24.
Ollie
Maybe it was getting easier.
Lately, there seemed to be whole hours that would pass that I’d be busy with work and I wouldn’t think about Wren. Everything was getting done how it should be, and I could tell that Garrett was pleased I didn’t seem to have my head up in the clouds anymore.
I was in the barn getting Bebop ready to go out on a group ride, listening to Ryan and Jesse argue over the merits of rodeo as they mucked out stalls, when Garrett strolled in. He stopped and watched me for a moment, patting Bebop’s neck.
“So, I just got a call from the Ericsons,” he said. “And they were planning to bring the trailer back here tomorrow, but I guess their truck just shit the bed.” The Ericsons were an older couple who were still trying to make it on their ranch, a small place with just a few horses now, longtime friends of Garrett’s. Technically, they were our closest neighbors. They’d borrowed one of the ranch’s trailers because theirs had rusted out, due to having been out of use for so long. Garrett shook his head. “It’s just one thing after another for them,” he said. “I told them not to worry about it though, and we’d come by and get it tomorrow.” Ryan and Jesse had stopped their discussion and were listening.
“I can do it,” I offered. “I can go after I finish up the morning chores.”
Garrett nodded. “That works. I’ll give them a call and let you know. You think about ten o’clock?”
“Sure. If you think of anything else you need me to do then, just let me know.” The busier I was, the better.
That night, after the evening chores were done and supper was eaten, I headed back to my cabin, hoping the busy day had tired me out enough that I could just go to bed. I took a shower, and as I was soaping myself up and washing the grit of the day away, I started to think about Wren. Just imagining her face made me begin to get hard, and I began to jerk off but then stopped after a few strokes. I was supposed to not be thinking about her.
I turned the shower on cold and it only took a few seconds of standing under the icy water to get rid of both my hard-on and any feelings of arousal. I got out, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. The second my head hit the pillow, I knew that sleep was still hours and hours away.
And the silence was deafening. I sat up, overcome with the desire to be around people. I didn’t want to talk to them, necessarily, but I wanted to be somewhere not completely consumed by silence. In other words, I wanted to be anywhere except where I was at the moment.
The only place to really go, though, was a bar. I hadn’t been to a bar since I’d been out, and I knew I wasn’t going to the Watering Hole. I drove a few towns over to a bar called Isaac’s. I’d never been there before, but that was good; I figured there’d be no chance I’d run into anyone I knew. Hopefully, I’d be able to sit at the end of the bar and be ignored, let my thoughts get washed away amongst other people’s conversations.
But right off I knew it wasn’t going to go as I wanted. I got a spot at the bar, but it wasn’t at the end, it was closer to the middle, and though the seats next to me were empty, they weren’t for long. A girl sidled up to the bar, dyed blond hair with the roots starting to grow out, big straight teeth that reminded me of a horse’s. She wasn’t bad looking, though, and when she smiled and said “hi,” I at least felt I should acknowledge her, not to be rude.
She must have taken that as an invitation to sit down and start a conversation, because that’s exactly what she did.
“You new in town?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. My name’s Paige.” She gave me a sassy smile and held her hand out.
“Ollie,” I said. I shook her hand, though she held onto mine for a few seconds after I tried to let go.
“You just move here?” She licked her lips in what she probably thought was a seductive gesture but just reminded me of a cat after it’d finished eating.
“I grew up around here, so I guess you can’t really say that I’m new. Never been to this bar, though.”
“Yeah, I knew that for certain. I would’ve recognize you if you’d been in here before. I’d never forget someone as good looking as you.”
I smiled wanly, not wanting to be rude but also not wanting to get into whatever it was she was looking for. “I’m not really looking for that sort of thing right now.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What sort of thing? I’m being friendly, is all.”
“Well, that’s mighty kind of you.”
“Everyone could use a friend, right?”
I took a sip of my beer. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
She looked over at my hands. “You married?”
“No ma’am.”
“So, you’re not married but you’re at a bar alone. And you say you’re not looking for that sort of thing. What are you looking for, then?”
I considered this. “I don’t know. Probably nothing that I could find at a bar, so maybe I should get going.” Sleep was still a far way’s off, but I could always drive around for a while.
But Paige was still giving me that coy look, as though I was nothing more than a simple challenge she was certain she’d be able to conquer by the night’s end. “I could try to help you figure it out. You might have a lot of fun—you just don’t know it yet.”
