by Ace Collins
Once out of the car and safely in her apartment, it was a completely overwhelmed Meg who attempted to put all thoughts of Steve’s death out of her mind. She had to try to forget, because just remembering brought on a kind of hopelessness she knew she couldn’t handle. Yet even as she opened a can of tuna fish, pulled some chips from the cupboard, and turned on the television, depression shook her like a rag doll. And with every shake, she was reminded of what she had lost and the impossible battle she faced.
When her iPhone chirped, she quickly grabbed it. The last thing she wanted or needed now was to face this alone. She needed to talk to someone, anyone! She checked her caller ID and smiled.
“Heather, I’m glad you called.”
“Just wanted to check on you.”
“I’m glad you did. I just realized something and I need to share it with someone I trust.”
“Do you want me to come over?” Heather asked.
“No, you don’t have to do that. But I’ve got to explain something to you. I need for you to listen because I know I’m not myself. I’m not sure I’ll ever be myself again. I’ve got feelings in me I can’t understand.”
“Meg, I think that’s natural. I just wish there was something you’d let me do.”
“Listen friend,” Meg began, pausing for a moment, trying to put into words what was written on her heart, “I don’t know how to say this, but Steve and I experienced so much love, so much of the joy, that now everything seems to be empty. It is like life is a blank page in a book on which nothing will be written because the story hadn’t been and can’t be wrapped up. It just seems the rest of my life will be nothing but meaningless blank pages.”
“I guess I understand what you mean,” Heather replied, “but I’m not sure I can feel it. I never had anyone like Steve in my life. You know me, I’m our generation’s oldest and last virgin.”
Meg smiled. Heather always used disparaging jokes to make others feel better. She loved that about her.
“Meg, where did you have to go tonight? If you don’t mind me asking, what was so important?”
“Maybe it wasn’t that important,” Meg replied. “I think I was going someplace to get some answers, but instead I just found a big wall that I probably can’t climb.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do,” Meg admitted. “Anyway, thanks for calling and checking on me. Maybe tomorrow or the next day I can figure out how to share with you my plans. I don’t know what they are yet and even when I figure them out, I’m not sure you’ll approve.”
“You’re not going to leave nursing?” Heather asked.
“No, kid, you’re stuck with me there. It has nothing to do with that. See you tomorrow.”
“Bye.”
Good old Heather! Her call was perfectly timed.
Setting the phone on the coffee table, Heather leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. Maybe she should have told Heather what she’d seen tonight. But would she be able to handle Meg claiming a personal vendetta as a reason to live? What would Heather think if Meg admitted that the passion of hate had taken root in her heart and was somehow starting to make up for the devastation of lost love? No, Heather was too kind and gentle and she wouldn’t have understood those things. To fully grasp it, her friend would have had to hear the words Jim Thomas had said to his friends. Those words had proven that life, the same stuff that she and Heather fought so hard to preserve every day at the hospital, was in reality very cheap.
12
AFTER ROUSING HERSELF FROM A FITFUL SLEEP, MEG SPENT SEVERAL HOURS on the Internet looking for DUI cases similar to the one that had taken Steve from her. Many were settled without a trial and some of those involved sentences that only included community service. Those who received jail time usually were repeat offenders, thus her research was anything but satisfying. The thought of Thomas only getting a few hours picking up trash made her sick to her stomach. Surely, a life had to be worth more than that!
Refining her search, she began to look at sentences coupled to the wealth of those found guilty of the crimes. After researching a few of these, there could be no doubt that money could buy anything, including freedom, for those who could afford the best lawyers. With the Thomas’s power and money, what hope did she have? Real justice might have to come outside of the courts. But what could she do to make that a reality? She yanked out a pad to sketch out ideas just as her doorbell rang. Pushing her hair back from her face and tightening the belt on her robe, she ambled across the room and pulled the door open.
“Mom,” she all but moaned.
