Storm Front (The Charistown Series) (Volume 2)

by Lisa N. Paul

  Saying the words out loud caused an instant physical reaction. A sharp pain struck his chest as a memory came to the forefront of his mind. Ashley was standing back against the metal, her eyes round like saucers, pain as clear as her long blonde hair. He remembered her beautiful face as she stared at him in confusion. Now, thinking back, he saw how she’d mindlessly rubbed her thumb up and down her sternum, trying to erase the searing ache that was probably ripping her apart. He had ripped her apart.

  “Oh my God, Leo.” His voice broke and unshed tears clouded his vision.

  “Don’t, ‘Oh my God,’ me. You fucked up, Ryan. You lost your temper and you lost your control…again. I’ve been telling you to get help. I warned you this would happen. You promised you had it under control. But you didn’t. Now, you’ve hurt my sister and you’ve hurt me. You’ve taken a love that was so pure and so beautiful and you’ve crushed it. Are you happy now?” Leo’s voice had adopted a calm tone—something that somehow made the words even more unbearable.

  “You’re right, Leo. You’re so right. What can I do to make this better?” It wasn’t lost on him that he sounded like a walking cliché. Every story ever told about an abusive person had them promising never to harm their loved ones again, but he meant it. He would do whatever it took to fix what he had broken.

  “Please, help me. I’ll do anything to make this right for the three of us. You guys are my family. Ashley is the love of my life. I screwed up but I’ll get help. Look, where are you? I’ll come to your house and maybe you can help me talk to her? I’ll go to the anger management classes Dad suggested. I’ll—”

  “No, Ryan. No. Look, I’m on my way home now. Ash was a wreck when she called me. Honestly, I’ve never heard her this way before. Let me go and be with her. We can ride out the storm over the next day or two and then we can figure out what the next step is. I think—”

  The distinctive sound of crunching metal had Ryan’s blood running like ice through his veins and his next breath caught in his throat. Pulling the phone away from his ear to look at the screen he saw that the call was still connected but he could no longer hear Leo on the other end.

  “Leo, what was that sound?” Until that very moment, Ryan had never understood what people meant when they said silence was deafening. But the lack of sound roared in his ears louder than any sound he’d ever heard before. Silence.

  “Leo? Leo, are you okay? That sounded like a pretty nasty crash, did you hit a guardrail?” Fear crept up Ryan’s spine as he prayed for an end to the quiet. “Leo, seriously, buddy, are you okay? I know you’re mad at me, but you’re freaking me out. Please, answer me.” Ryan had to use both of his shaking hands to keep the phone steady.

  A faint whisper crackled down the line.

  “Ry, it’s…bad…”

  “Shit, Le, fuck, where are you man? Let me come get you. You’re gonna be okay, brother. Where are you?” His body was tense and his lungs were barely pulling in air as he prayed for some sort of response. Already out of his garage and running to his car, the eerie symphony of static, wind and rain filled his ears in what felt like surround-sound.

  The harsh, pelting rain soaked his clothes through in seconds and he could hear the sounds of the storm on the other end of the line. “Leo, do you know where you are?” His voice shook with fear.

  “Beacon Hi—” Leo wheezed the partial street name as Ryan shut his car door, the deafening silence shrouding him like a blanket made of thorns.

  “LEO!”

  When his scream yielded no response, he tore out of his driveway and over to Beacon Hill which, thankfully, was only two streets away from his house. With the roads flooding and the leaves flailing through the sky the normally two-minute drive took closer to seven. Ryan had called 911 the minute Leo’s phone disconnected and he prayed that the ambulance was having better luck navigating through the chaos.

  Hydroplaning around the corner, Ryan quickly got control of his vehicle and threw it into park. He opened his door just in time to lose control of his stomach as the image in front of him assaulted his senses. There, in the middle of the road, lay a felled ancient Red Maple tree. The old tree that had once stood at about fifty feet tall had cracked in half and landed directly on top of the one material possession his best friend coveted—his 2002 Jeep Wrangler.

