The Things We Don't See

by Jessi Brazzell

  We spent the day holding her and Brian filled his phone with pictures of her as she slept in my arms. We all finally fell asleep on the floor of the living room while we let the Disney channel play. Even though Harper obviously had no idea what was on the TV, much less what a TV even was, it seemed appropriate. We only slept in small intervals before she would wake up crying throughout the night and each time, Brian and I would both jump up in a hurry to comfort her. We were awake when the sun started to rise and I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the exhaustion on Brian’s face. He didn’t mind it though. “You are worth it,” he smiled to her. This was what life was going to be. And I was perfectly content with that.

  Brian had just gotten her to sleep when the phone rang and instantly she started crying. I threw my head back and grabbed the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Chloe, I need to meet with you. It is important,” a man said.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “This is Professor Marks and I need to speak with you, today.”

  I knew that whatever it was had to have something to do with Detective Burns. “Of course, I can give you our home address.”

  “No, Chloe. I think you are going to want to come alone.”

  Alone? I don’t necessarily think that meeting for a secret lunch with an old college professor would be something that Brian would appreciate, and I wouldn’t ask it of him. “I won’t be able to do that. But Brian and I can cook dinner for you this evening. We would love to have you.”

  “Chloe, Brian cannot hear what I need to tell you. Meet me at Lighthouse Café at noon.” That was it. That was all he said before hanging up without even waiting for my response, which was an obvious decline on his invitation.

  Brian walked in and I started to tell him about it, but then I realized something. Something that I had never placed before. His sneakers. They were clearly worn, insignificant sneakers. Or so I had thought. But Brian didn’t bring those sneakers home until after Detective Pete had come over to discuss Detective Burns’ suicide. That very same evening to be exact. Those sneakers were in his gym locker and they had been for months. That had meant nothing to me until today. Those sneakers would not have been in his house the day they searched for a matching shoe pattern.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lighthouse Café on a Tuesday afternoon was not exactly a happening place. Apart from the hostess and one man sitting at the bar, there were no other guests that I could see. But this wasn’t a surprise. The place was well known for high prices and low quality. Pair that with the constant swaying from the tides while you are trying to eat and you can clearly understand why this isn’t on any tourist hot spot check lists. Hell, the deteriorating dock with rope hand rails leading twenty feet into the ocean just to meet the hostess was enough to detour any logical person.

  “Welcome to Lighthouse Café. How many in your party?” the hostess asked. Her voice impressively monotone, completely lacking any excitement. She was old enough to be out of high school but too young to have graduated college. She had a lip ring and fire truck red highlights in her hair. She was eccentric, but she was sad also. Her eyes were heavy with worry. Bags under her eyes too dark for such a young age and my heart hurt looking at her. Now that I have Harper, I see everything differently. Looking at this girl, clearly in her early twenties, I can imagine her as a small child. With her whole life in front her, endless possibilities. And I know that somewhere along the lines, things didn’t go the way she deserved. Something changed this young girl into this woman who stands in front of me now. Into a fragile, broken girl who is painting on this front of strength. And I wanted nothing more than to take her into my arms and tell her that life would get better. But I didn’t want to scare the poor girl. “Uh, how many?” she asked again.

  “Oh, I am sorry. I am actually meeting someone.”

  “Vamp lookin’ dude?” she asked, the first hint of a smile in her eyes.

  I laughed. He did kind of seem like one of those teen dream vampire guys. “Yeah, that is him.”

  “He is up on the Bell Deck,” she said, lazily pointing to the stair case beside her. The spark in her eye already replaced with the heavy, tired gaze.

  “Thank you.”

  I could hear the waves smashing against the exterior of the restaurant and I steadied myself on the stairs while the entire place rocked with what seemed like four large waves. My stomach was already getting queasy by the time I made it to the top and I took in a deep breath of the fresh air. Professor Marks was standing against the railing of the deck looking down at the water and I looked around to see that we were the only two people on the deck. Which was the exact reasoning I assumed he had chosen this place.

  I didn’t tell Brian about my meeting. What would I have said? I couldn’t tell him that I was meeting a man who undoubtedly had news that he didn’t want Brian to hear. So instead, I offered to pick up lunch and he was more than happy to stay home with Harper.

  I walked across the deck to Professor Marks and he barely turned his head to acknowledge my presence. “I am sorry I’m late,” I said, checking my watch to see it was five after twelve. Usually my punctuality is impeccable, but that stair case took me several minutes to tackle.

  “You don’t ever need to apologize for anything to me, Chloe,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper and his eyes were still staring down.

  I didn’t know how to respond. That was quite possibly the strangest retort I had ever heard to a casual apology like the one I had just given. “Okay, well what is this about?”

  “Do you remember dropping your pen in class?” he trailed off.

  I snorted air through my nostrils, annoyed now that he seemed to be attempting games. “Of course I don’t remember. What is this about?”

