The Last Thing You See (10 page)

I heard the alarm go off and reached out in every direction before I even opened my eyes, searching for Nick, before I woke up enough to remember that I was at home alone in my own bed.  I picked up my phone and turned the alarm off with a sigh.  No rest for the wicked
or
me.

With eyes still half-closed, I sleepily shuffled across my room to my drawers and found what I needed to go for a run, getting dressed on auto-pilot.  My reflection in the mirror elicited a mock-scream and I brushed my hair until I could manage to gather it all into a ponytail and went downstairs.

In the kitchen, my dad was just putting his breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.  You had to get up pretty early in the morning to be up earlier in the morning than him.

“Morning Dad, still not retired?”

“Apparently not, honey.  Morning.”

My income would have the whole family more than covered if push came to shove for some reason, but unlike Orson and my mom, Dad didn’t want to get involved in the movie business.  Even after The Last Perfect Day, when seven-figure contracts started being bandied about, he kept plugging his way up the corporate ladder in his own job.

I poured myself some juice and had a look out the window, hoping for good running weather.  My dad put on his suit jacket, and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Fair warning, Harp, your mom’s on the warpath this morning.”

“Ugh.  About what?”

“Take a guess.”

“Nick?”

“And all that entails,” he said.

“He’s… he’s a good person, Dad.  The best person.  I’m in… I love him.  You know?”

“I’m not telling you what to do, Harper, you’re twenty years old.  For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen you so happy.  Your mom’s sacrificed a lot for your career though, and things have worked out pretty well on that front.  So pick your battles wisely.”

“OK.  Thanks.  Have a good day.”

My juice was barely finished when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and braced myself for an onslaught.  My jaw clenched, waiting for the inevitable.

“Morning, Harp!” said Orson.

I let out a puff of air, unwinding for the moment, and turned around.  Orson was wearing his running gear too, looking ready to go.

“Morning.  Where’s Mom?”

“I think I heard the shower going, why?”

“Nothing.  You ready?”

“Can I at least get some toast first?”

“I really want to get an early start on the Dark Fox 2 lines, can we just go?”

Orson held up his hands.  “Fine, fine.”

It was a good time of day to be running, light enough to see where you were going but the air was not yet heated up enough to make things uncomfortable.  Orson and I ran most mornings when we were both home, and going for a run sometimes seemed like the closest thing I got to free time.

Although Orson always came with me for security purposes, it wasn’t a social thing.  Sometimes I listened to lessons from a dialect coach on my iPod if I was involved in a role that required a particular accent. Once, I had listened to an audiobook version of a movie-adaptation I was cast in.

Usually it was just music, but the most important thing about going for a run was the chance to be alone with my thoughts.  When I really wanted to think, I had a track on my iPod that was just “Rain on a tin roof with thunder” for two entire hours.  That’s what I played this morning.

When I was in a rage or my heart was broken like when my first real boyfriend cheated on me, when my mind left the building, I went on a run to find it, and it almost always worked.  I kind of depended on them sometimes.

We always ran the same route.  That made it easier for me to think about things other than where we were going.  Left out of our gate and all the way along our road and into the park, clockwise around the little man-made lake, out of the park and then up the hill and down the other side before looping back around and arriving back on our street at the opposite end.

By the time we returned, I hadn’t had the ‘eureka’ moment I was hoping for and when we stepped inside to the smell of coffee, I knew our mom was waiting for me.  Sure enough, she was at the kitchen table with her trusty tablet PC, reading something.

“Harper, we need to talk,” she said.

“Mom…”

“This… this thing, whatever you’re doing with this Nick boy, has got to stop.  They found an old friend of his who’s talking about all the drugs they used to do in school, another anonymous associate who says he was discharged from the Marines because he lost his mind about something.  You only have to look at him to…”

“To
what
, Mom?  Have you forgotten what he
did
for me?”

“Harper, I know you’re grateful, but you’re taking your gratitude too far…”

I saw red, absolute mind-numbing rage.  Could she, the woman who raised me, really be implying what I thought she was implying?

“You think I’d… you think I’d have
sex
with him because I’m grateful?”

“Oh no, Harper, don’t tell me it’s gone that far…”

“You’re right, it’s none of your business!” I yelled.

Orson was frozen in place behind the breakfast bar, hand in the bag of bread as he stared at us with an open mouth.  My mom stood and approached me, as calm and assured of herself as if she was talking to a child having a tantrum.

