The Last Thing You See (11 page)

After hearing about Nick’s adventures with Great Expectations, I thought I might not need an ab workout for at least a week.  My stomach hurt by the time I’d calmed myself down.

The stress of my run-in with my mother seemed far away by the time we went to bed, and that was a relief.  I thought it would bring me down for days until I caved in and agreed to go to the reading on Monday, even if there was no way I’d ever agree to break up with Nick on her say so.

Nick had said that his experience alone was probably a good enough reason to not do the Great Expectations movie, but even more important was that if I didn’t want to do it, then I shouldn’t.

It seemed so obvious, so logical, when he said it.  It was hard to understand the way the fear of abandonment crept up on me and sent chills down my spine when being around him made me feel so warm.

He was right, but I had no idea how my mom would take it when Monday came and I didn’t go.

*****

It was pitch-black middle of the night when I awoke to feel Nick’s hand stroking my hair, his fingertips tracing down my neck, across my shoulder and as far down the side of my body as he could reach.  I let out a contented but sleepy sigh.  If he was feeling frisky, it surely was an inconvenient time.

“Mmmph.  What’s up?” I said.

“Just making sure you’re still there,” he said in a low voice.

“Where else would I be?”

“I like reaching out and feeling you there.”

If I was a cat, I would have purred.  I smiled in the darkness and stretched out before resettling myself, feeling sleep slowly taking over again.

“When I was overseas, wherever I slept, I used to reach out.  Reach out for Christie.  I knew every curve of her body by memory and I swore I could feel her reaching back to me.  I hoped, somehow, she could feel it too,” he said.

I opened my eyes, though it made no difference to how much I could see, and held his hand against the side of my face, pausing it at the beginning of another stroke.  His voice was calm, but I could feel the faintest hint of a tremor in his hand.

“I bet she could,” I said.

“When I came back and found out what happened to her, I… I still reached out every night.  Stupid, huh?”

“No.  Not even a little bit.”

“After I left Warfields, I was in a motel somewhere one night and I… I just stopped reaching out.  I couldn’t feel her anymore.  It felt like I lost her all over again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s OK.  I mean… it’s not, it’ll never be OK, but… now when I reach out, I feel you there.  I love you, Harper.  I love you.”

“I love you too, baby.  And I’m right here.  And so are you.”

I snuggled up close with my head resting on his arm.  Nick stroked my hair again until the steady rhythm of it helped me drift off to sleep once more.

“No.  For the last time, no,” I said.

“Harper, don’t be silly now, tell him to leave because you’ve got work to do,” said my mom.

“I’m not doing it.  I’ll be back later if you want to help me with some Dark Fox lines.”

“What am I going to tell Goodman?  He’s a very important director.  If we pull out, he’s never going to work with you again!”

“You’re my manager, right?  So manage it.”

I slung my handbag over my shoulder, opened the door, and tried to close it behind me, but my mother blocked it and followed me outside.  Nick was waiting in his car, not too far from the bottom of the steps.

“Harper, come back!” she said.

“See you later, Mom.  I love you.”

I stepped into the passenger seat and put my bag down between my feet.  Nick looked from me to my mom and back again while she gave us a look that could have killed an elephant at two miles.

“Everything… OK?” he asked.

“Not so much.  I was supposed to be going in to read for Great Expectations today.  My mom’s not taking it very well.  Can we get out of here?”

Nick pulled away and I felt my muscles unclenching one by one as he drove us down the street.  I’d never seen my mother so angry and had no idea what she was going to do.

“She seems pretty intense,” said Nick.

“That’s a good summary.  Anyway, forget about it, you’ve got me all morning so are you ready to tell me what you’re going to do with me?   You’ve been so tight-lipped I figured I had to bring everything to be prepared or give up and bring nothing, so I decided it was easier to bring nothing.”

“That’ll be enough.”

“You’re not taking me to read for Great Expectations, are you?”

“
Hell
no,” Nick laughed.

Nick headed east along Santa Monica Boulevard and I kept on expecting him to look for parking at any moment, but instead he turned on to the South Hollywood Freeway.  I teased him about perhaps being lost when he started heading north again on Alvarado.

When he pulled on to Eagle Rock Boulevard, I struggled to keep up my end of the conversation.  This area wasn’t just away from my usual haunts, this was one place in Los Angeles I
never
went.

Somehow I knew, before he made the last turn, exactly where he was taking me, and I barely even looked up when he spun the steering wheel.  Instead, I stared between my feet at my handbag, breathing but hardly feeling the air go into my lungs.

