Coming Back (9 page)

Leaning back and laying my head on the pillow again, I turned to face away from Dean before shuffling towards him until I felt his whole body against mine.  With a fumbling search in the dark, I found his arm and pulled it over myself like a protective shield.

His calm breaths puffed against my hair, steady as clockwork, and he felt like a warm and solid rock wall behind me.  It wasn’t long before I was breathing in unison with him.  In… out… in… out.

That creeping cloud of tiredness came back and swirled around me again, turning everything fuzzy around the edges.  I sank into it with unspeakable relief.

Christie

The first thing I comprehended when I woke up was that Dean wasn’t in the bed anymore.  It was clearly still dark outside, but light from the hallway spilled into the room and I saw King lying just to the side of the open door, nose turned up at the delicious smell of cooking bacon, which made my stomach rumble.

King’s head shot in my direction and paused for a moment as he determined whether my stomach was issuing some kind of challenge to him before he finally decided that it wasn’t.  He got to his feet and left the room anyway, just in case.

I guessed Dean was an early riser as I hurriedly discarded his t-shirt and pulled on my own clothes.  By the time I was fully dressed again, the initial drowsiness had worn off and I felt more awake than I had since before my world fell apart.

Running, jumping,
thinking
all seemed within my grasp.  Making my way to the kitchen, I felt like one of those old cartoons floating through the air led by a delicious aroma.

I squinted against the bright light and made my way to Dean, who was busy in front of the stove.  My hand slid across his stomach from the side, and I resisted the urge to slip my hand
under
his shirt for a better examination of those abs.  He began to work with one hand to return the hug I gave him.

“It’s alive,” he said.

“You’re an early riser,” I replied.

“You’re not.”

“What do you mean?  It’s still dark.  And what’s this?  Bacon and pancakes?  I didn’t think the car ride was that far.  What’s the commute like to Warfields from Canada?”

Dean pushed some sizzling bacon around with a one-sided smile.  “It’s not
still
dark, it’s dark
again
.  It’s six pm, Christie.  I was thinking ‘what do I make for somebody who, hopefully, wakes up at dinnertime?’  Then the problem became ‘what am I
able
to cook that isn’t completely offensive?’   That narrowed it down a lot.  I can’t do much, but I’ve got bacon and pancakes down pat.”

“What?  How long does that make it that I slept for?” I tried to remember when I went to sleep the previous night.

“Somewhere around twenty-two hours.”

“Whoa.  How did I make it that long without even needing to go to the bathroom?”

“You don’t remember?” he asked.

I shrunk in his embrace, fearing the worst.  “W-what happened?”

“Middle of the night you sat up and said ‘bathroom,’ so I led you there and waited outside the door.  I’m not sure if you ever opened your eyes, but your auto-pilot took care of everything.  You came back out and said ‘nice shoes, coach’ even though I wasn’t wearing any, and then we went back to bed.”

I buried my face against his body and shuddered with silent laughter and surprisingly comfortable embarrassment.  He held me all the tighter and kissed the top of my head.

“OK.  Bacon and pancakes are good,” I said.

The food was simple and mouth-wateringly good.  I ate ravenously, enjoying food for the first time rather than eating to stay alive or keep up appearances, and Dean drove me home afterwards.

I leaned in through the driver’s window and kissed him, feeling like a teenager at the end of a perfect first date, and he watched until I was safely inside the house again before pulling away.  In the living room, I could hear the theme song for ‘The Right Stuff’ playing and Amber called out.

“Just in time!”

I kicked my shoes off and joined her and, as it turned out, my parents as well.  Mom had caught Amber’s enthusiasm for the show, but my dad was reading the newspaper next to my mom on the couch as if the TV wasn’t on at all.

Amber patted the seat next to her and I accepted the invite.  “Semi-final night, sis!  Pee-yoo, you smell like bacon!  I thought that was just an urban legend about cops.”

I swatted her with a loose cushion as Bert Dunlop started crooning about a broken-down tractor, sending the live audience crazy with excitement.  Amber leaned against me when I replaced the cushion and reclined on it, then watched the show, transfixed by ‘the excitement of sudden-death competition.’