  His grip tightened on the rail and his head fell back while he let out a deep, throaty laugh. I stepped away from him then, realizing his response was angry and frightening. I was standing 40 feet above the closest chance at help with a man I wasn’t really that familiar with and no one knew I was here other than the hostess.

  “Chloe, don’t pretend with me. I know you remember it. It was unforgettable. Eight minutes into class and your black ballpoint landed next to your white Chuck Taylor. Your eyes scanned the room, briefly, before you bent over to pick it up. We met then. Your hand brushed against mine…”

  My heart started pounding hard in my chest and I took another step back, bumping into a black iron chair. He whipped around to me then and my eyes fixed on the red rose laying on the rail in front of him. My breath caught and I turned to run but his hands were on my shoulders before I could get away.

  “Chloe, stop fighting it.” He was twirling my hair between his fingers and his breath was growing heavily, turning into a near pant. “Your perfect hair, it fell against my face as we both knelt to pick up that pen. I can still remember the smell of it.”

  I was trembling then, putting everything together. The roses, the pen from the patio, and I struggled to get away from him. But somehow, reason found its way to me and I remembered studying this kind of obsession. I stopped struggling and forced a smile at him. “I know, Professor Marks. Of course, I remember.”

  His grip loosened and he smiled down at me. “Everything I have done is for you. You have to know that, Chloe. Detective Burns was upsetting you!”

  He turned and grabbed the rose from the railing and I could taste blood from where I was biting down so hard on my lip, trying not to cry.

  “I know you like red roses. I remember when you got that tattoo,” he said. Looking down to my hip, his face lit with a smile that made Detective Pete seem harmless. My hand instinctively reached to cover where my nineteen-year-old rebellion permanently marked the lower part of my hip. So low and small that it wasn’t visible even in my skimpiest bikini and my skin tingled like a million needles were sticking into me when I realized that for nearly eight years, this man had been watching me. Watching me so closely that he had seen me naked and I ne
ver even knew it.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the rose into my chest. A thorn stuck into my skin and I reached to take it from him. My hands were shaking and he saw it, which caused his temper to rise again.

  “Why are you acting like you are afraid of me?” he yelled. His loud voice caused the tears to fall from my eyes before I could stop them and I turned to run again. He grabbed hold of my hair and threw me back into the rail. I landed hard against it, instantly feeling bruising and my breath was knocked out of me. I heard the wood crack from the impact of my weight and I looked over my shoulder to see the waves smashing against the rocks beneath me. I turned back to see him smiling again.

  “I cannot be without you anymore, Chloe.” He was stepping closer to me and despite the cracked rail separating me from the rocks forty feet below, I pushed back against it, desperately trying to put space between the two of us. The shoe print, it was his.

  “And Carson?” I asked.

  His head flew back again while he laughed a less angry laugh, but more of an amused tone. “Chloe, I didn’t kill Carson. I should have. I should have killed him for what he done to you.”

  I fought the tears away again but I knew that he wasn’t lying. He had just admitted to killing Detective Burns, although I am not sure how he got away with it. He talked like killing Carson was something he would have been proud of like he would have been doing me a favor.

  “But you had to go and ruin everything, Chloe. You had to go and marry Brian! I see the way you look at him, Chloe.” He was standing only inches away from me now. I could feel his breath against my face as he spit the words out. “Till death do you part,” he said, raising his hands to my neck, a crazed look in his eyes and I knew what he meant. I reached forward and grabbed his shoulders, spinning myself away from the rail and pushing him toward it.

  “Chloe!” he yelled over the loud crack of the rail. I watched as it gave way beneath him and he tumbled through it. There was a noise. A loud but dull noise and I knew it was the impact of him landing on those rocks. I held my breath, waiting for him to call out for help, but he didn’t. A scream shrieked through my ears and I realized it was my own as I looked down at his twisted body on that rock. Blood was spilling over into the water, forming a red cloud that was spreading quickly as the waves landed against his still body. He was dead.

  I could hear sirens coming but my body wouldn’t move. I couldn’t walk away from that ledge. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from his lifeless body. Maybe part of me was trying to make it go away, hope that it wasn’t real. Or maybe I was just so frightened that it wasn’t real that I had to make sure to pay attention to every detail until I knew that I was not in any more danger.

  The boat sped across the waves and I held my breath while a man knelt above Professor Marks to check for a pulse. I fell to my knees when he gave a nod to the men standing next to him. And I watched mortified while they zipped him away into a black body bag and load him into the boat.

  The rock was still stained with his blood and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t cleaned the blood.

  “Chloe!” Brian said over and over until finally I looked up to see him. He fell down beside me and pulled me into him and I let him hold me until a paramedic made him move away to examine me.

  The woman kept flashing a light into my eyes but still I couldn’t stop looking at the rock below.

