Coming Back (4 page)

Christie

For the first time in weeks, my stomach seemed unclenched enough to get a halfway-normal portion of food into it.  My mom smiled hopefully throughout the meal, as if seeing something really promising, and the smile stuck with her even after we finished eating and went to the living room while my dad went to do some busy-work in the front yard.

There was something incredibly relaxing about even such a short time playing with King.  The animal gave his friendship easily and, perhaps importantly, without any questions, accusations, or pity.

My dad always said you could tell a lot about a man by the way he treated animals, and King was clearly thriving.  I remembered how Dean was always that anti-jock at school, the talented athlete who didn’t use his size and status to terrorize the kids in the chess club, and it was nice to have some kind of tenuous confirmation that the personality trait had stuck with him into adulthood, especially as a police officer.

We probably would have dated if it hadn’t been for my anti-cliché policy that dictated that I, as a cheerleader, was
not
allowed to get into a relationship with a football player.  Nice guy or not, I’d stood my ground and ended up with the unlikeliest of knights in shining, tattooed armor.

Nick.  My stomach tightened up again as the loss hit me anew, just like it did every time I slipped up and let myself think about him.

I’d been taken just days after I learned of his death and thrown into a fight for my own life, all the while knowing that even if I won that battle I’d never feel his arms around me again, never be able to plan our future together.  We’d each heard ‘I love you’ from the other for the last time.

Part of me, a big part, felt guilty about having never been able to say a proper goodbye.  It was wrong, so wrong.  He had filled my life with so much love. I should have gone to his grave, or his memorial, or wherever his ashes were spread on the way home from the hospital, but everybody kept telling me there was plenty of time for all that and to just concentrate on me for now, and nothing I’d said so far had swayed them from that stance.

“Mom?”

She looked up from her knitting and Amber glanced up from her Kindle.  One look at my face seemed to strip away my mom’s lunchtime optimism.

“Yes?”

“I- I want to talk about Nick.”

My mom’s hands dropped to her lap, needles, half-finished sweater and all, and she looked at Amber, who laid her eBook reader flat on her lap.  They exchanged a look that attempted to convey a lot more than a facial expression was capable of.

“Please,” I said.  “I know you don’t think I’m ready to deal with it, but I’ll never be ready.  I have to do this, I have to know where to go when I need to talk to him.  I really need to talk to him, Mom, even if it’s all in my head.  I miss him so much.”

My mom didn’t answer me, instead talking to my sister.  “Amber, can you bring your father in?”

“OK.”

Amber stood and left the room while my mom carefully folded her knitting back into the little basket she kept her works-in-progress in.  I got the feeling she was doing her best to postpone having to broach this topic, but it did look like they were ready to tell me something at least.  I bit my tongue as I waited.

As Amber returned with my dad, Mom came over and sat with me on the couch.  Once their shoes were off, my dad sat on my other side while Amber knelt in front of me with her hand on my knee.

I looked at each of them in turn as if they’d gone crazy.  This felt kind of like one of those interventions I’d seen on TV years ago rather than a response to my reasonable request to know what had happened to Nick.  They were looking from one to the other, hoping somebody else would start talking, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Please.  I need to know.  I have to say goodbye.  So many other things too, but I need that.  Does he have a grave?  Did… did anything ever come back home
to
bury?  Does he have a memorial next to mine?”

I looked from face to face until my mom finally spoke.  “Christie, you know we’ve been talking with your counselor, getting his advice about what he thinks is best under your… circumstances.”

“I know that.”

“OK. Yes.  We… we just wanted you to know that we haven’t spoken about it, not because we wanted to keep you in the dark and not because you don’t deserve to know… it’s just…”

“I get it, I get it.  Really, I do.  Can somebody please just spit it out?”

My dad cleared his throat and put his arm over my shoulder.  “Christie.  Nick is… alive.”

For a moment I didn’t even process what he said, it had as much effect as if he’d just blurted out some gibberish.  Then a sledgehammer of realization hit me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me.

