I could feel the heat from the flames even as I walked away. It would be nothing to abandon my old life. My stressful job, my lack of a love life, my relationship with my son strained and nearly non-existent. There was nothing there for me anymore. That old life was burning up in the wreckage of my lexus.
In the darkness on the side of the highway I snuck away as the rescue vehicles raced to the scene. There was no one to save. Albert Manning was better off dead. I'd become someone new, someone who didn't have all those complications to burn away.
I had plenty of money with me, and of course the credit cards would be no good. I could get most of my money out with the atm before such a transaction would be suspicious, and the first atm machine I saw I bee-lined for and punched in the numbers, took the cash. In the darkness, in the artificial light of the atm kiosk, I felt a weight lifting off of me. No more surgeries, no more hospital employees to deal with, no more patients. No more agonizing over Craig and what I had done to him, no more agonizing over his state of mind, his fragile psyche. Now that father was dead, no longer an issue for him. I could see that he was bonding with Joey. It felt like a caustic solution in my veins, searing and tearing pain. Joey Jeremiah. I hated him. First he took Julia and now Craig but if I really looked at it I knew that I had caused them to leave. I had treated them badly and they had left. It wasn't Joey's fault. It was mine.
I walked, trying to leave that old life behind. I still thought of Craig, of his angry and tear stained face, how he yelled back at me. He'd never done that before. And he was right. I'd tried to change and had failed miserably. The darkness enveloped me and I kind of felt like a vampire, some sinful creature who couldn't help their vile nature. I was the enemy in Craig's story of his life. The villain. I knew about the whole gestalt of it, I was the one who beat him, who wouldn't let him see his sister or talk about his mother. I was the one he had feared and he would, to some extent, always fear me. Maybe a quick movement or a similar tone of voice would recall it to him like an acid flashback and he'd flinch away, and his eyes would glaze as he remembered something from his past.
What would it lead to for him? What would be the horrible sequela of how I had treated him? Would he be overly fearful, thinking Joey would react to his transgressions as I had? Would he himself become violent? Acting it out at school or with girlfriends or his own children? Would he start abusing substances? Would he develop some form of a mental illness that the trauma of abuse had in part triggered? Any or all of these were possibilities. I felt the guilt and shame of that like a knife going right through me.
I walked, still able to feel the heat from the blaze, my car and my life up in flames. I saw a hotel and headed toward it, its lighted sign a little beacon in this dark night.