Coming Back (7 page)

December 2013 (After)

Christie

Dean arrived on our doorstep on Christmas Eve with a mysteriously wrapped box.  The other present ‘from King’ was less of a mystery as the shape of the ball-thrower was clear through the wrapping paper.

His hand touched mine when he passed me the gifts, and we both paused for a moment.  I could feel all that gentle strength he had, and the contrast with where I was last Christmas almost made me cry.

Those hands could hurt me, but just feeling them, I knew they never would.  I looked up into his eyes and saw no pity, only something like admiration… and maybe something else.

I dismissed it as misreading the situation.  I dismissed my own reaction to it as well.  Those feelings had no place in my life, they were crushed under the boot for the last time when Nick chose somebody else over me.

Dean was just being nice for old time’s sake, and because that was the kind of person he always was.  That’s all.

“Merry Christmas, Christabelle Jayne,” he said at last.

“Merry Christmas, Dean.  I… I’m sorry, I don’t have anything for you.”

“If you just use the present, it’s enough for me,” he said.

“Well… I guess we’ll see.”

“OK.  Hi, Mr. Jayne.” He waved at my dad, who was hovering conspicuously down the hallway.  “I’ve got to get going, my mom’s expecting a big turnout tomorrow.  See ya, Christie.”

“Alright, bye.  Oh, hey, are you still around over the next couple weeks, or are you going on holiday or something?”

“I’ll be around,” Dean smiled and shoved his hands in his pockets against the cold as he turned back to his car.

On Christmas day, all eyes were on me as I opened Dean’s gift.  It was only a smartphone, but I handled it with as much fear as if it was a gun.  There were no bullets in it, but it turned out it was loaded with names and phone numbers and I knew them all.

Apparently Dean had been all over town collecting my friends’ contact details, and the card that came with it said there were a lot of people who wanted to hear from me.  The idea made my heart flutter timidly. What would they think of me now?  Especially after being back for so long and avoiding everybody?

After lunch, Nick called on the landline to wish me a merry Christmas, and I gave him my new number.  For a fleeting moment I was happy to hear his voice, and then I remembered that he was probably calling from whatever house he shared with Harper, from whatever
life
he shared with Harper.

Despite that, hearing his voice still made me feel guilty for all the time I’d been spending with Dean and for that whatever-it-was moment at the door yesterday.  This was a reminder of why those feelings had no place in my life anymore, they just ended up making me hurt.

That night in bed as I tried to fight off sleep, I scrolled through the contacts and was hit by a burning curiosity to know what was happening with the people all these names represented.  I lost count of the number of times I started writing a message to one or the other of them and then deleted it before sending.

I put the phone down and picked it up again the instant the screen turned off, quickly swiping at the screen to add its illumination to the nightlight.  With a sudden surge of determination, I hurriedly typed a message and sent it to almost everybody on the list before I could convince myself otherwise.

Lunch on Saturday at my parents' place around noon? - Christie

This time of year, I kind of expected maybe one or two people to
maybe
be able to make it, but despite how late it was, the responses started coming in almost straightaway.  Olivia and Liam were the first to respond, then Ava and Ethan.  Mia, Emily, and Abby all confirmed, with a lot of exclamation marks and emoticons, on the same night.  Liz, Ella, Hannah and Andrew, Zoe, Lily and Dylan answered the next morning.

By the end of Boxing Day, it looked like close to twenty people were going to descend on my parents’ house come the weekend.  My mom immediately started fretting about the logistics of entertaining that many people with great enthusiasm and the news seemed to perk up my dad and sister, too.

Hannah texted to ask if she and Andrew could come a little earlier at eleven o’clock, and I said that would be OK if they didn’t mind everything being not quite ready.  I didn’t know what their reasoning was, but when I opened the door to greet them, I came face to face with a pretty good clue.

The baby on Hannah’s hip was a perfect blend of the two of them, though Andrew had probably only worn a pink bow in his hair as cute as that very rarely, if ever.  I looked from one to the other of them with wide-eyed and open-mouthed amazement as they each hugged me in turn, the one with Hannah being a group hug.

“Come in, get this little one out of the cold!  Come in!”

“Christie!  Oh my gosh… I swear I squealed and woke up the baby when I got your text!  It’s so good to see you!”

Hannah gave me another hug as we awkwardly shuffled inside while still embracing, and the baby looked at our antics with quiet interest.  We sat around the coffee table, every chair my parents owned having been brought into the living room, and my friends looked around analytically.

