Finding Thyme

by TJ Hamilton

  I nod and touch the top of his shoulder. It feels so cold. I look at Liz and finally find my voice. “I’ll be okay now.” My voice is scratchy, but she understands what I’m saying and leaves.

  I hear the door close behind me and I finally allow myself to believe what they’re telling me. Nick is really dead. Saying that word in my head feels so final. Dead. It’s such an extreme word. I put my hand down on his chest and it feels like a cold piece of metal. I want it to feel like him but it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like Nick. I reach out to touch his face but stop just above him. I don’t want to touch him too hard. What if I hurt him? I slowly bring my finger down and gently rest the tip of it against his lips. They don’t move at all and they’re cold under my touch. They’re powdery white, there’s no colour left in them, much like the rest of his stony face.

  I lean down and kiss him. They’re not the same lips I kissed only hours ago at the Opera House. I’m waiting for him to react soon and kiss me back. But he doesn’t. I look back up at his face. His nose seems wrong and his face doesn’t look like him anymore, but I know it is Nick. He does look a little swollen in some places like Liz said but he mainly just looks like the life has been sucked out of him.

  Life has actually been sucked out of him. He’s not here anymore. I bend down and carefully kiss his lips again. I want to be close to him. I can faintly smell his smell. I don’t want to leave here. This is the last time I am going to smell him, or touch him, or see him. I look back down at him through tear-soaked eyes. I see a small mark on the other side of his neck as I lean across him. I’ve never seen a gunshot wound before, but I know that’s what it is. It doesn’t look as bad as the movies. It’s only a small hole and there’s no blood. I still don’t understand how this could’ve happened?

  “Why did you have to leave me, Nick?” I cry out as I lean down on him and sob.

  I’m still waiting for his body to react to my loving touch, but it doesn’t. His arms don’t wrap around me to comfort me like I want them to. His eyes don’t look up at me and he doesn’t tell me that it’s going to be all right like I want him to. He just lies there—no movement, no life. There’s nothing left of Nick. I wish I told him I loved him when I saw him last.

  I wish I told him I loved him the first time I saw him. I wish I said how much I loved him more than I got to. Why me? Why did this happen just when I was going to get my happy ever after? How can I say goodbye to someone when I’ve just learnt to say I love you?

  I close my eyes and see his gorgeous smile the first night I met him as Tom Smythe. I loved him so much back then but I never wanted to believe it. My mind races to Byron Bay, on the beach when Nick told me who he was. I reach up and touch my lips as I remember our first kiss and how his lips felt like pillows. Then I remember the proud look on his face every time he tried to cook for me. I see his beautiful blue eyes beside the fire when we first made love. I look back down at the lifeless face lying peacefully before me. This is not Nick. I shake my head. My body begins trembling again. It can’t be him. He was just at the Opera House. What if they have the wrong person? I look over his face again and see that it is him. He’s gone. He’s not here anymore. I clasp my chest with both hands.

  “In here forever,” I splutter before erupting into another fit of heartbreaking tears.

  I want to look at his face again, but there’s a part of me that wonders whether this is going to stick in my mind forever. Was seeing him like this really the right thing to do?

  I look down at Nick and wish it was Tench in front of me. It shouldn’t have been Nick. He was the one that I finally got to feel love for and now my whole experience with love is bitter and jaded … and it’s all thanks to Joe Tench. If it wasn’t for him, I never would have met Nick when he was Tom Smythe. If it wasn’t for Tench, I never would have started working for the OCT-U. I want Tench out of my life for good! Nick was a good person and died but Tench is evil and still gets to walk this earth? My life is nothing but a series of injustices and I need to set the path right again.

  The door opens up behind me and I look around to see Liz in the doorway. I nod to her unasked question. I know it’s time to go. But how am I supposed to go? How can I leave him here? What’s going to happen to him now? What do I do now? I turn around and walk towards Liz. I get to the doorway and can’t move any further. I need to look back just one last time. I have to remind myself that the body lying there is Nick’s. I feel like I’m not here at all. I feel like I’m watching all of this on the television. This can’t be real. I look to Liz for comfort but find none. No one can comfort me, only Nick can comfort me, and they took him from me!

