Juggling the oversized cups carefully, she pushed the cool glass door open with her hip and stepped out into the sun, squinting into the bright light. It was always such a drastic difference walking from the cold interior of the building into the sun beating down on the scorching concrete. She took a second to acclimate herself to breathing the muggy air again. It was so humid that it was like inhaling a glass of water.
She had only taken a few short steps before the loud revving of an engine and the sound of squealing tires commanded her attention. She turned to locate the source of the noise but barely had time to register the smell of burning rubber or to focus on the car tearing into the parking lot before it hit her. The old black Trans-Am drove straight into her as though it was on a zip-line attached to her chest. As though it had purpose.
The impact threw her forcefully against the bricks of the convenience store wall before she slid limply to the ground, her legs splayed around her and her Big Gulp cups splattered onto the hot pavement. As her eyes fluttered closed, she saw the battered car back up and spin around, speeding back in the direction that it had come from. And then nothing.
CHAPTER FOUR
If she had seemed delicate before with her swollen little belly and bird-like arms and legs, then she was excruciatingly fragile now. She was beyond pale. Every drop of blood had leached from her face until she almost blended into the white blanket beneath her. The dark fringe of her closed eyelashes was striking in contrast with the pale cheeks that they rested against.
Everything hurt-she couldn’t get away from it. All around her- up, down, right, left… there was pain everywhere. It raged from the tips of her fingers to the arches of her feet. Her stomach was spasming uncontrollably, wrapping around to convulse in her back. It was so excruciating that it stole the breath she was trying to take. She knew there was a lot of blood. She could feel it gushing between her legs. Her face was also wet- but she wasn’t sure if it was tears or blood. And she was afraid to open her eyes to find out.
She wasn’t dead. She knew that because there was a siren wailing in the background somewhere. And surely there weren’t any sirens in Heaven. Or pain. She took a deep breath and it smelled strange, medicinal. She struggled to open her eyes and it took her a second to realize that there was an oxygen mask strapped to her face. She raised her hand to pull at it and someone gently pushed it back down.
“No, sweetie. You need that. Leave it be.”
A fuzzy female face blurred back out of her vision, but Sydney felt her moving beside her. Poking, prodding. They were moving. She focused harder. There were medical supplies hanging from the walls and she was strapped to a gurney. She was in the back of an ambulance. She definitely wasn’t dead.
But what about her baby?
She yanked off the mask before the woman could stop her.
“Is my baby okay?” she asked urgently. Her voice was hoarse. Her throat felt gummy and she didn’t know why. She could taste the metallic, rusty flavor of blood on her tongue.
Another wave of pain wracked her body and she curled upward with it, trying to absorb it, to cushion it. It didn’t work. She couldn’t breathe- and the oxygen wasn’t helping. She fought to breathe so that she could scream. The kind female face hovered over her, replacing her mask and holding her arm tightly. There was a quick pinch and then warmth spread through her body. Everything blurred into nothingness.
* * *
“Syd?”
She opened her eyes to stare at a blank white wall. She struggled to focus, to figure out what had happened. The oxygen mask was gone. So was the pain. Well, the excruciating pain, anyway. She could deal with the piercing aches that she felt now. Her hands immediately flew to her stomach. It was flat, in an unbaked dough kind of way. Empty.
She turned her head to find Stephen’s face. He was sitting in a chair pulled up right next to her bed, her small hand clasped in both of his. They were alone in a hospital room. Blank walls, white floor. The sterility was smothering.
“The baby?” she whispered, afraid to know.
But it was the one thing she had to know, the only thing that mattered. She didn’t care if she had lost a foot, broken ten bones or had snapped her spine. Her baby’s life was her sole focus.
He looked away as he shook his head, not knowing how to say it. The look on his face was enough. Crushing sorrow bowed her shoulders with its weight and she closed her eyes as her heart silently broke into pieces.
“I’m sorry, Syd. They did everything they could. You’re lucky to be alive, that it didn’t rupture your liver. One of your lungs collapsed.”
Her arm brushed against a tube connected to her chest. The severity of her situation began to dawn on her.
“What happened?” she whispered.
The details were foggy. She remembered a beat-up black car and that was pretty much it. She hadn’t even been in the street. She had just barely stepped out of the 7-11.
“You don’t remember? Someone plowed into you and then drove away. The police were already here. They’re going to check the surveillance footage from the convenience store to try to identify the guy.” He squeezed her hand lightly. “They’re going to come back to talk with you.
“Sydney, I’m so sorry that I didn’t go with you. Maybe if I had…” His voice trailed off and he looked down at his hands, his chocolate brown eyes filled with regret and guilt. She shook her head. It wasn’t his fault. But she would have to address that later.
Right now she needed proof, because she couldn’t quite wrap her head around her loss without it. The last time she had opened her eyes from sleep, her baby had been healthy and kicking, bruising her ribs with every movement. She couldn’t go from that to this without seeing the evidence.
