“Lights”

Olivia

Olivia’s footsteps padded across the hard pavement as she walked from the therapist’s building. She felt slightly chilled as she walked and rubbed both arms even though she could feel the setting sun against her face.

Admitting that she needed help was a completely foreign experience for her and, while she acknowledged that it had taken a lot of courage and strength for her to take the first step, Olivia still felt awkward about it; she, Olivia, had been in therapy, like any other victim. With her eyes trained on the ground, she continued south, not wanting to wander aimlessly around the city, but still not ready to go straight home.

The apartment did not feel like home any longer and she spent as little time in it as possible. Most of her day was spent at the precinct or generally outside; early morning workout, breakfast on-the-go, at her desk or working a case throughout the day, dinner on-the-go or sometimes coaxed to join a family meal with the Stablers, evening workout, at her desk with back-end casework into the morning hours and cycle repeated.

Nothing had actually happened to her inside the apartment and she had no real reason to avoid it as much has she had, but each time she thought of her bed, the nausea she carried with her every day since the near incident amplified into something akin to absolute terror.

Olivia paused on the sidewalk as she prepared to cross the street and looked up; amber, vermillion and indigo interlaced with one another in the sky in a dazzling array she had not seen in a long time. The last time she had seen the sunset so ablaze with colour she was in pigtails being pushed on a swing by her mother in Central Park.

Her stomach rumbled as a tall man pushed passed her across the street and Olivia sighed as she prepared to hail a cab. It took another block and a half of walking before she was able to find an empty one and her stomach began growling even louder, almost clearing the nausea on its own; she had not eaten since she learned what had happened to Noah Sibert’s fourth victim, almost fourteen hours earlier.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked as he glanced her through the cab’s plastic partition.

“Downtown, please,” she said, scrambling into the cab.

The cabbie veered into traffic before she had fully settled herself on the seats and her wallet popped from her left pocket, spilling its receipts, cash and credit cards all over the floor. Olivia looked up sheepishly to see the cabbie’s narrowed eyes staring at her from the rearview mirror, and the floor of the cab began to resemble the floor of her apartment, which in turn reminded her of Caitlin Ryan’s apartment.

When she had spoken to Caitlin, Olivia had a prepared response for what she saw in and heard from Caitlin, but the real surprise came from Caitlin saying that the groups and therapy had not seemed to help her at all. Olivia had let that moment pass quickly because she had had a job to do and could not dwell on personal matters when she knew she was close to catching a predator, but as soon as she had a minute to herself, all she could do was think about it.

Her earlier conversation with her therapist was revealing, but it was not as helpful as she thought it would have been and Caitlin’s past words about “nothing helping” echoed in her mind the entire time along with his voice calling, “You bite me, you die…” What troubled her most was that, while she had not been physically raped, she was still experiencing everything that Caitlin had.

Caitlin had said she could function at first after the rape, but when she started to relive it again and again, she could not concentrate at work causing her to lose her job, her apartment and eventually her son because all she wanted to do was simply sleep. Olivia had no son to lose, but the desire to sleep all the time was already present and she would have done just that if she could manage to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Olivia paid the cabbie as she shifted out of the cab, leaving only a five percent tip for him instead of her normal fifteen and could not manage to stifle her heavy sigh as she stepped into her apartment building. She crossed the corridor and pressed the elevator button at the same time it opened to reveal the ten-year-old boy who lived on the sixth floor.

“Hi Jasen,” she said as they traded places; him out of the lift, her into it.

He only nodded toward her and continued out of the building. Allowing the doors to close on his retreating form, Olivia made a mental note to “stop by” the apartment Jasen shared with his mother and brother just to make sure all was well.

Ten seconds later, she stepped onto her floor, walked to the end of the corridor and paused for a full minute before she entered her apartment. The moment she stepped inside of it, again, she was immediately reminded of Caitlin and how her apartment had looked; clothes, dishes and general junk everywhere.

Her shoes were taken off and thrown into the small pile by the door and Olivia went into the bedroom to stare at the staggering heap the lay upon her bed. She shook her head at the now familiar sight, knowing that, while it would seem like madness to the rest of the world, there was still a method to it.

The first time she had tried to sleep on the bed following her attack, all she could remember was how he had had a bed prepared for her. It was not simply a mattress lying in the midst of dirt and grime, but a full bed complete with a sturdy bed frame, as if it had been arranged it in its spot for some time, allowing him to entertain as many victims as he had wanted. The sight of her own bed that next night was what had sprung the flooding memories and from that moment forward, she could not bear to look at it.

