the women.
In the distance, Sarah heard the wail of sirens. Moments later, the world outside the train filled with light from ambulances and police cars. The four passengers in the overturned car could now see the rest of the train. Most of the cars were lying on their sides; a few had landed upside down as theirs had. A couple of cars looked as though they had been crushed, and one was split in two. The scene was horrific, and the woman tucked the little boy’s head into her shoulder so he would not have to see.
“What a disaster!” the man said. He pulled a pen and pad from his pocket and began to write something down.
Outside one of the windows, a man in fire-fighting gear suddenly appeared, knocking on the splintered glass. “Any serious injuries in there?” he asked.
“No,” said the Jimmy Stewart look-alike. “We’re all right.”
“Can you wait there for a bit, then?” the rescuer asked. “We have some very serious injuries to deal with in a few of the other cars. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
“That’s all right,” said the man. As the rescuer walked away, he turned to the women, now illuminated by the headlights from one of the ambulances. “I hope you don’t mind. He said there are severe injuries up ahead, and we’re all right, for the most part.”
“We’re safe.” The blond woman sat on top of the luggage rack with the little boy curled in her arms. “We can wait it out.”
Sarah sat down next to the woman, looking the boy over more carefully now that they had more light. He appeared to be fine, his face tear-streaked and sleepy.
“Well.” The man lowered himself to the luggage rack opposite them. “My name is Joe Tolley. I’m a reporter for the Washington Post.” That explained the notepad that was now balanced on his knee, his pen poised above it. “And where are you ladies traveling to?”
“To Washington,” Sarah said. “I’ve been visiting family in New Jersey, but I live in the District.”
“With your husband?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
“No,” Sarah laughed. “Not that it’s any of your business. I work at Mercy Hospital. I’m a nurse. My name’s Sarah.”
“And my name’s Ann, and I’m a social worker,” the woman with the boy said. She pressed her lips to the sleeping child’s forehead. “I’m taking this little fellow to his new adoptive parents in Virginia. He’s been through so much, and now this.”
Tears rested in the woman’s eyes, and Sarah touched her arm. She was impressed by Ann’s caring nature.
“How do you do the sort of work you do when you care so deeply?” she asked. “You’re more upset than he is over what just happened to him.”
Ann smiled. “It’s a problem for me,” she said. “I’ve only been at it a few months, and my supervisor says I’m not cut out for this sort of work. I get over-involved with all the children.”
“If you ask me, you’re the type who should be doing that work,” Joe Tolley said. “The people who work with children damn well better care about them.”
“But it makes it too hard for Ann,” Sarah said. “It’s too hard for the caretakers if they feel every little ounce of pain the children feel.”
Ann nodded. “You’re right. You’re a nurse, you said? You must understand, then.”
Outside, men’s voices filled the air. One of the ambulances took off, sirens blaring.
“I’m a psychiatric nurse,” Sarah said. “And you’re right. It’s terribly easy to get pulled into every patient you see. You have to be careful to maintain some objectivity or else you’ll be of no help to them.”
“You sound like my supervisor,” Ann said.
“I don’t know.” Joe’s gaze was on the child. “I think little Donny here is mighty lucky he has Ann making this trip with him instead of some cold old prune who doesn’t really care what happens to him.”
“Well, my supervisor says my problem is that I have no children of my own and I try to make up for it through these little guys.” Ann nodded toward Donny, asleep in her lap.
“Are you married?” Sarah asked her.
“No. And I’m already thirty-four.” She whispered the age as though telling a dirty little secret. She was only two years older than Sarah. The difference between Ann and Sarah was that Ann thought she would get married one day. Sarah had no such illusions.
“What is it like, working with mentally ill patients?” Joe asked Sarah.
“Difficult. Rewarding. Challenging. Wonderful.”
Joe laughed. “All of the above, huh? Are any of them dangerous?”
“Some.”
“Aren’t you frightened?” he asked. “Repulsed at times?”
“No. I think about why they are the way they are. How they were raised. How they may have been unfortunate in their lives. I try to figure out what happened to them that left them so scarred and unable to cope. Then it’s easy to feel compassion for them.”
He was smiling at her, a smile that softened his eyes and made her feel suddenly shy.
“So you work at the Post?” she asked, anxious to get the attention off herself.
“Yes, I got lucky,” he said. “I worked for a few smaller papers but landed this job last year.”
“What sort of things do you write?” Ann asked.
“Some editorial columns. Some news stories. An occasional theater critique. That’s my favorite thing to write, actually.”
“Oh, have you seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?” Sarah asked, sitting forward on the luggage rack. “I’m dying to see it.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it, and you really mustn’t miss it,” he said.
