The Trouble With Bodyguards: Part 2 (4 page)

              “No,” he said, “not now. I found you, and he somehow slipped away again.”

              “Rick,” she said, sitting up, “how did you find me?”

              “Let me tell you the whole story,” he said, pulling her hand toward him, stroking her fingers with the pad of his thumb.

              “About a year ago,” Rick said, cradling Alex's hand in his lap, “we were sitting in the living room, TV dinners in our laps, and a news story about a local photographer who had made it big with some modeling contract came on.”

              Alex remembered the piece. She had been reluctant to be a part of it, wanting her work to be appreciated on its own merit, but knowing that with her background the media were going to paint a picture of a little rich girl who had actually done something worthwhile, which they had.

              “Jake was really focused on the screen. I thought that he was just enjoying all of the half-naked models walking around in the sunshine. I wrote it off like it was nothing,” he said.

              “He started to collect fashion magazines,” he continued, “buying a couple of them a week, cutting the pictures from them and taping them to his walls. Weird, but again nothing to be worried about. Every teenage boy goes through that phase where they have women on their bedroom walls, if you know what I mean.”

              He looked to her, a wry smile curling the edge of his mouth, and she nodded. True, she had never been a teenage boy, but she knew where he was coming from.

              “The thought never crossed my mind that something sinister could be going on, something dangerous. I noticed that his attitude changed, that he began to engage more in conversation, to participate in more of the everyday activities. I thought, wow, perhaps the doctors finally found the right balance of medications, where he can be a normal guy again. Maybe after all this time I finally get to have my little brother back again.

              “One night, standing out in the garden outside his window, I was amazed to find that the constant chatter of his late night ‘conversations’ was not to be heard. For the first time in longer than I could remember, my brother was silent in the darkness of his bedroom, instead of ranting to his imaginary companions. I was so excited I could barely sleep that night, expecting him to burst out screaming, his bottled up lunacy bursting forth from where he was attempting to keep it trapped.

              “But it didn’t happen. Not a sound came from his room that night,” he continued. “I awoke to the alarm going off in the morning, and walked into the kitchen to find my brother busy making pancakes at the stove. He looked up at me, smiling. Smiling! I hadn’t seen him smile since he was a little kid, not really. Only the grin of the lunatic had I seen on his face in ages. But here he was, greeting me with coffee and breakfast, well-rested and happy for the first time in longer than I could remember.

              “Things were amazingly normal. In the beginning, when I left for work each day, I worried constantly that this peace that had come over our lives was going to come crashing down, leaving things worse than they ever had been. And each day I came home to dinner on the table, my brother having gone to the store, or the post office by himself, normal things. I was lulled into a sense of calm by it, content. I thought that everything was going to be all right.”

              “What happened?” Alex asked. She could feel the tension building in his story, knew that the tragic turn of events was coming.

              “I went into his room,” said Rick, the color draining from his face. “I never went in his room,” he continued, “I never really had a reason to, and I was giving him a little bit of privacy, you know? Yeah, I would glance in there, when the door happened to be open when I was walking by, but I never really paid any attention. Things were going so well. Jake seemed to be regaining a bit of his old self. I was relieved that our lives seemed to be returning to a semblance of normal.

              “But something was bothering me, some small voice in the back of my mind that I wasn't seeing something that was very important, that I was lulled into a sense of security by his change in attitude, and missing the big, screaming danger that was underneath it all. I would wake in the middle of the night, to nightmares that he had murdered our mother, and that he was glad that he had done it. It didn't make any sense, but I had to try and see what he saw, when he was in there with the door shut. So I did.

              “It was a Saturday, and I had the day off. Jake was out in the living room, watching something on the TV. I was coming out of my room, just having taken a shower, and I stopped at his door. It was always shut, his sanctuary closed off to the rest of the world, and I reached out and tried the knob. I don't know why, but I expected it to be locked, barring me entry into his space, but it wasn't. The knob turned effortlessly in my hand, and I pushed the door open. The walls were plastered with photos, all cut carefully from magazines or newspapers and glued to every inch of visible space. Beautiful faces stared at me from all angles, full lips, perfect cheekbones, hair blowing in the wind. My breath caught in my throat, my heart dropping into my stomach as I noted that most of the women staring at me had their eyes blackened out, colored in carefully with a sharpie marker. They had been blinded by him; they could not see.

              “I stepped farther into the room, unable to process what I was seeing. Why would he do this to them? What was he trying to hide from these women that he surrounded himself with? One image stood out from the rest, one beautiful, smiling face with her eyes still glossy, bright and blue. As I searched the walls, I noted that her face was prominent among the rest, nestled carefully between hundreds of other faces, all blinded, while she stared smiling at me from her place among them. Who was this? I thought, and why was she different from the others? Why was she special?

              “As I stood there, staring at all of these faces surrounding me, I heard a sound from the hall. Turning, I found my brother standing outside the open door, a look of horror and betrayal on his face. I was in his space, his sanctuary, looking at these pictures that were supposed to be only for him.”

              “Jake,” Rick said, stepping toward his brother, “I'm sorry.”

              “Why are you in my room?” asked his brother, tears brimming in his eyes, the pallor on his face reddening with rage. “What are you doing in here?”

              “I don't know,” said Rick, stepping toward Jake. His brother dodged his touch, shrinking away from him as if he were being threatened. “Jake,” Rick said in a comforting tone, “I just came in here. I wasn't thinking. I'll get out.”

              “Are you trying to take her from me?” Jake yelled, tears spilling down his cheeks.

