by Pj Fiala
She reached out her arms and pulled her nephew in for a hug.
“She has to be okay, Aunt Jackie.” Jackie and David both swiped at the tears in their eyes.
“She will be, baby. She will be. We all know how strong she is.”
They sat and waited until a nurse finally walked in to let them know Joci had been taken to a private room. The nurse led them down the hall and stepped into Joci’s room. At Jeremiah’s huge intake of breath, the nurse explained, “She’s pale because she’s just come out of surgery and hasn’t been moving around. Her legs are elevated because of the baby. She woke up for a few minutes in recovery and was able to answer simple questions. She’ll be going in and out for a while due to the anesthesia and her body trying to heal itself. The best thing that can happen right now is that she gets plenty of rest.”
Jeremiah nodded. He stepped into the room and quietly pulled a chair to the side of the bed, turning it, so he faced Joci. He bent down so he could kiss her forehead. He touched her hair and kissed her lips lightly.
“I love you, Joci. Please know that.”
He sat in the chair next to her and watched. She was pale everywhere except under her eyes. There, it was bluish gray where her lashes rested on her cheeks. The right side of her face was swollen, and a few cuts and bruises were visible on her right temple and cheek. Her right arm and shoulder were thickly bandaged. They looked huge compared to her slight frame. The rest of her looked small. So incredibly small and fragile. Three different IVs led into one line in her arm. He reached over and laid his hand on her belly. Then he rested his head on the edge of the bed, next to her left hand.
Gunnar walked over and touched Joci on the forehead. He touched her hair and whispered, “Mom, I love you. We all do. We’ll be here as long as you need us.”
Everyone else took turns stopping in and watching and processing what happened. They counted ceiling tiles, floor tiles, and even the beeps from the heart monitor. Jeremiah listened to the seconds ticking by on the clock until he thought his jaw would break from the tightness.
The nurse walked in and saw them sitting and watching Joci. No one was talking. She checked the IVs and felt Joci’s forehead to gauge her temperature.
“Ms. James, can you wake up please?” she asked her a few times in a kind voice. The nurse rubbed Joci’s left arm and moved her left hand up and down to get her to wake up. Finally, the nurse put her hand on the top of Joci’s head to gently rub the uninjured side of her face. “Ms. James, can you wake up for me?”
Joci opened her eyes and closed them right away.
“That’s it. Take your time and open your eyes,” said the nurse.
She tried again. She tried to lift her hand to shield her eyes. The nurse leaned forward and adjusted the overhead light.
“Here. Now give it a try. I turned the lights down.”
She slowly opened her eyes again, and was able to get them to stay open. She looked at the nurse, trying to comprehend what was going on.
“Your family is here for you. But before you can visit, I need to take your temperature.”
The nurse stuck a thermometer in Joci’s mouth and took her pulse. Joci looked around the room, seeing her family there, and her brow furrowed until it dawned on her. She’d had an accident. She gasped and sobbed at the same time. She immediately reached for her tummy. She found a hand already there—Jeremiah’s. The nurse quickly pulled the thermometer out of her mouth so she wouldn’t bite into it. Tears spilled out of her eyes.
“Baby?”
The nurse smiled at her and touched her cheek. “You’re still pregnant. We’re watching you closely. Have faith, sugar.”
The nurse grabbed a tissue off the table next to the bed and handed it to Joci. She took it in her left hand and wiped at her tears. The nurse turned and walked out of the room. Joci looked down and saw Jeremiah sitting next to her. He was still, very still. The tears threatened again as she choked out, “I’m so sorry.” Her lip trembled.
Jeremiah leaned forward. “Shh, honey don’t make it worse. Try and relax, okay?”
“Mom, how do you feel?”
Joci turned her head toward Gunnar. She weakly smiled at her son.
“Well, I guess I’ve been better.”
“Mom, what happened? Deacon said you didn’t brake.”
She looked at Gunnar and her eyes filled with confusion.
“I did. I tried. The brakes didn’t work. There wasn’t anything there.”
