Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
R ight up to the moment he walked onto the ride platform, Gabe knew she’d be there.
But one glance inside the mostly empty queuing area made it clear she wasn’t.
He’d hoped to find her waiting for him in the ticketing area. He’d pictured it: she’d be sitting on a bench, legs crossed, bouncing her foot while she texted with Cata or Leena. Humming a showtune, she’d light up the darkened room.
No. Only the lights from the neon signs lit the empty space.
He bought a ticket so he could check the platform. The ride loaded indoors in a windowless room. Surely, she’d be waiting there, the lights glinting golden on her hair. She’d be perched up on the bars of the cattle pen, swinging her leg, flirting with the ride operators so they wouldn’t make her get off.
Nope.
The only people there looked to be part of a family. A middle-aged couple, a teenage boy and girl, a preteen boy, his mouth flashing with braces, and the youngest, another boy, maybe eight or nine. Just tall enough to ride. Bouncing with excitement, or possibly nervousness. They stood in a clump at the front of the cattle pen. Gabe’s gaze darted to the exit on the other side of the platform.
Where he needed to go now that he’d missed Sunny. Damn, he shouldn’t have gone with Michael to get his birth certificate. He knew who he was. He didn’t need proof. Why hadn’t he come straight here?
Scanning the area one more time, just in case he’d somehow missed her, he wiped his palms on his jeans. Even looking at the car, painted yellow to look like a taxicab, made him sweat. Dual restraints—shoulder and lap—were raised to welcome the riders in.
He breathed slowly. In. Out. Sunny wasn’t there, tempting him yet again to burst out of his comfort zone, challenging him in a way no one else dared. He didn’t have to ride. All he had to do was walk across the car to the other side of the platform to reach the safety of the exit. He’d conquered plenty of fears on the trip. Riding in a car? Check, did it for two thousand miles. Driving a car? Yep, even in a snowstorm. And if he didn’t find Sunny—hell, even if he did—he’d be getting into an airplane to fly home. No time to road-trip it now.
He didn’t need to overcome this particular fear. Not without Sunny. She was his talisman, his courage. With her, he could’ve done it.
Without her, he was just tragic Gabe. Someone you lowered your voice around, someone you excused, someone so broken you could push him around and make him do almost anything you wanted.
He shot one last defiant glare at the train, ready and waiting at the loading platform. He had nothing to prove.
The gates swung open, and the teenagers leaped ahead to the front car. The adolescent boy was just behind, and he beckoned to his brother. The parents started toward the middle of the train.
The littlest boy stood, frozen, behind the caution strip. Behind him, Gabe couldn’t see his face, but his rigid posture told him all he needed to know.
He was just as scared as Gabe was.
His family was about to abandon him.
No.
“Hey, kid.” The words burst out of Gabe before he could stop them. “Want to ride in the last car with me?”
The kid’s head whipped around, his mouth open, eyes wide. Gabe stood up as tall as he could. “In the back, you’ll be able to laugh at your siblings when they scream.” The boy understood what Gabe didn’t say: that if he rode behind them, none of his siblings could see him scream or cry or whatever he was afraid he’d do.
Slowly, the kid nodded, then walked toward the last car. Gabe clambered in first, the space too small, the restraints too close. The boy followed. Gabe met his gaze and tugged the lap bar toward himself. The boy copied him. Taking a deep breath, Gabe reached up and lowered the shoulder harness until the boy could grab hold and pull it into place. Then he lowered his own. Gabe hadn’t been as bulky the last time he’d ridden a coaster, and he felt squeezed, confined. His breathing quickened.
Still, he smiled the best he could when he turned to the kid. “You like coasters?”
“Dunno. I haven’t ridden too many. Last time we were at Disneyland, I was too short for the big ones. I had to ride stupid Dumbo.”
“We’ll be fine,” Gabe assured the both of them. “It’ll be fun.”
“You think so?” The way he squinched his mouth told Gabe the kid knew he was lying.
He shrugged, or tried to, in the restraints. “If not, at least you can say you rode it. And you don’t have to do it again.”
The kid nodded and turned his face to the front. A few cars ahead, his mother turned in her seat and waved. The kid set his mouth like he was marching to the firing squad.
The hand that tugged his restraint was pale and freckled, not dark brown, and a red ponytail, not Sid’s black curls, bounced into his vision. They were indoors, where they couldn’t see the blue sky. Still, chills raced along the back of Gabe’s neck, like if he looked fast enough, he could’ve seen his own mom and dad bending around to flash him their delighted grins.
The attendant finished her checks and gave them a thumbs-up. Gabe considered mirroring the gesture—when he’d been a ride operator, he’d loved seeing the guests’ eager faces before the ride began—but he couldn’t. Instead, he gripped the handle on the restraint until his knuckles turned white.
A second later, the car lurched forward.