When I felt the car start to slow down, a hot flush raced upwards from my chest and quickly faded, leaving a thin sheen of sweat that felt suddenly icy cold despite the sun shining in through the window.  I could see my legs shaking, an almost imperceptible quiver.

Nick had brought me to the worst place there was for me, the Tipton Group Home.  I couldn’t look at him.

“Not here.  Please, not here.”

The voice I heard was barely recognizable as my own.  It was weak and had almost regressed to a childlike timbre.  I shut my eyes, lest I catch a glimpse of the house I knew was just to my right.

“Why did you bring me here?”  I forced out, with no small measure of accusation.

“Harper, look at me.”

I felt Nick’s hand on my shoulder, almost on the back of my neck, and shied away from him for a moment, but there was nothing but care and gentleness in his voice, nothing but love in his touch.  If there was one thing I was sure of in the world at that moment, it was that Nick was safety.

That was the only thing that gave me enough assurance to open my eyes and turn my head, mercifully away from the view out of my passenger window.  The cool blue of Nick’s eyes held my gaze so I couldn’t look away, washing away the festering little notion that he might have brought me here for some cruel purpose.

“Believe me when I say that I understand what you’re feeling right now,” he said.

“No, you don’t.  You can’t understand, or you wouldn’t have brought me here.  Why, Nick?  Why?”

“I do understand.  This place is your own personal hell.  I have one of those too, it’s… Christie’s grave.  Or the place where her parents had the memorial service anyway.  One day I want you to visit there with me.”

“This doesn’t make any sense, Nick.  Please take me away from here.”  The first tear fell from the corner of my eye, and I could feel the reinforcements on their way.

“If that’s really what you want, then we’ll go.  You’re safe, OK?  OK?”  Nick waited until I nodded before continuing.  “Just listen for a second.  This last couple of months with you has saved my life, Harper.  When I first opened my eyes and saw you, I thought you were an angel.  And I was right.”

“I didn’t save your life,” I said.

“You did.  You showed me there was still something good in the world, something worth getting up for every day instead of getting up out of habit.  You gave me a reason to face the past, to face reality.  Now the future doesn’t seem like some crappy dark unknown wasteland, it feels like a place I’d actually want to be one day.”

For a moment, his eyes seemed like almost a literal window to the soul.  I could practically see the future myself, all the kisses, all the embraces, all the talking in the dark until we couldn’t stay awake any longer, new homes, babies.  Growing old.  It didn’t look so bad at all.

“But you’ve got this thing hanging over you, Harper.  This idea that you must be some kind of trash because of what happened when you were barely more than a baby.  Because of this place.”  Nick pointed behind me, but I still didn’t look.  “I want to help you face it.”

“How?  I just barge in there and ask for the current address of that… that woman who used to work here?  Will you kick her ass?”

“No.  I figured we could start out here and track down your birth parents.  That’s what really hurts, isn’t it?”

The feeling that I wasn’t getting any air came back, and I heard more than sensed that my breaths had become quick and shallow as I bordered on hyperventilating.  That was a scary prospect.

“Isn’t it?” he repeated.

I nodded.  It did hurt, it hurt a hell of a lot.

“So I called here and talked to the guy who manages the place, seemed like a nice guy.  I didn’t know where else to start and he couldn’t give me many details over the phone, with me not being you and all, but he did say that they still have records from when you were here.  From when you were ‘placed’ here, he called it.  He checked while I was on the phone and said there was even some property that belonged to you still here.”

“What property?  I didn’t own anything.”

“He couldn’t tell me, but when I talked about the possibility of you maybe visiting, the guy practically begged me to make it happen.  He asked, if you were up for it, if you could spend some time with the kids, because it would be so inspiring for them to see what somebody who used to live here made of herself.”

“I don’t know if I can even go in there, Nick.  How inspiring is it going to be for them to see me faint?”

“You don’t have to go in there, remember that.  If you go in it’ll be under your own steam, but I’ll be with you.  Think about it a bit, they don’t even know we’re here yet.  He just gave me a list of times that
weren’t
good, otherwise we could come whenever we wanted.  If you want to go in, I’ll send him a text and he’ll get back to me.  Hey, if that lady still works here, want to see me put her in a triangle choke?”

I looked down, a token smile barely lifting the corners of my mouth.  This place had been the stuff of my nightmares for as long as I could remember.  I never dreamed about monsters or the boogey-man under my bed when I was growing up.  If my subconscious wanted to make me wake up crying, it just put me back here.

