“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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Since 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.