Gunnar sucked in a deep breath. “I checked everything myself. I took it for a test drive before I called you to tell you it was all good. I swear it.”
Joci’s swallowed. “I believe you, baby.”
Jeremiah eyed Gunnar. “When?”
Gunnar frowned. “I don’t know. I worked on it Thursday morning. It ran great. Ryder took it for a ride, too, because we were adjusting the belt and he helped me with it.”
Gunnar looked at Ryder, and he nodded, “I did. It was fine. After we had adjusted the belt, I took it for a ride and everything was working great.”
Joci sobbed. She looked at Jeremiah. “I’m not lying. The brakes didn’t work. They were squishy, both hand and foot. There wasn’t anything there. I tried to lean into the corner, but I was too fast for it.”
Jeremiah touched Joci’s hair and tenderly stroked her head. He stood up, leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“Don’t cry, honey. We’ll figure it out. I’ll be right back.” He walked out of the room. Everyone watched him leave—his jaw tight, his back ramrod straight.
Jackie came to Joci’s side and rubbed her left shoulder. “Joci, honey, don’t get too worked up. It’s not good for you or the baby.”
She glanced at Jackie and nodded. “I didn’t try to hurt the baby, Jackie. I didn’t.”
The room was quiet, each person processing his or her thoughts on the matter.
“Honey, I know you didn’t. I know you never would. Jeremiah knows that, too.”
Joci calmed herself as much as she could. She placed her hand on her belly again. Everything just had to be okay. She was doing her best to remember everything that had happened, but she was still groggy.
In the hospital hallway, Jeremiah’s mind whirled. Fuck! Joci’s bike had been sitting at the shop for about a week. Anyone could have done something to it. Something could have fallen against it and damaged it. She said she didn’t try to hurt herself or the baby. He believed her. Pulling out his cell phone, Jeremiah called Deacon. “Deacon, where are you?”
“I just got home. How’s Joci?”
“She just came around. She said she tried her brakes, but there wasn’t anything there. Are you sure you didn’t see her brake lights?”
Deacon let out a breath. “I’m positive, Dog. I kept waiting for her brake lights, knowing she was heading into the corner.”
“Where’s her bike now?”
“I have it at the shop, in the back storeroom. The door is locked, just like you asked.”
Fuck! Jeremiah walked back into Joci’s room. He looked around the room and found his brother, Tommy. “I need to speak with you.”
Tommy looked at Erin, stood up, and walked into the hall with Jeremiah. When he stepped into the hallway, he and Jeremiah walked a few feet away from the door.
“I just got off the phone with Deacon. He has Joci’s bike locked in our back storeroom at the shop. He swears Joci never hit the brakes.”
Tommy rubbed his forehead. “I’m starting to think the worst here. I watched her face. I don’t think she’s lying.”
Jeremiah looked like he wanted to hit something. “Of course, she isn’t lying. Fuck, Tommy!”
“Hey. Ease up, man. We have to look at everything. I’ll call my chief. We’ll have officers go over and look at it with a mechanic. Gunnar shouldn’t be the mechanic.”
Jeremiah was enraged “Gunnar would never do anything to hurt Joci.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to make it sound that way. But if he was the last one to work on th
e bike, he shouldn’t be the mechanic to work with the police on the findings. We need an official report.”
Jeremiah let out a breath. “Find out when someone can get over there. I’ll call Frog.”
Within a couple of hours, two officers, Frog, Tommy, and Jeremiah were at the shop looking at Joci’s bike. It was a mess. Jeremiah’s stomach turned looking at the wreckage. The largest part of her bike was standing up on a trailer. The handlebars were twisted and scratched. One of the mirrors listed on the side of the handlebar, the other mirror lay on the floor of the trailer. The parts that had flown off when she crashed had also been placed on the floor of the trailer, scattered here and there. Some pieces had been broken into tiny pieces. Others were scuffed from sliding across the road or from the impact. They were so damn lucky she hadn’t been killed.
“Fuck!” Frog swore.
“What?” Jeremiah quickly asked.
