“Don’t come any closer.” I felt my hands form fists. I resisted the urge to hurl them at his chest. “Did your dealer fuck with my mom? Did you bring that on my mom? Tell me the truth.”
Luke tried to hold my gaze, but couldn’t. He lifted his hands to his face. “Yes, that was him,” he said, hollow.
“My mother!” I shouted. My beautiful mother, my heart, my only family, huddled on the ground near her car. Her pajama pants getting dirty in the street. Shifting into Spanish when she spoke to the cops, because that kind of fear was too deep for her second language.
“It’s done now, though,” he continued, putting his hands down. “Trust me.”
“How am I supposed to trust you?”
He spoke quieter now. “I took care of him, Cassie. I mean it. You’re safe. That’s my first priority, especially now.”
“I don’t care.”
Now. He was talking about what happened yesterday, and the night before, and long before that. The feelings that had grown for him, that I was ready to give. I’d fallen for every single lie out of his mouth. I’d blinded myself.
“I know I can’t change what I did, and I take full responsibility for it.”
A laugh built in me, hard, spiked. “You can’t offer to pay for a TV and expect everything to be fine.” My mother’s windows, broken. Her bare feet, cut.
“I didn’t know he would do that. I fucking almost killed him last night, Cass.”
I stayed quiet.
“And I didn’t like doing it, but I would do it again. I would do anything for you.” Another look of shock. He hadn’t known he would say that part, either. He was staring at me, barely blinking. I could hear him breathe. “If you want to forget about what we have and never speak to me again and be with Toby, fine. But you have to at least know that I have real feelings for you. That’s why I’m being honest with you. I’m telling you everything. When we kissed the other night, I meant it.”
“Don’t,” I said. I was so angry, my words caught in my throat. He was trying to smooth it over. Trying to distract me from my anger. And on this day. The most important day of my life. “I have to go do soundcheck.”
I headed toward the door.
Then I paused. I kept my voice cold, staring at the floor. “I want you out, Luke. Don’t come to the show. Don’t come back here. I’ll contact you about a divorce.”
“Wait,” I could hear Luke say. It was one of those moments when his pain crossed the bridge, and I could sense his agony. I bolted down the stairs away from it, and shut the door.
Luke
I refused to accept this. I stood under the ash trees across the street from Cassie’s house shortly after she and Toby had left, my packed army bag on my back, Mittens’s leash in one hand and my cane in the other, and knew this was not how it was supposed to go.
Maybe she didn’t have the same feelings I had for her, maybe she was scared out of her mind, but this wasn’t the end. Hell, maybe she and I weren’t even meant to be friends after this, but we had both fought too hard to build these new lives just for them to be knocked down by Johnno.
And those new lives were forever going to be connected, I knew that. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But they would be.
So, yeah, maybe I was being delusional.
That’s one of the great things about having an addict’s brain: We are fantastic at fooling ourselves. We could fool ourselves all the way until the end.
For instance, right now, I had started to think it would be a good idea to be cloud head.
My heart had just been ripped out, leaving a gaping hole.
Cloud head was good at filling holes.
But then I thought of Jake. I thought of what I’d done to him when I had succumbed to Oxy the first time, when I’d tried to escape.
Today was not unique in the grand scheme of things. Every day was hell, if you were paying attention. Every day would rip a new hole, maybe two, maybe three. Knowing this full well, sometimes I started to think that the rest of my life would be like bailing out a sinking boat. Once you stopped the leak that came from one pain, another hole would open.
But at least now I wasn’t alone. “Right, Mittens?” I asked her, giving her a scratch on the head.
Mittens barked.
“And where should we go now?”
I didn’t know. There was nowhere to go, at the moment, just the street stretching before us. Maybe if I started moving, maybe if I went around the block, Cassie would be waiting for me when I returned, and I could take her into my arms and we’d go from there.
I dropped my bag next to the tree, and leaned my cane against its trunk. I looped Mittens’s leash around my hand so she couldn’t get too far, made sure my shoes were tied, and started walking.
