Purpose (3 page)

Mangos and papayas, lime and sage.

My eyes flew open and I sat straight up,
nearly knocking my computer off the table.

“Relax, it’s just me,” Mom said. She placed a
tray of food on the table. “Seared tuna on greens with a lime
vinaigrette dressing and fruit. I thought you’d be ready for
lunch.”

I eyed the tray and realized the food must
have given off that mix of aromas.
How could I even think it’s
anything else?
I slumped back into my chair, feeling the
emotional wound pulling open again as if a physical gash had been
carved into my chest. My body quickly healed cuts, burns and
bruises, but not this most painful kind of mutilation.

I moved the laptop out of the way and took a
plate from Mom. She joined me across the table. When I looked up at
her, I noticed for the first time that someone stood behind her.
Quite a ways behind her—at least seventy-five yards, on the other
side of the pool, by the fence lining the back of my five-acre
property. I froze at his sudden appearance, sure he hadn’t been
there just a minute ago.

Something fluttered in my stomach and I
couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. I stood up and took a couple
steps toward him, not able to control myself. He just watched me,
his arms folded across his chest.
Could it be?
I had a
sudden need to see his face. I slowly moved another step or two
toward him, frightened and curious and…hopeful.
Who are
you?

“Alexis?” Mom startled me out of my
trance.

I turned back to look at her as if I’d
forgotten she was there. She had twisted in her seat to see what
had me ogling.

“Who is that?” I asked, raising my arm toward
the man.

She brushed her chestnut hair from her face
and peered behind me with her inhumanly sharp eyes. “Who? I don’t
see anyone.”

I turned back to him. He was gone.

“I thought…”
What the hell? Did he flash?
Was it
him
? Or a protector? Or just my imagination?

“Probably one of the landscaping guys,” Mom
finally said. “They have a different crew out today.”

“No Amadis?”

“Not until Owen comes later.”

“Oh. He just kind of…disappeared. And he was
staring at me.”

Mom raised her eyebrows. “There would be many
reasons for that, my dear.”

I looked at her for meaning. She just
shrugged.

I tried to see the stranger’s face in my
mind, but he’d been too far away. His build, though…his height, the
way he stood…so familiar….

I slumped back into my chair and stared at my
hands in my lap, fighting back tears.
It’s not him. It’s not
him. It’s not him.
I tried to convince myself. I’d had other
instances of mistaken identities, but because this was in my own
backyard, it felt different. Worse. Especially because the stranger
had simply disappeared, as if he hadn’t existed in the first place.
As if I’d been seeing things.
It doesn’t hurt. Just losing my
mind, is all.

I shoved my plate away and stood up. I had to
get out of here. Because it did hurt. It hurt like hell, actually.
For some stupid reason, something inside me had soared high with
the tiniest glint of hope, then dive-bombed into the pavement of
reality. All the pieces inside shattered into even smaller ones, if
that were even possible, cutting open old wounds and making them
throb and bleed again. I clutched at the pendant—my gift for our
one and only Christmas together—as if it could soothe the pain.

“You didn’t eat anything.” Mom pointed to my
plate, then gestured at me. “You eat all that junk food and look
what it’s done to you. I give you something healthy and delicious
and you don’t even touch it.”

The last tick of the bomb sounded. Psycho
Alexis could be suppressed no longer and a switch didn’t just flip
this time. The whole bomb exploded.

“
I’m not hungry, okay
?” I roared. “Why
can’t you just leave me the hell alone?”

The pained shock on her face stabbed me in
the gut. I fled to my bedroom.

Who is he? Why did he stare at me? And what
did Mom mean?

I went straight into my bathroom and, for the
first time in…
what?
… probably months, I looked in the
full-length mirror and really studied myself. My mouth dropped.

“How’d I get so
old
?” I demanded of my
reflection, moving closer in, staring at a face that appeared to be
fifty-five years old.

