ILLUSIONS AND LIES: Chapter 1

        Have you ever had one of those days when you wish you had stayed in bed? I know, how cliché of me. But when your whole world shifts in one moment, you really do wish you had not stepped out the door that morning.

My name is Charlotte Rose Palmer, my friends call me Charlie. I have two wonderful children, Bailey (7) and Sarah (5). My husband is dead. He was murdered two years ago by a group of thugs in the city. I watched him die you know? I could say he was the perfect husband and father. That’s what you do when someone dies, isn’t it? You go on about how amazing they were, how much you loved everything about them. The truth is, he wasn’t perfect. He was a jealous man and a sub-par father. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was by no means perfect.

The day he died is not the day I wish I had stayed in bed. I miss him terribly and the day he died was tragic and painful, but the day I wish I had stayed in bed is the day a man in a black van lost control.

                                                                                   

Breakfast had been eaten, lunches had been made, and bags had been packed. I shuffled Bailey and Sarah out of the house and into the car.

“Are we all going to have fun today?” I appealed with gusto.

“I have five spelling words, and I know all of them,” Bailey gloated.

“You’re so smart. What are you, like, grade 10 now?”

“Don’t be silly, Mummy, I’m only in grade three.”

“Are you sure? Hmm, I thought you were all grown up.”

Bailey shook his head and smiled.

“What about you Sarah? Are your friends planning a kegger?”

“What’s a tegger?” she asked.

I laughed, “Nothing, sweetie. Nothing at all.”

There had been no major arguments or tantrums this morning, that’s always a good start to any day. I entered the motorway, joining the daily swarm of motorists, and pulled my family sedan neatly between a shiny new Commodore and a B-double truck.

You know that tingling feeling of anxiety in the pit of your stomach, almost in your groin, you get when you feel impending doom? I get that when I’m on the road in the company of big trucks. I kept looking in the rear-view mirror, checking that the driver of the truck wasn’t too close to me. I would have changed lanes but my exit was so close it seemed pointless. I signalled my exit and began to merge when the idiot in the van came roaring up beside me –He may not have been an idiot. He may have suffered a heart attack while driving, or been bitten by a snake that was hiding under his seat, or any number of other things. Or he could have simply been an idiot. I call him an idiot because I’m still angry, and because I can’t allow him any kind of excuse for what happened next.

As the driver of the black van sped past me he swerved, hitting the rear of the shiny Commodore and front of my car. All three cars skidded off in different directions. The rest is mostly a blur. Well, the physics of what happened is a blur. The panic and adrenaline; the sounds and the smells; the sensation of metal crashing into metal at 100kph; those things are all crisp in my mind.

At some point, while my car was flipping over and over down a steep gully, I felt a hard thud as my head hit some part of the quickly-collapsing car.

Finally the car came to rest and I found myself hanging upside-down, held in place by my seatbelt, the roof now only millimetres from my head. The smell of burned rubber and petrol filled my nostrils, and other smells, unfamiliar smells, like hot metal and dry dust. Something warm and thick was running from just in front of my right ear, down into my hair. I touched my hand to my face. The warm stuff was sticky. I held my hand out to look at it… Blood! I ignored the sting and reached for my seatbelt. It wouldn’t budge. I pushed hard, shoving my thumb against it with all my strength. My thumb slipped and sliced open on the now-exposed metal of the buckle.

“Bailey, Sarah. Are you ok?” I screamed, frantic. “Sarah, Bailey. Answer me damn it.”

I pushed my bleeding thumb against the buckle once more, ignoring the pain. It gave way. The belt popped out. I fell the short distance and landed hard on my neck as my body collapsed down out of the seat. I was folded in half and twisted up like a pretzel. I struggle to right myself. I wriggled my body around and scrambled out through the window. The glass was gone and the opening was narrow. I managed to squeeze through, cutting my body on torn metal and broken glass as I did.

The sun was high now and day was hot, but I it may well have been the middle of the night for all I could see –dust and smoke filled the air, blood and tears filled my eyes.

“Bailey, Sarah. Bailey, Bailey. Sarah, can you hear me? Oh God. Sarah, Bailey… Answer me. ANSWER ME,” I screamed through the grey fog, deranged with fear, as I looked in the backseat.

Gripping the mangled window frame, I wrenched my upper body into the back. No sooner was I in, and something grabbed hold of my leg, pulling at me, wrenching. A voice came.

“Are you ok, Miss?” It was a man’s voice.              

Someone was trying to pull me out. I kicked out ferociously. “My babies are in here.”

The stranger continued to pull. I kicked again. “Get away from me,” I shrieked. My foot connected with something. His face?

He let go.

Searching through the smoke and darkness, chest heaving and heart pounding, I groped desperately, clumsily, the sting of glass and other jagged things cutting me again and again. I felt a tiny hand dangling down. I gripped the frail little hand in mine.

In the thick air I couldn’t make out if this was Sarah’s body hanging limp from the seatbelt, or Bailey’s. Lying on my back, in the course debris, I ran my hand the length of the diminutive arm to find and release the little body from the restraining clutch of the seatbelt.

