Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense) (9 page)

“I don’t want to hurt you, Ellie. I want it to be like it was.”

She doesn’t answer me for a while. Then she says, “It’s not, and it can’t be. Look at me, Jack.”

“I don’t care.”

“Maybe, but everyone else does.”

“So, fuck them.”

“Your dad is right. You could be—”

“Don’t you
dare
,” I snap before I realize what I’m saying. “Don’t you dare say that. He was wrong then and he’s wrong now. You think I give a fuck what somebody thinks my girl looks like?”

“Who says I’m your girl?”

“I do. I kidnapped you.”

I choke the wheel in my hands and grit my teeth.

“I wish I could go back there,” I say, my voice low and heavy. “I wish I wasn’t a sixteen-year-old kid with a broken leg. If he said those things about you to my face now I’d punch his teeth down his throat.”

Ellie rests her gloved hand on my arm. I loosen my grip on the wheel. I was choking it so hard my forearms were starting to ache.

“Can you drive?”

She shakes her head.

“Great, it’s all me then. We’re going to have to stop. It’s going to take us a couple of days to get to Arizona.”

“This is nuts,” she says.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

She sighs. “My uncle’s place.”

I glance over at her. “What? We can’t stay with one of your mom’s relatives—”

“He’s not her brother. He’s my dad’s brother. I haven’t seen him since I was little.”

“Where does he live?”

“Umm, Pennsylvania?”

“Ellie, we’re in Pennsylvania. You’re going to need to narrow it down for me.”

“Right on the border, down in the corner. I’m trying to think of the name of the town. I have him in my phone.”

She fishes the phone out of her pocket and fiddles with it, scanning her contacts.

“How often do you actually call somebody?”

“I can ring Fitzgerald with it.”

“So that’s a ‘never.’”

Ellie gives me a haunted look and rattles off the address.

“You have GPS on there?”

“Yeah. I think? It says
maps
.”

“You do it, I’m driving.”

She looks at me and we both know why I’m not going to fiddle with something while I’m driving the car. After about ten minutes she gets it to work and start planning our route.

“We can stop if we need to. It’ll remember where we’re going.”

She nods. “I don’t even use half the apps on this thing. Mom just buys me a new one every year.”

“Ellie, you can’t let her run your life.”

“She’s all I’ve got.”

“Really? Think your uncle will be happy to see you?”

“I don’t know. Look at—”

“He’s not going to turn you away at the door because you have scars, Ellie. If he does, he’s a shitty uncle and we’ll go somewhere else. Have you been in hiding this entire time?”

“Hiding?” she says. “Yeah, Jack, I’ve been
hiding
.”

“
I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it?”

“There’s no reason to hide from everything, Ellie. If somebody doesn’t like the way you look, fuck them.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re perfect. If your dad throws you out, you can always find work as an underwear model.”

“Are you saying you’d like to see me in my underwear?”

She rolls her eye and folds her arms over her chest again.

“Just drive. We follow this blue line, right? You have to take the next exit on the left.”

It’s going to be a long drive. Her phone says almost eight hours. It’s a detour, too; half the drive will be off the highway, which is probably a good idea anyway.

We started around nine in the morning. By noon we’ve been sitting in the car for three hours, two of them virtually silent.

“What bothers you the most?”

Ellie looks up. I think she was dozing off.

“About what?”

“The scars.”

She sighs. “Really?”

“I want to understand.”

“They itch.”

“That’s it? They itch?”

“It’s not like an itchy nose. It’s
under
the skin. Trying to scratch it is like running my nails over leather. I can barely feel it. The itch is always there but sometimes it gets so bad I want to roll around and scream, and nothing makes it go away.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighs. “Yeah. Thanks. I can’t sweat, either. The burned skin has no pores, so I can’t be outside when it’s too hot or I’ll get overheated and pass out.”

“Jesus.”

“It doesn’t matter, I don’t get out much. I tried. When I was in the rehab hospital…”

“You can tell me.”

“I’ve never really talked about this.”

“You don’t have to.”

She sighs, hard. “When I was in the rehab hospital there were people there for some serious stuff. Broken backs, head injuries, bad, debilitating stuff, but they were all disgusted by me. Especially when the bandages came off. It was all raw and red, and the nurses had to rub these ointments on my face. I made them take all the mirrors out of my room and cover anything where I could see my reflection. I hate looking at myself.”