Frog pulled his hands out of the bike wreckage. “Her brake lines were cut.”
Jeremiah looked at Frog with disbelief on his face. One of the officers looked at the bike where Frog had been working.
“Show me why you think that,” he said.
Frog reached his hand into the mangled mess and pointed to the brake lines. The officer shined his flashlight into the area. Cuts could clearly be seen across the top of each line. Frog cleared his throat.
“When the tops of the lines are cut, the fluid leaks out slowly and drips down the top of the lines. It falls into the bike somewhere and doesn’t leave a big mess on the floor.”
The officer then pointed with his index finger, following the path the brake lines took and showed them spots on the bike frame and other parts where older, hardened brake fluid had settled.
Frog went on. “It has likely been slowly leaking over the past few days. We had the bike here at the shop and moved it around out of the way a couple of times. No one started it up to move it; we just pushed it around. But we would have used the brakes to stop it when we got it in place. Each time the brakes were pushed, fluid leaked out and dripped down the lines. The brakes would have worked for a little while.”
Jeremiah’s stunned face found his brother’s. His voice cracked. “Someone cut her brake lines?” Everyone here loved Joci—except LuAnn. She had been enraged the day she found out Jeremiah and Joci had gotten engaged. “Deacon told me he sent LuAnn home from work the day our engagement was announced because she was throwing things around and being a bitch to everyone. Then the Milwaukee fiasco.”
Tommy cleared his throat. “You have a video here in the shop, don’t you, bro?”
Jeremiah slowly nodded his head. “I can take you to my office and show you the backup.”
Numb was the only word Jeremiah could come up with to explain his feelings right now. It had to have been LuAnn. No one else there hated Joci. LuAnn wouldn’t have known that Joci was pregnant. No one suspected except his parents, Jackie, Joci, and himself.
Tommy, Jeremiah, and one of the officers walked into Jeremiah’s office. He unlocked the closet where the computer system was housed and showed it to them.
The officer whistled. “Wow, you have a great system here.”
“My brother Dayton is a computer geek. He set me up with this system a couple of years ago. An employee was stealing from me. It backs up to the cloud, so I don’t have to change tapes. It saves perpetually.”
Jeremiah walked over to his computer, booted it up and logged onto the Internet, then called up his cloud surveillance backup for the past week. Based on Gunnar and Ryder’s conversation earlier, Jeremiah pulled up the backup video beginning with last Thursday. They all sat and watched in silence. Jeremiah focused on Joci’s bike.
Based on the time stamp, it had been around 8:30 in the morning when Gunnar had taken off on the bike to test it. He and Ryder then looked at it. Ryder took off the belt cover and loosened up the tension bolts on the back tire, then adjusted the tension on the belt. He tightened the bolts on the back tire and put the belt cover back on. Ryder left the shop on the bike. When he returned, they set the bike over to the side. Around eleven thirty, the guys in the shop all went to lunch.
At eleven fifty-one, LuAnn walked up to the bike. She looked around, leaned in with a knife and sliced the lines. She stood up with a smirk on her face and walked away.
Jeremiah sucked in a breath. “Goddammit, I’ll kill that fucking bitch.”
Tommy put a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Easy, bro, don’t make threats.”
They went back and re-watched the recording. The officer wrote down the times on the video.
“We’ll need access to this video,” he said.
Jeremiah nodded. He couldn’t look away. That smirk on LuAnn’s face enraged him. How fucking dare she? She hurt the one person in the world he loved the most. She had hurt Joci time and again. Why couldn’t he have seen it? Now, he might lose his baby—their baby—because of that fucking bitch.
Tommy put his hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Watching it over and over isn’t going to help, Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah scrubbed his face with his hands. He stood up and paced around the room a few times.
“How could I not see her escalating to this point? Jesus, I’m just as guilty for allowing that bitch to be within a thousand feet of Joci. God, I should have seen it.”
Jeremiah broke down. He had been holding back for so many hours. He was worried about Joci and the baby. He was worried about everything. He dropped into a chair, put his head in his hands and cried.
