Keeping Allie (Breaking Away #3) (12 page)

“Damn, that’s gotta hurt,” Bill says, turning back around and tapping his empty coffee cup on the counter. Rita and Tito aren’t there, so I scurry over, grab the pot, and start to pour. 

I look up at the television.

And see Chase.

“Jesus Christ, Girlie, watch it!” Bill shouts. I look down and I’m pouring hot coffee everywhere. It’s overflowing from his mug. I put the pot down and Bill grabs a stack of napkins. I don’t apologize. I don’t say a word.

I am numb, staring at the television.

The cable news channel is showing footage of Chase, doing a stunt on his bike in the desert.

Bill is cursing but cleaning up my mess as my ears strain to hear what the television newscaster says.

“...the amateur stunt man, Chase Derby, has been performing stunts for more than a year on YouTube, and has a popular following. In this stunt you are about to see, Derby and his friend have a nest of ten poisonous snakes in the cavern he’s about to jump. Caution: this video may be disturbing for some viewers.”

No kidding.

And then I watch as Chase, my beautiful reckless, warm, loving, crazymaking, risk-taking hero jumps and— 

Falls.

Down, disappearing into the hole between the two sides of the jump, the dark adobe land eating him like hell opened its jaws because it got hungry.

And that’s when I start screaming.

Chapter Nineteen

Rita rushes out from the back of the house, holding a giant soup ladle, and shouts, “Which one of you touched her?”

All the guys put their hands up in the air like she’s holding a gun.

“Nobody!” I hear Bill say. I stop screaming and can’t pull my eyes away from the screen. The newscaster flips from the end of the video to a still photo of Chase. Someone froze a frame of him in one of his videos. He’s smiling, the wind blowing his sand-colored hair in his face, eyes excited and fun.

The headline underneath his picture reads:

AMATEUR STUNT MAN PLUNGES TO DEATH

He’s gone.

No. Not gone.

Dead
.

Rita’s warm hands are on my shoulders, shaking me. “Allie! Allie! What’s wrong?” Her head jerks up to the television, where the news has moved on to some crisis in the Middle East, with tanks and bombs going off. “What upset you?”

“It’s the guy on the bike,” Bill says, standing now and pulling cash out of his pocket. “She freaked out when the news showed some guy on a bike, falling and dying.”

Dying.

Chase is dead.

My body seizes all at once, every muscle tightening like it’s reacting in unison. My stomach, my heart, my liver, my tendons and bones and fascia—all of it. Every cell of my body goes taut and squeezes, like it’s trying to wring out the horrible truth it just learned.

“He’s dead,” I whisper, my hand fluttering to my mouth, shaking so badly that the pads of my fingers bounce against my lips.

“Someone’s dead, honey?” she says in a rough voice. Rita has two speeds: grouchy and sarcastic. She doesn’t really do compassion. I guess this is her version of it. “Who is it?”

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

This is real.

Chase is really dead.

“Honey, your phone,” Rita says, looking at the television and then at my face. Her eyes skim to my pocket. “Someone’s calling you.” She frowns, rubbing my shoulder. “You really knew that guy?”

All I can do is nod.

“I’m sorry, Allie.”

And that’s when the tears start.

I reach to get my phone but it’s hard. My arms are so tight I can barely move them to dig into my front pocket. By the time I unlock my smartphone, it’s too late.

Call ended.

I look. The caller ID says it’s Marissa.

Then a text appears.

Call me now
is all it says.

She knows. She knows, too.

Oh God.

OhGodOhGodOhGod.

He’s dead. My sweet Chase is dead.

Another call comes in as I’m staring dully at the phone. It’s Detective Knowles.

“You gonna answer that?” Rita asks. I startle. She’s still here. It’s like I’ve telescoped into nothingness and am nowhere. Like there’s no cafe, no tables, no rag in my hand, no Rita.

Just a big void.

Like the one in my chest.

“Um,” I say, the tears tickling my nose, pooling at my lips, dribbling down my jaw and neck onto my shirt. “I need to go. Someone died and I am getting calls and—”

The guys at the counter look uncomfortable, long faces and awkward breathing filling the little cafe. The front door jingles as a couple come in. They halt, feeling the strange tension.

“You go home. Don’t worry about it. Me and Tito got your shift covered. You need to go be with your sister,” Rita insists. I don’t talk much about myself here at work, but she knows I live with my sister.