“I saw Inherit the Wind last year,” Sarah said. “It was so powerful.”
“I can tell you like the same sort of play I do,” Joe said. There was that smile again, bringing heat to her cheeks.
“Do you have an article you consider your best?” she asked. “A favorite?”
“I don’t think I actually have a favorite,” he said. “What I like to do, though, is take an unusual angle. I like to write about the human side of a story. I’m not as keen on the facts. That’s why I like editorials. It’s hard for me to keep my opinion out of what I write.”
The three adults continued talking while Donny slept. It was odd how close you could come to feel to other people in the space of a couple of hours, Sarah thought. She felt as though she’d known Ann and Joe most of her life, and she liked them both. She actually felt as though she loved them, although that was ludicrous. Still, their warmth and their humanity touched her, and when the rescuers finally broke into their car and freed them, she felt an odd sense of loss at the realization that she and her companions would now be going their separate ways.
Before they parted, they used pages from Joe’s notepad to write down their names and addr
esses for one another, and they exchanged heartfelt embraces as they walked toward separate ambulances.
Sarah was still thinking of her fellow travelers two days later, when she read Joe Tolley’s editorial about the accident in the Washington Post. He wrote about strangers becoming friends through adversity, about three adults and a child drawn together by accident, touching one another with concern and respect, and leaving the scene with “genuine affection for strangers on a train.”
“Would that all our contacts with one another were marked by such a sense of urgency, such a safe and necessary intimacy,” he’d written. “It would be a better world.”
Laura drove home to Lake Ashton from Meadow Wood Village, her mind still in the upside-down car of the ill-fated train. Sarah was a natural storyteller. She’d described the wreck so vividly that Laura had been able to visualize the scene with ease.
At the edge of the forest surrounding the lake, Laura stopped by the row of mailboxes to pick up her mail. There wasn’t much, and she sat in her car and opened the only piece of mail that didn’t look like a bill. It was a long white envelope, her name typed on the front. Inside was a sheet of white paper bearing one short typewritten line: Leave Sarah Tolley alone.
Laura turned the paper over, but it was blank on the other side, and the envelope bore no return address other than a Philadelphia postmark. A chill ran up her spine. Who would send this to her? And why?
She stared at the note, brow furrowed, for more than a minute. This was crazy. Annoyed, she tossed the piece of paper onto the passenger seat and drove through the forest toward her house. Whoever had sent the note was out of luck. They were too late. She already felt genuine affection for this particular stranger, and she wasn’t about to let her be lonely again.
15
HE SHOULD HAVE THROWN THE PICTURE IN THE TRASH THE moment Bethany brought it into the house. Instead, he ignored it. Each time Dylan walked through the kitchen, he caught a glimpse of it on the counter, and he’d turn his gaze away. He didn’t throw it away, but he didn’t look at it, either. It was as though he knew that once he looked at it, everything in his devil-may-care lifestyle would change. He was afraid of what he’d see in that photograph.
He was making himself a turkey sandwich one afternoon, when he suddenly set down the knife and picked up the picture, his hands moving on automatic pilot. It was a studio photograph of a pretty child—a beautiful child. And she was his. He studied the picture, although he didn’t need to do so to know that he was indeed her father. She looked very much like his sister had at that age. The same dark hair. The little arch to her left eyebrow. The bow lips. The light blue eyes that ran in his family. The same blue eyes he would see if he looked in a mirror.
He left the sandwich half-made on the counter, slipped the picture in his shirt pocket and went outside to his deck, where he lay down in the hammock. The branches above him swayed gently in the warm breeze.
Okay. He’d done it. He’d looked. He knew. So now what?
He had not lied to Laura Brandon when he told her he didn’t remember her, but he did remember the party and the snowstorm. The party had been to celebrate Rhonda’s moving into her new house, a house that could easily contain five or six of his log cabins. The enormity of the mansion remained in his mind, but not much more from that night. It was, as Bethany had said, his bad time.
Never much of a drinker, he’d made up for it during those few months after the crash that had taken the lives of so many of his friends, including Katy, the woman he’d lived with. He’d spent those months in a stupor of alcohol and cigarettes and sex. Anything to help him wipe out the pain.
Pulling the picture from his pocket, he looked at it again. There was that Geer smile. Unmistakable. So, she was his child. That didn’t mean he had to do anything about it. It sounded like Laura had enough money for her. He’d never wanted children—at least not since Katy died. He didn’t want the responsibility of them, the possibility of pain and loss. Yet this child was already here, gazing at him from the photograph, her eyes telling him all he needed to know.
Over the next few days, he tried to lose himself in work. No matter what he was doing, though, he found himself taking the picture from his pocket from time to time, to remind himself that she was his.