She had pulled all of the clothes out of her closet and threw them on the bed just to keep it covered and, when that had not seemed to work, she started to put her winter blankets all over it, just to make sure she could not see one inch of the bare mattress. Of course, sleeping on the couch had not done one bit of good because following the great urge to make her bed disappear without throwing it out the window, came a bizarre sense of loneliness and emptiness.

She had cancelled on her blind date that week for no other reason than she simply could not fake “it” anymore. She had gone on nine dates since she had ended her relationship with Kurt Moss, four of those were blind dates. In a wild effort to pretend that she had put the attack behind her, she had slept with all but three of them on the first night, always at their apartments, as her bed had been occupied by the contents of her closet for several weeks. Naturally, the dates turned one-night-stands had not helped. Like Caitlin had said, nothing helped. Eventually, loneliness settled into her psyche and that was when his face began to creep back into her dreams.

Stepping carefully over a knee-high stack of old newspapers, Olivia went to her desk to read the personal e-mails she had been neglecting for the past two months. No one she knew outside of work had been told about her run-in with her attacker and there was something so unsettling about answering messages that inquired about how she was doing with, “Everything’s fine.” when one glance around the apartment told her that was a cold lie.

Olivia’s eyes fell upon the set of papers next to her keyboard and she sighed as realized that she held a report that should have been completed a week earlier and would have been had Casey Novak been in and out of the precinct and calling her about it. There was still some time left to submit the report, but Olivia could feel an odd constricting at the back of her throat that signaled her mind was trying to keep her body from enfolding outright panic.

As she stared at the half-completed document, she knew that a long-winded discussion with Cragen was nearing each day her focus on the job became harried from other thoughts. She could not concentrate on the work at hand like she had always been able in the past and she knew it was only a matter of time before someone in the unit mentioned it. However, it was worse than outwardly showing that something was wrong; she could not afford to show any sense of weakness.

It was already bad enough that a strong and capable detective like herself had been overpowered and had to be rescued by her peer, but she still remained the only woman of the unit and Olivia could not help but imagine that if she started to show weakness, any weakness, the mutual trust and respect she had built with the detectives in her unit over the years would be broken. Instead of being someone to work with, she would become someone to protect.

Olivia unsuccessfully tried to quell a yawn and reached for the small bottle of No-Doz that sat in the desk’s side drawer. Without any water, she swallowed a long pill, immediately regretting her decision as it took an abundance of saliva and several exercises of her throat muscles to get the pilled caffeine down her throat.

Fatigue still ached in her eyes and muscles, but sleep managed to evade her regardless, choosing to come in sporadic shifts when the moment seemed least opportune. On her sofa at night, she would shut her eyes and then wake up ten minutes later. She would get up, get a glass of water, take hold of her gun as if it was the only thing in the world that could save her from the monsters that still lurked on the streets and then try to go back to sleep, only to wake up ten minutes later to repeat the process.

With the pill finally swimming in her stomach, its white coating firmly stuck to the back of her tongue, an abrupt and sobering thought popped into her mind.

Oh God... What if he’d actually done it?

The previous night, a very vivid nightmare woke her from the first sound sleep she had had in months. No one had come and there was nothing that could be done to help her. He was in her mouth and out again, and even though it was just a dream, she could almost feel it pushing against the back of her throat, slick with spit, bile and semen.

Following the dream, she had run to the bathroom as soon as she was upright and vomited half in the toilet bowl and half against the tub and then spent the rest of the night cleaning the bathroom from top to bottom. Everything else in the apartment was a complete mess, but the bathroom was so clean it glowed when she turned on the lights.

Even with several rolls of her tongue and a half-gag, the pill’s coating could not be dissolved and Olivia rose to get a drink of water, surprising herself in how she had managed to create pathways that were perfectly shaped and aligned to the space and width of her footsteps.

Newspapers and junk mail covered the floor in a vast gleaming display that seemed to make an arch from her door towards the window and dirty glasses with remnants of lipstick stuck to their rims littered nearly every orifice; the coffee table, the desk, the end table, the kitchen table and not to mention the counter tops. She had not done the dishes in over a month, only rinsing one of the many scattered water glasses and drinking more water after she had awakened from another nightmare.

