“You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to fucking quit, Tristan! You’re coward. That’s what you are. You’re a fucking coward. Come out here and fight like a man!” I did curse the day I met her and I wished with everything in me that I had never met her.
Until she opened the door with Baby-T in her arms that is. My heart burst into its own universe and I felt nothing but love for her, a gush of guilt burning my chest for the lying thought. God I loved her so much. “Tobias, please stop this. You’re making it worse.”
“Please, baby. Please. I can’t do this without you.”
“I don’t want you here. You have to stop. Leave us alone. I don’t want you here,” she said, screaming back at me with tears streaming down her face.
“Calm down boy,” the younger of the two police officers ordered, moving in behind me.
“You don’t mean that!” I screamed, trying like hell to thrash my body away from not only one, but two cops. I felt the pain in my shoulder blade, hearing the warning to calm down again. Like a dream that wasn’t even mine, I fought hard. I fought for one more chance. I fought until the end and I was scared. I was so afraid of that being it. My fate was between me and her and I couldn’t get to her. “What do you want? What the fuck do you want, Tristan?”
Seeing the tears stream down her face as her mom tried to coax her away from the door, I knew she felt the same pain that I did. This wasn’t over and she knew it. With her mother dragging her inside, she yelled back. “I want you to wake up, Tobias. Just wake up every single day just like I do. Just wake up.”
Jerking my arms to get to her before the door shut, I cried like a five-year-old little boy, my heart physically breaking, sucking all the air from my lungs, and crushing my chest with more force than I could handle. “I fucking do that. I’ve been doing that every day for seventeen fucking days. And then what, Tristan? Then what? Day after fucking day. I wake up. I’ve been doing that and you’re still not there. I don’t know what to do with all this grief, Tristan. Tell me what to fucking do with this grief! It’s my birthday…It’s my birthday,” I repeated, my heart feeling even more pain as I watched her lip quiver, and then close the door.
Trying to drop to my knees in hopes of dying, I stopped resisting. I gave up. The two cops didn’t let me fall though. They tugged on the handcuffs I didn’t remember being slapped on and tossed me into the backseat of a cruiser and hauled me off. And I didn’t even care. What was the point in fighting? Everything that I was fighting for had just closed the door in my face. My one and only chance was gone. These were people who had people and I knew that, too. I’d never get that close to her again. Not unless she was the one who made the effort. That wasn’t hopeful.
I was placed in a holding cell with a guy strung out on something, pacing back and forth, and drunk, slumped in the corner passed out, and I didn’t care about that either. Nothing mattered. They could keep me locked up forever and I wouldn’t resist. I was done with that. There was no peace, no love, and no resistance. It was all for nothing. Crossing my arms, I closed my eyes, expecting to sit there numb until at least morning; not forty minutes. The paperwork took longer than that. At least it did when you painted on national monuments in California anyway.
“Sheffield, you’re out of here. No charges.”
I stood from the bench and massaged the pain in the back of my neck from staring down, trying not to make eye contact with the freak on meth. “Where’s my van?”
“I don’t know. Impounded probably. Go to left. You can get your things at that window.”
Great, just what needed, an impound bill. I was given an envelope with my phone, pocket knife, keys, and a note with an address.”
“Your van is around back, and you should probably be on your way. Out of this town.” an older deputy warned, tapping a finger for me to sign on the dotted line through the square hole in the window.
I shrugged and stepped away, dropping the pen to the counter. “It wouldn’t be the first state I’ve been thrown out of state.”
Walking to the back parking lot to my van, I glanced around, looking for anything suspicious. I felt strange and eerie for unknown reasons. Hitting the unlock button I got in, sure that Tristan got her mom to drop the charges, but unsure of why my van was just parked along the street. And then eerie took on a whole new feel. A sticky note with an address was stuck to the clock. No name, no time, no nothing. The van had been flipped to, and whoever did it, failed the attempt to cover it up. The blue sheet that Tristan kept over the sofa had been taken off, the little blue flowers switched to the left instead of the right. A dishtowel that she kept drooped over the cabinet door was on the wrong side, and the toilet lid was crooked. My heart beat out of my chest with anxiety, and my fingers shook as I tried to get the key into the hole.
