A/N: I cannot get over the reception this story has gotten. I've never posted a single chapter and gotten the response I did. I'm amazed. I'm grateful. I'm overwhelmed. I'm scared of disappointing people. Mostly, I just want to say thank you to everyone who left a review, followed the story, favorited the story, or followed me. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope I can keep up the work that you seemed to enjoy in that first chapter.
Just to clear something up quickly- this is a slow burn to Rizzles. This story takes away the two most important things in Jane's life and breaks her down. It's sad. It's full of heartbreak. But eventually (around chapter 10), things start looking up. Jane starts to bounce back. There *is* a light at the end of the tunnel. Don't say I didn't warn you though. ;)
I didn't stop. I drove nearly seven hours through Boston traffic, and Connecticut traffic, and the ever-present New York traffic until I got to my new apartment in Manhattan. The movers would be by in the morning with my things, so I unfurled a sleeping bag and curled up with Jo on the floor. It was the most uncomfortable night I'd ever spent until that point, and it wasn't because I was trying to sleep on a hardwood floor.
My first week of work with the NYPD went pretty much the way I expected it to. As the outsider from Boston, I wasn't really feeling any love. Especially since I'd apparently been chosen over more than thirty-two candidates for the position, and I hadn't even interviewed for it.
They would hate to hear this, but I found out in that week that New Yorkers and Bostonians aren't all that different from each other. We're both fiercely loyal to our families and our hometowns. We love our respective sports teams and anything local. By the end of that first week, the ice had started to thaw. I had no intention of getting close to any of the detectives in that unit, but I did want them to trust me. Our lives depended on one another.
The Saturday of Maura's wedding I went out to a bar with five or six of the guys from my unit. I was the only woman in the unit and some of the guys had started to circle like sharks. Some of them wanted to get into my pants. Some of them wanted to give me a hard time about being a woman in a man's world. And some of them just wanted to get to know me. By that point I hadn't gotten to know any of them that well, but I was already starting to weed out who wanted to do what. I chose to go to the bar that night with the ones that wanted to get into my pants.
They were fools, all of them, but it felt good to string them along. It also felt good to get ridiculously drunk. By my fifth shot of whisky, I could no longer remember that it was Maura's wedding day.
It was the bartender that cut me off. It was one of the detectives I was there with that convinced him that another one or two shots wouldn't hurt me as he wrapped his arm around my shoulder and gave me a lecherous grin.
By my seventh shot, I could no longer remember my way back to my apartment, and the detective that had convinced the bartender to give me two more shots was ready to make his move. I was drunker than I had been in years, but I still had the clarity to know it was time to get out of there. I asked the bartender to call me a cab, and he was more than happy to do so. I gave the address to the taxi driver and hoped he'd be honest enough to get me there. He was. I rewarded the cabbie with a large tip and by not vomiting all over his back seat.
I staggered up to my apartment and passed out on the mattress on my living room floor, too drunk to realize I'd slept on this mattress in my living room with Maura next to me once before, a lifetime ago and another world away. Whether she realized it or not, Maura was always with me. She never left my thoughts, and I carried the lost friendship and opportunities with me like a brick chained around my neck.
I also got ridiculously drunk on Maura's birthday in August and the anniversary of the date she met William in September, too. Except I didn't need the detectives from my unit to take me out. I was perfectly content to sit at home and get drunk by myself at that point. They'd stopped asking anyway.
By the time the first subpoena for me to testify came through to the NYPD from Boston, it had been six months since I'd left. Frankie, Frost and Korsak hadn't spoken to me at all. My mother called occasionally to check on me, but her calls were short and clipped. She too was mad at me, ashamed of what I'd done to Maura. I missed her sometimes, but most of the time I was glad she was no longer prying into my life. She wouldn't like who I had become. Tommy occasionally sent me texts with photos of TJ in them, and they were the only things that kept me connected to Boston. TJ was growing in leaps and bounds, and I was missing it.
No one ever mentioned Maura. Maura never called, and I didn't call Maura. That was good. Because by that point I had solidified my existence as the miserable, lonely, misplaced detective from Boston. I had numbed myself to all things Maura-related. I was surprised it had only taken me six months, but I did have all the time leading up to her engagement and wedding to get me there too.
