Dream Sweet Read online

  This book is dedicated to my sons, for without them, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

  Dream

  Sweet

  Terence Matedero

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by TM Olson

  All rights reserved

  Matedero & Associates, Editorial Division

  Cheyenne, WY 82001

  www.matedero.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: January 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-463-60525-4

  “We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.”

  ~Voltaire

  “It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.”

  ~Buddha

  “All right, then, I'll go to hell.”

  ~Mark Twain

  1

  A dark blue Honda Accord sped onto the interstate in front of me, nearly rammed me, and splashed an enormous fishtail onto my windshield. The rain had been falling all afternoon and the commute home was miserable. My wipers were running, but not fast enough to dispel the added water, so I reached down to the lower dash on my old Ford pickup and turned the wipers on high.

  My Ford F-100 might have been 30 years old, but it only had 70,000 miles on it and it ran like the wind. My wife was constantly trying to get me to get rid of it, but I refused. I kept rationalizing to her that since I was driving something that wasn’t built from new, limited resources, then that alone offset the carbon footprint to some extent for the lousy gas mileage it got. She didn’t believe a word of it.

  The windshield wiper on the driver’s side squawked loudly and began to flop back and forth. It took me a moment to realize that the rubber had peeled halfway off the base of it and the motion was making my visibility even worse.

  “Why haven’t I changed those damn things yet?” I said to the empty seat next to me.

  I turned them off and squinted in an effort to see through the water flowing all over the windshield.

  “Goddammit all to hell,” were the last words out of my mouth before the Accord’s brake lights came on and the car quickly became a target for my cattle guard. I had just enough time to slam on the brakes before the rear of the Honda made contact with my truck.

  Another reason my wife was always telling me to get rid of my truck was that it only had manual brakes and manual steering. You had to be pretty strong to even operate the thing. On every other occasion, I would have disagreed with her for some machismo reason, but at that very moment, I absolutely agreed with her.

  The front end of the Ford connected with the Honda on just a slight enough angle to push it into a tailspin. Through the sheet of water on my windshield, I could see the driver trying to correct the spin and then overcorrecting into a sidespin in the other direction. It impacted a vehicle stopped in front of both of us on its passenger side, and the front cattle guard of my pickup slammed into the driver’s side of the Honda.

  An eerily morphed scene unfolded in front of my eyes through the water on my windshield as I saw a woman’s head slam against the side window on impact and smash through the safety glass before it bounced back in the other direction and rolled back once again to settle on the doorframe.

  I remembered little after that moment because the impact my head had made on the steering wheel knocked me unconscious.

  When I woke up, I was looking at a woman’s head dangling out of the side window of the car in front of me. The steam from my radiator obscured the view of the blood running down the side of her car, but it appeared to be gushing from her neck.

  With my mind in a haze, I tried to unhook my seatbelt, but it was jammed.

  “My God, I have to get out of here,” I thought. I was frantically searching for something to help me when I remembered that I had a lock blade in the glove compartment, and I reached to get it.

  I slashed the belt and tried the door. It opened with a hard push from my shoulder and I nearly toppled onto the wet road. Regaining my balance, I hurried around to the front of my truck to see what I could possibly do to help the woman.

  “Ma’am, can you hear me? Are you all right?” I asked. I approached the car and lay on the hood as I looked in through the shattered front window of her car and saw that there was no way for me to reach her from there. The blood, I could see then, was surely coming from a gash in her neck.

  I climbed on top of the car to see if I could reach her from there. As I reached out to lift her head from the door frame, I heard her moan with a wet gurgling sound.

  “Ma’am, if you can hear me, I’m going to try to stop the blood coming from your neck,” I said.

  No response.

  I lifted her head with my left hand, placed my right hand around her neck and attempted to squelch to the blood flow with a hard squeeze. “I can’t seem to, wait, there we go, I think I got it,” I mumbled.

  As I lay on the roof of her car, looking at my hand covered with blood, hoping that I was making some difference in stopping the blood flow, I heard the sound of skidding tires. I knew the skid didn’t come from something small. It most definitely came from something big.

  The last thing I remembered before waking up in a hospital bed three days later was flying through the gray wet air. The semi that made the horrible skid smashed into the back of my pickup and pushed the front end of my truck through the Honda’s roof and over the top of it. The woman’s head popped like a melon when the weight of the truck finally settled on top of her, and I ended up on the road after flying off the car in front of the Honda and flipping onto the ground, only to land with all the force smacking my head against the blacktop.

  2

  “Howard, can you hear me?” I vaguely heard a familiar voice ask. A machine was beeping in the background.

  I opened my eyes and could see a distorted object in front of me. It took me a moment to realize that the object was a person looking down at me. The light from the ceiling further obscured my vision.