“Good night?” my dad asked, glancing up from his paper.

“Yeah.”

“You’re a woman of few words.  A few less would be good,
if
you don’t mind.”  Amber didn’t look away from the screen.

I sank back into my thoughts, trying to unravel everything that had happened in the last day with a mind that hadn’t felt this awake in such a long time, a mind reveling in an unmedicated sleep.  Dean… loved me.  Did that mean I was
actually
lovable?

After everything that had happened, what would it mean to let that word and all the baggage, good and bad, that came with it back into my life?  Could I even do it?

I hadn’t said it back to him, but I was falling for him, falling fast.  How could I let myself feel this way if it wasn’t with Nick?  How could I love when I knew,
I knew
, that everything you love could be taken away so quickly and brutally?  How could I
not
when Dean made me feel like I was alive again?

Dean had managed to pull me up from the depths of hopelessness and, if not clarified, at least made the future look less murky.  The way he looked at me was something special, something worth fighting for.

Halfway through the show, Beatrice Holt was belting out her version of a song I’d never heard of called ‘Is This How You Feel?’ with a celebrity guest guitarist I had also never heard of.  The two of them had real chemistry, whoever he was.

At one point, all the instruments cut out and left her all alone up there on stage with nothing but her voice and one long high note that made me feel like I was flying.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath like I’d been hit in the face with cool sea-spray on a hot day and then went to the kitchen to get some water.

By the time I drank it and put my glass in the dishwasher, I heard my mom and Amber gasp at something and rushed back into the room to see the cameras trained on an older blonde woman unconscious backstage.

My sister was on her feet.  “
Bitch!
You got knocked the f-“

“
Amber
!  You’re an adult!  For the love of all things holy will you please, one day, act like one?”

“Mom, did you not see that?  Beatrice Holt could make a living in unlicensed boxing if this singing thing doesn’t work out.”

I felt the giggles growing in my belly with unstoppable force, shaking my shoulders with the spasms of trying to stop myself from snorting embarrassingly.  I squeezed my eyes shut against this classic Amber-Mom standoff and covered my mouth with my hands as if I was about to sneeze.

“Christie, what’s wrong?  Amber!  Look, dammit!  You’ve upset…” my dad said.

I held out one hand, the only thing holding in that snort, and waved him off as I laughed openly for the first time in their presence since coming home from the hospital.  My dad looked at me, and I saw a hopeful smile timidly creep on to his face that lifted my heart.

“What’s got into you then?” he asked.

“I know what-” Amber began.

“Quit while you’re ahead, sweetie,” said my mom.

I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands.  “I love you guys so much.  I just love you.”

I gave each one of them a hug, trying to make up for all the hugs I’d missed out on giving them over the almost two years I was gone for.  They weren’t enough, but if the future existed again, then I had more time to catch up, and I was going to try my best to do just that.

April 2014

Dean

Mr. Jayne eyed me with the same skepticism he had ever since I started showing up as anything more than a police officer.  He was taking advantage of the first really nice day of spring to tend to his garden at the front of the house, just as I was planning on taking advantage of it to take Christie out on a picnic.

He stood and met me at the gate, standing immediately on the other side so it couldn’t be opened.  I offered what I hoped was a disarming smile and stepped as close as I could while he pulled off his gloves and dropped them on the ground where he’d been working.

“Morning, Mr. Jayne,” I said.

“Dean.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if anybody was there.  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

This sounded serious.  “Sure, of course.”

Christie’s dad opened his mouth and licked his lips a few times before he managed to actually start and finish a sentence.  “You ever have nightmares, son?” he asked, finally.

I raised an eyebrow.  “Yeah, sometimes.  Why do you ask?”

“I never used to have them, you know, when I was your age.  That all changed when Christie was born.  It was never monsters or the aliens comin’ down to bugger me that made me wake up in a sweat, either.  I used to have these dreams where she’d be crawling around and I’d notice she was near the edge of a patio, or at the top of the stairs or something, just completely oblivious to it, you know?”

I nodded.