She’s quiet for a while and says, “It’s been ten years. I wasn’t even that good looking before the accident.”

“You were beautiful before the accident.”

“Was.”

“You’re beautiful now.”

She snorts. “Oh please, Jack. That was lame. Next thing you’ll ask is, if you said I had a beautiful body, if I’d hold it against you.”

“You’re too smart for a line like that too work.”

She punches me in the shoulder again. “Nice try.”

“Hey, how long has it been since you’ve had Wendy’s?”

“What? Before the accident, so, ten years?”

“Me too. There’s one.”

Ellie yanks her hood up as I pull into the drive through. It’s dinnertime, so we sit there inching forward for a good ten minutes before I get to the speaker. I order a triple for myself and a single for her, fries, and a large frosty with two spoons. I get confused for a second when they ask if I want chocolate or vanilla. They come in flavors now, apparently.

I back into a spot in the corner of the parking lot, kick my seat back and sit up.

“This is all greasy,” she says as she unfolds the paper wrapper. Her voice shrinks. “Jack, I’m going to have trouble eating this. My mouth. It’s hard to take big bites.”

“Wait here.”

I run into the place and come back out with a plastic fork, and cut the burger into four pieces for her. She nibbles at it slowly, taking small, carefully placed bites, but starts to eat faster and faster.

“Good,” she mumbles through a mouthful of food.

I grab a spoon and offer her a blop of Frosty. She gives me an odd look and then takes it right off the spoon with her mouth.

“Remember when I used to feed you when we were on dates?”

“Yeah. You were more worried about putting food in my mouth than in yours. If I wasn’t a moonstruck teenager I’d have thought you have some kind of weird fetish.”

I wiggle a spoonful of ice cream at her. “Maybe I do. Eat.”

Without protest, she takes the little blob of ice cream off the spoon. I end up using only the one spoon, eating off it and feeding Ellie off it, alternating between bites. She doesn’t even seem to notice that we’re sharing the same soda.

When her burger is gone she fumbles with the napkin. I sit up, take her hand, and wait. She nods with approval and I clean her hand for her, wiping away the grease. She can’t do little things like that; it takes both hands.

“Sorry,” she mutters.

“It’s okay. How was it?”

“Good. I’m all sleepy now.”

“Let’s get going. We can make your uncle’s place by tonight if we drive straight through.”

After we drive for a while, Ellie nods off and almost drops her phone, but grabs it before it falls to the floor. She props it up on the console and lays the seat back, and her head stars to bob. After a while she’s clearly asleep, and falls back into the seat.

I almost grab her when she shifts to the side, afraid her head will hit the window, but she turns in her sleep and her head lands on my shoulder.

Ellie

I wake up to Jack-smell. Silk brushes my cheek.

Wet silk. I drooled on his dress shirt. I snap upright and try to talk, but end up yawning instead, my mouth twinging as it stretches. I shake my head and try to process where I am.

I’m in a car, sitting next to Jack, and we’re driving through the middle of nowhere on a two-lane, sloped road, with trees right up against the shoulder, their branches reaching out like grasping fingers. It’s full dark, but the clouds have hidden the stars.

Oh my God, this is actually happening.

“Where are we?”

“Phone says another twenty minutes. We’re on the right road. Your uncle likes his privacy, huh? We’re about fifty miles from nowhere.”

I lick my lips and rub at my mouth with my sleeve. It gets so damn wet when I’m sleeping, but feels dry when I’m awake. I take a long pull on the watered-down dregs of the fast-food Coke. At least it’s sitting well in my stomach.

“I have to pee.”

“Okay, jeez. We’re almost there. Um, is that it?”

He points up, and I have to lean over to see up the slope. There are some lights on top of the hill, amid the trees.

“I’m not sure. I haven’t been here since I was twelve, Jack.”

He shrugs. “This must be it. There’s nothing else out here.”

The road up the hill is all gravel. Jack takes it slowly, navigating the turns and leaning forward to eye the road, to keep from driving off it. I tense up when the leaves cover the path, but it finally starts to even out.