“I’m not looking for fun right now, either.”
“Everybody’s looking for fun.”
She reached over and put her hand on my leg, inching it up toward my crotch. I grabbed her wrist; not tight enough to hurt but enough so she’d know I meant business.
“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” I said in an even tone. “I just want to be left alone.”
She yanked her arm back, a wounded look on her face. “Then why come out to a bar?” she asked as she got up off the stool. “That’s about the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard.”
“There a problem over here?”
A guy around my age had come over, looking first at me then at Paige. His face was flushed and the smell of booze was strong on his breath. They looked similar, had the same teeth. Brother and sister.
“He hurt you?” he asked Paige.
She rubbed her wrist. “He grabbed me.”
The guy turned to me. “Don’t you understand what it means when a girl says ‘no’?”
“Sure do,” I said, waiting for Paige to interrupt and tell her brother that it was the other way around—that I had been the one not interested in her advances. I realized a second later though, how very stupid that thought of mine was. She wasn’t going to say word one about it.
And her brother took my response as wising off. Anger flared in his eyes and he grabbed me, jerking me off the stool. I tried to get my feet under me but he used his momentum and the fact that I was stumbling to fling me into the side of one of the tables, the corner catching me right in the solar plexus. Would’ve been the perfect shot if he’d been trying to get an inanimate object to give me the Heimlich, but I wasn’t choking on anything. The people sitting at the nearby tables got up, taking their drinks with them. No one seemed that surprised that this was happening; it was probably some sort of regular occurrence.
“I’m getting real sick of out-of-towners like yourself coming into our place and mouthing off.”
He kicked me and my knee buckled but I remained on my feet, the pain coursing through my whole body like poison.
“Not so much of a big shot now, are you? You want to grab me? Go ahead. Grab me. I’ll give you a free shot.” When I didn’t make a move to hit him, he lashed out with his right arm, catching me on the side of the head. It felt like my brain was bouncing off the inside of my skull, there was a ringing in my ears. The urge to hit him flared but I kept my clenched fists at my side, which only seemed to enrage him further.
“Not so sure of yourself now, are you?” he taunted, his blows coming in harder and faster, to the point that I could no longer feel them because my whole body had gone numb.
“I think you’ve taught him a lesson, Ernie,” someone said. Other people started chiming in.
“Yeah, man, enough.”
“He’s not even fighting back.”
“How’s that guy even still on his feet?”
“If he’d hit back, I bet he’d have a great career in the UFC!”
Finally, the guy stopped, his breathing heavy, the anger still flashing through his eyes. His knuckles were bright red on both hands.
“I don’t know what the fuck your deal is, man,” he said, “but you’re sure as shit not welcome here. So, time to get the fuck out before I change my mind and take you outside and fuckin curb your ass.”
There was laughter now. “Ernie, you’re not going to curb anyone.”
“You’re gonna have to walk a few miles to find a curb.”
I headed for the door, though it felt like I was floating a few inches above my body, and I had to try to control it the way you had to control a car in a video game. I passed Paige on my way out, who had started the whole thing, and though she had the faint trace of a smile on her face, I could see she felt bad.
“Why didn’t you hit him back?” a guy with a goatee and lots of acne asked. He held the door open for me. “You should’ve hit him back.” He shook his head. He felt bad for me too, I could tell, or maybe he just thought I was stupid.
I limped outside, my face feeling swollen and hot, my ribs aching. Now that I was in the fresh air, I could suddenly feel every ache and pain and I was barely able to make it over to my truck. Why hadn’t I hit him back? It wasn’t that I’d been afraid of him. It wasn’t that I’d been afraid if I started to hit him, I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I wanted to know that I could stand there and take it. That I had the self-control to not fight back, even if it was in a situation where I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I opened the door to the truck and crawled in. I reclined the seat all the way back and lay there, tasting blood from a cut in my mouth. I think I passed out for a little while, because when I came to, the parking lot was empty and the bar had closed. My whole body felt stiff and was throbbing in pain.
“Fuck,” I said. I sat up, moved the seat forward, and fumbled for the keys. Driving was probably not the smartest idea right now, but I didn’t want to still be in the parking lot when the sun rose. I needed to get back to the ranch.
I made it, somehow. I parked the truck near the barn so the headlights wouldn’t wake up anyone sleeping in the cabins, and I gingerly walked to my own cabin. All I wanted to do was sleep.
