by Mia Kerick
“I’m taking care of a friend’s cat because he’s on a job interview in Boston this weekend. He’d be cool with us crashing at his apartment until we figure out which end is up.”
***
I can’t sit down on the couch, even though it’s old and ratty. My clothes are soaked in blood and I’ll stain the couch and scare the shit out of the sleeping cat, for sure. My blood? Ginny’s blood? “Ophelia’s” grandma’s blood? Who knows? But I don’t feel like I can stay on my feet any longer. And next thing I know I’m sprawled out awkwardly, face down on the floor, still seeing stars because I seem to have fainted. My big blond hero is kneeling by my side, shaking me gently.
“Hey… hey, let me help you out. We… we can… let’s go to the bathroom and get you cleaned up, and I can take a look at your head wound. I don’t think it’s life-threatening, because if it was… well, if it was you’d be dead by now.” Realizing what he just said, he shrugs his bulky shoulders awkwardly. “Just saying.”
I fake a half-smile and he lifts me right off the floor. I’m thin but tall, and he doesn’t even grimace as he stands up with me in his arms. I don’t say a word as he softly places my feet on the floor and leads me to the bathroom.
***
It’s certainly an unusual feeling to have your bloody clothes carefully removed by a big, burly, male stranger. And once I’m stark naked, to have him stand right beside the shower, with his hands on my waist, I do my best to clean the blood off my body, well, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. At least not to me. I hang my head and watch as the bloody water swirls around and is swallowed by the drain, and I don’t freak out, mainly because I don’t think there’s any “freak out” left in me at this point. As soon as my head is clean, the guy gently pulls me out of the shower, forcing me to bend at an odd angle so he can examine whatever made my head bleed so much. He studies the top of my head for a long time, until I start to shiver and I need the spray of hot water to warm me.
When he lets me go, he says, “I think a bullet grazed the top left side of your head. There’s a two-inch scrape on your scalp and it’s kind of deep. The bleeding’s stopped but you probably ought to get it checked out by a doctor in the morning. It’s pretty nasty.” His large palm finds its way back to my hip. “But dude, I’d say that overall you’re pretty lucky, know what I mean?”
Not feeling particularly lucky, I again nod and return to my place beneath the stream of water, wishing I could wash away everything that happened tonight. What’s weird is the deep scrape on my head doesn’t hurt… nothing does; I’m physically numb. I decide at this moment I’m not going to think about the stuff that hurts my mind until we leave this bathroom… or better yet, until we leave this apartment, which represents a short reprieve between the hell of the shooting and the hell of accepting the reality of it.
***
We’re dry and sitting on the couch wearing the sweatpants and T-shirts of the guy who lives in this apartment, someone I’m fairly sure I’ve never met. And I’ve never been more exhausted in my life. I’m yawning, over and over again. Huge, wide-mouthed intakes of air that leave me feeling almost intoxicated.
The guy who saved my ass and then acted as my shower monitor turns to me and looks into my eyes in a way I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at before. In his gaze, I see concern and compassion and protectiveness and… and something else I can’t pinpoint. Or something that I’m too weary to figure out right now.
He says, “I guess maybe it’s time we should introduce ourselves. You think?”
I yawn.
“I’m Liam. Liam Norwell.”
I stifle another yawn and reply, “Jason Tripp… you can call me Jase.”
He reaches for my hand but doesn’t shake it; he just holds onto it tightly. As we sit there, hand in hand, my fingers inadvertently tighten up on his larger ones. Then his other big hand joins our hand holding party and I once again feel a warm rush of safety, like I did when he’d pressed me beneath the seats in the theater and covered me with his body. “Sorry we had to meet like this, Jase.”
Neediness. The emotion I couldn’t name that I still see in his eyes is neediness. And it looks wrong on this big bear of a man who should be perpetually confident. “Who’s Ginny?”
“She is… was my girlfriend, ever since freshman orientation week.”
“Shit, man. I’m sorry. Shit….”