I walked fast, putting full weight on my injured leg. The same amount of weight I put on the other. Every step was a new hole and it hurt like hell.
But then it didn’t. So I moved my legs faster. I added bounce to my step. My heart carried blood to every ending and back in an instant. My bones did not break. Everything was working as it should.
The body is a miracle, did you know that, Mittens?
House after house passed, and the pain was there, but I was there, too.
Mittens galloped beside me, her tongue flopping.
My throat was raw and my lungs burned from lack of practice, but I felt awake, alive.
I didn’t need to attach the pain to other objects, other scenes far away where I had found peace. I found peace here.
I was running.
Cassie
“Check one,” I called to the empty bar, late-afternoon light hitting the dim neon and gilded walls. Any other day this would be a triumph, imagining my music hitting the bodies that would fill the tiled floor. But Luke’s shocked, bitter face haunted me. Drugs and threats and my mother’s broken windows. Luke drawing my leg across his lap. A drop of drool falling from his opiate-slack mouth. His nightmares. His calisthenics. The way his big hands flopped to his sides when he told me the truth. Everyone who he had lied to, everyone I knew and didn’t, following him like ghosts everywhere he went. I had brought poison into my home. The memory of Luke’s lips on mine sent a chill through my bones, the kind of staticky, tipping feeling I got before my blood lacked sugar, or the feeling I used to get when I couldn’t make rent.
But my rent was paid, and I had checked my levels in the bathroom.
“Cassie?” Nora was saying. “Up, down? That sound good to you?”
My keys loomed white, anonymous. I pressed a chord, and a surge of power leaped through my fingertips. He could walk through the door any second. I was scared that he would, scared that he wouldn’t. A man’s laughter across the room made me jump. Just the bartender, setting up. The door behind him swung back and forth, then shut. Why was I disappointed it wasn’t Luke? Of course it wasn’t Luke. I closed my eyes against the image of him laughing. I imagined him lying on the floor in front of me, motionless. Good. Stay where I can see you. So I know you aren’t out there, where you’ll hurt me again. I pressed another chord to drown him out.
I turned my head to where Nora stood, waiting behind me. “That sounds great.”
The hours flew, the lights went off, the neon clicked on. People were arriving, and I stayed in the corner, playing silent chords on my thighs so I would have something to occupy my flighty hands.
Nora asked me questions. No, I wasn’t that nervous. I was nervous, but not that nervous. Yes, I wanted to go on. I wanted to helm this block of concrete like a raft into space. Yes, I was pleased with the lighting. I liked how it looked like we were in the middle of a giant blood orange. How many did I think were out there? Oh, I didn’t know. It sounded like it was at capacity, that was for sure. Yes, I’d heard from the Wolf Records guy. His plane had landed earlier today. No, I didn’t know what he looked like.
Oh, shit, was I not saying any of this aloud?
The realization seemed to click on the sound. For me, and for t
he world. It rose in an electronic din, like that Dolby sound bite they play at the beginning of movies in the theater.
“Sorry,” I said to Nora, who had now dragged me into what appeared to be a supply closet. “I’m all out of whack.”
“Cassie, thank God, you were just, like, silent,” she said, her plump lips dark purple and sensuous, like two plums. “You look like one of those women who dies of consumption in the 1800s. Are. You. All. Right.”
“Yes, I—” I began, but with the sound turned up, some of the emotions had started to trickle back in. I bit my lip to keep it back until the show started.
“If you’re not, we don’t have to do this,” Nora said.
“Oh, yes we do,” I said. We did. This was a chance to leave all the bullshit behind. And you know what, fuck it. If I thought the dissolution of the fake marriage would stop me from playing the biggest show of my life, I didn’t deserve a record deal. Control was overrated. I played because I loved to play, that was it. If I wanted control, I wouldn’t be here. Regardless of what happened, we had worked too hard to let it go now.
