The Last Thing You See (2 page)

It was so fucking cold.  My neck hurt.  Of course everything else hurt too, but that one was new.  I must have fallen asleep in the chair.

My right eye was still swollen completely shut, but the swelling must have gone down enough overnight for me to make out a few details through the left.  The sunlight was still orange and had not yet begun to blast down with the white heat of full day.  It shone in through the hole in the wall they called a window.  It was early.

The problem was, he always started early.  As if on cue, the door downstairs opened, and heavy footsteps climbed the stairs up towards the room I was being held in.

I had no idea where I was, no idea if anybody knew I was still alive.  What I did know was that I was going to die here.  The door burst open, the enthusiastic gesture of a man who really loves his work.

“Ah, good morning, Corporal Martell. I see you are awake.  Maybe my training is doing you some good, my friend?  Maybe it is making you to be not so lazy?  Yes?”

I didn’t answer, I had nothing left to say.  He already knew everything I was ever going to tell him.

“We’ve got a big day today, my friend,” he continued. “Time to get serious.  Want to guess what’s happening?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I could see him pulling those fingerless gloves out of his pocket and putting them on.  If you’re going to be punching somebody a lot, you want to be wearing gloves.

When he had strapped them on to his satisfaction and it didn’t look like any response was forthcoming from me, he hit me with an arching right hook that came down square on my cheekbone.  That ought to even things up, swelling wise, pretty soon.

“Nothing to say?  Don’t want to sing the Star-Spangled Banner for me?  OK, because I like you so much, I’ll tell you.”

My ‘friend’ leaned in close until his mouth was right by my ear.  The first day I found myself in this chair, I flinched because of his body odor.  Now though, I couldn’t smell a thing through the clotted blood in my nose, and even if I could, his aroma would now pale in comparison to my own.

“Today I’m going to take your feet off,” he whispered.  “But that is for later.”

I was in and out of consciousness for much of the day. Sometimes I was being beaten, sometimes I was being cut.  All the while, he spoke to me.

‘My friend’ this and ‘my friend’ that.  By the time the day was stinking hot, I had a newly broken rib and every breath was like fire that wheezed out of me.  But I was still in control.

I was just a tiny spark, walled up in the last little fortress of my mind.  Despite all the pain, despite all the talk, he hadn’t yet found a way inside.  But then he did.

“Hey, my friend, you got somebody waiting for you back home?  Maybe some pretty girl?”

I didn’t want to react, I tried to ignore it, but I must have done something.  Did I stop breathing for a moment?  I didn’t know, I was in no state to be in a poker tournament.

“Ah!  You do!  What’s her name?”

Christie.  Her face appeared before me in the darkness behind my swollen eyes.  I’d been stopping myself from thinking of her.  Those first couple of nights, after my friend was done for the day, I had thought about Christie, hoping it would make things easier.

It hadn’t.  The idea that I’d held her for the last time, heard ‘I love you’ for the last time, had my last kiss, was too much.  So I’d let myself live through one last memory, that day we had ice cream on the bench by the lake, and then I shut her out.  But now she was back.

“Let me tell you this, the funeral will be what you call closed-casket for whatever pieces of you get sent back.  She would vomit at the sight of you.”

For the first time since I wound up in this place, I cried.  The tears managed to force themselves out through my puffy eyelids, and I felt their salty sting on my cuts.

Only for a few seconds though, because my sobs were like sunshine on this guy’s solar panels, and the blows I couldn’t see coming started once more.  Christie always could bring down my walls, but I never thought it would be used against me.

“You will never see her again, my friend,” he said during a water break.  “I promise you, I
promise
you, that the last thing you see will be my smiling face.”

Reality started to become a hazy concept.  His voice and his beating, the very pain that dominated my entire existence, took on a distant quality, as if I was floating away from my body.

You got somebody waiting for you back home?

You got somebody waiting for you?

You got somebody?

*****

When I woke up, the light was so bright I could barely see.  Must have been somewhere near the middle of the day, but it wasn’t hot at all, it was crisp and cool.

The whole room was white and blue, not the dusty old stone I expected.  What happened?  I made it out?  This wasn’t the army hospital tent… I remembered that that already happened too.

My eyes adjusted further and I saw that, even if it wasn’t the army tent I’d first woken up in after my rescue, it was most definitely another hospital.  I struggled to clear my head as the memory of the nightmare, the same old nightmare, still tried to hold on to my mind.

And somebody was holding on to my hand.  I turned my head and then my eyes travelled up along a bare arm to a face so perfect and somehow familiar that it only served to increase my confusion.

Now I remembered the acid attack, coming to the hospital, and ‘talking’ to the police.  I was supposed to be in L.A.

That nightmare always left my head all jumbled up. It was so vivid every time.  Waking up to this made me think I must have died in that chair, because now there was an angel holding my hand.

