“Address for Mr. Williams, ma’am?”
Anne managed to spit it out.
“Can you tell me what happened?” the deputy then asked.
“He’s armed and dangerous, be careful,” Anne warned.
“Ma’am, what happened to you?”
Anne was fading. She began to speak. She began to explain what happened and how she wound up at Jimmy’s that night. She began to talk through how things went from a friendly visit, to a deadly confrontation, to Anne scrambling, then running, and later fighting for her life. As she spoke, the lights and the image of the deputy leaning over her began to fade and blur, becoming fuzzy like a dream scene in a movie.
A chest tube is a plastic apparatus with holes in it, just as Anne Bridges had thought she’d seen on that night in the hands of a doctor. One end is pointed like a ground stake so it can be easily pierced into your side in an emergency situation. Doctors had several ready to go. The idea is to place the tube into that space between the inner lining of your ribs and the outer lining of your chest cavity. It’s called the “pleural space.” They do this when patients experience symptoms of lung collapse. Inserting the chest tube with a powerful jab and quick push allows your lungs to expand fully. Doing this would, in effect, keep Anne alive.
If it worked.
As Anne vaguely recalled seeing those plastic tubes being prepared, she thought she heard a familiar voice.
She focused on it.
“What is happening?” Anne thought she heard the voice ask. “Is she okay. Will she survive?”
“Is that my sister?” Anne said aloud.
“It is,” someone said.
“And that was the last thing I remembered,” Anne recalled, “for, oh, about two weeks.”
CHAPTER 4
It was early 1996 when Anne decided to leave her job as a Linden city clerk. She wanted to live a more simple, secluded, sheltered, and relaxed life. Take it easy. Enjoy the calming, everyday experience of not having to answer to the rigors of a high-stress, white-collar job.
I had resigned from my city clerk position, gotten married (to a man thirteen years younger), and became pregnant. The pregnancy turned out to be a molar pregnancy.
Anne suffered what is called a partial molar pregnancy, in which an embryo is present but is overcome by an abnormal mass. About one month prior to losing the child, she “actually saw the heartbeat” on a sonogram. She became very ill one day and assumed it was traditional morning sickness. But the tissue never expelled and her uterus grew as if there were a living baby inside. When she went for her next regular checkup, doctors couldn’t find the heartbeat.
I had a vaginal ultrasound done and that is when my doctors found the mass. I was then sent the next day to a gynecologist in Montgomery (a gynecologist specializing in female cancer). The next day he performed a D&C on me at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Montgomery (the hospital has since closed). Then weekly blood tests were done to check my HCG levels until they were back to normal.
I suffered severe “baby blues” because I went through the initial part of becoming pregnant with the excitement that, at thirty-nine years of age, I was pregnant. Yet, I had no baby. Many times suicidal thoughts crossed my mind. I had a twenty-six-year-old husband who had no children, and I knew that I was not going to be able to give him one. This happened in August 1997.
That terrible loss sent Anne’s life into a tailspin. What had become a rather tranquil, serene life of being a wife and soon-to-be stay-at-home mother turned into a nightmare.
My self-esteem and everything about myself exploded. It was really bad. Then my husband left. I was alone. Some time passed. This all led up to me trying to help someone, thinking it would, in turn, help me.
My son from my first marriage was a normal boy, healthy, smart, in private school, which took a big chunk of money. I had my mother, who took care of my son during this entire ordeal while I was in the hospital, move in with us, which became a more economical way of living.
As the spring of 1998 came to pass, Anne felt a resurgence of life. Possibly her old self, somewhere in the distance, maybe even coming back. Some time went by. She was managing through the loss of her baby and the dissolution of her second marriage. The pain was still there and real, but somehow she was fighting her way out of it all and grabbing hold of life.
“There was hope,” Anne said later. “Maybe I did not feel or believe it was there, but I could somehow sense it.”
Hope: believing something good will happen when your life has wound up in a hellhole.
One sign for Anne that spring was in the air was her allergies. They’d kick in just as the trees began to produce pollen. Regardless, at least this year, the change of seasons was particularly welcome.
Trying to sort out her life, Anne was feeling a bit sentimental. She’d run into an old friend one day while moseying about downtown. That conversation led to Anne thinking about an old flame, James “Jimmy” Williams, who, Anne learned from that mutual acquaintance, was in need of some help these days. Jimmy hadn’t been in such a good place. Details of what was going on with Jimmy were scant, but Anne got a sense from their old friend that Jimmy could use a shoulder to cry on.
It had been over a decade since Anne had seen Jimmy. Or had even thought seriously about him. Yet, with Anne emerging from the roughest period of her life, she wondered, why not reach out to her ex? Maybe the two of them, together, could find common solace and peace of mind. They could help each other. Anne was a believer in grace, forgiveness, and redemption.
My name is Anne, which means “one of grace.” It is rather ironic. I am definitely not graceful, but I am here today only by the Grace of God.
Anne’s divorce had been prompted by the age difference between her and her husband, she said. They’d stopped getting along, detached emotionally, and had begun to live separate lives.
