The Accident

by Donna M. Zadunajsky

  Kaitlyn heard the hum of the fluorescent lights as she walked down the narrow hallway. She stopped behind Moore and Leah, who stood in the doorway that led her to Ben. She felt nauseous. Not from the baby but being near Ben. She willed herself to walk past them and entered the room. She could see even from afar that it was him. It was Ben.

  She stood beside the bed and looked down at him. Even in the state he was in, he still gave her the chills. “You said he’s brain-dead?”

  “Yes,” Leah replied, standing across from Kaitlyn. “I was his nurse for a day and a half. When he was moved from the ICU to a different room, I came to see him and talk to him. I promised him that I would find his family, so they could say good-bye to him.” She smiled at Kaitlyn. “He didn’t have any identification on him, as you know, so he was our John Doe,” Leah concluded.

  Kaitlyn looked from Leah and then back down at Ben, replaying what Officer Moore had said in the lobby. She had found Ben’s wallet, but the wallet wasn’t with Ben, it was on the ground. Officer Moore had just found Adam and since their features looked somewhat alike, she had assumed with no other body to compare the two men, that Adam was the man on the driver’s license. Anyone could have made that mistake. She herself had thought when she saw Ben for the very first time that he was Adam, but seeing them just minutes apart, their faces didn’t look the same. There was gauze covering the same right side on Ben’s face as there was on Adam’s. By what she could see of him, it was and could be an easy mistake on anyone’s part.

  Kaitlyn let out a weighted sigh. A weight she had held onto for far too long. Ben couldn’t hurt her anymore. He couldn’t hurt the baby. Their baby. She had at one time loved this man, but he had taken that all away when he hit her. She didn’t feel any remorse for him. Inside herself for the first time in over seven years since she’d met Ben, she felt happy. Safe. Relieved that he was gone from her life, and she could finally be free of him without any worry that he would come for her. “What happens now?” Kaitlyn asked, glad that her thoughts were hers and no one knew what she was thinking as she looked down at this man she called her husband.

  “So, you’re identifying him as your husband, Ben Gordon?” Officer Moore asked.

  Kaitlyn nodded.

  “Well,” Leah said, answering Kaitlyn’s question, “I can go get the doctor and he can talk with you about what’s next.”

  “Next?” Kaitlyn questioned. “He’s brain-dead, what could be next?” she replied in an exasperated voice.

  Leah looked from Kaitlyn to Officer Moore, back to Kaitlyn. “You can choose to keep him alive on the ventilator or you can have the machine turned off and he will be pronounced dead.”

  Keep him alive? Why would she do that? Kaitlyn hadn’t known the word dead would sound so…so good. God, she felt like a horrible person standing here thinking these things, but he had done this to her. He had made her into this person who wanted nothing more than to see him gone! Dead! “I don’t need to see the doctor. Turn off the machine,” Kaitlyn said with an added hiss in her words. She looked at Leah and then at Officer Moore.

  “I still need a doctor in here to pronounce him,” Leah added, taking a step back, as if Kaitlyn was about to attack her.

  Without raising her voice, Kaitlyn said, “then please go get him.”

  Leah nodded and quickly left the room.

  Officer Moore cleared her throat. “How long has he been hitting you?”

  Kaitlyn looked up; their eyes met. “How? Who?”

  “When I saw you flinch the second Adam touched you and by watching you standing here. Your emotions are turned off and your expressions gave you away.”

  “I guess that’s why you’re a police officer,” Kaitlyn noted with a garbled laugh. “He started a couple of months after we were married, four years ago.”

  Officer Moore’s body stiffened as her mouth dropped open and then closed. “Why…”

  Kaitlyn held up her hand. “You were about to ask me why I stayed.”

  Moore nodded.

  “Because he made me afraid to leave. He threatened that he would hurt my family. He would kill me. He promised he would stop after he hit me each time. I believed him. Then he killed my baby.” Kaitlyn’s anger was rising with each word.

  Officer Moore came and stood beside her, reaching a hand out and touching Kaitlyn’s arm and squeezing gently. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you, but as much as you probably mean it, I will feel more relieved once I know he can’t hurt me anymore, or my baby.”

