Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

We all make choices. But I want you to know how much I love you, how proud I am of you.”

The tears started to sting behind my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time she had said something like that to me.

“You’ve done everything right,” she continued. “And I know how strong you are. Stronger than you realize.”

I took her hand, and she clutched mine with both hands.

“You are my warrior,” she said. She kissed me on the forehead and said it again. “You are my warrior.”

“I love you, Mom.”

She nodded. “I love you, too, Marina.” She smiled at me before she left the room.

It was the last thing I remember her saying to me.

In the morning, she was gone.

CHAPTER 8

At first, my father and I assumed Mom had gone to visit Robbie’s grave. She would sometimes do that without telling anyone, just to be alone there for a while. But after several hours, when she hadn’t come home, we called the cemetery. They hadn’t seen her.

My dad made a few phone calls. Neighbors stopped by. People came and went. And the day grew long and hours passed. Soon it was getting dark. There was no word of her.

You are my warrior, she had told me. What did that mean, Mom? Did you think I was strong enough to live without you? Did you just leave?

A police officer came by after dark to tell us they believed she had been spotted. A man had seen someone walking on the train tracks near the station late the night before, after my mother had said good night to me. The woman on the tracks matched my mother’s description. According to the officer, the woman had been standing in the middle of the tracks, as though waiting for the train to come hit her. The witness screamed for her to get off the tracks, but apparently she said she couldn’t. She insisted that she had to wait for the train, then shouted something else that the man couldn’t make sense of. So he called the police. But by the time they arrived, the woman on the tracks had left.

“We suspected . . . ,” the officer paused, eyeing me before deciding whether to continue, “perhaps attempted suicide.”

I could feel, rather than hear, my father inhale by my side. The air in the room became quite stiff, oppressive even.

“We searched but couldn’t find her. We can’t be sure it was your wife.” The officer was a middle-aged man, wide around the middle, with more hair on his knuckles than on his head. He couldn’t look my father in the eye, and instead talked to his chin.

“And then about an hour ago, we get a call from the high school. Security guard was reviewing some footage this morning and he caught a woman sneaking in through a back window in the middle of the night. No record of her leaving, however. We’ve searched the school, but we can’t find any trace of her.”

“You think it was her?” my father asked, and I couldn’t gauge from his voice whether he found any of this surprising. It was like he was made of steel.

“We need you to come look at the footage, sir. To verify it.”

My father nodded, his hand on my back. I remembered how he had put his hand on my mother’s back while they were telling me about Robbie’s accident.

I love you, too, my mother had told me.

“You can do it in the morning, if you’d like,” the officer continued, twirling his wedding ring around his fat finger, where it tangled with his knuckle hair.

“I’ll come now,” my dad answered, turning to me. “You’ll be okay for a bit?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He kissed my forehead, and they both stood up and turned to leave the room. But before they could make it very far, I stood up myself.

“Sir?” I asked.

“Yes?” the officer responded.

“The man who saw her on the tracks . . .”

“You mean the witness?”

“The witness, yeah. He said the woman on the tracks said something that didn’t make sense. What was it?”

The officer glanced at my dad, as if looking for permission to respond. But my dad was already lost in his own mind.

“She was raving,” the officer said, shaking his head. “Something like, ‘It’s on the tracks. It happens on the tracks.’”

It took me about fifteen minutes to bike down the path to the train station, after sneaking down the stairs at one in the morning and carrying my bike from the garage, through the kitchen, and out the back so as to not wake my dad by opening the garage door. He hadn’t been able to confirm much at the police station. The surveillance footage had looked like her, but it was blurry enough that he couldn’t be sure. He had come home about an hour after leaving, his shoulders slumped, and kissed me good night.

A light rain fell on my head now, which I tried to cover with a hoodie that blew off the moment I started pedaling. Soon the rain soaked my hair and made my jeans stick to my ankles. I kept pedaling anyway, even as the denim against my skin felt like icy fingers pulling my knees in the opposite direction.

The first bolt of lightning came as I approached the train station and threw my bike down on the pavement. I started walking along the track. Looking for what, I had no idea.

I felt like a complete fool. I became aware suddenly of how cold I was, shivering, my teeth chattering. There was nothing on these tracks but cold rain. I was empty and numb, so I decided to head back to my bike. But first, I took one last long look down the length of the tracks, as far as I could see through the dark swirling images that danced in the rain.

And that’s when I saw the figure.

It was far in the distance, maybe a hundred feet down the tracks,