My deposition was to take place on November eleventh. If all went according to plan, the trial would start several weeks later and I'd have to return to testify again in the courtroom. The weather was supposed to be awful the entire week of the deposition, so I bought a ticket on Amtrak and decided to take the train back to Boston instead of driving.
I didn't tell my mother I was coming. I didn't plan on seeing anyone. My goal was to get into Boston, be deposed, then get back to New York the next day. No one had to know I was coming. No one would want to see me anyway. Besides, the less time I spent in Boston, the less tempted I would be to find Maura and see how married life was going for her.
Because I wanted to make my visit to Boston as brief as possible, I opted to take a later train out of New York than I had originally planned. I paid a fee at the train station and changed my ticket to a train that left an hour later than I originally planned to leave.
I was deep underground in New York's Penn Station. I had no idea how bad the weather had become outside. I had no idea that my train would be one of the last ones to depart before New York shut down their public transit systems, and Amtrak would follow suit.
I had been asked by an Amtrak employee if I wanted to take the earlier train, even after I'd changed my ticket. "Your train might not leave. The snow here is bad, but the further north you go, the worse it's getting."
I decided to just wait it out. If I couldn't get out that day, I'd get out the next day. Or the day after that. I was going to a deposition; they were rescheduled all the time.
I had no idea that for the second time in just under two years, my life was about to irrevocably change for the worse because I decided not to act.
We were delayed by more than an hour, and I sat in the train car reading the news on my phone. A pre-winter blizzard of historic proportions was bearing down on the northeast. I was glad I wasn't driving. I was glad I had a hotel reservation.
I should have just gotten off of the damn train and rescheduled the whole thing, but I really didn't care. I just sat there and waited.
We eventually left, and it was slow going at first. The further we got from New York, the slower we moved. Until suddenly we weren't crawling anymore. We were flying. We were just outside of Hartford, Connecticut when the train started moving faster. I'd taken Amtrak trains before, and this wasn't a high speed express train, but all of a sudden we were moving as if it was one. I was curious as to why we were suddenly flying along, especially with the weather creating hassles for us.
We took a curve, and the next thing I knew, my phone had fallen out of my hand, under the seat in front of me simply from the train's momentum. I bent over to pick it up, and when I discovered it was too far away, I got out of the seat and kneeled down to reach for it.
That saved my life. I'm just not sure it was a life worth saving. Not at that point, and not now, not after what I've become. This isn't a life worth living.
As I reached for the phone, there was a sudden screeching noise followed by a giant bang. I remember lurching forward, slamming my head into the leg of the seat in front of me. I had been bent over, on my knees, rear end in the air, reaching under the seat for my phone, and the crash caused me to become wedged under the seat that I had been reaching under. As the car I was riding in derailed and began to fold in on itself, I found myself stretched out, prostrate under the seat I had been reaching under, jutting out between the legs of the passenger that had been seated there. If we weren't on the cusp of one of the nation's worst transportation disasters, it would have looked comical.
The event itself took only seconds to unfold, but it felt like it happened in slow motion. I watched as the train car began to crumple. I heard passengers screaming. I watched luggage and other belongings tumble down from the racks above the seats. I smelled diesel fuel and smoke and blood. And as I tried to grab hold onto something- anything- to stop my forward motion, I watched in horror as whatever it was that we hit started to push the row of seats across from me directly toward me.
After that, I don't remember things completely. When I woke up briefly, I was pinned under a lot of metal and bitterly cold. My hands were trapped under a sheet of metal, and they hurt when I tried to pull them out. My torso was also trapped, and everything from my navel down burned in agony. I was confused. I had years of police training, but nothing to guide me out of this situation. I slowly tried to extricate myself from under the seat where I was, but it was dark and I couldn't move. I felt something dripping onto my shoulder, and wondered idly if it was from the snow now making its way into the fractured train car, or if it was some sort of bodily fluid from the passenger who had been seated in front of me that I was now trapped under. I couldn't turn my head, but I rotated my eyes as far up as I could see, and from what I could tell, it would have been impossible for that passenger to have survived.
