Chapter 4

I went back to school feeling like a new person. I had my degree paid for. I just had to pass the courses. I got my apartment set up and threw myself into the work. I felt like I was on top of the world. I talked with Sabrina almost daily even if it was just a few minutes on Face-Time. I had daydreams of moving out to Miami for work while she finished her Masters there and the two of us settling down together. It was a good dream.

Christmas came and I sent a single card to Mom. I wished her a Merry Christmas and told her that she was invited to come with Mike and Mary to my graduation at the end of the year. I didn’t bother with the troll gifts this year. I just didn’t acknowledge that they existed. Mike told me later that there was a lot of speculation about what that meant.

The year came and went. Sabrina and I were falling in love, my courses were coming together, graduation was a certainty at this point. I was going to have a great job, I had the love of the most beautiful woman in my high school and my future was going to be worry-free.

Mom, Mike and Mary came out to see me graduate and then I was done. I sold off the minimal furniture I had to one of the other students that was staying for another year and I waved goodbye to LA. I might be back, but it wouldn’t be as a student.

Sabrina and I were both working for the summer and had cemented plans to move in together in Miami in September. It was the happiest I’d ever been. I put off buying a car, planning to get one when I got to Florida instead.

I went back to work for Mike and Sabrina worked at Target for the summer. I thought that made perfect sense. She was always so sunny and friendly that she fit right in with the attitude of the company. She talked about liking the corporate culture at Target and wanting to take that attitude into every job she took.

I was deeply in love with her and told her so as often as she’d let me. She always grinned and giggled a little, like she was surprised and delighted. We were disgustingly affectionate. I met her parents and they were nice. They reminded me of how things had used to be at home for me. I introduced her to Mike and Mary and they loved her.

“NOW can we tell them that you’re dating?” Mary asked one night late in June. “I’ve been bursting to tell them that you’ve got a girlfriend since last summer.”

I laughed and nodded. “You can even tell them who,” I said. “Billy and Linda both know who Sabrina is. They might faint when they realize that we’re dating.”

“I can do better than that,” Mary said with a smirk and showed me her phone. She’d snapped a picture of the two of us sitting together on the sofa. We were too focused on each other to even realize she was taking pictures.

“That’s beautiful,” I said to her, enthused. “Show them that!”

The next night, they were going over for a big family dinner. Billy and Linda were going to be there and I was going to take my regular date with the bathtub while they did their thing.

I was relaxing in bed when they came home and wanted to tell me all about the reactions. Mom had been ecstatic with the news. Dad had grunted something but had claimed that she must be retarded since she didn’t look ugly enough to have to resort to dating me. Billy and Linda had both admitted that she looked familiar, but couldn’t place her until Mary had supplied her name. That made them both gape in shock that I’d started dating her.

We chuckled at their reactions and then we all turned in. Life was normal for all of us. Mike and Mary were in love, Sabrina and I were in love. It was the best summer of my life. It was mid-July when that changed.

Sabrina and I had been out for dinner, followed by a long, hot make-out session. I wanted her in the worst way imaginable and I knew she wanted me too. I’d asked Mike if he minded if she stayed the night and he was cool with it. Tonight, we were planning on christening the bed I’d slept on the past several summers. I’d turned in my seat to look at her, my mind on how beautiful she was. The light had just turned green and she started through the intersection. I watched in horror as the truck bore down on us, plowing through the red light.

“NO!” I screamed and didn’t even have time to reach out to her before it slammed into her door. Everything lurched like someone had picked up the car and shaken it. I could see flying glass and hear screaming and then I hit my head and everything stopped.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, I could hear sirens in the distance. I was still in the car. “Sabrina!” I gasped and looked for her. When my eyes fell on her, the noise that ripped out of my throat was nothing that sane men should hear.

“Pete...” she mumbled, choking up blood.

I took her hand in both of mine. “I’m here, Baby!” I told her. “Stay with me. Help’s on the way.” She was covered in blood and she was spraying tiny little flecks of it with each coughing breath she took. The truck had hit us hard enough that her door had imploded. I prayed harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything.