  “Howard, I can see your eyes, honey. Are you okay? Can you see me?”

  I recognized the voice as being my wife, Donna’s, but my mind was lagging behind for any response. I couldn’t quite understand why I was lying in a bed in what looked like a hospital room, and why my head was pounding.

  “Honey, you’ve been in an accident,” she said, as if reading my mind.

  “Humuphrup,” I tried to speak but wasn’t forming words with the sounds coming from my throat.

  “What, darling?” My wife looked puzzled.

  I concentrated on making the words in my mind come out of my mouth as the correct sounds.

  “Mum fe heed urps,” I managed to say.

  “What, darling? I can’t understand you.”

  “Mi ed urps!” I spat back at her. My frustration began to bloom.

  “Oh, honey, please don’t get upset. Everything is going to be fine. Your head suffered a major trauma and you’ve been in and out of consciousness for the past 3 days,” Donna said, as she caressed my hand nearest to her.

  I nodded my head and mumbled once again, “S, don, a , my, ed, hu, urts.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, I understood you that time. I’m sure it’s horrible. I’ll go get the nurse, ‘kay?”

  As she left the room, a scene from the accident flashed into my thoughts. I saw myself slamming on my brakes to avoid hitting a car, and I felt myself falling from the sky. Everything was very wet.

  A noise penetrated my memory, too, that I just didn’t have any visual to relate it to. It was a popping sound. A soggy hollow popping so
und. Like the sound your boot makes when you pull it out of the muck in a bog.

  The door swung open and a slightly overweight nurse came in the room wearing pooh-bear scrubs. My wife trailed just behind her.

  We had been married some 25 years and I still was awestruck by her beauty. I couldn‘t get enough of her long flowing brown hair, and her deep gray eyes. She smiled when she noticed me looking at her and the light from her smile penetrated my heart. For a tiny moment, everything was better.

  “Mr. Cushman, it’s nice to see you awake, how are you feeling?” the nurse asked. “Your wife tells me that you are having pain in your head. I certainly can understand your head being painful. It usually is when you split it open.” She smiled. “But we’ll fix you up, okay?”

  Pooh-bear and friends walked to the morphine machine that was next to my bed. After making a few beeping sounds with the buttons, the nurse continued, “Doctor Morrisey said that I could increase your morphine drip. But only a little. This ought to reduce your pain in just a few moments, Mr. Cushman. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take a few vitals in the meantime.”

  I nodded and turned toward my wife.

  “Wha, appent to me?” I asked her, as I tried to point to the bandage on my head with my left arm that I just then realized was in a cast.

  “What, darling…oh…you were in a horrible accident on your way home from work Tuesday. It was raining really hard and your truck ended up in a pileup on 270. Somehow, you ended up on the road in front of two cars that were in front of your truck, well, actually, one of them was under your truck. It’s the damnedest thing because no one can positively identify how you got there. A semi rear-ended you, and your truck ended up on top of a little car that was up against another car, and you were in front of all of that.”

  “Wha?”

  “Yeah, honest. Your windshield was intact. Your seatbelt had been cut as if you escaped from it. We really don’t know how you ended up on the road. The police are pretty sure that you got out of your truck, but they aren’t very sure of what happened after that. There were no witnesses at the scene because the driver of the car that caused the accident was unconscious from a diabetic coma, the woman in the car under your truck was, well, squashed, and she died instantly, and the truck driver wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and ended up swan diving through the front window of his semi.” Donna looked at me for a moment before she asked, “Do you have any idea how you ended up in the road, honey?”

  I hesitated for a moment. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what happened to me other than the few pieces I remembered a moment ago. Slamming on my brakes to avoid rear-ending a car in front of me, hitting the car, and flying through the air like I was falling from the sky.

  “I, uh, reely don, t, know,” I replied. My speech was getting better the more I spoke, but it was still difficult for me. I could also feel the effects of the morphine which wasn’t helping my mental functioning at all. It definitely was helping my pain, though.

  My lids began to droop. I wanted more sleep.

  “You get some rest, darling.” Again, as if she read my mind. “It’ll all come back to you, I’m sure.”

  Donna bent over the railing of my bed and kissed me on the forehead. “I was so worried about you, honey. I thought I’d lost you and that was the most horrible thing that could ever happen to me. I love you so much, darling. I can’t live…”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what Donna said as my lids closed and my mind drifted off.

  ~

  A tiny light was visible in the darkness. I tried to move toward it, but it seemed like the more I tried, the less I moved. The light became bigger and bigger like the old television sets used to do when they were shut off, only in reverse. As it continued to expand, I started to make out a scene within the light. It was a gray rain-soaked evening and I was looking at my truck in the distance. It looked like it was on fire. Smoke was coming out from under it on all sides. Only, it looked like it was moving in reverse.

