Coming Back (5 page)

Dean

When I arrived at the Jayne household for what I hoped, by all accounts, would be Christie’s first voluntary excursion from home aside from her counseling appointments, I was feeling pretty optimistic.  Unfortunately, Christie’s dad answered the door and it was clear that things had taken a turn for the worse with Nick’s visit.

It took a lot of convincing for him to begrudgingly tell me to go around the house, not
through
the house with King, because Christie was sitting out back again.  I let the big dog off the leash as we went around the side, and he was already almost up the back stairs by the time I was at the corner.

Christie was leaning forward with her hands gripping the front of the seat, looking like parts of her body were in disagreement about whether to get up or stay where she was, and the internal debate may have been going on for some time.  King had his head in her lap, ears flattened back as he tried to feel out the mood of his ball-throwing friend from a few days ago.

It was a few moments before Christie even noticed me, and when she looked up, I could see some of the turmoil that was raging behind those eyes of hers.  Sure, it was mixed with pain and confusion too, but it was better than dull hopelessness. It was a spark of Christie in there, a hint of a girl with some fight left in her.

“Dean?”

“In the flesh.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“It’s Thursday, you were going to come out with King and me, remember?”

“It’s Thursday?”

I nodded, and Christie looked down at King, who was giving her the puppy-eyes.  I could see some of Christie’s tension unwinding under the assault of his cuteness, and it wasn’t long before he was getting scratched behind the ear.

“Sorry, Dean. It’s… it’s just not a good time.  I don’t know if there
are
any good times anymore, but I don’t think I can go anywhere today.”

“Oh?  Why not?” I asked, knowing a good portion of the answer already.

“Turns out, Nick’s alive.” Her eyes narrowed. “Did you know?”

“Yeah, I knew.  I didn’t know
you
didn’t know though.  Didn’t seem like a very good topic to bring up.  That must have been a shock.”

Christie shook her head as if she couldn’t believe my understatement.  “Yeah, a bit.  I thought, maybe, everything was going to be OK again.  Everybody must think I’m pretty stupid.”

“Nobody thinks…” I began, but Christie was letting it all out.

“I mean not only do I not get my life back but, just to rub salt in the decapitation wound, I learn that what I thought I had in my life wasn’t even real.  Everybody moved on so easily.  Even Nick didn’t love me enough to hold on.  How quick did he jump into bed with the next pretty face?”

Christie’s voice was rising.  King’s ears, which had perked up from the scratching, started laying back down again, and he looked up at her with concern.

“He started talking about how hard it was to go to, get this,
my
funeral!  Can you believe that?”

I sighed and climbed the steps, taking one of the other seats and leaning forward with my elbows on my knees and fingers loosely interlaced.  I took a deep breath and hoped I wasn’t about to put my foot in my mouth.

“Can I be a little blunt?”

Christie looked at me warily.  “I guess.”

“First of all, I don’t think Nick moved on lightly or even intentionally.”

“You’re on
his
side?”

“This isn’t really about sides, Christie, it’s about some things I know.”

“And what might those be?”

“It’s one of the worst things in the world to go to the funeral of somebody you love.  Especially if it’s before their time.”

I paused, wondering if I could really dredge up those feelings again.  The police psychologist had only been marginally successful in getting me to talk about it before I’d moved back to Warfields.  Maybe I needed to talk about it as much as Christie needed to hear some home truths.

“After I graduated from the academy, I worked in New York.  Did you know that?”

Christie shook her head.

“Yeah.  I thought it was a place where I could really do some good.  There’s… uh… definitely enough work for the police,” I said.

“You know somebody who died?”

“Yeah, I worked with her.  Kathryn.”

I hadn’t said her name out loud, hadn’t
heard
it in so long now, I was shocked at how hard the sound of it hit me again.  Like a shotgun blast of guilt.  She’d done her best to fill my life with love, and since she’d been gone, I’d been doing my best to forget.  She deserved better.

“More than work?” Christie asked, quietly.