The cabin is bigger than it looks from below, and much more solid, not some ramshackle structure but a solidly built country retreat. Jack parks in the gravel out front and steps out.

I check my phone, but it’s lost its signal and just shows a blue dot in a grid. That’s useful.

My door swings open and Jack takes my hand. I stand up and stretch, wincing when my shoulder pops a little too hard, and yawn.

“I’m glad to finally get out of that car,” Jack sighs. “Come on, let’s see if we’re in the right place. Are you sure about this? This cabin looks like the Evil Dead live here.”

The porch light comes on.

I pull my hood down and walk up the stone steps to the front door. Jack stands behind me, hands at his sides, shivering a little. He didn’t plan this out very well. He could use a jacket.

The door unlatches with a heavy grinding sound and swings open. I blink a few times.

“Ellie?”

My uncle is a giant bear of a man, thick around the waist and thick in the arms and shoulders and thick in the hair, with a big, shaggy mop of brown curls shot through with gray and a wiry black beard with stray white hairs around his mouth.

He steps back. “Come in. What are you doing here?”

“It’s complicated. We needed a place to stop.”

“Who’s we? Who’s the boy?”

“Boy?” Jack snaps.

“This is Jack,” I say hurriedly. “He’s with me. Can we come in?”

“Of course.”

Jack looks warily at the shotgun propped by the door. Inside, the smell brings back memories. The cabin smells like wood glue and fresh baked bread, with a stale undercurrent of beer. Uncle Rod closes the front door, bolts it, and turns on the lights in the living room.

Jack sucks in a breath. He wasn’t expecting such a big space, two stories with a high loft ceiling held up by thick cedar beams. It may look rustic, but my uncle has his share of the inheritance. The furniture is the same, finished logs fitted together into chairs and a sofa around a big slab of a table that looks like it was just hewn from a tree.

“Let me get you something,” he says. “Beer?”

“Yeah, I could use one,” Jack sighs.

Uncle Rod throws his arms around me and I squeak as he picks me up from the floor, hugging me tight.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” he says, and never takes his eyes from my face. “How are you holding up?”

“Not very well.”

He nods. “Sit, I’ll be right back.”

He comes back with the stems of three beer bottles clasped in his thick fingers in one hand, and a plate of cheese and sliced cold cuts and sausage in the other. I remember him talking with my dad about the beer; it has no label, it’s his own brew. He hands me one, then Jack, then sits down with his own and takes a long pull.

“What, fourteen years?”

“Yeah,” I say, turning the bottle in my fingers.

I work up the courage to take a pull on it. Beer and I are not close friends, but this tastes good enough, very heavy. After a few sips I feel a little lighter, if no less sleepy. Jack drinks half of his and then puts it down on the table and starts shoveling food in his mouth.

“What are you doing out here?”

“It’s complicated,” Jack says.

“Don’t remember asking you, boy. Ellie?”

“It is complicated. I’m sorry I haven’t called you or anything, Uncle Rod. I’ve just been…”

“I know what the problem is,” he says before tearing a thick slice of sausage in half with his teeth. “It’s that bitch Jessica. I refuse to call her your mother, she has no claim to that.”

I sit up. “Don’t call her—”

“Why not? I wanted to see you when you were in the hospital. She was your guardian, you see. She said no, she’s in intensive care, you can see her in the rehab hospital. Then I came to see you in the rehab hospital, and the nurses wouldn’t let me in. Not their fault, mind you. I don’t blame them. Orders from Jessica, as your guardian. So I called again when you got out, and she said no, she’s healing, later. Always later, later, later, for years until I finally gave up. I still sent you a Christmas card and a birthday present every year. I make things out in my shop, you see.”

I sit there, blinking. “You sent me presents?”

“Of course I did. You’re my brother’s little girl. You meant the world to him, you know. He was so proud. Every time we talked it was Ellie did this and Ellie did that, Ellie is so smart and talented, Ellie met this boy and she’s over the moon for him… That must be you.” He looks at Jack.

I can feel myself turning red. I curl up on the couch and grab the beer. I need a drink.

“I never got any cards or presents,” I say slowly, “and Jack says he sent me letters when he was overseas. I never got them, either.”