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Linda and I hadn’t always been lovers. It’s true that in our teens, we’d both had been very sexually active, but it had always been with other partners, never with each other. In thinking back, maybe she’d never have lost her legs had we been lovers back then. Be that as it may, it was enough that we were now. I’ve found that I truly love her as much as she loves me.
We were born less than a year apart, Linda was first and I came along roughly ten months later. Both my parents wanted a big family and they saw no sense in waiting. What stopped them was that my father was a diesel mechanic and, several months after I was born, died when a hydraulic lift failed and dropped a car on his head. He lingered for a few days, but according to my mother, his brain-dead body finally gave up and succumbed to the injuries. Mom raised us alone for the next ten years with a little help from her two sisters.
Social Security benefits paid for us until we were eighteen, but before then, she met and married a real nice guy. Being the bantam rooster I was, it took me a few months to adjust to his constant presence. I mean, when she was dating him, he’d occasionally stay overnight, but that wasn’t the same as constantly being in my hair. He chivvied me along and I finally grew to accept him as the dominant male in my life, representing the father figure I guess I needed. From him I learned to treat others, especially women, with more respect. He taught me that others had feelings and to respect them and he did it by his example. For that, I guess, I love him as a father. Anyway, he and Mom had another four kids.
Alan and Marsha were the first two – fraternal twins – they came along when I was around ten or eleven. Alan popped out almost as soon as Mom went into labor. He’s always been an eager beaver, brash and up for almost anything. Marsha came along a leisurely hour later. She peeked out of Mom’s womb before pushing a shoulder then the rest of herself out. She didn’t scream or yell, she only took in her new surroundings with the calm equanimity of a thinker. She later became the brains to Alan’s willing brawn, leading them into some real doozies. A couple of years later came Steven, a willing follower to the Alan and Marsha gang. Sally came along almost three years after Steven. The baby of the family, after Mom had her tubes tied, she was the typical spoiled little brat. Be that as it may, my other brothers and sisters aren’t in any way a part of this story and I mentioned them because I wanted to give them a little shot at their fifteen minutes of fame.
As I said before, Linda and I were born less than a year apart and, other than the usual childish spats and fights, we got along pretty well. I also mentioned that as teens, we were sexually active as well. I gave my virginity up when I as around fifteen to a dumpy sixteen year old girl named Debra. She was available and it was a hurried job under the visitor’s bleachers during a football game. I got some coke and ice cream spilled on my back, but I didn’t care, I ‘d finally gotten some pussy! One guy spotted us under there, but it was as I was pulling out of her. She did my ego good when she told me that I was the best guy she’d ever had. I guess she meant it because, she tried to corner me a number of times during and after school. I had several other encounters that year, but during the summer and the following year . . . boy, did I ever do well. As for Linda, she told me recently that she gave up her virginity when she was sixteen, to a long, lanky basketball player after one of his games. After a few times with him, he left her broken-hearted for another girl, because, he said, she demanded that he always wear a condom. After a brief mourning period, she took up with another boy. A nicer boy, she said, but he, too, caught the eye of another girl. All told she said that she’d had eight lovers, unless you also counted one night when she’d got really buzzed and let the geek have some in the back seat of his car.
We both went on to college, and in college Linda entered a Miss Lovely Legs contest and won. She truly had a very beautiful pair of legs and I’d admired them many times. It was also at college that I began to feel a little jealousy for her. We had both enrolled in our local community college and planned to apply for a credit transfer to a more prestigious college or university for our last one or two years of pre-baccalaureate study because it truly does matter where your diploma comes from. Her contest win went a little to her head and she blew a whole semester with her partying. She was suspended for a year, but she buckled down and got back to her studies, getting accepted back in after her suspension, doing very well. Meanwhile, I’d applied for and gotten accepted in one of the top universities. I ended up receiving my Bachelor’s degree from MIT and figured that within a year and a half, two at the most, I’d have my MBA.
