Shooting with Helena Ch. 08

[Cassie lies in a coma after her fight with Jack. Is the love of her sister enough to bring her back. This is the conclusion to ‘Shooting with Helena’. I hope you enjoy it. C xx]

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Having a near death experience can be, so they say, a liberating experience. Some people who claim to have had such an encounter say that they’ve received revelations from past incidents, visions of futures to come, ineffable questions answered, or a feeling of lightness and nirvana as close to God as can be described.

I felt none of those things.

In my near-death experience, all I felt was an empty, vast universe of nothingness. A place devoid of light, noise, movement or the passage of time. All I can remember of it is the feeling – the suggestion really – of an infinity of nothingness waiting out there to take me back. It was a very dark and frightening place.

It took me two weeks to awake from my coma, my infinity of blackness, and another two days before I could begin to speak again. My first words, when I forced the near-fatally bruise muscles of my throat to articulate them, were;

“Wsss Llllnnaaa?.”

Which should’ve come out as “Where is Helena?” but failed to do so by some margin. For in those three days since I had woken – at night time as it turned out – I had not seen my sister. The hospital where I was being cared for was sterile and clinical, but the bed was comfortable and the nurses were kind. They sat with me, spoke or read to me, helped me to eat and bathe. Mom’s visits were frequent and wonderfully loving. She would talk about everything that had happened in her day, or since she had seen me; going into great detail about how the egg she had cooked for breakfast had been more like a dairy Picasso than a regular fried hash. Or how she’d met old Mr Patterson at the store, and he’d asked her whether her twins (he always called Helena and I twins) had been to a girl guides camp during the summer (he still thought we were about twelve years old).

But Helena had not come to see me. I tried to ask mom questions about where my sister was, by using hand gestures or, on one occasion, attempting to write it down (that was a disaster too, let me tell you), mom would seem to understand, but change the subject. She would only ever say that everyone was okay, including Helena, and that we were all looking forward to you coming home as soon as possible.

Eventually, I gave up. I even got quite depressed that I could see her, touch her hand, have her kiss me gently. I missed her. Missed her so much I wanted, on one or two occasions, to tell the nurses why I missed her so much and how, as both Helena’s sister and her illicit lover, she meant more to me than anything. But I didn’t. I kept that part of my relationship with her a deep and unrequited secret. I also couldn’t understand why she hadn’t come to see me and teetered for many long moments between the emotions of anger (that she hadn’t bothered to see me), and fear (that she had abandoned me). The fear was the worst. Fearing that my sister, my beautiful sexy little sister who had been my closest friend and most ardent lover, no longer wanted me was too painful to think about.

On the day that I uttered those non-words (after which I was too embarrassed to try again; I wanted to get my head straight first), a kindly looking middle aged doctor came into my room to see me. He sat on the chair beside my bed and asked me lots of questions about my health and well-being. I nodded, tried to smile, and gestured to my throat.

He smiled back, lips his lips then said;

“Cassiope, I have to ask you a question. When you were attacked, do you remember being sexually assaulted?”

I wondered what on earth he was talking about for a moment. Surely he could see that I had very nearly been strangled to death? Some other doctors had even spent long minutes trying to explain to me how close I had come to a complete organ failure as a result of it. What had sexual molestation anything to do with it?

And then my mind caught up with me and I realised that when I arrived at hospital they would have certainly checked me all over for other injuries. And, without a doubt, they would have found some evidence that I had recently had sex. Quite a lot of it, actually. And, of course, they would wonder if I’d been raped.

Not knowing what to say to that, and feeling more than an inch or two of guilt or shame or some other stupid caveman reaction steal over me, I simply turned my head the other way and looked out of the window to the hospital gardens.

The doctor laid his hand briefly, but only very briefly, on my arm.

“You’re not pregnant.” he said, as though that should have come as some kind of comfort. Still I said nothing and, I would later realise, that that silence would be taken for confirmation of my status as a rape victim. Over the next couple of hours I heard snatches of conversation between the doctors or nurses, picking out words like “…terrible attack…” and “…vicious trauma…” and “..lucky she wasn’t injured more…”

I felt slightly giddy (and a little bit ashamed) that nothing could have been further from the truth. That I had not been brutalized and raped, but had loved and been loved back by the most beautiful woman in existence. By my sister, Helena.

