Cartwheels In The Dark, page 5
By now, they were no doubt wondering where she was and what could be keeping her. She never missed a meeting since she was the chairperson. The gossip wheels were no doubt churning while they tried to figure it out. If they knew where she was and why, they’d be burning up the phone lines across the state to share the dirt. She could hear them now.
“Evie? Joanna here. Listen, you are NOT going to believe what I’m about to tell you! Honestly, you are NOT! Well, I hardly believe it myself, but it’s true. I assure you it's true! I heard from Buffy Charmsworth that every bit of it is one hundred percent true. How does she know? Well, she heard it from her hairdresser who heard it from the the Douglas’ gardener, so I assure you, it’s ALL true. Imagine...Mrs. Douglas....yes Kallie, wife of Camden Douglas…. well, I don’t know how to say this without coming right out and saying it, Evie...Mrs. Douglas, come to find out, is well…she’s common white trash from a dumpy shack in the middle of nowhere in Maine. Oh yes, Evie. It’s true. Poor, poor Cam never could have known of her background! There is no way he would have married into a family like that…no…not coming from good parents such as his. He couldn’t have known that she was plain white trash when he married her. Absolutely! She must have lied to him. Oh my gosh, to think he had no idea who she really is just was breaks my heart, I tell you! Just breaks my heart!”
Undoubtedly, the conversations within the elite circles in town would go on that like for days. The gossip tree wouldn’t stop growing until someone got to the bottom of something. It didn’t have to be the truth. It rarely ever was but not one of them ever seemed to care about that. If it was something juicy for them to chew on, they were happy. As soon as one member was informed, another would be dialed up to fill them in and see what they knew. It would take a week of martinis and a trip or two to the south of France for the ole biddies to heal from the shock. Kallie could care less what they thought about her. She never really had. Her husband was another story altogether.
She never wanted to do anything that would jeopardize all that he had worked for at Douglas Enterprises. Cam had always known where she came from, and it never mattered to him. He was grateful that Maddie had taken her in when her own mother tossed her out like old garbage. Her childhood years were not something she shared with anyone but her husband. It was no one’s business. She wasn’t proud of her background, but she hadn’t really been given a choice as to what family had been born into. The story she had created back in grade school was easier to repeat than explaining her morally bankrupt mother to her friends and acquaintances.
Sharp piercing pains began to sweep across her forehead. The repetitive pounding in her head was becoming unbearable. Every white line that flew past felt like she was looking through a kaleidoscope that was spinning at warp speed. Her heart began to pound so hard that she could almost feel it pounding against her shirt. The heavy, sinking feeling in her chest that she had experienced the day before was back. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she didn’t like it. Struggling to take a full, deep breath wasn’t a feeling she was familiar with, nor did she like it one bit. She was a healthy woman of forty. What was going on? Was she having a panic attack? A heart attack? Whatever it was, needed to stop!
“This…. all of this…is YOUR fault, Connie. You are an evil, evil woman! Why were you ever allowed to be born into this world?” She heard the words, and she knew they were hers, but she felt like she was hearing them from a distance just as she had the day before. It sounded as though she was at one end of a long echoing hallway yelling into the nothingness. She kept hearing loud voices in her head. Voices of people arguing but was unable to make out the words they were saying. And then the cries for help were there again as well. A deep, heartbreaking sob, like one from a child who has bumped their head or skinned their knee grew louder and louder.
Thoughts and memories began to flood her mind. Little by little, Kallie began to remember things. As much as she did not want to, she started to have flashes of recognition. Suddenly, she knew the voices all too well. They were the cries she had heard in the darkness so many times. Some had been her own pleas for help. Some were her younger sisters, begging for help. The voices called out for someone, anyone to rescue them. Cold chills traveled from one end of her body to the other. The uncontrollable shaking had returned also. She felt her entire body quickly becoming uncontrollable.
“God! Please make this stop!” she cried, “I lived through this hell once already. Please don’t make me do it again! I can’t! I won’t! Please, I beg you, please make it stop!”
But it wasn’t stopping. The clouded confusion was only getting stronger. Time felt like it was standing still. It was as though it had stood still for the past twenty years, hiding just under the surface of her skin. As she drove, she felt the sting of the burning waterfall that covered her face. The more she tried to stop the stream of tears, the more they raged on.
The lines in the center of the highway were becoming increasingly difficult to see. Flashing white blurs whizzed by her. She had no idea if she was even in the right lane any longer. She hoped she hadn’t passed the exit for Somerfield! If she had, she would have to go backtracking to make up for it. She tried to clear the blurriness to see where she was at that moment, but truly had no idea. She felt like she was in some spinning time warp. The tears, the dizziness, the memories were all on a loop, playing over and over. Reciting faster each time they played.
“Where the hell am I? Am I even in the right frigging lane? I shouldn’t even be here! Oh God, what am I doing? I don’t need this!” she yelled as she tried to wipe her eyes with her shirt sleeve and keep the other hand on the wheel.