Dark puffy circles surrounded my bloodshot
eyes that were once a deep mahogany, just like Mom’s, but were now
a flat brown. Deep lines permanently etched my forehead, between my
eyebrows and around the corners of my mouth, which drew down into a
perma-frown. My skin was pale and sickly looking, blotchy and aged.
My hair, a dull reddish-brown, hung lifeless down my back in
strings.
Holy shit! Grays!
I looked closer at my head and
stopped counting at ten.
I’m not even thirty!

I stepped back to see if my body looked just
as bad. It was worse.

“How’d I get so
fat
?”

A round pooch protruded in front.
Where
did these huge hips come from? And my ass?
No wonder I
preferred sweat pants and elastic-waist shorts. My breasts were the
only part that looked smaller…and saggier.

I crumpled to the floor, wailing a mix of
sobs and screams.
What’s happened to me? What did I do to
myself?
I’m fat and ugly and old. And alone
.
All
alone
.

I literally looked twice my age and I never
noticed I was getting older. For me, life stopped at nineteen. I
knew time had passed. Dorian’s birthdays were the biggest marker
another year went by. Plenty had happened, but I hadn’t
lived
it. I’d just been going through the motions, barely
existing in the fog.
Over seven years gone that I’ll never have
again
. And I looked like
twenty-seven
years had gone by.
I’d let all that stress take a toll on me and my body while never
realizing that
I
—the essence of
me
—was aging.

Images of the last seven years flashed
through my mind like a slideshow while I lay on the bathroom floor
with my eyes closed, tears still seeping. Pictures of Dorian—his
first smile, his first steps, his birthdays, his first days of
school—were bright. Others were dim—book launches, signing tours,
buying my first house with my own money. Those experiences should
have been remarkable, but I’d let them slip by barely noticed, like
water through a sieve, as I wallowed in my pain and loss and
loneliness instead.

How could I be so stupid? So wasteful? So
fucking
miserable
?

I cried for some time. Then I grew mad. Mad
at myself. Then mad at Tristan. The anger boiled up and exploded
again.

“
How could you do this to me?”
My
voice came raw and scratchy as I screamed at the top of my lungs to
ensure the one who left me behind heard me, wherever he was. I
pounded my fists on the floor, breaking the tiles. “How could you
leave
me? Why haven’t you come back? It hurts so much. I am
so
alone
.”

I broke down in hard sobs again.

Where are you? Come back to me! Save me from
this emptiness!

I cried until my chest and stomach hurt. Then
I curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, closed my eyes and
pulled out every single memory I could possibly grasp,
forcing
their clarity, no matter how much they felt like
daggers piercing my soul.

That first night of class, when we met. The
first time he smiled that angelic grin at me. Looking into those
hazel, sparkly eyes, full of love. The first time he touched me and
the unusual spark. Our first kiss as the sun set that fall evening.
Cooking together. Motorcycle rides. Christmas, when he gave me the
pendant, explaining it was a piece of his heart. His warm laugh.
The night he proposed. His strong hands and powerful arms holding
me close against his hard body, feeling so safe and so loved. And
our wedding on the beach. Our wedding night….

Darkness overcame me.

Mom knocked once and I told her to go away.
She didn’t come back until much later. I didn’t move from my fetal
position on the bathroom floor. I no longer cried; I physically
hurt from the sobs and didn’t think I had anymore in me. I barely
acknowledged her as she helped me up and to my bed. But I hugged
her fiercely as she tucked me in, as if I were six again.

“It’s okay, honey,” she murmured in my hair
as I held her tightly. “It
will
get better. I can feel
it.”

“Mom?” Dorian squeaked from the doorway, his
stuffed shark tucked under one arm. “Are you okay?”

I propped up on an elbow and held my other
arm out to him. He crawled onto my bed, squirmed under the covers
and snuggled against me.

“I’m okay now,” I said as I wrapped my arms
around him. Mom left, turning off the light and shutting the door
behind her.

“Please don’t be mad at Dad,” Dorian
whispered in the darkness. “Don’t yell at him for leaving. You said
it’s not his fault. And he can’t even hear you anyway.”

I sighed sadly. I hated that he’d heard my
bursts of anger.

