On the Other Side (24 page)

“ 'Til death us do part,” she said.

D
amita took a shower. She put on a comfortable pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, then went into the kitchen and fixed herself a turkey and cheese sandwich. She searched for a can of tomato soup she thought she had bought, but couldn't find it. She got pissed off all over again when she realized Neal had probably eaten it.

“Motherfucker doesn't even like tomato soup. He ate it just because he knows it's my favorite,” she said aloud.

She sat in the living room and ate her sandwich and looked at the television. The coverage of the Towers collapse was beginning to get to her, so she searched for something else to watch. She was able to find one channel with old sitcoms that didn't mention the World Trade Center, terrorists or anything even closely related. She felt good. She kept thinking she would feel even better if she had that tomato soup. That's when she extended her foot and kicked Neal.

For a moment she considered calling her mother and Carmella. They were probably both out of their heads with worry. But, she needed a moment to herself. She had to think. For the first hour, she thought Neal would simply get back up and start ranting and raving all over again. When he didn't get up, she checked his pulse. She remembered seeing people do that on television. She didn't
think she felt anything, but wasn't sure if she was looking in the right place, so she checked her own in the same place.

“Definitely dead,” she said matter-of-factly.

A bit of food in her stomach and clean clothes on her back, she was able to start to see things more clearly. She looked around the apartment. There was blood all over the place. The apartment itself looked like it had been ransacked. There were not only drugs out and visible to the eye, but she was sure somewhere in the apartment there were probably more illegal substances. She remembered one of her last conversations with Wendy.

“Wendy, if you had it to do all over again, would you make the same decision? Would you still leave it all behind; your family, your friends?

“I absolutely would. That's what we do, isn't it? Whatever we have to in order to stay alive?”

She realized that was exactly what she would have to do. She would run. She would miss her mother and Carmella, but if she could speak to them, they would agree with her. After all she had been through, she had no intention of going to prison for killing a piece of garbage like Neal. She tried to help make it easier, by telling herself that one day she might be able to see her loved ones again. However, logically, she knew she was lying to herself.

She remembered that Neal kept a large stash of money in the house. She assumed it was the money he used to buy his drugs. She would have to sneak out undetected and would not have an opportunity to go to a bank. She had much more in her account, but there would be no way for her to get to it. After searching for at least twenty minutes she found twenty thousand dollars inside of a box in Neal's underwear drawer.

“It's mine now,” she said.

The more she thought about it the more she realized that no
one had probably ever been presented with a better opportunity to disappear. The world had watched while the building she worked in collapsed to the ground. No one would ever question where she had gone or what had happened to her.

She felt remorse about the agony her mother would be forced to endure as she hoped upon hope that she had survived. At some point, her mother would probably try to find her at Carmella's and the apartment she once shared with Neal. Damita's only hope was that someone else would discover Neal's body and her mother would at least be spared that.

She went online to figure out where she should go and if there was anyplace she
could
go under the circumstances. All of New York City was a mess. Flying was out of the question and even if there hadn't recently been a terrorist attack involving an airplane and flights weren't grounded, she didn't think flying was the way to go. She considered using Amtrak, but that would delay her departure, since the train station would take some time to recover. The only way to go would be by Greyhound bus. She booked her trip to Seattle and a motel room in New York until it was time for her to leave. She wanted to wait until things calmed down, at least a little bit, before she tried to get out of New York. She didn't want to risk anyone coming to the house and finding her there, so she would have to find a way to leave the apartment before morning. She contacted a car company that could care less who she was and booked a ride to take her to the Staten Island motel room she had gotten. It was cheap and out of the way and no one she knew would ever find her there.

While she was packing, she thought of Brandon and smiled. His motto was to always travel light.

She booked both the trip to Seattle and her hotel room online.
Under the circumstances, everyone would probably assume that someone had either stolen or found her credit cards, and that was if anyone even noticed that her credit cards had been used.

As Damita fully expected, it was at least a week before it made sense for her to travel. During that week, she never left the hotel and ordered all her meals in. She considered using her credit cards to order her food, so that she would have more money available for use when she got to Seattle, but she didn't want to take any chances. She decided she would, however, stop at an ATM machine on her way to the bus station, when she was leaving, and get as much cash off her cards as possible. There were cameras at most of the ATMs and she realized that she would have to cover and disguise herself as much as possible, so as to be unrecognizable, if it should come to that. She colored her hair dark ash blonde and cut it severely short. She wore a sweatshirt with a hood, pulled securely around her head, so as to disguise her features—just in case.

Every time she looked at herself in the mirror, she couldn't help but think that she looked more like a teenage boy than the sophisticated, attractive woman she had once been. The irony of it all was unbelievable. From the moment they were married, Neal's jealousy about what she might do was what ruled his actions. Every man she encountered he viewed as a potential fuck buddy. Now, here she was, at a seedy Staten Island motel, all alone. And, after months of her husband beating her mercilessly, she was the one going into hiding for doing little more than defending herself.

Lying on the bed, she felt so lonely; not for a man, but for the life she once knew. There wasn't a situation, an accomplishment, a painful event that she couldn't count on her mother and her friends to help make better. Now, she was forced to make so many
hard decisions without being able to reach out to her mother or her friends. She thought of friends and realized there were people she spent years working with that could be dead now. She had no way of knowing and probably would never know. She thought of Underhill and how he had mentored her from the very start. Her vocational success had been due in large part to him. He was almost like a father to her. Damita wished Underhill was here right now. With all of his connections and his reputation, he would be able to help her. She considered trying to reach him, but fear ruled out and she put the thought out of her mind.

