That’s when I thought about checking to see if she was breathing – which, at a later date, would hit me as the first thing I should have looked for.
Seeing her chest moving, I carefully moved around so that I was now in front of her, next to her arm that was outstretched on the floor.
Leaning over her so that my mouth was next to her ear, I called, “Katy.”
When nothing happened, I reached for the hand on the floor and gently lifted it up. That got a reaction in the form of a pained groan.
“Jarrod,” Rita called, sounding like she was crying. “Her grandmother’s over here.”
Reluctantly taking my eyes off Katy, I looked over my shoulder and realized immediately why she’d sounded like she was crying. The ever vibrant Maude, so full of life, was almost unrecognizable. Her eyes were already swollen, and her face was bruised all over.
“Did you call 911?” I barked, turning back to Katy and panicking because I didn’t know what to do.
What if one of them stopped breathing? With the bruising on Maude, I wouldn’t know if it was safe to CPR. With Katy, I’d probably break having to do that to her.
I didn’t know what to fucking do!
“No,” she whimpered. “I saw Maude and… and…” she broke off and started sobbing.
Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I unlocked it and hit a number I’d never had to dial before in my life.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
Four words I’d never expected to hear in my life, and then I said some words I’d never even thought about saying, but once I had, I never wanted to say them again.
“I need an ambulance. My girlfriend and her grandmother have been beaten and are unconscious.”
With Rita crying hard in the background, I felt something deep inside of me start to crack, but then Katy twitched and something hit me. She needed me to be strong for her, and so did Maude. If I did that, I could follow the instructions that the lady on the phone was giving me while we waited for the ambulances to arrive. If I cracked now, I wouldn’t be able to do that and it could cost them their lives.
The lives of these two beautiful women, who’d made such a big difference to me in such a short space of time, were potentially in my hands.
So, with that epiphany, I took a deep, shaky breath in and did what the woman said.SixteenKatyI felt it as soon as I began to wake up, but it didn’t make sense to me. There was just so much pain all over. It wasn’t unusual for me to wake up with aching thighs or a pain here and there, it happened to everyone and I liked to think I was an Avenger while I was sleeping, but this was different. Whatever I’d done through the night had left me feeling like I’d gotten in the ring with the late and great Mohammed Ali.
Surfacing more from slumber, I took in a painful breath and couldn’t stop the moan that followed it. Holy shit, that fucking hurt.
“Katy,” a deep voice whispered beside my ear and a hand gently picked up one of mine. “Wake up, baby.”
Moving to roll onto my back, I almost screamed with the pain that filled me with those movements. My elbow, my back, my side, my shoulder, my head… everything felt like it had been crushed.
“Baby, you’re in hospital. You were in an accident,” the deep voice rumbled, and that’s when my eyes opened as it all came flooding back to me.
“Where’s Elodie?” I whimpered, needing to know he hadn’t taken her.
“We don’t know, Katy. And if you wake up a bit more, maybe you can tell us,” Mom’s voice said from the opposite side of the bed to where Jarrod was sitting, and I looked at her without moving my head and causing myself more pain.
Seeing the tears in her eyes, I looked back to the other side and saw that Jarrod looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“It was freaky Shane,” I rasped, closing my eyes as it all played out in my mind. “I dropped Rita at the garage and went to get diapers. When I came back, I heard Elodie screaming from the driveway and ran into the house because it sounded like she’d hurt herself. Gloria was sitting on the couch with her on her lap, and her face was bleeding. I didn’t even get to ask what happened because something hit me on the head, and when I fell down he started kicking me,” I stopped to lick my lips, feeling how dry they were.
Every word, every replay of what I remembered was draining me, but the panic… the panic hurt.
“I was trying to crawl away from him, but he grabbed my arm hard and pulled it up behind me. I turned onto my back and then Shane put his hand around my throat and squeezed. He kept asking where the shit Effie stole from him was, but I still don’t know what he was talking about. I told him I didn’t know, but he squeezed harder and then started punching me,” I whimpered, the tears falling out of the corners of my eyes and trailing into my hair.