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CHAPTER 1
CHRISTOPHER
Standing in the now quiet emergency room heightened my senses. There was no rush of doctors or nurses, no machine blaring, nothing that hinted at life being present. I kept thinking,is she really gone?I waited for her to pull out the tube taped to the side of her mouth, sit up so she could get off the bloody sheets, and remove the IV port still taped to her left arm. I could see blood splattered all over, and my mind kept drifting back and forth between the smell of iron and the bloody mess on the floor. I imagined this was what a war zone hospital room looked like. As I stared at her limp, lifeless body, I realized for the first time that her lips were turning blue and her skin had an ashy paleness that I had only seen in the movies. The reality of death started to set in.
“I’m sorry to say, sir, but your wife succumbed to her injuries caused by the car crash…. We did all we could, but she is gone.”
Those words echoed in the background as I stood glued to the ground, my legs feeling limper with each passing minute.
The police called me on my cell phone before dawn, waking me from what must’ve been a nasty nap, and said my wife had been in a car crash. The accident occurred just ten minutes from our country ranch home in Highland Park Texas.
I’d hurried to the hospital in a frenzy. My mind was still foggy, yet all that mattered to me was making sure she was okay. Still, this clenching feeling in my chest would not go away, making my ride to the hospital gut-wrenching.
When I arrived, the doctors had already pronounced her dead. I couldn’t believe what I had heard, so I asked if I could see her to ensure they had not missed anything. I remembered a story I heard a while back of a man that had been pronounced dead and woke up a few hours later. I knew it was a long shot, but it was all I had to keep myself from falling apart.
As much as I was trying, I couldn’t pay attention, my mind in a daze. The walk to the emergency room seemed longer with each step I took. I kept replaying our last moments together. We didn’t have a perfect marriage, but I loved her and our family. The call from the police was shocking. I wasn’t sure how to put things back together without her being alive. The room door swung open with just a slight push from the nurse, and that’s when I saw her. My first instinct was to rip the sheets back, but the blood,so much blood, stopped me in my tracks. I think that was when I knew she had indeed left me alone. Till death do us part.
The doctor was talking, but I could only stare at my wife’s body on the gurney while one nurse put a sheet over her torso and another put the defibrillators back. I could tell they were uncomfortable with me being in the room. They hastened to cover her distorted body and the blood that seemed to overpower my senses. I stood frozen in time. I couldn’t comprehend what had just happened, and as I stared at the doctor with glossy, tired eyes, I remained expressionless. Motionless.
Victoria was slim and had beautiful long black hair. Her high cheekbones were strikingly beautiful and made her stand out in any crowd but it was her green eyes that captivated everyone that saw her. As I stared at her, I couldn’t remember what she looked like. Her green eyes were now grey and her beautiful black locks looked like molasses, sticking to anything they touched.
When the doctor asked if I needed more time to say my final goodbyes, I walked away silently. The tubes protruded from her body, and the smell of iron from all the blood filled my nostrils. It was too much for me.
I knew there was no one left for me to say goodbye to. As I walked down the hall in a daze, doing my best to avert my gaze into the other rooms separated by curtains, I focused on my blood-stained hands. The blood seemed to cover her in a caked, dark mess.
I pushed my way out of the emergency room entrance and headed outside. As soon as I passed the sliding glass doors that separated the outside world from the sterile but terrifying and cold hospital, I threw up in the bushes just a few feet away. I was lucky to have made it that far.
A few nurses stopped to ask if I was okay, but I shooed them away and walked briskly to my Tesla, threw the door open, slipped inside, and put the drive mode to home.
As I sat in my leather seat and let the car drive, I tried to replay the events in my head. I was in shock; Victoria was in an accident and now she was gone. Was I dreaming? Was this really happening?
Victoria was driving her Tesla; she always drove in auto mode. This didn’t make sense; how did she get in a wreck? I felt like I was forgetting something.
