Page 5 of Pocketful of You
"Please –"
"Don’t beg for him," he snapped. "It won't change a thing."
Our eyes locked, and for the first time in my life, I truly saw it. The distance. The lack of emotion and love. The wonderful lie that I had been led to believe my entire life. And just like that, a life full of repressed memories bombarded me…
The room was dark and full of tension. My body was swaying. I was struggling to remain on my feet as I watched the horror unfold in front of my eyes.
"You're making a terrible mistake," a much younger version of Mr. Capaldi warned in a low, hard voice. "All hell will break loose. You'll start a war you can't win, Cal."
"I'm already at war," Daddy told him, and then he pressed the piping hot branding iron against the little boy's hip.
"No!" the three-year-old version of me cried out, eyes locked on the blue-eyed boy enduring horrendous torture at the hands of my father. "Daddy, stop hurting him! Daddy, please, he's my friend –"
"No!" I sobbed into my hands as my mind continued to play tricks on me. "No, god, no!"
"Now you're getting it," my father said. "Finally."
"The boy behind the door," I squeezed out, shaking so hard I could hardly breathe. "It wasn’t just a dream." Teary eyed, I stared at my father. "It was real, wasn’t it?"
"Yes."
One word, one small concession of truth, and my whole world crumbled around me.
"Oh my god, Dad," I choked out when the car came to a sudden halt. "I was there, wasn't I? And I saw…. oh god, I saweverything–"
"We don’t have time for this," he snapped, pressing a button and unlocking the car. "We have business to attend to."
"He was real," I repeated, mind reeling. "The scar." Stunned, I racked my brain, desperately trying to piece together a puzzle IknewI held the pieces to. "TheTon his hipbone. It's a burn mark, not a birth mark –"
The door flew open, causing my words to trail off, as we were faced with what looked like a small army of men. "The liner is waiting, sir," one of the men announced. "Did you bring the boy?"
"Better again," my father replied, climbing out of the car. "I brought the girl."
"Sketch," I whispered, numb to the bone. "It wasn't a dream. I'm not going crazy. The boy behind the door wasSketch!"
"No, Ramona." With a dispassionate look etched on his face, my father turned back to answer my frantic ramblings, and in doing so, he caused my world to crash down around me. Because my father, the man who raised me, then spoke the name that would irrevocably change my world forever. "The boy was Jacob Toretto.”
2
Sketch
Idied three times on the way to the hospital and twice more on the operating table, while the doctors furiously fought to remove the bullet from my chest.
I knew this because I was a witness to my own death. It was the creepiest damn experience I'd ever endured, watching from above as my own heart flatlined and then jackknifed back to life over and over again.
Where I was now, I couldn’t tell.
Alive or dead, heaven or hell, purgatory or limbo.
I had no clue if my heart was still beating or not.
All I knew was long after the bullet perforated my flesh, and long after the doctors began their frantic race to save me, whiskey-colored eyes continued to materialize just beyond my reach.
In the emptiness of nothing, only one face kept me company.
Romi.
And still, I couldn’t fight my way out of the darkness.
