The noise startled Officer Woods as he jumped up from his seat, dropping the pencil in his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You just look like someone I know. I’m sorry for staring. As for the man in the accident, unless there’s a body I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”
“Oh, I see. What about his belongings?”
“I thought you said that Sergeant Miles from Franklin had them checked?”
Leah swallowed. The officer was right. What was she thinking, that he could find something that the other police officer couldn’t? She was a fool for coming here. “I’m sorry for bothering you. I’m not sure what I was thinking or how you could help me,” Leah said as she made her way toward the door.
“Wait!” Officer Woods said loudly. His hand reached out to touch her but dropped to his side.
Leah opened the door and bulleted down the hall before he could stop her. She walked quickly out the doors of the police station and to her car. She pressed the button, locking the door once she was inside the comfort of her car. What the hell was wrong with her? No, it wasn’t her, but the way Officer Woods was looking at her. It was as if he knew her or was undressing her. Whatever it was, it creeped her out.
Leah looked out the windshield and saw the same officer standing at the door watching her. She started the car and quickly drove away. She would have to figure out what her next move would be. She could do this on her own. She didn’t need their help. She shivered as if shaking off the disgusting feeling she had experienced as she drove toward home. She knew for certain she’d never step foot in the Edon police station again.
25
Four Days after the Accident
Kaitlyn pulled the car up along the curve where Ben was waiting in a wheelchair with one of the nurses. She climbed out and quickly walked around the car to open the door. Once Ben was securely fastened into the passenger seat, she drove away from the hospital. She wanted to get Ben home and, on his feet, again. But she didn’t want him to remember the way he used to be. She didn’t want him to be the man she married. The man that swore to protect her, but in the end, only hurt her.
Three hours later, Kaitlyn took the exit and drove toward their home. Ben had fallen asleep on the drive, which gave her more time to herself to think about the past few weeks. Would she want Ben to remember? No, of course not, but what difference did it make? She was leaving him as soon as he could take care of himself.
She loved Ben once a long time ago and that’s the way she wanted to keep things. She gave him her heart after losing the love of her life. She was afraid to love again when they had met on that rainy day, wondering if it would end the same way it had with Adam. She’d been cautious when it came to Ben in college, but after months of him persuading her, she reluctantly went out with him on a date and they’d been together ever since. She could see now that he had controlled her from the start and she was naïve to allow him. Had she been vulnerable, and Ben had taken advantage of her? Her heart still fresh and broken from losing Adam?
She’d sat for hours on end after years of marriage and put the pieces together. He’d never been physically abusive until after their marriage. He was a total gentleman who opened car doors and brought home flowers, not someone who tortured her in ways no one could imagine a husband doing to his wife. There were times she wanted to suffocate him with her pillow after he had fallen asleep but was scared if she didn’t succeed, he’d kill her for sure.
Kaitlyn turned the corner. Their house appeared in the distance. She crept down the street until their driveway appeared and pulled in. God, it was so good to see her house again. Although she hadn’t been gone long, it seemed like forever in her mind. She would miss this house she called home, but she knew that she needed to leave for her baby.
She turned off the car and looked over at Ben, who was staring at her. She jumped in her seat. She seemed to do that whenever he looked at her that way, afraid he would hit her, even touch her. She swallowed then spoke. “We’re home.” She felt sick to her stomach. She was about to take him into their home and was scared to death. Paranoid. Ben always waited until they were behind closed doors before he punished her.
Ben turned from her and looked at the house. “So this is our home?”
“Yes. Do you remember it?” She placed her hand on the door, readying herself to run. But from what? His leg was in a cast; he couldn’t chase her.
“No. But maybe once I’m inside something will come to me,” Ben said as he opened the passenger door.
Kaitlyn got out and opened the back door, grabbing the crutches for Ben.
He slowly took hesitant steps toward the house. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to these things,” he chuckled. “I haven’t used them since the war.”
“War?” Kaitlyn questioned.
Ben didn’t seem to hear her question as he made his way toward the house.
Kaitlyn hadn’t known that Ben fought in any war. He had never told her about being in the military, nor had she known about any broken bones. Ben hadn’t shared his past with her. Her mind raced back, trying to remember if there were scars on his body. Most of their love-making, especially after they were married, was him forcing himself on her. Yes, she had seen scars on his body, but he wouldn’t tell her where they had come from.
She stopped and stared at the ground, her mind shuffling through their life together, but came up with no recollection of him ever telling her about fighting in a war. When would he have been in the military? They had met in college so there was no way he could have unless he lied about his age, about everything he ever told her. She’d have to sit and search her mind later and find the missing pieces he had to have told her. Was she so obsessed with thoughts of Adam that she didn’t remember Ben telling her? Yes, that was definitely what had happened because she had thought about Adam a lot after he had left for Afghanistan and when she started dating Ben.