“You haven’t picked up on my calls,” Barbara said.
“No, I haven’t felt like talking.”
“It’s kind of cold out here,” the older woman noted. “May I come in?”
Meg said nothing as she stepped aside. Barbara strolled uncertainly across the room, fiddled with her gloves, finally placing them on the coffee table before yanking off her coat. As Meg watched, her mother patted the couch, something she always did when she wanted her daughters to join her for a conversation. Barbara took her place on the couch. Meg parked herself in the chair that had been Steve’s favorite, crossed her legs, and waited for the lecture she was sure would follow. She didn’t have to wait long.
“Megan, it’s not good for you to be alone—to be here. You need to come and stay with me for a while.”
“This is my home and I’m staying here,” Meg defiantly argued.
Barbara shook her head. “And I hear you’ve gone back to work. It’s much too soon. You need time to process—”
“Process what, Mom, that Steve is dead? I sleep in an empty bed, have received a hundred condolence cards, and now only set the table for one; I figured it out.”
Her dark eyes painfully examined her daughter.
“I’m still me,” Meg said. “I’m the same girl you’ve known for almost three decades. Except it’s different now. I didn’t scrape my knees. You can’t fix what happened this time with a Band-Aid and a kiss. In fact, you can’t fix it at all. This is all on my plate and I have to work through it in my own way.”
Barbara smiled weakly as she offered a predictable suggestion, “You might talk to Reverend Brooks. He’s dealt with this sort of thing many times.”
Meg almost laughed. She knew her mother would trot this line out and she was ready for it. “Mom, so Reverend Brooks has had a spouse killed by a drunk driver?”
“No,” came the reply, “I didn’t mean that.”
“Exactly! His wife is still by his side. They sleep in the same bed. They go on vacations together. So he doesn’t have a clue as to what I’m going through.”
“But he’s a trained minister . . .”
“Yeah and that makes him about as prepared to deal with my issue as a trained seal. In the case of the latter, at least, I might get a laugh or two. I know that probably sounds horrid. And maybe I sound that way as well. But Mom, when you are hurting like I am, when you have a person you love die at the age of twenty-eight, well, tact goes out the window. So if you toss something at me, you have to expect me to be bluntly honest when I toss my words back your way. I hope you can deal with that.”
“That’s just not like you,” Barbara argued.
“You’re right,” Meg agreed. “It’s not like the way I used to be. But being sweet and accepting isn’t working for me now.”
“Well, there’s this group of women at church who’ve lost their husbands. They meet each Thursday night and . . .”
Meg shook her head. “They’re all over seventy. Their situations are much different than mine. And they’re not facing having an upcoming trial where they’ll have to relive the details all over again.”
“I don’t care what you say,” Barbara argued. “You need to go to those meetings!”
Meg rose from the chair and moved back to the door. She opened it and glanced back toward her visitor. “I think it is time for you to go.”
“Megan! You better li
sten to me!”
“Don’t use that indignant tone on me. I’m not five years old. The fact is I don’t want you around right now. When I need to talk, I’ll call. Until that time, give me my space.”
“But, Baby,” Barbara pleaded as she got up from the couch, “I can’t bear the thought of you being alone.”
“Get used to it, Mom, that is what I want to be. When I decide to rejoin the social scene, I will let you know. Until then please respect my wishes. And make sure and tell Reverend Brooks I don’t want any visits from him here or at the hospital. I don’t need any preaching right now!”
The older woman nodded and reached for her coat. It was obvious she was hurt, but she wasn’t the only one in the room who was in pain. And no meeting with other widows was going to take care of that pain. What Meg needed was to make someone pay for Steve’s death. When that happened, maybe she would be ready to once more show her softer side.
Barbara slowly walked to the door, pausing in front of her daughter, lifting her eyes, and tilting her head. Her lip quivered for a moment before she whispered, “Can I at least hug you?”
