by Raine, Meli
“Was I screaming again?” I ask, feeling defeated.
They both nod.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. I start to cry. An image of Chase morphing into El Brujo invades my brain. I gasp, the sound sharp and bloody in the night.
Like El Brujo’s teeth.
“It’s okay,” Morty says in a rumbly, deep voice. “It’s not your fault the bastards did this to you. Anyone would have nightmares. It’s perfectly normal.”
Marissa says nothing but reaches out to rub my shoulder.
“Want some tea?” she finally asks. Her eyes search my face. She wants to make sure I’m okay.
I’m not.
“No, thanks.” I give a fake yawn, still shaking horribly on the inside. What did that dream mean? Why would I dream about Chase making love with me on the beach and have him turn into El Brujo? And his...his cock. How it—
I shudder.
“You’re not okay,” Marissa declares in a flat voice.
I look at her and ask, “Where do you think Chase is? Really? I just miss him. And then I hate him. And then I want to ask him a million questions and just talk to him.” The tears roll down my face like a river.
She gives me a pitying look. “I don’t know, Allie. But I don’t think he’s coming back.” She can tell I’m changing the subject and lets me get away with it. She’s tired. I absolutely do not want to talk about my dream. If it weren’t the middle of the night, she’d argue.
I sigh, plucking a loose thread on the sheet. “I know I need to accept it.” Saying that is progress. A week ago I couldn’t. “He’s gone.”
“You will accept it someday. No one is rushing you.” She pats my hand and stands, Morty going with her.
She looks him up and down and hisses, “Seriously? You come into my sister’s room naked?”
“I’m not naked!” He seems outraged. “I’ve got underwear on. Besides,” he shrugs, “it’s no worse than wearing a Speedo around her. If I can wear a bathing suit around Allie, why not underwear?”
“I can see the outline of your... you know!”
“That’s not naked!”
“Close enough!”
They hiss at each other as Marissa closes the door. Even though she sleeps in Morty’s room every other night, she normally curls up with me when I have a screaming nightmare.
Tonight I’m glad she leaves.
There is one thing that makes me feel better, and I can’t do it when she’s in the room.
I grab an old laptop Marissa uses sometimes and go to YouTube. I navigate to Chase’s channel. He has about forty old videos David took of him performing stunts.
Every single one of them is seared into my mind. My memory.
My heart.
“Hey, everybody! Check it out!” Chase says to the camera. “I’m doing a bike flip over this small culvert.”
The camera pans to what looks like a twenty foot jump. I remember watching this with Chase and David once, and gasping. They both laughed and said the camera made it look farther than it was. It was really only twelve feet or so.
Chase guns the engine and gives the camera a glamorous smile, all white teeth and mischief. Those eyes. Oh, those eyes. It’s like he’s loving me from the video.
He takes a running start, then his body pulls up and over, the flip on the bike like caramel in motion. Chase is nothing but kinetic grace.
He lands.
A gloved thumb goes up in the air.
And then it cuts to an ad inviting people to subscribe to his channel. “Chase Derby,” he calls himself. He wants to be someone new. Begin a life where he isn’t Galt Halloway’s kid. Where his life isn’t planned for him, steeped in crime and drugs.
So where is he now?
For the next few hours I watch every single video, earbuds plugged in so I don’t wake Morty and Marissa.
This is all I have of Chase.
It has to be enough.
Chapter Eighteen
“Hey! Allie! We need more of the lemon meringue!” my boss Tito shouts from behind the counter. After applying to twenty-nine (I counted) different shops, restaurants, and gas stations within walking distance of the apartment, I finally got hired by Tito. Tito is a short little Italian dude with a limp, and his wife, Rita, was the one who made him hire me. The day I came in to apply I still had bandages on my burns. Most store owners had taken one look at my inner elbow and seemed to think I was a junkie.
Not Rita.
She’d looked me over and shouted, “TITO!” Their coffee shop was a tiny place with eight tables and a long counter. Tito was behind the fry line. I’d come first thing in the morning, and the counter had been full of what looked like regulars. She wasn’t even taking orders, just putting coffee and mugs in front of a string of guys wearing paint-covered clothes and construction boots. Tito’s hands had been flying with spatulas and eggs behind the line.
“WHAT?” he’d screamed back.
“We need a new waitress,” Rita had declared.
“We do?”
She’d looked me in the eye and smiled, eyebrows up. She was shorter than Tito, and made me feel like I was looking down at a very fat witch with grey hair and dark, inky eyebrows. “Any girl who comes in at seven in the morning covered with bandages looking for a job is gonna be a hard worker.”
And that was that.
She wasn’t a witch, though. Rita was my fairy godmother.
I work the six a.m. to three p.m. shift six days a week now. The breakfast regulars leave me fifty cents each, which isn’t much, but they’re easy. Once I memorized their orders the job got easier. Most of them get the morning 2-2-2 special of two eggs, two pieces of bacon, two pieces of toast and an unlimited supply of coffee.
