The Last Thing You See (18 page)

‘Harper Bayliss Found with Throat Slit.’

I was staring at a newspaper headline, unable to believe it.  Below it was a picture of Harper, Harper as she should have been.  Harper as she was such a short time ago.  Young, beautiful, perfect, a soul that cared so much for other people.  For me.

The words of the article seemed to shift and move around every time I tried to read them, every time I tried to read about how I failed.  One second they said one thing, the next they said another.  I had to start over again and again.

People were talking to me, saying things that didn’t make sense.  Why wouldn’t they leave me in peace to read this newspaper from my nightmares?

“Man, where you learn to drive?  I called the cops, they go’n arrest yo ass.  Hey, you alive, man?”

The newspaper faded away and I opened my eyes, vision and pain both rushed back into my existence at the same time.  I was in my car with my head resting against the steering wheel.  It was night time.

I sat back, watching the dashboard sway and swirl for a few seconds before turning my head to the left and looking into a couple of faces that were showing a mixture of anger and concern.  I had no idea who they were.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You drive like a jackass, what happened,” said some guy that looked like he might be in his late teens.

Get to Harper,
a voice in my head screamed.  I gasped, which sent a spear of pain into my side.  I reached around and grasped at my ribs with a grunt.  At least one of them was surely broken.

“How… how long was I out?”

“Like a minute,” said the other guy.

I turned my head and fought back the nausea as the entire world kept on whirling when I stopped.  The gun was no longer on the passenger seat, I couldn’t see it anywhere.

“Shit.”

“Damn right.”

The piece of paper with the map printed on it was miraculously still on my lap.  I picked it up and blinked at it a few times, trying to bring it into focus.  My thumbs smeared blood on the paper as I held it, but I finally managed to read and recall the number of Walter Lambert’s house.  It should be one block ahead and one house from the corner on the opposite side of the street.

The seatbelt release, so elusive before I blacked out, clicked easily and I tried to open my door, only to find it jammed shut.  The door on the other side was pressed up against a parked car, so I began to climb out the window.

“Hey, what you doin’, man?  You need to stay there.  We ain’t letting you go.”

I crashed to the ground and cried out at the explosion of pain from my side, as well as the sickening sensation of everything spinning while the broken ends of my ribs seemed to grind together.  It took three attempts, but when I rose to my feet, I towered over the two of them and they didn’t look so confident in their abilities anymore.

“Here.” I gave them the map with Walter’s address on it.  “The police are already on their way.  If they stop to talk to you, send them here.”

“You late for a party?”

“I better not be.”

I began lurching in the direction of Walter’s house, leaving the two confused young men in my wake.  Every breath was punctuated by a spark of pain as my lungs inflated against however many broken ribs I had, and every time I put weight on my left leg, it hurt, but that pain at least eased with every step I took.

By the time I reached the next corner, I was already jogging, my leg hurting but almost fully functional, though every time I inhaled was still agony.  There it was.  The only house I could see on that side of the street with a light on.  One room at the rear-left side of the house.

Adrenaline surged through me and dulled the pain of my ribs.  I picked up speed and nearly sprinted across the road, heading for the front door.  I kicked it with everything I had, right at the edge and just under the door handle, throwing my entire weight behind it and pushing off my planted foot.

It didn’t come off its hinges, but the door jamb was effectively splintered and the door crashed open against the internal wall.  I ran through the nineteen seventies décor in the direction of that room at the far left of the hallway, barging through the door with a voice inside my head screaming and begging that I would find Harper there, and find her safe and sound.

I burst into a room almost entirely covered in movie posters and pictures of Harper.  It was a shrine to her if ever I’d seen one, but more importantly, she was there.  She was tied to a chair with blood dripping from her fingers behind her, but she was alive.

Standing in front of her, in the middle of the room, was Walter Lambert with a long thin knife in his hand and a dumbfounded look on his face.  I didn’t give him time to think.  I barely gave myself time to think, relying on my experience of being in situations where people were trying to kill me.

Walter had no such experience and swung the blade in a wild and uncontrolled arc, missing me completely and allowing me to grab hold of his wrist as I drove him backwards into the corner of the room.  He hit the wall with a thud and I drove my shoulder into his mid-section, hearing the wind get knocked out of him even as the pain in my ribs blossomed anew.

