Liz

A snippet from my current novel project.

“I have to figure this thing out Randy. How many people get an opportunity like this, huh? How many people get to be dead and walking? I have the chance to find out who I am really am, because I have no idea anymore. I’m going back to my roots, I’m going back to the beginning, to where it all began. I’m working backwards, until I find my way home. If I ever had one, that is…”

Randy began to pour her a cup of coffee before she stopped him. “Don’t.”

“What do you mean?” He asked, bewildered. “You always used to love coffee.”

“Not anymore.”

“Alright,” he said, then went about pouring himself a mug instead. She watched him as he did so, watched the way his hands shook slightly as he held the glass pot. The grey in his hair was consuming the black, and the wrinkles in his face had deepened since she had last seen him. It had been years. “A man came by here last week.” Randy lowered himself slowly into his seat, as if this took great effort. “He was looking for you.”

“A man?” She asked, bewildered. “What sort of man?”

“The tall, dark, and mysterious sort. Dressed up in one of those nice European suits, he had a picture of you, asked me if I knew who you were. Told him I’d never seen anyone who looked like that before, but that I’d let him know if something came to mind. Left me his card, it’s on the counter over there.”

The woman stood swiftly and moved to the counter Randy had gestured towards. The counter was, of course, a clutter of papers and knick-knacks, but she spotted it right away. She had seen that same card enough times in the recent years that she would never forget it. She picked it up gently and studied it. Thick, bleached cardstock with crisp letters on just one side. “Jameson Daines,” it read in the centre, and, just below it, “[phone].” That was all. She sighed deeply. She should have been angry, but she wasn’t anymore and she didn’t know why.

“It’s been over ten months,” she said softly, “and he still hasn’t given up.”

“Who is he?” Randy asked suspiciously. “A cop? Ex-boyfriend who won’t leave you alone? Because I’ve got some old buddies who-”

“No, that’s not necessary, it’s nothing like that. It’s… complicated.” She placed the card neatly back on the counter then returned to her seat and sank heavily into it.

“How complicated?”

“Very.” This is all she said, but Randy sat quietly, knowing her well enough to know that she would continue eventually. After a long silence, she spoke again. “He and I… we worked together, for a long time, in very close quarters, with a team of others whose relationships with ourselves were admittedly more distant. A lot of things went wrong, and Daines stepped over a line he should have never crossed. The poor fool never did understand boundaries. I told him if he ever tried to contact me again, I’d kill him. He’s been three steps behind me for months and I thought he’d given up. Now it seems he’s ahead of me.” The woman leaned back in her chair and raised her face to study the ceiling. “That man is a terrible person, you see, and cares about none but himself. He’s a selfish b*****d and I want nothing to do with him, or any of them. But instead of respecting my wishes he’s gone and decided to do whatever the hell he wants anyway, like he always does.”

“You paint him as a pretty lousy friend,” Randy pointed out.

“He and I were never friends.”

“Well, that’s not what he said.”

“I told you,” the woman’s voice took on a tone of annoyance, “the man’s a fool.”

“He reminded me a lot of a worried parent after a child goes missing. I’ve had many coming knocking on my door with a handful of fliers, asking me to pass them around to the customers. He had a notebook with him, and he seemed more concerned than hostile.” Randy took a long, slow drink of his coffee, knowing she would wait for him to continue. “Now, you of course know him better than I, but I believed the man. He told me you were a dear friend of his, and that he was worried you would do something destructive. He sat down in that very same chair that you’re sitting in now and drank my coffee. He knew you very well. He told me he just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“I’m glad you two are getting on so famously,” she snapped, slightly offended, “but he’s not my problem anymore, and I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m going home Randy.” She leaned across the table, stressing this point. “I’m going back to where I’m from, so I can be who I am instead of whoever I’ve become. And I can’t have him getting in the way of that.”

“Alaina, you’ve never had a home in your life. Unless you intend to stay here, that is.”

“No, Randy, not here. This is where I lived, but this is not my home. There’s a difference, you know? Home is where you go when you’re tired, or scared, or lonely, or cold, because you know that you’ll always be safe there. And I’m going to find mine. I’m going back to Brooklyn.”

“And you think you’ll find what you’re looking for there?”

“I know it Randy, I do.”

“Then, I’m sorry to say, that makes you the fool my dear.” Randy stood and gathered his mug from the table. “I have work to do, and you have a train to catch. Good luck to you, and I hope you figure it out before it really is too late.” He went into the kitchen and left her sitting there, confused, trying to decipher the meaning of his words. When she realised that he was not coming back, she stood and left the building. She did not notice that the card that she placed so precisely in the centre of the counter was no longer there.

 

 

The doorknob had always rattled slightly when it was being unlocked, and she watched it shake as she sat there in her chair on the other side of the room. The door opened slowly and she waited, holding her breath without realising it. He didn’t enter the room. He just stood there before the threshold, just stood in the hallway and stared at her. He stared at her for a long time, and she stared at him too. Ten months. She had not seen him in ten months.

He looked tired. He had always looked tired, it came with the job, but he looked even more so than usual. His chin, which was usually clean shaven, was covered in uneven stubble. His hair lacked its signature crisply jelled look. He was a mess, and he stood there, in that hallway, staring at her. She waited for him to speak, to say anything at all, but he did not. Instead, he broke eye contact and entered the apartment. He shut the door behind him, shrugged off his suit jacket and threw it over the back of the couch, and walked straight into the kitchen. She heard a cabinet door slam shut then the faucet run, followed by silence. She stood, and slowly approached the archway that opened up into the sparse kitchen. She stood there beneath it and stared at him.