Not far from the roof, as the impact had crushed it so that it was only inches away, hung the blood soaked hair on her head. It was Sarah. I fumbled with the latch and caught her as she fell from her seat. I felt the sticky warm blood seeping, thick and slow, from a gash somewhere on her face or head. The blood pulsed in time with her heart beat. That meant her heart was beating. My ears rang with terror and the sound of sirens.

“Sarah, wake up. Speak to me, Sarah,” I pleaded.

I heard another voice from outside, a different voice. “Pass her to me, I’m a paramedic.” They must have arrived quickly, or else I had been knocked out for a while.

I was reluctant to pass my little girl to the waiting arms. But it was their job to save her, and I still had to find Bailey. My arms flailed around, feeling through the mangled mess for another child. He wasn’t there. I searched and searched, and Bailey was not there. I guess I started screaming because a pair of strikingly strong hands dragged me from the wreck while their owner chanted, “It’s Okay, ma’am? It’s Okay?”

The moment he had me away from the twisted metal I pushed myself out of his arms. He resisted, trying to drag me somewhere, probably to a waiting paramedic. Or maybe he was the paramedic and he was dragging me to an ambulance. I don’t know, didn’t really care. I pushed away again, kicking and thrashing my body this time. He finally released me from his iron grip –I think I may have kicked him in the balls.

I turned away from him, and scrambled up the embankment. That’s when I saw it, the chaos, the carnage. The road was peppered with Ambulance, Police, Fire and Rescue, and a half dozen contused vehicles. There were too many people to count, darting this way and that, yelling at one another. Some barking orders, some taking those orders, and some more people crying out for help.

There were blood and oil stains on the road, broken glass covered the asphalt like confetti. The scene before me was so surreal, so alien, that I forgot momentarily where I was. I soon snapped back to reality when I heard the cry of a small child as she was being pulled from one of the wrecks. I looked over to see a young man, the child’s brother maybe, clutch her in his arms and start yelling for help while he looked around frantically for an unoccupied paramedic.

I started screaming Bailey’s name, looking from one paramedic to the next, to check if they were treating him. It didn’t look like it. I stumbled along, limping on what I later found out was a broken leg, away from the crowd. If they hadn’t found Bailey he must be further along the road, or somewhere in the scrub that my car crashed through on its way down the embankment.

My leg was aching so intensely that I couldn’t walk on it any longer. At the edge of the road I sat on my bum, calling out for Bailey as I wriggled down the slope. Soon I saw a small shoe at the base of a large bush a few metres further down. I dragged myself toward it, my hand slipped on a rock and I rolled a little way. The shoe was within my reach. As I reached out I prayed it wouldn’t come away empty. I gave a little tug and felt some resistance. I wriggled a little closer and pushed my arm under the bush and under the small body.

Pulling with all the strength I had left, I dragged the little body out. His face was cut all over and he was covered in blood and bruises, but it was Bailey. Now, how was I going to get him back up the hill? I hadn’t thought about that.

Clutching Bailey in my arms, I used my good leg, digging my heel into the soft earth, and shoved myself backward, up the slope. Gaining only a few inches at a time it was going to take a long time to get back to the road. Bailey didn’t have a long time. So I began calling out for help while I continued edging backward, inch by excruciating inch.

I guess they heard me, because the next thing I remember was being grabbed from behind, having Bailey torn from my arms, and being dragged the rest of the way to the road.

The female fire fighter carried Bailey to a waiting ambulance, and I followed, with the assistance of the man who had pulled me up the hill. By one tiny stroke of luck, on an otherwise perfectly unlucky day, Sarah was in that very same ambulance. The paramedic who had taken Bailey from my arms began working furiously, on the gurney opposite Sarah, to bring a spark of life back into his tiny body. I gripped Sarah’s hand while another paramedic squeezed a large plastic bulb that was attached to a tube running down her throat, pumping air methodically into her lungs.

“Breath baby, breath” I begged.

The paramedic turned to look at me while he pumped. “Her heart is beating and she has a pulse, though it is weak. She is unable to breathe on her own. We had to intubate. We need to assist her breathing until we get her to the hospital.”

I didn’t reply.

A third paramedic had climbed into the small space to help with Bailey. They were shouting things to each other and passing instruments. I had no idea what they were doing or what they were saying, I just had to trust that they were doing everything right.

Keeping Sarah’s tender little hand in mine, I reached out with my free arm and took hold of Bailey’s as well.

It hadn’t occurred to me until now that tears were streaming from my eyes. I was in an immense amount of pain. Not physical pain of injuries, but a pain that seized every inch of me and drove numbly through my veins. There were no words I could say, no actions I could take. I sat to the floor of the ambulance, arms out-stretched to my children, chest heaving in time with my gasping sobs.

The ambulance bumped slightly as it accelerated and we were on our way to the hospital. I didn’t move, I didn’t stop sobbing, and I didn’t let go of my babies’ hands.