“I love your father very much, Dorian. Don’t
ever think I don’t. I just get mad sometimes and say things out of
anger, but only because I miss him so much. Understand?”

“Yeah. I miss him, too.”

I squeezed him tighter. “But we have each
other right now. I love you, little man. Very much.”

“I love you, too, Mom.” Within minutes, his
breathing settled into a quiet snore.

I fell to sleep shortly after, welcoming
unconsciousness, waiting for the memory-dream to start.

But it never came.

After more than seven years of the same thing
every night, my dreams were finally different. I found myself in a
world where everything was a shade of what I could only call
steel-blue-gray. I sat on the top of a mountain, at the apex of the
arced range with several peaks pointing to the steel-blue sky in
each direction. Far below, at the base of the mountains, looked to
be a meadow and a lake but they seemed small and vague from this
perspective. A multitude of images hung in the air, as if projected
on unseen screens. The images changed, like the slideshow of my
waking memories while lying on the bathroom floor. Dorian, the
beach, vampires, writing, college classes, Mom’s old bookstore,
werewolves, my mom, motorcycle rides, me on the bathroom floor and
the figure in the yard…a lot of him. In fact, I later realized, I
didn’t even remember seeing Tristan’s face, not clearly anyway.
Anytime his face would start to come into focus, the image would
shift to the stranger standing in the yard watching me.

I’d always feared losing the memory-dream.
Because I knew I’d lose forever the clear image of his face…and my
sanity along with it.

I awoke slowly, not my usual gasping, upright
bolt. I opened my eyes, but didn’t find the expected darkness. I
lay on my stomach again, my head nearly hanging off the edge of the
bed. From the dim light on the floor, it looked like the sun had
just started to rise. I glanced up at the clock. 6:05. Not 3:45.
Not 8:00. And I felt wide awake.

I rolled over to find Dorian still sleeping
peacefully, spread-eagle on the other side of the king-sized bed.
He was a strange phenomenon, just like his mother. Before me, no
Amadis daughter had ever given birth to a male without a twin
sister. Mom and Rina had been sure I was pregnant with twins. I’d
never had an ultrasound, never even went to the doctor for prenatal
care. Mom acted as my midwife and her and Rina’s
feelings
were supposed to be enough.

I had developed my own theory: Mom and Rina
had sensed a boy and were so sure I’d follow everyone else’s
precedence, they simply assumed a girl accompanied him in the womb.
Stupid assumption. I was always abnormal, even for us. Of course, I
would be the one to screw everything up.

They hadn’t given me a good reason why Dorian
couldn’t lead the Amadis when the time came. Instead, they clung to
the hope that, because I was different in so many other ways, I
might still be able to have a daughter. Mom and Rina
felt
this could happen, although no Amadis daughter had ever given birth
more than once.

There was one obvious problem with this new
“plan”—it required a father. And my only love was…
gone
.
Disappeared. Not seen since that tragic battle seven-and-a-half
years ago, less than three weeks after our wedding.

As I watched Dorian sleep, his face looking
so much younger than his nearly seven years, the thought of him
hearing my temper-tantrum last night tortured me. No kid should
have to witness such loss of control by his own mother. He had his
own pain to deal with; he didn’t need to hear mine, too. I was
supposed to be strong for him.

It was time for a change. Time to live,
instead of barely existing. Time to discover the Real Alexis. I
couldn’t entirely let go—that was out of the question—but I could
surely move forward with some things. Right? I needed to, for me
and for Dorian. I owed him. He deserved more than Almost Alexis.
But how?

I thought I could start with my writing. I
needed to get back on track with it. I hadn’t written for nearly
two days, finding it difficult to write the final chapters of the
last book of the series I’d started six years ago. The series was a
wildly successful—although dark—love story bringing together the
worlds of humans, vampires and other creatures. I stayed out of the
talks of movie deals, so they hadn’t come very far. I didn’t
care.

Shortly after Dorian’s first birthday, my
agent started harassing me for another book, since the first one
did fairly well. She reminded me of my contract, but I didn’t care.
Writing was a part of my old life, I’d told her. That’s not who I
was anymore.