I had to force myself up on time the next morning. The pain felt a thousand times more intense than it had the night before, though the swelling in my face had not gotten worse. I looked at myself in the little mirror above the bathroom sink. Luckily, I wasn’t planning on doing any group rides today, and if I had to, I could probably steer clear of the guests. And if any of them asked, I could say I’d gone bull riding and gotten thrown.
“Rough night last night?” Ryan asked, eyeing my face.
“Something like that.”
“Shit. That’s hurtin’ for certain.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, you’re still planning to get the horse trailer from the Ericsons?”
“Shit.” I nodded, even
though I’d completely forgotten that Garrett had asked me if I’d be able to get
the trailer. “Yeah, I’m still planning on it. What time is it?”
“Nine-thirty. You told Garrett ten, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did.” I couldn’t remember exactly what time I’d said, but that
seemed right. “I better go get the keys.”
I went back to the cabin and found the keys, then limped back toward the truck, which was where I had left it last night. Garrett was down at the barn, talking with Ryan about something. He frowned when he saw me.
“What in hell happened to you?” Garrett asked, eyeing my face.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“It don’t look fine. You look like you should be lying in bed with an ice pack on your face.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
Garrett gave me a long look. Things had been going pretty well lately, at least in terms of gates not being left open or water being left on; the ranch had been running smoothly and I hoped he was realizing that I was handling my shit.
“It was a misunderstanding,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Looks painful. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go get the trailer.”
“No, I can go.”
He shook his head. “It’s just going to upset Maureen Ericson if you show up there with your face looking like that. Trust me, it will.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s no problem. I’ll take this truck, though, save me a trip back up to the house to get my keys.”
I hesitated, but then handed him the keys. “Thank you,” I said.
“Wait a second—I thought Ollie was going to do it,” Ryan said.
“He was,” Garrett said, “but I’m going instead.”
“Don’t you think Ollie should go?”
“Did you not just hear the conversation we had?” Garrett asked, a note of irritation in his voice. He started to walk over to the truck.
Ryan’s eyes widened. “Wait!” he said.
Garrett stopped. “What?”
“You can’t take the truck,” Ryan said.
“What do you mean I can’t?” Garrett said. “This is my truck. It won’t take me that long.”
“No, you just can’t.” His face was turning red.
Garrett looked at me and then back at Ryan. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but unless you give me a good reason why I can’t take this truck, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“I cut the brake line.”
He mumbled it, and for a second I thought I misheard him, because why the hell would he do something like that?
Garrett, though, did not. “You cut the brake line.” He stepped right up to Ryan, and waited until Ryan looked him in the eye before he continued. “Why in hell would you do something like that?”
“I . . . it was supposed to . . . .”
“Don’t pussy out, now,” Garrett said, a hard edge in his voice that I’d never heard before. “You had the balls to go out and do this in the first place; man up and tell me why.”
“Keith and Jacob wanted me to.”
A muscle in Garrett’s jaw twitched. “Why?”
“Because . . . because they wanted to get rid of him.” He looked at me. “They didn’t want him running this place.”
“And so you were going to try to kill him?”
“No!” Ryan shook his head. “No, I wasn’t going to kill him. I’m not a murderer.”
“But you assumed he wouldn’t notice the brakes had been tampered with until he was going too fast and tried to slow down. At which point the situation would be completely out of your control, so he very well could have been killed.”
“They just wanted him to get banged up. Maybe enough so he couldn’t work on the ranch anymore. Or, he’d get into an accident and total the truck and you’d fire him.”
“You’re a fool,” Garrett said. “You’re a fool and my two sons that put you up to this are fools. This isn’t like the goddamn movies—I’d know the second I braked for the first time that something was wrong.”
Ryan kicked the ground. “Keith said—”
“Keith’s a fool.”
Garrett took a step back but then narrowed his eyes. “Now that I’m learning of this little plan my sons hatched, it would probably be fair to assume that you and they were responsible for the other things that have been happening around here? The horse getting out? The water being left on? That poor girl’s saddle slipping?”
Ryan shot me a look. “Yes,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, and I kept waiting to wake up. It had to be a dream; there was no other way.
