Young Writers Society

Last bit of our heroes. Enjoy. And maybe go back to read Chapter 1 or the last chapter if you have missed them.

Judith Kemper was in her late fifties. She was a tall, muscular woman with a strong jaw, a stubborn nose and short steel gray hair. She favored long wool sweaters and oversized corduroy trousers that hung very loose on her large body. She also wore small glasses on a cord around her neck.

Judith wasn’t a talker. Even in AA meetings, her stories were always brief, factual and to the point. She rarely met anybody’s eyes and her wide face never betrayed whatever she was thinking or feeling. She was one of the most intensely focused people Nyssa knew. It wasn’t hard to imagine her once being the hottest plastic surgeon in San Francisco. Sometimes, she would look up and it was just plain obvious in those shrewd eyes, those long nimble fingers.

The first time, those well-trained eyes had spotted the marks on Nyssa’s body from across the aisle. No judgment, no well-intended pushiness, no shock and – thanks God – no pity. Judith had just looked her over with clinical detachment and taken her to the bathroom, where she had untied the bandage around her ribcage and proceeded to palpate the bruises on the younger woman’s chest.

They had re-enacted that scene, time and time again, in the following months, but, no matter how hard Nyssa had cried, how beaten she had been, Judith had always withheld the painkillers.

Dr. Kemper believed in tough love – it was love, nonetheless.

After she had moved back North, closer to her brother, Nyssa had kept in touch through burner phones, eternally grateful for the quiet acceptance her sponsor showed her. Judith wasn’t one to expound on her personal history but, from her silences and from what little she shared, Nyssa didn’t think it was her friend’s first experience with domestic abuse.

That’s how Nyssa landed on the front-porch of the former surgeon’s new house, bruised and battered as usual. She was crying, and she craved the comfort of a hug with every cell in her body. Judith, bless her heart, didn’t blink. Her eyes moved over her, narrowing disapprovingly when she saw the condition of her face and wrist.

“Made a hack job of treating yourself, uh?”

She pulled Nyssa inside the house.

***

Judith’s house was quiet, but for the faint echoes of classical music drifting out of the bedroom. It was pleasantly warm, but it felt a little cold. That was no doubt due to the severe style of the furnishing and decoration, which was all gray and white, all geometric shapes. Everything was clean to the point of obsession. Judith had once told Nyssa something about needing an uncluttered life to stay sober.

A calligraphed quotation was framed and held a place of honor on the coffee table, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

It was the first thing Nyssa saw when she woke up in Judith’s couch. The prayer of serenity. It had always been a source of comfort but, now, it inspired nothing but despair. She had tried as hard as she could and what had that gotten her?

Struggling to contain her tears, she sat up in the sofa. Judith didn’t deal well with tears and, so, Nyssa, who already owed her so much, wouldn’t get weepy on her. But damn, she hurt everywhere.

Judith had re-bandaged her wrist, which she said wasn’t broken. Unlike her nose. That was definitely broken, but she could still breathe okay and it had been part of their plan to operate on it anyway. To her surprise, her ribs were only cracked, not broken.

With bone pain, Judith had broken out the Toradol. Strength of will simply wouldn’t cut it. But the drugs just eased the pain, they didn’t erase it. Only vodka could do that. Nyssa knew, she could feel how much she needed alcohol, not just as a painkiller but to let loose that other part of her.

Reflexively, she revisited memories of shitty mornings-after. Normally, it was enough of a deterrent. Now, it barely registered.

Vodka, she thought again, longingly. But no, there would be no alcohol to be found in Judith’s house. Of course. And Nyssa wouldn’t bring any. Her friend was trusting her an awful lot, already, to allow another – newly-sober – alcoholic to clutter her clean space.

Hazily, Nyssa wondered if it was what she needed too – cleanness, a clean new start. Wasn’t that what she had always dreamed of? To shed her old identity, down to her face, to be forgotten. Everything pressed down on her, tightened, like an ill-fitted mask. Claustrophobia set in. Viggo’s words slipped into the small crack – words about being a beast locked in a cell, about finding escape in books, in movies, about creating worlds inside his mind.

She decided to start small. The house. She was safe within the house, free within the house. The monster under her bed had been slayed. It boggled the mind. She existed in a world where Russel Pierce didn’t.

She walked by the kitchen, but didn’t go in. She simply wasn’t hungry. Judith, like Viggo before her, wanted Nyssa to eat. Tomorrow, she would eat. Today, she would just drift through the house like a ghost.

The light was on in Judith’s office. She went to stand in the door looking in. Her friend was sitting at her desk, a closeup of Nyssa’s face on the screen of her laptop. Judith seemed to be sketching yet another stage of the minute alterations she planned to make to it.

Nyssa knew Judith had a file full of such sketches, that she had designed several possible new faces on her computer. Her friend loved the challenge of performing surgery so fine, so precise that it would make someone almost unrecognizable while also leaving no marks. Her alcoholism had driven her to an early retirement, but it hadn’t curbed her taste for the art.

Before, when it had seemed important, Nyssa had been excited about getting a new start, about waking up with a rounder face, a reshaped chin, nose and wider eyes. Before, when it had seemed so important, she had decided on lighter eyes and auburn hair. Before, when it had seemed so damn important, she had put together an entirely new identity, invented an entirely new personality to go with it.

Ana Flynn – that’s the name she had decided upon. A nice, common name with just a hint of Hispanic, in case someone decided her skin was too dark. It wouldn’t be the first time someone mixed up Cairo and Tijuana where she was concerned.

Ana Flynn owned a small condo in the suburbs of another big city on the West Coast. She had a history of crappy retail jobs, as well as a comfortable sum set aside on her bank account – an inheritance from her dead parents. It was a nice package, that identity, she had everything: Flynn’s old school reports, her pay slips, her driving license, her medical records even.

Ana Flynn was fleshing out in Nyssa’s mind even as she stood there, looking at the sketch of another woman emerging under Judith’s hands. She would be so different from Nyssa Malik that inhabiting her skin would be like a vacation.

Maybe Ana could be a genuinely nice girl under a snarky, prickly exterior. Few friendships, but deep ones. She would be a little shy around men, courtesy of the ex-boyfriend who had left her with a scarred leg and a certain self-consciousness. She would hide that behind sarcasm. She would be smart too and curious about the world around her, because Nyssa didn’t think she could hide that part of herself. Maybe Ana could enroll for night courses at the local college, trying to better her life.

Nyssa snorted, realizing that Ana was handling freedom pretty much the way Viggo had handled captivity. Was that irony or karma? Whatever it was, it was biting her ass.

A scratching sound and a moan came from the bedroom, drawing Nyssa out of her daydreams. Judith twisted around in her chair and their eyes met. She smiled one of her rare smiles. “Sounds like our patient is awake.”