Vulnerable (8 page)

            After the trip that seemed much quicker than the way to the campsite, they finally made it back to the parking lot of the church. Everyone was limp with exhaustion and practically tumbled out of the van when they arrived. One by one, everyone left. Everyone but Millie and Michael.

            He looked at her but realized the shadows were back inside her eyes. This made the nausea rush back as well. He took a step closer to her, but she took a step back.

            “It’s been a long day, and we have a date tomorrow,” she smiled. “You should go home and get some rest.” He nodded and placed a hand on her shoulder.

            “So… I guess I’ll see you at home,” Michael said. She nodded back. The nausea was fluctuating—sometimes there, sometimes not—because now he was feeling the same way he’d been feeling since he first laid eyes on her. He stroked his fingers along the outline of her face. He knew what it meant to him, but it was a little risky to be so forward with her; especially considering her complex with physical contact. She closed her eyes and breathed in the moment. He wanted to kiss her with everything inside of him, but he resisted; maybe tomorrow… he thought… we’re going on a date. He felt his heart flutter and flip and flop—he felt like he did in high school again; he felt like he did when he met Lindsay.

            He hopped in his car and thought about their date. Tomorrow’s going to be great.

·
       
 

            Millie smiled and thought about the day that awaited her. She thought about dating and how she’d never experienced it before; she thought about maybe taking a chance because she felt the wholeness—the goodness—of his spirit. She didn’t knew how that was possible, but she knew that Heavenly Father guided her through life when she tuned herself to Him by making good choices, and she felt that this was right.

            She turned around and reached for her keys. They rattled in her pocket as she pulled them out, but the moment the warm key pierced the icy keyhole, the wind seemed to whisper something dangerous. It whisked through the trees and whistled in her ear. Then a crunching sound broke through it all. Then another. And another. Someone was walking towards her. The feeling of good, of wholeness, dissipated immediately and was replaced by a repulsive feeling of nausea and calamity.       

            Millie turned around and gasped so suddenly that it didn’t even make a sound. Her hand clapped hard against her mouth and the trembling that she knew all too well began quaking as it always had in these moments.

            The night grew still—eerily quiet—not even crickets dared to chirp. “What are you doing here?” Millie whispered. The man stepped out of the looming shadow next to the church.

            “Aren’t I allowed to visit my daughter?” He asked, smiling the kind of smile you’d see on a serial killer’s mug shot. Her breathing grew heavy, quick, and short. Her bag slipped from over her shoulder and landed in a pile next to her feet. Silence cut back in, bringing with it heavy blankets of anxiety and secrecy.

            “I’m no daughter of yours,” she said in a quivering voice that she tried to make sound brave and courageous. She didn’t succeed. The man stepped closer.

            “Now, Millie, don’t you remember what I told you when I rescued you from that hell hole of an orphanage?” He stepped closer; she stepped back, her spine clattering with the doorframe of the church behind her—the door frame of her haven, the haven that was now standing empty, helpless.

            “I ASKED YOU SOMETHING!” the man barked. Millie retreated to the ground, huddling partway in fetal position, her hands clapped over her ears. She started humming some sort of lullaby. The man claiming to be her father shook his head in irritation, his tongue clung to the inside of his cheek. “I told you,” he said through gritted teeth, “never to sing that song!”

            “I’m humming it,” she cried before continuing humming the song. She focused on the buzzing of her lips, trying to block out the man who stood before her. She shot her eyes up and looked around her in hopes of finding someone—anyone who could hear her cries for help if she decided it was to come to that—but there was no one. She squinted her eyes as she thought about Baba, the maternal figure she knew at the orphanage—the only maternal figure at the orphanage. She closed her eyes tightly and tried to remember her singing, but the memory faded over time; it had become worn and well used from all of the times she let her mind rush back to it.

            “Don’t give me that smart a—,”

            “STOP IT!” She cried. Her lungs felt like they were about to collapse. She continued to hum the song.

            “That woman was never your mother!”

