PROLOGUE
Nikki’s head rested on the window of the car, her eyelids closed as her heart beated to the hum of the engine. Her family was heading back from a family reunion an hour away from their home, something that she always dreaded going to. Matthew, her brother, was home from college for spring break, choosing “home sweet home” over going to Florida, which we could not afford for him.
There was quiet snoring coming from the left side of Nikki, none other than Matthew’s. Her parents were sitting in the front, talking in hushed voices about all of their relatives getting drunk and dancing around like there was no tomorrow. She was proud to say her parents didn’t drink, giving them safety on the drive back home.
It had to be close to midnight and unfortunately, it was a school night for Nikki. Her family seemed to plan special occasions at the oddest time, and unfortunately she was one of the youngest members of her entire family. The rest of her cousins were in college, on spring break just like Matthew.
Conversations of that night at the buffet table kept circulating in her mind. Matthew had just announced that he was going to be deployed to Iraq in that same year, leaving for six months. But who knew how long he would actually stay. Maybe they would keep him longer.
Nikki’s blood boiled at the thought. Matthew had decided not to tell his one and only sister about the life changing choice he had made. Why he didn’t tell her, she did not know, but she was still surprised as to why it came to that. Apparently he told their parents but left Nikki out of the picture.
His excuse was that he didn’t want her to worry. What was he to think when he told people he was going to war? That everyone would be fine with him leaving and there being a chance he wouldn’t come back? How were they not supposed to worry? She was to find out sooner or later and being left out of it made things even worse.
There was no reason to stay mad at him forever. Besides, she needed to spend time with him before his deployment. There was a voice in the back of her mind that said spending time with him was so she could be with him in his last months of life. But she kept telling herself that not every soldier gets killed in war. Most of them do come home to their families. She’d seen a couple of troops return to her town even.
Her brother’s snoring had stopped. His light brown hair was splayed across his head, and his face looked so angular against the moonlight streaming through the mirror. He almost had a baby face to him still, especially his lips, but his six foot frame was built of muscle. There was no fat on his body; he was chiseled by his runner‘s physique.
The bright headlights of the oncoming traffic seemed to wake him up. Nikki moved over to the middle seat, buckled again, and rested her head against her brother’s shoulder. His dark blue eyes looked at his sister for a moment before a smile creeped onto his face. Then his expression was somber.
“I should have told you,” he said quietly to her. There was a moment of silence as she contemplated her response.
“It’s okay… I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” Nikki said, already feeling the pain in her stomach. It was a sense of betrayal that she knew she would have to get over.
“I just didn’t want you to freak out. It seemed like the right time to tell everyone and unfortunately, you hadn’t been told about it yet. I was going to tell you, but I wasn’t sure when,” Matthew said.
Her eyes closed halfway. “Just promise me nothing will happen to you,” she said quietly. The thought of losing her brother brought tears to her eyes. She was already starting to feel anxious.
“I promise,” he whispered, kissing her on the head.
If only this moment would last forever. If only her brother wasn’t going to leave her for six months in a foreign country where he could be dead in a second.
They had to be fifteen minutes away from their house when it happened. Nikki’s eyes had just closed when she saw the headlights of a car come straight into their lane of the highway. Her mother honked for as long as she could but it was already too late. There was no where to swerve and the car was not stopping.
The cars crashed head on at fifty miles per hour. Nikki’s head jerked away from her brother’s shoulder as the seat belt dug into her body, breaking her collar bone and cracking ribs. The pain was incredible. Glass flew everywhere inside of the vehicle, cutting away at their skin and leaving gashes several centimeters deep. It was as if her entire being was thrashed around like a rag doll.
Her vision was fading quickly, everything happening so fast she couldn’t tell which way the vehicle was going. Their car spun around two, maybe three times before rolling into a ditch. Then everything fell silent.
Nikki opened her eyes slowly, trying to move her limbs to see what was broken and what wasn’t. If she moved her neck, there was a sharp pain that greeted her. Her right arm was twisted at an awkward angle. Because she had moved to the middle seat, her legs were not trapped from a seat ahead, but her brother wasn’t so lucky.
She couldn’t see his legs because her mother’s seat was caved in… her mother. Her father. Her brother. She didn’t think of their health as she was assessing her own damage. Nikki could feel a sticky, hot substance running down the side of her face from her right temple, flowing into her eye a bit. It had to be blood.
There was no way she could see how the rest of her family was doing. They all seemed to be unconscious. It was pitch black outside and the headlights from the stopped cars only sent strange shadows across everyone. There was also an eerie silence, almost like all of time had stopped. She heard nothing; not a car door, not the hoot of a night bird, not the sirens of an ambulance. Everything was moving so slowly.
Red and blue flashing lights. People surrounding the vehicle, their lips moving but not a sound escaping their lips. Waving hands and arms. Confusing looks on everyone’s faces.
Nikki could see the EMTs searching for signs of life on her parents and Matthew. More shouting that she could not hear. A fire truck appeared and it seemed like ten years had gone by before they had extricated her family from the wrecked vehicle.
They had become separated. Nikki and her mother occupied one ambulance, Matthew and her father in another. Her hearing was starting to return as she heard the asphalt beneath her stretcher grind against the wheels. She was strapped tightly down and a neck brace prevented her from looking for her family.
The doors of the ambulance were closed. “Mom? Mom?” Nikki cried out as loud as she could, which was painful and barely audible.
There was no response. She could sense her mother beside her in another stretcher, her peripheral vision picking up a bit of her mother, but not allowing the details.
She was terrified, absolutely and completely terrified. Everything felt like a dream. None of it seemed real. She must have been in shock because the onslaught of pain finally appeared. Her body ached, felt like it had been run over by ten horses. There had to have been countless bones that were broken.
There was a man and woman beside them, the woman taking care of Nikki and the man on her mother. “Could you tell me your mother’s name, sweetie?” he asked her.
“Ang… Angela Dawson,” Nikki mumbled.
“And yours?”
“Nikki.”
A needle was poked into her arm along with heart sensors placed on her chest. Immediately she could hear her fast heart rate, beating a mile a minute. But when she saw the man place them on her mother, there was a solid, straight beep. There was no stop in the beep. There was no hint of life.
She could hear the man fumble around for something, and when she heard the charging of the device, it didn’t take her long to figure out from medical TV shows, what it was. They were going to try and restart her mother’s heart.
“Clear!” the man shouted. Every time he shocked her mother, Nikki could feel tears streaming down her face. How could this have happened? Did her mother deserve this? By some miracle, was she going to live?
The man tried four times with the same solid beep. Nothing had changed. Her mother had flatlined.
Nikki’s mother was dead.