by Linda Nelson
The guards led Karla away. Carol couldn’t watch. She turned her back on her as best as she could so she couldn’t see Karla being taken away by the guards.
When the two guards grabbed onto Carol’s arms, she was kind of ready for it. She had some idea that they probably would be taking her away too because of the incident.
Shawna stepped forward blocking the way of the guards who were about to lead Carol away.
“It wasn’t her fault.” Shawna said to the guard in hopes of gaining a little bit of favoritism with them. She had high hopes of an early release if this went well.
“What do you know of this incident?” The guard asked.
“I know that girl Karla has been festering about getting revenge against this here girl for a week. That’s what I know.”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“Because I didn’t think she was going to be stupid enough to act on it. I told her what was going to happen to her if she did.”
The guards released their grips on Carol’s arms.
She stood there and waited for them to walk away. As soon as they were gone and out of earshot Carol approached Shawna and asked, “Why did you do that for me?”
Shawna advised, “Sometimes you shouldn’t ask questions. Sometimes you are better off not knowing. So leave it alone and forget this ever happened.
I’m sure you will be out of here before Karla has a chance to make another attempt. The girl has flipped her switch, and I wouldn’t want to be around her when they let her out of the pit. So my advice, forget it ever happened.”
Carol didn’t push the matter. She let Shawna walk away to join her friends. The group of girls who met up with Shawna gave her a look and turned their backs on her. Apparently they too knew Karla and her story.
She knew Shawna was right. It was no easy matter, and a lot of internal guilt had been building up inside her ever since she talked to her dad that first day on the phone when he had told her about her mom.
Now Carol was adding Karla to her guilt list. She knew that if she had never sat with Karla that day in school things probably would still be the way they had always been except the fact about her mom dying from the bad bag of coke.
There was no way around that incident. Carol had known for quite some time that her mom had been stealing her stash. She just never let her mom know that she was on to her.
Whom was she going to tell anyway? Her Dad…?
That was the last thing he needed to know that his daughter, the only child he had, was using coke just like his wife was.
It wasn’t like she had it as bad as her mom. At least she didn’t think so. She only used coke occasionally to take the edge off. It wasn’t like she actually needed it. Not like her mom did.
No, she was more of a pot head, and she liked the drink more.
She even had a better tolerance for alcohol. Most times no one could tell that she had been drinking, even the volleyball coach.
How long had it been since she had taken her first drink? She couldn’t remember.
Carol took a seat against the wall. A couple of her cellmates came over to see if she was all right.
Now was not a good time to cry. Instead, she balled her fists and tried to look as angry as she could to hide the fact that her insides hurt.
“What was all that about?” One of the girls asked.
Carol answered, “Oh, she is pissed because I got her into this mess.”
“How’s that…?”
“It was my idea to take a road trip with our boyfriends.”
Carol thought about Rod. She certainly couldn’t call him her boyfriend. It hadn’t been the same as it had been between her and Heath. She missed him so much. Why had she broken up with him? Because she had thought, that he had been one of Karla’s attackers at the party back at the beginning of the year. She never believed him when he had told her that he didn’t do anything.
Heath had spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and Carol never went to see him. She was so furious with him. He had tried to call her a couple of times after that, but she refused all his calls. In school, she couldn’t even look at him.
She wondered what he was doing now. Was he with someone else? Did he have a new girlfriend yet? Would he ever talk to her again?
Chapter 21 – A Change of Attitude
After a long surgery Max was finally taken to the recovery room. It had taken the police several hours to find and contact his parents to confirm the treatment of surgery.
There had been some bleeding on his brain along with severe swelling. All of which were sure signs of a serious head injury.
The doctors had to place a shunt in his head to help drain the fluids and wait.
Several hours after the surgery, Max woke up in the hospital. His head hurt, even his face hurt too. He was hooked up to wires and a monitor and didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten there.
He felt the big ol’ bandage wrapped around his head with his one good hand, his left one. The other one was in a cast.
A nurse entered his room and was pleased to see that he had come around and was back in the big happy world just in time for Thanksgiving.
He had a narrow escape with death from the head injury he had sustained from the pummeling he had taken from Rod.
“You’re awake,” she said as she scooted around his bed to check the monitors. She would leave them connected for the next few hours until they were sure that he was going to be out of the woods. “How do you feel?”
“My head hurts,” he said bringing the good hand up to touch the side of his head, feeling the bandage. “Where am I?”
“You’re at Dixon General Hospital. You received a nasty head injury, and we had to operate and put a shunt back here behind your ear.” The nurse gently pointed out the tube sticking out from underneath the bandage without actually touching the tube with her hand. “You had bleeding, and it had to be stopped before too much damage was done.