  “Baby?” Moore questioned.

  “Yes, three weeks ago, I found out that I’m pregnant and was planning on leaving him for good, then the accident happened. Now I don’t need to be afraid. My baby and I can be safe. Will be safe now that he can’t hurt us anymore.” A tear ran down her face, not from sadness, but from relief. Her shoulders and back had always felt tense with fear, but right now she felt the weight begin to lift from her body.

  Leah returned a few minutes later with Dr. Amal at her side. “Kaitlyn, this is Dr. Amal. He’s been the doctor treating Ben.”

  Dr. Amal held out his hand. “Mrs. Gordon, I’m so sorry we have to meet under these circumstances,” he said as Kaitlyn shook his hand. “Leah has informed me that you are giving us permission to turn off the life support?”

  “Yes,” Kaitlyn replied.

  Dr. Amal handed Kaitlyn a clipboard. “Please sign at the bottom giving us permission and then I will turn off the machine. The ventilator will stop and then this machine,” he pointed to the one tracking Ben’s heart rate, “will tell us when his heart stops and will produce a thin, straight line.”

  Kaitlyn nodded.

  “There is one other thing,” Dr. Amal said before continuing. “When he was brought in and taken for a CT scan…” he paused as if waiting for some kind of reaction from Kaitlyn. When there wasn’t one, he continued. “He has a brain tumor, one that can’t be removed because of its location.” Before he had a chance to ask her if she’d known, he saw her mouth drop open. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  Kaitlyn shook her head.

  “Well, like I said before, it’s inoperable. The surgery alone would have killed him.”

  Kaitlyn stood there in shock. Questions began to form in her head. “How long has it been there?”

  “It could have been growing for quite some time, but if I were to take a guess, two, maybe three years.”

  “And what symptoms would it give a person with this kind of tumor?” Why did she care? She wanted him gone. What difference would it make knowing what the symptoms were?

  “Headaches for sure, maybe even make him more aggressive with certain things. Angrier even. Some people deal with their pain in different ways than others. Some may have no pain at all.”

  Kaitlyn sucked in a breath. So this tumor could have made him want to hit her? Made him angry? Irritable? She hadn’t done anything wrong. He made her think that she was the problem, but she knew now that it wasn’t her fault. She closed her eyes, letting go of everything, and breathed in deeply.

  “Everyone deals with pain in a different way,” the doctor said again as if she hadn’t heard him.

  Kaitlyn raised her hand. “I don’t want to know any more. I’m ready to let him go.” She did the math in her head. If it were only three years ago, his beatings started after they were married. The tumor had nothing to do with how he treated her. He knew what he was doing before he got sick. It would be stupid to believe that she was to blame so she decided ‘NO MORE.’ She wouldn’t let him hurt her anymore. She signed the paper and handed to back to Dr. Amal.

  Dr. Amal reached over and flicked off the switch on the machine. Leah removed the ventilator from Ben’s mouth. Kaitlyn took in a breath and exhaled, waiting for the machine to inform them all that he was gone. Gone from this world he so desperately needed to get out of.

  As silence filled the room, Kaitlyn only heard the tick, tick of the second hand moving on the clock out in the hall. Kaitlyn looked f
rom Ben to Dr. Amal, waiting for the machine to sound, letting her know that he was dead.

  Tick, tick, tick. Five minutes passed, then ten. Her thoughts were beginning to run wild. They said he was brain-dead, so why hasn’t he died yet? God, I can’t take this any longer. She wanted to wrap her hands around his neck and squeeze the life out of him as he had done to her more times than she could remember. Her mind screamed and told her that he wasn’t going to die. That he would stay alive only to torture her until he killed her. A gurgle deep inside her started to move its way up, making her almost laugh out loud at the thought of Ben surviving after being pronounced brain-dead. Kaitlyn stilled as the alarm sounded, and a straight line appeared on the screen.

  Dr. Amal clicked off the machine and placed his stethoscope on Ben’s chest. “Time of death is 1:12 p.m.”

