CHAPTER 5
Death was beckoning Anne. A heart rate monitor and ventilator buzzed, puffed, and beeped. Deputy Terry Mack stood over her, trying to get information about what had happened, fearful Anne would not make it. Doctors were simultaneously prepping her for exploratory surgery. They would learn that Anne had suffered a collapsed lung; buckshot had pierced her diaphragm, lung, and liver; one of those BBs was in her shoulder. Still, as they worked on Anne Bridges during those early-morning hours of April 18, 1998, nobody knew the extent of her injuries or how she’d gotten them.
“Ma’am, could you both please step out of the room at this point?” one of the doctors asked Anne’s sister, Joyce, and her husband, John, who had arrived at the hospital with a police escort from their Linden home.
Both stood stunned, speechless.
“Why? Why? . . . What’s going on?” Joyce finally asked.
“Please, ma’am, we need to do this. And you don’t want to see or hear it.”
One of the doctors had a chest tube in his hand and was about to force it, in a stabbing motion, like a knife, into Anne’s side.
As Anne drifted further into unconsciousness, and doctors forced a chest tube into her side in order to drain the blood and expand her lungs, Anne’s sister put her hands over her mouth in shock and left the room. John put his arm around his wife’s shoulder to comfort her.
“So when they put the chest tubes in, my sister heard me screaming all the way from outside,” Anne said later.
I am a Christian. I was raised Southern Baptist, but I don’t think what church you go to makes you a Christian. My parents made sure I was in church every time the doors opened, literally. Guess what? Being in church every Sunday did not make me a Christian.
Even though my parents made me go to church, I was not a Christian. That near-death experience I had during my ordeal in the hospital started me thinking about things. I did not, I should add, become a Christian until September 2003.
As Anne screamed, doctors drained the blood from her lungs and piped anesthesia into her veins so they could cut into her abdomen and chest cavity and begin exploratory surgery to hopefully save her life. Doctors knew Anne was bleeding internally. They just didn’t know where. They knew her diaphragm had been pierced. They knew she was losing blood pressure fast and needed to be stitched up before it was too late.
It was a bizarre feeling, Anne later explained. During this period of being in the hospital ER, prepping for surgery, she felt a tremendous pull toward her childhood and her parents. Her father, especially. It was as if she were being summoned to think about them from some outside, celestial source.
All my life, all I ever wanted was for Dad to be pleased with me. But I gave up on that during my teenage years. Don’t get me wrong, Dad was a good man, but it was kind of like he would look straight at me and yet never see me.
I hate it when people blame the way they are on their upbringing. Adults are what they want to be. You have a choice to be like you were raised or break the cycle. Even though I believe you can break the cycle, there are things that stay way back in a little pocket and sometimes come up.
My little pocket used to hold the thought that a man would never love me, since Dad didn’t. But Dad did love me. Just in his own way. I just could not see it then, when I was a kid. This one stupid thought in my mind had caused all types of trouble in my relationships with men over the years.
When she woke up from an induced coma, Anne had a strange feeling. She opened her eyes and looked around. Her hands were tied down to the sides of the bed. A vent tube was in her mouth. She could not talk. Her sore throat felt dry and rough as sandpaper. Swallowing burned. Everything around Anne felt so unfamiliar and different. Medical machines, with small red and blue lights, blinked and pulsated. Monitors with fluorescent green lightning-bolt-like graph lines keeping the pace of her heart. Other beds with patients apparently sleeping and not breathing on their own nearby.
I’m in a hospital, Anne told herself. That is clear to me.
Looking around, seeing the tubes feeding her veins, Anne knew she had been in big trouble. Feeling achy all over, she experienced a lot of pain in her chest. She looked down and saw a large bandage running almost the length of her torso.
Immediately, after the blow of realizing she was now awake for the first time after having had major surgery, Anne recollected what had happened back at Jimmy Williams’s house and why she was in the hospital. But still, something about the room struck Anne as unusual.
A nurse walked over when she realized Anne had opened her eyes. She took the vent tube out of Anne’s mouth and untied her arms.
“Hello, Miss Marsh. Do you know why you’re here?” the nurse asked.
“Miss Marsh”? Anne thought. Oh, my goodness, they have the wrong patient.
She had a hard time talking. Her throat was dry, raw, and scratched.
The nurse fed her sips of water.
