It all happened so fast. People crossing the
pedestrian bridge above were able to see it all. But who couldn’t want to see
all of that, you would like to see how lives end and how tragedies happened?
The SUV was driving extremely fast. Eileen,
the driver, was worried about so many things. She had just received vey bad
news and just wanted to head back home or anywhere she could feel safer, loved
and appreciated. She had been crying and was in no state to drive. But there
had been no one to tell her that, no one that could stop her from making that
mistake.
On the other side were the Martins. Joanna and
her husband Matt were in a small car coming back from the hospital. They had
received troubling news: Joanna was pregnant with their fourth child. Normally,
a couple would be happy and celebrating. But in the Martin’s car, there were
only long faces and sighs. Raising such a big family was very hard on them.
They had stopped doing all those nice things life has to offer to invest them
in education and diapers and food and so on. Their children were too young to
understand but they really needed that time off.
But they had been silly and that’s why they
were pregnant again. If they didn’t want more children, the solution would have
been really easy. Well, apparently not easy enough for Joanna and Matt who kept
having unprotected sex just because they had been together for over fifteen
years. Actually, that was the other thing. They weren’t really that attracted
to each other anymore. They didn’t feel anything when the other got naked near
them in the mornings or even when they showered together. That’s what Matt was
thinking when he got distracted, let the car go a bit to far to the left and
then it was chaos.
Eileen was so furious, so sad and so broken that,
at first she just let gravity do its job. Her body was propelled out of the
window just after the two cars had crashed against each other, done several
circular turns and then hit the side of the road. When she was conscious of
what had happened, Eileen realized she was on the ground, probably bleeding and
not really able to move. She could feel the wind caused by the passing cars and
felt suddenly even lonelier than ever before. How could people be so mean, so
awful, that they wouldn’t even stop for an accident?
Joanna and Matt had been wearing their
security belts and that was good because their car had been flipped over. The
baby chair they had in the back was one against the roof of the car and they
were both bleeding but still breathing normally. Matt was the first to wake up
and he was so scared the first thing he did was liberate himself from the belt
and they try to get out. In his attempt, breaking the window with a kick, he
realized his wife was there. Of course he had known this all the time, but it
was as if his survival skills had made him forgot about her, at least for a
minute.
He then screamed and Eileen heard him, far
away, but clearly. She then knew there were more people involved but, somehow,
she couldn’t care less if they felt as miserable and broken as she was. Because
even with so much physical pain, Eileen’s heart was the one that hurt the most.
She even began to cry right there in the pavement, not even trying to lift a
leg or an arm. She just lay there and cried her eyes out, thinking about how
she had run into her long time girlfriend with another woman. And they weren’t
kissing or touching. She even felt disgusted, truly sick about it and she
vomited.
Joanna was bleeding. She had hit her head
during the accident and Matt was worried he couldn’t be able to move her like
that. He decided that it was best to get out of the car and ask for help or see
if there was any police coming or ambulance or whatever was available. He cut
his hands with the glass but tried to ignore the pain and just stumbled out and
suddenly passed out. He only did for a few minutes but during that time he
dreamt about the time it was only him and Joanna. He remembered their first
date, how they had planned to eat in this fancy Italian restaurant but then had
problems with the reservation and they ended up having some tacos in fancy
outfits. They really loved each other that day.
After crying so much, Eileen opened her eyes
and realized she really needed to start thinking about what was happening and
decided to try and stand up but the thought of Erika and that woman together
were like a film in her head that she wasn’t able to shut down. It hurt her
badly because they had been together for a long time and they were doing all
these things together like looking for an apartment and even planning to get a
baby through adoption. It had been Eileen who had met Erik when she was a girl
afraid of the world and with no knowledge about anything. She had been the more
mature woman that taught her everything that she may need to know and
apparently she had learned it all too well.
Like trying to scare some flies away, she
moved her arm a bit and finally tried to stand up but realized she couldn’t.
She could only see forwards because of her position but had a feeling there was
something wrong with her legs. Having been so worried about Erika, she had not
realized that her legs didn’t feel as before. They did not feel at all.
Matt woke up from his dream and realized there
was a man running towards him and asking him so many questions. It seemed to be
a policeman but he really had no idea. He answered what he could, not even
knowing if it made any sense and then heard an ambulance and a fire truck.
He stood up by himself, trembling and with
pain all over his body, and saw that there was another car that had been
involved but he couldn’t see anyone in the driver’s seat. Maybe that person was
also trapped or maybe that person had fled the scene. His mind was everywhere
and nowhere at the same time. Thinking hurt him but he couldn’t stop doing it.
He walked to his car and a fireman asked him to remain away for the moment. He
nodded and decided to wander off in the opposite direction. He didn’t care
about the voices that spoke to him, policeman and people on the bridge above.
He couldn’t hear them and felt everything was slowing down so every single
sound made no sense to him.
The paramedics picked up Eileen first and she
remained awake during the whole trip to the hospital. However, she wasn’t able
to speak. She really wanted to answer the questions, she really wanted someone
to know that it was all her fault and that she had been cheated on but nothing
came out of her throat. Her heart was still hurting to much and, with morphine,
she felt a little bit better and then fell into an uneven sleep in which she
would imagine entering several room and in some of them Erika was with the
other woman and in other she could see her parents or herself when she was just
a little girl. She recalled her past times back then and how much she loved
horses.
The second person to get into an ambulance was
Joanna. Her husband nowhere to be found, she had to board the ambulance alone
after several men were necessary to pull her out of the car and then up into
the ambulance. She was bleeding internally, as determined by the instruments
used by the paramedics. The driver was ordered to rush to the hospital but only
two minutes after that they told him there was no real emergency anymore.
Joanna was stable but she had lost her child, so they didn’t have to be fast to
save anyone.
Matt kept walking until a distracted old man
run over him. The car lifted him and pushed him to the side of the road. The
old man didn’t stop to see what he had done. Matt lay there and then came back
to his body for a while. And realized how miserable he was, he realized how sad
he had been for so long and it was all because his life had failed to be what
he wanted. He loved Joanna and the kids but he wanted so much more from life,
so much more than responsibility.
In the hospital, Eileen was put in the room
next to Joanna, who got better quickly but got almost insane when she was
notified about the baby. Then she learned, through a nurse, that Eileen was in
the other side of the wall, so she tried to choke her with a pillow, because
the nurse had told her it was Eileen who was to blame for the crash. It was the
only way Eileen came back to the real world and the only way Joanna could realize
how ready she was to be a mother again, when she couldn’t be one anymore.
Meanwhile, Matt lay there in the pavement. And
cried too.