My vision went blurry as I felt my parents take my hands and hold me down as I started crying and shaking.  A thousand questions fought tooth-and-nail to be the first out of my mouth and left me spewing forth the exact kind of nonsense between sobs that I’d thought my dad had said.

Where was he?  Could they take me to him?  Why didn’t he come see me?  Was he OK?  Was he in a coma?  Did he know I was back?

Waves of hot flushes followed intermissions of cold sweat as I swayed between anger and confusion at his lack of contact and clinging at a straw of hope and joy at the very fact that he was alive.  He was alive.  Really?

My stream of half-realized questions took on a distant-sounding quality and the room started going dark as if a cloud had flown in front of the sun.  It wasn’t until everything started spinning that I realized I was fainting and the most potent smelling-salts in the world couldn’t have stopped it.

Christie

What were you supposed to wear for a day like this?  There were no style guides in existence that addressed the issue, but as I did my best to camouflage the worst evidence of my exhaustion with make-up, I desperately wished there was.

I also desperately wished I had more skill with make-up.  Aside from fainting, I hadn’t had any sleep in a couple of days and no
good
sleep in a year and a half.

In the mirror I could see that spark of hope, excitement even, that had kept me awake last night.  It was a welcome change from the usual terror, but seeing that spark surrounded by the signs of overwhelming tiredness reminded me of everything that had happened and began to chip away at my feeble optimism with painful questions and comments.

Look at yourself.  Do you think there’s enough make-up in the world to cover everything wrong with you?

Tears threatened to undo, with streaks running down my face, what little good that I might have done with a make-up brush.  Downstairs, the landline rang and somebody answered it on the second ring.  A jolt of fear gripped me in the chest as it did every time the phone had rung or the door had been knocked today.

Nobody can love you now, Christie.  You’re damaged goods.

“It’s Nick.  Nick can.  He will.”

What if this is some crazy shock-therapy scheme from your counselor?  What are you going to do when they flick on a light and say ‘Surprise!  Nick really
has
been dead this whole time!’?

“Shut up.”

“Who are you talking to?”

I turned to see my sister leaning against the doorframe to the bathroom as she peeked in.  The look of extreme concern hadn’t changed on her face, nor my parents’, since they had told me Nick was alive yesterday.  Whatever small snowflake of hope the news had brought to my hell, it really didn’t look like they shared in any small optimism.  It was one thing that fueled the idea it might all be a trick.

“Nobody.  Myself, I guess.  I always did talk too much, right?”

“Well, you are
my
sister.  Hey, that was Nick on the phone.  He says he’s almost here, you want to come down and wait?  He’ll only be a few minutes.”

I tried to nod casually and walk towards her, but instead I dropped the brush on the floor and froze with my fists and jaw clenched against the sudden urge to sob uncontrollably.  My face went red with the effort, and for a second I felt like a malfunctioning pressure cooker about to explode.  A gasp managed to force its way past the blockade, which relieved some of the pressure.

“Is it…
real
?” I asked.  “Is this really happening?”

Amber took a couple of steps, picked up the brush, and set it beside the bathroom sink, putting her arm around my waist at the same time.  She rested her head on my shoulder and gave me a little hug.

“It’s real,” she said without any enthusiasm. “You wanna come down?”

“Yeah.”

I was surprised by how much I leaned on my sister to get to the living room.  My dad was on his feet near the door closest to the hallway and front door while my mom was sitting on the sofa, wringing her hands.

Amber semi-led me to a spot next to my mother.  She looked like she was just about to say something when slow, heavy footsteps made their way up the stairs in front of the house and we all looked in that direction.

I reached out for my mom’s hands in her lap next to me and held them so tight that the wringing she’d been giving them was like a gentle caress by comparison.  My heart was booming in my ears as my dad left the room before the knock even sounded on the door, and my breaths came quick and shallow.

The door clicked as my dad opened it and I heard his voice, not the words, just his voice say something in low tones.  Then, likewise too low to grasp the actual words, I heard a voice I would have recognized anywhere. The memory of it had pulled me through some dark times I thought would never end.  Nick’s voice.