Tommy walked over to Jeremiah and put his hand on his shoulders.
“It’s not your fault, Jeremiah. You can’t think you’re responsible for the actions of anyone else. LuAnn is responsible for herself.”
The other officer got on his phone and called the station. “Is LuAnn Mason still in custody? Then we’ll need a warrant for her arrest. I have a video of her cutting the brake lines on Joci James’ bike, which resulted in Ms. James being injured in an accident earlier today.”
37
Baby
Joci laid back in her hospital bed. Everyone had left a couple of hours ago. According to the clock on the wall, it was near two in the morning. A nurse had just left her room and would be coming back with pain medication.
Her shoulder and arm hurt. The throbbing wouldn’t stop, and she couldn’t sleep with the pain. She didn’t want to put the baby in any more danger than she already had. The nurse told her that if she couldn’t get any rest because of the pain, that was worse for the baby than taking a mild pain reliever. After that, she finally agreed to take something.
She hadn’t heard from Jeremiah since he left the hospital hours ago. Her heart hurt more than her arm and shoulder. On top of that, she might lose the baby. She broke down in a hard cry. It hurt, but then, everything hurt right now.
“Hey. Aww, baby, don’t cry. I’m here now,” Jeremiah’s voice cracked.
She looked up at him and tried to compose herself. “I don’t want to lose the baby. I don’t.”
“I know you don’t, honey. Please don’t cry.”
He leaned down and laid his forehead against hers. He placed his hand on her belly and lightly rubbed back and forth, then leaned down and kissed the place where his baby rested, fighting to live. Joci sobbed.
The nurse walked in with a syringe and injected something into Joci’s IV line. In a calm voice, she said, “Okay, sweetheart, you have to settle down. This should help calm you. I promise it won’t hurt the baby. You’re doing well, you know. It’s been several hours now, and you’re still pregnant. Every hour that passes means a better chance for your baby. Try and stay positive; okay, honey?”
Joci nodded and calmed as the medication hit her veins and made her feel drowsy. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. The nurse looked at Jeremiah and raised her brows.
“I’m staying,” was all he said.
The nurse nodded, then turned and left the room. He pulled the recliner next to the bed and sat down, hold
ing Joci’s hand in his. His mind reeled over the day’s events, and he prayed that God wouldn’t let them get pregnant only to take the baby away. That would be worse than never being able to have another baby. Having one so close, only to be lost, would be unbearable. He drifted off to sleep about a half hour later, still holding her hand.
He jerked awake at the sound of a nurse coming in to check on Joci but he didn’t open his eyes all the way. He looked to see who was in the room and then closed his eyes again. He listened to the nurse monitor the IVs. She checked Joci’s vitals, straightened the blankets on the bed, and left. Then he realized that someone, at some time during the night, had put a blanket over him. He fell quickly asleep.
Joci awoke to see Jeremiah sleeping alongside her bed. She took in his beautiful face and saw the lines that had formed over the past day. Poor man, she must have given him a fright. Dark circles had taken residence under his eyes, and he was still wearing clothes with her blood on them. A blanket covered his lower chest and legs.
She closed her eyes and sighed. Relationships were hard. She had never had a normal relationship with a man one on one. Keith had been distant and obviously otherwise involved. Derrick had been in a band and traveled around a lot to be where money could be made. He hadn’t known how to do a one-on-one relationship either. He had a different woman in every city. Joci found out after a few weeks with him. She looked back on it now and thought about what an idiot she had been.
Jeremiah was the very first man she had been in an honest and close relationship with. She had a lot to learn.
She rubbed her hand over her belly and looked at the spot where their baby was resting. She glanced at Jeremiah and froze. His eyes were open, watching her. “I love you.” He spoke softly.
She took a deep breath. “Jeremiah…I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, honey. We’ll get through this.”
After a moment of silence, she grinned. “So, I came to tell you, I’m pregnant.”
He looked at her and smiled. “I’m thrilled beyond belief. I already knew it before you went to the doctor. I just knew we were having a baby.”