His knuckles where white as they dug into the countertop. He was leaning rigidly over it, an untouched glass of water beside him. He did not turn his head to look at her, though she knew he must have heard her approach. It wasn’t like him to miss something like that.

When he finally raised his head, it was towards the ceiling. When he spoke, it was bitterly. “I can’t decide whether I’m hallucinating because of the drugs or the lack of sleep, but I must have done something to piss God off because you’re the last thing I need to see right now.”

At that, she was inspired to walk right up to him and, without a word, slap him across the face.

He raised his left hand to his cheek, which had been made bright red, then turned his head slowly to look at her. His voice was raw, and it cracked when he spoke. “Liz?”

“Who the f**k do you think you are Jameson? Drugs? Are you kidding me?” She was angry, and it showed upon her face and in her voice as she yelled at him. “Does eleven years of sobriety mean nothing to you? What, just because I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with your sorry, pathetic a*s, you decided it was time to null and void eleven f*****g years of hard work? You, who told me that you would never, ever, go back to that place? I can’t f*****g believe you. You make me sick, you worthless little-”

“Liz,” he said again, though with more initiative this time.

“What?” She snapped, even more outraged by the fact that he had interrupted her.

He didn’t responded, just stared at him again, dumbfounded, astonished. There was a newfound light in his eye. He shook his head slowly, in the way people do when they don’t believe what they’re seeing. His cheek was still red, and he reached out to touch hers. She knocked his hand away. “What, Daines?” She said again.

“I’ve been looking for you for ten months,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And to be honest I’m unimpressed. I thought you were supposed to be good at your job.”

“Yes, but you’re better,” he insisted. “How did you keep it all straight in your head for so many years? All those different people, how did you never slip up?”

“What are you talking about Daines?”

“You.” He began fumbling through his pockets until he pulled out a small notebook. He flipped through the pages for a moment before he found what he was looking for and handed it over to her. “Twenty-three,” he said, “twenty-three names.”

She looked down at the page the notebook was opened to and read down the list.

“Elisabeth Hastings
Slick
Alaina Pierce
The Viper
Adder
Mikayla
Heather Jones
Shade
Sarah Smith
Josephine Harper
Ariana Johnson…”

The list went on for three pages, and as she read each name she flashed back to the time during which it had defined her. He was right. She had been a lot of people in her very short life.

“Who are you?”

She looked up, startled by his words as she had been lost in her thoughts. “What?”

“Who are you? All those names, all those people. I’ve been all over the state, I’ve been up and down the east coast looking for anyone who might know where you are. And while everyone had a different name for you, they each recognised your photo right away, whether it had been six months since they’d seen you or fifteen years. That notebook is filled with all the people you’ve been and all the things they’ve done, and frankly, I’m not even certain who you are anymore. Do you even know?”

She was silent for a moment before she moved to the little round table and sat in what had become her chair over the years they had shared that apartment. “I didn’t know, to be honest.” She spoke quietly, partly to herself. “That’s what I was looking for. For the once place that was assuredly, undoubtedly, my home. For the one person who I truly was. I thought the answer was in Brooklyn, with Andrew and the boys. But though the streets where the same as I walked them, they felt foreign to my feet. Everywhere I went was wrong, every word I said to the people there was a lie. It took me far too long to realise that I had already found my home, and that I had left it.”

Jameson pulled out the chair across from her, his chair, and sank into it. He reached across the table and took her hands into his. “Liz,” he said softly.

“Did you know,” she said, meeting his gaze, “that you are the only person in the entire world who I’ve ever been okay with calling me that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

She looked down at the notebook before her, then back up to him. “It’s not on the list.”

“Should it be?”

Elisabeth had cried a total of two times in her life since infancy, and as tears rolled down her cheeks she noted this as the third. “It is you, after all. You’re my home. And you call me Liz, so I figure that must be who I am.”

Jameson drew circles upon her wrist with his thumb. “I really missed you too,” he whispered. Liz let out a snort of laughter. He cracked a sly grin. “Though you should be more careful, I might not forgive you so easily next time. You can’t really go around telling men you’re in love with them and then threatening to kill them if they ever try to talk to you. It really sends us mixed signals.”

Liz took back one of her hands to wipe away the tears on her face. “I’m sorry, Jameson, I really am.”

“I know,” Jameson said, smiling gently.

“Also, I’m throwing out everything in your medicine cabinet.”

Jameson’s smile fell into a slight frown. “I know.”

“And then after you get out of rehab, we can figure out where we’re going to go from here.”

“Hold on,” Jameson protested, letting go of her hands, “I’m not going to rehab.”

“The hell you aren’t,” Liz snapped. “In fact, I’m calling them in like five minutes. You’re going tonight.”

“I don’t want to go to rehab, Liz. Besides, I just got you back and-”

“Well maybe you should have thought about that before you started popping pills again. Now where’s your phone, I need to make sure they’ve got room for you.”

Jameson sighed and dug his cell out of his pocket. He handed it to her, grumbling. “You really should get your own phone, you know.”

“Nah, I don’t need one.” She dialled in the number, and of course she knew it by heart, of course she did, of course she memorised it as soon as he learned that he was an addict, of course she did because she was her.

“I love you too, you know,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved him off with the phone to her ear as it rung. “Now go pack a bag. And, friendly tip, no-one wears suits in rehab. Ah- hello? Yes, Doctor Barker? My name is Jennifer Hale and I am calling on the behalf of…”

Jameson shook his head slowly, in the way people do when they’re extremely fond of someone, stood, then left the room to do as she told him, as he almost always did.

Author's Note

I wrote this because I was bored, but it may actually end up being the final chapter of the novel series I'm currently working my ass off trying to write. Who knows, we'll see where things go.