  “We are going to have to take her in. She is in shock.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Two miserable days in the hospital and I have never been so homesick. They wanted to do a forty-eight-hour watch for what they said was because of my cracked rib and the proximity to my lung. But what I believe was for a psychiatric watch. Killing someone, whether necessary to your own survival or not, is absolutely brutal. It changes something inside of you. I don’t know which emotion haunts me more. The resentment for being in that situation, the anger I have for feeling like it was unfairly thrown upon me, or the guilt. The guilt that I could have done something differently. And even if I couldn’t have, why had I decided that my life was more valuable than his?

  It is so easy to look back on a situation and find a thousand other scenarios that would have ended differently. But we don’t have that luxury, that chance to choose the outcome we could live with and go back and make those choices instead. I didn’t even scream for help. That is what I think about the most. I could have called for help and he could still be alive if I had. Fear can cripple us but it can also motivate us to become exactly what we fear the most. I feared he would be capable of taking my life so I became someone capable of taking his instead.

  The guilt from taking a man’s life was enough to get me to be completely transparent with Brian. I told him about my suspicions of his shoes and how Professor Marks had implied there was information about Brian which is why I had even gone. As terrible as it seemed for me to question everything about the man I was married to, he understood. He wasn’t even angry. I think mostly we were both relieved to finally know who had left the roses and who had left the shoe print. That shoe print had been following Brian around for nearly a year and now we both knew the truth.

  Detective Pete, the least likely person to sympathize my situation, explained stalking to me. Apparently, fifteen percent of women have been stalked in their lifetime. Now if they know about it or not, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t trying to prolong any conversation with Detective Creep so I kept my questions to myself. And this is just what Detective Pete said so I am also not sure on the truth behind it at all. But he also said that over half of the cases are from an intimate relationship, which was his way of accusing me of pulling the classic college freshman and professor affair routine. I tried to argue with him, tell him my own opinion on that. That all relationships would be considered intimate by the stalker or else the stalking would never have happened but he wasn’t interested. But even though Professor Marks and I were never intimate, he obviously felt, in some way, that we were.

  The nurse handed Brian a pamphlet on PTSD when we checked out. I couldn’t help but smile down at it. I could have written that pamphlet and I could also treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorders. The pamphlet seemed a little silly and Brian smiled up at me, obviously thinking the same.

  “Harper will be happy to have you home,” he said, opening the door for me.

  “How has Rosalie been?”

  “She has been great. Harper has started to warm up to her. But I will be glad to get her out of the house.”

  “They aren’t going to tell the public that Detective Burns was murdered,” I told him. They hadn’t said this for sure, but I could tell by the vague questions that Detective Pete had asked that it wouldn’t be publicized. They wouldn’t want the community to think they were incapable of distinguishing between a suicide and a murder, especially one that involved a veteran detective. But what about Detective Burns? They were going to tarnish her memory by letting people believe she was clinically depressed and suicidal. It wasn’t right, no matter how big the bigger picture was.

  “I know, Chloe. I am sorry.”

  Rosalie was standing on the porch, Harper in her arms, when we pulled up in the drive. I ran up the drive to her and Brian called after me to take it easy.

  “Mrs. Chloe, I am glad you are okay,” Rosalie said.

  “Thank you, Rosalie.”

  Walking into our home, with the harsh reality that I could have never seen this place again, I realized there were no pictures of us. Growing up in foster care, I had never had a family picture. Honestly, I had never even given much thought to such things. But having Harper around, I wanted to capture every moment. I wanted each precious memory to be saved, stored away and accessible. Because I knew that eventually, Harper wouldn’t be so small and Brian and I would be elderly and alone while she was off at college or married. And we would want those pictures around. We would want to hold those memories in our hands. And I wanted them for Harper too. If I hadn’t made it off that deck, she wouldn’t have
anything of me to hold onto. Not even a memory.

  “I want pictures,” I told Brian.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I felt a pang of guilt when I kissed Harper goodbye. She was smiling and bouncing in her chair, happy as could be. She had no idea that we were going to her birth mother’s murder trial for her birth father. And even worse, I had every intention of her never knowing. I wanted to protect her from the truth and the dark secrets that laid behind her birth parents. Her very existence in this world was a result of something tainted and I didn’t want her to ever know that.

  Leaving for Carson’s trial left a bitterness in my mouth for Detective Burns. She deserved this same chance at justice. She made a career in serving justice and the system failed her.

  “Are you nervous? What do you think will happen?” I asked Brian on the drive. Life has been so hectic and happy apart from Professor Marks that it has almost been easy to push aside the fact that my late husband was murdered. I obviously knew the trial was inevitable but now that it was here, it just made all the feelings come rushing back in and I had almost forgotten how painful they were.

  He hesitated, “I don’t know. I think this trial will be her last adventure into the public.”

  “A service to the world,” I mumbled looking out the window. With Detective Burns being gone, I wasn’t sure how anything would go and now that it is here, I felt a severe panic for what would happen if she were found innocent.