“Oh boy, there’s a lot of breakable stuff here.  She’s a crawler,” said Hannah.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“A little over twenty-six weeks,” said Hannah.

“Oh, come on!  You promised when she hit six months we could stop measuring her age in weeks,” Andrew said.

“She’s so beautiful!  Yes you are!” I cooed.

The baby looked at me when I spoke and absolutely melted my heart with her pretty blue eyes and those teeny little feet.  Then a memory clouded my mind, something I half-remembered.

“I… I’m sorry… I thought you miscarried?”

My friends looked at each other with a flash of sadness as Hannah put her little girl down on the floor and immediately stopped her when she tried to pull a bowl of popcorn down on top of herself.  Unperturbed, she made some progress around the coffee table, exploring for something else of interest.

“Well… we did, but we conceived again and everything went smoothly.  Um… as smoothly as these things can go anyway.”

“Oh.  Good.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up… bad memories.  It’s, um, easy to forget how long I’ve been away.  Can I?”  I pointed to their little girl, who had made it to my side of the table and looked like she was considering heading back to the front door.

“It’s OK, and of course you can!”

I couldn’t have been more careful if I was picking up a priceless and delicate artifact as I brought the wriggling bundle of joy up to my lap.  She immediately started playing with the material of my shirt.

“Hello… what’s her name?”

“Her name is… Christie.”

I pressed my lips together and looked back at my namesake, doing my best to hold back the tears.  It wasn’t easy.

“Hello, Christie.  You’re perfect and don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise, OK?”

Christie-the-second babbled happily and didn’t try to squirm away as long as I let her play with my shirt.  She really was perfect.

I looked up at the people sitting in the room with me, who had named their little girl after their dead friend, and tried to smile through the turmoil of emotion.

On one hand, it hurt to have been gone long enough for this new life to grow inside Hannah and grow up this much.  On the other hand, it made me so happy to see there was something perfect, beautiful, and innocent in the world.  It gave me hope.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.  I couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t do it,” I said so quietly that I feared maybe only the baby would hear me and I’d have to say it again.

“Everybody understands,” said Hannah. “Nobody knew what we were supposed to do so we’ve all just been giving you the space you asked for.  It’s good you’ve got a phone again so we don’t have to go through one of your gatekeepers anymore!”

“Hmmm?  Oh, Mom and Dad?  Yeah.”

“And Amber.  I was kind of surprised to have Dean track me down and hear him say that he’d been spending some time with you.  How did he manage it?”

“Oh, he’s around sometimes because the police have been keeping an eye on the house, but… uh… generally he just shows up and bypasses the gatekeepers,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad he did,” said Hannah.

I thought about the man who reintroduced me to ‘outside’ and took me to that beautiful clearing where the sun warmed my face in a way I thought it never would again, the smells of the late-blooming flowers with the faint undercurrent of wet dog.  He made it possible for me to be holding this little girl and to talk with friends again.

“So am I.”

“Are you two…?” Andrew asked tentatively.

“Andy!” Hannah back-handed his knee, but then looked at me with undisguised interest.

“Dean… and me?”  I blinked.

January 2014

Christie

My arms and legs weigh a million tons each.  It’s all I can do to lurch forward on my hands and knees, one scrabbling movement at a time.

I can feel the scratches on my body, all those leaves and twigs under my hands and the occasional sharp rock that tore my feet up a lifetime ago and contributed to my inability to stand up after I walked right into a tree.  It’s night time, and the full moon is bright enough that the tree branches cast shadows despite how thick they are here.

For some reason, it’s not cold though.  I’d think that’s strange if I had the energy to spend on thinking.

The forest is forever.  I know that now.  For a second I thought it might end, and that was stupid of me.  I never should have let hope find a chink in my armor because now it hurts all the worse.  Everything I’ve been through, everything I did was for nothing.

I crawl forward one more step and put my hand down on the forest floor again, right in a shaft of moonlight.  My skin looks bright and pale in the darkness, but smeared with dirt and God only knows what else.  For a second the leaves and twigs squirm as if they’re alive, as if they’re really carnivorous insects in disguise, but I don’t have the energy left to snatch my hand back or even scream.

Soon, they stop moving and once again they’re just leaves and twigs, but I keep on staring for a while longer.  I tell my hand to move forward, one more step.  Just one more.  Keep going.  What would Nick say if you stopped?

My hand doesn’t listen and I realize just where I am.  I look over to my right, but there’s no trash there, no empty plastic bottle from an energy drink.  There’s a rock, caught in another shaft of moonlight like my hand.