“Where’s my baby? I need to see her.”
Her voice was soft, but firm, even though every word she spoke rasped against her tender broken ribs like a scalpel.
She knew beyond any doubt that it had been a girl. She had known that from the moment she took the pregnancy test. She had also known that she was going to name her Aspen Nicole. That name just seemed to match the perfect little face that she had already seen in her head a hundred times. Her sense of loss was all-consuming and she tried to steel herself against it.
Stephen looked away, again uncertain how to respond.
“Stephen?”
She didn’t need to ask the question again.
For the second time that day, Stephen had to apologize for things that were out of his control. He fiddled with the edge of her blanket, apparently unsure what to do with his hands. He finally settled for picking up her hand again.
“Sydney, she’s gone. I’m so sorry. Your parents were here, for a little while- to sign all of the papers. They told the nurses to dispose of her.” He couldn’t hold her gaze and she stared at his sympathetic face.
To. Dispose. Of. Her.
A lead weight sprung up in her stomach and pinned her to the bed. She fought back nausea, as pain welled up from her stomach into her throat in the form of acidic bile. They had thrown her baby out with the garbage and then they just signed the necessary paperwork and left. Before anyone saw them, she was sure. And they hadn’t even waited for her to wake up. She wondered if Stephen was so firm in his convictions that they loved her now.
“Did they even look at her?” she asked thinly, although she knew the answer before he shook his head.
Of course they hadn’t. To them, she was just a mass of cells, a problem. If they looked at her, they would have to acknowledge her…to acknowledge that she had little hands and feet. They wouldn’t do that. So no one had seen her baby- the little face that she had waited for months to see. Her pain was overwhelming and she was on the verge of losing it… of snapping, screaming, thrashing, throwing things. She took a deep breath, then another. And leveled her gaze at her cousin.
“She was a girl, wasn’t she?”
Her voice was deadly calm and oh-so-frail and he nodded slowly, assessing her face. She showed
no outward signs of distress, but anyone who knew her at all knew that it was a façade. Something she had 17 years practice at perfecting.
He squeezed her hand gently, because there was nothing he could say right now that would help. He knew that and so did she. She laid her free hand on her hollow stomach and lay perfectly still, listening to the clock on the wall tick past the seconds and staring listlessly at the wall. Words would be a distraction. She only wanted to think.
An hour passed as they sat in silence, with only the beeping of the hospital machines and the muted thudding of the nurses’ shoes in the hallway for noise. Time did not register with her. She was only cognizant of trying to repress the waves of pain and shock, to tuck it into the furthermost corner of her consciousness…into a safe place. A place that wouldn’t hurt her.
The more still she became, the more she was able to empty her mind and think of nothing. It was numbing, like anesthesia. So she found a spot on the wall and fixated on it, breathing deeply in and out, as if she were meditating. On the outside, it wasn’t apparent that she was desperately clinging to the last vestiges of her sanity. But she was. And Stephen quietly held her hand, not saying a word, giving her exactly what she needed. Silent support.
Later, when she recalled that day, she would be able to pinpoint that it was at that exact moment that she fell in love with him. But she was too immersed in the moment to recognize it at the time. Too overwhelmed trying to survive the pain.
She eventually drifted off to sleep. It seemed like a good idea for her to escape. The nurse had come in to give her another pain shot and the drowsiness overtook her like a current in the ocean. She let her eyes drift slowly closed, clasping Stephen’s hand tightly, silently willing him not to leave…to stay with her. She had never felt so alone in her life.
He was still watching her sleep when the police returned to interview her an hour later. They knocked briefly on the door, two quick raps, before they went ahead and entered. Sydney stirred from her drug-induced rest as she heard the voices next to her bed.
“Ms. Ross?”
The man standing in front of her, Detective Harrison Daniels, possessed a commanding attitude, one of curt formality. But he was not the type of person that Sydney would have imagined as a detective.
He was tall, dark-haired and had the look of a Wall Street investment banker, not a policeman. His fingernails were manicured, his clothing expensive. His gaze was intelligent as his discerning eyes scanned the room. He took everything in- the lack of visitors, the absence of flowers, Stephen’s hands holding hers, everything. It made her feel self-conscious and she pulled her hand from Stephen’s before she answered.
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Daniels. This is my partner, Detective Wills. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your accident.”
He spoke in a decisive manner, motioning to his partner, who was a short, hard-faced woman with pinched lips. Her hair style was as sensible as her black walking shoes. She wore very little makeup and her fingernails were unkempt. It was clear that she didn’t take much time for personal pampering, although Sydney could tell from her muscled biceps that she must spend hours in the gym.
“Of course. But I don’t remember much.”
Sydney was already apologetic. She knew she wasn’t going to be much help. Her memory was sketchy at best.
“Anything that you can remember will be helpful.”
He dismissed her statement with cynical disregard, as though her opinion was of the most miniscule of importance. It was clear that he felt that he was the only one qualified to determine what was helpful and what was not.