Meg opened her arms for the woman who’d raised her. As the two embraced, a tear rolled down Meg’s cheek. She patted her mother on the back and then stepped back. Barbara took a final look into her daughter’s eyes and rushed through the door.
As her mother walked to her car, a thought rose from Meg’s heart and lodged in her brain. She had always known that emptiness brought pain, but until this moment she hadn’t understood that it also brought a complete void of positive feelings. There were no longer any memories that soothed her heart. Love, which only last week had been the most powerful force on earth, now seemed like a cancer. So, unlike the women in that group her mother begged her to join, Meg didn’t just feel a sense of loss, she had gone numb, focusing not on her own broken heart, but on something else. And it was that something else that called her right now.
Closing and locking the entry, Meg made her way back to the table. Sitting in front of her was a blank legal pad. Picking up a pen, she wrote down the number one and began to sketch out a concept for revenge.
13
THE AFTERNOON AIR WAS COOL, BUT AFTER A LONG, COLD WINTER, THE steady sun, coupled with a southerly breeze, made the forty-degree temperature seem almost balmy. The sunshine, the first Meg had noticed in days, seemed to be a good omen. Perhaps all of her plans and efforts would come to fruition today. Maybe the right things would finally begin to happen.
She stood just a few feet away from a sheer cliff, some two miles out of town on hilly and curving Route 63. This was an area the local kids called Lovers’ Leap. A small, two-foot stonewall, built in the 1920s and now crumbling with age, separated the road from the deep valley on the other side. Countless times, drivers coming down old Jenkins’s Hill had failed to slow enough to safely make the almost L-shaped turn. The fact could easily be verified by even casual observation as many places on the wall were marked by a large number of different paint scars, the most recent red. Still, because rarely did anyone but locals use the road, most knew just how dangerous the turn was and how tragic going over the cliff would be, so they slowed down. Therefore, this had been the site of only a few significant accidents. The last fatality had been more than twenty years before when a trucker had lost control of a big rig hauling gasoline. That fire had burned for hours.
Checking her watch, Meg wandered over to the edge of the wall. Glancing down at a patch of snow that still stubbornly remained only because it had been safely hidden from the sun’s rays by the shadow of the hill, she wondered just how it would feel to go plunging over the wall. What would it be like to hurtle through the air, knowing that within a second, maybe two, your body would crash into a mound of boulders and trees some four hundred feet below? Could a person hope to survive such a fall? From what she’d been told, no one ever had.
Picking up a rock, she stood on top of the wall, her body now just inches from the edge, and pitched the three-pound piece of stone down toward the bottom. She listened as it rebounded from boulder to boulder until it finally reached the end of its fall. Smiling, she glanced toward the road. Even God would forgive her this one time. Everyone would understand, but the best part was that no one would know. Not a single person would suspect sweet little Meg.
The noise of a distant car turned her attention from the cliff and valley and back to the road. Glancing at her watch, she nodded. It was time. Quickly jumping off the wall to the safety of the road’s shoulder, she ran to a place she’d picked out weeks before. There, safely hidden by two large oak trees, she could watch every car come down the hill, but the drivers and their passengers wouldn’t be able to see her.
Easing her face from behind the tree, she glanced up Jenkins’s Hill. There, at the very top, now only a few hundred yards away, Jim Thomas’s new Corvette drove into view. She knew it would be him because he was the ultimate creature of habit. His girlfriend, Kristen Jennings, lived just a mile up the road and he brought her home from school between 4:10 p.m. and 4:15 p.m. every day.
The two of them would talk and kiss for two or three minutes before Kristen went inside. Then, rather than take the quick way back to town, he always challenged his driving ability and nerve by going home via Lovers’ Leap. Down the hill he would race, accelerating more and more as he reached the curve, and at the last moment, he’d jump down on his brakes, causing the tires to squeal and the vehicle to jerk violently to the point where the rear tires all but lost contact with the asphalt. With a quick turn of the wheel, he would literally slide the car around the outside of the curve, coming just inches from the wall. Today, it would be different.
