Coming Back (6 page)

November 2013

Dean

How they managed to get Harper Bayliss in and out of town without temporarily tripling the population I had no idea, but they did it.  Even though I’d been there when Christie had made her demands on the phone, I didn’t think it would happen.  Not in only two days, and not without causing a lot of crowd control problems anyway.

Dan Abrahams had radioed in that Nick and ‘some actress named Harper’ had knocked on his window to tell him that she was going in to meet with Christie and to please be on guard if there was any sign of paparazzi or any other kind of trouble.  He also asked if any of us had heard of her.  Dan wasn’t a big moviegoer.

Apparently she came out after a good long while, looking a bit shaken but leaving with a polite wave in his direction.  After that, everything had been quiet at the Jayne household, back to the routine by all accounts.  Even when I had my shift on Jayne-watch, as it had become known amongst the guys, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary except for Christie staying inside as the weather turned a bit colder.

My next day off was comparatively warmer than the preceding days, though the morning frost still clung everywhere in the form of dew, and I decided to have another crack at getting Christie out of the house.  I felt like a high school kid again, turning up at the doorstep only to be greeted by the disapproving glare of her dad.

I pointed at King.  “Visitor for Christie?”

“Sorry Dean, she doesn’t want to see anybody.”

“Could you double check?  She did say she’d come out and help me give King a bit of exercise.  We’ll keep her safe, I promise you that.”

Mr. Jayne looked like he’d been having a lot of restless nights himself and deflated a bit.  I had to wonder how worried he himself was about Christie’s self-imposed captivity.

“OK.  I’ll check,” he said.

To my relief, Christie rather than her dad came back to the front door.  She looked as tired as ever, that brief burst of energy when she’d focused on Harper now a thing of the past.

“Hey Christie, I really need your help, King’s getting fat.”

The German Shepherd wagged his tail at the mention of his name, and Christie looked down at him with whatever fondness she could muster, given her energy levels.  She brought her eyes back up to me and seemed to be searching for the right way to decline, but then gave up and shrugged.

“OK.  Why not?  Mom? Dad?” she called out and waited for the response. “I’m going out, I’ll be back in…” she turned back to me.

“Couple hours, tops,” I said.

“A couple hours,” she finished.

Her mother stepped into the hallway.  “Really?”

“Yes, really.  I’ll be with Dean and back for dinner.  Police escort.  OK?”

“Well… yes, of course.  OK.”  Mrs. Jayne took the news with mild shock.

Christie picked out her shoes from a pile near the front door and lifted a light coat off a hook before stepping outside as she shrugged it on.  I was a couple of steps ahead of her and offered her my hand when I noticed how wet the steps were.

“Careful, it’s a bit slippery here.”

I couldn’t help but smile when she took the help I offered.  How often had I hoped to have her hand in mine, to walk through the kingdom of Warfields with its princess at my side?  An embarrassingly large number of times was the answer.

Unfortunately, the illusion evaporated quickly when she retracted her hand at the bottom of the steps, but I remembered it like a burst of warm sunshine that passed over me through a tiny break in the clouds.  Even tired and hurt as she was, I felt lucky for any time spent with her.

I decided it would probably be a pretty crap idea to take her to help me exercise King in the park she had been abducted from, so I brought her out past the old McKinley farm to a sparse forest with a clearing not too far in that was peaceful and private.  I loved it there, and so did King.  Hopefully Christie would too.

We took turns using the ball thrower, a kind of plastic grabber at the end of a long handle that helped to launch the ball a lot farther a lot easier.  It didn’t take long before King smelled of wet dog and was panting happily.

“So what was it like meeting Harper?” I asked, sending the ball bouncing off a tree at the edge of the clearing and handing the thrower to Christie.

“Um…” she pondered it while King brought the ball back and then sent him scampering off in the other direction.  “Confusing,” she finally finished.

“In what way?”

“She… wasn’t what I expected.”

“What was she then?”

“I dunno how to explain it.” Christie paused and sighed, giving me the thrower back.  “I wanted to
hate
her.  I wanted to tear her a new one.  You know?”

“So you don’t and you didn’t?”

“She wasn’t what I expected,” Christie repeated quietly.

King brought his prize back, dropped it in between us, and wagged his soaking wet tail all over our legs as I scooped the ball up and fired it off into the distance.

“I don’t know what to do now,” said Christie.

“Hmmm?”