Sydney was immediately taken aback by the curtness in his voice, which only served to put her on edge. His partner moved around the bed to stand closer to Sydney, pulling out a little leather notebook and a heavy ink pen.
“What do you remember, Ms. Ross?”
Detective Wills had the no-nonsense manner that Sydney would have expected from a detective, as well as the dumpy clothes and the coffee breath. She could tell from her burned out demeanor that this woman was someone who had seen everything and had probably spoken with a hundred girls just like Sydney. And it was very apparent that she was weary of it.
Stephen picked up her hand again, reassuringly. She didn’t pull away, even though Detective Daniels flickered his gaze briefly as he registered the gesture. She tried not to care because they weren’t doing anything wrong. The warmth of Stephen’s hand gave her the assurance that someone in the room was on her side. The unexpected glacial cold emanating from Detective Daniels certainly wasn’t doing it for her.
“I only remember an old beat-up car. It was black. And it had a big gold bird on the hood. I didn’t see it at all before it hit me, only when it was backing up to drive away. And there was the smell… burning rubber, I think. I heard tires squealing.”
“You didn’t see the driver when he struck you?” Detective Wills’ pen hesitated on her paper, waiting for Sydney to confirm.
“No. I didn’t. It happened too fast. I heard a loud engine and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. I didn’t even feel anything at the time.” The heavy pen scratched quickly against the paper.
“Were the car windows up or down?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were the windows tinted?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was the car in the parking lot when you went into the store?”
“I don’t think so. But I didn’t notice.”
“Do you know anyone with a black Trans-Am or Firebird?”
“No.”
“Do you know anyone who would want to hurt you?”
The pen lingered over the paper, waiting for something to write.
Sydney halted her answers and stared at the detective in shock. She had been under the assumption that it was a strange, random accident. The idea that someone had tried to kill her dawned on her as suddenly as someone dumping ice water on her head.
“You think someone hit me on purpose?” she asked incredulously. “Who would do that?”
“That’s what we’re trying to ascertain, Ms. Ross. Do you have any ideas?”
“Why would you think they did it on purpose?” She couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that someone would want to hurt her enough to ponder who it could be.
“The clerk in the store saw a late model black Trans-Am speeding into the parking lot, as though it had been waiting for you to walk out of the store. It hit you, then made a quick three-point turn to escape from the parking lot. Unfortunately, the glare of the sun was on the windshield, so he couldn’t get a description of the driver. He couldn’t see the tag either because the driver fled the scene too fast. But they’re pulling up the surveillance tapes for our review. Do you have any enemies?”
“No. I don’t. I mean, my ex-boyfriend’s parents hate me because I got pregnant. But I don’t think I would call them enemies. They just pretend that I don’t exist.”
“When is the last time that you spoke with them?”
“When we told them… about four months ago.”
When Mrs. Price called had called her a stupid little twit.
“How did they take the news?”
“Not well. They wanted me to get an abortion.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Stephen interrupted, surprise and annoyance on his handsome face. “What does that have to do with the situation? Is it relevant?”
“Yes, it is. I am trying to determine Ms. Ross’ motives.” Detective Wills barely spared him a glance before turning her attention back to Sydney. “Were you hoping to get money from them?”
Shock rippled through Sydney again. Why in the world would she want to get money from them? That had been the furthest thing from her mind.
Stephen interrupted again. “This is ridiculous! Of course she wasn’t. Do you know who her parents are?”
He unconsciously moved closer to Sydney, a move that he didn’t even realize, but tha
t Detective Daniels certainly did. The detective absorbed everything, his face impassive.
Sydney squeezed his hand. “It’s okay, Stephen.” The detective’s eyes continued their cold appraisal. He filed away the cousin’s protective demeanor in his mind as he watched their gentle interaction.
“You’ve already spoken with the Prices’, haven’t you?” she softly asked. “I can tell that you have. They don’t like me much. But I don’t want their money. I just couldn’t get an abortion, that’s all. I wanted the baby. They should be happy now, though. She’s gone.”
She closed her stinging eyes, a sudden weariness flooding over her, even though she had just woken up. Stephen shifted his gaze from her to the detectives.
“Will that be all? She’s been through a lot. She’s tired.”
Stephen’s voice was firm. His question wasn’t really a question at all; it was a statement that the interview was over. Detective Daniel, however, made it clear that it would be over when he said it was over. He stepped closer to them, his eyes glinting firmly as he gazed at the two of them sharply.
“We’re just trying to do a thorough job, Mr. James. We have to understand everyone’s motives so that we can find out who did this.” Detective Daniels’ steel blue eyes stared at Sydney, his voice no longer perfunctory; instead it was cold and penetrating.
“Why would someone with the world on a string choose to get disinherited for a surprise pregnancy? You just graduated high school and are not married. Not even in a relationship. It would seem to me that the easiest thing to do would have been to get rid of it and go on with your life. Unless you wanted something.” He continued to stare at her, unflinching.