Once she made her way  into the kitchen, Olivia grabbed one of the used glasses that sat in the sink and then shifted its brothers so that it could be tilted against the faucet enough to be rinsed twice and then half-filled again.

The water had a flat, chlorinated taste, but it suited her purpose, though it re-ignited the hunger that still gnawed on her stomach and, as she stared at her glass in her hand, she decided that it was as good a time as any to take a bath and rest her wearied body.

She took a tertiary path from the kitchen toward the bathroom, turned on the hot water from the spout, removed her clothes that still carried the scent of city pollution and stared at herself in the mirror.

Years later, the scar that had been left by Victor Gitano’s blade glistened lightly against her neck in the intense bathroom light, but her eyes, like always, were immediately drawn toward the dark macula on her side from the car accident with Kathy the previous year. A vast bruise had once covered her entire back and most of her ribcage and had been so painful that even putting on clothes each morning felt like agony. It no longer hurt and had faded considerably, but the skin on her side was still far darker than the rest of her body.

Olivia turned to stare at the tub and shook her head. She could see the light above the bathroom mirror reflecting on the water and the longer she stared, the more often the lights seemed to shift and form his face on the surface.

Unable to withstand another near panic attack, she pulled the drain and changed first into sweatpants and her FDNY t-shirt, then to jeans and a hoodie and then back to the sweatpants and the tee once more before finally settling on jeans and her worn Sienna College sweatshirt instead.

The need to simply get out of the apartment overpowered any other coherent thought and she ran down eight flights of stairs rather than wait for the elevator. Once on the street, she took a deep breath and prepared to just walk as long as the remaining sunlight lasted.

As indecision seemed to plague her attempts to subdue her panic attacks, she suddenly desired to be off her feet, but still in motion. She walked all the way to Houston and Broadway before hailing a cab just in time to watch a black Jaguar speed through the light, nearly colliding with a car that was trying to make a left turn against the same light.

Her mind whirred as she played a mental game with herself; one side of her brain tried not to add the amount of money she had been wasting on cabs recently while the other side, the side that always managed to steer her fingers to the business section of The Times and her steadily dropping investments, had already surmounted that she had spent fifty-three dollars on cabs that day alone.

The cab headed for the Upper West Side, as she had told herself and the cabbie vocally that she wanted to visit a friend, but when they came to Central Park West, she asked to be let out at the Park.

The aligning trees blocked out much of the sun, but felt very comforting just the same, so she continued walking across the edge of the Park until the caffeine pill dispelled an undesired backward effect, making her limbs feel very heavy.

A few meters away from her, Olivia spotted an elderly woman sitting on a bench next to the Pond. The woman held a rather large loaf of baked bread in her lap and seemed be enjoying herself immensely as she ripped pieces of the bread to feed to the ducks who had gathered around her, both in and out of the water.

Olivia slowly meandered towards the woman’s bench, as it was one of the only benches with one person sitting on it and, as the nausea, which had deferred to the near panic attack that ensued once she tried to take a bath, returned in full sway, she had a great need to sit before her legs failed.

The woman on the bench smiled at her as she sat and immediately broke off a large piece of her loaf to hand to Olivia.

“Want some?” she asked.

There seemed to be some inherent rudeness in refusing the bread, so Olivia accepted it, returning the woman’s smile. With her stomach completely empty and the caffeine in her system now causing her body to crave food even more, she had half a mind to simply start gnawing on the piece that had been handed to her, but choosing sanitation over a basic needs, she tore a piece off the loaf, tossed it into the air and watched it land with a tiny splash in the water.

“I like to come and feed them every once in a while,” the woman said. “It’s actually a bit soothing to watch them squabble like they do. Just seeing animals be animals…it makes life simpler, I suppose.”

Olivia nodded and flipped another piece of bread into the water.

“I’m Lucy, by the way.”

“Hi Lucy.”

“And, what’s your name dear?”

Olivia hesitated, but eventually spoke. “Olivia.”

“Oh, how wonderful! Did you know that’s the name of my granddaughter?”

“Really…”

“She’s just turned four this month,” the woman continued as she threw another large piece of bread at the smallest mallard. “She’s the youngest of the six and a bit homely at this point, but you can tell she’ll be quite the beauty once she’s grown up a little.”