I could feel myself shaking as I stared intently at the door.  I didn’t dare blink for fear of fainting again or, worse, finding out when I opened my eyes again that I was back in my room and this was all a dream.

My breath caught in my throat when I saw movement in the doorway, and my father stepped through.  Right behind him, ducking down a bit to not bump his head on the top, came Nick.

I snatched my hands back from my mother and covered my mouth in disbelief as I sucked in my breath with a loud gasp.  His neck and arms had a lot more scars than when I last saw him, but it was Nick,
my
Nick was alive and whole.

All the disbelief I felt was mirrored on Nick’s face as I stood up.  He looked like he was seeing a ghost, his jaw working as if trying to find the words to everything he’d planned on saying.

After all this pain and hopelessness, the love of my life was three steps away from me.  I didn’t know what to say either.

Two steps away.

The whole room and everybody else seemed to fade to background noise, leaving Nick and I in our own little universe.  I reached out towards him with both hands.

One step away.

I was right in front of him, looking up into the eyes I’d always been able to see my future in.  If he was really here, then I could have it all back.  I could love and be loved, I could sleep safely in his arms, I could have something to look forward to again.  A purpose.  I could find myself.

My hands were hovering over his chest, a bare inch away from touching him, but I couldn’t quite do it yet.  How many times had I dreamed or hallucinated this?  How many times had I reached out for him, only to have him dissolve into smoke?

I looked him up and down, taking in his features and refreshing my memory if indeed this wasn’t all a product of my imagination anyway.  I silently begged any God that might be listening for it to be real and looked up into his eyes again, trying to lose myself in there.

If this was a dream that came crashing down around me when I touched him, I wanted those eyes to be the last thing I saw.  I swore that I’d never dream again if this wasn’t real.

Please…

I laid my hands on his chest.  It was solid,
he
was solid, I could
feel
him more clearly than any dream.  He put his hands on my shoulders and slid them around to my back, his strength all around me.  I slipped my arms around his back too and held on for dear life.

“Christie…”

“I missed you, babe,” I said, and cried against his chest, hidden from everybody else by his arms.

Christie

There was no telling how much time had passed when I ran out of tears.  When I looked up, I saw that Nick had shed more than a few of his own on to the top of my head.

Reaching around his neck and pushing myself up on to the tips of my toes, I pulled him down into a kiss.  I didn’t know what I was expecting.  Deep down it may have been a fireworks display, for all his scars to disappear and for everything that had happened to me to be eradicated from history like magic.

The reality fell short of that mark by a long way. Something was wrong with Nick.  He wasn’t ‘all there’ in the kiss.  Something was wrong.

I shook it off.  It had been so long since we’d kissed that we might have forgotten how to do it.  Plus with the nerves, the audience, and everything, it was silly to expect a top ten kiss of all time.  Everything would be OK, Nick was really here.

“It’s really you, Christie?  I can’t believe it,” he said.

I shrugged and rested my head against his chest again.  His heart was beating as fast as mine was as he pulled me against him protectively.

“Hi Amber, Vera,” he said in a wavering voice over my head to my sister and mother.  “Would you mind if Christie and I went out back to talk in private?  There’s so much…”

“Yes please,” I said, though apparently the question hadn’t been directed at me.

“Christie, maybe it’d be better to stay with us to listen to what Nick has to say,” said my dad.

“No, some privacy sounds good.  It’s OK, Dad.  We’ll just be in the back yard.”

My dad looked to my mom and then back to me.  “We’ll be just inside, OK?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

I held on to Nick’s arm as we walked out the back door, amazed at just how
many
more scars he had.  My heart sank thinking about what he must have been through and that I wasn’t there to help him through it.

We sat on the two-seater swing my dad had put in the garden a long time ago and stared awkwardly at each other for a few seconds.  I licked my lips and gulped.