It dawned on me how eerily quiet it was. There were no screams for help. There were no screams in agony, not even from me. There were no sounds of human movement. No voices of rescuers coming to find us. There was the sound of flames burning not far away and of metal groaning as it settled. There was no human noise though, so I tried to make some. And when I tried to scream, the pain in my head and lungs was so intense that I passed out again. Later, the top part of the train car would collapse on top of me, essentially burying me alive.
It was the nation's worst train disaster in over fifty years. Apparently the snow had covered a signal, and the conductor on our train misread it, thinking he'd been given the go ahead to increase speed and try to make up for lost time and beat out the storm.
The signal actually was telling the conductor to stop. Another train was heading toward us on the same track, using it to get around a snow drift. If we had stopped, the other train would have returned to its track a quarter mile from us, and we would have continued on our way without incident.
Instead we went hurtling right for the other train at full speed, and over three hundred people perished in the crash and subsequent derailment.
There was serious confusion after the crash. The weather hampered rescue efforts, and Amtrak was criticized for allowing their trains to continue to run during the blizzard and for not keeping a better passenger manifest. Since passengers had been encouraged to take the earlier train when the weather started to turn, people who were supposed to be on the train that crashed weren't on it. They were the lucky ones. People who had been scheduled to take a train even later than the one I was on had been encouraged to take my train. Most of them met with a terrible fate. There were far more fatalities than there were survivors of this incident.
Everything from this point forward was told to me anecdotally. I've seen my medical records and can confirm the injuries were not exaggerated, but I don't know about my rescue. I wasn't awake for it, and even if I had been the trauma was so severe that I likely would not have remembered it.
My rescue was delayed by the fact that I had changed my ticket, and was originally supposed to be on the train that left an hour before the one I was on. At first no one was even looking for me. No one but the Boston District Attorney's Office knew I was heading to Boston. I hadn't told anyone else I was coming. Add to that the fact that I was unconscious, pinned under a row of seats, surrounded by the outside of the train car that had been pushed in around me, and I was nearly impossible to find.
It was almost a full twenty-four hours later, when I didn't show up for my deposition and the train crash had made international news, that someone from the DA's office sounded the alarm. When no one could locate me initially at any of the hospitals that had received survivors, and my cell phone's signal was traced to the accident scene, I was added to the list of passengers "presumed dead".
My mother was at Maura's house, making dinner for the two of them, when the news of the train derailment broke into regularly scheduled programming. They stopped to watch the news and remarked about the tragedy of it all. Neither of them was aware that I was a part of that tragedy. It wasn't until the next day, while Maura was down in the morgue performing a routine autopsy and listening to the news on her laptop that she first heard that I had been involved.
"Sources are now telling us that former Boston detective and hero, Jane Rizzoli, was on the northbound train. She was returning to Boston to testify on a case she had solved while working with the BPD. Her contacts at the Boston District Attorney's Office have not heard from her since before the crash, and none of the hospitals treating patients have admitted her. At this time officials are indicating that Detective Jane Rizzoli is considered among the dead."
I actually wasn't dead. I was deep in a coma at that point. The frigid temperatures were helping to keep my brain from swelling and killing me, but hypothermia had set in, and time was working against me.
By the time I was found, the mission had changed from search and rescue to a recovery mission. I was found by a cadaver dog that had sniffed out the passenger I was trapped under, and was nearly put into a body bag when someone heard me gasp for breath.
Even when I shot myself to save Frankie and Maura, I didn't come this close to dying.
I was airlifted to a hospital in Hartford where I was put on life support and kept in a medically induced coma to give my brain the rest it needed to stop swelling. When I was stable enough, the surgeries started. I had two broken legs, two broken ankles, and a severely crushed pelvis. My right hip was so severely crushed that they had to give me a new one. My last lumbar vertebra was fractured, but not crushed. It's what made the difference between me being a paraplegic and just severely injured. I had massive internal injuries and wound up having an emergency hysterectomy to control the bleeding caused by my pelvic fractures. My bowel was perforated and caused a serious infection. I had a head injury that required them to cut a hole in my skull when my brain started to swell. If it hadn't been for the freezing temperatures I was in, my brain would have swollen before my rescue and I would have died. No one knew whether or not I'd have brain damage when I woke up. If I woke up.
My hands had been pinned in by the wall that got pushed into me as I reached down to get my phone. They too were broken, but they were the least severe of my injuries.
