Witness

We returned, numbly, to Holmes Chapel, but only for the day.

Simon lent Harry his jet and unceremoniously saw us off at the airport, meeting me for the first time in a near comatose state. I’m sure he wondered why Harry was dating a disheveled girl with puffy red eyes, but we couldn’t tell him the circumstances. Harry texted the lads to let them know to keep my story hush hush, but again not explaining why. He would take me home, deposit me like a treasure in a safety deposit box, and then leave for press in Korea for the week the following morning.

He couldn’t have picked a worse time to leave.

“We could go for a run,” he suggested hopefully as I sat on the couch in my embarrassingly furnished row house, trying to get me to say anything. I hadn’t been able to pry my lips open for going on twenty-four hours, merely nodding from behind dead eyes.

They may as well have been dead, anyway. Amelia was, and it was all my fault.

I was quiet for a while, hoping that he would just look away in defeat. When he didn’t, green eyes still bright but carrying an unfamiliar glint of fear, I held back a sigh.

“I can’t,” I said simply, casting my gaze to the ground.

Amelia was dead. I could imagine her parents and Greta, still confused at how this all came to be as they planned her funeral – a funeral I would not be able to attend. I could imagine her ashes in an urn in her fathers study, already taken care of because things happen quickly like that in the city, no place to keep any more bodies if they aren’t moving or working or making art. I could imagine her empty apartment that she had been so excited to move back into, now a crime scene, the walls splattered with her blood.

Harry looked disappointed, but understanding.

“I could go get us something to eat,” he tried again. I hadn’t eaten since the restaurant in London overlooking the river. Hours later, my stomach had yet to rumble, too sickened at the thought of Amelia happily hugging her parents upon her arrival home, only to be killed shortly thereafter. We’d never had a chance to catch up. I never had even found out where the O.E.O. had sent her, if she’d liked it there enough, how everything actually happened.

I would never get that chance.

I nodded absently just to have a moment alone. He was gone in a flash, eager to please, and almost instantly I regretted the decision to send him out. I was terrified once more to be alone, feeling like Damien’s breath was hot on the nape of my neck once more. To occupy myself, I turned away every screen that was watching me in that room – the television to the wall, my laptop beneath the sofa, my cellphone pressed down on the coffee table – because with them watching me, it felt like he was watching me too.

Hector didn’t spare me the details once I calmed down the night before, once my tears had turned into silent streams instead of shuddering sobs. “I’m sorry, Miss Lilia,” he apologized softly as Harry held my hand, not quite knowing what else to do. “Hudson told me to tell you everything.”

And so, as I sat fuming mad that Hudson didn’t have the balls to call me himself and explain his shortcomings in protecting my best friend, Hector explained.

“She was at home alone,” he explained. “Which was something we didn’t even think twice about, of course. Just had come back from a movie with her parents – they literally just missed her, we think. The neighbors heard a gunshot and when they came to check on her, the door was ajar and she’d been shot straight through the back of her head in the kitchen. We think she didn’t even see him coming. And, expectedly, he took one of her teeth. And left not a trace but that.”

I swear I could see his face in the window as I waited for Harry to return.

“I’m back!” I heard his voice call from downstairs, clear as a bell, and it sent me scrambling behind the couch, searching for something to fight with within arms length, my self-defense class’s instincts kicking in. But a moment, Harry’s curly brown mop appears at the top of the stairs with two paper sacks in his hands, and I realize I’m imagining things.

“I couldn’t decide, so I got options,” he announced, only to realize that I was cowering behind a piece of furniture. With a sad smile, he set the bags on the coffee table to come and crouch next to me, pulling my body close to his and holding my head to his chest. His heartbeat was loud in my ears, but soothing. We sat like that for a while, just the two of us, just trying to silently figure out how to support each other.

His stomach rumbled, the noise rising to the place where my ear pressed to his sternum. With a glance up at his exhausted and ravenous face, I pulled away from him and lead us back to the couch to allow him to eat. In no time at all he pulled all the food from the bags, splaying out a keen selection of fish, chips, and pastries from the bakery. The scent was almost nauseating, but to appease him, I nibbled on some French Fries.