One humid afternoon, he walked from the barn to the cabin to refill his water bottle, and some part of him must have known he was going to make the call. He didn’t even stop at the sink before pulling the picture from his pocket, turning it over to read the number and picking up the phone.
He recognized Laura Brandon’s voice as soon as she answered, and he felt an immediate jolt of dislike for her, still reeling from the way she’d manipulated him.
“This is Dylan Geer,” he said.
“Dylan!” she said. “I’m really very sorry. I was an idiot.”
He laughed. “No argument there. But I suppose I wasn’t much better.”
“I should have written it to you in a letter, maybe, instead of dumping it on you hundreds of feet in the air.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” he said, turning the photograph over to look at the little girl’s face. “What matters is that I finally got around to looking at the picture, and I know you must have been telling me the truth. She’s got…I don’t know, the eyes, the eyebrows, everything. I’ve been trying my best to ignore that fact, but I don’t seem to be able to. I don’t know what you want from me, or what my obligation is, but I guess we need to talk about it.” A shiver of dread ran through his body as those words left his mouth.
She let out her breath. “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” she said. “And as I told you, I don’t need financial help. I just needed to see if you might want to be in her life. Which is pretty complicated right now.” She laughed.
She sounded nervous, and he felt a trace of unexpected sympathy for her.
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to be, though,” she said. “And I hope you’ll understand if I wind up not thinking it’s right for her to meet you. But yes, let’s at least talk about it.”
“Fine. Do you want to come over here again? Or meet someplace?”
“I think the best idea would be for us to meet with her therapist. She could help us figure out how to handle this.”
“She’s…what’s your daughter’s name?”
“Emma.”
“Emma’s in therapy?”
“Yes. I told you that, but I don’t think you were listening.” There was no recrimination in her voice. “Her father…her adoptive father, my husband, died in January—”
“I remember you saying that,” he interrupted her. He’d grown up without a father himself. No doubt that was driving him.
“She was traumatized by losing him and hasn’t spoken since then,” Laura said.
“What do you mean, she hasn’t spoken?”
“I mean, she doesn’t speak. Doesn’t say anything. She’ll communicate sometimes with gestures or by nodding her head, but that’s it.”
“For months this has been going on?”
“Yes.”
“Was she…normal before he died?”
Laura laughed. “If you call being an outrageous chatterbox normal.”
“Poor kid,” he said. “She’s really changed, huh?”
“It’s been hard on her.”
“Well, when can we get an appointment with this therapist?”
“I have one scheduled for one o’clock Friday afternoon. Can you make it then?”
Friday was a busy day, with both morning and evening flights. He would have to miss his nap. Big deal. “Yes,” he said. “Just tell me where.”
16
LAURA WAS ABOUT TO KNOCK ON SARAH TOLLEY’S APARTMENT door when Carolyn, the attendant, spotted her from down the hall.
“Oh, Mrs. Brandon,” she said, rushing up to her. “I’m glad I bumped into you.”
Laura was instantly worried. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Caro
lyn was a bit winded. “I just wanted to thank you for your visits to Sarah. They’ve made such a difference.”
“Have they?” Laura asked, surprised.
“She’s always telling people about her walks. ‘Well, when I was on my walk, I saw this and that,’ she’ll say.”
“Really? We’ve only been out twice.”
“It means a lot to her.”
“She barely seems to know who I am, though.”
“Well, that’s typical of someone in her condition. But believe me, getting out of here once a week means the world to her.”
Laura hesitated, then pulled the cryptic letter from her purse. She’d thought of showing it to Sarah, but decided against it on the drive to the retirement home, not wanting to upset her. She handed the letter to Carolyn.
“I got this in the mail the other day,” she said. “Do you have any idea who might have sent it?”
Carolyn studied the one line with a frown. “God, no,” she said with a shiver. “This is creepy.”
“I couldn’t imagine who sent it, either,” Laura said, “but now that you’ve mentioned the fact that Sarah’s talking about our walks…” She looked at the other doors. Well-worn pink ballet slippers were attached to one of them, a picture of a St. Bernard on another. “Do you think some other resident here might be envious and want to put an end to Sarah’s outings?”
Carolyn studied the ceiling as though sorting through the residents in her mind. “I can’t imagine who it would be. It’s true that there are some women here who envy Sarah, because she dresses so nicely and is…well, a cut above some of them. But I can’t see any of them having the wherewithal to type this up and mail it to you.”
“Besides,” Laura remembered, “it was sent from Philadelphia.”
Carolyn shook her head. “I don’t think it’s from one of ours,” she said, handing the sheet of paper to her. “But listen, please don’t let it scare you off from seeing her.”