“This is useless thinking,” she said out loud.

“You need to get down to serious planning and you can't do that pining for the life you once had. You need to figure out how you can get a job and apartment with no credentials and how you can make the best use of the only money you've got.”

Damita suddenly laughed.

“You also need to stop talking to yourself, since it's usually a characteristic of crazy people.”

“The fact that I'm wondering if I'm crazy, may in fact be the very thing that makes me sane.”

She decided it was time for her to go to sleep. She was feeling punchy and knew it was a combination of her impending new life and the fact that she was beginning to feel a bit cagey after being locked away in a motel room for close to a week.

“Damita Whitmore, you're going to be fine. Tomorrow you will board that bus to Seattle and you will start your new life. No matter how much you may want to, you will not look back. You're a Seattle girl now. As long as you're smart and make all the right moves this could actually work. It had to work. As much as life with Neal felt like a prison and spending a week alone in a motel
room also felt like prison, she would never survive if she had to
actually
go to prison.

She began to fall asleep, not feeling all that much like Damita Whitmore or Damita Westman at all. One of the few things she kept from her old life; her computer, was sitting open on the bed. She gazed at the picture on the screen. In the picture she was standing in front of a Christmas tree in her mother's house, along with Carmella and Brandon, holding that very same computer. Her mother had given it to her as a gift. The picture was taken before any of them met Neal Westman.

Damita wondered if people realized how important the small moments in their lives really were. As she drifted off to sleep, she agonized over the fact that she would have to get rid of that computer that she held near and dear to her heart. Interestingly enough, it wasn't the value of the computer that mattered or even the work she had been able to use it for. It was those simple moments created by it that mattered most.

S
ince she arrived at the motel, Damita had been checking every day to see if there was any report of Neal being killed. Yet, there was none. She assumed that the news outlets were too occupied with covering the nine-eleven disaster to be concerned with a simple murder.

As odd as it may have seemed, Damita realized that what happened at the World Trade Center might have actually saved her. She wasn't sure why, but the entire time she was married to Neal, it was like she was another person. She allowed him to do things to her that she would never have allowed anyone else to do. And, as much as she would have liked to believe that she would have eventually let him go, she wondered if the disaster on nine-eleven hadn't happened, would things have played out the way that it did. After all, she had gone back to him time and time again no matter what he did to her. She might have done the very same thing again.

The next morning, Damita pulled out the checklist she had written on a pad she found in the motel room. She found her thoughts flowed better when she could see it in writing. Since a checklist of her escape plans wasn't something she wanted discovered if her computer was found, she decided a pen and pad would be best.

First on the list was to check on the status of the car. She checked that off the list, since she had already done it. Next on the list was
to ask the driver to stop at the first non-bank ATM she came across. Third on the list was to wait for her bus to arrive as far away from other passengers as possible.

The person at the hotel desk called to let her know that her car was outside. Damita looked around the motel room, yet another place she was leaving, and made sure that she hadn't left anything behind. She grabbed her bags and went to meet the car.

She was happy to see that the driver wasn't chatty like some of the cab drivers she had often gotten. He verified where she was going and that was all she heard out of him the entire trip.

Damita followed what she had written on the list and stopped at an ATM inside of a bodega. She withdrew as much cash as she could get from her collective cards, and left. She was nervous about the twenty thousand dollars that was in her backpack, especially since she noticed someone in the store watching her use her card. She had to use several cards, which meant she was holding a good deal of cash. If someone decided to rob her, they would not only get the money she had taken out of the ATM but also the twenty thousand dollars she was walking around with. When she exited the cab she considered leaving the bag with the money in the car, but she didn't trust that either. When she was done using the ATM, she walked outside and right back into the car.

The driver continued on to the bus station. She paid the driver in cash and left. She remembered the notation on her checklist about keeping to herself while she waited for the bus and stuck to it. Unfortunately, within minutes of arriving she noticed there was a man watching her. At first, paranoia took hold and she was sure that he was an undercover police officer sent to find her and arrest her for murder. Then, she remembered that even with the short hair and the hood pulled sharply around her head, she was
still an attractive woman. He wasn't sent to find her. He was checking her out.

Finally, the bus arrived and Damita's plan was to sleep through the entire trip. She found a window seat, close to the back and threw the backpack she was carrying in the seat. She had already given her larger bag to the driver to put under the bus. So, all that was left was to settle in. Her plan was to spend as much of the time on the bus sleeping as she could. If and when she made it to Seattle safe and sound, she would have a long road ahead of her. The long bus ride might be her only opportunity to simply sit back, relax and let someone else do the driving.

Unfortunately, she thought her plan might be ruined, when the man that had been staring at her while they waited for the bus, got on and sat right next to her. Surprisingly, all he said to her was hello. He pulled out a book and began reading.

After six hours of trying to sleep comfortably on a Greyhound bus, Damita was well aware of how flawed her plan to sleep most of the way really was.

She decided that instead of sleeping, she would use the time to think. She pulled out her notepad and began writing. She made lists for everything; things she might need where she was going, what her next steps should be. She found it helped her pass the time and she figured if it helped organize her thoughts then that was even better.

Her brain in overdrive, sleep finally overtook her. When she woke up, the man sitting next to her was holding her notepad.