Morto.
Dead.
Not Derio. No.
“Someone please!” I scream again, and a middle-aged woman comes over to me, babbling in Italian and trying to comfort me.
“No, no,” I tell her, grabbing onto her shirt. “I don’t speak Italian. Derio, Desiderio Larosa, is he dead? Morto, morto? I know him, he’s my amore. Mio amore!” I thud my fist against my heart. “Is he dead? Morto?”
She has tears in her eyes and she nods. “Si, si, mi dispiace.”
I look at everyone else in the pizzeria. They all seem solemn, some looking at the screen and shaking their heads, others eyeing me with pity and sorrow.
This is not happening. They are all wrong. They have to be. I stare back at the screen, blinking, feeling an icy sheet of shock wash over me. The woman beside me pats my shoulder and keeps telling me she’s sorry.
This can’t be happening.
I can’t breathe.
I’m going to vomit.
Suddenly, I’m curled over, clutching my chest, my stomach, my heart.
No, no, no.
Another person comes to my side, a man, but I don’t see him. I don’t feel him as he leads me over to a chair and sits me down. Someone gives me water. The middle-aged woman is crying. The steely-eyed man brings me a fresh slice of pizza.
When I can finally raise my head, I stare at the screen, trying to read it, interpret it. They keep showing the crash in slow motion. The racer on the outside is passing on a corner and his bike skids out and goes flying into the racer on the inside. He’s ejected into the air and lands in a way that you know he can’t survive. He’s completely limp. His bike crashes into the other bike and the other one bursts into flames, flipping into the air with the other racer until it smashes down on him.
Seconds later, as the fire starts up the racer’s leg, medics run over. It’s a replay of the scene that had caught my attention.
Derio always said his weakness was passing on the outside during a turn. That’s how he was injured the last time. Derio always wore red when he was racing before. The man who went flying through the air was wearing red. Derio is taller and more muscular than most Italian racers. The man who landed on his head, motionless, has the same figure.
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.