Christmas Miracle: A Family (15 page)

“It’s waiting for you,” Jess said. “Any time you’re ready.”

“I know,” she said, fighting against the panic welling up in her. She was perfectly content to never fly again. Walking, driving, taking a bus…all fine and dandy. But not lifting up off the ground. “Is there a road up there?”

“There is, but it will take you an hour, if you can even get through. It’s probably not been cleared since the last
hard snow, and I’m betting you’ll probably come across a tree or two down on the road.”

“So flying’s the only way,” she said, not to Jess but to convince herself.

“Unless you want to waste half the night, it is.”

“Then all I have to do is…” Her hands started shaking. “Is get into the helicopter, fasten myself in, and…” And think of James and Tyler. And all her friends. They were counting on her now. Everybody in White Elk was counting on her, and here she was, working on a good case of nausea. She shut her eyes for a moment, trying to steady her unraveling nerves, but in the darkness behind her eyes she could see James and Tyler very clearly. “All I have to do is get in,” she said resolutely. And that’s exactly what she did. She marched to the helicopter, climbed into the seat, fastened herself in, and folded her hands in her lap as it lifted off into the darknight. Forcing herself to breathe. Forcing herself to concentrate on what had to be done.

Five minutes later, five minutes that felt like an eternity to Fallon, Jess was hovering over Daphne’s Pointe, shining his spotlight down on the train. Or what should have been a train. The old locomotive and the first two cars were not visible at all, and only the tail end of the caboose could be seen. Those who’d been riding in the caboose were standing on the tracks, waving. Somehow the caboose had separated from the rest of the train and they’d managed to get out safely. That was a blessing.

The second blessing came when she saw that the rest of the train was on the tracks. Good news she radioed immediately to the hospital.

“Can I have a look at the side of the rock?” she asked after she was sure that the entire train was still upright. “Because what concerns me is that if we bring in crews to
dig out the train, we might put them at risk from another avalanche.”

“First avalanche we’ve had in these parts for fifty years,” Jess said, bringing the helicopter round to a better spot. Once there, he turned his spotlight on the side of the mountain looming directly above the train. “Damned shame it had to happen just as the Christmas train was passing through.”

While she wasn’t an engineer, Fallon didn’t rule out the possibility that the train was the reason the snow had broken loose and plummeted off the mountain. They’d had unseasonably warm weather, followed by several snowfalls, then warm weather, followed by snow again. The constant changing, plus the vibration of the train, seemed as good an explanation as any for what had happened. Only thing was, any more activity was likely to set off another avalanche, cover the train even more than it already was. And already Fallon was worried about the amount of oxygen inside the train cars. She had no reason to think that there would have been injuries as a result, but every fiber of her being screamed of suffocation because the train looked sealed shut inside a white mountain!

“I need an engineer who can figure out if the rest of the mountain’s going to come down on us when we begin the rescue,” she shouted to the group of people loitering in the hospital hall, waiting for instructions on what to do. “And I need someone who can tell me about the train car…what kind of timeline we’re talking about on the oxygen situation.”

Emoline stood off to the side, her hands jittery, her eyes full of tears as she took hasty notes.

“I want the best climbers we can find in White Elk, and notify the forestry service to respond, and I need…”
Strength. Dear God, she needed strength. There were so many people to rescue. If only James were here to help her through this. “Also call the avalanche center and tell them we need all the help that we can get, that we may have up to a hundred people trapped in those cars.

“How long’s it been?” she asked Emoline.

“Just over an hour. Jackie Peterson called it in. He was watching the train from the opposite ridge. Saw it happen.”

“Well, the good news is, we’ve got some people out on the tracks—they got out of the caboose. We need to get them out of there as fast as we can.”

“I’ll do that,” said one of the volunteers, Mark Anderson.

She remembered him from the restaurant.

“I’ll go with him,” George Fitzhenry volunteered. “And take my crew.” He was one of the senior members of the White Elk Mountain Rescue Team. “I’ll also see about getting a bulldozer loaded up and transported down there. Maybe get another one coming in from the opposite side.” He flipped open his phone and started dialing. “The backup engine for the Christmas train should be available, so I’ll have somebody go get it ready.”

“They won’t have much time,” Mark Anderson whispered in her ear. “A few hours. But without fresh oxygen, and with all the carbon dioxide they’re exhaling while they’re sealed in…”

“It’s going to take a miracle, isn’t it?”