            She hummed louder.

            “I AM YOUR FATHER!”

            She hummed even louder.

            “LISTEN TO ME!”

            She broke. She wailed in pain as if something inside of her mind collapsed, causing so much of an emotional break that she could feel it literally killing her from the inside out. “The song…” she whispered too low for her adopted father to hear, “was to drive the monsters away…”

            “What? Talk louder, runt!” he barked.

            “But… there was always one monster… too great to be driven away…”

            “TALK LOUDER!” He somehow managed to hiss and bark at the same time.

            “GET AWAY FROM ME!” She shrieked, her body quaked and fell to the stone steps of the church. Her eyes remained bolted shut. She heard nothing but the crinkling of grass from her father’s boots inching closer to her. Her heart sped up, matching the shortness and quickness of her breaths.

            “Make me,” she heard as she felt the puff and smelled the stench of his alcohol- and Dorito-stained breath leaking onto her eyelashes.

            The blinker of Michael’s car blinded the darkness as he reached the parking lot of Wilting Leaf Apartment Complex. He sighed and looked at the empty seat next to him—well, it wasn’t exactly empty. There sat a bundle of roses and a blue velvet jewelry box. He parked the car and looked back at the gifts. “How cliché….” He muttered, rubbing his face with irritation. “Why am I so bad at this stuff in real life? And why am I talking out loud?” He shook his head and unbuckled his seatbelt.

            Opening the door, he looked back at the gifts one last time before proceeding with the date as he had planned in his head a thousand times. Okay, he thought, it’s pick-up, then dinner at the café, and then dancing on the shore. Pick-up, dinner, dancing….pick-up, dinner, dancing…

            He focused on each of his physical steps as he thought of these three metaphorical steps in his head on his way up the stairs to Apartment 258. Pick-up, dinner, dancing… pick-up, dinner, da—

            His heart nearly stopped with his halted thoughts and footsteps. He blinked what seemed like a million times before returning his gaze at what was in front of him, just a few feet away. “Millie…” he whispered in almost a question, rushing to the lump of limp limbs on the doorstep of Apartment 258.

            “Millie! Mill! MILL!” Michael screamed to a pitch he had never thought possible for him to hit. His voice cracked as he kept repeating her name. “MILL! What happened to you?” He collapsed at her side. Her mangled body looked like a mass of body parts twisted and contorted into a lump of chaos. His eyes burned as they found their way against her skin. He focused on her ribs: they made a slow movement. She was breathing! Somehow through this tangled mess, she was breathing!

            “Millie, can you talk?” He swept her face into his hands. Her eyes were closed in with purple shadows holding them together. Deep, dark brown bruises spotted her face like a leopard that hadn’t won in its last fight against a fellow predator. A tear found its way through Michael’s eyelids. Dripping against her unconscious face, he hoped that somehow they would revive her. Childishly, he hoped, like the types of things that happen in his books… something like that.

            “What happened to you?” He whispered. Time seemed to stop. The whole Earth seemed to stop entirely in its tracks, but then he realized it had been much longer than he realized it had been while he gazed at Millie ’s misshapen—but still beautiful—face. He turned around frantically, searching for a witness—searching for anybody.

            “HEY!” He called out across the perimeter, “IS ANYBODY HERE? CAN ANYBODY HELP? DID ANYONE SEE WHAT HAPPENED?” But silence greeted him once more like an old once-friend coming back to taunt him. No one. Nobody heard his cries, and apparently no one heard hers. It was as though the existence of everyone he’d seen walk past him in on the street in his entire life ceased from existing in a moment. He looked around frantically, but the night was as lethally still as the crumpled woman lying flaccidly in his arms.