Who I still had not seen since I woke from my coma.

That evening, after the doctor had spoken to me, mom arrived with a female police offer at her side. Mom looked worried, in that way that all generally innocent people seem to suffer a guilt complex in the presence of authority.

“Hey sweetie!” she said, stepping up close to the bed and kissing me on the forehead. I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth and love in that kiss. She sat down and looked over her shoulder nervously.

“Um, Officer Payton here would like to ask a few questions, honey. Is that okay?”

In answer, I raised my eyebrows and smiled a little. Mom smiled back and vacated the chair, which Officer Payton took, assuming a very stiff pose because of all the equipment fastened to her belt. She was a stern-looking woman, in her late thirties or early forties. Trim, in the way that suggested hard hours at the gym, with short bleach-blonde hair ruffled a little at the top. She didn’t have any make-up on that I could see. In fact, not much really to identify her as a woman other than a pair of breasts at least two sizes too big for someone of her build. They strained against her buttoned shirt and must have been awfully uncomfortable to carry.

“Ms Jones.” she said, formally, setting her lips in a kind of grimace that was presumably meant to be a smile. Her voice had a thick country accent, Iowan maybe, but certainly not local.

“Can I call you-” she consulted a notepad “-Cassie?”

I nodded.

“Cassie, I know that you can’t speak right now, but I need to ask a couple of difficult questions about the attack the other day. Will that be okay?”

I nodded again.

“Okay. At about what time did the attack occur, as far as you remember?

I wrinkled my brow, trying to think. We went to Sasha’s at about eleven fifteen. Must have left there about one o’clock. After that, including the short drive to the car park where Helena and I confronted Jack, it must have been another hour at least. I looked over at officer Payton and raised two digits from my left hand.

“Two o’clock?”

I nodded. Officer Payton frowned, checked a couple of pages back in her notebook, then returned to me.

“Okay. Now the attack – and if you want me to stop, Cassie, just raise your hand up, okay? – how many attackers do you remember, two or three? More?”

I wrinkled my brow again, as though trying to remember. I had no idea what Helena or Jack had said to the police, but thought that I ought to aim low, blaming my memory rather than pitching wildly too high., I raised another two fingers.

“Two?” Officer Payton looked confused, then carried on. “What did they look like? Hispanic, white, black?”

I waved my hand a little. Can’t remember, said the gesture. Pass.

“Okay, Cassie. Okay. You’re doing fine. Now, this is going to be quite difficult. I know one of them singled you out and stra- uh put his hand to your throat. Do you remember falling to the ground, or being knocked down?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Now did one of your attackers take off your jeans and underwear?”

Another nod.

“And did one of them force himself onto you?”

A reluctant, extremely guilty nod. In the background, Mom started crying softly. Officer Payton was scribbling notes on her pad. She asked me a few more questions, to all of which I was non-committal, then, when I held up my hand, she mirrored the gesture and folded up her notepad.

“Okay, okay. Thank you very much, Ms Jones. You’ve been very helpful. I’d like to come visit you when you’re well enough to speak to take a full statement if that’s okay?”

I nodded. Officer Payton stood up and laid an uncertain hand on my arm.

“You’re lucky you had your cousin nearby to step in and save you.” she said. “Quick thinking from your sister too.”

I nodded, closing my eyes at the dreadful idea that Jack had somehow saved me.

Officer Payton went over and said a few words with mom, glancing over her shoulder once or twice and tapping her notepad. After a bare minute or two, she left the room and mom came over. She sat very close to me, and hugged me for a while, trying not to cry at the thought of her daughter all but confirming that she had been raped. At that point, I felt the most wretched that I’d ever been in my life. Only my inability to speak saved me from being a worse liar.

That night, after mom had gone home and the daylight outside had pitched itself well past the ninth innings, I drifted off into a strangely comforting sleep. When I awoke the next morning, it was the first time that it didn’t make me wince whenever I swallowed. I felt oddly refreshed and focussed. When I reached into the vanity bag mom had brought for me, I felt something soft and pulled out a piece of tissue paper. I unfolded it and my heart skipped a beat. There were words written onto the tissue using the thin edge of a deep red lipstick. It was a message from Helena!