“I prefer to believe in skill,” he said, quite rigidly. “Let the believers have their miracles. I’ll rely on my skills.”

“Then I hope you’ve got some mighty good skills because, at the end of the day, when they run out, we’ll all be praying for a miracle. And that will include you too, Mark.”

In the course of the next two minutes Fallon ordered out the rescue team’s emergency lights, and put out a general call through White Elk that if anyone had any kind of generator-based lighting, or kerosene or propane lighting, they needed it. She wasn’t sure yet how to get it to the scene, but she knew that this was a rescue that had to have as much light on it as they could muster. Daylight would have been good. Unfortunately, they didn’t have it. But she depended on the people here to do what was necessary. She
depended
on them… “James,” she whispered. “You were right about everything.

“I’ll be working from the field,” she told Emoline, as she did a mental check. “There are enough people here, in the hospital, to handle whatever comes in. And I’d feel better on the scene, directing operations from there.” She’d feel closer to James and Tyler.

“You handle what you have to, any way you have to,” Emoline said, batting away a tear. “We know you’ll take care of this. You’re the only one…”

An ominous distinction. One she didn’t want, yet one she couldn’t refuse. James was on that car. And Tyler. People she loved. People she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life without. She’d already suffered so much loss, and the most excruciating pain…the one she feared most…was the loss of even more. She knew that now. And while every available avalanche expert and rescue team in the area converged on White Elk, she couldn’t put aside the fact that she loved James and Tyler with all her heart and she’d made a huge mistake, turning away from them.
She did need them
. They would make her whole again. All these months, pushing people away, pushing James away…it had always been about her. Her fears, her denials, her pain. Not about James. Now she had to tell him. He had to know she’d been wrong, and he’d been right all along.
And all the time she’d wasted, trying to find ways to push him away… “We’ve got to get them, Emoline. That’s all there is to it. We’ve got to get them.” When they did, all she wanted was to collapse into James’s arms and lean on him for a while…for ever.

At the two-hour point, Fallon went back out to the field. She needed to see the scene again. Needed to see if anything had changed, needed to direct all the people now coming in to help. So she turned over hospital preparation to half the handful of doctors who’d come in, and took the other half of them with her. Along with more than a hundred other volunteers. She wasn’t sure what she would do with all that many people but if the train was declared stable enough, she’d have every one of them digging by hand, if that’s what it took.

“Don’t give up, James,” she whispered, running through the parking lot on her way back to the helicopter. “I can do this. I know I can do this.” If ever there was a time she needed to believe in herself, to trust herself, this was it.

At the three-hour point, Fallon received the news she’d been waiting for. “We think it’s an isolated incident, Miss O’Gara,” Ben Lawson from the avalanche center told her. “My engineers are up top and don’t see anything that looks like it’s going to come down. The snow load that broke loose is fairly light, so we should be able to move it off pretty quickly once we get the equipment out here. I do need to advise you that it will be a safer job for the rescuers if we wait until daylight. I commend all the people here for the way they’re trying to light up the area, but it’s not good enough, and I can’t recommend a night-time rescue. It’s too risky.”

She glanced across the canyon at all the lights lit up on the opposite ridge. It looked festive, like White Elk had
joined together, bringing every light they could find, just to have a party. Not to rescue the Christmas train and all its passengers. “They’re going to run out of oxygen,” she said gravely.

“They should make it until morning.”

“Should?”

“It’s hard to calculate.”

“Well,
should
isn’t good enough.”

“Maybe not for you, but it’s still not advisable to start some kind of haphazard rescue. It puts the rescuers at as big a risk as the people trapped in the train. And in all probability, like I said, the oxygen should hold out until we can get to them.”

“And like I said,
in all probability
isn’t good enough, Mr. Lawson.” The tough decision was about to weigh down on her. She could already feel it pressing on her shoulders, feel all the people depending on her now crowding in. “I have to have a guarantee. A one hundred percent promise that if we don’t go in tonight, every single person on board will come out fine and dandy in the morning when we finally do get to them. Can you give me that?”

He shook his head. “You need to know all the variables. That’s all I’m telling you.”