            His chest throbbed eerily; he turned back at the image of Millie. It was up to him and him alone to get her to the hospital. But what would they think? Would they think he was the perpetrator? Surely not, surely she’ll wake up…

            The next few moments were blurs of frantic anxiety. Michael never
was
good under pressure, but this was worse than anything he’d ever experienced. Even worse than when his wife had passed away, but there was no time or energy left to feel guilty about that now. He needed to get her an ambulance. And it wasn’t until he heard the sirens wailing that he moved from a frozen, entranced state, holding the lightly breathing Millie in his arms.

            He couldn’t hear, he couldn’t smell, he couldn’t breathe. The whole world around him was muffled through the loud screaming of his mind. What’s going to happen to her? Why do things like this happen? Why is she in this state, anyway?

            “Sir? SIR? I said, answer the question?” a voice rang out, asking this through the thick sound barrier in his thoughts.

            “What?” Michael asked, shivering although he felt no cold.

            “I said, what’s your name, what happened to her, and is she asthmatic?” Michael’s thoughts flickered back to the moment on the hike when Millie felt relieved in the fact that she didn’t need an inhaler.

            “She’s not asthmatic—er—and my name is Michael. Michael Lansbury, and I have no idea… that’s what I’d like to know too…”

            “What happened? How did you find her? Were you the one who phoned us?

            “Calm down, Simon,” hushed a fellow paramedic that looked a lot more collected in his uniform. His hand was now placed on his colleague’s shoulder and his eyes spoke of experience and loss. “He’s been through a lot; he needs to remain calm just as much as—if not more than—the rest of us.” His gaze switched to face Michael, “Don’t worry, sir—Mr. Lansbury—your friend will be all right, and we’ll have other professionals get to the bottom of what happened. For now, just calm down and try to stay relaxed. I know that’ll be hard, but please try.” His confident gaze reassured Michael, if even just a little, but he still found it extremely difficult to be relaxed in a cramped miniature ambulance with the woman he had feelings for in a heap of mangled limbs on the stretcher just a few inches from his trembling legs.

            “You can’t overwhelm people like that, Simon, apologize!” he heard the wiser paramedic hiss.

            The first paramedic, Simon, inched over to face Michael. Michael looked up and saw embarrassment in his flushed cheeks, “I’m sorry, man, it’s my first day.” Simon looked back at the other paramedic who just shrugged and rolled his eyes a bit; the body language of: “Good enough.”

            “It’s all right,” Michael assured him. The man nodded and waddled back over to his superior.

            Michael’s eyes flashed back over to Millie; his thoughts flooding with worry once more.
Oh Millie,
he thought desperately,
please be okay… You’ve shown me so much… I just….

            His prayerful plea was interrupted by one of the paramedics shouting that they’d arrived at the hospital. Michael slid out of the vehicle and walked off his strained legs in a limp as he followed the men leading Millie in the stretcher into the hospital’s emergency entrance.

            “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t be in here past this point,” the wiser one said apologetically. “Please enjoy the cafeteria or wait in the waiting area until you are notified further.” And with that, Michael watched the bottoms of Millie’s feet fading farther and farther away into the cold white hospital halls.

            The smell immediately reminded him of that dreadful night, but
that
time he was in the room.

            “We’re losing her,” he remembered one of the doctors calling out.

            “What do you mean you’re losing her? Lindsay! Lindsay! Can you hear me?” he clutched the rim of the metal hospital bed’s barrier, he had reached over to stroke her pale, failing face.

            Her dried lips moved faintly. “I love you,” he thought he heard them say, but he was never positive.

            “Lindsay? Lindsay!” His cries unnerved the nurses, who escorted him out of the room as the doctors were shouting “CLEAR!” He stumbled alongside them until he heard the sound that nearly stopped his own heart: the sound of hers stopping—the sound of her death.

            “NOOO!!!! LINDSAY!” he screamed until his throat hurt. He clambered over to her bedside and wept into her cooling arm. “I love you too…” he whispered through blubbering breaths, “I love you too, Lindsay…”

            “Mr. Lansbury, sir?” asked a voice that brought Michael back into the present. “You can see her now.” His heart leapt.

            “Already?” he gasped, shooting up and following the man into the hallway.