Once I’d started the engine, I glanced around the parking lot to nothing suspicious. Two cops walking in the back door, a guy on a bike, and woman with a baby stroller. That’s it. Feeling a little silly, I studied the address on the post-it note, and sighed. “Jesus, Ty. That’s what you get for wasting half your life on Crime Scene Investigation.”
Even though I said it out loud to calm my nerves, it didn’t really help. Nothing about this was silly and I couldn’t shame myself enough to thinking it was. It wasn’t her writing and that made me even more nervous. I could be going to a house I may never come out of and there was no denying that it was plausible. It was. With my heart on my sleeve and its beat sounding loudly in my ears, I set the address on my phone and took in a deep breath of air, a failed attempt at courage. Knowing I would rather die for her than live without her, I listened to the robotic voice on my phone and turned left.
One second the adrenaline rush came from thinking about meeting the author, and the next it pumped harder, thinking about meeting my maker. Highlander Street wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t even a street. It was a park. People were everywhere, and I had to park two blocks away just to find a spot. I got out of my van and walked toward the crowd, stepping in behind a group of high school kids, discretely blending in as I looked around. Pretending to be one of them, we made our way to the sound of a marching band playing patriotic songs on a running track.
I brought up the tail end of the latecomers, following the crowd through a gate and to a table where I paid seven bucks for plate of spaghetti. I bought a drink from one of the stands set up on the track and looked around, the paranoia never giving the pounding in my heart a rest.
At first I thought I was at another Republican rally, but then the bidding started on a stage in front the crowd. I stared across heads of people holding sticks with paper plates glued to them, each with a unique bidding number. My eyes shifted from the autographed book already up to three hundred bucks, to the faces, unsure who I was looking for.
“Follow me, Mr. Sheffield.”
I turned to see a familiar face, but I wasn’t sure why it was familiar. The lady wearing a Donald Trump badge walked away from me, and I followed. Nothing really made sense at that time. Tristan wasn’t really anyone special, and I doubted she needed to go to this extreme to keep me discreet. This wasn’t her work anyway. She would never use middlemen to get to me, but her mom would.
“Keep staring at the next item up for bid, Tobias,” Vanna Wise ordered with her back away from a wedding ring quilt, donated by the women’s auxiliary. The lady that I had followed, stood on the opposite side of her, and the conversation was directed to her, and not me.
“Where’s Tristan?”
“Shut up. You don’t do the talking. Stand there and pay attention to the auction like I’m not even here. This whole thing is coming at an unbelievably bad time. For reason’s you know nothing about, and neither does Tristan. I’m going to keep it that way. Tristan has always been independently more than capable of taking careof herself. I was blindsided by not only her, but this baby as well and I don’t know what to do with them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shhh. Tris
tan’s agreed to get on a bus tomorrow morning and go to our condo in Los Angles. I wanted her to fly, but if you know her at all, you know she’s not getting on an airplane. She has refused a driver, but she’s agreed to ride on a bus clear across the country. While I can’t understand her way of thinking, I am grateful that she’s chosen this route. Tristan’s first layover will be at the Greyhound Bus Station in New York City at one-thirty in the afternoon. That’s where you’re going to pick her up.”
Everything around me went deathly silent except for one thing, the pounding in my ears. Even when I tried to speak, I couldn’t. All my words had dried with the saliva in my mouth, taking the thoughts in my mind with it. I didn’t know what she was saying and I couldn’t speak.
“She’s really pissed at you and she wouldn’t tell me why, but I’m sure she doesn’t hate you as much as she says she does. Girls’ don’t cry over a guy like that when they hate you. And guys don’t show up on Clay Wise’s lawn to get them back either. I still can’t believe you did that. You’re lucky he came on ahead for this event. Nevertheless, I’m trusting you because I don’t have anyone in my life that I can depend on right now. I’m well aware of how much you love them.”