“And she was the first person I met at Batcheldor.” I nod and yawn. “I… uh… we were at the theater tonight to see her roommate, Mariah, perform. She was playing Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.”
Liam smiles. “I was there to see Mariah too. Mariah Craft, right?”
“Yeah… how do you know her?”
“She’s in my marketing class. We’re in the same final project group.”
Our gazes lock, and although I’m an introverted person by nature, I’m okay with this intense mutual staring. And it hits me that since he looked up at me right before we started holding hands, his eyes have never wavered from mine. “I’m still having trouble believing this is real. I… I…” I’m going to be sick again. I frantically grab an empty popcorn bowl from the coffee table.
I concentrate on the pressure of his hand on my knee as I hurl. “Jase, I know… it was fucked up and awful and….” His voice, not so much his words, soothes me. “And shit, we’ve gotta tell somebody about Dom.”
“I know we’ve got to go to the police, but… but, Liam, do you think I can just sleep for a little while first… and then…then I promise….”
“I guess… yeah… just go to sleep, Jase. I’ll set the alarm on my phone for a couple of hours and we’ll get up and go to the police then.” He finally looks away. “Besides, don’t these mass shooter types usually kill themselves when they’re done shooting up the room?” He seems hopeful. “Dom’s probably already offed himself… so he won’t hurt anyone else.”
“Yeah, I think they commit suicide before they get caught… usually.” I’d never been one to watch the news on the days and weeks surrounding school shootings. Too depressing. Too scary.
“So a couple of hours won’t make a big difference.” He sounds unconvinced.
“Liam, thanks… and not just for letting me sleep. Thanks for… everything else you did for me tonight.”
His intelligent, brown-eyed gaze softens as it again rests on my face. “Yeah… yeah, no problem.”
I just thanked a man for essentially saving my life by saying, “thanks for everything.” And he accepted it as if he does heroic stuff every day. Maybe he does. I shrug, turn sideways on the couch, and curl up, trying to get comfortable while Liam slides over to the easy chair and kicks up the footrest. But all of the thoughts and memories of what happened in the theater that I’ve been blocking from my awareness with such determination threaten to return as I settle down and try to sleep. I can literally feel the memories, like hungry crows, pecking at the protective shell enclosing my consciousness every time I start to drift away. I turn onto my other side but I still can’t stop those ravenous birds from jabbing and poking, leaving me with no other option but to again take advantage of the close proximity of the popcorn bowl. There’s nothing in my stomach now, and all I do is heave.
My guardian angel returns to sit on the far end of the couch, opening his legs and patting the place between them. “Come here.” His voice is raspy and infused with raw emotion as he indicates the place he wants me to be. “Come here, man. Let me help you get to sleep. ‘Kay?”
Somewhere in the depth of my throbbing brain I know that his offer is not “normal” and that two guys aren’t supposed to cuddle on a couch, no matter what the circumstance. But once again I simply nod, shift around, and crawl toward him until my body fills that slot between his legs. His thick legs close around my hips, and when the sleek black cat snuggles in between us to share our warmth, it feels like exactly where I’m supposed to be right now. Which I realize is wrong for so many thousands of reasons but I do it anyway—I place my
face against the soft cotton stretched across his broad chest and listen to the miracle of his steady heartbeat, and I luxuriate in the warmth of his arms and legs as they enclose me.
When I wake up I’ll deal with everything. I’ll get up off this couch and face the truth….
***
“This is the Sanford Police. Open up!”
I don’t want to leave the warm comfort of this soft nest.
“We want to talk to you!”
Not ever.
“Open the door now! We know you’re in there!”
But my nest starts to move and pull away and soon I’m struggling to inhale the cold air that now surrounds me.
“Open the door!”
I’m disoriented. Where the hell am I? Who is this burly guy dragging himself out from underneath me? And why are the freaking police at the door? I grab the sleeve of my bed partner’s sweatshirt as he gets to his feet. I don’t know why I do this—it’s like some kind of an impulse… as if, by keeping him in this nest, I can somehow prevent the day from dawning.
