The Last Thing You See (8 page)

Consciousness crept up on me slowly as I awoke from the kind of sleep normally reserved for recovery after a full day of marching.  By the time Harper and I finished the previous night, we were as exhausted as we’d ever been after a BJJ session.

The first thing I noticed, before I’d even opened my eyes, was the faint smell of vanilla.  I was on my side and Harper was beside me, facing the other way, the entire length of her perfect body pressed against mine.

The vanilla scent was coming from her hair.  I took a deep breath through my nose and opened my eyelids just a crack.  I could just make out the side of her face as she slept peacefully.

I licked my lips and got the idea, not as obvious as a real
flavor
, but just the idea of strawberries, and I thought of Harper’s lip gloss.  She had kissed me, she had
seen
me.  It was still a concept that warranted skepticism.  Harper.  And me.

Under the covers, my arm was draped over her and she had fallen asleep hugging it between her breasts, her fingers interlaced with mine.  Everything was silent except for the faint sound of Harper breathing.

The whole room was quiet.  Maybe the whole world had stopped so I could stay in this moment forever.  That would be fine by me.  If there was a heaven, this was what it would be like.

It felt like life had, recently, been nothing but unbearable heat and choking dust.  I couldn’t breathe, everything was so
hard
, so
sharp
, and there was nowhere to rest.  I’d only been waking up each day out of habit. There was no other reason for it.

Then Harper came along.  And she was cool.  She was fresh air.  She was soft.  I took another deep breath.  She smelled
good
.  She felt like home.

Home.  That used to mean something else besides Harper.  Some
one
else.  A long time ago I’d given my heart to Christie and assumed that it would always belong to her.  We’d promised each other forever.

For the first time in months, I let myself think about Christie.  The memories came to me like a series of pictures on the wall of a decrepit old house.  They were dirty and cracked but, when I wiped the dust off, the colors underneath were still beautiful.

God it hurt, the way she looked at me in those memories.  She trusted me, but she didn’t know that our forever was going to be a lot shorter than some others.  Neither did I.  A tear fell out of the corner of my eye and landed somewhere in Harper’s hair.

If I was really going to do this, if I was going to ‘give us a shot’ with Harper, I had to come clean about Christie.  Harper had to know that I wore the worst scars on the inside.

I paused, trying to memorize every single little detail of this momentary heaven I’d woken up to this morning in case I never woke up to anything like it again.  With a kind of internal sigh, I carefully disentangled my arm from Harper and eased myself backwards and out of the bed.

In her slumber, Harper sighed.  It was a sound slightly reminiscent of some of those sexy little noises she had made last night, though much more subdued.

I found my underwear and pulled them on as Harper rolled on to her back and pulled the covers up over her shoulders.  She let out a sleepy little growl of annoyance without opening her eyes or even her mouth, not quite awake yet but definitely stirring.

My wallet was on the bedside table where I’d hurriedly dropped it after retrieving a condom I’d first thought would probably expire before I bothered using it.  There was something else in there though, a picture I had tucked in behind all the bank cards and hadn’t taken out since I returned home from the Marine Corps to find out that everything I cared about the most was gone.

I picked the wallet up and sat back down on the bed, rifling through the cards until I got to the back and ran my finger along the somewhat tattered edge of the photograph.  Harper took a deep breath behind me, and I could sense her stretching out as the mattress and covers shifted with her movements.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” I replied in a low voice.

“Everything OK?”

Harper sat up, sheet wrapped around her chest, and peered around the side of my arm to see my wallet in my hands.

“No charge,” she said.

“Harper, we have to talk.  I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?” she said quietly, pulling the sheet more tightly around herself.

I tugged the photo out and averted my eyes as I passed it over my shoulder to Harper.  I knew what it looked like, I didn’t need to see it.  I still couldn’t look at it anyway.

It was taken shortly before I shipped out for the first time, Christie and me kissing, with eyes squeezed shut and fish-lips sticking out from our faces, as she held the camera out at arms-length.  It was a miracle we were in frame at all, let alone perfectly centered and caught in a moment so silly and sweet that the very thought of it still ripped me apart.

“Who’s this?”

“My girlfriend.”

“What?” Harper’s question was like a judge’s gavel.

“My… my…”

“Are you
cheating
on her with me?”

I’d never said it before.  To say it aloud would be admitting it was true, and I’d not yet been able to face up to that reality.  For Harper, though, I had to.  I couldn’t give Harper my heart until I’d taken it back from Christie.  Until I’d let Christie go.

“My… ex… girlfriend.  Ex.”

“Why do you still have her picture in your wallet?”

“She’s not... she… she’s… she died.  And it’s my fault.  She saved my life and I couldn’t save hers.”

Harper brought one hand across her mouth as she looked back and forth between the photo and me.  I could see tears welling up in her eyes as that part of her that cared so much about people took over.

“W-what’s her name?”

“Her name is Christie.  Well, Christabelle, really.”

“That’s a pretty name.  She’s really beautiful too.” Harper handed me the picture back and I held it between the fingers and thumbs of both hands, still not quite able to view it directly.  The slightly faded colors floated in the lower periphery of my vision, daring me to look.

“Yeah.  A name like that, you know her mom wanted to dress her up as a little princess ever since she found out she was having a girl,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Must have really pissed her off that her little girl just wanted to be called ‘Chris’.  When I tell you she was a tomboy, you better believe it.  Oh, man.”