“I do love them.”
“Shhh, your job is to get her to go with you without a scene. As of right now, Clay hasn’t mentioned having her followed and I doubt he will with everything that we have going on this week. You hurt her,” she accused, her tone changing to that of a mama bear with a wounded cub.
I looked down at my feet in shame, and back to the handmade coat rack being auctioned off, but I didn’t speak.
“Tristan is really good at bolting. She’s been doing it ever since she turned sixteen. Tracking her down was essentially impossible. Private investigators can’t even track her down. She doesn’t use a phone, she doesn’t have social media, she likes to live in the wilderness like a wild animal, and she doesn’t use one cent from her trust fund.”
“Trust fund?”
“Two of them actually and I’m not surprised you don’t know about them. Seven thousand from my grandfather and four thousand from her dad’s grandparents. That one just kicked in back in May when she turned twenty-one. It gets deposited on the first and it’s gone by the fifth. All charities she’s handpicked. Every single month, her inheritance goes to four different places that she’s set up to come directly out of her account.”
We barely had gas money to get from one place to the next sometimes. I listened with a confused look. And not because she had a substantial amount of money coming in either. Once again, I was in awe. Tristan was like the messiah to me. She claimed that she came here to raise the vibration and wake me up, and that was exactly what she did. Tristan truly was the peace, the love, and the resistance. Any other twenty-one year old with that kind of money would have bought cars, parties, trips, clothes, and good times, but not her. Not Tristan. She gave it away and never took credit for it.
Just like that, Vanna had to go. After a glance to the ding on her phone, her demeanor changed, she turned, straightened her spine, and glanced right to Clay. “I’ve got to go. There’s plenty of money in here, but you have to promise one thing. As soon as the air clears, you have to call me, and not in two years from now either. Promise me.”
“Okay, but how will I know?” I questioned, trying to get it; trying to take it all in. It was hard.
“You’ll know.”
“Does she know that I’m coming?”
“No, and I don’t want her to know. Clay will think she bolted again and he’s too busy with this election to try to chase her down right now. Stay out of the spotlight.”
With that, I glanced to the envelope full of money, and watched her walk away, a fake smile, and a handshake to a total stranger. Vanna Wise struck up a conversation about the auction to the lucky lady used as a ploy as her husband neared her.
That’s when I ducked out, too. Only this time I had a smile on my face and an envelope full of money. A huge smile because I knew I was about to get her back. There was absolutely no way she could reject me. I wasn’t even a worry. I would apologize for the rest of my life, swear to never betray her again, and love her harder than I ever did, if that were even possible, but she wouldn’t say no. She would never choose a condo in the middle of Hollywood over me. Ever.
Epilogue
Not one second of the hours I’d spent wide-awake rehearsing what I would say to her could have prepared me for the actual event. I waited right in front of the bus doors with my heart beating out of my chest, passengers stepping off one by one, planning to be right in her face when she stepped off. Only she wasn’t there. She was on the bus that had pulled up right behind the wrong one I stood in front of. The nerves jumping out of my body calmed just long enough for me to chastise myself for being so stupid, but quickly returned.
Her voice was what the stars would sound like if they could be heard, sweet, yet very confident. I fell right into the crowd entering the building from the bus a few steps behind her, running on pure adrenaline with my mind on plan B. Whatever that was.
Leave it to Tristan to make a friend or a few. They surrounded her, four girlsThree of them wearing matching tee shirts. The bride party is here, written across their chests gave away their future destination, and the one that said, the bride, carried Baby-T. Of course I didn’t like that. At all. The other one wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the hood over her head; the one Tristan spoke to directly. “Seriously. I don’t mind at all. It’s just going to be me and Baby-T there anyway. It’s a four-bedroom condo. You’re not the only one who could use a friend right now. I’m happy to have you.”
“Are you sure? You don’t know how much this means to me right now. I mean. For real. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You have no idea how much I didn’t want to go home.”