  44

  Ben’s body was transported back to Illinois, where Kaitlyn had him cremated. She told the morgue to do whatever they wanted with his remains; she didn’t want them. Ben hadn’t told her about his family. She only knew that he was in foster care and that was all he had said. She didn’t dare ask him any more questions about his childhood life, knowing what the end result would be.

  Kaitlyn knew she had a lot to do. She wasn’t going to remain in the house they shared. The house that only reminded her of the abuse she lived with for five long years. No, she had already spoken to a realtor on her drive back from Ohio and set up an appointment for the man to see the house the minute she got home.

  She’d spent the past week going through their things. She had taken two car loads of Ben’s clothes and belongings to the local Goodwill store. There was nothing he had that she wanted. She packed everything else that she needed and put all the boxes in the garage.

  She lifted and placed the last box of her things on top of another box when pain coursed through her abdomen. She doubled over, squeezing her eyes shut. Loud, piercing sounds came from deep inside her as she screamed bloody murder. The sounds of her screams echoing off the walls of the garage. Then blood exploded down her legs and onto the floor. She was losing the baby.

  ~ ~ ~

  Three days later, Kaitlyn’s friend Judy came over to visit and to see if she needed any help. Judy was the one who took her to the hospital. She had stopped by on her way home from work to see if Kaitlyn needed any more boxes for her move. Judy had told the EMTs that she heard the screams coming from the garage the moment she opened the car door. She had been thankful that the front door was unlocked.

  Kaitlyn was ordered to stay off her feet for a few days after the miscarriage. The doctor said that she had probably overdone it, but not to blame herself. These things happened, especially since she had a miscarriage in the past. The doctor hadn’t known that Ben had caused her to lose the baby the first time, after he used her as a punching bag.

  There were two scenarios that could have been a factor: damage to her uterus from Ben’s punches to her abdomen all these years or a weakened cervix. When the fetus started growing it became too heavy, causing her to lose the baby. The doctor told her that she could still try to get pregnant after a couple of months.

  Within a week, Kaitlyn felt more like herself and although she was still sad from her loss, she knew that it was for the best. She had thoughts about the baby being like Ben and knew that God had his reasons for taking the baby before it was born. Though it didn’t change the sadness she felt inside at losing her second child.

  With all that had happened and since she had missed so much work, she decided to give the school her resignation without a two-week notice, but said she wanted to say goodbye to her students. The principal told her that if she needed anything to just call. Kaitlyn was moving to Ohio. She had been away from Adam for far too long and no matter what it took, she would be with him again; he just didn’t know it.

  She had put the house on the market the day she returned home from Ohio and sold it within two weeks, along with all the furniture inside the house. She didn’t want any of it. She said goodbye to her family and friends, promising to visit often. Then she packed her car and left Illinois behind. At one time she thought she couldn’t live anywhere else in the world, but she was wrong. Illinois wasn’t the state she needed to live in. She needed to be wherever her true love was, and that’s the way it should’ve been nine years ago.

  Yes, she’d been in college, but her life without Adam in it didn’t mean anything to her. She was lost without him and she wouldn’t lose him again, which she knew now was because of Ben, thanks to the letters he had kept all these years. What was that saying? “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours; if it doesn’t, it wasn’t meant to be.” Adam had come back to her and she would do whatever she had to to keep him. She just hoped that he felt the same way.

  45

  Three Weeks After The Accident

  Adam had decided after another week off from teaching he needed to go back to work. He couldn’t stand sitting at home not being able to do anything with the cast still on his leg. He couldn’t drive or ride his motorcycle, which had been totaled in the crash. With his best friend Scott dying, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to get another bike. Maybe it was time to close that chapter in his life, but what else did he have to do?

  The silence alone in the house was nerve-racking, although his mother had suggested he stay at her house. He refused to have her take care of him. He was a grown military man who was taught to take care of himself, but it was lonely in his three-bedroom house, and the weather outside had begun to turn cold. October was here, bringing the cold winter weather with it. There were things he needed to do but couldn’t with his leg the way it was. Scott had always been his right-hand man and with him gone, Adam felt even more alone.

  He would have had his mom drive him to the cemetery to visit his friend, but was informed that Scott had been cremated and that there was no funeral or services to attend. Adam had gone to see Gilda, Scott’s grandmother, to pay his respects and give her the American flag that Scott so deserved from his service in the Army.

