Protector (2 page)

Once in his parking spot, he turns off the ignition and catches a glance at the clock on the dashboard
.  It is screaming at him with its aqua blue light that it is almost eight o’clock.  He quickly grabs the flowers and his briefcase off the passenger seat and gets out of the car.  He doesn’t even bother taking the time to lock the doors; he is in too much of a rush to care.  He prays Anna-Marie won’t be too upset.  She has never been one to get easily upset and can usually roll with the punches; it is something he has always loved about her.  He’s sure she’ll understand, but really, who wants to take the chance.  He can picture her now, probably sitting on the couch, dressed up and ready for dinner, as she waits for him to finally arrive.  Maybe she even has her sleek, and hopefully bare legs, crossed with the top leg bobbing up and down maniacally in a never ending restless motion.  He smiles to himself as he pictures her signature annoyed look.  Even then, she is still so beautiful. 

With only one foot in the direction of his apartment building, he is stunned by a sharp stabbing sensation to his upper back. 

His smile quickly turns to shock, “What the -”

He desperately tries to turn around to see where the pain is coming from, but
massive arms wrap around his chest holding him in place.  The attacker breathes heavily in his ear, his hot breath tainting Dylan’s senses.

Then he feels pain shoot through him
again, then another and another. 

Someone
has snuck up behind him as soon as he got out of the car and started to attack him, feeling as if the attacker is stabbing him in the back repeatedly with something he can’t see. 

Dylan wills his shaking hand to drop his briefcase; he feels paralyzed from fear.  With trembling hands, he tries to fumble in his back pocket to retrieve his wallet, hoping if the person gets what he wants, he will leave him alone. 

Just as he is starting to bring the wallet out of the pocket, he feels a sharp stab on his bicep. 

Oh god, this person intends to kill me
,
he thinks to himself.

His blood is everywhere.
He doesn’t know how much blood he has lost so far, but it seems like a lot.  He is beginning to get dizzy and black spots are blurring his vision, threatening to make him lose consciousness. 

Still wrapped in his attacker’s arms h
e is still unable to move.  All he can do is stare at his apartment building and wait to die.  As thoughts of death flash into his mind, a vision of a scrawny little beautiful brown-haired girl with penetrating emerald green eyes comes into focus.  It’s been a long time since he has seen her at this age.  She appears to be the same age as when they met on that first day of kindergarten.  Dylan can remember watching her for a few minutes before running up to her that day.  She seemed so shy.  Without saying a word he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to the swing set at recess, smiling and laughing with joy.  The girl smiles that same magical smile at him now and holds out her hand to him and silently beckons for him to come to her.

“
Anna-Marie,” he whispers. 

The attacker releases him and h
e falls to the ground in a cold heap, crushing the bouquet of flowers he is still holding in the tightest grip he can manage.  Even with his head swimming in a fog, he doesn’t take his eyes off this girl he has known almost all of his life.  He holds out his weak shaking hand to her, wanting so badly to find the strength to touch her, only then will all be made better.

Slowly,
with all the strength he can muster, he begins to crawl in the direction of the building.  His knuckles are being cut raw on the concrete sidewalk as he drags the hand full of flowers with him.  It is only about twenty feet to the entrance, but in his weakened state, it seems more like miles. 

He closes the distance from the blood soaked spot, littering his path with vibrant flower petals, to mere inch
es of the doorstep and stops when he realizes the stabbing has stopped.  He wearily turns his head to look behind him, half expecting to come face to face with his attacker, but sees he is alone.  He is so numb from the assault and blood loss, it is hard to be sure when the attack actually ended.

Just moving those few feet have weakened him to the point where he can’t go any further. Visions of
Anna-Marie flash through his mind again, images of her through various stages of her life, as tears start to fall.  He relaxes his numb body on the cold concrete and closes his eyes, hoping to savor these visions of her as long as he can.  He thinks back to the day he stood on the front steps of her parents’ house in Oriental to pick her up for their first date; they were only sixteen years old at the time.  He had worked long hours after school and on weekends in the tobacco field all season to buy a car just so that he could ask her out on a date.  He was so nervous waiting for her to come to the door that he could actually hear his heart pounding in his chest, but when that door finally opened, his heart stopped all at once.  Standing before him was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and one he had loved all the while, even if he was too naive to see it sooner.  Her deep emerald green eyes penetrated the deepest core of his soul and took his breath away.  She was the same girl with the long, unruly dark hair that she was on that first day in kindergarten, but on this day she became so much more.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her and his hand trembled as he held out a bouquet of fresh wild flowers to her.  They have always been in each other’s lives one way or another for almost their whole life, but out of a lifetime of memories, that was the one day he remembers the most.

With his last breath, he beckons to the wind to carry a message to her.  An apology for breaking a promise he has held dear to him since the first day he met her. He had promised her that he would always be there.  In the beginning, it was meant as her playmate at recess, but as the years went by, that promise grew into so much more.  It is a promise he never intended to break, but he had to now.

“I’m sorry.”

2

Anna-Marie opens her eyes to find herself surrounded in almost complete darkness.  The only light in the room was coming through the sheer curtains from the street lamps below her bedroom window.  She rolls on her back and stretches her arms out wide.  She has had a long day at work today and decided to lie down for a little while before Dylan got home, but she didn’t expect to sleep so long.