She looked up and over at Ben, then at the house. She forgot about the ten steps leading up to the front door. “Maybe it would be best if we use the garage. There’re only two steps to get into the house in there.”
“Sure, that’ll be fine.”
Kaitlyn walked toward the garage door and tapped in the four-digit code. The garage door rose, clanking and rattling as the chain pulled the door up.
“I’ll have to fix that when I’m able to walk without these things,” he said. “Sounds like it’s in need of some grease.”
Kaitlyn stood in her tracks and stared at him. “You’ve never fixed a thing in your life. Do you even know how to grease the gara—?” She stopped talking, waiting for Ben to look at her in a way that told her she would pay for speaking to him in that manner, but he didn’t look at her. He didn’t even sound upset.
“It’s no different than a chain on a bike,” he said, making his way inside the garage.
After he cautiously took the two steps inside the house, Kaitlyn walked ahead to make sure that there wasn’t anything in his way. Not that there would be. Ben hated having furniture on every wall. He liked space, and everything needed to be in a particular spot.
“Do you want to lie down in bed or on the sofa?”
“Bed sounds fine.”
Kaitlyn nodded. “Follow me.” She took the lead and flicked on the switch in their bedroom. The bed sat in front of her in the middle of the room. It was neatly made of course, and she was grateful for that. She slept on the right, closest to the bathroom. She walked to the left side of the bed where Ben slept and started removing the decorative pillows and placing them on the floor. Then she peeled the blankets back for him.
“I always sleep on this side,” he said as he pointed the crutch to the right side of the bed, then carefully made his way to the bed.
Since when? You’ve always slept on the left. Are you sure you’re all right? I mean since we have gotten home you’ve been, I don’t know, different. You’ve never told me about being in the war and now you say you’ve always sleep on the right side of the bed, which
I know you haven’t in all the years we’ve been together, Kaitlyn stood thinking all of this but knew better than to say it. She didn’t need to start a fight. Not when they just arrived home.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and positioned the crutches against the nightstand where they could be reached when he needed to get up. Ben pressed his palm against the side of his head.
Kaitlyn went over to him. “Are you all right?” She had to listen to what the doctor had told her before leaving the hospital with Ben and not push for his memories to come back to him. “It will only cause him stress if forced. You must let them come back on their own,” the doctor had said.
“Just a headache is all. Could you please get me some Tylenol or Advil?”
Kaitlyn didn’t speak the words she was thinking. Ben had never so much as taken a baby aspirin in the eight years she’d known him. “How about I get the pain meds that the doctor prescribed,” she said as she left the room, returning with the bottle and a glass of water.
After Ben took the meds, Kaitlyn helped him into bed, pulling the covers up to his chest. “You get some rest and I’ll check in on you in an hour or so.”
“Okay,” he replied and closed his eyes without any hesitation.
Kaitlyn stood looking down at him. Granted, she knew that it most likely was from the accident, but even the little things he would have remembered, right? And the war? She definitely didn’t recall him talking about ever being in a war, in the military. It was like she hadn’t know him at all. What if the accident changed who he was? That was unlikely, wasn’t it? Could a head injury change who a person is? She’d have to call their doctor and set up an appointment. Did Ben even have a doctor of his own? She hadn’t recalled him saying anything about him going to one. He almost always never got sick. Ben would need to be checked out and his bandage on his face would need to be removed and cared for, though that was something she could do at home.
She left the room, closing the door behind her. She needed answers but didn’t know where to start or who to talk to. Maybe she would start by making an appointment with her doctor and go from there. This way, they could work together to try and remember the past. The past Kaitlyn didn’t seem to know anything about.
After making the call, she went into the office and logged onto the computer. She typed in traumatic brain injury and clicked on memory loss. She read until she got to retrograde amnesia. It said that as people get better with their head injury, long term memories start to return. Some may return like a jigsaw puzzle in random order. The site didn’t say how to get the brain to remember things, but she assumed that would come in time. Ben would recall his life in bits and pieces.
As she read farther down the page, she came to a paragraph about a Specialist in memory loss. She hit print. She’d show this to the doctor. The paragraph also said to write things down every time the person remembers something. Kaitlyn opened the drawer next to her and took out a pad of paper. She’d keep track of Ben’s memories as he remembered them. She wrote down war, aspirin and bed.
She clicked off the computer and walked into the kitchen. Ben stood in the family room staring at a photo of them. She hadn’t heard him get up, but the office was on the other side of the kitchen. She walked and stood behind him. “That was taken a year ago,” she said. “We had just come back from a cruise in the Bahamas.”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember that trip.”
She nodded. “Would you like to look at other pictures of us? Maybe one of them will trigger your memory.”
“Sure.”
Kaitlyn walked over to a cabinet near the far side of the room and grabbed a photo album from the shelf. There were only two, one from their wedding and the other from trips they had taken, not that they went on vacation much with Ben always being on the road.