It had been a part of me for so long that the concept of being free of it was almost ludicrous.  It couldn’t happen, could it?  What would going in there change?

Nick was right though, what happened to me did taint everything else, a life I academically knew I should be overjoyed about.  I had a family now, I was successful at a job that was sometimes stressful, but which I
did
love.

What’s more, I was
in
love.  The idea that the future I’d just glimpsed in Nick’s eyes might be tarnished by this too if I didn’t try to deal with it was what finally made me turn my head and look at the Tipton Group Home for the first time in over a decade.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I said.

The way Harper was walking, all bunched up with her arms wrapped around her front, hugging herself, she looked like she was being led to the electric chair, but she was being so brave.  I kept my hand on her back, gently urging her forward but trying to not cross the line from supportive to pushy.

When we arrived at the front door, I paused before pressing the doorbell to check in with her one last time.  She was looking up at the window on the second floor furthest to the right.  Maybe that was her old room.

“You ready?” I asked.

“I guess.”

The ‘ding-dong’ of the bell inside made Harper flinch, and I saw her actually bunch her fists when the door first swung open inwards.  However, standing just inside the doorway was about the most disarming thing imaginable.

A little dark-haired girl wearing what looked like official Princess Sundancer fairy wings was looking up at Harper with nothing short of hero worship.  Her jaw dropped when she first opened the door, then opened and closed a few times as she tried to get some words out.

Further back, I could see a man and a woman waiting with a few other girls of various ages, wearing big smiles.  The girl in front of Harper finally found her tongue with no small amount of effort.

“H-hello M-miss. Bayliss.  On b-be-behalf of the T-Tipton Group Home and a-all the Seven F-fairy Kingdoms w-we… we thank y-y…”

The dark-haired girl burst into tears, the waterworks almost seeming to squirt out of her eyes like a cartoon.  Her little downturned face jolted Harper into action and she swooped down and gathered the little fairy up in her arms, lifting her up into a hug that she would probably talk about for the rest of her life.

As the man and the woman came forward, I could see Harper whispering something in the girl’s ear, but I couldn’t hear what.  She wiped her eyes and nodded.

“What’s your name?” asked Harper.

“Kaylee.”

“Wow, what a pretty name.  I like your wings.”

“Th-thank you,” said Kaylee.

“Sorry Miss. Bayliss, Kaylee here is without a doubt your biggest fan in the world.  I think she knows every song and dance in the whole movie,” said the woman.  “It wouldn’t be safe for anybody to sleep here if you visited and she wasn’t allowed to be the one to answer the door.  I’m Regina, and this is Jeff.”

Regina shook hands with Harper, and then Jeff extended his hand to her.

“I’m basically in charge of administration here,” said Jeff, “Regina is in charge of the children day-to-day.  Is this your bodyguard?”

“Nick,” I said.

“Oh,
you’re
Nick?  Well, thank you very much.  I’ll be the smuggest manager at the next meeting when I tell them about this.  Come in, come in.”

We stepped through the door and Kaylee wriggled out of Harper’s arms, her shock at meeting her idol apparently done with as she grabbed Harper’s hand and begged her to come look at a picture she had drawn.  Harper looked at Jeff and Regina hesitantly.

“Only if you have time, Miss. Bayliss,” said Jeff.

“Please?” said Kaylee.

“Um, sure.  Just call me Harper, OK?  The place looks so different.  It used to be so… clinical.”

“Oh yes.  Ideas have changed a lot about just how important a child’s early environment is.  We try to make it as non-institutional as we can.  Staff turnover is absolutely
glacial
compared to the early days.  That continuity of care is incredibly important.  Regina here has been around for ten years, for example.  I’ve been here for six.  We both came after your time, sadly,” said Jeff.

“You gotta see!” said Kaylee, leading the way and dragging Harper by the hand.

Kaylee brought us to a room with lots of beanbags and some comfortable-looking sofas and armchairs.  One wall was almost entirely dedicated to books of all kinds. The lower shelves looked a lot more colorful and much more chaotic than the higher ones.

A woman who looked to be in her early thirties was on the floor putting together a puzzle with some girls about Kaylee’s age, while a slightly older girl played with some toys by herself.  In the corner was a girl in her early teens, wearing mostly black, with some dark make-up and hair covering one eye.  She was reading a magazine and listening to an iPod at the same time and barely glanced at us when we walked in.