But it seemed to be reality, because I could feel the hot sun beating down on the top of my head, could smell the hay and hear one of the horses in the pasture whinnying. If Ryan was telling the truth about all of this, then that meant I wasn’t going crazy. It meant I wasn’t losing my mind.
It also meant that I had broken up with Wren for absolutely no reason at all.
Garrett rubbed his hand across his face. “Well, I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Seems to me we’ve got quite a situation here. My sons—I’ll deal with them later. We could press charges and you could go to prison for this sort of thing, you know that?”
Ryan paled visibly. “It wasn’t supposed to be—”
Garrett turned me.
“Ollie, what do you think we should do? You’re the one they were out to get
with all of this. How do you feel about it?”
I felt like my head was spinning. It was too much to take in all at once, and I
couldn’t even begin to think of what should happen to Ryan.
“I don’t know,” I said. I
looked at Ryan. “Why did you do all this? Never mind me getting hurt—it
could’ve been one of the guests. And Ditto! He’s dead. Why? Why would you do
this for them?”
“They said if you were out of the picture then they’d put me in charge of
running the ranch.”
Garrett laughed. “Now that’s a good one. Except my sons failed to take into account that I am still the owner.”
“They said they’d convince you to let them take the place over.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell, now.” Garrett shook his head. “I’ve got half a mind to call the authorities and have them take you in. But what I think we’re going to do instead is have you pack your shit and get the hell out of here. And don’t think that we ranch owners don’t talk, that we don’t know each other. You’re never going to find work on another ranch again, if I have anything to do about it. You took a gamble, son, and it didn’t work out. Now get the fuck out of here before I change my mind.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan mumbled before he hurried off.
Garrett and I just stood there, neither of us saying anything. I could see how agitated he was, absorbing the full effect of Ryan’s words. It wasn’t so much the stuff that Ryan had done, but the fact that Keith and Jacob had put him up to it in the first place. It was hard to wrap my mind around.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a minute.
He looked at me, eyebrows raised. “What do you have to be sorry for? You’re not the one who should be standing here apologizing. Those shitbag sons of mine should.”
“They didn’t agree with having me back here. If I hadn’t come back, none of this would have happened.”
“That’s a shit way to look at it,” Garrett said. “You’re the best worker I’ve got. And this isn’t their ranch, and it never will be now. Goddammit.”
“I need to borrow your truck,” I said. All I could think of was Wren. I needed to see her.
Garrett nodded. “Go right ahead.”
I knew she wasn’t there the second I stepped through the doors. The place was full of customers, the whole counter was full, but I knew Wren was not working.
“Hey, be with you in one second,” Lena said as she rushed by. She looked up and saw that it was me.
“Oh,” she said. “Um, hi.”
“Is Wren here?”
“No.”
“Is she coming in later?”
Lena’s eyes darted from the left then to the right. “I might as well tell you!” she exclaimed. “She called the other day and said she wasn’t coming back!”
“What?!”
“I guess she just likes it out there so much! I don’t know what to think of it myself, or what’s going to happen here, but for now I’m just going with the flow and trying not to stress out!” Her voice was getting higher with each note. “I’ve got to get these dishes back to the kitchen.”
She rushed off and I just stood there, catching bits and pieces of the surrounding conversations. I turned and went outside, pulling my phone out of my pocket as I did so. It went straight to voicemail when I called. I thought about leaving a message but then hung up right as the beep was going off. What I needed to say wasn’t something you could leave in a message for someone. I had to say it to her in person.
Looks like I’d be going out to San Francisco, after all.
I was not a city person by any stretch of the imagination; I’d only been to Denver a handful of times, and I’d always been aching to get back to the ranch after a few hours.
Getting a ticket on such short notice meant I was paying an astronomical fee, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even bother to call Darren to tell him I was coming out; I figured I’d just get in touch with him once I arrived. I packed lightly, stuffing a few pairs of jeans and some work shirts and clean socks into a duffel bag.
San Francisco International Airport wasn’t actually located in San Francisco; it was south of the city, so I had to take a cab. I’d never been in a cab before, and it felt strange to be sitting in the backseat while the guy in the front drove, a plastic partition separating us. The red numbers on the cab’s meter ticked up every few seconds.
“So . . . would you like to be more specific with where I’m taking you?” the cab driver asked after a minute. When I’d first gotten in, I’d only said I wanted to go to the city. I’d tried to call Darren but he hadn’t picked up, and now I wasn’t quite sure where I was supposed to go.