The road, the fuzzy shapes of other cars on the road, the guardrails, all were becoming distorted and twisted. Kallie felt like she was blindfolded, flying down a bobsled run without brakes. It was as though all she could do was sit back and hold on for dear life as she flew down the highway at seventy miles an hour, blindly. She knew she shouldn’t be behind the wheel in the state she was in, but the thought to pull over didn’t seem to occur to her.
She continued to sob from somewhere deep. Maybe the absolute rock bottom of her heart, she wasn’t sure. She cried for herself. She cried for the loss of Maddie. She cried for the baby sisters she had left behind. Years of penned up heartache had chosen that moment in time to rear its ugly head. She felt like the weight of the entire world had just dropped on her shoulders with a heavy crushing motion.
Why had she felt the need to return to this horrible place? Why did she have to be such an impulsive person? She told herself that if she had half an ounce of common sense, she would have realized from the beginning what a bad idea it had been. A very bad idea. “Who in their right mind voluntarily returns to the one place in the entire world that is the sole source of so much pain for them?” she shouted and answered herself, “People without any frigging common sense, that’s who!”
She should be at home at her fund-raising meeting. At that moment, she would rather be sitting across the table listening as the rich, over entitled whiners sipped their cocktails and gossiped. She knew she shouldn’t have come to Maine. “What I should have done and what I did, well those are two very different things!” she burst out. She knew she’d always had a bad habit of doing things the hard way. The adventure north, she realized, was no exception.
Kallie couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom that was slowly seeping through her chest. Reaching across the car to the passenger seat, she felt around for her handkerchief. Dammit! Had she put it in her bag? She swore she had seen it on the front seat earlier. She quickly glanced over to see that it had fallen to the floor. She reached for it, taking her eyes from the road for a split second.
What she hadn’t realized, until it was too late, is that she had just approached the exit sign at about the same time. The car hit a cement traffic island and she lost all control. She felt herself soaring high. There was nothing beneath her but air as the vehicle rolled and rolled again in midair. And then she felt the bone shattering crash as the roof of the car landed against solid earth and everything went dark.
CHAPTER SIX
A call from the 911 dispatcher came across Officer Wentworth’s scanner. A group of cars were blocking traffic in the northbound lane of I-95. When he arrived at the scene, a Canadian tour bus and six cars had stopped in the middle of the road. Within minutes, a large roadblock formed. An extremely excited older gentleman approached Adam, trying to tell him about an accident he’d just witnessed but he was talking so fast that he wasn’t making any sense. Before long, an entire group of people gathered around the officer all trying to talk at once. Thankfully, another unit arrived and helped to lead the crowd and their vehicles to the side of the road. As soon as the vehicles were parked in the breakdown lane the officers started taking statements.
Finally, the elderly gentleman had caught his breath and was able to give details about a car that went “flying” over the embankment. The man and his wife were traveling behind the car as it left the road. As Officer Wentworth peered over the guardrail into the deep ravine below, he could see a vehicle resting on its roof. The entire area was eerily still. He saw absolutely no movement coming from the vehicle. Fortunately, there were no flames as sometimes happened when vehicles were involved in a crash of that magnitude.
Trying to keep his footing, he edged along the steep embankment toward the wreck. As he approached, he felt his heart drop clear to his feet. There in front of him, lying upside down on its roof, was a silver SUV that looked remarkably like the one Kallie Douglas had been driving the night before. “Please don’t let it be her!” he prayed silently.
As he approached the vehicle, he saw what appeared to be a lifeless arm lying on the ground sprawled out of the driver’s window. As fast as he could, he ran across grassy terrain at the bottom of the gorge. Crouching beside the vehicle, he saw the last thing he wanted to see. Automobile crashes were never an easy thing to respond to, but it was even more difficult to see someone you knew involved in one. Unconscious in a pool of her own blood among a pile of twisted metal and broken glass, lay Kallie Douglas.
After quite some time and much effort, the Jaws of Life extracted her from what remained of the rental car. The process was lengthy and painstakingly slow due to the condition of the mangled metal. The location of the deep gorge didn’t make access easy for the rescue team either. As the medics freed Kallie from the wreckage, a sigh of relief passed over the first responders when they managed to find a pulse. She was alive and Adam was grateful to hear it. He volunteered to escort the ambulance to Pineview Hospital once they had her loaded inside. It was a routine trip that he sadly knew all too well. This time was different though. He felt a connection to this woman. Less than twenty- four hours ago, he had shared a meal with her, shown her to the B&B and said goodnight. Now, he wasn’t sure there would ever be another chance to talk to her. One of the paramedics told him that the chances of surviving a crash like that were slim. Adam knew they were right but hoped with all his heart that they were wrong.
Once at Pineview Hospital, Kallie was taken directly into the emergency room where she remained unconscious. Adam spoke to the physician on call, Dr. Roberts. who reported that Kallie would be prepped for surgery ASAP, as time was of the essence. If she were to stand any sort of chance at all, they would have to act immediately. He explained that large pieces of glass had become lodged in the center of her chest causing her to hemorrhage internally. She was also going to need at least one blood transfusion, if not more, depending how things went in the operating room. Dr. Roberts spoke frankly to Adam and told him that as much of the glass as possible needed to be removed from the chest cavity or she would die. It was that simple. She had already lost so much blood and had been unconscious for quite some time. Given those obstacles, he didn’t dare to say one way or the other what her chances were of surviving. Further trauma would surely be evident once he was able to examine the patient closer but that was something the ER team expected in any accident. Get the big issues taken care of first and take it from there.
