“But I saw a woman and a man back by the car with the garbage bag,” I protested.
“Has to be your imagination, your DID. You saw them 'cause I told you they were real.”
I shook my head as I started to remember the therapy years ago. I thought I was cured. This couldn’t be. I banged my head on the cement when I tripped, that’s why I have a bandage.
My brother started talking. “You have the right to remain silent …” as he helped me to my feet. We made our way to his cruiser. We stopped at the back door. Another cop car was pulling up behind my brother’s. I felt lost. Could I really have this other personality?
“I just hope they don’t try too hard to match the hand writing in that journal,” my brother said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Handwriting?”
“I would hate for them to realize that the evidence was planted. No one is going to believe you over me, especially with your history of psychological disorders. This was the best thing for the both of us. I get a lot of money quick and I get to keep it because everyone thinks someone else took it. Don’t you think I deserve it after all I’ve done for this little shit town? No one would believe in a million years that I, a recognized police officer, would frame my brother. This helps you too. My plan was genius. You can continue to get help for your problems and have a place to stay and eat for free.”
He shoved me by my head into the backseat of the cruiser and slammed the door.
An Illusion of Haunting
I am the haunter, the haunted, and the haunting.
I can’t believe what I just witnessed. My heart is pumping in my chest like it’s trying to escape. I have to gulp air to keep it in. I’m so nervous my hands can hardly manipulate the wheels of my wheelchair. But I have to move. I have to tell somebody what I’ve just seen. Someone has to know. I mean, this isn’t real, is it?
I turned from the window. It took me a full minute to exit the guest bedroom. This doorway hadn’t been renovated after the car accident six years ago, when my wife died. I thought, I’ll never use this room again, so why waste money renovating it? This was the first time I’d rolled into it, in over three months. I wonder why I did in the first place.
The image of what I’d just seen rolled over and over in my head like the film in a projector, casting a horrid scene in my brain, one that I was unable to banish.
My house is two stories high. The money from my wife’s life insurance policy had enabled me to have the chair lift for the stairs installed in the house, access ramps added, and doorways modified. I loaded myself onto the elevator and started my descent. Halfway down, I remembered there was a phone in my bedroom. What’s wrong with me? Why am I not thinking more clearly?
If what I’d just witnessed had happened two seconds earlier or two seconds later, I would’ve missed it. There had to be a reason I’d seen the accident; there just had to be. I believe in omens, premonitions. I had been chosen to witness it. Me alone.
Captain Michaels - this kind of thing never happened in our quiet little town of Michael’s Bay - no connection to the town’s name - runs the town like it’s his own.
When I got downstairs, I rolled out of the lift and went to the phone in the living room. I hit speed dial and selected the hands-free feature. After the proper amount of rings, Captain Michaels himself answered the phone.
“Frank. It’s Bryce Montgomery. I just witnessed a car accident.”
I found it weird how I seemed to be running out of breath when I was only sitting.
“Calm down, Bry. Start at the beginning. Where are you right now?”
“At home. In my living room.” I stopped, and gulped in air like I was eating it now. Maybe I was having a heart attack, and the pain would arrive soon. I tried to ooze lower into my chair, looking for a position of calm. “I just saw, from my guest-room window, an older model white Honda Prelude race by and it hit a guy. He’s still lying in the street at this very second.”
“Did you just say your guest-room window?”
This, I couldn’t believe. Why would a Captain of the police force ask me about my guest room when I’m telling him a man may be dying in the street? He’d been inside my house numerous times. He’d visited my wife and I, before she died, for Christmas and Thanksgiving more times than I could count. Captain Michaels and I were very close in high school; he was the best man at my wedding. Virginia, my wife, always tried to set him up with one of her girlfriends. After many years, we’d learned to get used to the idea that the Captain had married his job.
“There’s a man lying in the street in front of my house. He could very well be dead and you’re asking me what room I was in? You know my guest room faces the street.”
“Well, Bry, you haven’t been in your guest room for almost three months.”
This was the second time Frank Michaels had surprised me with a weird comment. Something was off somehow. Maybe the Captain had been drinking and didn’t understand what I was saying? Drinking? Why would I think that? What’s going on with me? And how did he know how often I visited this room or that room?
“Do you understand what I’ve told you?” I asked. I turned my head and looked around the room as I was feeling watched. The front door of my house stood open. The soft breeze held my screen door in its grasp, swaying it to and fro.
“Of course I understand. I’ll get in my car and be right over. You watch how quick I’ll be. No accidents for me. Just hang out. Wait for me, okay Bry? Don’t go outside without me.” The line went dead.
Why was he calling me Bry, instead of Bryce? Virginia was the only one who ever called me Bry. I hadn’t heard that in a long time.
The car accident that took her life wasn’t my fault. I know I’d been driving, but the accident wasn’t my fault. I keep telling myself that, but it doesn’t work. The truth is, Virginia, the love of my life, died on that snowy highway, Christmas evening, 2006, because of me. No one else was behind the wheel. I lost both legs above the knee.
I looked at the phone. The dial tone blasted from its speakers. I turned it off. I looked back at my front door. It was shut and I could tell from where I was sitting that it was locked, the thumb bolt turned horizontal.
I felt stupid and stunned. How could the door have been open a moment ago and now be shut and locked from the inside? Had I imagined it, or could there be someone in my house?
“What the hell is going on?” I asked the empty room.
No one answered me.