Do you remember anything about the incident?”
“A little…”
“That’s a good sign. Can you tell me your name?” She picked up the chart in hopes of adding this vital information. Another good sign would be for the patient to know who he was upon waking from such a procedure.
It was all coming back to him, Rod, Carol, Karla and the road trip. Had the girls gotten away safely?
He hoped that they did.
“Maximo Colton…”
“Good that is a start… Max can you tell me where you are from?”
He thought for a moment and almost said Roxbury then he remember that he and his family had moved recently. “Brantwood, Massachusetts.”
“Good. How about family members, next of kin, we can call them for you if you want to talk to them?”
It took Max a moment for the names of his parent to come back to him. But the fog was beginning to lift from his head even though his head hurt him so. He was even able to give the nurse his home phone number.
She asked him again if he wanted to call or if she should call for him.
He decided maybe to call later. He actually didn’t feel like talking because of how his head felt.
“Your head is going to hurt for a while. That guy certainly had it in for you. You are pretty lucky to be alive.”
Max had to ask, “What happened to the guy? Did they arrest him?”
“No, he didn’t make it. He had a heart attack shortly after the police tried to apprehend him. I guess his drug usage did his heart in and made it too weak. It is such a sad thing to see when you are a health care worker.”
This news was not what Max had expected to hear. He had never known anyone who had died from their drug usage.
It took the nurse a few more days before she was able to get Max to agree to call his family.
She made the call right then before he changed his mind. The nurse was about to patch Max’s mom to his room when the woman replied unexpectedly by saying she didn’t want to talk to her
son. Instead, she simply asked if he was going to be all right.
When the nurse replied, she said, “Yes, he is expected to make a full recovery.”
The woman on the other end of the line replied, “Good, then that will be all. We’ll pay his hospital bill, but we don’t want to talk to him, and he is not welcome home.” The phone line sounded with a click signaling the call had been disconnected.
This was pretty sad news for the nurse to deliver to her patient during the holiday season, so she opted out not to let him know that she had been able to make contact for him.
She was sure that he was going to be in the hospital until after the first of the year. Hopefully his family would come around by then. If not the patient at least would be strong enough to be on his own by then.
A few days after Max began to recover from his surgery Officer Lance paid him a visit to see how he was doing and to let him know that he was not being charged at this time. The county decided to do a nice deed for him given his situation and the fact that he had a long road to recovery even after he was released from the hospital.
Max asked about the girls and was not happy to hear about how they had been charged and arrested, especially Karla.
Officer Lance did neglect to tell Max that Karla and Carol had been already released and sent on their way. He just said, “You should count your blessings that you are still alive, son.”
Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went. Before long it was the New Year. Max was released from the hospital that very next day.
He still hadn’t heard a word from his family back home and thought that it was odd knowing that his hospital bill had been taken care of, but his family had not once tried to call or come see him.
When they had said that he was no longer welcome in the home, he did not think once that it might also mean that he was disowned too.
The day he was to be discharged he was able to confirm his suspicions about his family not wanting anything to do with him. That was the day he made a brief call home to his mom, and she gave him an ear full.
How could they be like that to him, their only son?
Since he had no wheels, and no job, and only a little bit of money, he had no choice but to remain there in North Carolina. He still had no idea as to what had happened with Karla and Carol.
After a little asking around he was able to find a room at a boarding house in Downtown Dixon. He managed to find a few odd jobs here and there until he finally found an opening at a diner as a short order cook. He had never worked in his life. He figured that if he could learn how to cook then he could do almost anything.
There he remained in Dixon, North Carolina until late spring after he was able to save enough money to buy a bus ticket back home.
Chapter 22 – Bad News
Thanksgiving Day Rod’s mom received a visit from Officer James and Theresa. She figured they were there looking for her son and promptly let them enter.
James and Theresa didn’t like having to give such bad news to anyone at this time of the year. But they had no choice. They had recently received a call from the state police department in Dixon, North Carolina about the death of a possible resident of Brantwood. They just needed a next of kin to identify the body, and then it could be released for autopsy.
“Can we sit down?” Asked Officer Theresa.
Rod’s mom obliged and led them into her living room where they both took a seat on her couch and waited for her to take a seat in the chair across from them.
“What’s this about? Are you still looking for my son? I haven’t seen him for over a week, and he took my car to boot.”
“Mrs. Phelps, we are no longer looking for your son. We believe he has been found.” Officer Theresa looked toward her partner hoping he would step in.
“Is he all right?” She asked. “Has he been arrested?”
“Uh-no, unfortunately he, had a bad turn of events,” replied Officer James.