“Nick!”  Harper screamed, seeming almost delirious with stress.

I extended my legs and felt the top of my head hit Walter’s nose with a satisfying crunch as I pulled back on his wrist and then slammed it against the wall again and again until the knife was dropped.  With that safely on the floor, I created a little distance between us and aimed a knee to his stomach that doubled him over before pulling him backwards and tossing him towards the ground.

In the distance, I heard sirens approaching and almost laughed in relief.  This nightmare was almost over, but Walter wasn’t out for the count yet.  I needed to subdue him until the police arrived.

He was already trying to sit up when I trapped his head and right arm between my legs and put him in a mounted triangle choke as I knelt over him.  In a few seconds, Walter would be unconscious and I could find something to restrain him without the danger of him fighting back or recovering that dagger.

Walter’s right hand tried to grab at my face, but he couldn’t reach. He arched his back to try to get me off of him, but that wouldn’t have helped his case even if he did manage to roll on top.  The blood would be cut off to his brain just as well with me on the bottom.  The hold was locked-in.

When the gunshot went off, I realized my error in judgment.  He hadn’t arched his back to try to dislodge me, he’d done it so he could reach for a gun he had tucked into the back of his pants.

My ears were ringing, and a whole new spear of pain was thrust into my belly while the rest of me went numb.  Walter’s eyes finally lost focus as he was choked unconscious and I managed to glance down to my right where his arm now hung limp with a revolver loosely clutched in his hand.

The triangle choke was still on tight, held on by my own body weight, as I slumped forward until my face mashed ungracefully against the ground, looking towards the wall.  A warm river flowed out from my side, and I felt like some kind of hydraulic machine with a leak.  I couldn’t seem to make myself move.

The sirens came closer and closer, and somewhere behind me Harper was screaming something.  I couldn’t hear what that might be.  If Walter was to be released from the choke now, he’d regain full consciousness in less than a minute and still have that gun in his hand.  If it stayed on for another few minutes, he’d have brain damage.  A few more minutes and he would be dead.

In a way, I was glad that the decision about Walter Lambert’s life was out of my hands.  It was all I could do to concentrate on the dust and lint on the floor in front of my face.  Disentangling myself from him was completely beyond me. 
I’m fucking dying
, I thought.

‘No’.  That’s what Harper was yelling.  Over and over again.  As that damned dark fog rolled in from the edge of my vision for the second time in too few minutes, I tried to muster up all my strength for one last thing.  I just wanted to turn and see Harper safe.

Come on, Marine, you want the last thing you see to be this dirty floor? Move!
  My head barely twitched.

The last time I thought I was going to die, I was in a foreign land thousands of miles from anybody that loved me.  As the darkness covered my eyes completely, I could feel Harper reaching out to me across the few feet that separated us like a comforting hug, and I thought that this was almost alright.

Times like this would get you thinking about what the meaning of your life was.  Over there, I didn’t have an answer to that question.  I wished I hadn’t left home.

This time I thought maybe I was put on this earth so that Harper could
stay
on this earth.  That was OK by me.  The sirens and screams warbled and buzzed in my ears, seeming to become distant as another sound became clearer.  I heard a voice echoing from my memories.  It was Harper.

I’m right here.  And so are you.

I didn’t feel any anger or fear.  Maybe I didn’t have any energy left for that, maybe it was because she was with me.

I love you so much, Harper,
I thought at that beautiful memory.

I love you too, baby,
it said.

Before I opened my eyes, I reached out to the other side of the bed.  Nick wasn’t there of course, but I hoped he could feel it anyway.

It was lonely, waking up all by myself back in my room in my own house, but I’d take it over waking up tied to a chair.  I stayed in bed for several minutes, letting the sounds of birdsong and the distant whir of a lawnmower slowly chase away that last bit of sleepiness.

There was no filming schedule to keep to.  The scenes that required my presence had been postponed for as long as I needed to mentally and physically recover from my ordeal.  As long as that didn’t take more than a month or so.  So, for a few minutes at least, I could take my time.

