Piece: Part VII

That night Matthew didn’t go out. He hadn’t in a while, but everyone had been expecting him to bounce back. Instead, he threw a frozen dinner into the microwave and flipped on the news.

The apartment was simple. Having had to work on and off to afford school, he was still finishing his undergraduate degree at Boston University in Broadcast Journalism. As a result, he lived simply in a fourth-floor apartment off the Charles where he only had to catch one train to get to school, one more to get to work. His room looked more like the studios you see that were the very first of somebody famous, with bare wood floors and whitewashed walls, with paint speckles on the windows. He had minimalist furniture and a kitchen that seemed too clean to be that of a man. Everything was black and white with Matthew Carter. His apartment reflected that.

He sat staring at nothing, eating his Hungry Man chicken and potatoes, when a story caught his eye. It was the story of the accident he had been passing. The anchorwoman introduced it as a tragic mistake, passing it on to the on-site reporter, who explained that a glitch in the brake system of the semi had caused it to lose control, slamming into and instantly killing a young girl in her car, which then rolled into three different cars, killing three more people. The girl had been eighteen and a college student, and had been going home to New Hampshire for the weekend. The other three victims were all business people commuting home after work, two older women and a young man. Four different families now had to go through what Matthew had just gone through.

He clicked off the television and stared at it, his eyebrows furrowed in thought. The semi’s brake system, the woman had said. That is exactly what had happened the night Elisabeth died. She had also been hit from behind by a “glitch in the system” and had rolled over other cars. A family of three, another young girl and an older man going to his son’s house had also been killed because of the accident. The details were strikingly similar.

But it was dark and rainy that night, Matthew thought. I should stop letting my imagination get ahead of me. He tumbled off the couch and shuffled back into the kitchen to dispose of the plastic plate and fork. Besides, how could the two be related? They were both accidents…only accidents…

Matthew shook his head and looked at the clock. 9:00, he read, too late to go back to work, to early to get out. But I didn’t want to go out anyways. He brushed his teeth, locked the door, took a couple of Tylenol to get him to sleep, and fell into bed. He fell asleep almost instantly.