I nod and walk straight out the front door, past the new customers. The guys at the counter say nice things to me as I leave, like “I’m sorry” and “Take care” and I hear them, but I don’t. I’m in a daze.

Chase is dead.

And my phone won’t stop ringing.

The walk home is only about ten minutes but it feels like time doesn’t exist anymore. Like I’m walking through a giant gray cloud of fog. Just one foot in front of the other until I get from point A to point B.

I’ll never get to ask him all the questions I have. I’ll never feel his fingers on my face again. He saved my life and now he’s dead because of a stunt.

A stunt?

I pull out my phone as I stop at the front door to my building. My first text isn’t to Detective Knowles or Marissa or Mom.

It’s David.

What happened? You must have been the one videotaping,
I type.
 

And I hit Send just as Marissa opens the door and comes flying out to hug me. The force of her body as she runs to me makes me reach out and grab a railing. I grab it with my bad arm. The skin pulls and burns. 

I barely feel it.

“Oh, my God, Allie. I was getting up for work and saw the news. That’s Chase! He had a different last name but it’s got to be Chase, right?” Marissa asks.

“Yes.”

Her eyes search mine. “Do you know anything about it? About what happened?”

I shake my head.

“What’s the deal with the stunts? The television clip said he wanted to be a stunt man in Hollywood and has this YouTube channel for his stunts?”

I nod. “Chase and David used to go out in the desert and film these crazy stunts. David taught him how to put them on YouTube and earn money from people watching them,” I answer. My voice is dry and robotic.

Dead. Chase is dead.

My phone buzzes. I look. It’s not David. It’s Mom, telling me she’s coming now.

David’s the only person I want to talk to right now. Only he has the answers I need.

“Come inside,” Marissa urges. She doesn’t really give me a choice, grabbing my hand and dragging me in.

For the next few minutes she clucks over me, making coffee and putting it in front of me, sitting next to me while I answer texts.

I feel like someone is draining my guts out through a hole in my heart. Like someone’s hooked a vacuum cleaner hose up to me and is sucking it all out.

Detective Knowles just texts a single line to tell me they haven’t recovered Chase’s body yet, but he’s sorry to inform me this way. My mom texted, and Marissa texted me nine times in the ten minute walk from the cafe to home.

Still no text from David.

I can’t really feel anything. After a while, Marissa takes my cold coffee cup away. Morty wakes up. He works opposite shifts from me, and noon is about when he gets up. I hear him and Marissa whispering furiously in the kitchen, and she comes out with another hot cup of coffee for me.

Morty gives her a sour look. He’s wearing flannel pajama bottoms and no shirt. He leaves the living room and comes back in carrying a big bottle of scotch. He pours a bunch in my cup. The muscles of his chest are so big. He’s a huge guy, impossibly wide, with layers of muscle under layers of muscle and that ginger-colored curly hair. 

“Drink it, Allie,” he insists. 

“I’m not thirsty,” I mumble to him.

“Allie, honey?” he says in a voice I can’t argue with. “I don’t care if you don’t want it.” He bends down, his eyes firm and compassionate. “You
need
it.”

He picks up the cup of coffee and presses it into my good hand. I start sipping. The alcohol makes the coffee bitter. It stings going down my throat, but I don’t gag. The steam is easy to inhale, and bit by bit, sip by sip, I find the void inside of me expanding.

Growing.

It’s not so bad like this. Morty goes into his bedroom and comes back out wearing a peach colored tie-dye shirt that is stretched out and has small holes in it. He wanders into the kitchen and returns with his own cup of coffee. Taking a seat on the couch next to me, he peers over the top of my mug. 

“Drink up,” he insists.

I finish it. The alcohol is making me fuzzy. The giant gap inside me feels a little less cold. It doesn’t change the fact that Chase is dead. It makes that fact a little less raw. But that’s temporary. His death is forever. 

Morty puts his arm around me and I stiffen, then I nestle into him. I’ve never had a big brother before. Morty’s the closest thing to it.

He just sits there with me. He’s a presence, solid and safe. Stable and just
there
.

And when I cry so much half the front of his shirt gets wet, he doesn’t say a word.