  “How did this happen?” I wipe away the remnants of my tears as I sit in the commander’s office, wanting answers.

  “It was a training exercise. A live fire round. He wasn’t even supposed to be involved in it but he wanted to help the new recruits. I’m struggling to come to terms with it too, Mia. Nick was our best operator and he’s going to leave a big hole in this agency.”

  I look up at the boss. His words slice through me like tiny razor blades. He can’t be serious right now? Is that all he can say to me … that Nick was his best operator and he’s going to leave a hole in the agency? I see only a shallow torment in his eyes and frown at the stupid male syndrome that he suffers from. What an insolent asshole! He is another reason why I need to finish what I’ve started.

  All men seem to underestimate a woman’s capabilities … and I need to set this straight and show them all that they have fucked up the wrong girl. I have lost enough people in my life now and I’m not going to lose any more. Tench needs to be on a cold steel table like Nick … but not before I finish what I started. I want Tench to suffer a worse fate than death! I want him to feel the rotting heartache that I feel. I stare through the commander’s vacant eyes, realising that I really mean nothing to him. I’m just a pawn.

  He doesn’t care about me. No one does anymore. Tench is just obsessed with me, and not in a caring way. No one has my best interest at heart but me.

  “Well I’m here now, sir, and I won’t be leaving until my job is done. So let’s not forget how much you need my services, shall we? I can do things Nick was never able to do, remember? I want Tench gone and then I want you to leave me the fuck alone for good! All thanks to you, I have lost the only person who has ever meant anything to me! So if you so much as question anything I do, I will walk. You get it? I will fucking disappear. Then let’s see how much of a fucking hole your fucking agency has! From now on, I’ll come to you. Not the other way around. I don’t want to see anyone from this agency unless I ask to see someone.”

  I get up from my chair with the strength of ten men and begin to walk out of his office. If I have to look at the boss—the man who took Nick away from me—then I am likely to stab him in the neck with one of the fancy pens on his desk. I get to the doorway and have the sudden urge to turn back to the commander and stare him straight in the eye. Nothing but determined anger courses through my veins now.

  “One last thing … I may be on your side, but I don’t work for you. I don’t work for anyone anymore.”

  I slam the door on the commander’s office and walk out of the building without so much as a glance at anyone around me. I need to get out of here before I lose my shit and go postal. I know what I have to do now … and I am doing it for no one else but myself. All I want to do is live a simple, peaceful life. I want to sit on a deserted beach and have someone serve me Pina-fucking-Coladas all day … and live the life that Nick and I talked about together. And if the only way I’m able to do that is if Tench and the agency are out of my life for good … then I will stop at nothing to get there.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  Exactly six hundred and sixty minutes ago my life changed forever. Six hundred and sixty minutes ago I saw the love of my life lying, as cold as stone, on a steel table in a morgue.

  Everything is different now. I breathe different air. It now smells rotten
, and life tastes sour. For over an hour now I’ve lain on my bed, staring at a mark on the outside of my seventy-second floor window, unsuccessfully willing it to move.

  My faithful feline friend, Flossy, has come to see if I’m still alive. Her little wet nose sniffs my cheek until I say her name, then she leaves me alone before she does it again a half hour later. First I cried without sound, and then I made a crying sound without tears. For fifty-four minutes, I forced myself to eat a couple of Oreo cookies, and I’ve now listened to the same four-minute song on repeat one hundred and fifty-four times … make that now one hundred and fifty-five times.

  I don’t know how to pull myself out of this, but I have to soon. I have a job to do: I have to find out what Joe Tench is doing. Whatever it is, it must be bad enough to kill my friend when she found out, and have the OCT-U on his tail with their best operative in charge of it. Or, their best operative was in charge, until he died during a training exercise. That alone seems incomprehensible. It’s like when Steve Irwin died. He wrestled crocodiles, for fuck’s sake, only to have a stingray kill him? There’s just something wrong about that whole ironic scenario. People like Nick Davis don’t die in training exercises. He’d been in far more dangerous situations than that.