Her hair was long and glamorous, falling in loose dark waves over her shoulders, framing a face that was looking down at me with such care and concern that I wanted to tell her I was OK just to put her mind at ease.  I wanted to see her smile one of those smiles that go all the way into the eyes.

Her skin was flawless, normally the sign of a lot of make-up, but if that was the case here I couldn’t tell, she looked like a natural beauty.  She was maybe the most classically beautiful woman I’d ever seen in real life.

Athletic and so very feminine, I was physically drawn to her in a way that I hadn’t experienced since Christie.  Surely no man could look at her without feeling it, without wanting her.

For me, though, there couldn’t be anybody after Christie.  There just couldn’t.

Nick slowly opened his eyes and turned to look at me, his breathing much more calm and quiet through the oxygen mask now.  He didn’t say anything, I didn’t even know if he
could
speak, but under a thick blanket of confusion I thought I saw some kind of half-recognition.

There was more than that too.  The quick glance down my body before returning to my eyes was so fast it probably wasn’t a conscious decision on his part.  Men might not think women notice that kind of thing, but we do.

I was perhaps more used to it than most, I was paraded around in front of a lot of people more often than most anyway.  Sometimes it made me feel embarrassed, worried that I wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny.

Usually men seemed to like what they saw, but not always, and the unspoken rejections affected me more than they should have.  When I slipped up and let myself read some of the things written about me, like yesterday when some random person wrote that the acid probably would have made an improvement to my looks, it didn’t help my self-doubt.

Sometimes the most positive responses were the worst.  Sometimes I couldn’t tell if people could even see me behind the characters, behind the carefully crafted image.  Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were just faking it for whatever reason.

With Nick, it felt like there was some kind of energy between us when our eyes met properly for the first time.  I would have sworn on my life that he felt it too. His blue eyes lit up like the sky on a clear summer’s day and I was lost for words.

Then they clouded over and he looked away again, and he pulled the sheet up to his chin with his other hand. It left me with butterflies in my stomach as if I’d been floating on air, realized that’s not how people really walk, and then fell back down to earth.

I pulled my hand out of his, feeling suddenly awkward and unsure of that I’d read in his eyes.  I looked down at my feet for a second, licking my lips and trying to think of what to say when he reached for a small whiteboard and marker that was resting on a table next to his bed.

After scribbling on it for a moment, he turned it around with a slow reluctance to reveal a question.

‘Are you Harper Bayliss?’

“Yes.  And you’re Nick. The police told me.”

Nick spun the whiteboard back around, quickly rubbing off the previous words with the side of his hand and writing something else there.

‘Why are you here?’

“Um… well, I mean… sorry I didn’t come sooner, if that’s what you mean.  I just wanted to come by and say thank you.  You know.”

I gestured at the small bandage on my forearm and then thought of the painful burns he had endured and felt my eyes watering.  I didn’t want anybody to be hurting because of me.  Nick’s next message was accompanied by an incredulous look.

‘That was you?’

I nodded and threw my hands up for a moment before wiping my eyes.  “I’m so sorry, Nick.  That man was going to… you stopped him and now you’re here because of me.”

Nick shook his head and wrote a new message.

‘Not your fault’

“I guess not.  But still, I can’t thank you enough.  Can I… give you a hug?”

The moment I said it, I felt like a moron.  Nick’s eyebrows raised and he hadn’t finished writing his next message, nor had my blush begun to fade, when his doctor cleared his throat from the doorway.

“That wouldn’t be a great idea. Nick’s skin is still extremely sensitive,” he said.

“Is he going to be OK?” I asked.

Glancing down at the whiteboard, which Nick was now holding so only I could see it, I saw it read ‘Rain check?’ and couldn’t help but feel the corners of my mouth lift in a tiny smile.

“Are you happy for me to speak with Harper about your injuries, Nick?” the doctor asked.

Nick gave a shrug and a thumbs-up.

“By the way, my daughter has dressed up as Princess Sundancer for the last three Halloweens, she’s your biggest fan, Harper.”

“Oh really?  That’s so cute!  Thank you.”

“Anyway.  Mr. Martell here is going to be just fine.  Thanks to the quick action of bystanders with all the water, the burns are not going to have any lasting effect beyond some scarring.  The only reason he’s still in here is because of the inhalation.”  The doctor waved his hand around his mouth, indicating the oxygen mask Nick was wearing.

“Oh, what’s up with that?”

“Well, unfortunately, Nick inhaled some of the fumes and it’s given him some minor burns down his trachea, the windpipe.  It’s resulted in some difficulty breathing and talking, but there’s no evidence that there’s been any damage to his lungs, so he’s just here for observation.  And the Jell-O, they all stay for the Jell-O.”

