His spine strikes the metal rails and the breath is knocked from his lungs, momentarily stunning him. He struggles to sit up but his coat is snagged on a rusty railroad spike. He looks to Jordyn’s teacher for help and for a minute Thomas is afraid that John Dover will simply allow him to be crushed by the train. Afraid that he will just walk away. Suddenly Dover steps into view and is standing over him, his mouth open in a twisted scream.

“Get up!” Dover shouts, his voice drowned out by the screech of the train. “Get up!” Dover reaches down and grabs onto Thomas’s legs and tries to pull him from the tracks but his coat is hopelessly ensnared. “Please.” Dover furtively glances to the right and at the coming engine. “Please get up!” He stands upright and waves his hands over his head, trying to get the conductor’s attention. The train doesn’t slow but continues its steady progress toward them.

Again, Thomas tries to right himself but he is pinned to the tracks like an insect mounted on a specimen card. Dover steps over the tracks and bends over to wrestle with the zipper on Thomas’s coat. His fingers are stiff from the cold and the zipper doesn’t budge. “Please, God, please,” Dover breathes as he tries to unthread Thomas’s arms from the coat and pull it over his head.

The world goes black and he feels like his arms are being torn from his body. A deafening roar thunders through his ears. Thomas thought that he’d be terrified. That death would be just about the hardest thing he’d face. But now he knows it’s not the hardest. Losing Betsy, being separated from Tess, what’s happening to Jordyn are all the hardest. The hardest in different ways. He can’t leave them, not when they need him the most.

But dying doesn’t sound so bad, he thinks, and not so scary. Maybe Donny would come home. Maybe even Randy would come home to take care of Jordyn and Tess, take over the bar. He’d like to have seen that. Thomas is tired, so very weary. He feels Dover give him one final yank as the train brays its arrival, low and insistent, filling Thomas’s ears with its somehow soothing, dizzying wails.

Case #92-10945

Case #92-10945

Excerpt from the journal of Cora E. Landry

Apr. 15, 2018

I tried to cancel the overnight. I don’t want to do this. I tried everything. I told my mom I was sick. But she told me that I’d used that excuse one too many times. She said that it was good that I was spending time in the land of the living again. If she only knew.