“For a second there, I knew what I had to do.  The first step was to get rid of Harper, and everything else would fall into place.  But my life really is gone, there’s no coming back.  So what do I do?”

I gave her the ball thrower.  “I heard King say you throw like a girl.  New first step, prove him wrong.”

Christie smirked without humor and loaded her weapon, winding up and firing the ball halfway to the horizon with a grunt of effort.

“Good one.  That’s one thing I always loved about you, Christie.  When you get pushed, you push back.  You’ve never let life walk all over you.  I bet when the Feds catch that asshole, you’ll be there in that courtroom looking him in the eye.”

Christie didn’t seem to know how to take me mentioning there was something I always loved about her, and she visibly flinched at the idea of confronting her abductor in court.  I inwardly kicked myself for both slips of the tongue and tried to move on quickly.

“In the meantime, I’ve seen a lot of your friends around town.  Most of them say they’ve barely seen you.  You could catch up with them, maybe?”

“That’s another thing.  I… I don’t know if I can handle seeing them.  I remember how I used to be like it was a TV show or something.  People cried on my shoulder, I had good ideas to help.  I remember it… but not really what it felt like, you know?”

I nodded and she continued.

“I don’t know if I could handle their… disappointment.  I’m so much…”  Christie trembled as she struggled for a moment to keep it all together.  “
Less
than I used to be.  I don’t want to see all that pity, all that… everything.  I don’t know where I fit
in
anymore, I don’t know who I
am
anymore.”

“Hey, Christie.  Look at me.”  I waited until she did so.  “I remember you.  I know who you are.  Believe it, OK?”

Christie didn’t answer, instead absentmindedly stealing my turn to throw for King.  I watched him go and felt, as much as saw out of the corner of my eye, her studying my face, maybe looking for some sign that I was just saying what she might want to hear.

King brought the ball halfway back and lay down, panting.  It seemed that enough exercise had been had.  Christie turned towards the sun, low in the sky but not turning the blue to red and gold just yet, and closed her eyes.  I watched her as a puff of wind rustled her hair and listened as it did the same to the leaves in the trees on all sides.

Without opening her eyes, she took a breath so deep she must have been close to bursting and held it for a few seconds.  When she let the air out, it looked like she was beginning to let something else go with it, some poisonous memory, some pain.  Something.

After a while she looked at me again.

“Thanks for listening,” she said quietly, as if she was almost embarrassed.  “Thanks for bringing me here.  It’s beautiful.”

I didn’t answer, but I thought this field, this forest, this
world
was a lot more beautiful with her in it.

November 2012 (Before)

Christie

Something was wrong.  That was an understatement,
everything
was wrong, but in the next room over he sounded like he was ready to start World War Three.  If that was the case, I bet I knew who the first casualty would be.

Up till now he’d always been so calm and self-assured, but whoever he was screaming at on the phone in the other room had found a way under his skin.  This might be the day he forgot about his policy of keeping the beatings to open-palmed slaps.  Closed fists did too much lasting damage, and he didn’t want to lower my value, he said.

It didn’t sound like the man in the next room cared much about that though.  This, at long last, might be the day I died.  It might finally be over.  Part of me fought against the vague sense of relief that idea brought, mustering up all the hate it could for fuel and directing it at
him
.  The rest of me cowered in terror, more so every time the sound of his boots got close to the door before stomping off again.

My heart almost stopped when the shouting did, only to be jolted back into a panicked beat when, with one last unintelligible scream of rage, I heard his cell phone smash into a million pieces against the door.  I backed into the corner on the opposite side of the room, pressing myself against the walls and wishing I could just melt into them as I heard the locks being undone, one by one.

There was nowhere to hide.  My room had a bed, an exercise bike, and a treadmill, the bare minimum to keep me alive and healthy, to make sure I was in good shape to command the highest price.  That’s all I was to him.  Stock.

He saw me straight away and stalked to the center of the room, looking like a wild animal.  My reaction was visceral, I was almost overwhelmed with mind-numbing terror.  The devil walked the earth, and he was right here.  Nobody was coming to help me.

“Come
here
.” He pointed at the ground right in front of him.

My jaw muscles cramped my mouth closed so tight I thought my teeth might start to crack apart, my lips pulled back in a grimace of revulsion, fear, and that spark of hatred.  I shook my head silently as the tears blurred my vision and pushed myself into the corner even harder.

“Come. 
The fuck. 
Here.   You uppity bitch.”