It happens.
“I should have known it would have never worked out, anyway,” Anne said. “Then, after losing the baby, well, that was it. Still, as I began thinking about Jimmy again for the first time in over a decade, I was clawing my way back to being myself, or however close I was going to get after losing a child.”
Because she’d given birth to the child, Anne had experienced some of the same conditions and symptoms that came from carrying a baby in her womb full-term.
Including postpartum depression.
Except I didn’t have a baby. You know, if you can imagine this scenario: You have “baby blues” and you have a baby, you both cry and things turn out okay for the most part. But then you have “baby blues” and you don’t have a baby. Well, it was devastating for me. I did not know what to do.
Anne was twenty-six in 1983 when she first met Jimmy Williams. He was a “supernice guy,” Anne remembered. “We got along fantastic.”
For several years they’d had the time of their lives. When they decided the relationship had run its course years later, they ended it amicably, resolved to remain friends, and went their separate ways.
“The split was entirely cordial and we remained really good friends,” Anne said.
So, during spring 1998, Anne was managing what had become a “horrible” divorce. She was a bit vulnerable and in great need of someone willing to listen and provide empathy, maybe even a bit of emotional support and advice. She thought she’d licked all the pain by late winter. However, as April came, there it was again, like a blossom popping back up. She woke one morning feeling lethargic and blue.
The depression she’d somehow managed to crawl out from underneath had slammed her once again. She was heading back into the darkness. She surmised later this was why, when the name Jimmy Williams crossed her path, she was more than willing, open, and even eager to reconnect. An old, broken relationship, sure. But as Anne thought about it, she’d had good memories of Jimmy, save for the ending. She was looking for a friend. Someone to talk to. Someone who would listen to her and understand. Someone with whom she could relate. She hadn’t seen
Jimmy in so long.
What I had been hearing about Jimmy, I was naïve and believed it could not be true. The things people were telling me could not be associated with the same Jimmy Williams I knew and had dated all those years before. I needed to find out for myself. I could not imagine he’d done what they were saying, because he had always been such a gentleman when I dated him.
Serious trouble for Jimmy Williams began in December 1997. Jimmy was arrested and charged with holding two people hostage inside his home on Steel Bridge Road. Jimmy was also being accused of injecting one of them, a female, with morphine, before savagely beating her. When his house was searched after the incident, police found close to sixty firearms, hand grenades, prescription medication (not prescribed to Jimmy), and other illegal drugs, according to several published (and public) reports.
In the late 1980s, Jimmy had been arrested for receiving stolen property. Since that time he had the mark of “convicted felon” on his record. Indeed, convicted of a felony, Jimmy wasn’t allowed to own or possess any weapons, especially firearms. So when the police searched his home after the alleged hostage situation and found all those weapons, he was charged as a convicted felon in possession of firearms. Regardless if the assault charges stuck, Jimmy was staring down the barrel of perhaps some time in prison, and certainly probation on those charges alone.
* * *
Curious, not to mention in total shock, Anne had done a bit of research after hearing about the incident. She found out that on March 26, 1998, just a few weeks before she’d decided to look Jimmy back up and possibly reignite that old flame, the woman he’d supposedly held against her will wrote a letter to the court. His “hostage” demanded that prosecutors drop all the charges against Jimmy.
Huh, Anne thought while reading this. Now that doesn’t make sense if he did what they were saying.
How could you go from being held hostage, being beaten and injected with drugs, to demanding all the charges against the perpetrator be dropped?
It didn’t make any sense.
The woman at the center of what seemed to be a violent conflict with Jimmy now claimed to have been “confused” about the incident. It had not happened the way in which she had first told police, she said. The injuries she’d sustained had actually come from riding with Jimmy in his truck on that same day. According to the woman, the new story was that Jimmy had stopped quickly to avoid hitting a deer and she went flying into the dashboard. This revised version made more sense to Anne.
The person I knew could not have done any of what they were claiming he had. It was so hard for me to believe Jimmy could have done any of it—and I refused to. So when that report came out about the deer and the accident, it was easy for me to believe. Which was why I wanted to reach out and speak to Jimmy myself.
I needed to find out what was going on with him to even wind up in such a situation where he could be accused of such horrible things. This just wasn’t my Jimmy.
Anne stopped by Jimmy’s sister’s house during the first week of April, a day or so after running into their mutual friend, not long after those charges against Jimmy had been dropped. Seeing Jimmy’s name in the newspaper, seeing that old friend downtown and talking about old times, and then hearing about Jimmy, had sparked something in Anne. Maybe they could help each other? Be there for support during what had been a terrible start to the year for both of them. If nothing else, Anne concluded, it would just be great to see Jimmy and have a conversation. Catch up.
“How’s he doing?” Anne asked Jimmy’s sister.
“Not good. He could use a friend.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why don’t you give him a call?”
“I will,” Anne said. “He was always so nice to me.”
We kind of just drifted apart, back when we were in our twenties. It was nothing bad. Not some blowup or anything. We simply stopped seeing each other and left it on good terms.
