Trissa counted the railroad ties as she walked them and had reached one hundred and twenty-seven before it didn't matter to her anymore, before it didn't help to keep the tears from falling or her heart from slamming against her ribs like a bird trying to escape its cage. Though the rain had stopped, she was cold, having fled the house in only her cotton blouse and wool skirt, but that didn't matter much either. She could no longer determine whether the pain of the cold came from without or within.
Still and chilling, the night pressed her, urged her on toward anywhere, nowhere, as long as it was away from where she had come. Through the thin clump of woods to her right she saw the winking headlights of the cars parking along Calvary Drive. How many summer nights had she watched them from her hidden spot among the trees, wishing she were in one of them. They were hope to her back then. A sign that somewhere love or something like it went on.
But now she knew with dreadful finality that she would never be one to find love there. Or anywhere. That would not be her future. There would be no future.
She felt the faint hum of a distant train through the soles of her shoes and it filled her with a shiver of anticipation. Peering down the tracks to where they disappeared round the bend into the darkness of the night, she let her tormented mind make the decision her heart was too torn and ragged to make.
She couldn't see it yet, but she collapsed to her knees and waited. Now the hum became a pulsing throb and then a numbing rumble that gently rocked her soul into acceptance. She closed her eyes and swayed on her knees then bent to press her cheek against the rail. The icy steel wrenched one gasping sob from her. Then only the thunder of the train and the wailing cry of its whistle rent the night as she waited.
*****
A sound lurched Nicholas into awareness. It was not the steady roar of the train or the piercing shrill as it trumpeted its approach round the bend, but something closer, softer, something that reached into his soul and shook it out of its slide into eclipse. His muddled mind told him it was Cynthia, and he remembered how he used to hold her as she whimpered in her sleep, unaware that he was close and that he ached to save her from the sadness that made her cry through her dreams.
He spoke her name but it was less than a whisper, the sound of it enough to make him see it was impossible. Not Cynthia but someone. Someone, something, a child, an animal huddled on the track less than twenty feet above him.
The train. It couldn't see the train. Or maybe it was trapped. He scrambled up the embankment, kicking the churned-up gravel out behind him.
The whistle sounded again and the growing beam of the train's headlight illumined her face, her eyes clamped shut and her features set tightly in a determined grimace as she hugged the track.
"Trissa?" he mouthed in wonder then "Trissa!" he shouted as he hurled himself at her, tackling her and hurtling them both off the track. He tumbled with her in his arms down the embankment on the other side and he heard her soft moan as she settled into stillness just as the train thundered by.
"Trissa, my God, it is you." His hands trembled as he gently straightened her crumpled body, examining her for injuries, alarmed at the chill of her skin and the deadly paleness of her face. There was a spattering of blood on her blouse but he could find no source beyond the gravel burns that marked both of them.
"Please, Trissa, please be all right. I'm here to help you. I'll take you to help." From where he stood, he could not see the houses on the street below the raised berm of the tracks, and he tried to recall whether any of them showed lights and life.
He heard the grind and sputter of an igniting car engine and turned to see the line of cars parked along a road on the other side of a clump of trees. Some of them had their lights on and their engines idling. It was obvious what the purpose of their drivers' parking in such a deserted spot. It didn't matter. Nicholas was thankful for