I pulled her close by the collar of her long, black sheath dress. “I’m ready. You ready?”
Nora took me by the cheeks, and planted a huge purple set of lips on the spot right between my brows, which I didn’t wipe off.
We left the closet. I checked in with Toby, who winked, banging out his warm-up. So far I’d been able to avoid him. I had no idea what to say to him, how I felt. Had no idea what would happen to us. But all that would have to wait.
From the wings, I scanned the crowd. There, in the corner, her bag clutched on her lap, her navy Crocs perched on a bar stool, sat my mother. Rita turned around from the bar with two glasses of white wine, handing her one.
I caught Mom’s eye. Her calm smile stopped my shivers, my doubts. This would be the first show where Mom wouldn’t want me to walk offstage and be someone else.
Nora picked up her bass, drawing three deep-end-of-the-pool notes.
I stepped up to the keyboard. Whatever intro music they were playing at the Sahara had ceased, and the crowd began to bellow.
My heart had just been ripped out, leaving a gaping hole.
But sometimes that just meant more room for the music.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for being here,” I said into the mic, the keys’ soft weight against my fingertips as familiar as the Casio I had as a little girl. I looked straight into my mother’s smiling eyes. “We’re The Loyal.”
Luke
When I finished, red faced and humming with a cocktail of endorphins and excruciating pain, Mittens and I walked the rest of Cassie’s block.
As I approached, I noticed two figures standing near the ash tree where I’d left my bag and cane. Two men in identical suits.
The endorphins dissolved. Now it was just pain. Pain and knots in my gut.
A few feet from me, the taller of them flashed a badge.
CID, it read. I recognized it. Dad used to have the same one, I remembered that now. My heart raced. Johnno. He really had reported us. The other shoe had dropped.
“Are you PFC Luke Morrow?”
I thought of saying no. I thought of testing my running skills again, of having a few more minutes of freedom before they took me. Some wall had been knocked down. I almost felt like laughing out loud, though there should have been nothing to laugh at.
I tried to keep my voice from cracking. “I am.”
“We’re going to need you to come with us.”
“For what?” I asked, but I knew.
“You’re under arrest.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from darting across the street, toward Cassie’s house. If she were here, we might be able to talk them down, to show them we weren’t a fraud in the way they thought we were. We could come up with another story together. But the Subaru was nowhere in sight.
I let go of Mittens’s leash to hold my hands up, and said, “Sirs, can I drop my dog at my neighbor’s place?”
Mittens looked back and forth between me and the men like they were her new friends, her tongue still hanging out.
The tall one nodded.
I scrambled in my pockets for the extra key, remembering Rita was at Cassie’s show right now. Where I should have been. Where I wanted to be. Mittens looked at me knowingly for a moment as I shut the door, then turned and ran back into the house. I felt my muscles relax, beyond relax, and fall into bone tired. For the first time since I was nineteen, since before I met Johnno, I wouldn’t have to look over my shoulder. That was it. Johnno had done his worst. Mittens was safe, Rita was safe, Cassie was safe, and they were safe because they were away from me. The dirt was out of their corners, drowning me. It was messy and awful and too much at once, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be floating above my life without any consequences anymore, because up there, I was missing everything. The bad and the good.
This part, the part where the tall officer was picking up my bag as the short one put a firm hand on my back, happened to be bad.
But inside the bag he held, there was no pill bottle. It was in the trash, in the house of a woman across the street. Everything was flowing around me, the pavement, the ash tree, the sweat that still fell in drips from the exertion, the cold handcuffs on my wrists, the good, the bad, I was in it.
I let the CID lead me to their car.
Cassie
“Holy shit, Cassie.” Nora had latched herself to my back, muttering repeatedly as we exited the stage as one strange, sweaty creature. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”
We had even done an encore. I had nothing left. They had it all.
You could still hear the crowd, even from back here.