“I’d get this feeling like I’d just been jolted with one of those defibrillators and I’d start running towards her, yelling for her to stop, but I was always just too late.  She’d fall and I’d see it, follow her down to the ground, and I’d pick this thing up wondering if this was the last time I ever hugged my little girl.  It would kill me every time, wondering that, just heart-wrenching grief like you wouldn’t believe.”

Mr. Jayne paused and looked at his hands as if maybe picturing that baby in them again, his eyes glassy with the memory of that imagined grief.  I listened in silence as he continued.

“But she was never dead in those nightmares.  They used to end in one of two ways.  One, I’d pick her up, I’d be praying she was OK, and then she’d look at me and I saw that she’d fallen and hit her head in some awful way and that spark in her eye was gone.  That one that used to tell me she was looking at
everything
and learning all the time.  Somebody with that look in their eye could grow up and be anything, do
anything
.  For somebody like that, the future was bright, the potential was endless, but in the nightmare it was gone and now everything would be dull, like looking at a pretty picture through dirty glass.”

“What was the other way it ended?” I asked.

He looked me in the eye and I saw those tears were as close as they could possibly come to falling without actually doing so.  I looked down, feeling like seeing them was some kind of blasphemy to the old-fashioned man.

“I’d pick her up and she’d be hurt and bleeding, she’d look at me as if she was saying ‘
You.
’”  Mr. Jayne’s voice growled with disappointment that bordered on disgust when he spat out the imagined quote.  “'You were supposed to keep me safe.  Where were you?’”

A car drove past and a cool puff of wind blew from the east, reminding us that winter wasn’t so far gone.  When I looked up at him again, he’d more or less composed himself.

“When I woke up from those ones, I’d get up in the middle of the night and go to her room just to make sure she was alright.  I’d tell her I was sorry, that I’d do better.  Well, twenty-some years later, it turns out I was a liar.  I couldn’t keep her safe.”

“It’s not your fault, Mr. Jayne,” I said.

“Yeah.  It’s easy to say that, it’s a tougher pill to swallow when you talk about
knowing
it.  Christie never used to have nightmares either, before all this.  She has them
all the time
now.  She wakes up in the middle of the night, shrieking like somebody’s killing her.  Usually, if I can make out any words, she’s screaming for help, but normally it’s just plain old screaming like people would have screamed before they invented language.  Sometimes she yells ‘there’s so much blood’ over and over again.  What did she go through, Dean?  What did they do to my baby?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said.

“All this time she’s spent with you, she hasn’t talked about it?”

“I haven’t pushed for it.  Figured she was getting enough of that from the counselor and the Feds without me dragging her through it again.”

“Those agents seem pissed with her for not giving them the guy’s name and address.  The last time I saw one of them, I wanted to knock his head off.  That sick son of a bitch that did this to Christie is still out there somewhere, and they aren’t doing their job worth a damn.  Her therapist says he thinks she’s trying to sweep things under the carpet rather than dealing with them, but that never works in the long run.  She can’t say she doesn’t remember forever.”

Mr. Jayne sighed.

“I’ve gone off on a tangent there.  I just wanted you to know that I’m done with anybody hurting my daughters.  Look in my eyes.”

I did.

“I’m
done
with it, so don’t you dare do it.  I haven’t tried to get between you two, even though the thought of having her out of sight terrifies me.  You should know, she sleeps better on the days she sees you.  She has less nightmares.  I’ve always thought you were a good kid too.  That’s why I
haven’t
tried to talk her out of it, out of you.”

“I’ve loved your daughter for a long time now, Mr. Jayne.  I will
never
hurt her.  Believe it.”

Christie’s dad took a deep breath and shrugged, wanting to believe but having to settle for hope instead.  He sure did have some incredible timing, considering what I had planned for today.

I thought about what I had in the back of my car, about how fragile Christie might still be and how she would react, but something she’d said a while ago had given me a crazy idea and once it had a foothold in my mind, I couldn’t shake it.

Earlier this morning I’d put that idea into action and, whatever happened, it was going to be a pretty intense day for the two of us.  I hoped I was making things better, not worse.  I hoped this would help her let go of some of the past that was weighing her down.