The longer I stare at that rock, the more it looks like a skull.  I look away before it starts to move too.  The last time I was here, the car park was just over this hill.  This can be over soon.

With that newfound anticipation my limbs start working again, but I’m still exhausted by the time I get to the top of that pathetic little hill.  When I push my way through that gap between two bushes, I expect to see a sparsely populated car park of the Gas ‘n’ Snack, a couple of people in a car on the other side.

Instead, I’m in the Warfields cemetery, and I’m not alone.  Sitting on a bunch of fold-out chairs, I see so many faces I know.  Friends, family, teachers from school, people I haven’t seen in a long time.  They all look disappointed.  Some of them are checking their watches or passing time doing things on their phones.

My mother and sister are sitting at the front near a freshly dug grave, and I see my dad and Nick leaning on shovels and mopping their brows until they see me and drop their tools to put their suit jackets on again.  It’s hard to lift my head all the way as they approach, so I roll my eyes the rest of the way and I see them come for me.

Their strong hands lift me up by the armpits and I lick my lips, trying to wet them enough so that I can talk.  I never thought I’d see them again, never thought I’d hear their voices.

Come to think of it, they’re strangely quiet.  Everybody is.  You kind of expect the people sitting down to be silent, but it’s not like they were listening to anybody when I showed up.

“M-missed you.  Missed you,” I managed to croak.

My dad glances down at me, then up at Nick as they half-drag me towards the gathering because I can’t seem to find my feet.  Nick returns my dad’s look and then turns to me.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Christie,” he says.

“N-no.  Don’t.”

“We already buried you once, and people are supposed to stay dead.  It just hurts everybody to see you again, you know?”

“What are you talking...”

They aren’t taking me to a spare seat.  Nick and my dad, the two men in my life that taught me what love was, how a man should treat a woman, the solid ground under my feet, they’re holding me up at the edge of the grave.

And it’s not fresh, it’s an old one that’s been dug up.  I see the grave marker.

Christabelle Jayne

Didn’t Know Her Place

1988 –
2012
2013

“Please…”

What I see in the grave cuts my words off as surely as if my lungs had been ripped out of my chest.  There’s a coffin in there, and it’s not empty.

I recognize the dress, it’s a pretty one my mom bought and we always saved for special occasions.  Wearing it is what can only be my own dried up corpse.  I don’t recognize the facial features, they’re too far gone from a year underground, though still framed by my dark hair.

“No.  Nononono.  Noooooo…” I groan in horror and try to struggle backwards.

They’re too strong, yet again I’m not big enough to fight them off.

“Why…”

“You’re a real hassle,” says my dad as they heave me forward and let go.

There’s no fighting gravity and it seems like that desiccated body, with the lips pulled back in an endless grin that nobody was ever supposed to see, rushes up to meet me just as much as I fall on to it.  I scream, a weak sound that is cut off by a rush of air as I crash into my own coffin, brittle bones cracking under me inside that beautiful dress like the twigs in the forest when I could still walk.

The lid to the coffin slams shut, trapping me in that tiny space with the almost mummified remains of the girl I used to be.  I scream, a weak sound that is cut off by a dry heave as I get a taste of the rancid dust forced out of the corpse when I landed on it.

I turn around and pound on the lid but It.  Will.  Not.  Move.  I can hear the dirt being shoveled on top of it as I struggle against a piece of wood that might as well be a solid slab of lead for all the good it does.  The bones rattle under me, a lot more than I would have thought possible, as I thrash and kick.

The sounds of falling dirt get more and more muffled until I can barely hear them anymore and I’m trapped in the dark.  I stop my struggle, straining to hear somebody coming to help me, to hear them taking the dirt away, but nobody comes.

Finally I realize I’m just straining to hear anything, to feel like I’m not alone.  Even the sound of being buried means I’m not alone, but that’s gone now too.

How much air is in here?  How long can I last?

These surprisingly rational concerns evaporate like the hopes and dreams before them when the bones under me, behind me, move by themselves.  I feel dead hands curling around me, holding me tight, as the remains of my former self take a dry, rattling breath and whisper in my ear.

“There’s.  So.  Much.  Blood…”

Nobody could ever have been as scared as I am.  There’s no way out, there’s no way out, I’m screaming but I can’t breathe, there’s not enough air in the world for all the screaming I need to do.  The arms curl around me even tighter until I feel the metallic taste of blood in my mouth as if I’m being squeezed like a sponge. My screams are little more than gurgles now.  There’s so much blood.

In the darkness, I can hear Amber.  How can I hear Amber?

“Wake up, Christie!  Wake up, Christie!”