The man who went flying is the man who is dead. I can see that now as the sheet is placed over him. I can see the wrist of the man who is taken into the hospital, the man who survived the accident, albeit badly injured, and he’s wearing a silver bracelet, like one of those medical alert ones. Derio doesn’t wear one of those.
My heart sinks.
Derio doesn’t wear one of those.
I burst into tears. It comes suddenly, like a bomb gone off inside of me, and I am ripped apart violently, ruined and destroyed. I am gutted, like a dying fish, my very being cut out, yanked out, discarded on the floor.
My grief is too powerful, too devastating for me to survive.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
I can only cry. The pizzeria fills with my wails, the inhuman cries coming out of me that I don’t even recognize.
Eventually, someone mentions getting a doctor and I think they mean for me. I can’t stay here anymore. Before they can call someone or take me somewhere, I burst out of the pizzeria and into the chaos of the streets.
I can hear them yelling after me in concern but I can’t stay there. I have to leave. I wildly hail a cab, arms flailing, and throw myself into the backseat. When the door closes I feel like I’m hidden from the world, if just for a moment.
The cab driver is listening to cheesy Italian pop music and has rosary beads hanging from his mirror. He’s asking where I want to go but I don’t know. I want to go back in time, when Derio was alive and I had his love, but I don’t think he can take me there.
I tell him Rome. I want to go to Rome.
He tells me I’m crazy and can’t take me there, but he can take me to the train station. I start crying again, banging my head against the window. He’s frightened now, unsure what to do, and I yell at him that my boyfriend is dead and he is in Rome and would he please take me?
His voice softens but is still firm. I frantically dig through my purse and pull out a wad of euros. There are three hundred of them. I reach over the seats, tears blurring my vision, and shove them in his hand. “Per favore,” I plead.
He looks at the money and nods. “Okay.”
Rome is not a hop, skip, and a jump away. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour cab ride up the highway, which I spend drowning in guilt. Derio made a mistake during the race and it was all because of me. He wasn’t thinking clearly, he couldn’t have been. What was I thinking? Breaking up with him right before his first race in a year? Couldn’t it have waited? Would it have killed me not to be so selfish for once?
It killed him. My selfishness killed him.
It.
Killed.
Him.
And Derio died on that track, alone. He died in the horrible way I left him, thinking he wasn’t worth it, thinking I didn’t love him, wondering how he was going to take care of the twins without me there. He died with a broken heart.
He died with my broken heart.
I didn’t think it was possible for my heart to break any further, but now it has been completely obliterated, turned to dust, the ashes swept away into the abyss.
The driver asks where I am going once we reach the crowded outskirts of Rome and I repeat the name of the hospital I saw on the news. He nods and then starts asking what happened, why I am going, but I don’t know enough to respond to him. I can only cry to myself, trying to hide those strong, rolling sobs that rip the air from my lungs.
When he pulls up to the hospital, I see a crowd of reporters outside. No one pays attention to me and I slip inside while they talk excitedly to an exhausted-looking doctor.
I don’t know where I’m going. Compared to the small Capri hospital I went to, the Rome one is a whirl of confusion, full of baffled cries and painful whimpers and the smell of iodine and sour skin. I start wandering through the halls, ignoring the nurses who glance my way, knowing if I even make eye contact with them they’ll ask me why I’m here and haul me away.
I think I want to find the morgue. Maybe the emergency room. I want to find Derio. I want him to be alive so I can tell him I’m sorry. I want so much but can afford so little.
I end up in a long hallway past the noise and smells of the ER waiting room. The hall hums with fluorescent lights.
Then I see her, leaning against the wall, hugging herself.
Felisa.
I start running toward her, amazed that she’s here but craving the embrace of someone I know in a land where I don’t really know anyone.
“Felisa!” I cry out, and when I see the tears streaming down her face, I know the truth.
It nearly knocks me off my feet.
Instead, I collide into her and she wraps her arms around me and cries. I cry. We don’t have to say anything, I can feel her grief just as I feel mine, raw and bleeding.
Finally, she pulls apart and smooths down my hair affectionately. “I look for you,” she says, her English thick and mangled. She clears her throat. “I am sorry, my English is not used much. I thought you would be here.”