“Where do we even begin?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  I don’t even know how many times I’ve dreamed of this, how many times I’ve thought about all the things I would say if I only had the chance.  Now you’re here and I don’t know how to say it.  I… I wanted to come sooner, straight away, but your family said that your
counselor
said it was important to let you find your feet a bit first.  Keep you away from the media, watching TV, reading about yourself online, major shocks, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah, they told me yesterday.  I kinda would’ve expected you to ignore all that and come anyway though.”

Nick smirked ruefully.  “You were always my acid test for what was right and wrong, you know?  And this was a tough one.  Even now that I’m here, I don’t know what the right thing to say is.”

“It’s too much for one conversation, I guess, but I’ve got a lot of questions.  My family said you wanted to be the one to tell me everything that you’d been up to, what happened last year and everything.  I dunno… how about we start at the beginning?  Like, what happened to you?  I thought you were
dead
.  The guy knocked on our door and gave me the speech and everything, Nick.  What
happened
?”

“I almost
did
die, it was random luck I got out of there.  We were clearing out some little town, building by building, and there was this explosion and bullets everywhere.  My buddies were all getting shot around me.  I got grazed by one, then knocked out by something.  I was the only one to survive, and that was only because the local insurgents handed me over to a crazy son of a bitch to torture me.”

I reached out and touched his arm, tracing my fingers on some of his new scars.  “That’s where all these came from?”

“Yeah.”

“Babe, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to… to help you.”

“Don’t be sorry for anything, Christie.  Not you.  It’s my fault you were out that night,” said Nick.

“It was a… a bad night, Nick.  But we can make it better, we can have our lives back.  Are you still in the Marines?”

“No.”

“That’s good.  What are you doing with yourself then?”

“I… um… I live out in L.A. now. I do a bit of work in security and I’ve also had a few gigs consulting in fight choreography for movies…”

“Wow!  That’s… that’s incredible!”

“But, Christie, there’s something I have to tell you.”

Something about his tone made me feel like I was heavy beyond belief, like the world was sucking me down.  The way he said it, the way he kissed me, made me think that, maybe, he was about to say something every bit as bad as I had feared when trying to put some make-up on.

“Please don’t say it,” I whispered.

“I have to.”

“No.” I shook my head.  “Please, don’t. 
Please
.  Can’t you… please… can’t you just hold my hand?  Can we be quiet together?”

I grabbed his hand before he could answer and held it in my lap, leaning my head on his shoulder and wishing as hard as any girl ever wished for anything that he didn’t
really
have anything he needed to say.  Not anything that needed a warning like
that
.

For maybe five minutes we sat in silence, looking out at my dad’s garden and over the fence to the forest.  It wasn’t overly different from the one I’d fled through for an eternity, the one that killed me a little bit more every night in my dreams.

Seeing that resemblance now made me try even harder to wrap myself in this little illusion.  I wanted to sit here and pretend forever, because reality hurt too much.  In the real world, people said ‘there’s something I have to tell you.'

The trees rustled and a cool breeze invaded from the outside world, stirring my hair.  It would have been a comforting breath of fresh air under most circumstances, but it made Nick shiver and my breath hitched at the same time, shattering whatever spell I might have been wishing to weave around us.

“Christie… while you were gone…”

“No.”

“I’ve been with somebody else,” Nick finished.

I pulled away from him, drawing my hand back and wrapping my arms around myself.  I felt small, tiny really.  Next to him almost everybody looked insignificant, but I thought the next breeze might blow me away like a dandelion seed if I couldn’t fix this, if I couldn’t save us.

The thought of Nick with another woman cut me like broken glass.  How could he touch somebody else the way he had touched me?  Did he reach out to her in the night, just to feel her there?  Did they dream of their future?

What about me?  Somehow I shrunk even further, and shame almost squeezed my throat shut as I grasped at whatever straws I could, real or imagined, to rescue my heart and soul.

