When Life Gets in the Way

by Ines Vieira

  My shift at the restaurant breezes by and I’m pretty excited that I was able to get 60 dollars in tips in one day’s work. Sure there are some nights that I make more, but this will be enough for a whole week’s of groceries for me. Whatever I make next week in tips will go directly to the bank for future expenses. Even though I’m ecstatic, my back is killing me and my feet are sore. Nothing that a good soak in the tub won't fix, followed by another tub. Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I knew that I should go home now and soak my weary bones at least for a good hour, but today was Sunday. Every weekend, I would go to my pier and be with him. Even if he wasn’t physically there, he was still with me in my memories.

  My pier is a ten-minute walk from the restaurant, so it's far enough from all the commotion. The only things you see are boats docking on the bay and seagulls flying over the sky. I left later than I had expected, so the sun is already getting ready to call it a day. I finally reach my pier and on the sides I see a couple of fishermen still trying to catch something, stubbornly waiting for that one catch that will make it worth their while. Down the pier on the spot that I usually have reserved for me I see a man staring at the ocean. I’m a little disappointed that I won't have my spot all to myself today, but that won't stop me from doing what I came here to do.

  As I get closer, I verify that the man standing on the pier must only be a couple of years older than me. From the back, I can see he has short trimmed blond hair and strong shoulders. He’s wearing a simple navy t-shirt and black jeans fitted perfectly. I see a tattoo on his left upper arm, I can almost make it out from the angle he’s leaning on the bar. It looks like a Celtic sun setting on a calm sea.

  My mouth starts to dry up and I know that this is one of my mirages, but I want to keep holding onto to those extra seconds of hope before this young man turns around and I see that it's not him. I find happiness in those seconds. Though when I do verify that it isn't him, it will shatter me like all the other times.

  But once he turns around, I freeze solid. The stars that I dream of every night are staring back at me. The crooked grin that irritated me so is drawn on the face that I have engraved in my heart. I touch my chest with my palm. My heart has returned to me. I feel it thumping again rapidly, radically. It has returned. He brought it back to me and my eyes start to water for the first time out of happiness.

  Isaac walks towards me slowly never taking his eyes off mine. He places his hand on my cheeks, and all of me melts against his warm palm. He smiles sweetly at me with those perfect lips drawn on his lion face that has come to me every night in my dreams.

  “Cassandra” My heart soared at him saying my name. “Cass,” I close my eyes to take his voice in. How I have missed it. How I have missed him. How incomplete I’ve been without him.

  “Are you still my girl, Cass?” I open my eyes, and I see the fear in his eyes mingled with unshed tears.I simply nod.

  “Now and forever.”

  SEAN

  One year later

  Canada was colder than I had expected. I remember Massachusetts winter’s being cold, but Canada’s winters were a total bitch. Aside from that, though, life was almost good.

  Tony had been instrumental to our escape. To this day, I still don’t know how he got them, but a few days after all hell broke loose at my uncle’s house, he had shown up with two fake passports.

  One for Abby Philips, my mother, and the other one for me.

  Sean Philips.

  Just like that we became other people with these two pieces of forged documents that my cousin was able to conjure up. When we crossed the border in Niagara Falls with nothing but a smile welcoming us to Canada in the guards faces, I could have kissed Tony for his resourcefulness.

  We told everyone that we wouldn’t be able to contact anybody from back home. We needed to make sure that my prick of a father couldn’t find out where we were. If he thought that we had cut ties with the family as well, that would make it easier for him to believe that they really didn’t know where we were. I knew that my mother had been true to her promise of not making any contact.

  I wasn’t as strong, though. She had too many painful memories of home which made it easier to move on, but me? I had left my heart behind. As much as I tried, moving on from Cass was impossible.

  Tony having given us our false identification, knew the aliases that we were using, so one day I wrote him a postcard with only a P.O. Box number and signed it Sean. He’d been writing me ever since. A guy that preferred to abbreviate every word in a text message to anyone, even to Grandma Irene, was now sending me at least two full pages, front and back, once every week.

  His letters mostly contained news about the family and also the tabs he had kept on my father. He had told me that he had moved in with the girl I had seen at my uncle’s store with him once and had been running his mouth all over town how he had been conned by his wife and kid. Tony said that the prick had even gotten a lawyer involved, seeing as legally he was entitled to half of whatever my mother made off the sale of Nana’s house.

  Since these letters from Tony were a secret I even kept from my mother, I couldn’t tell her what my father was up to. I was glad though that as much as he tried, it was going to be well near impossible for him to ever find Isaac and Evelyn Silva. They had vanished off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.

  But all this Intel was nothing to what I really wanted to know. Cass had been the only reason that I was risking to maintain this correspondence. Tony knew that, but since she was off to College in California, and Jess in New York, it had been tricky for him to get any info on her.

  But just like the fake passports, Tony was creative in this as well. He took a part-time job at Mechanic Pete’s where Cass’s dad would spend most of his time when he was home.

