by M. C. Cerny
“Do you go to school here?” Sierra looked close to my age and I wondered if I would see her in the halls when summer ended.
“Nope. My Nona homeschools me.” My chest deflated a bit at hearing this. I wouldn’t see her in school which was a shame. I would place bets that her exotic looks and funny little voice would make her the popular flavor of September while we waited for the leaves to falls and boys my age to calm their hormones down enough to ask girls to the homecoming dance.
“How come?” She followed me a bit as I carried the wine inside putting it near the door so David could take over and bring it downstairs where Dad was sorting the inventory.
“Oh, you know, my Nona thinks you regular kids are a bad influence on me and she’s a retired school teacher. I dunno.” Sierra shrugged her shoulders and I felt like there was way more to this skinny freckled girl.
I liked the mystery.
“Is that so?” I said.
“Actually, Nona thinks I don’t know enough English yet and she doesn’t like me taking a bus or my bicycle so far on my own.”
I mulled those thoughts over for a while.
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” I picked up another crate and moving around her while she watched me work under scrutinizing stares.
“I told you I just moved.” That smart mouth of hers would be the death of me and I barely even knew her. Her hips swayed back and forth while her brow creased and her stance registered a bit more belligerent than before. I wondered if she might want to join my friends and I in some lake swimming this weekend.
“Nah, like not American I meant.”
David poked his head around the corner to give me a puzzled frown and I shrugged reaching for another crate.
“I’m Greek,” she said and I heard the stubborn streak within her a mile wide. I was a bit in love with her. I knew it was ridiculous and David would ream me out, but her caramel candy-colored eyes and wild hair sucked me down a sticky sweet path and I suddenly wanted to know everything about her.
“Like the restaurant down the street?” I’d never seen her before today, but I swore she blanched when I mentioned it and takes a huge step back.
She shook her head.
“No, I live with my grandparents. I have to go.” She panicked stepping from side to side. She looked like a caged animal and I didn’t understand what I had said to make her so wary. She left me there jogging out the door in her stupid shorts that made me want to tackle her to the ground to cover her up in some protective fashion. She confused me and sparked a curiosity.
Dad joined me in the hallway squeezing my shoulder. “That one right there is trouble, mark my words.” He walked outside to talk to a man who I presumed was her grandfather at an old truck in the back lot.
“Hey, moon eyes, you gonna bring me another box?” David yelled and I turned around to glance at my brother smirking.
“I’m coming.”
“Yeah, you uh might want to finish that elsewhere.” He nodded his head in my direction and I looked down awkwardly, hard in my pants. I didn’t even know it happened looking at Sierra in her short shorts and snarky attitude. I was embarrassed shifting my stance around to cover it up.
“Shut up!” Stalking off, I head for the bathroom ducking out of the way so my dad doesn’t see me slacking off. I hid in the bathroom, but there’s only one stall and it’s currently occupied by the suit that had been sitting at the bar. Damn.
I accidentally walked in on David rubbing one out last summer so I figured we’re even on the bleaching eyes.
The man from the bar groaned and I could tell he’d be awhile so I run the cold water from the tap and stick my hands under it hoping the temperature change calmed my dick down. I hoped that’s not why Sierra ran away, but I guess I’ll never know.
5
Sierra
Bad Dreams and Beautiful Boys
He’s so beautiful it hurts. From the bones under my skin to the charging beat of my heart, that boy was something else. My grandmother would probably wax poetic about him, but as beautiful as he was, there’s always a dark side. Boys. Men. All of them predators of some sort and I wanted nothing to do with them. I had enough on my plate if I was ever going to get to school someday. My parents sent me to live with my aunt and uncle who ran Mykonos the Greek restaurant in town. When Andy mentioned it, my stomach did a somersault and I had to get out of there or vomit on the spot. I’d curl up and die if he ever learned what went on behind those walls. Dirty things girls like me shouldn’t know about.
None of that mattered now because I’m out of there. I only came into town with Gramps because we were picking up the Guardianship papers they filed and dropping off a shipment of wine to a local pub. I was supposed to stay in the truck, but I couldn’t help myself and then I saw him hauling crates of wine from the back of the truck. It was a hot day and I couldn’t bear to stay inside the truck waiting, squinting my eyes from the sun glare. In some ways, he was like the sun and I leaned closer his way with every burning ray. I was Icarus flying dangerously close. Curiosity got the better of me and like melting wax wings, I followed behind him until he turned and noticed me. I couldn’t run off without making a scene so I let it play out and with it my fears about the male gender under his direct gaze.
If I had another nightmare tonight, my Nona might think about sending me back to Greece or worse and I didn’t want that.
Something had been stolen from me under the cover of night, I believed in nothing, saw no goodness in kindness and let cynicism wrap her talons around my heart. Her nails were deep anchors that held me steadfast and bitter clinging to the pain. As long as I felt pain, I wasn’t numb and I knew I was still alive.