“Wow, I guess
I really was tired,” she says to herself yawning and stretching her arms out wide.

She turns her head to look at the bedside clock on Dylan’s side of th
e bed and notices the time.

“
Dammit, it’s almost eight thirty already.”  She sits up quickly, with the warm down blanket still wrapped around her and a chill goes through her. 

Anna
-Marie and Dylan have lived in the same small, but quaint, apartment since moving to Wilmington at the beginning of their freshman year of college.  Now, as she looks around the room, goose bumps begin to rise up on her skin and she is struck with a strange feeling, a feeling of utter loneliness mixed with fear.  Never in her seven years of living there has she ever felt anything close to the feelings that grip her now.

Startled, she calls out, “Dylan!”

Nothing.

“Dylan, are you home?”

Still no sound is heard.

Quickly the loneliness she feels begins to turn into something else, another feeling she isn’t familiar with
- panic. 

She grabs her phone from her nightstand and enters Dylan’s speed-dial number. 
Anna-Marie listens as the phone rings in her ear.  Her mind works as she waits.

It isn’t uncommon for him to work late, but he never does so without calling her first, especially if they had made plans.  After four rings it goes straight to his familiar voice on his voicemail. 

She throws off the blanket and jumps to her feet; the wooden floor is cool to her bare skin and sends goose bumps up her legs.  Slowly she inches towards the bedroom window to look out into the night.  Her view of the parking lot is obstructed from this angle, but it doesn’t stop her from trying to see if Dylan’s car is there anyway.

She walks out to the living room and turns on the light.  Everything is exactly the way she left it.  A chill runs down her spin
e causing goose bumps to run down her body again, covering her arms and then her legs.  She holds her phone out and hits redial. 

There is still no answer.

She sits on the couch and pulls her knees up to her chest as she contemplates what to do next.  She tries to convince herself that he is just running late and can’t get to his phone.  Maybe the battery in his phone died.  But the sinking feeling in her heart isn’t convinced.

She grabs her coat off the back of the couch and slips on her shoes.  Maybe he was stopped by the nosy neighbor downstairs
; if so, he would need rescuing for sure.  Everyone tried to avoid the man downstairs, but sometimes it was impossible and the only escape from his endless chattering was to be rescued by another tenant making their way in or out. 

She slowly walks
out of her apartment and down the three flights of stairs, hugging the wooden banister as she goes. 

Once on the bottom step, she looks towards the nosy neighbor’s door.  It is closed and she could hear the TV blaring on the other side.  Her heart begins to pound in her chest, threatening to thump straight out and onto the cold floor.  Her brain is yelling at her to keep going, but her legs are frozen, unable to respond.  She grabs her phone out of her pocket and hits redial again.  This time she hears it, not his voice as she was hoping, but the song in the distance that was theirs since high school.  Slowly she follows the music, scarcely hearing the singer swear on the moon and the stars in the sky to always be there.  As she makes her way to the building’s entrance the music suddenly stops.  She holds her breath and looks out through the smudged glass door.  That’s when she sees him crumpled on the pavement in front of their building. 

Her pounding heart stops at once.  She throws the door open, a frigid early December breezes slams in her and runs to his side.  Her wobbly legs are unable to hold her weight.  She collapses on the cold concrete beside him.  She stares at his broken body confused, and then pulls him into her lap like a sleeping child.  His clothes are dirty and covered in a dark brown substance.  As she looks closer, she realizes it’s not dirt at all, but blood seeping through shreds of his favorite olive colored suit that she had picked out for him to wear earlier that morning for his big meeting.  

“Dylan!  Dylan
!  Open your eyes, baby.”  Even as the words are coming out of her mouth, she knows he won’t respond.  She hugs his limp body even closer to her and rocks back and forth.  She is unable to move or call for help, even though she knows she should. 

A neighbor from her floor
, coming home from wherever his world had taken him tonight, sees her heaped on the ground with Dylan at her chest.  

“Oh my
God, Anna-Marie, what happened?” he asks. However, she is still unable to speak or take her eyes off Dylan’s still face.

“
Anna-Marie, are ya’ll okay?” 

Still she doesn’t respond.

“Stay right here, I’m going to go call for help,” he says frantically as he runs inside of the building and up the stairs to his apartment.

She doesn’t know how long she sat there, unable to move, before the paramedics arrived.  Surely it was only minutes, but it felt much longer.  In the darkness of her mind she feels someone tugging hard on her arms, as another person is trying to pry Dylan from her tight grip.  That’s when
Anna-Marie finds her voice and the darkness that has clouded her vision fades away.

Anna
-Marie cries, begs and curses as they pull her convulsing body away from his.  She screams and fights with every ounce of desperation that is coursing through her, “NOOOO!!!  What are you doing?  No, please don’t.  Stop it!  He needs me. Dylan!  No baby, please open your eyes for me.  Please baby, wake up.  I need you.  You can’t leave me.  You promised.  Baby, please!  You promised!” 

That’s all she could say as the words tumble out in one big painful attempt to bring him back to her.  Her tears continue to flow in a never
-ending stream, as her voice goes hoarse.  Pure exhaustion has finally made her body go limp in the paramedic’s arms.  Despite all of her efforts, he didn’t wake up.  She fought hard, but failed.  The shock and numbness of it all takes over as she stares at his lifeless body on the cold hard ground.