“And I appreciate that, but the only variable you need to know is that those people trapped in the train have to be rescued
now
. Not tomorrow. And it’s my decision to make.” She understood the risks both ways, but she also understood all those variables he talked about. And the one variable he didn’t know was the volunteers…she knew them, trained them, worked with them, trusted them. Depended on them. More than that, they trusted her. It was a variable Ben Lawson couldn’t even fathom. “My decision is that we’re going to do it
now
.”

“So, what’s the status?” she asked George Fitzhenry.

“We got fifteen people off the tracks, and they’re on their way back to the station. Walking. Cold. Shaken up. But glad to be alive. And, no injuries.”

“That’s good. What about the bulldozer?”

“We’re in some luck there. We’re about thirty minutes out, having one brought in from White Elk, and Aspen Grove is sending one up from their end of the tracks. It’s got an ETA of about an hour. They’re also sending in volunteers with it.”

She glanced up at the helicopter overhead. Jess was back up again, hovering, keeping watch. His engine was loud. Could James hear it? Would he know that was her trying to rescue him? “Radio Jess for me. Tell him to set down in the meadow, that I need to go up top again and have another look for myself.”

“At what?”

“The safety of going over the edge. We need people on top of the train. It’s all well and good to dig from both ends, but we’ve got to get the top cleared so we can get some windows open. Ben Lawson said it looks stable to his people, but it has to look stable to me before I send anybody over the edge. And, George, I want you up there with me. By rights, you’re the lead on this operation and I need your expertise on this.”

“Maybe by rights, but I think I’d be barking orders at a crowd that’s waiting for your orders, Fallon. They listen to me, but they depend on you, and that’s the difference. But I’ll go up with you. Give me five minutes to secure my team down here. OK?”

Five minutes where she wanted to dig at the snow with her fingers.

“When are they going to turn on the lights?”

James looked at the cellphone display. Four hours now,
and nothing. He’d expected…no, he’d hoped for.. something. A tap from outside, an errant cellphone message getting through. Anything. But they’d been sitting in the dark for four long hours, getting colder as well as running out of oxygen. Neil had managed to find a rescue tank in a supply closet and had it on hand for Gabby, who was too close to her due date to suffer any kind of oxygen deprivation. Other than that, all they could do was sit and wait, and not panic. Panic sped up oxygen consumption. Theoretically, they could exist here for days, if they had oxygen to breathe. They were safe, no injuries, no one suffering any real ills. And there was plenty of cold hot chocolate and cookies to dole out in moderation over the course of several days.

“I know she’s working on it,” Eric said from across the aisle, where he was huddled with his wife and daughters.

“She’s got good instincts,” Neil added. “She’ll get this figured out.”

But in time? James wanted to believe that Fallon could pull out a miracle, but even Fallon had her limitations. “You knew I wanted to marry her, didn’t you?” he said into the dark, knowing all his friends were listening. Somehow, talking about Fallon brought her closer. Made him, and probably everybody else, feel more confident. Most especially made him believe with all his heart that Fallon would pull out the miracle. That she
was
the miracle. “That’s why I originally applied for the job here, to be closer to her. She’s stubborn, you know. I knew it was going to take some work.” It still
would
take some work. And once they got off this train…

In the dark, as the silent agreement spread over them, everyone chuckled at their own recollections of Fallon’s stubbornness.

“Haven’t given up, though,” James continued. “I thought I was going to, that it was time for me to move on with my life. Fallon has this idea that she’s better off alone, but she’s wrong about that. So once she gets us out of this, I’m going to start all over and this time do what it takes to convince her that she’s wrong about that and I’m right.” And he
was
right. Fallon needed him, and Tyler. She knew it, and she denied it, and she fought it because she was afraid they’d leave her, like her mother had. Like her baby had. What she’d done during those months when she’d been clinging to a futile pregnancy… He couldn’t fault her for that because he would have been fighting to save
her
while she’d braved the fight to keep her baby. That’s the Fallon he loved. But
that
Fallon wouldn’t have given in to him, wouldn’t have ever thought that
she
came first, not as long as her baby was still alive inside her. Not as long as she was holding onto hope. That, too, was the Fallon he loved. She’d done the only thing she could do, and hated herself for it. But now it was time to find a way to help her, to make her feel safe again, to convince her that the people who loved her wouldn’t leave her. That he wouldn’t leave her. When she understood that, her true healing would begin. And as hard as she would fight to push him away, he was prepared to fight even harder to stay.