  The three loud thuds on my front door send me into a downward spiral of questions. Who would that be? Only the agency knows where I am. I told the boss that I would disappear if someone came to me, and not the other way around. So why is there someone at my door now?

  I peel myself from the bed and make my way to the front door. Inhaling the nauseating air around me, I close my eyes and count to three, trying not to lose control of my temper that is wildly teetering on the edge.

  I peer through the peephole and immediately recognise Liz Donohue on the other side of the door. Why is she here? I stand motionless for a few more seconds, contemplating whether to just ignore her altogether.

  “Open the door, Mia. I know you’re in there. You have a tracking device in your leg, remember?”

  Fuck! She’s right. I almost forgot about that. Those fucking assholes! I unlock the door and fling it open to give Liz a mouthful of my anger, but as soon as I do she shoves a bottle of vodka at my chest and walks straight past me without saying a single word. Surprised by her actions, I turn and watch as she storms into my apartment and notice that she’s dragging a baseball bat behind her. Something tells me she means business. Without hesitation, she brings the bat behind her and swings it straight at the mirror above my hall table. I flinch as the mirror shatters and the fragments of glass fly through the air around her. She hurtles the bat once again towards the remaining glass until there’s nothing but a frame left on the wall.

  Liz looks down at the mirror shards at her feet and raises the bat above her head again before smashing it down on the ground repeatedly, destroying what pieces were left. She heads straight for my stereo and brings the baseball bat down onto it, as if she’s chopping a piece of wood. “Laura”, the song that meant so much to me for the past eleven hours, ceases immediately as Liz continues hacking at the device. She doesn’t so much as look at me when she finishes and then makes her way to the bathroom to repeat the same crazed assault on my bathroom mirror. Each blow brings a more noticeable look of bravado across her face. She turns to me as she storms out of the bathroom and breathes a subtle two-worded sentence as she passes.

  “One left.” Her eyes dart towards my bedroom.

  The mirror at the entrance to my closet is Liz’s final target and she unleashes the same vigour upon it, smashing every last piece until it no longer resembles any reflective surface at all.

  “There’s something therapeutic about smashing the shit out of things.” She smiles maniacally. “Here, you wanna have a go? Might do you some good?”

  I’m unusually lost for words, staring blankly at her with the bottle of vodka still clutched to my chest.

  “Let’s just smash all the mirrors,” she says as she throws me the bat and reaches for the bottle firmly gripped within my hands.

  The wicked gleam in her eye causes a spontaneous chuckle to seep from my pursed lips as I snatch the baseball bat. Liz shoves me out of the bedroom and before I register exactly what’s happening, I’m swinging the bat, full-pelt towards the mirror in the second bathroom. Once that mirror is disintegrated, I head to the spare bedroom and begin blasting the mirror at the end of the bed, finally taking the last of my vicious swings out at the flat-screen TV in the lounge room. She’s right, this is cathartic. There’s one last mirror that I need to smash, to smash away a memory: the one in the foyer. I need to get rid of the mirror that Nick and I cracked when we were about to have sex for the first time … before he walked away from me.

  I fling the front door open and take out that mirror with more anger than I had for the others. I bring the bat down on it over and over and over until I feel Liz’s hand on my shoulder.

  “I think you got that one, Mi.” Her voice startles me from my outburst of total madness. I stare with bewilderment at her for a moment, which quickly morphs into fits of uncontrollable laughter. My laughter is contagious and Liz snorts as she giggles at me.

  I drop the bat on the floor and double over. The pain from it is too much. Every time I look back up at Liz and our eyes meet, the crazy-woman snorting-laughter spills out with yet another spate of rumbling giggles from the both of us. Eventually, we exhale with loud aaaaahs as our bodies wind down from the ridiculous outburst.

