Last Safe Place, The by Ninie Hammon Page B

me, but … could I have … would yinz sign dis?” The girl said, her accent decidedly Pittsburgh. She held out a napkin. “It’s all I could find, but it’s all right, heh? For an autograph, I mean.”
    “Sure,” Gabriella said, and switched to autopilot. She fixed a smile on her face like putting on a surgeon’s mask and fished around in her purse until she found a pen.
    “Could you make it ‘To Louise Yurkovich … from The Bride of the Beast ?’” Gabriella took the paper napkin and the girl continued to gush. “I can’t believe I seen yinz here today—right here, in my very own restaurant. Your book is like my favorite book ever! The way you write, it’s … poetry—only it ain’t. I got to ask—how’d yinz ever come up with somethin’ that … real?”
    Because the pain that spawned it was real. And poetry was the voice of Gabriella’s soul. She’d been a rising-star poet when she walked away from her blossoming career to put into words the feelings her twin brother could only express musically.
    And suddenly, he was gone.
    The way Garrett died and the reason he died had combined to rip Gabriella’s heart right out of her chest.
    She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think or move or … be without him. Born three minutes before she was, he had always been there, every second of her life. They had their own language no one else spoke. How could there be life without him? Her husband and son faded into a background worldwhere their voices were muted, like people shouting in a soundproofed room and what you hear through the closed door is muffled.
    In the end, both her marriage and Garrett’s band disintegrated without him. The band fell apart because of the absence of his presence; her marriage fell apart because of the presence of his absence. The rest of her life crumbled while she mourned his death, poured out her anguish and anger the only way she knew how—by tacking words onto it. But her hurt was too ugly for the delicate sensibilities of lyric verse. To release that putridness onto the page required the sturdier genre of fiction.
    Gabriella wrote what the girl had asked, handed the napkin back and said “We’d like our check, please.”
    “Oh, yinz don’t owe me nothing. Your check’s already been paid.” The girl leaned closer. “The tip, too. A twenty-dollar bill!”
    “Already paid?”
    “Yes ma’am. That’s how I knew. But soon’s he said your name … The Bride of the Beast was the first book I read all the way through since I was—”
    “As soon as who said my name?” Gabriella felt an empty, hollowness in her chest that made it hard to talk.
    “The man who paid for your lunch.” The waitress turned and pointed to a man sitting alone at a table beside the door. He hadn’t been there when Gabriella came into the restaurant. Nobody had been sitting there when Theo left to go to the food court for coffee. She was sure of it. But he was there now. A man dressed in black—shirt, pants, tie and coat. With pale blonde hair, ice blue eyes and the perfect Germanic features of a Nazi SS officer. He faced them, smiling at her with a sneering, crooked smile. There were crutches leaned against the empty chair on the other side of the table and he had a splint of some kind from his left foot halfway up his leg.
    Gabriella’s heart began to knock so hard in her chest her vision pulsed; the arteries in her neck thumped like jolts of electricity were firing through them. She got to her feet, though she did not will her body to rise, and walked slowly toward him, her eyes manacled to his, such a brilliant blue she could see the color from all the way across the restaurant.
    The closer she got, the colder she felt, as if she were approaching a glacier. She stopped in front of him and expected to see her breath frost in the air.
    “Going on a trip, I see,” he said. “The Warwick offers a great location but I consider the accommodations in such an old hotel lackluster at best.I can