“Uh . . . well, I’m not too familiar with this place, is the thing.”
“Where are you staying?”
“With my brother.”
“Okay. Where does he live?”
“I don’t know.”
The cab driver looked at me in the rearview mirror, only his eyes and his eyebrows visible. He didn’t need to tell me how skeptical he was of my response.
“You don’t know,” he repeated.
“I don’t. I mean, I bet
he’ll call me back soon, and then I’ll know. Where’s a popular spot people go?”
“I’ll take you downtown,” he said. “It’s a central area. The city isn’t very
big anyway. Seven miles by seven miles. Did you know that?”
“I did not. That doesn’t seem very big at all.”
“So, wherever your
brother lives, you won’t be too far. You can access BART, Muni, more cabs from
downtown. Lots of restaurants, shopping. You don’t look like you’re someone
who’s that interested in shopping, though. Where are you from?”
“Colorado.”
“Is this a vacation for you?”
“Sort of. The girl I broke up with is out here and I need to find her.” There was something about being in the cab, with the partition between us, his back to me, the scenery rushing by outside, something about all of that made it easy to talk. Maybe it was because I didn’t know the guy, maybe it was because I knew I’d never see him again, but I found myself overcome with the urge to tell him exactly what I was doing, and why. “I broke up with this girl that I was in love with, and I realize now that I shouldn’t have.”
“Mmm.” He nodded. “I have heard similar stories like this one. San Francisco is a very romantic city; if you are going to win someone back, this is one of the best places to do it.”
“That gives me some hope.”
“Why did you break up
with this woman if you loved her so much?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Sometimes, at the time, we think we’re doing the right thing, only to later realize that it wasn’t. I know the feeling well, my friend.”
“Yeah, except I knew at the time it wasn’t right. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I still went ahead and did it anyway.” Just saying it out loud made me realize how foolish I’d been.
The cab driver dropped me off in what I guessed was downtown. A trolley trundled by, commuters zipped past on bicycles, cars honked their horns. Families bustled around me, carrying shopping bags, holding their phones out to take pictures, I caught bits and pieces of a lively conversation in a language I couldn’t understand. There was so much happening, in every direction, it seemed. I felt my heart begin to speed up and I wondered if this had been a mistake, coming out here. I was standing there, amongst all these people, all this activity, yet I felt more alone than I ever had.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I took my phone out and checked to see if Wren or my brother had called me back. Neither of them had.
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but would you mind taking our picture?”
I looked up from my phone to see a young woman holding hers out to me. A guy was standing next to her, looking a little embarrassed.
“It’s really okay, you don’t have to—” he started, but the girl cut him off.
“Sean, he doesn’t mind. Do you?” The girl had wavy brown hair the breeze kept blowing across her face. She brushed it back and held her other hand out to me, palm down. A rather large diamond ring glittered on her ring finger. “He proposed to me this morning! At the Palace of Fine Arts. It was so beautiful! And I was completely surprised—”
“He doesn’t need the whole story,” the guy said, but he was trying not to smile and I could tell he was just as happy about the whole thing as she was.
“Sure,” I said, sliding my phone into my pocket. “I’d be happy to take your picture.”
“Thanks so much! I’m trying to document everything we do today, and I wanted to get a picture of us downtown. We’ll stand here so the Financial District is in the background.”
He put his arm around her, and they stood there, big grins on their faces, the tall buildings and skyscrapers rising in the background of the photo. I took a few pictures and then gave her the phone back.
“Thank you so much!” the girl said. “I hope you have a great day!”
I smiled and waved as they turned and started walking down the street. Her good mood was infectious, and I felt a renewed hope. I pulled my phone out of my pocket again and called Darren. It rang five times and then he picked up.
“Ollie?” he said. “Is that really you?”
“Hi. Yeah, it’s me. Sorry to keep calling you.”
“No, that’s fine, I
would’ve picked up the first time but I was in the shower. What’s up?
Everything okay?”
“I’m here,” I said.
There was a pause. “Here? Where do you mean?”
“Here in San Francisco.
I’m . . . I’m downtown, I think. There’s lots of stores.”
“Wait, what? You’re really here?”
“Yeah. I know it’s probably unexpected, but . . . I needed to talk to Wren. Is
she there?”