  The rest of his memories came back a couple of days later. He remembered everything that he shared with Kaitlyn before he went for Afghanistan. The letter. The bomb, and even the day of her wedding when he watched from across the street. Kaitlyn, after her husband Ben died, had gone back to Illinois to take care of the funeral and, he assumed, to live her life. He hadn’t heard from her since she’d left three weeks ago. He didn’t think his heart could break again after losing her the first time so many years ago, but he was wrong. It was breaking and crushing him worse than the first time he’d lost her. That’s another reason why he had finally decided to go back to work.

  The days seemed to drag, his thoughts only of Kaitlyn. His students were beyond thrilled to have him back as their teacher. The bell rang, and the students grabbed their things and walked out of the room, heading home for the day. Adam grabbed his satchel and placed his things inside, then positioned it around his neck so he could use the crutches. Once outside he waited for his mother to pick him up since he couldn’t drive legally with the cast still on his leg. In two weeks it would come off. God, he couldn’t wait to be able to do the things he used to do.

  A few minutes later, a black Audi pulled up along the curb, blocking the handicap zone. He stood there, but the car didn’t move. He looked around to see if anyone was waiting for a ride, but no one showed. After five minutes, he made his way over to the car to tell the person that he was waiting for his ride and ask if they could please park somewhere else.

  He tapped on the window. It began to lower. “Excuse me, but could you maybe park in a different spot,” he said before looking inside the car at the person in the driver’s seat. “Kaitlyn?” he murmured, nearly losing his balance. “What are you—? I mean why are you here?”

  “Do you want me to get the door for you, or can you get in on your own?” Kaitlyn asked.

  “My mom will be here…” he was cut off.

  “
We talked, and she suggested that I should pick you up from the school,” she smiled.

  “Oh.” His insides were melting from the sight of her. He thought he would never see her again. He hoped he would, but when she left, she never said she’d be back. Of course, a lot had happened with her husband dying, and she needed to go back to Illinois to take care of the funeral or whatever needed to be done.

  “Do you need help getting in?”

  He shook his head. “I got this,” he said, puffing out his chest. He didn’t want to seem like a wimp around her. He opened the door and lowered himself inside. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but he wasn’t sure what her intentions were, and his heart couldn’t take any more heartache.

  Kaitlyn pulled away from the curb and drove out of the parking lot. “Where would you like to go?” she asked.

  “Um, how about my house,” he said. “I’d like to get out of these clothes and put my leg up. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, just lead the way.”

  The ride seemed longer than the ten minutes that it took to get to his place. Neither had spoken another word since he had gotten in the car. It wasn’t as if he knew she was coming. He would have been ready for her and had questions, or at least something to talk about, but he was scared to tell the woman beside him how he felt.

  “Wow, nice place,” Kaitlyn said, looking out the windshield. “Did you build it yourself?”

  “No, but I have done some renovations to the inside. I’ve always wanted to live near Lake Erie and I guess I was just lucky the house was for sale when I got out of the Army,” Adam said as he opened the door and maneuvered his way out. His mother had a small SUV, which was higher off the ground; Kaitlyn’s car was closer to the ground, making it harder for him to get out.

  Once standing, Adam slammed the car door behind him and made his way toward the house. Kaitlyn followed behind him.

  “Sit wherever you want, I’m just going to put on some shorts,” Adam said as he slipped into his bedroom and closed the door. Once the door was closed he rested his back against it. What was he going to do? Or say to her? He couldn’t believe how nervous he was around her. He felt like a teenager who was having a crush on a girl for the first time. Get a grip, dude, his mind shouted. You can do this. First, find out what her intentions are and go from there. Don’t look like an idiot. Be yourself. “Be myself,” he mumbled into the room. He’d try; that was all he could do was try. He hadn’t been with a girl since, well, since Kaitlyn. He didn’t date while in the Army or when he came home. He was always busy doing things. Things that kept him occupied. God, he was pathetic. Kaitlyn had gotten married and he hadn’t done anything with himself. He felt like prey ready to get eaten up by coyotes.