Weeks later, when all of the surgeries were finally complete, I had more hardware in the lower half of my body than the bionic man. Rods, pins, plates and screws. The portion of my skull that they had removed to allow my brain room to swell up was sewn into my belly so that they could retrieve it later and use it to close up the hole in my head. I would later have surgery to remove it, when doctors would decide a metal plate was better for repairing my skull.
I was lucky to have survived, but the road to recovery was going to be a long one, and there were no guarantees that I would recover. I spent almost two months in a medically induced coma, while doctors urged my body to heal. No one knew if I would ever regain consciousness on my own, and if I did, what would be left of the Jane Rizzoli they knew.
It wasn't Maura that alerted my mother to the fact that I had been on that train. It also wasn't the authorities. It was Susie Chang. She came running into the autopsy suite when she heard the tray full of instruments crash onto the floor. Maura had fainted at the news, knocking the tray over and taking it down to the floor with her. Susie found her and roused her, and Maura told Susie that she had to go get Ma in the cafe and let her know I was on that train. After getting Maura up and onto the couch in her office, Susie ran upstairs to find my mother and broke the news.
Frankie got called off of his shift to come and take her and Maura home.
It wasn't until a full forty-eight hours after the crash that someone from the Hartford Police Department was able to contact my mother and let her know that I was in a critical care unit at a trauma center in Hartford, Connecticut. She spent nearly a day thinking I was dead. They all did.
For the first time since I had left them all behind in Boston, they all thought of me with something other than anger.
A cadre of volunteers from the Massachusetts State Police gave my brother's cruiser an escort to the state line, and the Connecticut State Police met them at the state line and continued the escort to the hospital in Hartford. Frankie drove for hours with my mother, Tommy and Maura in the car. They were silent the entire time, together but each alone with their worry. My mother later remarked to me how touching it was that fellow police officers volunteered to escort them into Hartford. It was a little thing that got magnified under the circumstances and turned into something big and touching.
My mother never questioned why Maura would want to come. She just insisted on coming with them. When I woke up and was coherent, I didn't believe it at first. By then Maura had returned to Boston, but she tried to come back to see me a few weeks later when I was moved into rehab.
There were other little things that happened while I was in a coma that turned out to be really big things. I had boarded Jo Friday at a vet's office near my apartment before I left for what was originally going to be a two day trip. Vince Korsak, upon hearing the news, tracked down that vet through one of my neighbors and drove all the way into Manhattan to get her. And the vet, upon hearing the news of what happened to me, refused to take payment for boarding her. Korsak then drove over to my apartment building, showed the super his badge, and convinced him to let him into my apartment to get my tortoise. He then turned around and drove all the way back to Boston. The man had been devastated by my abrupt departure, and he hadn't spoken to me in six months, but he still cared enough to drive from Boston to Manhattan and back to bring my pets home with him. Unfortunately, it took several days after my awakening for me to find out that my pets were safe with Korsak, but in hindsight everyone had more important things to worry about.
Maura had to return to work once she knew I was stable, but she hired an attorney to represent me. She paid for his services out of pocket, and as one of the best personal injury attorneys in the country, his services didn't come cheaply. By the time I woke up, he had filed a lawsuit against Amtrak, the estate of the conductor of the train I was on, the estate of the conductor of the train we struck, the railroad that owned the tracks we were on, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Boston District Attorney's Office.
The NYPD was paying my medical bills out of an injured officer's fund, similar to workers compensation. Even though I had been summoned by the BPD to go testify, the NYPD had approved my travel as work-related and therefore the NYPD's compensation fund picked up my medical bills.
I understood the lawsuit against Amtrak and the conductors for their negligence and the difficulty in putting together a rescue, and the Port Authority for allowing trains to run out of Penn Station during the storm. I understood the suit against the railroad that owned the tracks we were on for failure to properly maintain the track signals. Initially though, I was confused by the suit against the Boston District Attorney's office. It wasn't until later on that I found out someone from their office had taken a payment under the table and leaked the news of my alleged death to the media. My mother had heard about it not through official channels but through the news via Susie Chang. Then I understood that lawsuit.
No lawsuit was going to heal me though, and I had a long, long road to recovery ahead of me.
A/N: More soon. :)