  Leo had worked so hard to make sure that the Jeep was paid for entirely by himself. Something he’d purchased without an ounce of assistance from his parents. The day he’d bought the yellow and black Wrangler the two of them had skipped school and gone off-roading for hours. Ryan had never seen Leo look so proud. It was like the carefree façade had penetrated his skin, and Leo was actually living free and happy, out from under the expectations of his parents and the world he and Ashley had been pushed into.

  Using the back of his hand to wipe the bile from his mouth, Ryan made his way toward the mangled carcass of a Jeep. The raw sound of someone screaming Leo’s name filled his ears. He felt the agony in the voice, but as he looked around and saw no one else present, he realized the screams were his own.

  Quickly approaching the driver’s side, he saw what looked like a hand clutching the steering wheel. The fingers were clearly broken—the bones poking through the thin skin that was supposed to cover them. The tree’s trunk had plunked straight down, crashing through the windshield, through the soft top of the roof, and landing directly on top of what appeared to be Leo. The glass looked like a thousand diamonds scattered over tattered canvas mixed with the liquid red life that slowly left Leo’s body, one heartbeat at a time.

  “Leo,” Ryan croaked, “Leo, I’m here, buddy, can you hear me? Oh my God. Can you hear me, Le?” He carefully reached his hand into the carnage to run his fingers over the swollen jaw of his best friend, his brother.

  Trying to contain his tears, Ryan continued to speak, “Leo, I’m so sorry. I did this to you, to Ashley. I did this.” His voice shook and the knot in his throat pulled tighter. “Leo, please, please don’t leave me. Fuck. I don’t deserve you, but she does. Please, don’t leave Ashley. You’re all she has in this world, Le. You. Are. It!”

  The whipping winds and pounding rain hid the sounds of the ambulance sirens until they were practically in front of the wreckage. Quickly, the rescue team and the fire unit worked to lift the tree off of the car. Other than the sound track of Mother Nature and communication between rescue workers, Ryan heard nothing but silence. His brain was numb and his heart was laden with cement.

  “Son, do you want to or not? We don’t have time to waste,” the medic asked him.

  “What?” Ryan stared blankly.

  “Do you want to ride with your friend in the ambulance? He probably shouldn’t be alone.” The look in the medic’s eyes told Ryan, saying “no,” was not an option he would be able to live with. “Just stay on the bench and let us do our job.”

  Ryan hopped in the back of the ambulance and they sped off, headed for the hospital. He never looked back at the scene left behind. Leo’s car was in shambles. His car still running, the driver’s door left wide open. None of it was relevant.

  Ryan watched in horrified panic as the medics placed two intravenous lines into Leo’s arms. The erratic sounds of the heart monitor filled the cabin as the medics hooked Leo up to the pulse ox, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and listed possible injuries to the driver to report to the hospital.

  “With that depression and bruise on his chest, we may be looking at a flail segment.” The grim way the second medic nodded to the first had Ryan’s stomach twisting into an even tighter knot.

  “Leo, please, please stay with me,” he begged his friend from the corner of the ambulance. As the medics worked to stabilize Leo, Ryan prayed to a God that he hadn’t spoken to since the day he’d placed his mother in the ground.

  “Ry…” Leo’s voice was breathy, broken, but it didn’t matter, because Ryan was so grateful just to hear his name that he rushed to his friend’s side not noticing the skeptical looks from the medics. />
  “Ashley…” Leo started again and then groaned as the medic tried to replace the oxygen mask over his face. Leo nodded off the mask and made eye contact with Ryan. One of Leo’s eyes was swollen shut but the other was open. It looked determined but full of pain. Leo had something to say and Ryan needed to hear it.

  “Tell me, Le. Please, what is it? I’ll do anything,” he pleaded.

  “Make it right.” The wheezing became louder as Leo struggled to speak, “sh-sh-she’s stubborn…but it works b-b-both ways.”

  “Shhh, son, you have to rest, try and stop talking,” the medic suggested, but it appeared that Leo needed to finish what he started.

  “Ry, g-get h-h-help. She’ll l-l-love you forever. Ry?” Ryan could barely make out his friend’s face through his own tears.