“What’s gotten into you?” she asked.  “This isn’t like you at all!  I haven’t forgotten what Nick did, but that doesn’t mean he’s right for you.  We’ve worked for so long, for most of your
life
, so that you can live the dream.  You’ve got this wholesome image because you are a wholesome girl.  Everybody wants to work with you because you’re a professional.  Since you met him he’s been damaging that image and your mind has been all over the place.  People have noticed.”

“I honestly don’t care,” I said.

My mom couldn’t have looked more shocked if I had shot her in the foot.  She shook her head as if recovering from a daze and blinked like she had something in her eyes.

“Harper, has he got you on drugs?”

“Mom, don’t be stupid. 
He
isn’t even on drugs himself.”

“As far as you know.  This behavior is so disappointing.  There’s more than just your job on the line, this is a family business now, you know.  Is this how you repay me after everything I’ve done?  How could you do that to me?  Imagine if I’d never come along.”

I hadn’t dared to cross my mom’s path too many times in my life, but if it ever got too far, she always managed to remind me, either directly or indirectly, that she had rescued me from the group home.  The loneliness and dull terror I’d felt on a day-to-day basis in that place was so dark compared to the happy home this family had given me.  It always took all the wind out of my sails.

The anger drained away, deflating me and leaving me feeling about as big as a mouse.  Oh yes, I remembered all too well what she saved me from, the love she’d shown me, the home she’d given me.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I forced out.

“Attagirl.  We all make mistakes.  You just let him down nicely, you never know how badly a man like him might take it, and we can get on with life.  You’ll be able to concentrate on the audition for Great Expectations on Monday. No doubt you’ll get the part, and then shooting for Dark Fox Two starts Thursday…”

“I’m
sorry
, Mom… but I’m
not
breaking up with Nick.  It’s not your choice to make.  I love him.  And I’m not doing Great Expectations.  I’m sorry… I love you too.”

I left the kitchen at an almost-run all the way back to my room, feeling about as scared as if I’d poked a hornet’s nest with a stick and ashamed for being so scared at the same time.  The last thing I wanted was for her, Dad, and Orson to stop loving me, to disown me and make me an orphan again at the age of twenty.

I didn’t want to be alone like that ever again.  Never.  I’d been abandoned by one set of parents before and I didn’t think I could handle it another time.  But I couldn’t give up Nick either.  I thought about burying myself in a big Nick-hug, and it helped me fight away the tears.

With the last of the dishes put away, I did one last inspection of my apartment.  It was sparsely furnished, so it didn’t take very long.  Even now it was hard to imagine a girl like Harper in such plain surroundings, but she’d been here before and her text confirmed she’d be here again any moment.

My phone had never seen so much action.  People I hadn’t heard from in years were calling and texting, sending messages from the sublime to the ridiculous, congratulatory and crass.  It was a strange feeling to be put under the spotlight like that.

The intercom buzzed and after a ‘Hello?’ and ‘It’s me’, I pressed the button to let her in the building and waited by the door.  I drummed my fingers on my thigh, feeling this humming excitement in my stomach like I used to feel on Christmas morning when I was a kid.

For the first time since I found out about Christie, there was something to look forward to.  Not just some pie-in-the-sky one day I might win the lottery kind of dreams.  Something even better, closer, sooner, more tangible.  She was probably walking down the hallway right now.

The knock on the door confirmed that assumption and I opened it right away.  Harper stepped through and threw her overnight bag on the floor unceremoniously before wrapping her arms around me and burying her face against my chest.

She looked tired, not like after we’d trained together, but simply worn down by something.  When I hugged her back I could feel her pressing as close as possible, as if she wanted to melt into me, and she relaxed her legs a bit, letting me bear some of her weight.

I flicked the door closed behind her and held her for a while, resting my cheek on the top of her head.  Tired or not, she still smelled like heaven with a faint sense of vanilla.  Finally, she stood on her own power again.

“You look like you could do with a glass of wine,” I said.

“Oh yeah.  Yes please.”

Harper picked up her bag and put it in my room before heading to the couch, sitting down, and kicking her feet up sideways to lie down.  I could see her dark hair flowing over the armrest from my vantage point as I took the wine out of the fridge and popped the cork, which came out with a massive bang and ended up putting a tiny dent in the ceiling.

“Whoa.  Was that a bottle of wine or a gun?” she asked.

“I need higher ceilings,” I said as I poured.  “You look tired.  Busy day?”

“Yeah, Dark Fox Two starts filming late next week and I’ve been practicing my lines with Orson for most of the day.”

Harper shuffled back against the armrest and sat a bit more upright when I brought the wine over and handed her one.  I sat down and pulled her legs over my lap like a little blanket before clinking glasses.

“Cheers.  You find that tougher than the interviews and all the promo stuff?”