I didn’t have to tell anyone something was wrong. My grandmother just knew and in her wise wisdom she took me right out from the back of the restaurant where I had been washing dishes from sun up to sun down before the night terrors found me at the end of each day. She had words for her son shaming him and his wife for neglecting me. It seemed to be the end of the discussion. I would come to live with them and nobody needed to get involved. Those papers would make it official and I need never tell anyone what happened there.
We would never speak of it again and all would be forgotten.
It was in a way, a breath of fresh air, but unsettling at the same time. I wasn’t confined to the restaurant’s kitchen slaving away, but I wasn’t free to go to school just yet either. Nona worried about my cousins bullying me and I tended to agree. My English was good, passable even, but her anxiety set the rules. Greek had been forbidden in her efforts to acclimate me though I often heard my grandparents speaking it under the cover of dark and my mouth would silently form the words pretending.
I was okay with this. I needed to find my own way and maybe time would help. I only wish someone had told my brain that message because whenever I closed my eyes I simply could not forget.
The nights in my small bedroom decorated in pale pink were restless. The clammy sweat I woke in was just as bad as the humidity of back home. The only difference being the lemon groves I used to stare at under moonlight. Now I had fields of black dirt and indigo grapes. Location didn’t change the feelings, didn’t alter the reality of my dreams. Every night like clockwork I woke in a panic unsure if it was safe to come out from the covers despite sweating under the thick and heavy blankets.
The saving grace was not screaming the house down and having to explain that to my grandparents. I wouldn’t do anything to get me sent back. I would stay at home, attend school in my grandmother’s office and pretend everything was okay until it really was okay. That American saying, fake it until you make it, yes, that’s exactly what I would do.
So, I stayed under those hot stuffy blankets until exhaustion took me. Sometimes I’d sneak a small flashlight into bed with me and a stolen book to read until my eyes grew heavy and the words blurred together. I preferred fantasy, stories like Alice in Wonderland, or The Wizard of Oz. Anything that wou
ld transport me far away from this place. Other times, I would think about the boy at the pub where grandpa and I went to drop off the crates of wine. The sweet boy with light brown hair and kind eyes that promised he wasn’t anything like my hulking dark-haired cousins or mean aunt and uncle. His face centered in my dreams and chased the bad ones far away. He didn’t know it, but thoughts of him saved me on the darkest of nights.
When the terrors came and stole my breath away, he gave me a purpose to keep going. Seeing him one more time, even fleeting from the backseat of a rusted pickup truck.
6
Andy
Sierra was like the greatest recorded music single. I could have listened to her over and over again never getting tired of her melody. The problem was that the rest of her album scared the shit out of me. One pop song followed by a rash of dark edgy slasher rock indie shit was not how I planned on spending the rest of my life. Since she had skipped town and left me high and dry at the altar, I busied the years in between trying to fill my life with the good stuff, upbeat, and yet I always seemed to come back to her in the dark. Her siren call kept me captive in a prison of my own making. A part of me would always love Sierra without a doubt, but it also meant I had to leave her wild and to keep my sanity walk away while I was still sane.
I was fucked up if I thought she was good for me. David would kick my ass and our parents… well I can’t imagine how they would feel after welcoming her into our house when she had nowhere to go. I was partly glad they were enjoying retirement at their bungalow in Florida. She had slapped us all in the face with her deception and lies, but the bigger question I had to answer was why I had already forgiven her? If I spoke the words, I knew my parents would trust my judgment. Oh, they would have their reservations, a decade full of them, but I also knew their love for me would temper their vocalization.
Part of me was devising ways to make this all right, but I wasn’t confident I could pull it off. Sierra would be the biggest coup this town had ever seen and maybe it was because I now had controlling interest in her grandparents’ vineyard and she had absolutely no idea. Buying it from them cemented my connection to her because I had the one thing she wanted. The one thing she thought she deserved to have and wouldn’t that be a shock to her system. I had ways I could bend Sierra to my will, but would she want to bend? The last time I tried something like this she ditched me, skipping town, and crushed my heart. What everyone didn’t know was that I knew where she had been the entire time after I confronted her grandparents, I had been foolishly holding on to hope that she would come back to me.
Nothing like unfiled annulment papers and a will to make the trip down memory lane one rocky road.
Vegas could be just as small town as New Paltz if you knew the right people. One of the reasons I kept my apartment above the bar was that it let me save enough money to hire a private investigator to find her and keep her on his radar. Seems weird given how mad I was with her, but I couldn’t let her go. I couldn’t abandon her the way everyone else had. She expected that. I also expected my scared little wife to come home, but hey, here we are playing out the rest of this movie that was slated to end in a fiery crash and burn of disappointment.