“Hey, it’s gonna be okay, Jase. Looks like the police just came to us before we got a chance to go to them.” His warm hand covers mine.
Despite his comforting gesture, the horror of the night rushes back into my bewildered brain. The theater… the shooter… the earsplitting pops… the smell of blood… Ginny…. Oh, God, Ginny!
“Stay calm, ‘kay? I’m gonna go answer the door.” Liam’s tall blond spikes have slumped to the left side of his forehead and though he still looks big and rugged, he seems much younger than before. He picks his glasses up off the coffee table, puts them on, and goes to open the door.
As soon as he swings the door open, six police officers burst inside, several of them taking Liam to the floor and cuffing his hands behind his back. When two others approach me, Liam loses his cool for the first time, shouting, “Leave him alone! Don’t touch him! Don’t you know what he’s been through tonight?”
I stand up voluntarily and allow the police to cuff me, if for no other reason than to take that wild look out of Liam’s eyes. He needs to think I’m okay with this, even if I’m not.
“We want to ask you a few questions about where you were earlier tonight.” A second officer speaks and I can’t read his tone or his blank expression. “You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?”
I utter, “I understand,” but I don’t understand anything at all.
3
I might be safe here, but it’s not where I want to be. The only problem with this acknowledgment is that I don’t have a clue as to where I’d rather be. I have a suspicion that any place I could possibly land right now would be as unappealing as this bland, neutral-colored budget hotel room. It’s been thirty-two hours, not that I’m counting, since the shooting, and I’m not doing well.
I try to get comfortable on what I’ve claimed as “my” double bed but I nonetheless go through the same hell—the kind of hell associated with stuffing down emotions that desperately need to surface—as when I tried to fall asleep alone on Liam’s friend’s couch on Friday night, and at the police station where I’ve been ever since. Constant nausea, coupled with the inability to block out the persistent thoughts I’m not yet ready to digest, have me flipping from side to side on the stiff mattress. I just can’t get to sleep.
Which came first, the nausea or the restlessness? I have no idea, not that it matters. At least I can comfort myself with the knowledge that Mom has been informed that I’m okay, so she’s most likely worried, but not having a nervous breakdown. I’m actually far from okay, but physically I’m relatively unharmed.
As it turns out, driving away from the scene of a violent crime makes authorities quite suspicious. Unfortunately I learned this too late, never before having been involved in, or even present at, a violent crime. After intense, and extremely intimidating separate interrogations, it was determined that Liam and I were not accomplices of Domenic William DeSalles, the active shooting suspect in the Batcheldor College Theater Shooting. We’re just victims with apparently very bad judgment in terms of our decision to cut and run from the scene of a mass murder.
And all I know with regard to the shooter is that since my arrest the night before last, Domenic William DeSalles, 21, junior at Batcheldor College majoring in Business Information Systems, has been identified as the alleged solitary gunman in the shooting at the Harrison Theater that killed 17 and wounded 6. He’s still at large, which is the reason I’m being held here in this fifty shades of tan hotel room.
There’s a sharp knock on the door, to which I a jump a mile, followed by the shouted identification, “Police!” and then the door swings open. Two uniformed officers, the man I’ve come to know as Detective Spader, and Liam enter the room.
“You’ve both eaten and are seriously in need of some rest as a result of this unfortunate incident.” Spader is a to-the-point type of guy. He removes his wire-rimmed glasses and rubs his balding head as if weary, which I’m sure he is, and I silently welcome him to the club. “Go to sleep, and by the time you guys wake up later on today, I’m sure we’ll have the suspect in custody and you’ll be able to go back to your normal daily lives.”
Really? You think we can return to college classes and keg parties as if this “unfortunate incident” never happened? To go on as if I didn’t just witness a bloody slaughter on an innocent audience of Shakespeare-lovers, or at a minimum, on friends and family of Shakespearean actors? You’re suggesting that I go back to my former life as if my best friend/girlfriend wasn’t fatally shot in the head when we were shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowded theater? And you expect me to forget that my instinct was to curl up into a fetal ball rather than to attempt CPR, or at a minimum, to hang onto Ginny’s hand as she died? Really, Detective Spader?