‘It
is
good’

The doctor chuckled at Nick’s sign while Nick pulled a water bottle with a straw from some drink holder hooked on the side of his bed and held his mask out of the way while he drank a few good gulps.

“So I’m just doing my rounds, making sure you’re feeling like you’re on the mend.  Are you?”

Nick gave another thumbs-up.

The doctor mimicked a large tick on an imaginary clipboard.  “And sleep, did you manage to get some?”

‘Some’

“OK, great.  These kinds of injuries can make it incredibly difficult to get to sleep and stay asleep, so keep it up and you’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Thank goodness,” I said.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it… um.”

The doctor was looking unsure of himself for the first time, like he was suddenly out of his element.

“Would you like me to sign something for your daughter?  Or a photo, maybe?” I asked.

“Oh!  Would you?  That would give me some much needed street-cred.  I’ve got my phone here.”  He pulled it out of his pocket.

“Hmmm.  Actually, I’ve got an idea.  Does it take video?”

“Yeah, what did you have in mind?”

“Just tell me what button to press, I think she’ll like it.  What’s her name?”

“Her name is Kelly.  You just tap here to start and then there again to stop.”

I took the phone from him and pressed the icon on the screen where he had pointed, quickly turning it around to point at myself and holding it out at arms-length.

“Hi Kelly, I heard about your Halloween costumes and I wanted to say thank you!  Listen to your dad, he’s a good friend of mine.  Don’t forget the magic word and, whatever you do, never forget to dance.”

I finished the video with my head resting on the shoulder of Kelly’s dumbfounded-looking dad while I smiled my best fairy-princess smile.  The doctor accepted his phone back as if it was a bar of solid gold and grinned at me.

“Thank you so much.  With this, we might be able to stop tying her up to get her teeth brushed.”

“That’s alright.  You know, anything I can do to help in the fight against tooth decay.”

Nick snorted out a laugh that immediately turned into a coughing fit and only managed to get himself under control after another drink of water.  He was left red-faced and breathing hard by the end of it and I found myself back by his bedside with a hand on his shoulder, an area unmarked by the burns, before I even thought about what I was doing.

“Well Nick, I was starting to think you weren’t going to have any visitors, but I see you go for quality over quantity.  Good plan.  I’ll see you later. Nice to meet you, Miss. Bayliss.”

“Bye.”

Once again, I retrieved my hand from Nick.  It was odd that I couldn’t seem to keep my hands off of him, surely it must have made him uncomfortable, but I guessed it was a bit too much effort to write it down.

I went over to the bouquet on the table by the window and looked at the little card tied to the stems.  Just as I thought.

“So these flowers are from me,” I said.

‘Very nice’

“It’s the first time I’ve seen them.  My mom ordered them and said it would be enough, but I didn’t think so.”

Nick shrugged.

‘Glad you came’

I smiled.  “So, I… uh… cleared my schedule for an hour or so.  Mind if I stay?  Shoot the breeze a bit?”

Nick gestured to the chair next to his bed and I took it, putting my feet up on part of the frame under his mattress.  I wasn’t sure how well a conversation could flow under the circumstances, but we didn’t do too badly.

I found out that Nick was a former Marine, discharged last year, and was now working security for Jeremy Holt, a local businessman who I knew actually lived on the same street as me.  Small world.

None of his answers were quite what I had expected, given my first impression when I saw him on the sidewalk.  Under that bad boy exterior he was totally different, though he did seem to avoid some questions and turn the conversation back to myself.  Maybe that was just easier because I could actually talk.

Either way, there was something about him that was intriguing.  It was more than the fluttery feelings I got when he looked me in the eye, but that didn’t hurt either.

My time was running out though.  I had a photo shoot to get to, one that would now probably have to consist of clever poses with one arm behind my back.

The thing was, I didn’t want to say goodbye.  There was something special about being close to him.  It wasn’t fair that somebody like that, somebody that did what he did, would only be part of my life for such a fleeting moment.

But where would he fit in?  What would my mother say?  Something along the lines of how bad for my image he would be, probably.  Maybe she was right… but still.

“I’ve got to go, Nick.  I’m so glad to have met you though.  Thank you again. I can’t say it enough.  Goodbye.”

‘Goodbye’

I stood and began to walk out, reaching into my handbag for my sunglasses and cap, and then turned around before I was out the door.

“If there’s anything I can do, you know, about the medical expenses or anything?”

Nick waved the suggestion away but wrote something on his whiteboard and paused a long time before turning it around, as if he was struggling with the decision to show me.

‘Would you visit me again?’

The question took me by surprise, as did the burst of joy that filled me up for a second.  Then I came back down to reality again.  My schedule was absolutely jam-packed for the next few days, it wouldn’t be easy.  I probably couldn’t make it.  No, definitely not.

“Yes.  I’ll visit again.”