Purple Hearts(88)

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.

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.