  “Right. Let’s get drunk!” Liz demands.

  We both sit on the couch and stare out of the huge windows in front of us as Liz pours the straight vodka over the ice-filled glasses each time they empty. Finally, I feel the effects of the alcohol and find the words that I was missing for so long.

  “Were those bugs always in here? Nick told me I found all of them … Oh … Nick …” My voice cracks.

  When I say his name out loud, the thought of him not actually being here anymore brings tears to my eyes and I splutter my next drunken breath. Maybe talking wasn’t such a good idea. Liz takes another sip from her glass of vodka and lets out a puff of air.

  “No, they weren’t in here before. The agency put more in while you were at the morgue … with Nick. I can’t stand it, Mi. They’re not treating you like you’re part of the team, and I won’t have it. Nick wouldn’t have allowed it if he was still here …” Liz’s eyes fill with the same salty sadness as mine. “I’m going to miss him so much, Mia. I still can’t believe he’s gone. It doesn’t feel right. I loved him like a brother. I hated the hell out of him most of the time, but for the last seven years of my life I’ve had him in it. I honestly don’t know what to do now. The boss has put me in charge of the operation—” Liz takes a solid gulp from her glass again, “—and it’s what I’ve always wanted. Now I have it … but it’s only because Davis bloody died on me. What a prick.” She buries her head in her hands and her shoulders shake as she lets out gentle sobs.

  My eyes fill with tears again as I move next to Liz and put my arm around her. Selfishly, I never really thought about how Nick’s death would be affecting Liz. Her red, tear-soaked eyes stare straight through me as she looks up.

  “Mia. You have to finish what Nick started. You don’t understand how good you are. You know, it’s taken me eleven years to get where I am in the agency. First Nick came along and within a year, he was where I had tried to get for over four years. And you’ve now done it in less than a month! Nick saw something in you, and he was bang on the money. But you can do a lot more than these agency men would ever give you credit for. Trust me! I know. I’ve had to work my ass off to get just a fraction of the clearance and access that you’ve got, so exploit it! Find out everything there is to know about Joe Tench and then get the fuck away from this life.” She stares into the glass of vodka and shakes the ice inside. “Don’t end up like me, Mia. I have nothing but my work. No love, no man, just working to satisfy a boss who pays very little attention to women.”

  I smile and s
queeze Liz. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. Except for the part about having nothing. You have me, mate. We can do this together. Let’s show those assholes that two chicks can do more than the whole agency combined.” I pause and imagine the possibilities. “I want my only contact with the agency to be through you. You can deal with the boss, but I refuse to. I’m not doing this for them. I’m doing this for me, and then I want to get the hell out of this life, and I need your help to get there. We can do this, Liz. Get me every bit of information you have on Tench. Is the apartment next door to here still vacant?”

  Liz nods, blinking her tears away.

  “Good. We’ll use that as our forward operating base. I need you to get my firearm, too … and any other arsenal, for that matter. And I need plenty of bugs. We’re going to do this properly and take Tench down forever.”

  A smile finally surfaces across Liz’s strong features. “Shit, you’re good, Mia. We can do this.” She raises her glass towards me. “Here’s to finishing what Nick Davis started.” The pair of us drunkenly clang our glasses together.

  I try not to cry after our empowering speeches, but the grief in my heart feels so heavy. I scull the vodka and pray it clouds my emotions for a bit longer. I’ve got to do this for Nick.

  The morning’s harsh sunlight feels like it’s burning a hole straight through my vacant heart. The wild drinking the night before has done little to help me escape the fact that Nick is still dead. As my mind slowly adapts to the waking world again, I realise that no amount of alcohol will change things.

  I squint at the bright sunlight at the window but I can’t move my head yet. My mouth feels like something ghastly has crawled into it and died within the two hours that I’ve been passed out on my bed. As I move, I feel the dampness around my cheek from where I’ve been drooling in my heavy unconsciousness. What a beast!