“I see we’ve gone back to being Amish,” he hummed, gesturing with a nod of his head to the turned-around television. It made me sad to hear him crack that now outdated joke – the last time I’d heard it, I was scared and alone for the first time, lost in Holmes Chapel with the fear of Damien’s presence always following me everywhere. It almost felt like it was happening all over again.

“I got nervous…” I started to say, but my voice broke with tears at my confession, “without you.”

I struggled to choke back the tears, needing more than ever to be brave. Harry was leaving and it was going to have to be okay. I was going to have to learn not to cry, not to stay inside, not to cease to function. I needed to be brave without him, but in that moment it seemed next to impossible – the softening of his face at the sight of mine made it even worse.

“Mara,” he sighed, using my real name before scooping me up in his arms. “You are perfectly safe, you know that. Use that head of yours; you’re smarter than him. There’s no way he can get on a plane to get over here. His face is all over the world as a wanted man. There’s simply no way he can even get to you.”

I shuddered but nodded into his chest.

“And besides, Hector is just a phone call away if you want him to come stay with you, just to be sure,” he suggested, stroking back my hair from my face with his large, assuring hands, the cool metal of his rings making me realize I was feverish with the fear. With a gulp, I nodded again.

“How are you not scared?” I asked softly, pulling away from his chest and tucking my knees up to my chest. “He knows you’re with me. It’s all over the news.”

He gave me a sad smile, those lips I knew so well looking melancholy for once. “Scared? I’m proper terrified,” he assured me with a shake of his head. “But that can’t stop me from living my life. Now that he’s made it clear he’s still out there, we’re more protected than ever. Things just have to be okay until they’re not. We have to be brave.”

I was quiet for a minute, wishing I could think that way.

“I need you to be brave, Mar,” he insisted as he reached forward to cup my cheeks with his hands. “I need you to be brave for me.”

So when he kissed me goodbye before getting on that plane, I didn’t cry. And when I went back to my house alone, I didn’t cry. And I told myself that when he called me from Korea, though it would be tomorrow there already, I wouldn’t cry. I couldn’t. I needed to be strong for Harry.

I allowed myself fifteen minutes of alone time when I returned to my house, though I wasn’t really alone – I was greeted by my white ceiling as I sprawled on the floor, all limps pointed out to make a star. Gravity tugged down on my spine in an effort to keep me from floating away with all of the shaky air pumping in and out of my lungs. For the first time truly alone, I mourned my best friend, though tearlessly. I spoke to the ceiling as if it were she, apologizing over and over, telling stories I never told her, asking questions and receiving no reply.

I held my own funeral for her once I could peel myself off the floor. I collected all the things that reminded me of her that I had brought with me – the ticket stub from The Lion King on Broadway still in my wallet from last July, the dress I wore to her 19th birthday, the picture of us I kept on my bedside table – and formed them into a little shrine in the window, a small candle flickering beside it, just for her. The sky had grown dark, leaving that single dancing flame brighter than ever before. I’d like to think that she was there with me too as I read e.e. cumming’s “I Carry Your Heart With Me” to her and her alone.

“I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart,” I breathed shakily, so close to tears but fighting them off instead. “I carry it in my heart. I am never without it – anywhere I go, you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling.”

I struggled through the rest, my eyes welling with everything I truly did carry with me – with the fear, with the sadness, with the loss and the confusion. From then on, I would carry Amelia with me, my ‘Mil, with the bright blue eyes and long blonde hair, the kindest soul I’d ever known. Whatever a moon has always meant.

“And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart,” I sighed finally, the tips of my fingers pressed to the photo of the two of us, missing her more than ever. “I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.”

And with a final breath, I blew out the candle and said goodbye.

“I love you, ‘Mil,” I whispered to the soft trail of smoke evaporating into the night air. “And I swear to God, I’ll be brave for you. If not for anyone else, for you.”