            “It’s been two and a half hours, sir,” the man’s surprised tone mimicked how Michael felt.

            “
What?
” he asked, more to himself. He wondered where the time had gone. Had he been stewing over Lindsay that whole time? Did he still love Lindsay? Of course, he did, he was married to her… but what about Millie? His heart pained with confliction, but it hid itself from plain sight when he saw Millie with her eyes open.

            “Millie!” he said in a whispery whimper.

            “Michael!” she replied in a pathetic crackle of a voice. She craned her neck to see him as he approached her closer, “I’m so glad to see you.”    

            Tears were forming over Michael’s eyes. He saw in her the good he’d seen in Lindsay, but purer. A more pure love even, if you could call it that. She just felt… more…
right
for him… Of course, the guilt swarmed on this thought, biting at his brain like fleas. “I’m glad to see you too,” he replied, trying to restrain the sobbing he felt knocking on his throat’s imaginary door. He stroked the bloody strands of blonde curling around her face. She reached up and placed her hand over his, closing her eyes, taking in the feeling—taking in the moment.

            And for a good while that’s just what they did: take in the moment. Love it, breathe it, live it, until Millie broke the silence with news that hugged Michael’s heartstrings. “They say that I can leave tomorrow morning. They just want to watch me overnight to make sure everything’s not more serious than it seems, then I can go home.”

            “That's great—,”

            “Actually,” the doctor chimed in as he walked over, his eyes glued to some sort of medical charts, “You’ll be good to go when you’re ready. But,” he looked at her, “We
do
have the police here. They’d like to speak with you about what happened before you leave. Will that be all right? Do you feel up to it?” Michael looked tentatively between the doctor and Millie.

            “You don’t have to, right?” he asked, still dashing his gaze between the two of them. The doctor opened his mouth to reply but Millie replied first.

            “I want to, Michael, it’s time.”

·
       
 

            When they got home a few hours later, Michael clambered over to Millie’s side and gave her a steaming mug of thick hot chocolate, accented with fluffy lumps of mini marshmallows. She looked into the cup as he shuffled quickly to the red velvet chair next to the fireplace. He wanted to give her space, but still wanted to be close by to make sure she was all right.

            “Hot chocolate,” he said to her, trying to grin, “Sometimes all we need is a steaming mug of hot chocolate to get us through the days.” She returned his smile with a faint grin of her own, but emotion behind it was clearly not there. The room was quiet; the sound of the still puttering rain could be heard behind the thick, lifeless glass windows that stood ominously in the Withersworths’ study.

            “I still have nightmares that he’s going to find me,” Millie’s voice broke the sound of echoing raindrops. It quivered as she said those words, and her eyes looked as though she wasn’t really there and not likely to come back any time soon. She took a shuddering breath and continued, “He used to… come in the middle of the night and…” her body was shaking by this point; her eyes were wincing from what looked like unbearable pain. Michael stood up from the red velvet chair and rushed closer to her.

            “Don’t,” he whispered through chokes lumping within his throat, “You don’t need to keep talking about it.” He was inches from her reddened lips; her breath was warm against his face.

            “I’m,” she said through pained breaths, “I’m fine… just… I just…” Her voice trailed into a wavering cry that pierced the dead windows as echoes bounced off of them. “Haley…  Haley isn’t my friend…”

            Michael’s face contorted into a caught-off-guard mixture of surprise and questioning: why was she saying that all of a sudden? His question was shortly answered by her stammering speech.

            “She’s my sister…” she looked away and seemed to drown with the rain, melting and streaking down the sky. Michael’s face softened a little, but mostly switched to a look of concern, of adorational apprehension. She went on, “Well… she is my sister through the adoption… she’s the natural daughter of…” her voice trailed into a high-pitch squeak. “He almost abused her as much as he abused me… but… most of his abuse to her stayed… the same…” Her lips quivered and she tugged at her stomach; Michael figured that the same angry nausea was twisting in her stomach as was in his.