Rod’s mom looked puzzled. If he hadn’t been arrested, then why were they there?
“Is he threatening suicide?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Did he kidnap someone?”
“No, Ma’am. You son has died of natural causes.”
Mrs. Phelps hand shot to her mouth, and tears immediately welled up in her eyes. this couldn’t actually be happening, could it?
“The other thing is that it has happened out of state. We have some photos with us and were hoping you would be able to identify the body from looking at them.” Officer James held out two pictures taken at the scene after the paramedics stated that they had lost him.
Mrs. Phelps began to cry even harder. In-between her sobs she said, “That is him.”
Officer Theresa hated this part. “Are you positively sure? If so we would like to offer assistance to you, to make the trip to make the final identification of his body and to retrieve any personal effects he may have had on his person.”
An hour later Officer James and Theresa were setting up transportation for Mrs. Phelps to travel to Dixon North Carolina to finish the identification process of her now deceased son.
When she arrived at the Police Department, she stopped at the desk to ask for Officer Lance. He immediately came out of his office to greet her and to take her downstairs to the morgue.
She never thought she would lose her son. Not this soon.
“How did he die? Was it a drug overdose?”
“He apparently has been using substances for a while, and they took their toll on his heart. He died from heart failure when we tried to apprehend him in his current state after using a substance called Bath Salts. Do you know of the substance and how long he had been using it?”
“No, I have no idea what that is…”
“That is fine; we were just trying to gather information for our own data base since not much is known about the substance.”
“How do you wish to handle his body? We may be able to help in some way if need be.”
Once again she broke down in tears. This is something no one wants to have to discuss during the holiday season. She had no money, so there wouldn’t be a funeral.
After telling her that an official autopsy needed to be done first, they agreed to cremate his body for her and send her his ashes.
Officer Cassie joined her partner soon after and offered comforting words and encouragement to Mrs. Phelps. There really wasn’t much they could do for her other than try to point her to support groups that met in her area.
They were sorry it had to be this way, but there wasn’t anything they could do.
All Mrs. Phelps wanted was to bring her son back home.
Chapter 23 – Homeward Bound
Another week passed before Carol was able to appear before the judge. Her dad was not there in court for her, but instead he was able to obtain a lawyer for her.
Because of her over all good behavior over the past few weeks the lawyer was able to secure a deal for Carol in order to get her out of the prison and on her way home.
She agreed to take part in some sort of program back at home. What it was, Carol had no idea. She just couldn’t wait to get out of there and be back home with her dad.
When they released her two days after her appearance they gave her a bus ticket home and just a couple of items that she had on her and a twenty dollar bill. She didn’t care. She was going home.
The bus ride was long, and she never thought she would be so happy to see her dad’s face.
He didn’t look the same. He looked haggard and sad.
They didn’t talk on the way home. She peeked over at him from time to time. His eyes remained on the road.
No sooner had she stepped through the door to their home her dad finally spoke. “Carol, get your stuff. You need pants, shirts and such. Go get them together. You need to pack a week’s worth of clothes.”
“But Dad, I just got home.”
“Do as I say. We don’t have much time. You have to be at this place by two, and I want
to make sure that I find it all right.”
“Can’t I just make one call first?”
“Make it quick.”
A gut feeling told Carol this was something she needed to do. She picked up the phone and dialed Heath’s number.
It was almost like he had been waiting by the phone, by the way that he had answered it.
“Hello?”
“Heath, it’s so good to hear your voice.”
“Carol, where have you been? I haven’t seen you in school lately. I was wondering if you were all right.
I heard about your mom. You should have called me sooner. I would have been there for you.”
Carol wanted to cry just from hearing him say this.
“Heath I have missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
Carol’s dad made the cut mark sign to his throat, meaning her time on the phone was up.
“Look Heath, I can’t talk any more. I have to go. I will be gone for a while. Can I write to you or call you later?”
“Yeah, sure… where are you going?”
“I have to stay at this place, I don’t know where it is, but I will be gone for a while. I’ll tell you more about it later, I’ve got to go.
I still love you.”
There she said it and she said it in front of her dad. He didn’t look happy about it either.
A pause sounded on the other end of the phone. She was scared about how Heath was going to react to her declaration of her feelings for him.
Then it came… “I love you too.”
That was all Carol needed to hear. She hung up the phone and immediately went to her room to pack up her belongings she was going to need for her stay at the drug rehab for teens. This was the bargaining chip that the lawyer had used to get her a suspended sentence and released from the North Carolina prison for women and teens.
If she completed the program, the judge might consider dropping the charges against her.
It sounded easy enough, didn’t it?
Carol thought so. This should be a piece of cake, but she couldn’t understand why she felt so nervous.