And I never have to search for quarters to do laundry.
Getting used to being called names was a whole different story. It’s like they don’t care my name is Allie. Instead, I’m Sweetie, Honey, Sugarpants, Darling, and the current favorite—
“Hey! Hot Tits! Refill over here!” shouts Joe, a foreman who works pouring concrete at a skyscraper job a few blocks over. It’s a Friday morning and the place is busy. All the regulars come in on payday and get their breakfasts. I’ll go home with a nice pocket full of cash.
“Cut that shit out, Joe!” Tito screams at him, coming off the line with an egg-covered spatula raised in the air like he’s going to whack him.
Joe flashes me a wiggly-eyebrow grin. “It’s okay. She likes it. Right?”
“My tits are ice cubes when I think about you, Joe,” I respond.
The other guys start howling.
I’ve learned to dish it right back.
They love it.
The tips go up when I mouth off, so...a girl’s gotta pay her bills, right?
Jeff never let me reply when I got heckled or pinched at the bar. No one here at the Sunrise Cafe ever touches me, though. They know they’d have to deal with something way worse than Tito if they did.
Rita would beat them to a pulp so badly they’d wish for death.
And then she’d pour hot bacon grease on their begging form.
How do I know this?
She told old Mike so my first day on the job when he patted my ass.
“Ice cubes,” Tito howls, wobbling back behind the line.
Rita watches it all and sighs, shaking her head. “You boys are corrupting her,” she shouts.
“She’s corrupting us!” Joe calls back. He slips a one-dollar bill under his plate and gives me a wink. I give him one back.
It’s all in good fun.
The rhythm of working at Tito and Rita’s place has been good for my soul. While each day is different, it’s the same kind of different. I don’t have to think about the cavernous hole inside me for the nine hours a day I’m here, six days a week.
The hole left by Chase.
Nights and Sundays are the hard part. I’m trying to find a part-time job to make even more money and fill my time. So far, though, the Sunrise Cafe shifts exh
aust me. I go home and sleep every day.
And that’s the problem.
The nightmares won’t stop.
Marissa thinks I need to find a therapist. When I was in the hospital, the social worker got me on state medical insurance. I might be able to get therapy covered. Detective Knowles said I don’t qualify for some victim’s assistance fund because my injuries weren’t brutal enough. He said there was more to it, but that’s the part I remember.
Not brutal enough.
What would be enough? Did I have to get an arm burned off completely? Lose a leg? Get raped?
Those questions haunt me. They loop and they loop and they loop through my mind. My memory turns into a merry-go-round sometimes. It repeats the same images. The same horrors.
The same terror.
And it can’t stop.
Other times, I can get my mind to go to a happier place. Being naked with Chase in his little shack is the best. When I can remember those sensations and emotions, and transport myself back in time, it’s like a little bit of me heals.
“Hey, Girlie!” Old Mike is sitting at the counter, dipping a piece of soggy white toast in his coffee. He smiles with a grin that shows three teeth. “You in la la land?”
I realize I’m standing at a table now, just washing the same spot over and over, staring out the front window. The words “Sunrise Cafe” appear backwards to me.
Girlie. The nickname gives me pause.
I give him a quick smile and no eye contact as I finish the table. “Just thinking, Mike.”
“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” he asks. “Your next date with Joe?”
The line of guys drinking down their last gulps of coffee chuckles in unison.
“No, that’s what you’re thinkin’ about, Mike. Every night when you choke the chicken,” Bill says as he twists to face Mike. Bill’s a lineman for the cable company and always wears the same dark-grey hoodie with a company logo on it. He’s probably old enough to be my grandpa but is tall and lean. Unlike some of the other guys, he doesn’t stoop and he has no beer gut at all.
Even Tito laughs at Bill’s comment.
I go quiet.
The television above one corner of the tiny cafe is on non-stop, at a low volume. Rita tunes it in to a non-political national cable channel. Mostly, people watch the big news stories. The quick sports report. The weather.
Then again, this is Los Angeles. If it’s not sunny, it’s news.
My eyes have become accustomed to the never-ending blur of color and images going past in the background. There’s another news report of a young woman who’s gone missing just north of L.A. Three weeks ago, Marissa commented that the missing women look a lot like me and Mom.
I don’t want to think about that, but I can’t stop myself from looking at the news. Twenty-one. The missing woman is twenty-one. Her picture doesn’t resemble me, though.
I turn away and wash a table.
Normally, the regulars ignore the television unless there’s a big sports game. But this morning, one of the guys twists his counter stool around and looks up, jaw open.
“Ho-lee-shit,” he says with a low whistle. “Wouldja look at that?”
The entire row of men turns around, all eight of them, a few still holding their coffee cups. I’m facing them now, so I don’t see what they’re looking at.
“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 awkwa
rd 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.