Earlier, while Thomas sat unknowingly in class, Meg had driven to Springfield High, and after crawling underneath his Corvette, used a hacksaw to puncture his brake lines just enough to make them fail only when he applied a great deal of force. Because she knew that Kristen wouldn’t let him drive recklessly when she was in the car, Jenkins’s Hill would likely be the first place Thomas would exert any force on the brake pedal. This daily ritual, combined with the fact that he always downshifted to slow the car down, meant he’d barely touch his pedal until he needed his brakes the most. Now, as the red car became a blinding blur, she waited for that moment.
In the car, Thomas was likely unaware of anything other than the thrill of reckless speed. His heart had to be beating faster and faster as he neared the stone wall then, as he had almost every day for a month, he downshifted to third and hit the brake pedal. As Meg watched, a look of pure terror registered on his face as his foot went directly to the floorboard and the brakes failed to take hold. He attempted to adjust his course by yanking the steering wheel to the left, but that move came much too late. Instinctively, he threw his arms up to protect his face as the wall came closer and closer.
Stepping out from behind the tree, Meg now openly observed the speeding car and studied the young man’s face, now filled with a mixture of panic and agony; his mouth locked open in a silent scream. Right before the car hit the wall and hurtled over the cliff, Thomas’s eyes locked onto Meg. Smiling at him, she raised her hand in a wave and formed a kiss with her lips. She wanted to be the last thing he saw before his car went twirling over and over in a death spin to the rocks below.
Waiting for a few seconds until the sounds of boulders crushing fiberglass and metal ended, Meg walked over to the cliff and studied the sports car burning on the rocks below. She watched, almost in a detached manner, as a badly injured Thomas attempted to climb through the vehicle’s shattered roof. Then, just as it appeared he would make it, a huge explosion blew both him and his car to pieces.
“Oh, revenge is sweet!” Meg murmured as she casually turned to walk back to where she had hidden her car. “This is for you, Steve. It was all for you!”
“Did you say something?”
Responding to Heather’s upbeat voice, Meg looked up from where she sat.
14
MEG BLINKED RAPIDL
Y. HOW HAD HEATHER KNOWN WHERE TO FIND her? What was she doing here? As her eyes and mind snapped into reality, she realized she was not at Lovers’ Leap but sitting in her usual spot in the hospital cafeteria. Disappointment rushed over her. It wasn’t real. It never had been real. It was all a daydream!
Not so much questioning as observing the half-eaten tuna fish sandwich on Meg’s plate, Heather quipped, “Got the old dependable, huh?” When Meg only nodded, Heather sat down across from her friend and attempted to draw her into conversation.
“You remember Jamie? The four-year-old girl you met last week.”
Meg nodded as she took another bite of the sandwich.
“Well, she’s been asking me if you’d come by and see her. Your visits last week meant a lot to her. As a matter of fact, she showed me a picture she drew of you—pretty good likeness. I think the girl’s got some artistic talent! It’d sure mean a lot if you could drop in on your break or something.”
As Heather’s words trailed off, Meg pushed the plate with her still half-eaten sandwich toward the middle of the table. Looking up but avoiding Heather’s big blue eyes, she took a long sip of her Coke before finally mumbling, “Maybe I can drop by this afternoon.” Then almost as an afterthought, she added, “But you know my wing has been pretty busy today, so I’m not making any guarantees. So please don’t say anything to her.”
Heather nodded as Meg got up from her chair, put her tray in its designated return spot, and caught her reflection in a mirror. That brief glimpse proved her shoulder-length brown hair was perfectly combed and fixed. Her makeup, as always, looked as if it had been applied by Max Factor himself. She didn’t have to have the mirror to know her figure also still filled her pale blue scrubs—the same uniform that made most women look as if wearing generic flour sacks—as though the outfit had been molded for her shape.