When Anne got home from Jimmy’s sister’s on that day, she called her former boyfriend to see how things were.
“Anne? That you?” Jimmy sounded surprised.
“Jimmy, how are you?”
“I’ve been better, Anne. Not gonna lie.”
“I’ve heard, Jimmy. Thought I’d call to say hello and let you know I have been thinking about you.”
“Why don’t you stop by some time, Anne? I’ll cook us dinner out on the grill. We can talk. Watch a movie. Go out and do something.”
Anne was impressed with how positive Jimmy sounded. He seemed so upbeat. So happy to hear from her. Her gut, in a fleeting moment of questioning perception, told her that perhaps she should let this go, move on. Maybe she should deal with her own demons and allow Jimmy the time and space to deal with his. But then that little voice inside her head—the one Anne even today says is her Achilles’ heel—told her that an old friend was asking for help. She thought she heard “need” in Jimmy’s voice. And she couldn’t just allow that to pass her by.
“I’d like that, Jimmy,” Anne said. “I’d really enjoy seeing you again.”
So Anne hopped into her blue Subaru and headed over to Jimmy’s Steel Bridge Road house, a little ranch where Jimmy had lived for several years. Steel Bridge Road was a desolate part of Shawnee, about an hour’s drive from Linden, a street lined with thick foliage on either side, dark green shrubs and dense forest. Minus any streetlights, driving alone at night felt as if you were swimming through the bottom of the ocean. No woman wanted to be out here, in the middle of the night, all alone in darkness.
CHAPTER 5
Death was beckoning Anne. A heart rate monitor and ventilator buzzed, puffed, and beeped. Deputy Terry Mack stood over her, trying to get information about what had happened, fearful Anne would not make it. Doctors were simultaneously prepping her for exploratory surgery. They would learn that Anne had suffered a collapsed lung; buckshot had pierced her diaphragm, lung, and liver; one of those BBs was in her shoulder. Still, as they worked on Anne Bridges during those early-morning hours of April 18, 1998, nobody knew the extent of her injuries or how she’d gotten them.
“Ma’am, could you both please step out of the room at this point?” one of the doctors asked Anne’s sister, Joyce, and her husband, John, who had arrived at the hospital with a police escort from their Linden home.
Both stood stunned, speechless.
“Why? Why? . . . What’s going on?” Joyce finally asked.
“Please, ma’am, we need to do this. And you don’t want to see or hear it.”
One of the doctors had a chest tube in his hand and was about to force it, in a stabbing motion, like a knife, into Anne’s side.
As Anne drifted further into unconsciousness, and doctors forced a chest tube into her side in order to drain the blood and expand her lungs, Anne’s sister put her hands over her mouth in shock and left the room. John put his arm around his wife’s shoulder to comfort her.
“So when they put the chest tubes in, my sister heard me screaming all the way from outside,” Anne said later.
I am a Christian. I was raised Southern Baptist, but I don’t think what church you go to makes you a Christian. My parents made sure I was in church every time the doors opened, literally. Guess what? Being in church every Sunday did not make me a Christian.
Even though my parents made me go to church, I was not a Christian. That near-death experience I had during my ordeal in the hospital started me thinking about things. I did not, I should add, become a Christian until September 2003.
As Anne screamed, doctors drained the blood from her lungs and piped anesthesia into her veins so they could cut into her abdomen and chest cavity and begin exploratory surgery to hopefully save her life. Doctors knew Anne was bleeding internally. They just didn’t know where. They knew her diaphragm had been pierced. They knew she was losing blood pressure fast and needed to be stitched up before it was too late.
It was a bizarre feeling, Anne later explained. During this period of being in the hospital
ER, prepping for surgery, she felt a tremendous pull toward her childhood and her parents. Her father, especially. It was as if she were being summoned to think about them from some outside, celestial source.
All my life, all I ever wanted was for Dad to be pleased with me. But I gave up on that during my teenage years. Don’t get me wrong, Dad was a good man, but it was kind of like he would look straight at me and yet never see me.
I hate it when people blame the way they are on their upbringing. Adults are what they want to be. You have a choice to be like you were raised or break the cycle. Even though I believe you can break the cycle, there are things that stay way back in a little pocket and sometimes come up.
My little pocket used to hold the thought that a man would never love me, since Dad didn’t. But Dad did love me. Just in his own way. I just could not see it then, when I was a kid. This one stupid thought in my mind had caused all types of trouble in my relationships with men over the years.
When she woke up from an induced coma, Anne had a strange feeling. She opened her eyes and looked around. Her hands were tied down to the sides of the bed. A vent tube was in her mouth. She could not talk. Her sore throat felt dry and rough as sandpaper. Swallowing burned. Everything around Anne felt so unfamiliar and different. Medical machines, with small red and blue lights, blinked and pulsated. Monitors with fluorescent green lightning-bolt-like graph lines keeping the pace of her heart. Other beds with patients apparently sleeping and not breathing on their own nearby.
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