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Not your fault.” Leo then started coughing wildly and blood shot from his mouth. The medics shoved Ryan out of the way and began to suction Leo’s mouth. Ryan watched from the side as his best friend’s eyes rolled in the back of his head and his body started convulsing.

  “Leo!” Ryan shouted as he tried to reach for his brother. Red foam began to froth from his mouth. The labored rattling turned to silence.

  “Stay back!” The medic screamed at they started chest compressions on what looked like a now lifeless form of what was once Leo Kynde.

  “No!” Ryan shouted as the ambulance pulled into the emergency bay at the hospital.

  What Good Are You?

  “I AM SO sorry, son.”

  The medic scrubbed his hand through his hair as he trudged out of the trauma room a short time after arriving at the hospital. Ryan’s head was still spinning from the flurry of activity that took place as soon as the ambulance stopped moving. The doors had flown open and the trauma team had appeared as if from nowhere. They, along with the medics, had whisked Leo away into the trauma cube and slid the door closed, leaving Ryan pacing in the hallway, in shock and alone.

  After several minutes the medical staff exited the room, stoic looks on their faces as they jotted notes on paper and walked past him as if he weren’t standing right there. Acid began to rise in the back of his throat as he saw the medic from the ambulance exiting the room.

  With crimson colored vision, Ryan felt his skin prickle with heat as his insides iced over in pain. “You’re sorry?” He roared. “What the fuck? You didn’t save him. You didn’t help him. What good are you?”

  “We did everything we could to save the patient—” the older man began to explain before Ryan cut him off.

  “He has a name. The least you can do is call him by his name, goddamn it!” His tears stung as they fell, unchecked, down his cheek.

  “You’re right, we did everything we could to help Leo. The tree hit him hard enough to crack his ribs into small pieces. The pieces punctured his lungs, Ryan. We couldn’t save him. I’m sorry.”

  The venom seethed from his tongue but Ryan didn’t have the capability or the care to hold back. “You’re not sorry yet,” he bit out, “but you will be. You know that was Doctor Mitchell Kynde’s son, right?”

  Ryan couldn’t believe the words and tone spilling out of his mouth, but he also couldn’t believe his best friend was dead so he let himself go, not taking in the exhausted and defeated look of the man standing in front of him. The man who’d tried but failed to save a young person from dying on his watch.

  “We couldn’t have saved your frie—Leo even if he was the President of the United States’ kid. I know and respect the Kynde doctors, and I feel horrible about what they are about to endure. Just like I feel horrible for y—”

  “You feel bad for the Kynde doctors, huh?” Ryan cut off the medic again. “Poor them! They may have to miss a day of work for their son’s funeral. The only person who will really mourn Leo is his sister. This is gonna kill her. FUCK!” He screamed as he punched his clenched fist into the wall: the cinderblock wall.

  “Fuck!” He screamed again, hearing the crunch of his knuckles. A searing pain shot up his right arm. The next thing he knew, he was hunched on the floor wailing like a baby. He cried for his pain, his loss, his love, and his life. In one day, he’d managed to destroy his relationship with the only woman he ever loved, and he’d killed his best friend.

  How was he going to live?

  Furthermore, how was he ever going to face Ashley again?

  Leo

  ALL THE CRYING must have taken its toll on her body because Ashley woke up still curled-up in the fetal position in the middle of her queen-size bed. The storm whipped around outside, sheets of rain pelted the windows, and debris flailed through the air, slamming into the side of the house. That must have been what had woken her from such a deep sleep. Groggy and a little confused, the events of the day hit her and she knifed up to look at her clock on the bedside table.

  “What the—? It’s ten p.m? Leo?” She called his name but there was no answer. It had been close to seven hours since she’d spoken with him. Where was he? Maybe he came in and saw me sleeping and didn’t want to wake me, she thought to herself, but that sounded wrong, even in her mind.

  Climbing off her bed, she padded barefoot through the Jack and Jill bathroom into Leo’s bedroom. His room was dark and quiet. “Leo?” She whispered, knowing somehow in her heart that her brother had never come home.