A blonde from the wedding party interrupted the new living arrangement with an annoyed growl. “Great, you have a place to live. I’m happy for you. Can we get back to the story now? You were saying something about lesson locations.”
“Destination lessons,” Tristan corrected.
Even with the nerves, I couldn’t help but smile. No matter what the situation, no matter where she was, no matter what it cost her, Tristan was a spreader of love. She came to this planet to raise the vibration. And she did. Every single place she went, every person she spoke to, and every child or animal she touched. Tristan left every living single one of them better than she found it.
Tristan reached her hand over to Baby-T and smiled, patting his diapered butt. “We go through life hopping over spots all the time. Most of them you don’t even notice until you look back, but we’re all thrown into shit storms I like to call it destination lessons. It’s where you find yourself at your weakest and you’re stuck there. It can be anything, but usually you’re blindsided; a loss, an illness, a tragedy, or someone that knocks you clean off your feet. Something so impactful you didn’t even see it coming. Like an explosion. No time to prepare.”
“I don’t get it. What does that have to do with Tobias? I want to know what happened to him. Did you get back together? You had to, right? Please tell us he came after you once you got your baby back. Please. I’ll be devastated. Where is he? Ahhh, I can’t take it.”
Tristan giggled a short laugh and led the pack of girls to a row of seats where they would wait for the next bus. Only Tristan wasn’t getting on that bus. I leaned against a pole right on the other side when Tristan sat, the rest of her flock gathering around her, waiting on a story I wanted to hear, too. With my hands in my pockets, I pulled down on my cap and crossed my ankles, kicking the backpack Tristan would notice beneath my feet. Two girls my age or younger sat across from Tristan and two sat beside her, one holding Baby-T over her shoulder, facing me.
He looked right at me and I said hi to him with only my lips, two fingers waving in the air, and a smile I couldn’t have hid had I tried. His little arms jerked and his body wiggled with excitement when he saw me. Ind
eed, I mentally boasted, unbelieving of how much he’d changed in two short weeks, but he had. His little cheeks were chubbier, his back and neck were a lot stronger, and for whatever reason, he seemed to be slobbering. A lot.
Tristan’s words were quiet and as much as she tried to disguise it, she still sounded sad. At least to me anyway. She wiped the corner of Baby-T’s mouth with his bib and continued. “Yes, the idiot came after me, but my mom had him arrested.”
“No! I’m done. I’m not listening,” one of the girls wearing the matching pink shirts, exclaimed, her fingers in her ears.
The bride holding Baby-T made up her own happy ending. “Ohhh, I know. He got out and you’re going after him now. Right?”
Tristan laughed, but that wasn’t what surprised me. It was the way she laughed that surprised me. It went from a fake entertaining chuckle to her full-blown cackle. Had I been able to see her through the pillar between us, I would bet her shoulders even bounced up and down. That wasn’t all I noticed. My own nerves and speeding heart had calmed and I felt complete. And so did Tristan. She just didn’t know it yet.
“No, will you hang on a minute? You’re on your last road trip before you let a piece of paper and a last name define you. I’m getting there.”
“Well that makes me want to run to the altar.”
“Sorry, girl. I’m not into dumbing people down. I’m just planting the seeds.”
“Whatever. Too late now. Keep going. Did you find each other? That’s all I care about right now. You’re killing us.”
“God, I drooled over that stupid boy like a love sick twelve-year-old. One minute the connection with him was mind-boggling and the next it was absolutely terrifying. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done for him. He was a destination lesson and he hit me like bomb. No warning whatsoever. Some people spend their entire life unhappy, stuck in a destination lesson because they’re not even here. They’re in last Thursday and barely see what’s in front of them, let alone where to find the lesson right there, knocking on the door. People have become so stuck in a system, they’ve forgotten the choices. Trust me, you’re going seek out many destinations in your life, but it’s the lesson in the destination that matters. Remember that. You’re sucked in and you drink too much orange moonshine, or you lose someone who wasn’t even yours to begin with. Those are the destination lessons; the ones you don’t just hop over; the ones that hit you like explosions. No warnings. You know?”