“You knew her when you were kids?”

“Oh yeah, we knew each other since we were about five years old.  But, you know, kids are like boys over here and girls over there.  We didn’t really have all that much to do with each other until we were eight.  That’s when we were… uh… properly introduced.”

“How?”  Harper shuffled forward and leaned against me, her head resting on my upper arm.

“In the only way an eight-year-old boy knows how to introduce himself.  I put glue in her hair, of course.”

Harper tentatively smiled.  “You Casanova.”

“Yeah, but remember how I said she was a tomboy?”

“Uh oh.”

“Whoa.  She turned around and kicked me in the balls
so hard
that I swear I was lifted a good foot off the ground.”

I could see Harper was smiling even though I could feel the wetness against my arm.  “Girl power,” she said.

“To this day, I swear my voice is a full octave higher than it otherwise would have been.  The agony.  So Christie’s mom eventually gets to hear about this whole incident in the principal’s office, as do my parents.  I thought my punishment was bad enough. I had to make her an apology card, which I was supposed to give to her the next day.  I thought
my
parents were strict, but you should have seen Christie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I guess this was the straw that broke her mom’s back.  After years of dainty little dresses getting ripped and muddy, dolls set on fire and who knows what else, she snapped.  She could have just cut out the bit of hair with the glue in it, but she didn’t.”

“She left it in?”

“No.  She shaved it right down the middle and made her come to school for the rest of the week like that.  My apology card was… not well received.  It went straight in the trash as soon as the teacher wasn’t looking.  Her mom eventually made Christie sign up sponsors and then shave her whole head for cancer research, but that’s how years of enmity between us began.”

“It’s not quite Romeo and Juliet,” said Harper.

“No.  It took a long time.  I hated her as much as she hated me until we started high school.  I don’t know what magic was worked in those summer holidays, but when she came to school, Chris was gone and then she was Christie.”

“Did you ask her out?”

“Like everybody else, yeah.  I won’t tell you
exactly
what she said, but it wasn’t ‘yes’.”

Harper stroked my arm with her hand, shuffling even closer.

“We kinda went our separate ways for a while.  I got my growth spurt and started getting into a few fights here and there.  Fell in with the wrong crowd too.  Every few months or a year, I’d ask her out again, but she always shot me down.”

I looked down at Harper, then finally at the happy moment caught in the picture.  The sound of her voice from the past hit me like a ton of bricks.  What had she said when she held out the camera? 
Kissyface!
  My breath hitched and I looked away again. Harper’s other hand came up to my shoulder, giving it a little rub.

“I know what people see when they look at me, Harper.  Some violent criminal, probably on drugs, probably going to get shot for no good reason soon.  That’s just what I was turning into when Christie finally said yes.”

I closed my eyes and pictured her there, arms crossed and laying down the law for me.  It was so vivid, I could almost reach out and touch her.

“We went on a date.  I laid on as much charm as I had and we, somehow, hit it off.  I was hooked on her right from the start and I think she was hooked on me too, but she wouldn’t date me anymore until I promised her something.”

“Promised what?” Harper asked.

“She said my friends were a bunch of assholes.  She wasn’t going to date some drugged-out douche getting into brawls on the weekends and stealing things.  If I wanted to be with her, I had to make some pretty big changes, leave a lot of stuff behind.”

“But you did.”

“She was… worth it,” I said.  “Nobody was ever proud of me the way Christie was proud of me.  The guys I used to hang out with, a couple months later they went to the next town over and broke into somebody’s house.  That somebody shot one of them.  Boom.  Dead.  If it wasn’t for Christie, I might have been there.  You know how I said I joined the Marines because of my dad?”

“Yeah.”

I shook my head and tapped the photo.  “This.  This here is the real reason.  I got this idea in my head that I had to go out
there
to make sure Christie was always safe, I had to do my bit to make sure the best thing in the world was defended.  My dad had always wanted me to do something like that, so it seemed like a good idea.”

My throat closed up on me and I rested my forehead on one hand to force the air in and out, feeling like somebody was scrubbing my insides with a piece of steel wool.  My stomach cramped and I winced. Harper rubbed my back, a wordless supportive presence.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The last time I had leave, before I got captured, I remember Christie there at the airport telling me not to go, to just be one day late. We’d go somewhere so we could have one day all to ourselves.  Just one day.  I told her I couldn’t, I had to be where I was told to be.  I had orders.  I’d give anything to have told her yes instead.”

“Then you got captured.”

“Yeah, but I went missing first.  They found… pieces… of some of the guys I was with, others were just all shot up.  They had no idea where I was, or if there was anything left of me to find.  Well, my dad had passed away after I’d been in the corps for a few years, my mom just after I graduated high school.  By then I had Christie as my contact in case of emergency.  They told her I was missing and presumed dead.”

“Oh no,” said Harper, the last word drawn into a kind of horrified groan.  “I don’t know what…”

“Christie didn’t take it too well, so she went back to her parents’ place and locked herself in her old room for days.  She went out one night for a walk.  In Warfields.  The little town where nothing ever happens.  Well…”

“What happened?  Nick?”

“Somebody attacked her.  There aren’t a lot of details. All they ever found was blood on the sidewalk, a
lot
of blood, and some drag marks.  They searched for months but, with that much blood, they had to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that she had been… killed.  She was out there because of me.”

“Nick, it’s not your fault.  You know that, right?”