I nodded. “That kind of thing is frowned upon, but so common too, you know?”

Christie shrugged.  “I can believe it.  I guess you’re all thrown into these intense situations so often, it’s only natural that you come to rely on each other and then…”

“Yeah, that’s it, that’s exactly it.  She was a dog handler, a great one, and she got called out to this domestic disturbance where neighbors heard a whole lot of yelling and stuff breaking.  She was supposed to wait for back-up, but she was there, she heard this woman getting the crap beaten out of her and there was no option to wait, no time to get her dog, Blaze, out of the back.  She went in and the guy ran for his room.  She chased him down but he got to his shotgun first.”

“Oh… Dean, I’m sorry.”

“He killed her, his wife, and then himself.  Nobody called me, we weren’t ‘officially’ a couple after all.  I didn’t find out until the next day, wondering the whole time why she wasn’t answering her phone.”

Christie’s eyes dropped to King and a tear fell on his head.

“So believe me when I say I have some small idea of what you’ve had to deal with.  And… we both have some idea of what Nick had to deal with.  If it’s anything like that meeting I had at work that morning, or if it’s anything like when they told you about Nick being killed in action, it’s not easy.  Kathryn had a closed-casket service, Christie.  I never got to see her again, she never got to hear my goodbye.  If you’ve wished any of the same things I have, then you’ve wished for the chance to say that.”

Christie didn’t look up at me, but she nodded.  “I did, so many times.”

“Seems to me that you might have it.  Secondly, I remember you, I remember the two of you from school.  I saw the way you were together.  Anybody could see it was the real thing.  I think you’re pissed off, because if you let yourself think about it, you’ll know it was real and that will hurt too much.  It’d be a real shame if your lasting impression of your relationship was that it wasn’t even real.”

Christie wiped her eyes and looked up with an expression of determination that took me aback.  “You’re right!  It
was
real.  I’m not just going to sit here and let
Harper Bayliss
take Nick away.  No way.”

“That’s not exactly…”

Christie stood up, sending King scampering backwards, and stormed inside.  The German Shepherd looked from me to the screen door and back again.  I held my hands out, innocent of knowledge as I was.  After less than a minute, she returned with the cordless phone held to her ear.

“Hello Nick?  It’s me… No, you can’t, I just… No, I can’t… I don’t know… No, I’m not… Listen, I need you to do something for me… I want to talk to Harper… None of your damn business… Yes… No, face to face… Screw the phone, I want to talk to her face to face… I don’t care,
make it happen!”

King wandered over and put his head in my lap as I watched Christie demand an audience with a Hollywood actress who got paid millions just for showing up on set.  This was not what I expected.  This was not what I thought I was advising.

“Good, call me back… No… No,
just us girls.
I’ve got a lot to say to her.”

Christie

The more I mulled it over, the more I thought Dean was right.  What Nick and I had wasn’t something I could let a fake, dog-in-a-purse, airhead, millionaire, starlet strumpet swoop in and take away.

She caught him at a weak moment, tortured and grief-stricken, and put the stars in his eyes while she fulfilled some wrong-side-of-the-tracks fantasy.  She didn’t know the man behind the muscles, the tattoos, and the scars.  She didn’t grow up with him, didn't see him become the man he was, and she didn’t love him like I did.  She couldn’t.

I hated her.  A meek voice in my head told me it was indefensible to hate somebody, especially so vehemently, without ever having met them, but I pushed it into some dusty backroom and locked the door so it couldn’t bother me anymore.

The fact was, it felt
good
to hate somebody that wasn’t me for a change.  Dangerously good.  She was due any minute, and I was going to give her a piece of my mind that would have her running for the hills with her tail between her legs.

By some miracle, I’d managed to convince my family to give me some space for this meeting.  There’d been nobody to say it wasn’t healthy to stand by the window for an hour waiting to catch a first glimpse of somebody you were going to chew out, so I was right there when I saw those huge sunglasses framed by that perfect hair.

