IT ALL HAPPENED in slow motion. Of course, in real time, the period between Lindy pushing open the French doors and tumbling into the greenhouse happened much faster than she actually thought it had. But in her mind, the scene played out like a movie. An action movie even, the kind where intense sequences pan out slowly so that the audience can scrutinize every detail in front of them.
This happened to Lindy. Except she was the audience — she didn't have any part in the actual slowing down, the long, drawn out seconds that took place. She was watching it as a bystander, processing the details and making sense of them one by one in her head.
The first thing she saw was Kurt. But he wasn't the way that she had pictured finding him.
He was sitting up, his legs out in front of him as she had initially seen, but the rest of his body upright as he held a cigarette between his fingers in one hand and a can of Barq's root beer in the other.
This sight alone should have caused her to faint with sheer relief, but there other tricky details that kept Lindy locked in place as her eyes roved the greenhouse. Next to Kurt, who was clearly and thankfully alive, was a cigar box of many things. Things like a syringe, a rubber band, and a very loaded packet of tar black heroin.
But worst of all was the shotgun case that lay open not too far away from Kurt, revealing the slender gun poised in its cocoon casing. For some reason, this struck Lindy the most. She zeroed in on the gun, and its presence in the setting was enough to wrest her back into present time and out of the slow motion sludge she'd become stuck in.
Kurt's face, which had been peacefully thoughtful before Lindy had entered the greenhouse so unceremoniously, took on an expression of genuine astonishment. He had been mid-sip of his root beer when she walked in.
"Lindy?" he asked, unable to even understand how she found him.
Lindy didn't bother responding. She latched on to the first goal that crossed her mind, and that was to disarm Kurt before anything else could go wrong. She sped forward, catching him by surprise as she swiped the cigar box of heroin fixings from his reach and scuttled backwards, away from him.
She gasped when her back hit the wall and she slid down it. Now she was sitting too. They faced each other, both of them on the linoleum floor of the greenhouse with nothing but space between them. Lindy clung to the cigar box as if Kurt was going to telepathically snatch it from her hands. Her eyes were wide as she stared at him.
He was alive. But he almost hadn't been. And that terrified her.
"What the hell are you doing?" Kurt demanded, putting out the cigarette as time returned to its normal pace and Lindy felt like she could finally breathe again.
"What the hell are YOU doing?" she cried, shaking the box before tossing it on the floor next to her. As badly as she wanted to sweep him up in her arms and kiss his face, to cry on his shoulder and thank God for keeping him on earth, she couldn't. Lindy knew better than that. Nothing was over yet. Not quite.
Kurt locked his jaw. Guilt fell over his face like the graceful fall of a curtain, and Lindy knew that she had her answer. She'd been right. Maybe not all the way — he wasn't dead. But the greenhouse had turned out to really be the best hiding place in the world.
"God fucking damn it!" Lindy shouted. The French doors had swung close, but she didn't even care if Cali heard her. She was too overwhelmed by an odd mixture of rage and love, two starkly different emotions that bounced back and forth inside of her.
"How did you find me?" Kurt asked, avoiding Lindy's eyes as he looked down at the floor. He seemed disappointed, angry even, to have been found.
"You told me about this place," Lindy said breathlessly. "You told me it was a hiding place where no one could find you. You told me yourself."