With the brilliant sunset glimmering through the trees and bathing everything in its path in gold, Olivia continued nodding and added the occasional “Is that so?” or “Really?” as the woman prattled as if she had known Olivia for ages. The lump of bread that had so readily been given seemed to be lasting with an almost providential hand and, not able to think of anything better to ease her mind, she kept tearing and throwing bread in the water, watching the ducks pecking for the pieces and listening to the woman talk about her family all the while.

“My husband,” the woman said, “he’s slightly younger than me, but you’d never know it…he’s had the little pub off of West 86th forever and those darn developers have been trying to push him out of there for close to a decade so they can build some new dream co-op and charge four grand a month for the spaces…in this economy even.”

“Is that so?”

“And, you know he’s been there since the boys were young and it’ll take quite a bit to move him at this point. Besides, everyone knows the liquor industry never fails even when times are rough. Knowing him, though, tonight he’s probably trying to close a little early so he can watch his ball game in peace, but I’m sure he’ll have a few stragglers coming in.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, dear…”

The woman suddenly stood, catching Olivia off guard, and broke her remaining loaf into four large pieces and threw them into the water at the same time before dusting her hands and returning to the bench.

“So,” she said. “You don’t look like you came here specifically to feed the ducks. Have you a lot on your mind, dear?”

Olivia shrugged. “Just needed a moment to relax and my walk landed me here.”

“Oh, it’s good to take those moments while you can. Otherwise, you’ll run yourself into the ground with worry and you’ll never be able to get back up again. Sometimes it’s best to just get away from it all, even if it’s just to the Park and back home again. If I were a young woman like you, I’d probably come out here everyday just make sure I got in my…moment.”

“Well, that’s the thing about relaxation,” Olivia said. “If you did it every day, it wouldn’t be a way to relax. It’d just be another chore…something else to get done that would eventually pile on as much pressure as anything else in your life.”

The woman shook her head at Olivia and smiled. “You really ought to take more walks, dear. You’ll live a lot longer that way.”

Olivia chuckled and kept throwing the bread into the water until the sun had descended beyond the horizon leaving a sea of blue in its wake.

“Well,” the woman said, standing. “I’ve got to get going. It’s a long walk and, if I’ve not got the bed turned down after that game’s done, he’ll be grumpy for the rest of the night and into tomorrow.”

Olivia stood with her. “It’s almost dark. You want someone to walk with you?”

“Oh, that’s all right, dear. I can make it on my own. I’ve been here too long not to know how to walk home.” She paused and winked at Olivia. “It’s one step at a time.”

Olivia laughed with the woman and waved as she headed west and became a dark mark in the ensuing dusk. The ducks were still fighting over the last bread pieces as the park started to empty and the streetlights were beginning to spring to life before Olivia shifted from her bench again to walk to the edge of the Park.

She walked two blocks south, intending to take the F Line towards her apartment, but hailed a cab instead when she remembered she had left her MetroCard in the pants that lay on her bathroom floor. It had been hastily crammed back into her pockets during the original voyage home; another fifteen dollars down the drain.

Twenty minutes later, she stood in her apartment, staring intently into the bedroom. Two large piles lay across the bed, one consisting of street clothes, the other of “work clothes,” and she could just make out the pieces to the outfit she was planning to wear the next day from her vantage point at the doorway.

The new routine of standing at the doorway had replaced that of standing in front of the closet for ten minutes to make the same decision before sprawling across her bed for a good night’s rest, happy that she had splurged on eight hundred-count Egyptian cotton when she had the chance. She still longed for the old routine, yet it was so far away from her, it was like something she did in her younger days; like something she did before and the new routine was something she did after.

Five full minutes passed before she moved again, stepping into the bedroom, her heart beating so wildly she thought she was going into cardiac arrest. She shifted the clothes on the bed until she found a loose blanket and spread it across an open spot on the floor. With a great heave, she then pulled everything off the bed and onto the blanket-covered floor.

Her heart was still banging against her ribcage, but Olivia took a step backwards to admire what she had done. The bed was completely empty, much like the one had been when he had lead her to his secret chain-link enclosed chambers, but for the first time in months, she did not slam the bedroom door shut or move everything back onto the bed to cover it.

The streetlights pouring in through her window mini-blinds shined onto the bed, painting it in saturnine stripes of yellow, yet she nodded her head as she stared at it. Panic was clawing its way through her veins and she knew she was nowhere near ready to sleep in the bed again, but in that moment, she knew she would beat the repercussions that were threatening to break her.

One step at a time…