I trembled against the walls, fighting against that dangerous fire in me that wanted to charge him and fight it out, the consequences be damned.  It was like an animal inside me that had been driven feral from starvation and mistreatment, only held in check by the cage of my own terror and the ludicrous hope that there was a way out of this hell.

He pressed his lips together and bunched his fists as he came at me, and I held my hands out to push him away, an exercise in futility.  I squinted my eyes against the blows that I thought were coming, but instead he pushed my hands aside, grabbed me by the front of the shirt near my shoulders, and threw me closer to the middle of the room, my back hitting the edge of the treadmill and knocking the wind out of me.

Before I even realized it, I was gasping and crawling for the door, which he’d left open.  My chest hurt with the effort of breathing, but all I could see was that narrow glimpse of freedom.

His boot came down on my back and flattened me to the ground with an impact that forced what remaining air I had out in one pained puff.  My eyes stayed fixed on that door even as I felt his weight come down on me, straddling me from behind for a moment before he twisted me around so roughly that I felt my shirt graze my skin and heard it rip somewhere.

I didn’t have the breath to scream or fight, all I could do was watch helplessly as I saw his fist poised to come down and change my face into something my own mother wouldn’t recognize.  It came down but hit me in the stomach, igniting a pain that was scarily deep inside me.  That might have done some real damage.

I wheezed up at him, my face red with the effort of staying alive, as he roughly grabbed a handful of my hair and made sure I was looking right at him.  He slapped me across the face with his free hand again and again.  There was no escape from it, each one punctuated by words he was spitting out in his rage.

“Do… you… know… what… a… fucking… worthless… piece… of… shit… you… are?”

One side of my face felt like the skin had been flayed off.  I was regaining the ability to breathe, but only far enough to groan a little bit.  That wasn’t answer enough for him, and he used his grip on my hair to bang my head against the floor a few times.

“Well? 
Do you
?” he screamed.

I shook my head.

“The motherfucker who was supposed to buy you has pulled out!  I fucking got you
specifically
for that order and you’re still not good enough.  Son of a
bitch
!”

He hit me in the stomach again, so hard I swore I could almost feel my organs bursting, and the air was forced out of me again.  I almost passed out from the pain.  My heart was going at a million miles a minute and there was no oxygen to go around.

“You better hope there’s somebody else out there willing to pay that much for you,” he said, grabbing my breast and squeezing so hard there was no way he wasn’t leaving bruises, “otherwise I’m just going to fuck you myself and bury you alive.  Or maybe I’ll get fifty friends over and we can all have turns.  Film the whole thing in high definition?  I might even let you go after that, worthless, used-up slut.  Bitches don’t talk after shit like that anyway.  Not when they know what’s been recorded.”

His hand lingered on my throat.  “You’re on my fucking nerves, bitch, you need to get with the program quick-smart.  You’re already more hassle than any of the others, but you’re worth
nothing
.  You are
nothing
.  Want some fucking proof?”

He stood over me, and I began to curl up around that burning feeling in my stomach as he angrily tried to get something out of his pocket.  It turned out to be some piece of paper, which he threw at me with a smirk.

“They gave up on you pretty quick, bitch.”

He stomped out of the room and slammed the door behind him.  I curled up even further as I listened to the locks sealing me in my prison once again and tried to breathe.

It was at least twenty minutes before I struggled to a sitting position and curled both arms protectively over my stomach.  Every breath was fire and my eyes fell to the piece of paper, the piece of folded
newspaper
, he had thrown at me.

I picked it up and shuffled over to my bed to get on it, but I couldn’t straighten up and cried out in pain when I tried.  Sinking back down to the ground, with a flash of heat bringing sweat out on my forehead, I stayed still until the pain was manageable again and unfolded the paper.

It had been so long since I’d had anything to read aside from the control panel of the treadmill that the words made no sense at first.  I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.

My heart almost stopped.  It was a newspaper clipping about
me
.  My brow furrowed with concentration as I tried to understand what it was saying.  Police?  Leads?  Were they close to figuring out where I was?

The world seemed to turn as black and white as the newsprint as I finally understood what the article was about.  The police had run out of leads in my case.  I was presumed dead.  My memorial service would be held on…

The date was cut out.

I dropped the paper on the ground and stared out across the colorless room.  The fear, the anger, the hope, everything faded away.  I was dead.

How long has it been?  How long?  How long?  I’m dead, so why isn’t it over?

There was no dinner that day, but when he came back to give me my sedatives for the night, I didn’t have any fight in me.  He seemed pleased.