As the doctor passed the desk, Adam heard him tell a nurse to be sure the coffee was on because they were all in for a long night. He heard another nurse respond and he turned toward her. He knew that voice. In the craziness that had been his night, he had totally forgotten that his wife would be on duty by now. As he approached her, an O.R. nurse interrupted requesting an order from the blood bank for three pints of type O positive blood. Hopefully, the blood bank could get it to them ASAP. Adam let her know that he was a match and asked where he could donate on Kallie’s behalf.
Amy smiled, “You are the most caring person I’ve ever known. You don’t even know the patient and you’re offering up your blood to her. I don’t know how I got so lucky.”
Even after five years together, she still knew how to make him blush. “Thank you love. I don’t know how I got so lucky either. I do know the patient, by the way. Well, I don’t know her, but I met her yesterday. She had pulled over in the breakdown lane out on the interstate and was having an emotional meltdown. I had her follow me to the diner so she could get her bearings before she attempted to travel any further.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize it was someone you knew.”
“Like I said, I don’t know her. I just met her last night. You were sleeping when I came in and were gone when I woke up. Otherwise, I would have mentioned it to you.”
“Honey, that’s fine. I just didn’t realize it was someone you had so much as spoken to. That’s all. Whatever the case, I think it’s admirable that you didn’t think twice before offering to donate blood. I think whether it was someone you had ever met or not, it wouldn’t matter to you. You’re that kind of person and that’s part of the reason I love you so much.” She looked up and down the hall to be sure they were alone and leaned in to place a kiss on his cheek.
They watched as the gurney carrying Kallie flew past them toward the operating room. He noticed the look on Amy’s face when the patient passed her. She looked troubled, which wasn’t like her. Adam had seen her treat the most horrific accident victims without so much as batting an eyelash. She was the kind of person who didn’t hesitate. When there was work to do, she jumped right in and did what she could for her patients. This look was something he hadn’t seen before and couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was all about.
“Amy? You okay?”
Her furrowed forehead told him that she was deep in thought. “Amy? Hon? Are you okay?” he asked again.
“I’m okay. It’s just that the patient on the gurney…that’s the person you brought in from the accident?”
“It is. She’s in pretty bad shape huh?”
“She sure does seem to be. I don’t know for sure but for a second, she reminded me of someone. Silly, I guess. Half of her face covered in bandages and the other half ballooned up beyond much recognition. Been a long night, I guess. Anyway, I’m fine.”
Adam agreed that it was hard to recognize much of the woman he had met the day before.
“What do you know about her, Adam? Family? Husband?” she asked with a pen in her hand ready to take down any relevant information for the chart.
“She said she lived in Virginia and used to live here in Maine a long time ago. Someone she used to know passed away and she was here to take care of the estate. She didn’t mention a husband or any family by name though.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping we could notify someone that she was here.”
“The ambulance would have brought a purse or any personal items they may have removed from the vehicle. You may want to find out what came in with her. Maybe an emergency contact is listed in her things?”
“Good idea. I’ll see what I can find out.” She looked at her watch and then smiled at him. “Hey, aren’t you off duty in about five minutes?”
The night had flown. Adam hadn’t checked the time in hours. She was right, it was time for him to go home and get some sleep.
“One of those shifts! Time flew by today. I think it’s time I head home and had me a shower and some sleep. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. Oh! By the way, I do know that her name is Kallie Douglas. Jesus! I almost forgot that. Might come in handy to know that, huh?”
He scooted behind the desk after making sure no one was looking, and he gave her a tight squeeze and a kiss. “Get some sleep, babe. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon when I get up. Hey, it’s your day off tomorrow, isn’t it?” she smiled. “I don’t have to be back here until seven p.m. It’ll be nice to spend a little time together.”
Adam flashed that smile that melted her every time. The strong cleft in his chin along with the boyish dimples still made her weak in the knees. After he left, Amy went to find the ambulance drivers who had brought Ms. Douglas in. Hopefully, with any luck, she would find a contact number to let someone know where she was.
Dr. Roberts was the on-call surgeon for the rest of the night and Amy knew that whatever could be done, would be done for the woman. He was a young, crackerjack surgeon who had come from California a short while back. Thankfully, he brought much knowledge of innovative procedures with him to their little hospital. She felt good about him being the one who would operate on the woman she had seen moments earlier. Whatever her issues were, there had been an awful lot of blood on the sheets that covered her. As she did with all her patients, she silently asked the Universe to watch over her and do what it could to help her. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that she had earlier when the woman was wheeled past her. She looked familiar somehow, but Amy couldn’t place where she would have known her from. But then again, Adam did say she was from Virginia, so probably she just looked like someone she had known at some point in time.