Although I hadn’t seen Sierra in years, only keeping infrequent tabs on her from afar when the mood struck me and my skin itched with anxiety knowing she was out there all alone, the scars on her skin told a story I wanted desperately to know. To see her visceral pain up close washed away the hurt of being shut out from her choices for a decade. I wanted the free access I once had to caress her, kiss her, love her like a good book with the freedom to turn her pages. It seemed the folly of youth would forever haunt our decisions about things we could never take back. That saying about never being able to go home, well it made my chest ache thinking that this was how our story ended, right here, right now on a humid night in July so thick the glow bugs laid low and the sky rumbled threatening to say all the things our mouths wouldn’t. Truth be told, I was perfectly fine staying stuck here in this moment because it meant that nothing could hurt us if we just kept our damned secrets to ourselves.
Today was the day we’d meet with Francesca, my lawyer who was handling the all the legal documents. I already knew what they said because Francesca and I had read through them all at the reading of her grandparents’ will. A will, her grandmother petitioned to change once she realized nothing was going to bring Sierra home.
I could have given her the current address I had for her in Las Vegas but I doubted the woman who was so strict with her granddaughter wanted to be reminded of all the ways she had failed her. The ways I had failed her because I hadn’t known about her past until it had been too late.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do, Andy?” Francesca leaned against her desk. Her arms crossed over her chest, wearing a much more relaxed version of her power suit. She looked at me sympathetically. She had come to New Paltz by way of her fancy NYU law degree and a need to keep her hair highlighted by the best colorist our town had to offer. She and Tommy were a romance that transcended all the stereotypes I knew. I’d never call her a cougar, but she did have a solid number of years on her guy and salary that easily tripled his with her private law practice. I’d never known this but as a student, she’d clerked for a summer with my friend Chase’s mother who was a local judge. It was definitely a small world feeling with six degrees of separation.
“I feel good about doing this. She should have the cottage. The workers still live in the main house but the cottage and a stipend would give her some security while I figure out if I can keep the business going overall or hire someone to manage it.”
Francesca sighed and I knew she was firmly wearing her lawyer hat.
“And the other issue?”
I gulped back my unease.
“I don’t know if I want to file them, yet.”
“Andrew.” She chided.
“I know, but before her grandmother’s passing, I had annulment papers drawn up because it seemed easier, and then I couldn’t do it.” I’d sat on them for years because I had hoped she’d come back.
“It’s more complicated now because you waited. I’d recommend a simple divorce and since you’re giving her significant assets, I could argue in a way she won’t be able to say no.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m not ready.”
Francesca moved to her filing cabinet pulling out a drawer and dropping a folder on the table in front of me.
“Read it. Sign it when you’re ready and move on.”
I opened the file and found that Francesca had done all the hard work for me and all it required was my signature. Nope. My stomach churned and shut the file.
“I’ll review it later.”
“See that you do.”
The phone buzzed and she answered it.
“Ms. Occho is here.” The receptionist said.
“Thanks, send her in, Molly.” She looked at me and sighed. “Molly is single.”
Chuckling I said, “yeah, no thanks.”
“Stubborn, but alright.”
The door opened and Sierra popped into the office dropping her backpack on the floor. Her hair was wet like she just showered and her face was free of makeup. Her smile was tentative and I returned one of my own politely.
“Ms. Occho thanks for coming. It hasn’t been easy tracking you down.”
“I’m here now.”
“Yes, she is. Francesca.” I warned my lawyer to behave.
“So, we’re here today at the request of my client to transfer some property and funds into your name that were left to him in an uncontested will. I have advised my client against this and if you would like legal counsel of your own, we can wait before we proceed for you to obtain a lawyer familiar with these matters.”
“No, that’s alright. I hadn’t planned on staying long, but if we can wrap this up, I’d appreciate that.”
“Very well.” Francesca read out the terms I wanted and I waited for Sierra to give me a respo
nse of some kind. To fight it at least and demand more or throw it all in my face. I didn’t care about that. I cared that she’d left this chasm of ten years between us with not a single explanation that had nothing to do with our communication getting lost in translation. She did this deliberately and all I wanted was to break through her walls and understand why for my own closure.
Without a word she slid the documents over and signed each one before taking her copies and leaving with the same amount of fanfare she entered the office.
“Sierra.” I stood up to stop her from leaving. My chest tightened with the same anxiety of her abandoning me even though I knew the official transfer would take sixty days due to some obscure estate law.
She winked giving me a smile ducking her face away. Her hand touched my chest lightly in a friendly pat as she spoke. “I appreciate it, Andy. I really do. At least now I won’t have to stay in the hostile across the street.” She shrugged leaving me slack jawed as Francesca reviewed the signatures and arranged the piles of papers orderly.
“Stay Andrew.” Francesca said giving Sierra the opportunity to slip out as I sunk back into my chair.
“Yeah?” I asked putting my head between my knees to regulate my breathing. Francesca sat next to me rubbing my back in a motherly sort of comfort.
“Please consider the divorce papers. You need to let her go, for your sake.”
Francesca helped me up and I left walking back to the pub passing the hostel where I knew she was staying at least for tonight. I walked inside the pub and up the back stairs to my apartment on the top floor where my windows overlooked her.
Her light was off.
She was so close and yet so far.