  In his letters, Tony explained that Cass’s mom was doing great and was even working at Riverside now. It seemed that Mr. Mackenzie was now rejecting rig jobs left and right and preferring to spend his afternoons restoring old cars at Pete’s instead. From Tony description, it seemed like Cass’s dad was reluctant to leave home for longer periods of time that he absolutely had to. It also seemed that he was teaching Tony all the tricks in the trade since Tony would go on and on raving about him.

  I was glad that Tony was connecting to something he liked, and I was really happy that he was being molded by Cass’s dad, but the only thing that really made my day was the little information that Tony was able to get from Christopher Mackenzie.

  She had been doing well her first year of college and was working at some seafood restaurant in the San Francisco bay area. A connection from Ronnie, apparently. News on Cass was like air to me. It kept me going just long enough until his next letter arrived. But when the news was bad, that’s when my lungs would dry up in my chest. Sometimes Tony would write that Cass's father was worried about her. How she didn’t do much but study and work all the time. How she went to live off campus only after one semester and isolated herself. He was worried that she wasn’t making any friends or milking the college experience for all it was worth.

  Tony had seen her over Christmas break and said that she looked like a zombie. Living, but dead inside. Disembodied somehow. Tony begged that I let him give her the only address he had for me, but aside from that one postcard I had sent him initially, I never replied once to any of his letters. I couldn’t risk it falling into my father's hands. So since I never replied, Tony never told Cass that he had a way to reach me. It killed me, but preserving the life that my mother and I had finally built for ourselves here was a necessity.

  When we got to Canada, mom and I were at little bit lost for a while. Sure we had enough cash to start over, but this new found freedom was strange to us. We were still dealing with the ghost of our past. It was difficult to start to believe that we actually had a future now. A future that didn’t involve being beaten with a belt just for passing by the TV when a football match was on

  For the first couple
of months, we just traveled the Canadian terrain until we finally came to White Rock in British Columbia. It almost seemed like we were back home in Plymouth with the Marina overseeing the Pacific. It looked so much like home, that the place itself seemed to heal old wounds for both of us. It comforted me somewhat that Cass could be looking at the same sea back in San Francisco. The idea that she was just a day’s ride away was also a determining factor for me to choose White Rock as our new place of residence.

  Much like Cass, mom tried to persuade me to go to college while she got a job answering the phone in a dentist’s office, but all I ended up agreeing to was just take a couple of courses. I couldn’t commit to the whole college experience either. I was still very restless and I felt lost for the better part of those first couple of months.

  Then on one Sunday afternoon, while I was getting myself more acquainted with this picturesque town, I saw it. A sign on a pale blue house with dark blue shutters. There was even a tree up front with a tire swing. Not only did I leave Cass behind, but I had also left the place that felt more like home to me than any other place in the world. The Youth Center with all those kids had been as much a part of me as Cass and my mom were. This was what I needed to do. My future revealed itself with two little words: FOR SALE.

  Once my mother saw the light back in my eyes for the first time since we left Plymouth, it was easy to sell her on the idea that we should buy the house and the land around it and build our own Youth Center in White Rock. It wasn’t easy. The house was smaller than the one back home, but we rolled up our sleeves and got to work on rebuilding it in a way that would benefit the kids more. We even hired a contractor to build a gymnasium much like the one I had spent tireless hours in with Cass, Brandon and my other beloved rascals.

  Before the year ended, we had gained the community’s support as well and opened our doors in January with a little bit over thirty kids to start with.

  I finally found my place in the world, and the one thing missing was my girl’s laughter in my ears.

  I hadn’t been able to go to Vancouver for the past couple of weeks to get Tony’s letters. I thought that having a P.O.Box at our local post office was just too risky, so I had rented one instead in Vancouver. The center had occupied so much of my time that I hadn’t been able to make the 45-minute drive up there, but now as I’m sitting in my car re-reading each and every word, I curse myself for not coming sooner.

  Fuck!

  The Fucker was in prison!

  It’s finally over.

  I rest my head on the steering wheel just so I don’t pass out from every single thought that is rushing at me all at once. I feel guilt for not having warned that poor girl of the monster he was before I left. I feel relief at finally having that man behind bars where he can’t hurt anyone else ever again. My heart aches for Uncle Carlos as he is still grieving the brother that he loved so much and never once saw the devil he truly was. Most of all, I feel conflicted on what I should do next.

  My first instinct is to drive to San Francisco and see Cassandra. That’s what I want to do. But what can I tell her? With this news, she might think that we could go home now and she’d be right. I can be Isaac Silva once more. The thing was that I liked being Sean Philips. Sean was reliable, trustworthy and had no sordid past. No skeletons in his closet. He was leveled headed. Isaac was anything but. Sean was a happy, well rounded twenty-year-old. Isaac disappeared angry and disillusioned at nineteen.

  But whether or not I had decided between being Isaac or Sean, I was still certain about one thing they both had in common.

