The Art of Hero Worship (3 page)

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.

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?