“This is it,” said Kaylee, pointing at one of many crayon drawings on the wall opposite the bookshelves.  It was a classic stick-figures-plus-house-and-the-sun-in-the-corner type drawing.

“This is me, and this is Mrs. Able, she came to visit me and she’s going to take me home.  That’s here,” said Kaylee, pointing at the house helpfully.

Harper looked straight up for a moment, and I could see her features contorting with the effort of holding back tears.  When she looked back down, her face was the very definition of joy and she beamed at Kaylee.

“That’s great!” she said.

“Yeah!  Will you read us a story?”

Kaylee, picture forgotten for now, pulled Harper towards the bookshelves, and the mention of the word ‘story’ got the attention of the puzzlers, who looked to have recognized Harper but were too shy to say anything.  A couple of them wandered over, and one of them tentatively pulled a well-read looking book from the bottom shelf.

“Uh… yeah, OK,” said Harper, eventually taking one book from each of the girls before she was led to a chair at the ‘front’ of the room.

Harper looked at me and I braced myself for any signs that she was panicking like she had been on the brink of in the car, but instead she gave me a happy smile and flipped open the first book.  Puzzles and toys were immediately forgotten, even if magazines and iPods weren’t, and Harper held the half dozen or so little faces enthralled with her ability to control her voice and speak different characters with different accents.

Regina and the woman who had been helping with the puzzle took photos, and Jeff stood there beside me looking pleased with himself.  Harper had just finished the last book when the girl at the back piped up.

“What are you even doing here?  Your charity visit for the year?  Another photo op so you can show what a nice person you are and sell more tickets?  You are so full of shit.”

“Samantha!  You do
not
speak like that to anybody, let alone a guest.  You apologize at once, you’re already in enough trouble as it is!” said Regina.

“No, it’s alright,” said Harper. “Samantha, is it?  I’m visiting because I used to live here.  My family found me here.”

Samantha looked like she had another few choice words, but halted when Harper stood up.  The kids on the floor and in bean bags looked from Samantha to Harper to Regina and back again as if World War Three might be starting.

“Can we talk?” asked Harper, picking her way between children towards the chair next to a disgusted-looking Samantha.

“Read another story?” asked another girl, who was echoed by the others.

“Hey!” I said, pulling a conical princess hat out of a big box of costumes and putting it on.  “I found my hat!”

The kids looked at me in silence for a few seconds and then agreed, by some undetectable child-radio-frequency, that, yes, a man as big as I was in a princess hat was hilarious.  They rolled around the ground as Harper sat next to Samantha.

“You’re not a princess!” accused one of them.

“Says who?” I asked, kneeling next to the box.  “What else of mine do you have?”

They rushed over, and during the next fifteen to twenty minutes they found a lot of stuff that was possibly mine, and I had to try it all on.  Most of it didn’t fit.  The woman who had been in the room when we arrived pressed play on a little CD player and excused herself for a moment.

Harper and Samantha had a hushed conversation under the cover of the music, and I was only a little surprised when I saw Harper give the girl a hug at the end, a hug that was timidly returned at first, but gained in confidence before they released each other.  I knew firsthand that Harper was a good listener.  I supposed Samantha had just learned that too, maybe along with how much Harper really cared about people.

“OK everybody,” said Regina, “It’s time for lunch, can we give a big Tipton ‘thank you’ to Harper and Nick for coming to visit us today?”

A high-pitched and semi-synchronized thanks came forth from the kids, and Kaylee hugged Harper’s leg.

“Come along then, let’s wash our hands.”

The kids filed out, Samantha coming last, glancing up at me but otherwise mostly looking at the floor.  Harper pressed close to my side and I put my arm over her shoulder.

“Thank you for coming, Harper,” said Regina, “I think we’ll be watching Princess Sundancer on repeat for the next week.  You too, Nick.”

“It was really nice to be here, you guys look like you’re doing a great job.  The girls seem so… happy,” said Harper.

“Aw.  I hope so.  Bye.”

Regina left the room, leaving us with Jeff, who stopped the music.  “I really can’t thank you enough for coming, Kaylee is going to be walking on air.  I guess that just leaves your paperwork and belongings?  I’ve made you copies of the documentation and gathered it all together.  All I had was a shoebox, sorry, but it was about the right size.”

“Yeah, Nick said something about ‘property’ but, you know, I’m not really sure what that was all about.  What property, exactly, is it?”

“Well, mostly, it looks like letters addressed to you.”