  We both loved Cassandra Mackenzie. With that thought in my head, I stepped out of the car and ransacked my trunk until I found my US passport safely hidden under the spare tire. I called my mother to cover for me at the youth center for a couple of days and that I would explain better once I returned. I heard the worry in her voice so I briefly told her that her husband was no longer a concern of ours. He wouldn’t be seeing the light of day anytime soon. This was all she needed to know to understand exactly where I was off to.

  “Give Cassandra my love.” It took me eighteen hours to finally arrive in San Francisco. I only stopped for a couple of hours to rest my eyes, but the adrenaline in me was too much to contain for me to be able to even attempt a full night’s sleep. I didn’t know where she lived, but I did know she worked in one of the restaurants in the Marina. It was Sunday so that was my best bet. If I couldn’t find her this way, then tomorrow I would have to go to Berkeley and knock on every class door until I found her.

  I got lucky on the 5th restaurant I visited. One of the waiters told me that Cass was on the day shift and she would clock out around four. At first, I couldn’t contain my excitement and thought that I would wait for her until she arrived, but I wanted privacy.

  I was a mess. I needed a shower and a change of clothes. This was not how I had envisioned seeing Cass again like a guy that lost the taste for all personal hygiene. Not like this. I guess the waiter picked up on my uneasiness.

  “If you want, you could always go to pier 5 after she clocks out.” Apparently Cass never went home before spending an hour or so watching the sunset. It bothered me that this guy knew these things about Cass, but this tidbit of information was enough to spark that little bit of hope in me. So I thanked him and left to find clean clothes and a hotel to freshen up.

  The whole ride down, I had imagined the different scenarios that could take place today. One was that she was over me and my return was just something that she wasn’t remotely affected by. The other was that she moved on and was now in a relationship with some college asshole. Both hypotheses were unacceptable to me. Even though Tony’s description of Cass had tormented me, it still gave me hope that we weren’t over. That she was still mine as much as I was hers.

  One year can change a lot of things. One year is enough to move on from the past. I did. I put all that bullshit of my previous life behind me. I just never moved on from her. But had she moved on from me?

  The hours dragged by the rest of the day, and I found myself walking to the pier two hours early. But I wanted to be as close to her as I could be. I wasn’t brave enough to peek in on her at the restaurant for the same reason I never came to San Francisco before or tried to stalk her on social media.

  If I had done any of those things I knew I couldn’t just watch her from afar. I needed to touch her. I needed to smell her hair and kiss her lips. I needed to feel her soft skin on my fingertips. Yep, stalking was not an option. It was either everything or nothing. And I had gone with nothing for too fucking long.

  It was a warm May afternoon, even though the wind was cool, the sun held enough warmth that I had left the jacket back in the car. Or maybe it was the knowledge that Cass would soon be near me that made my iced heart thaw and my body heat up with anticipation.

  No sooner did I start to imagine the different ways that this encounter on the pier could play out, that I felt it. That feeling you get in your gut that tells you that you are no longer alone and that if you turn around your life will finally begin. I closed my eyes just for a few seconds to savor this feeling. When I finally turned, there she was.

  My Cass.

  My beautiful, strong girl looking back at me as if I may disappear at any second.

  I walk slowly to her, breathing her in. The memory of her is nothing compared to the woman before me. Every strand of auburn hair, every perfect quiver of a lip, every trace of green in her eyes. I take it all in. The need to touch her is too strong, so I cradle her face in my hands, begging for her to look at me and see that I am only whole when she’s near.

  “Cassandra.” I haven’t said her name out loud for too long that even my lips miss saying the words.

  “Cass,” She closes her eyes and I feel so much, that it’s hard for me not to feel overwhelmed. I feel the tears in the back of my eyes, tears that I thought weren’t in me to shed with all the shit that I’ve gone through in my life. Only the uncertainty of this girl’s love
can bring me to my knees.

  “Are you still my girl, Cass?” My heart feels like it’s going to either burst or wither away anticipating her next words. But my girl just nods as the tears fall down her face, with the most illuminating smile on those lips that will only ever be kissed by me from this day on.

  “Now and forever.” I grab her to me and she clings to my waist with the same fevered grip. Our smiles are more felt than seen. They leave the sunset behind us jealous that it can’t compete with such a perfect feeling of true utter happiness.

  “Baby, I am going to hold you to that. You just watch me.” She leans her head back and stares at me, her eyes a mixture of wet tears and joy, her smile a challenge to take.

  “Isaac… Just kiss me already.”

  And life starts as it should.

  With a kiss.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This has been one of the most fulfilling things that I have ever done in my life. I have no words to describe how good it feels to finally achieve a dream I have had since I was 8 years old. To all the readers that bought this book, there are no words. Just by picking up a copy of “When Life Gets in the Way”, you have been able to give an aspiring author faith that her stories should be read and not tucked away in her attic. My heart is full of gratitude.

  But none of this could have happened without the love and support of some very special people.

  I would like to thank my first beta readers, the girls from the office that took some time to read my first chapters. Especially Catia Reis and Alexandra Felix for encouraging me to not stop there.