A flush of anger made my face feel hot for a second and then cold when I clamped down on it.  I didn’t intend to lose control like I had with Nick, I needed to be calm and clinical with…
Harper
.  Even her name made my skin crawl.

Speaking of Nick, there was no sign of him.  I’d told him I didn’t want him to come, but he must surely have parked just out of sight, maybe near whatever cop had pulled the short straw to watch our house today.  I doubted he would be too far away.

Other than those sunglasses, I wouldn’t have picked her for somebody who could buy entire racks of designer clothes.  With jeans, a t-shirt, and sensible shoes, she looked like she could have been any small town girl.

I stepped away from the window while she was still looking for the house number on the letterbox and went to loiter in the hallway.  It was time to get rid of this obstacle.

For somebody who was so close, it was a long time before she knocked.  I almost went back to the window to see if she’d been hit by a bus or something, but knock she did.

I opened the door. “
Harper
.”

I tried to put as much venom into it as I could without raising my voice, without losing control.  Harper’s face, already a picture of sadness though still painfully pretty, sank a little further.

“Hi Christabelle,” she said quietly and then, after a pause, “can I come in?”

I stepped back, pulling the door with me, and gestured inside in the general direction of the living room.  I pulled my lips into a tight line.  She’d already sidestepped the first thing I was going to set her straight on.  She didn’t have the right to call me Christie.  Not her, not ever.

Her sunglasses were gone, presumably in her handbag, and she kept me in the corner of her eye when she stepped in and looked around the hallway warily as she kicked off her shoes next to the pile of my sister’s and mother’s.

Harper clutched her handbag to her side and faced me as I closed the door.  It looked like she was trying to figure out what to say but kept on changing her mind.  I gestured for her to follow me into the living room and pointed at the couch.

“Take a seat.”

She did, setting her bag down next to her, and she looked so relieved when I sat down at the other side of the same couch that I almost stood up again.  We stared at each other from the trenches of our respective seats at each end, the no-mans-land between us so much bigger than the single cushion width that could be seen by a casual observer.

I wondered if she could see the same resemblance I could.  We looked kind of similar except, you know, she was younger, prettier, richer, and living a blessed life.  She looked like a better version of me and I hated her all the more for it.  I wanted to punch her in the face, ruin that perfection, make her hate what she saw in her mirror as much as I hated what I saw in my own.

“Did you…
really
kick him in the balls?” Harper asked sheepishly.

It was the last thing in the world I had expected to be brought up in conversation today, and it caught me completely off guard.  She was talking about the first non-teacher-mandated interaction Nick and I ever had.  There were consequences to putting glue in an eight-year-old girl’s hair.

I blinked and shook my head as if clearing the cobwebs.  “I… uh… well, yeah.  It’s hard to believe now, but at the time I was actually bigger than him.”

Harper’s efforts to reconcile that idea with the hulking Marine that Nick had grown into were obvious and endearing.  I scolded myself internally, feeling like my assault on the Hollywood starlet was already on the back foot.

She surprised me again when, after a couple quivers of her bottom lip, tears started flowing down her cheeks and she looked down at her hands in her lap.  I felt my anger stumbling and I did my best to hold on to it, to wrap it around me like armor.

Remember
,
this is the woman who took Nick. 
This
is the face of everything that’s been taken from you.  Hate it, or walk back into the woods and never come out again.

My own thoughts sounded like they were coming from somebody else, somebody I wouldn’t have liked very much if they hadn’t kept me alive for the past year and a half.  It was like a surgeon who saved your life and then told you to kick puppies.  How do you tear apart somebody who’s already so distraught?  I glanced around awkwardly, maybe for some tissues.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened.  Everything that happened to you, Christabelle.  Everything between Nick and I that makes it worse for you.”

“What do
you
care what hurts me?” I asked.