Because of her missing year, Linda was turned down by several top universities, but she did finally get accepted to a real good University in Louisiana, LSU. A week before she was to leave to start classes, she and a number of her friends decided to party it up. It was the last weekend she’d have there since she had to be in Baton Rouge the following Friday. I had a lot of leeway studying for my Masters so I was home for the big send-off. However, just because I had a lot of leeway didn’t mean that I could ease off on my studies and I worked my index cards hard, doing some heavy writing on my Master’s Thesis while I was home.
The night of Linda’s big send-off party, I’d gone to bed late, long after Linda and her girlfriends had departed. I’d gotten up to take a piss around six the next morning, and lazily wondered how big Linda’s head was going to be after her party. I hadn’t heard her come in, but I chalked it up to sleeping soundly. Heading back to bed, I idly picked up my index cards and was casually re-sorting them when I heard a heavy, banging knock on the front door. Dropping my cards on the bed, I sat up and wondered who it could be. Suddenly, I got a cold knot in the pit of my stomach. Linda! Without checking to see who it was, I knew it had to be the police knocking. It had to be about Linda! I hurriedly skinned on my jeans and ran out the door with Mom and Papa Ralph trailing a few yards behind. I don’t know how, but Papa Ralph was first to the door and, throwing it open, I saw two city cops over his shoulder, standing just outside the door.
“Would this be Miss Linda Maria Carter’s residence?” the first one asked.
“Y-yes, I’m her father,” Papa Ralph stuttered.
“Well, Mr. Carter –”
“Williams, Ralph Williams, I’m actually her step-father.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Williams your daughter, er, step-daughter has been in an accident –”
“Is she all right?” Mom gasped, pushing between me and Papa Ralph, “I’m her mother! Tell me, is she all right?”
“Hush, honey,” Papa Ralph held her back, “let the man speak.”
“Well, ma’am,” he nodded his thanks to Papa Ralph, “she’s been admitted to Memorial Hospital for treatment of severe injuries. They’ll know more about her condition there. I’m just here to let you know where she is.”
“T-thank you, officer,” Papa Ralph sighed, running his fingers through his hair, “would you two like a cup of coffee or something to drink? Iced tea?”
The officer only shook his head and gave him a weary smile as he turned away.
“We’re sorry to be the bearers of bad news, ma’am,” the second officer half-saluted and turned, “have a good, um, uh . . . good bye,” I could see him biting his lip at his partial slip.
“Bye,” Mom mumbled after him.
The younger kids were still in bed, so I volunteered to stay with them and made a fresh pot of coffee as Papa Ralph and Mom had a quick shower, dressed and, with a squeal of tires, left. A couple of hours later, I got the kids up, got them fed and loaded them on the school bus when it pulled up. I cleaned up, threw on a clean shirt and headed out. As an afterthought, I turn at the door, grabbed the house phone and put it on call-forwarding to my cell phone. A half-hour later, I was at the hospital. I found Mom in the main waiting room, Papa Ralph had gone to get them a coffee refill, and she told me what she knew about the accident.
The first thing she told me was that Linda had lost her legs, but that she was still alive. She had some serious internal injuries, but the prognosis was good overall. Her condition was still a little guarded and she was still in surgery, but they were “just cleaning her . . . her s-s-stumps” – she broke down and sobbed for a few minutes before continuing. They were trimming off the bones in case she might be eligible for prosthetic devices later.
“Oh, my poor baby,” Mom sobbed.
I had a big lump in my throat and wondered if, had I horned in on them and come along, she’d be in this condition. But I hadn’t wanted to go drinking. I’d been too damned tired, although in spite of that, I’d stayed up very late myself. Papa Ralph interrupted my self-recriminations, arriving with three cups of coffee.
“Figured you’d be here by now, so I brought you one,” he half-smiled.
“Thanks, Pop,” I smiled up at him, pleased at his thoughtfulness – but he was like that, always thinking. I guess he’s where Marsha got her brain power.