I must be day dreaming, thinking about Virginia again. There hadn’t been a day since the accident that I didn’t think about that night; about my wife. Could I have done something different when I saw the headlights careen towards us? Instead of turning to the left and exposing the passenger side to the oncoming car, could I have turned right?
Not now
, I said to myself. Snap out of it. The Captain’s on his way. Probably an ambulance, or coroner too. That guy was whacked pretty hard. Wonder what he was doing in the street in the first place.
Something scratched the wood flooring upstairs. I looked up, but only saw the ceiling of the living room. I heard a thump and then what I can only describe as something heavy, being dragged along the floor.
Someone must be in the house. There could be no more guessing.
I reached out and picked the phone up again. The line was dead. No dial tone.
What were they after? Who were they? I have nothing of value. The insurance money is gone now. Disability paychecks are small. Only an idiot would try to rob me.
I’m not the best in physical situations as I’m bound to a leather chair with moveable parts, so I rolled to the front door, unlocked and opened it and then bounced my wheels onto the front porch.
People across the street had gathered. I counted twelve so far. I looked up and down the street but saw no sign of the white Honda Prelude.
I eased out further and spun my chair around to look up at the second story windows. Nothing looked wrong. No one stood there, looking down at me.
I heard a siren in the distance. I turned back around and rolled to the sidewalk. I was safe outside. Whoever was in my house would be in serious shit as soon as the cops arrived.
As I waited, I took in the sweet smell of summer. The heat rose toward midday. Virginia’s favorite time of year. She loved early May. It was time to work in her garden, clean the windows. She used to say she cleaned them to remove the touch that a cold winter would leave behind. I never understood that, but I do now, as I’ve been touched by the cold hand I was dealt. Bound in a wheelchair, widowed, alone. I understand it completely because my life is like a winter’s touch, desolate, empty, cold, and lonely.
Virginia’s loss had destroyed me. I’d been paralyzed in the accident. I would never remarry. Who wants an invalid? My life ended when Virginia’s did. I felt incomplete. Not only because of my legs, but because Virginia was gone.
An ambulance pulled up. Two guys jumped out and dropped a black bag beside the victim. The Jefferson’s kid from across the street said something to the paramedics. They looked at my house and then at me.
“That sure is something, eh Bry?”
I jumped. Well, half of me jumped. It was Captain Michaels. When did he get here? And how did he happen to be standing on my lawn behind me without me seeing his cruiser?
“What’s something?” was all I could say.
The Captain reached out and grabbed the handles on the back of my chair. He pushed me towards the street. I wondered what he was up to, but decided not to ask. Something about getting closer to the scene felt right. It’d been a long time since it felt this right. Just go with the flow. Let it happen. Personally, I wanted to get as far from my house as I could. Then maybe I’d be free.
“Must be lonely in that big house by yourself.”
I wasn’t sure if this comment was in the weird category, or in the just plain rude section. He knew my circumstances better than anybody. I knew his. This was a small town. Everyone knew everything about everyone. I decided to stay quiet and not dignify that question with an answer.
Then he said four words that won the prize for craziest of all. As he pushed me away from my house he said, “You’ll never be free.”
“What?” I don’t know how or why, but a revelation was on its way.
We hit the edge of the sidewalk and Michaels wheeled me onto the street. We were getting closer to the ambulance.
I turned away when we got close enough to see the body. I took pride in never being a rubbernecker. After seeing my wife’s body in the carnage years ago, I’d never wanted to see an accident victim again.
“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident. I tried to get out of the way.” The words slipped from my mouth, almost like they weren’t mine. Was I talking about the accident from many years ago? Did my guilt surface to form words from thoughts?
I felt strange. Too much was happening without answers, resolution.
I turned my head and looked at the man on the pavement. He bore a slight resemblance to someone I might’ve known. What got my attention was something I hadn’t seen from my guest-room window. The man’s pants were tied together above the knee, where he was missing the rest of his legs. Ten feet past his body was a busted up wheelchair. Just like the one I was sitting on. I started to suspect that I was losing my mind as I realized that I was looking at me, dead, in the street.
Captain Michaels pulled me back on the two large wheels, spun me around and began pushing my chair back toward the house. We passed the ambulance as I turned around and stared up at Captain Michaels. It all hit me like an awareness, a consciousness. Captain Michaels died six years ago. He was the driver of the other car that careened into mine. Or did I turn into his cruiser? It seemed foggy now, hard to hold.
We hit the ramp in front of my house and I knew I couldn’t be there anymore. I had to get out. That was why everything happened today. I was dead and had been since my suicide two weeks after I killed my wife and Captain Michaels. They had been having an affair. I remembered everything now. I had decided to die the day I found out. Then I thought it would be better to kill them too. The accident left me alive, sans legs.
Two weeks after I was discharged from the hospital, I rolled my chair in front of a white Honda Prelude in front of my house.
I’ve been stuck here since, haunted by my dead wife and her former lover. Both of them enjoying their carnal knowledge in whichever room I’m not in. Both of them teasing and taunting me, until I let go and release my sanity to them.
I will not submit. I will not let go. I will resolve this somehow. They think they’re haunting me, but I torture them every day that I exist here.
I turned around before passing the threshold of my virtual prison and saw that the street behind me was empty. No ambulance, no accident, and no Jefferson kid pointing at me. I had imagined the whole thing. Or had they orchestrated it to torture me further? Somehow I knew it was me, trying to get out of the house, my feeble attempt at escape.