“It’s… it’s OK.  I forgive you.  It was a crazy time.  I-I understand if you had a little…” I squeezed my eyes shut against a wave of grief that transcended into physical pain.  “Little fling.  I love you, Nick.  We’re going to be OK, right?  Us?”

I was humiliated.  What kind of a person is OK with their partner cheating on them?

Nick couldn’t look me in the eye.  “Christie,” he said quietly.  “I’m still
with
her.  I’m staying with her, but I want to be there for you too.”

“W-what?”  Every breath hitched now, turning me into a stammering mess.  “N-no!  Don’t s-say that!  Don’t
say
that, babe, not you!”

“I’m so sorry, Christie.  You deserve…”

“Who i-is it?” I asked.  “Janet Turk?  She always h-had a thing for y-you.  She…”

“No, it’s not Janet, I haven’t seen her since your… funeral.  Her name’s Harper, and… I love her.  She’s…”

“H-Harper who?  I d-don’t know any Harpers.”

“Harper Bayliss,” he said.

“L-like the actress?”

“Literally, the actress.  I met her in L.A.”

If I thought I’d run out of tears before, I was wrong.  The whole world seemed to have moved on without me. I was easily replaced.  A movie star? 
A movie star?

“You
fuck
!”

The words came out strong, no stutter, not held back by the sobbing.  I latched on to that strength, borne of anger though it was, and gave him a shove, my hands slapping against his shoulder and chest and not moving him much.  He was just too big and I was just too small.

I held on to the seat and sucked in air through my clenched teeth like I might fall to pieces if I didn’t concentrate on keeping myself together.  I looked everywhere for somewhere to escape to and for where that awful, broken, groaning sound was coming from.  It took altogether too long to realize the sounds were coming from me.

The eye of the storm came suddenly and I went silent again, shrugging off Nick’s hand, which he’d put on my back at some point.  I took a deep breath and let it out.

When you drop an ice cube into a glass of water at room temperature, the outside of the cube expands faster than the inside and the ice cracks.  In that silence, my heart made the same sound.

I winced in pain for a second. “So… you’re gone again?”

“I’m right here, Christie.  I want to give you everything I can to help you through this.  I just can’t give you… that.”

“Some fake-ass Hollywood bitch.  It didn’t take you long, did it?”

“She’s not a... she’s something special.  Listen, I didn’t just ‘move on,’ Christie, I was
fucked
when I got back and found out what happened to you.  I went to your
funeral
and…”

“Oh boo-
fucking-
hoo!  It was
my
funeral, you asshole!” I yelled.

The eye of the storm was passing as quickly as it had arrived, and a hurricane of uncontrollable emotions was tearing me up inside, debris hitting vital organs. I thought I might start frothing at the mouth.  I couldn’t take it much longer.

“You’re gone.  So go.” I said quietly, feeling the last of my self-control slipping away.

“I can’t leave like this, Christie, I have to explain…”

“Go.”

Why was he still talking?

“Go!”

Why was he still
here
?

“
GO!
”

Why was this
happening
?

“
GOOOOOOO!
”

I was hurt more than I could have believed possible.  I was screaming so loud it hurt my own ears.  My throat was raw with the sheer quantity of pain and anger that was exploding out of me, like I’d swallowed dynamite.

This was it, this was the scream I’d feared when I heard Nick was dead.  This was the scream that I wouldn’t be able to stop.  Through a blur of tears and red haze I realized I was hitting him, and I jumped away with self-loathing.   I brought one hand to my mouth as I ran for the back door of my parents’ house, as if my soul might abandon ship through there otherwise.

Nick was following, but my dad and sister came out before I reached the door and I ducked between them without slowing down.  I heard voices behind me but couldn’t make out what they said.

I was through the door before it had even swung shut of its own accord after Amber and my dad had exited, passing my mom in the hallway as I scrambled for my room.  The voices still followed me even as I slammed my door shut and looked for somewhere to hide in my room.  I only heard one thing for sure, from a voice I recognized but which couldn’t possibly have been anywhere but in my head.

They gave up on you pretty quick, bitch
.