Toby had jumped into the crowd at the end of the set, greeting a friend. Now he wove through the edges of the mob, his gap-toothed grin bobbing over screaming head after screaming head. He held my shoulders and we rocked back and forth, laughing. And yet I couldn’t be in his arms long enough without my throat seizing, thinking of Luke.
His image was a stone I kept choking on. That asshole. That fucking asshole. He wasn’t here.
“They want to sign us,” he said into my hair.
I unlatched and looked up at him. “What?”
“What?” Nora repeated. Her eyes were glued on Toby.
“They want to sign us,” he said louder, making a circling motion with his finger. “My friend heard him talk to the owner of the Sahara. They may even have us start opening for one of their bigger bands right away.”
“On tour!” Nora screamed. “We’re going on tour!”
“Is he still here?”
Nora and Toby held each other’s hands, hopping in a circle, chanting, “We’re going on tour, we’re going on tour, we’re going on tour.”
I had to laugh.
“Quick, get your phone!” Toby said, ignoring my question, shuffling me toward the greenroom. “He may call right now.”
Not a minute after Toby said it, the phone began to ring. I smacked Toby and Nora on the arms, pointing.
They stood with their arms around each other, looking at me.
“Hello?”
“Cassie?”
That did not sound like Josh van Ritter’s New York voice. It sounded like a Texas voice. A Texas voice, beat down.
“Yeah?” I said, moving away from the eager onlookers.
“It’s Jacob Morrow. Senior. Luke’s dad.”
“Hi,” I said, my blood suspended.
“I have some bad news. Luke’s been arrested.”
That fucking asshole, I thought, and immediately burst into tears.
Luke
The official charge was larceny and fraud. They held me overnight, in a room about the same size as the one I shared with Frankie and Rooster at Camp Leatherneck. A bench with vinyl tacked on for sleeping. A toilet sticking out of the wall. A hallway where officers passed, glancing in my direction under their crew cuts and dress blues on their way to somewhere else.
&nb
sp; I fell into a deep sleep, deeper than I’d ever slept, losing track of whether it was morning or evening.
When I woke, I taught myself to tell time, as I’d done at Cassie’s. The rounder, balding officer who brought a circular yellow rubber thing that was supposed to be eggs meant it was around nine in the morning. The dark-skinned officer with glasses who brought me a bologna sandwich with stale corn chips meant it was around noon.
They must have forgotten dinner. No one passed but a jowl-faced officer who was playing on his phone and didn’t notice I was in the cell.
I made up rules for myself for after I got out, whenever that would be. Meetings twice a week. Bachelor’s degree, not associate’s. Finish a book every week. And the last one, the one that would be the hardest, that I would constantly reverse in my head for every selfish reason, but knew I couldn’t break: Leave Cassie alone.
Finally, shortly after the balding, rounder one brought the third yellow rubber thing, they told me that the court-appointed attorney would be arriving later that afternoon.
I was used to the way business was handled in a place like this: I had about three questions max before they lost their patience or felt I was challenging their authority, and after that I had to shut up and operate on their terms.
First, I asked about Cassie. Had they taken her in, too?
“No information is available at this time, Private.”
Second, I asked when the hearing would be.
“I will let you know.”
I knew what the third question should be, but I was hesitant, knowing it might be wasted. It was highly doubtful Dad would drive to Austin just to watch me fuck up again. But if the arraignment was soon, and if no one posted bail, I could be detained up until they moved me to prison. I didn’t know when I would have the chance to speak to him. I wanted to explain. I wanted him to be here.
Cassie
We sat on the covered porch at Mozart’s, waiting to work out the details of a record deal that might be just a myth. I had left The Loyal show in a haze, the details Luke’s dad gave me written on my hand with a Sharpie while lying down backstage at the Sahara. Jake had told me it was best to keep my distance until after the arraignment, unless they called me in. And depending on which way Luke pled, they might do worse than that. Arrest. Last night, I had told Nora and Toby about the arrest. I told them that I didn’t feel well and went home, locking the door and lying in darkness, not sleeping.
Purple Hearts Page 26