We sat and sipped coffee quietly for a minute or two, then Papa Ralph told me the rest of the story as he’d heard it. It seemed that one of the girls Linda was with, had borrowed her father’s Volkswagen and she, Linda and two other girlfriends had piled into it, driving off to another party. They were all drunk. One of the other girls took the other car and the remainder of their party, and followed a couple of miles behind. They all knew where they were going, so there was no need to try to keep up. The second car, however, was stopped by a cop who’d noticed their erratic driving and they were carted off to the drunk tank. Mom dropped her head into her hands and sobbed as she listened and I, too, wished that Linda had been stopped by the cops. Anyway Papa Ralph continued, Linda and them got lost and ended up on an empty back road. The girl driving apparently lost control of the car going into an s-curve and, at sixty miles an hour, thirty-five miles faster than the speed limit, and ran into the support wall of a concrete railroad bridge. It was a smack-on, flat, head-on hit. It hadn’t looked as if she’d slowed nor tried to steer away. He paused, his hand trembling as he took a sip of his coffee. The driver and front seat passenger were apparently killed on impact. One of the back seat passengers didn’t have her seat belt on and was thrown into the back of the driver’s seat and apparently traveled over the driver and went through the windshield. She was stopped by the same concrete wall that had stopped the car. Linda, however, was buckled in and was still in her seat, although it did break loose due to the impact, and suffered internal injuries from the seat belt. However, the loose seat slammed forward, the front seat had been shoved back from the impact and her legs were crushed between the two.
She’d drifted in and out of consciousness as she sat there, trapped by her legs as effectively as a bear in a trap. The bear, however, could gnaw it’s paw off, but Linda wasn’t a bear. The road remained devoid of traffic until the wee hours of the morning. They’d hit the bridge at around ten and it wasn’t until one o’clock that a railroad switcher, heading for the siding nearby, found them. He didn’t own a cell phone, so he had to go to the switch itself for a direct line to the dispatcher and called for help. A state trooper arrived roughly an hour later followed by an ambulance and the fire department’s rescue squad. Papa Ralph said that he’d been told that the girl that had been thrown through the windshield had still been alive when the ambulance arrived. An emergency helicopter had been called and arrived about the time they’d extricated Linda. They loaded both surviving girls on it, but Amelia had died en route. She was too broken and torn up for them to successfully resuscitate her – but Linda survived. Her legs had been broken at mid-thigh, one a little higher than the other, and the pinching of the seats had kept her from bleeding out. However, because her lower legs had been deprived of blood for so long, they were turning black by the time they got her loose and had to be amputated. It was a sorry ending to happy party.
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Linda didn’t get her degree then. She did eventually get it, but that’s farther down the road. I got my MBA and hired on with a company in a city near home, got a small loft apartment and began working my way up the ladder.
Back home, the twins were high school sophomores and the boys were in middle school and grade school. Linda was progressing, but still complained of painful twinges in her non-existent calves, ankles and feet. She visited me at my apartment about as often as I visited home, staying overnight on occasion. I usually picked her up and took home whenever Mom or Papa Ralph didn’t bring her. The prostheses hadn’t worked out. There was something about the stumps being too short. They’d talked about hip replacement to give her something longer to hook some prostheses on, but Linda had turned them down flat. She didn’t want that kind of pain. She’d heard of how much hip replacement hurt and, although the pain lessened, it was always there. She didn’t want that.
One weekend, Papa Ralph, Mom and the kids were going camping and she didn’t want to go, so she came up to spend it with me. She said she didn’t want to be a drag on Papa Ralph by having him carrying her around like an invalid. Which brings to mind – after she was back home, she moped around for several weeks, getting a little round and chubby. I liked the look, but she didn’t. As she realized that she was going to be permanently legless, her attitude changed dramatically. She went back to her old diet, cut out most of the junk food and got a pamphlet from her doctor about wheelchair exercises, quickly getting back her former looks. She’d still occasionally get depressed missing the girls that had died, and often visit their graves.
At any rate, like I said, she came up to spend the weekend with me. Papa Ralph and Mom brought her up that Friday afternoon and asked that I drop her off back home Monday evening, since I had a long weekend as well. After they left, she and I played a few games and watched some TV. We were chatting and arguing amiably about who would be…