“Thank you, Detective.” Liam stops just short of the other double bed and turns to the three law enforcement officers, placing his hands on his hips defensively. “I think we can take it from here.”
“You know you aren’t allowed to leave this room for any reason,” Spader reminds us.
Liam and I nod.
“If you need anything, use the cell phone I gave you to call and make a request.” He looks from Liam to me, his brow creased, and admits, “We just don’t have the manpower to leave a couple guys sitting outside your hotel room to guard you. We’ve decided the best use of the officers’ time is to search for Dom DeSalles, see what I’m saying? So yeah, use the phone.”
We both glance at the cell phone that’s on the table between the two beds.
“How’s your head, Jason? Do you need to see the doctor again?” Detective Spader asks, as if it is an afterthought.
I shake my head. I still can’t feel any pain.
“Good. Now, there are bottles of water and some snacks in the mini-bar if you can’t wait until we bring you a meal.”
The silence in the room informs us all that everything necessary has been said.
“Well, we’ll take off then.” The three men head for the door. One more time, Spader reminds us, “No leaving this room. Don’t open the door for any reason.”
And then Liam and I are alone. It’s awkward. This kind of thing, thankfully, doesn’t happen every day, and neither of us knows exactly what to say. Finally, Liam kicks off his boots and falls back on his bed. “How are you holding up?”
I lift the small plastic bag meant to line the ice bucket and wave it in the air. “I’m still hanging onto a barf bag, if that gives you a clue.”
He’s quiet, and I figure he can’t think of a thing to say to a guy who hasn't exactly been the picture of grace under fire. Okay, a guy who has crumbled under the pressure like a week-old sugar cookie in a backpack filled with heavy textbooks.
“Off to the john,” I say, figuring I can escape from the awkwardness there, and I slide off my bed. When I get to the bathroom, I grip the sides of the sink and glance into the wide mirror to find out what sort of horror show L
iam has been seeing for the past day-and-a-half. A bit thinner than usual from stress, my short, dark hair is in place except for the stripe of raw scalp on the top left of my head, but my olive-colored skin is paler than usual.
The red rims around my green eyes and major dark circles beneath them prevent me from appearing like the “2014 Face of an Angel,” which was one of the superlatives I won as a high school senior, among “Most Popular Boy in the Senior Class” and “Boy Most Likely To…wink, wink.” I splash water on my face and brush my teeth one more time with the hotel-supplied toothbrush.
I can’t get the taste of death out of my mouth.
Ten minutes later I feel more mentally together, so I exit the bathroom and head back to my bed.
“I know Dom DeSalles from the business program. We both did internships at the Langston Industrial Park last fall,” Liam says softly.
I sit down on my bed and listen to the cadence of Liam’s deep voice because, despite the topic, it comforts me.
“Plus we live on the same floor in RetroHouse.”
“I live in the RetroHouse basement. I’m one of the few lucky freshman that got the privilege to live in upperclassmen housing.” I smirk. “Lucky me.” If I lived with the other freshmen I probably wouldn’t have a clue who Dom DeSalles is, and he may not be searching for me so that he could blow my brains out, since he missed by a few inches on his first attempt.
“I’ve seen you around. We’ve passed by each other at the laundry center and in the cafeteria too, I think.”
“Yeah, gotta have clean clothes and food.” I’m not a funny guy, but today I’m fighting my embarrassment and deliver the line with what Ginny used to call my Sponge Bob voice. As expected, it falls flat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Dom.” Liam directs the conversation back to the topic of Dom. He seems to want to talk about the asshole and I just want to listen to his calm and steady voice, so it’s a win-win situation. “He wasn’t the friendliest dude on our floor. He always seemed sort of pissed-off. Like he had a chip on his shoulder, you know?”