              “No,” said Rick, confused. “Take who from you? No,” he said again, “I'm not trying to take anything from you.”

              “I knew I had to keep her secret,” said Jake, crossing to the wall and caressing the photos of the woman who could see with his fingertips. “Keep her safe. I knew that someone would come along and try and take her from me. I just didn't think that it would be my own fucking brother!”

              “Hey,” Rick said, “I'm not trying to take anything from you. Calm down.”

              Jake leapt at him, knocking him to the floor of the room, pinning him down on his back, his face mere inches away. Rick could see the rage in his eyes, the blind hatred that he had seen before, when Jake had turned on their mother so long ago. Spittle flew from his lips as he screamed, “You will not have her. She is mine! I will fucking kill you!”

              “We wrestled,” said Rick, pain visible on his face. “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he had flipped out. I was really afraid that he might kill me.”

              “Oh, Rick,” Alex said, gripping his hand tightly in her own.

              “I ended up hitting him,” he said. “I had to. He was freaking out, screaming all of these horrible things at me, scratching my face. I couldn't get him to stop. I still remember the look on his face, after I hit him. Like he was shocked that I had fought back. He didn't say anything, just sat there staring at me as I tried to talk to him, to bring him back from whatever place that he had gone to. I apologized, profusely, for both hitting him and walking into his room in the first place. God, I felt so awful. I still do.

              “He left. Just picked himself up off the floor and walked out of the house. I didn't know where he went, or what he could be doing. I was a nervous wreck. I got into my car and drove around for hours, searching for him. I walked through the woods around our house, calling his name. I couldn't find him anywhere. It was exactly the same as when he took off after the incident with our mom.

              “That night, I laid in bed, trying to sleep. I started at every sound, jumping up from my bed and running out into the hall to see if he had come back. The door to his room stood open, the faces of all those women staring at me from the dim room, as if they were judging me. I understood why he had blackened out all of their eyes. I felt so guilty, like somehow all of this had been my fault.

              “Several weeks went by, and nothing, not a word from him. I called the police, letting them know the situation, and filed a missing persons report. I called his doctors, worried that he hadn't taken his medications with him, and that he had been without them for so long. I didn’t know what he would do, what he was capable of.

              “One night, I found myself in his room again. Sitting on the edge of his bed, I stared at the pictures glued to his walls, trying to imagine what could have been going through his head when he did the same thing. My gaze was drawn again and again to the image of the only women whose face had not been altered, the one who could see. She was important; she was the key to finding him. I needed to find out who she was.

              “I scoured the internet, searching for pictures of models that had recently been featured in magazines that could be purchased around here. I went to the bookstore, scooping up every glossy magazine that I could find. Those guys probably thought I had some sort of problem myself, a young man walking out of that place with a hundred magazines a week. I stared at those pages, comparing the women to the photos that were plastered all over his bedroom walls. I found many of them there, their eyes darkened, blinded. I couldn't find her, the one that was so important to him, no matter how hard I looked.

              “I began to feel despair, as if the whole thing were hopeless. I sat down on the couch, pulling the tab off a can of beer, and flipped on the television. I almost choked on the first drink of that beer, spitting it all over myself and the coffee table in front of me. There she was, the woman that I had been searching for, on the TV.”

              “Who was it?” asked Alex, her voice small. She already knew who it was, who Rick's brother had been focused on, who had started this whole mess.

              “It was you,” he said, turning his head and looking at her for the first time in a while. “It was you, the woman behind the lens that had captured the images of all the other women. It was a replay of the interview that you had done so many months before, the one that had caught my brother's attention. You said something that made the whole mess click into place, made it all make sense. 'People don't really see my art in these pictures, they see beautiful women wearing expensive clothes. I want people to see the pain in this beauty, I want them to react. People deserve to feel something.

              “I searched you out,” he said, “reading interviews that you had done, looking at your work on the internet. I found that you had an office here in town, and I drove by, sort of a stalker myself at this point.” He chuckled uneasily, his cheeks reddening slightly with embarrassment. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn't know where he had disappeared to, and you were the only lead that I had.

              “I was there that day that you were shooting at the fountain,” he said. “I sat in my car, watching, searching the crowd for my brother. I was hoping that he would show up, somewhere, and that I could get a chance to talk to him. Just when I had lost hope, and was about to head back to the empty house, I caught a glimpse of him, walking down the steps toward you. I couldn't believe it; he was actually there. Then a horrible thought came to me, that he was headed toward you, and I didn't know why. Fear that he was going to try and hurt you hit me, and I jumped out of the car and ran toward him. I called out, hoping to catch his attention, but he was really focused, not seeing the world around him. He had something in his hand, and I watched as he sat that paper bag down on a table. I tried to catch him, sprinting down the sidewalk, but as soon as he set down the bag he ran off into the crowd. I chased him, frantically trying to catch up, but he melted into the group, and I lost him. By the time I got back to you, hoping to take the bag away, see what was inside it, you had already packed up and were leaving.”

              “It was the pictures,” she said, her voice far away. “He was taking the pictures, and you were there.”

              “Yes,” Rick said, “I was trying to find him, and I thought that he might try and get close to you.”

              “He did,” she said, fear trembling in the pit of her stomach. “He walked right up to my table. I was only a few feet away, and I never even noticed.”

              “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his thumb gently over hers.

              “I got into my car,” he continued, “and followed you onto the freeway. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to lose track of you, because I had been right in thinking that he would try and get close to you. I sat in the lot outside your apartment, after you got home, hoping that he would show up.”