Damn. Another blank.Why was I having so many of these today?The sun was barely starting to rise over the horizon, yet I couldn’t remember a thing from the past six hours since that dreaded call. The last thing I remembered was talking with Victoria, and now the doctors were saying she was dead! Could all this be possible?
When I woke up to the phone call from the cops, I realized I was wearing the same khaki pants and my $5,000 blue Loro Piana polo shirt I had on the day before; I reeked of alcohol and body odor. My Louis Vuitton loafers were nowhere to be found.Did I even shower when I got in? What exactly happened last night?
As an oil billionaire with multiple sites in my home state of Texas, oil fields in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, and even locations in Bahrain and Iraq, I am always very conscious of my appearance. I needed to look the part; my mother ensured that growing up. My thick brown hair is always well groomed, and I guarantee my tailored suits fit perfectly to accentuate my muscular six-foot-four frame. That was not the case today; my mother certainly would disapprove. Despite all these random thoughts, my mind seemed more preoccupied with my current dilemma.
It took roughly twenty minutes to get home, my eyes barely noticed the surrounding mansions and cottages that led into the countryside of Highland Park. There was only one ranch within one hundred miles that was as magnificent as the Brooks’ ranch. With one thousand acres of lush green pastures and two five thousand square foot stables. The main residence is sprawled across forty thousand square feet, boasting fifteen bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, and two half baths. The drive into the main residence is five miles long and paved with red cobblestones. It forces visitors to admire the pristine acreage on both sides of the perfectly built red wood-stained fence.
There is a staff of fifteen employees who maintained the main residence and another thirty that maintain the grounds and the stables. Each stable was home to five stallions. I owned six black Thoroughbreds, two red Dutch Warmbloods, one brown Selle Francais, and one white Arabian. The value of my herd is $4.5 million dollars.
As I got out of the car, I looked at my hands and noticed they were shaking and bloody I tried my hardest to remember the night before I fell asleep, but nothing came to mind.
I made my way to the study, now blinking back tears. The sight of the massive island in the kitchen brought back memories of the grand parties I hosted every Christmas for the last 7 years. The Dallas elite would all line up for invitations every year just to see how much money I would spend. Victoria was not very fond of the events but she was the main attraction, her beauty and grace made the event special. Every man wanted her and every woman wanted to be her.
The recollection of the morning events rushed over me like a raging storm, one that had every intention of tearing my body and mind to pieces. The second grief stage was setting in, and I wanted to stay in denial. I felt comfortable in denial, silently hoping this was all a bad dream. But the pounding in my head kept reminding me that was not the case.
My study was my sanctuary, the twenty feet high ceilings made the two thousand square feet room look bigger than it was. The two built-in bookshelves behind my oversized mahogany desk were home to books that here handed down to me by my father. They were all heirlooms and a few were so rare, the only other copies left in the world were rumored to be housed in the Vatican Library.
Victoria was the love of my life, we met at one of my mother’s many Sunday socials in Dallas eight years ago. “Who is that mom?” She quickly glanced at me and gave me a disapproving look. “No son, I would steer clear of that one, she is from New Jersey and has all the makings of a liberal tree hugger.” I couldn’t resist her charm.
“Excuse me mom.”
I remember listening intently as she captured the attention of a small audience on the east corner of the plush lawn. “The way of the future is electricity and clean fuels. Oil is a dying industry much like coal. If it wasn’t for the greed of the 1%, we would not have to worry about oil polluting the ocean.”
Her beauty captivated me despite her harsh rhetoric about my family business. “So, are you going to ignore the millions of dollars the oil industry has donated to environmental causes? Do they mean nothing?” I was not surprised when she quickly responded. “Do you mean the blood money?” “That is quite harsh, isn’t righting wrongs worth anything?” She looked at me with her gorgeous green eyes and I would have given her everything I owned. “Perhaps but isn’t an ounce of prevention better than a pound of cure?” That night we debated for hours about global warming, politics, and the economy. I was in love.