“Because I don’t
want
you to hate me!” Harper blurted out between sobs.  She struggled to calm herself before continuing.  “The way he talks about you, the way he always
did
talk about you, like you’re some mythical heroine from local legend.  I’ve heard so much, and the way he spoke…
I
wanted to know that person too.  I wanted her to like me, I wanted her to know I love Nick more than I thought I could love anything and I was keeping him safe, keeping him in my heart always.  I wanted her to know I was holding his hand and making him laugh when he was sad.”

Harper’s words were rushing out faster and faster between hitching breaths.  I clenched my jaws against my own sobs that wanted to come out, even enlisting the help of my hand to hold my mouth shut, or hide it at least.  I blinked as rapidly as I could to disperse the tears before they fell, but I didn’t know if that was a battle I could win.

“And now you’re here, and you
must
hate me,” she finished.

I was shaking with the effort of holding it all in, I looked away for a second and closed my eyes.  Somehow, the pressure needle inside me went back down to the edge of the red zone and I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.

“How did you even
meet
him?” I asked.

Harper took her own deep breath and told me a story that started with a crazed stalker, a cup of acid, and a Marine I knew that became her hero.  She was a master storyteller, it had to be said.  I would have given anything for her to have a different tale to tell other than the one where she and Nick fell in love, but I was engrossed anyway.

My heart sank with every passing moment.  Every time she mentioned Nick, her eyes lit up with some unquenchable fire, and it felt like a pair of scissors were cutting my ties to him.  The notion was especially strong when she talked about her own ordeal.

“Walter had this dagger, a replica of one I used in a movie, and it was pressed right against me, right here.” Harper pointed at her stomach, just under her ribcage.  “He said that if he did it quick, right into the heart, it wasn’t supposed to hurt.  I was out of ideas, out of hope, out of time.  I was saying goodbye to everybody I loved in my mind, hoping I could make it through everybody before I was dead.  Then there was this huge
crash
, footsteps, another crash, and pieces of the door were flying everywhere.”

I leaned forward despite myself, desperate to hear how it ended even though it hurt so much.

“It wasn’t a S.W.A.T. team, it was Nick.  He smashed Walter against the wall and made him drop the knife before they both went to the ground.  He didn’t see that Walter had a gun and it was so
loud
when it went off.”

Harper squeezed her eyes shut and fresh tears rolled down her face at the memory.

“Nick choked Walter unconscious, but Nick was bleeding out so quickly.  He just sort of s-slumped over on top of him and lay there.  I was tied up,
I couldn’t help him
.  I thought I was watching him die right in front of me.”

“But he was OK in the end,” I said, barely loud enough to be heard.

I wanted to run to Nick, to tell him how sorry I was for the other day.  The poor man seemed to have been through war after war, overseas and at home.  I wanted to run to him and give him the peace he deserved.

But he wasn’t mine to run to.  Not anymore.  He belonged to this girl in front of me.

“Yeah, he’s amazing,” said Harper.

“So you love him.  And he loves you.”

Harper was still for a while, then nodded with downcast eyes.

I was silent for a long time, sitting with the woman who had replaced me and trying to find the anger to shield myself from everything that hurt.  The anger didn’t come.  Instead, I told her something that even my counselor hadn’t been able to pry out of me.

“I was locked in a room too, you know.  He said I was going to get sold like a piece of meat and raped if I was lucky, killed if I wasn’t.  I screamed so many times.  I screamed, just like you.  But nobody ever came for me.  How come nobody ever came for
me
?  I thought everybody forgot me.  I…”

I buried my face in my hands and cried like a baby.  The world disappeared into self-induced darkness and I lost track of it until I felt Harper wrap her arms around me and hold me tight.  My mind balked at the idea.

Not you!  Not
you!

I tried to push her away but she wouldn’t let go, she held me all the tighter and hushed in my ear.

“Nick missed you when you were gone. 
Everybody
did.  They still do.”

I gave up and went slack for a moment, then tentatively put my arms around her too and let my tears make a wet patch on the shoulder of her t-shirt.  She didn’t
feel
like an enemy, she felt like a sister.