Kristie Cook - Purpose

There he is! He stood across the playground, about sixty or seventy yards away, and I immediately knew he was the same person who stood in my backyard yesterday. I could feel his eyes on me again. He stood a little closer now, but I still couldn’t see his face. His brown hair hung way past the shoulders and it whipped around in the March breeze. The shade of the large oak he stood under also concealed his face. Something, maybe the long hair, told me he was young. Just a boy. But his body looked more developed than a boy’s. Much more. No, a man. Too young for me, but definitely a man. Just like the day before, he felt…familiar. I started toward him again.

“Alexis? You okay?” Owen asked, after I took only a few steps. I turned and looked at him.

“Huh?” I asked distractedly.

“Are you okay? You look…odd.”

I looked back at the stranger. He had disappeared again. Damn it!

“I’m, uh, fine. Go on. I’ll see you at home.” I started jogging again, which seemed to be enough for Owen. He took off in the other direction.

I wanted to search for the stranger. I had to know he was at least real. But I had no clue in which direction he’d gone. Or if he really was just a figment of my imagination. Or wishful thinking. I walked home, mentally and emotionally feeling like crap again.

Physically, however, I felt great. Owen ran up behind me just as I walked up to the beige-and-brick, ranch-style house. He said he’d run another three miles to add to the nearly two miles we did together. Two miles? Oh, this is going to hurt. I wanted to do it again, though, and went to the store to buy my own running wear. Of course, I would probably be over this idiotic impulse by tomorrow and would never run again, but right now, it made perfect sense that I needed my own running shoes. Which was how Swirly operated—making the most irrational thoughts seem logical.

“You’re sure you want running shoes?” the pock-faced kid at the sporting goods store asked, his nose slightly crinkling. “I mean, we have walking shoes. Or my mom really likes these cross-trainers.”

He pointed to a pair of plain white shoes that looked like they belonged on a grandma whose idea of exercise was walking around the Wal-Mart.

“Are they good for running?” I asked, my annoyance clear. “I run.”

He gave me a doubtful look, but led me over to the running shoes. I couldn’t blame him…except for the part of making me feel as old as his mother. Stupid kid. What does he know? He couldn’t have been more than five or six years younger than me.

“There you go,” he said a while later, handing me a bag full of shoes, socks, shorts and sports bras. “Good luck with your, uh, running.”

Maybe he was being polite. Maybe a genuine smile stretched across his face. I didn’t know. With my deranged frame of mind at the moment, the grin looked like a smug smirk to me and his tone dripped with sarcasm. The switch flipped again.

I leaned over the counter, my face only inches from his. “Who the fuck do you think you are, treating me like a worthless bag of shit? You don’t even know who I am!”

He stared at me, his eyes bugged and his mouth wide open. I stared back. Did I really just do that? A couple of customers who’d walked in the door just in time to hear me stopped and gawked. Yeah. I did. I opened my mouth again and then shut it. Thankfully, I wasn’t so far gone to make sure they knew exactly who I was as I went completely whacko on the kid. I grabbed my bag and stomped out of the store before I could make a bigger fool of myself.

I stood on the gas, taking my anger out on my car, which felt bulky and sluggish. I forced myself to back off the accelerator because I already soared way above the speed limit. I aimlessly roamed the surface streets, first on the main roads, and then through a park-like residential neighborhood, but the urge to go faster overwhelmed me.

As I sat at the red light blocking my turn to the highway, my phone beeped with a text message from Mom. She worried about my uncharacteristic absence.

“Where are you? Where did you go?”

I laughed out loud, a high-pitched sound that was just a little frightening, as I typed into my phone, “Crazy. Where else?”

I tossed the phone on the passenger seat, ignoring Mom’s replies. Once on the highway, I moved over to the far-left lane and floored the pedal. Speed. The faster, the better. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I needed. The speedometer held at ninety. It felt like a crawl. The loss of control at such high speeds usually scared the hell out of me, but I couldn’t go fast enough now. My Volvo sedan was designed and built for safety, not speed, which is why I had bought it. It was practical. Now I hated it. The car couldn’t give me the release I needed, so I headed home.

By then, a level of rationality had returned and I appreciated Rina for insisting I use a pen name. Although the Amadis council originally wanted me to publish under Alexis Ames, they finally decided to use the pseudonym A.K. Emerson. I didn’t know why that particular name and, honestly, didn’t care much. No one but a small handful of people knew my real name, protecting my privacy, especially against incidents like today’s. The clerk might recognize the name A.K. Emerson or Kat Emerson, which I’d used back when I’d made public appearances, but he wouldn’t be able to match it to the name on the credit card. Otherwise, I’d be in deep trouble with my publicist and I really didn’t have the mind to deal with her at the moment.

Dorian, home from school by the time I pulled into the driveway, distracted me from my anxiety. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with him, Mom and Owen. We went to the park for a while and we all played with him on the equipment, like kids again. My eyes regularly scanned the area for the young stranger I’d seen earlier. I thought I saw him once, but he was gone too fast to know for sure.

“Tell me a story,” Dorian said later as he jumped onto his bed while I closed his window blinds.

“Hmm…about what?” I teased, already knowing.

“Dad, of course! How ’bout the boat trip?”

“Ah. Your favorite.” I sat on his bed, took a deep breath to settle my insides, and started the story with his dad’s thrill of fighting sharks.

At one time, telling these stories had been the hardest job of being Dorian’s mom, but it had become a little easier after a few years. They still tore at the pieces of my heart, but not as much as stirring up memories when I was alone. The stories provided a way to remember Tristan and the precious time we had together without completely breaking down. Perhaps this was my answer—hanging onto him by sharing memories with Dorian, while letting go in other ways.

Letting go…my breath hitched at the thought.

“I’m going to fight sharks one day, too,” Dorian promised me, not noticing the choking sound in my throat. I swallowed the lump as he wrestled his stuffed shark and put it into a headlock.

“Yes, I believe you will,” I said. “Now, do you want me to continue?”

“Yep!” He tossed the stuffed shark to the side and I told him about the leather-faced man who tried to rob us during our honeymoon in the Keys. Knowing the story by heart, Dorian moved his hands as if he fought the guy and shoved him off the boat.

“Okay, it’s time to settle down and say good night,” I said after finishing the story.

I picked up the framed picture on Dorian’s nightstand. It was the only picture I had—the one Owen had taken with his cell phone at our wedding. Camera-phones were cutting-edge then, but the technology seemed old by today’s standards, and the enlarged picture was grainy and unclear. But Mom’s cottage and the bookstore had been torched shortly after we left that fateful August and all we had were the few belongings we’d taken with us. The picture was mounted in an expensive silver frame. I had one just like it, lying in my nightstand drawer—if I left it out, on top of the nightstand, I could stay up all night staring at it and not get any sleep. I trailed my fingers over our beaming faces and then kissed the glass over Tristan’s. Dorian kissed it, too, then embraced the frame in a hug.