“Do you think you can speak yet, Miss Marsh?” the nurse said after a time.
Anne shook her head no. The pain was too much. Her throat far too parched.
“Miss Marsh”? That name again, so she had heard it correctly.
“Do you know why you’re here, Miss Marsh?”
Anne nodded her head affirmatively.
Within a few more moments Anne fell asleep. Hours later, when she awoke, she could talk slowly, with lots of pain, whispering what she had to say.
“Where am I?” Anne asked.
“Do you know why you’re here, Miss Marsh?” the nurse asked again.
“ ‘Marsh’?” Anne was confused. She let it go, however. Then: “I do know why I am here. I was shot. Where am I, though?”
“You’re in a hospital ICU, Miss Marsh. You’ve been unconscious for two weeks.”
It had been two weeks since she’d been driven to John Paul Jones Hospital and transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Birmingham, Alabama, a day later. Anne learned that she had not been able to breathe on her own for one week straight. It was only on that day when she woke up that she had started to breathe again without the help of a ventilator.
Anne looked down toward the end of her bed. She saw a chart hanging off the side.
SALLY MARSH was listed under patient name.
This confused her.
“ ‘Sally Marsh’?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s your name.”
Still staring at the chart, Anne asked, “Why does it say Johns Hopkins . . . ?”
“You were transferred here a few weeks ago after your surgery, Miss Marsh.”
Anne was in a different hospital. She had been airlifted, actually. That first week after Anne was attacked, she was admitted to a hospital in another county, far away from Johns Hopkins, under the alias “Sally Marsh.”
“No one in either hospital knew me by my real name, except the hospital administrator and his assistant. My immediate family, too. I found out that they do this for surviving gunshot victims to stop the perpetrator from coming after them to ‘finish the job.’ ”
As Anne lay in her bed, finally awake after two weeks of forced sleep, she felt safer knowing that Jimmy Williams could not find her. As she thought about it, Anne had no idea what had happened to Jimmy. Had he been arrested, or was he on the run? Everything on the outside was unknown. All Anne understood was that she had faced death, beaten it for now, and was in a hospital fifty miles from home, under an alias.
She tried to comprehend what had made Jimmy, a man she’d dated and trusted, snap and viciously attack her. What made Jimmy turn into a demon that night? As Anne went through that evening and the days leading up to it, she could not fathom how in the world she had survived, or why Jimmy would want to hurt her. What had she done?
“Someone wanted me to stay alive,” Anne said later. “Someone was watching over me.”
The scar on Anne’s chest was not made by a small incision. She had been filleted open from the top of her chest, just below her neck, down to her navel. They had folded her chest and abdomen out like opening a book to get inside and see what was going on. That was when they found Anne’s liver had been pierced. So they fixed it and closed her back up.
“So, for the first week, the ventilator breathed for me,” Anne recalled. “Then they decided to go back in and have another look, because they knew something was still drastically wrong. I still could not breathe on my own. Which was when they found my wounded diaphragm.”
Anne soon realized that her hands had been tied down because she’d had an allergic reaction to the morphine they gave her for pain. She had pulled all of her wires and tubes out after the morphine injection.
* * *
Not long after Anne woke up, Joyce stopped by the ICU for a visit.
“How are you?”
“I’m alive,” Anne said. She explained what she could recall about being in the hospital, on top of what they had told her she went through over that two-week period she was in a coma.
“Thank God,” Joyce said.
Anne’s mother was there, too. Talking exhausted her. All Anne could really do was stare at them, hold hands, and be grateful for being alive. It was by God’s grace, she believed, that He had allowed her more time in the world—time she would never take for granted or squander in any way from that point on. What other reason could she fathom for surviving such a terrifying and violent ordeal. It had been something out of a horror film.
One day as Anne sat, waiting to go home from the hospital, and thought about things, she had a hard time understanding how Jimmy had turned into a monster and what led up to that violent night. Something had broken inside Jimmy. He’d gone from zero to one hundred, and Anne was searching for an answer.
It was, I don’t know how to articulate it properly. . . but it was a nightmare of the most unimaginable kind what happened inside Jimmy’s house. Apparently, as I spoke to my mother and sister and found out some facts from back on the night I was admitted, I learned that not only had I told Deputy Terry Mack what happened—I don’t remember telling him—but I gave specific detail that later checked out.