It was all wrong. The car emerged from the platform between a pair of buildings, not onto a track suspended over green space. Yet the clack-clack-clack of the lift hill, the afternoon sunshine warming his shoulders, the soft breeze lifting his hair off his sweaty brow, the heaviness of his own body tugging him against the seat back toward the earth where he belonged, shot him back to that day, the day his youth had ended.
That day, he’d been the kid, adrenaline coursing through his system. He’d ridden Fright or Flight hundreds of times, maybe thousands. On sunny days, on cloudy days, once with the rain pounding on his face in a sudden squall. In the early mornings next to Brandon before the park opened. Late at night, holding a girl’s hand high above their heads. And that day, that last day, empty cars separating him from his parents before the scream of metal against metal and a cloud of dust separated them from life, from his life, forever.
“How high do you think it goes?” the kid’s voice squeaked.
Gabe blinked back to the present. They were still climbing, maybe another thirty slow feet to go. “Not much more. You can see the top of the hill from here. And that’s the highest point on the ride.” No need to explain to the kid how potential energy and gravity fueled the ride.
Next to him, the kid nodded. “We won’t fall out, will we?”
“No.” As the track flattened at the top of the hill, Gabe tapped his restraints. Again, no need to get into the physics of inertia. “These keep us safe.”
They hadn’t kept his parents safe. But he couldn’t tell the kid that, either.
The car crept to the end of the flat and tipped forward. “Hold on!” Gabe shouted into the roaring wind. But holding on wouldn’t help. Even if his parents hadn’t been waving their arms in the air, their car still would have jumped the track when the axle snapped. Holding on wouldn’t have done anything when the ground rushed up to meet them, when the metal buckled around them.
Maybe if they’d all made different decisions that day, he could have held on to them. Kept them around a little longer. Or a lot longer. He’d wished for it every day since. He’d wish for it every day for the rest of his life.
But wishing wouldn’t bring them back. Neither would holding on to his fear.
He had to trust the physics, the ride operators, the mechanics.
He had to let go.
The way his parents had let go. The way they’d lived their lives in the present, wringing the pleasure out of every day, trusting there’d be a tomorrow.
Because holding onto fear was like staying on the dark, dingy ride platform, never experiencing the joy of a vertical loop, of a diving twist, of the wind in your hair and a delighted shout in your throat.
Like his life before Sunny had burst into it and spun him around like a quadruple heartline roll.
“Hey, mister. You okay?” The kid’s voice came from around Gabe’s shoulder. He opened his eyes, blinking away the tears the wind had torn from his eyes, just as they rolled back onto the boarding platform. The car stopped suddenly, jerking them forward against the restraints. Then they lifted, and Gabe finally freed his hand to wipe the moisture off his face.
“Yeah, I’m good. You?”
The kid grinned, showing his too-big front teeth and gaps behind. His chest heaved. “Yeah! It was awesome. And Blake and Devin screamed the whole time. I’m gonna make so much fun of them.”
Gabe extended his hand to shake the kid’s tiny one. “Good job. Thanks for riding with me.”
Lurching out of his seat, Gabe wobbled on shaky legs to the unloading platform. His neck was sore from the jolting, and he bet he was going to have a bruise on his shoulder from hitting the side of the car. The boy skipped past him with a “See ya” to rejoin his family.
Gabe stumbled to the exit and eased himself down the stairs, finally regaining his equilibrium at the bottom. But she wasn’t waiting for him there, either. Nausea, not from the ride, churned his stomach as he walked to where Rafe waited in the car, checking out the passers-by from behind a pair of aviator sunglasses, another dusting of sugar on his chin.
“No luck?” he asked when Gabe opened the door of the SUV.
“She wasn’t there.” He leaned back in the seat, trying to slow his pulse. “She’s gone.”
“Shit. You made your grand gesture, and she wasn’t even around. That never happens in the movies.”
The car speakers rang out. Gabe scrambled for his phone, hope filling the empty place where his stomach had been before the ride. Sunny was calling him at last!
Rafe pressed a button on the steering wheel. “Hey, Mary.”
It wasn’t even Gabe’s phone that had rung. He looked at its home screen, innocently taunting him.
“Gabe still with you?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Gabe couldn’t muster the energy to greet his sister.
“Good news is I heard from Sunny. She’s fine.”
“And the bad news?” Gabe asked. Rafe shot him a concerned look.
“She’s on her way to LA. She called from a truck stop just over the state line.”
Gabe’s vision tunneled to a speck of powdered sugar on the black leather seat. She was gone. She was the balloon, aching to soar away. He was the string, tethering her to the earth. Now she’d loosened that string. She’d left him to pursue dreams that didn’t—couldn’t—include him.
“Head back to the garage.” Mary’s voice came from far away. “We’ll figure out what to do.”
“Take me to the airport.”
“Car would get you to LA faster.” Rafe checked his mirrors and pulled out onto the street. “We’ll lend you one. This one, if you like.”
“You’re following her to LA?” Mary’s voice rose to her upper register. “That’s so?—”
“No.” Gabe stared out the window at the neon lights of the Strip. “I’m going back to Ohio to save my business.”