“Pete...” she repeated. “I’m scared! Hold my hand!”

“I’ve got you, Baby. I’m here. Just hold on. Help’s coming.” I had her hand in mine and I squeezed it. “You feel that?” I asked. “I’m squeezing your fingers.”

She nodded weakly. “I feel it now. Pete. I love you. I need you to know I do.” She was starting to cry. “I’m so sorry I’m not gonna be around to tell you from now on.”

“No! Nonononono!” I babbled. “Don’t you leave me! You’re gonna make it and we’re going to Miami and we’re gonna be happy there. We’ll get a little place near the beach,” I promised as if pleading with her not to leave me. “I’ll get a job and you’ll go to school and everything will be perfect. You just have to stay awake. Stay with me, honey.”

But she was already gone. I’d had so little time with her and she was dead, trapped with me in her little Honda Civic. I felt her fingers go slack and heard her whisper that she loved me one last time and then she closed her eyes for good.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!” I bellowed and wailed in despair. “NOOOO! Wake up, Baby!” I lost all sense of time, shaking her a little as I tried to coax a response out of her. I held her, leaning across the seat to wrap my arms around her and cried. Then the emergency crews were there and trying to get me out of the car. I fought them, trying to stay with Sabrina, but I was hurt too and there were too many of them. They pulled me out so the paramedics could work on her, but a quick look at her and they shook their head. There was no saving her.

I was strapped to a gurney and loaded into an ambulance. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I wanted to lay down and die right here. I wanted to be with Sabrina. I wanted to hold her forever. I didn’t care if we were buried in the ground. That was where I wanted to be. I got more and more hysterical, the farther away from her we got until they sedated me. I drifted off to sleep and hoped I didn’t wake up again.

But I did wake up. At first, I just surfaced and there was calm. I could hear the distinctive hospital sounds and I was curious about why I was here. I took a deep breath and then I remembered. It hit me with the same force as the truck had and I started bawling in despair all over again. The nurses were there in moments, having heard me or seen the spike in my vitals at the nurse’s station. A needle full of liquid calm was pumped into my IV and after a moment, my cries trailed off to helpless whimpers. “Just let me go to her,” I begged piteously before darkness stole the world.

When I woke again, it was daytime. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up.

“Hey!” came a woman’s voice nearby. “Take it easy!” Mary came to push me back down flat.

“Sabrina!” I said. “She’s...” I trailed off, my face screwed up in grief.

“I know,” she said, crying a little too. “There wasn’t anything you could have done. They say she wasn’t in any pain. She probably didn’t even know it happened.

“NO! She was awake!” I wailed. “She said ... She said ... she was scared!” I broke down into tears again and she held my hand, weeping with me.

There were no words. We wept for the young woman we’d gotten to know and love. After a while, I was calm enough to tell her about Sabrina’s last words. That started us back to weeping though and that’s how we spent most of the day. Tears, broken up by periods of startling calm.

Sabrina’s parents came to see me late in the day. That started us all crying again. I found out that I’d been out for two days. Her funeral was the day after tomorrow.

“I have to be there,” I told Mary. “I need to get out of here.”

I’d been examined by the doctors and had been told that I had bruised ribs, a severe concussion, a sprained wrist and a bruised kidney. He said I was lucky to be alive. I just looked at him like he was stupid. This wasn’t lucky. Lucky would have been dying in that car, being with Sabrina forever. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

They were okay with releasing me in the morning, so long as the concussion didn’t cause me any complications. Mary stayed with me all day, just watching me most of the time, but engaging in conversation when I wanted to talk.

When the police came to take my statement, I asked them what had happened. “Was he drunk? Did his brakes fail? Why did he hit us?”

One of the cops looked at the other and shook his head. “He just wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “He was talking with his girl and just didn’t notice the light change as he approached the intersection.”

I closed my eyes. “So, Sabrina died because he just wasn’t looking where he was going?” I repeated.