“Nah, it’s not that.  I’m having a tough time with my mom at the moment.”

“About what?”

Harper looked at me for a second and then looked down at her wine before taking a sip.  She licked her lips and let out a little sigh.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day.  It’s not even this latest problem that is the
big
issue.  You know how the Bayliss family adopted me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I think one thing I’ve been scared of this whole time, my whole life since then, was that something would happen and I’d lose my family.  Then it would be just like I was in the group home again.  I mean… it’d be different, but it would still feel the same.  You know?”

“Sure, I can see that.  But odds are nothing is going to happen to them, Harper.”

“That’s the thing, though.  Something
did
happen.  That’s what I’ve been thinking about today.  Ever since The Last Perfect Day hit it big and things got crazy, I lost my mom and gained a manager.  And that sucks.  All she wants to do is run my life, nothing’s more important to her than my career.”

“Hmm.  What’s the latest battle you’re having with her?”

“Uh… well, I’m supposed to be going in to read for another movie-adaptation of Great Expectations next week, but I don’t want to do it.  She doesn’t want me to be typecast with doing too many action and adventure style movies.”

“I hate Great Expectations,” I said.

“What?  The last movie, the book, or what?”

“Everything that it is, everything that it stands for.”

Harper gave me a sideways look and raised her eyebrow.  “That’s a pretty… strong stance to take, isn’t it?”

“No.  I had a bad experience with the book when I was a kid.”

The movie star on my couch snorted out a laugh and then covered her mouth with her hand, a little sparkle seeming to light up her eyes.  When she took it away, I could see she was smiling.

“Did the book… do
bad
things to you, Nick?”

“I accidentally read it when I was about ten years old.”

Harper laughed again.  “Accidentally?  How do you accidentally read a whole book?  Oh, wait, wait, is that some macho thing?  Like you can’t admit that you read a book like that so you call it an accident?  Like after the award show how your clothes mysteriously disappeared and you accidentally fell on me a few hundred times?”

“First of all, it was a thousand times at least, and second of all, I swear I didn’t mean to read this book.”

Harper was shaking with laughter now and let out a little squeal when some of her wine slopped out of her glass and landed on her shirt.  She reached out and grabbed on to my arm as if to steady herself.

“You gotta… you gotta tell me how,” she stammered out between slowly dwindling chuckles.

“OK.  So there I was, in school, minding my own business, and one of the things they made us do for a couple of hours a week was what they called Silent Sustained Reading.  SSR for short.  Did you have that?”

“I was home-schooled starting when I was about nine years old.”

“Oh.  Well, it was just teacher code for ‘shut up for ten seconds so I can think about my life choices, please’ but it forced us to read at least.  So our classroom had a bunch of books in the corner and I was a bit slow choosing, and all the good ones were gone.  I was flicking through them trying to find something, all the while being told in no uncertain terms that if I wasn’t back at my desk by the count of three, I was in big trouble.  That’s when I saw it.”

“The light at the end of the tunnel…”

“This plain green book with white letters, sticking spine-out on the shelf.  It had an interesting title, so I grabbed it and ran back.  It started out slow, but I thought I could live with that, like, sure, a bit of background information on the main characters might make it a better story, more exciting when they’re out shooting lions or exploring old ruins or whatever.”

“Lions?  What the…” Harper’s shoulders started shaking with the giggles again.

“I should have just put the book back and chosen a new one for the next SSR hour, but I thought it would get better.  By the time I looked at how many pages were left and I knew that I was living in a house of lies, it was too late.  I was going to finish the book or die trying.”

“House of…” Harper had tears running from the corners of her eyes.

“I was like when are these…
assholes
… gonna
go
somewhere.  I was so angry.  Then I finished the book, and I was just… so pissed, you know?  Like how can they make an entire book where nothing happens?  Then I closed it and looked at the cover.  Plain green, white letters, just like the spine.  I guess it was some abridged version for younger readers, but that wasn’t the worst thing.”

Harper wiped her eyes and waited with bated breath.

“The title of the book.  It was Great
Expectations
… not Great Expeditions.  You ever seen a book fly?”

Harper burst out laughing and put her wine down before reaching out and pulling herself against me, holding her face against my arm in a similar way to how she had buried her face against my chest when she first walked in.  When she got herself under control and looked up, she cracked up all over again.

For my part, I was so happy I could have burst.  To hear her laughter, to see a smile on her face and know I put it there, felt like first prize in a meaning of life contest.

I knew it was a stop-gap, though, a temporary thing.  What happened to her in that group home was hanging over her every step of her life.  I wished I could figure out how to make it all better.