  “LEO?” She screamed his name praying for a voice that didn’t respond. Just as her panic levels were about to hit high-alert Ashley’s phone started to bleep. Running through the bathroom and back to her bedroom, she grabbed her cell and stared at the screen.

  “Mom? Where are you? Have you heard from Leo? He was supposed to be home hours ago? Do you know where he is?” Ashley fired questions rapidly at her mother, not slowing down enough to give the woman time to answer.

  “Ashley.” Her mother’s voice sounded strange. It was filled with something that was so foreign to Ashley that she almost couldn’t identify it but it was definitely there. Was it emotion? Leo and Ashley always laughed at their mother because they found it humorous that the woman could be such a brilliant surgeon and businesswoman, but as soon as she left the office, it was like she would shut down. Almost as if she’d used all of her energy in public and only came home to recharge. Whereas their father was a terrific doctor who also had the bedside manner and charm to keep up appearances in all of the right social circles. So when Ashley heard her mother’s voice she knew instantly something was wrong, very, very wrong.

  “Did you hear me, Ashley?” Her mother asked stoically.

  “No, I’m sorry, I think I misunderstood. Can you repeat yourself, Mom?”

  “Okay, but please listen, this is important. Hurricane Wilma has hit Miami really hard. Your father was called in twelve hours ago to perform emergency surgeries. I was on my way home—after all, I had put in eighteen hours…” Her mother’s voice, while fueled with emotion, was still calm and clinical and it began to piss Ashley off.

  “Mom! Get to the point!” Ashley never disrespected her parents—that was Leo’s job—but she was worried, nervous and downright frustrated.

  “Right, right, anyway, as I was packing up to leave, I got paged to the ER, there had been an accident on Beacon Hill.” Beacon Hill, thought Ashley, that’s just up the road. Panic started to bubble in her stomach. “Apparently, the wind had blown a huge tree down on top of a car.” Tension crackled through the phone like Pop-Rocks. Ashley waited for her mother to speak, knowing in her gut what the next words would be. “It was Leo’s car, Ashley. Leo is—”

  Emotion leaked from her mother’s voice like water trickling out of the cracks in a dam. Ashley had never, not once in her life, heard her mother’s voice sound like this. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

  “Mom?” She was finding it almost impossible to speak because of the growing lump in her throat. “Is Leo…okay?” The silence that met her ears didn’t answer her question.

  “Mom!” Ashley cried, “please, answer me!” The so
unds of sobbing ricocheted in her ear. “Okay, I’m coming to the hospital. I’ll be there in fifteen—”

  Ashley didn’t have the chance to finish her statement before her mother cut her off. “No”—her voice was back to cold and clinical—“you need to stay in the house. We have already had one accident tonight. I don’t know what your brother was thinking driving in a storm like that. Every news station around is advising people to stay off the roads. You stay home and let us worry about him.” With those parting remarks, her mother disconnected the call.

  “I don’t know what your brother was thinking to be driving in a storm like that. Every news station around is advising people to stay off the roads.”

  That statement reverberated over and over in her head as Ashley grabbed her jacket, purse and shoes and headed down to the garage.

  “Ashley, oh my God, how did you get here? Did you drive in this weather?” Ryan knew it was an asinine question—of course she had—but he couldn’t bear to think about what could have happened to her now that the winds were blowing over 130 miles per hour and the rain was making visibility practically impossible. Well, at least that was what he’d overheard people saying while he waited to have his hand x-rayed, and then while he’d waited again to have his four broken knuckles and his fractured wrist cleaned up and casted. He gave no thought to the throbbing in his right arm as he drank in Ashley’s appearance before pulling her tight to his chest with his left arm, and having her near him after everything that happened with Leo was like honey on a sore throat—warm and soothing. Just as that thought hit him, so did the next one.

  “Ash,” his voice shook as the chill ran through his bones. “Ash, baby, what are you doing here?” He wasn’t sure what she knew about her brother and he didn’t know if it was his place to tell her. Maybe her parents already broke the news. She looked horrible. She was soaked through. Her eyes were puffy and red. She looked…broken.