“I’m afraid so,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry for your loss, son.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“What?” one of the officers asked.

“The guy that killed my girlfriend,” I said. “Who is he?”

“Hamilton,” he told me. “William Hamilton. Any relation?”

I stared at him. “You’re telling me that my brother murdered my girlfriend?” I asked him.

“No one’s calling it murder,” the cop assured me.

“I am!” I snapped.

“Is there something we should know about?” the other cop asked.

Mary jumped in. “Peter’s first serious girlfriend cheated on him with Billy. The two of them are still together. They’ve never repaired their relationship from that. She would have been the girlfriend he was talking to when the accident happened.”

They nodded. “We don’t have any evidence that he knew you were in that car or that he’d planned to hit it,” the first officer told me gently. “Given your history, I can understand your feelings about him, but we need to look at the facts.”

“I understand, officer,” I said dully. Mostly, I understood that Sabrina was dead and Billy was the one that killed her. I understood that no one was going to do a damn thing about it and that they weren’t going to let me go to Sabrina, like I wanted. They weren’t going to punish him, they were no use to me and they were gonna declare it an accident, move on with their paperwork and hit the next case with the same lazy detachment.

“If there’s any other details you can remember, give us a call,” the other officer told me and tried to hand me a card.

“I remember my girlfriend telling me she was scared,” I told them, “and that she was sorry she was going to have to leave me.”

They both looked sympathetic and they left their card on the table. When they left, I just stared at my hands in my lap. “You knew?” I asked.

“I wasn’t keeping it from you,” she said. “I was waiting for you to ask on your own.”

I nodded. “I can’t say I blame you. I wouldn’t have wanted to deliver that piece of news in your shoes either. Mike at work?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “He’d have been here, but the doctor wasn’t sure you’d wake up today.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “What are the parents doing about all of this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “They came to see you when they came to pick Linda and Billy up. They didn’t say much, just wanted to see you.”

I nodded. “I suppose I can understand that,” I said woodenly. In the span of the last few minutes, all the emotion had drained out of me. I felt like a husk. I’d been hollowed out when Linda had betrayed me. I was just starting to put my life back together and then Billy took the woman I loved again.

Mary tried to talk to me a little more, but I barely heard her. I wasn’t even sure if she was speaking to me half the time. Mike came and we talked a little, but my heart wasn’t in it. Yes, I knew that Billy had been behind the wheel. Yes, I spoke to the police. No, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. They left, with looks that told me they didn’t know how to help, but desperately wanted to.

The next morning, Mary picked me from the hospital and took me to get a new suit for the funeral. The fitting was excruciatingly painful for me and seemed to go on forever, but eventually, I had a suit that fit reasonably well. Mary wanted to take me somewhere to eat after we had my suit. I shrugged. I wasn’t hungry, but I was agreeable enough to go with her.

We sat in the booth and she ordered Chicken Parmesan and I ordered a club sandwich, planning on taking half of it home to put in the fridge. We ate slowly, with Mary doing most of the talking. When she’d exhausted most of the safe topics, she sighed. “How are you feeling?” she asked quietly.

“Numb mostly,” I admitted. “Sometimes it hits me that she’s gone and I’ll never see her smile again, but mostly, I just don’t feel anything right now.”

She nodded. “Just take it one step at a time. I know Sabrina would want you to be happy. That’s not gonna happen overnight, but it’ll come eventually.”

I nodded. “I ... I can’t stay here in Denver,” I told her. “I’ll kill Billy if I stay. I’ll see him at a bar or a store or on the street and I’ll...” I trailed off and shook my head.

“Yeah. Mike and I talked about moving last night,” she admitted. “The family is pretty fractured. Your dad hasn’t been the same to me or Mike since he switched jobs. Billy ... Well, whether he meant it or not, there’s no way to put things back together for the two of you. Your mother is caught in the middle. She loves you and your brother, but this one has her in fits. She can’t condemn Billy for an accident, but at the same time, she knows you have to want his blood.”