Chapter Twenty

It’s Monday morning and I’m back at work. Rita called me on Friday to tell me not to bother coming in Saturday, and Sunday was my day off. I spent the last two and a half days drinking Morty’s spiked coffee, crying on his, Marissa, and Mom’s shoulders, and wondering why David abandoned me.

He never did answer my text.

The regulars at Sunrise Cafe are being extra nice to me. It feels weird. I can tell they don’t know what to say or do. They care, though. Mostly, they’re showing it with bigger tips, quieter voices, and sad eyes. And hugs. So many hugs. At the rate the hugs are coming in, I’m starting to think they’re using this as a chance to cop a feel. No one’s inappropriate, though. I couldn’t handle that now. 

“Was that your boyfriend?” Mike asks in a mumbly voice. The question sounds like
zacherboyfend?
and it pings in my head. Over and over, like an echo. 

I just stare at the coffee pot in my hand. My arm has healed enough that I removed the bandage. The ugly red scars taper down to my wrist and lick the thumb joint.

Was Chase my boyfriend? For a precious time, yes. At the end—no. Definitely no. No matter what he told my mom, he wasn’t my boyfriend. Boyfriends don’t disappear on you. They don’t kidnap you. They don’t deliver you to a drug lord, then rescue you. 

And they definitely don’t disappear again and then resurface in a video where they
die
.

I’m so full of grief and so full of anger. How can you love someone so much and at the same time want to smack them upside the head?

“Um, no,” I finally say to Mike. He just nods and goes back to staring at his coffee cup. The guys at the counter are starting to shoot me looks that go beyond concern. They think I’m unraveling.

They’re right.

“What happened to your arm?” Joe asks. He’s just sat down and I pour him his cup of coffee and pivot, grabbing an ice water for him. His eyes are on the shiny, waxy skin.

“Burned it.”

He snorts. “No shit. I mean, how?”

How.

How do I explain that I was being rescued from a motorcycle compound by a disguised DEA agent and fell off the bike? How do I explain how tired I was, how my ankle got caught on the bike, how Chase was fighting my mother’s old man in order to get me out of there?

I can’t. The second I start to open my mouth and tell even one, single truth it all sounds like I’m lying.

The truth sounds more like a lie than any fake story.

“Cooking oil,” I mutter, and turn back to the line. Tito’s got two plates ready. I deliver the breakfasts to Mike and some new guy, a friend of Mike’s. He’s about my age and has razor burn, wide eyes and dark hair that’s super short. He taps his fingers constantly on the counter and has had three cups of coffee already.

“You did that here?” Joe asks. Oh, boy. He’s curious today.

I smooth my hands over the dirty dark green apron I wear when I work. A giant bulge of quarters and other change in one pocket hits my hand. I go home lopsided like this every day, my front pocket filled with about twenty bucks in coins.

“No. At home,” I say. Every word is hard to speak. I stare at the scar and the next words just pop out, unplanned. “They’re really ugly, aren’t they?” I add. “There goes my modeling career.” 

His face sort of folds in on itself. Crumples, like a paper bag. “Oh, baby. No, Allie. No. You’re beautiful, sweetheart. No scar will change that.” He dips his head down, like now he’s ashamed of himself for asking about the burn.

“It’s okay,” I say, fighting back tears. Great. Now I’ve upset him. Joe doesn’t worry me. He’s older than Jeff, first of all, and he’s not my type. When he calls me names he’s just kidding. When he tells me I’m beautiful, he’s just being nice. I know the scar is nasty. I’m marked. Forever.

El Brujo did this to me, in a way. So I’ll never forget him. I may have escaped, but did I really?

Joe looks like he’s trying to figure out what to say next. I wish he’d stop asking me questions. Bill comes in and I give him his coffee and water. Now all the counter seats are full with the regulars and their friends. This gives me a feeling of satisfaction.

Life is back to normal.

At least, here at Sunrise Cafe.

Joe nudges Bill and says, “We’re asking Allie about those nasty burns on her arm.” His eyes narrow in a funny way. “Says it’s cooking oil.”

Bill gives one hard nod, his chin going up, eyes on me. “Did cooking oil cause the scars on your forehead, too? And the one on your jaw?” Bill asks.

They’ve clearly been talking to each other about me. They think someone did this to me. Hurt me. They’re right, but it’s not what they think. It’ll never be whatever they’re thinking.