When she turned around, he was standing right behind her. She was frozen where she stood, nowhere to go. Panic ran through her body. He was going to hurt her? Had he been pretending to not remember anything until they were home?
She looked into his eyes. There was something different about them. Something she hadn’t seen in a long time, but that couldn’t be. This was her husband Ben, not Adam. Though they hadn’t seen each other in nine years…and yes, they had some features that resembled one another, but she would know them apart, wouldn’t she? She didn’t know this. She hadn’t seen Adam since he left and the photo she had of him was from nine years ago; surely, he didn’t look the same. She had never seen him with hair, just a buzz cut.
Her mind spun back to the past. She remembered that day like it was yesterday, running into Ben on that rainy morning and looking at his face, in his eyes. The same color blue that Adam had. She almost for one split second thought Adam had come back for her. Wouldn’t that be something? She still wished to this day he’d never left and went off to Afghanistan. She didn’t even know if he were alive or dead. He left her here and then never returned. She was the one that received the Dear John letter, not him, because she would have never left him.
He gently touched her face, and she flinched. She could tell from his reaction that he’d seen her pull away. She waited to see if he would do anything. He didn’t. He just stood there looking at her, and she was wishing with all her heart that it was Adam and not Ben standing in front of her. The past she had with Adam came flooding back to her. She had to leave Ben and find Adam.
26
Four Years Earlier
After thirteen months in Afghanistan fighting the endless war twelve years after 9/11, Adam was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where he served the remaining two years of his enlistment. When he was off duty, he took classes at the local college near the base. He wanted to fill his time with as many classes as he could to get his degree toward becoming a teacher once he was out of the military. Sometimes he thought about staying in the Army for his full twenty years, but he didn’t want to give up his dream of becoming an English teacher, not that he couldn’t be one after he retired from the Army.
Adam wasn’t alone in the Army. He had many friends in his barrack that he hung out with when he wasn’t studying or doing his daily duties. Adam met Scott Wards and became best friends. While out in the field, Adam had found out that Scott was from Franklin, Ohio, the next town over from Edon, which was ironic to them both. Not only were they neighbors separated by two towns, but they had also enlisted in the Army at the same time and were stationed together all four years. They not only were assigned to the same barracks together but were teamed together as Operational Detachment Alpha. Special Forces Soldiers consisted of twelve members, each with their own specialty. Scott served as a Special Forces Communication Sergeant who operated every kind of communications gear, while Adam, a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant, operated and maintained a wide variety of weapons.
As busy as Adam’s life seemed, there was never a moment while in the military that he didn’t think of Kaitlyn and wished he could be with her. He hated seeing his buddies with their significant others, holding hands and kissing. It made him miss Kaitlyn even more. There were many times he picked up the phone to call her. He had gone as far as to dial her phone number but stopped on the last digit and hung up, his heart beating fast as the blood pulsated through his veins and the tears threatened his eyes. He shielded his face away from anyone who could see. He should have never given her up so easily after receiving her last letter saying she didn’t want to hear from him again. She was the love of his life and always would be and now he had to live with the decision she’d made, even though it destroyed him.
All he wanted was to hear her voice and know that she was doing okay. To know if she was missing him as much as he missed her. That she had made a mistake breaking up with him. Kaitlyn, he knew, wasn’t someone who would move around from place to place. When they spent those ten months together in Illinois, he could tell that in her heart she was to live in Chicago the rest of her life. She was raised there. Her home was there. He respected that and would n
ever ask her to leave her home. Had he even asked her if she wanted to go with him once he came back to the States? No, because he didn’t want to hear her say no.
He had seen many things fighting the war. His fellow soldiers getting killed or hurt from bombs exploding as they drove through the towns of Afghanistan. Many had lost body parts or their lives. Adam thought that he might not survive himself. One day it had happened. He and his Unit were driving through a town of Banaq, scouting out possible shooters, when a bomb exploded, and pieces of debris penetrated Adam’s face. He had many facial surgeries to help reconstruct the damage that was done. He still looked like himself, but there were areas on his face that were different than before. Scars lined the side of his face where the doctors had to pull the skin, but only he saw the difference. He himself had feared putting Kaitlyn through the not knowing if he would make it back to her, but he didn’t want to let her go. He knew in his heart that he’d never forget her or stop loving her. He had to respect her wishes of not contacting her again. It killed him inside to know that someone else would one day get to love her and spend the rest of their life with her.
When his enlistment ended, Adam went back to his hometown in Edon, Ohio and finished the remaining courses he needed to become a teacher. After he finished college, Adam applied as an English teacher at Edon High School, where he had graduated years before. He lived with his mother until he was able to buy his own house near Lake Erie. He had never dated nor wanted to date anyone; he was content living alone in his house for the rest of his life. Although he wanted to have a wife and several children running around, he just couldn’t make himself be with anyone other than Kaitlyn.
The Accident Page 14