  The smoke ceased and I saw myself walk into the scene, only backwards. I got in my truck and backed away from the scene, only by then I knew that what I was looking at was the scene rewinding. As it did, a large blood-soaked head started to poke out of the spot where my truck had just been. It was contorted in an odd fashion just for a moment before it snapped back into a normal shape. The blood started flowing back into the head at all different spots and I became aware that it was a female. She started to say something, but I couldn’t understand her. She was speaking in reverse.

  I continued in reverse until she was well out of sight and then I began to move forward towards a figure crossing the road. A different road that I had just been on. The closer I got to it; I realized that it, too, was a woman. At the precise moment that I intercepted her path, the truck stopped short and I flew through the windshield, only it didn’t seem to shatter. I landed on my feet, and the woman turned and spoke to me.

  “Don’t let me die,” she said. “I don’t deserve to die.”

  I looked at her and it didn’t appear like anything was wrong with her. Then, her eyes started to turn red and her lips followed. Blood tears trailed down her cheeks as her complexion turned stark white and large black roaches crawled out of her ears. When she opened her mouth, blood soaked maggots fell out of it.

  “BUT YOU DO!” she screamed, spitting maggots in my face.

  I awoke with a start. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. I was wet with sweat. I looked around trying to remember where I was. The throbbing pain in my head clued me in.

  3

  I felt a light touch on my right arm and opened my eyes. My wife was smiling down at me.

  “Are you feeling any better, darling?” she asked.

  My head was still foggy and painful and I told her so. My nerves were a bit on edge still from the horrible dreams I had all night and I kept that to myself.

  “I found a copy of the newspaper from the day after the accident. I thought you might like to see it, you know, to see if you might be able to recall any more about what happened.” She placed it on my lap.

  “I’m not sure if I really want to read it just yet, Donna.”

  “Why not? Don’t you want to know what happened to you?”

  “Well, yes and no,” I replied with a quiver in my voice. “I don’t want to know if the woman in the car under my truck was killed exactly. I mean, I know she was, how could she not have been, but it won’t really hit me, you know, it really won’t seem real until I see it in black and white.”

  After a moment of reflection, Donna replied, “I guess I can understand that, honey. I think that it would be better if you just got it over with, it wasn’t your fault, Howard, but I wasn’t there and I’m not struggling to remember like you are, and, well, I have to respect that.” She reached down to pick the paper up off my lap.

  I grabbed her hand and said with a bitter tone, “But you don’t know that it wasn’t my fault, do you?”

  “Well, geesh, I can only go by what I know about you, honey. I know that you wouldn’t have been driving recklessly no matter the conditions, and, well, I just know in my heart that it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, that really doesn’t do me much good right now,” I shot back at her. My head was starting to pound again. I could feel my blood starting to boil.

  Of course, Donna could see it in my face and she knew just what to do to calm me down. She started to stroke my hair and whispered to me, “It’s okay, darling, really. I understand how tough this is for you. I couldn’t imagine what I’d feel in your situation. Just know that I love you and I will stand by you no matter what, ‘kay? We’re a team, darling, me and you.”

  I first heard Donna say that to me when we were both in junior high on the eighth grade debate squad and we were doing a team debate that day. I’d never had the opportunity to get very close to her until then, but I knew who she was, and I knew I really liked her. The moment she said that, she also placed her hand on my shoulder
, and smiled ever so sweet at me. I remember that moment and that smile, to this day. That was the day I fell in love with her.

  “Darling, I’m sorry, I’m all edgy and groggy, and I didn’t…”

  “Shhh, honey, you don’t have to say anything. You’re in the hospital, honey, and you are allowed,” she said as she leaned down and kissed my forehead. “You get some rest, ‘kay? I’m going to go and see if I can find the doctor. I have a few questions for him.”

  I sank back into my mattress and breathed deeply. “Okay, hon. Tell me what he says, ‘kay?”

  “I will,” Donna replied.

  ~

  After the door had shut, I lay there for a couple of minutes going over in my mind what she had said about getting it over with. As much as I tried to rationalize that I was right, I knew that she was. She always was. I always loved that about her. She was the practical one in our family.

  Unlike our daughter, Kate, who was so hard-headed I think I could have thrown a baseball at her head and it would have bounced off without a care. But I loved our daughter and our son, Brandon, as much as a father could love their children. My family was my life and I couldn’t fathom them not being in it.

  I decided to look at the article and picked it up with my good arm.

  “Six Car Pileup on I-270, Three Pronounced Dead at the Scene,” the headline read.

  “Oh great. Nice start,” I thought, as I recognized my smashed truck in the picture. “Do I really want to do this?”