Today was a big hurdle I had to get over, though.  There was nobody else to do it, so I set the date myself.  This was one of those days where I’d look back and think of my life before now and after now as two almost-separate things.

Eventually I couldn’t put it off any more, and I swung my feet out of bed, determined to face this daunting thing.  When I went downstairs, I found my mom in the living room, sitting in the same spot she had been on that awful night, with her head leaned right back and her fingers interlaced over her eyes and forehead.

“Mom?”

She dropped her hands and turned to look at me, and I saw that she was wearing exactly what she had been wearing the previous evening.  Could she have been there all night?  The bloodshot tinge to her eyes hinted at that very possibility.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  It’s… every time I start to nod off, I start hearing these sounds like somebody’s trying to break in.  Doors rattling, tapping on the windows, footsteps.  I’ve sprinted halfway up those stairs at least three times overnight thinking somebody might have gotten to you.”

Tears fell from her eyes and I circled the couch to sit next to her, pulling her into a hug.  After a moment I felt her arms around me, squeezing once and then releasing as she sat up straighter.

“Look at you,” she said.  “After all you’ve been through, and it’s me that’s a mess.  How are you so strong, Harper?”

“It’s a hell of a strange thing, thinking you’re about to die, then to not have it happen.  I feel like… I don’t know.  There’s so many possibilities now compared to when he was coming at me with that knife.  I thought about you, you know.  When I thought it was the end.  You, Dad, Orson, and Nick.  All the people who showed me what home, family, and love was all about.  All the important stuff.  I was so sad about how we left things, I just wanted you to know that I loved you.  That’s all I felt, so much love.”

“Harper, I love you too… you know that, right?”

“I know… but we’ve had some problems lately, haven’t we?”

My mom clasped her hands on her lap and looked down at them, suddenly unable to meet my eyes.  She nodded without glancing up.

“It’s not even all the stuff with Nick.  Everything changed after The Last Perfect Day.  I feel like I haven’t seen my mom since then.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since then, you’ve been my manager.  Where’s the mom who used to read me stories before I went to bed?  Where’s the mom who said I could quit acting tomorrow if I felt like it?  Where’s the mom that told me we’d just go get some ice cream if I did?  Something changed, and I don’t like it.”

My mom looked up for a fraction of a second before dropping her gaze again, wringing her hands together anxiously.  She took a few deep breaths before answering.

“I’m sorry… I… I didn’t know what I was doing.  I
don’t
know what I’m doing.  It’s tough being a parent.  You start off with this helpless little thing who needs you for everything, then one day they don’t seem to need you for
anything
.  Overnight, it was like you were suddenly all grown up and riding this wild bull of a career.  I saw a way I could be… useful?  I don’t know… a real part of your life for a bit longer anyway.  I just didn’t want to lose you.”

“Oh, Mom.  How could you think I didn’t need you?”

She shrugged and I reached out to take her hands.  “I tracked down my birth mother, you know.”

That brought her head back up with an almost audible snap.  “When?  Where is she?”

“A little over a month ago.  She’s… she’s dead.  But even if she wasn’t, you’d still be the one who brought me up, you’d still be the one who was always there for me.  I always thought that my birth parents threw me away like a piece of garbage.  No matter what, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t remember that and feel a little part of me get torn off.  I know better now.  I
needed
to know better, or one day there wouldn’t have been anything left of me to tear off.  I need you to be my mom again too.”

“OK… of course.  I…”

“And that means you can’t be my manager.”

My mom looked as if I’d told her the world was coming to an end.  “But… but… Harper, I… you need to have people you can trust to…”

“I want to be able to talk to you about my job.  I want to be able to talk to you about my personal life.  I want your advice, but I want it as my
mom
, nothing else.”  I gave her hands a squeeze.  “Mom, I love you so much, but this has to happen or, one way or another, you
will
lose me.  I have to be my own person, and I can’t do that with you as my manager.”

“Are… are you firing me?”

“Think of it as a promotion.”

My mom looked past me out of the newly repaired window for several seconds before meeting my eyes again.  “OK.  I don’t know what I’ll do with myself, but OK.”

I hugged her again.  “I love you, Mom.  Thank you.  I’m going to have a quick breakfast and then I’m gonna head out.”

“Where are you going?”

“You know where.”