“No, she went out. I’m heading into the office for a little bit, so she went
over to Golden Gate Park. She left maybe an hour ago. Why don’t you hail a cab
and come up to the house? I’m at—”
“No, that’s okay. I’m going to go find her.”
“The park is pretty big. I’d say call her but she left her phone here. I think by accident, but maybe on purpose, who knows. Are you sure you don’t want to hang out here at the house until she gets back?”
“The whole reason I came out here was to talk to her.”
“By talk to her do you mean tell her you realized you two actually
belong together?”
“Did she say something to you?”
“No. Well, she’s said plenty, but we’ve tried to keep you off limits in terms of topics of conversation. Which, if you want my opinion, is a good sign; if she was able to talk about you that means she’d be over you. Which I don’t think she is.”
“I’m hoping that’s the case. So, I’m just going to head over there. I’ll see you later on today though.”
I hailed a cab and told the driver I wanted to go to Golden Gate Park.
“Where in the park?” he asked.
“Um . . . I don’t know. Someone’s there that I need to find, but I don’t know where exactly she is. Just that she’s at Golden Gate Park.”
The cabbie gave me a skeptical look. “There’s a million places she could be then.”
“What’s a popular spot?”
“I’ll drop you off at the Conservatory of Flowers. Does she like flowers?”
“Um, I think so—”
“Of course she does—all girls like flowers. That’s as good a place as any to start looking, at least.”
As we drove, he kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, as if he thought he knew me or wanted to say something. I tried to ignore it at first but he kept doing it.
“Is there something you want to ask me?” I finally said, trying to keep my tone neutral.
He sighed. “I’m sorry; I know it probably seems like I keep looking back at you. Well, it seems that way because I am, but not for the reasons you think.”
“You know what I’m
thinking?”
“I’m not gay. I’m not checking you out.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.” Though now that he mentioned it, I supposed it seemed as good a reason as any for him to keep looking back at me the way he was.
“Not everyone in this city is a homosexual.”
“I didn’t think they were.”
“So, that’s not why I’m looking at you.”
“Are you going to tell me why, then?”
He paused, and for a moment it seemed that after all that, he wasn’t going to tell me. He sighed again. “You’re not from around here, I can tell. So, that leads me to believe you’ve come out here to find some girl. Maybe some girl you met online, maybe some girl who broke your heart, I don’t know the details. But you came out here to find a girl, and for that reason, you remind me of me.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, you’re sort of right. I was the one who broke up with her, but . . . I realized that was a mistake. I don’t know if it’s too late to do something about it.”
“It probably is,” the cabbie said. “It was for me, anyway. I came out here from Oklahoma. I was twenty, so that was, what, ten, fifteen years ago? It was a while ago, anyway. I’d broken up with my girlfriend because we’d been going out since freshman year of high school and I thought I needed to see what other fish were swimming in the sea. Which is a strange metaphor for me to use because I fucking hate swimming and I also hate fish. But that’s what kept repeating in my head at the time, and, if I recall correctly, those were actually the words I was foolish enough to utter to her. Well, let me be the first to tell you that there aren’t that many fish swimming in the sea, at least not in Carver, where we lived. So, I tried to get back in touch with her, with Annie, but she’d moved out here to San Francisco. You see, she’d always been happy living in Carver, liked being a small-town girl, but then she was so heartbroken over our break up that she decided she needed to do something drastic, so she moved out here.”
I shifted in the seat, a feeling of discomfort coursing through my gut. Obviously his story did not have the ending that he wanted it to, and there were quite a few similarities to my own.
“So, I came out here, just like you, feeling as out of place as you look. This also being at a time before everyone had cell phones, so matters were a bit more complicated. But I didn’t care. It took me almost three weeks of walking the streets, sitting in cafes, going in and out of stores, before I finally—finally!—found her. In Golden Gate Park, as a matter of fact. Not at the Conservatory of Flowers, though, no she was out on Martin Luther King Drive, rollerblading. She zipped right past me and would have kept on going but I called her name and she stopped. She was with another guy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Well, the guy she was rollerblading with was gay—you should’ve seen how short the shorts were he was wearing—but that’s not the point. The point is, he was kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk, in which time Annie told me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d broken her heart and she’d never forgive me for it. Yet she also thanked me because if I hadn’t broken up with her, she probably never would have moved out here to begin with.”
I swallowed, even though my throat felt like sandpaper. Sure, some of the details were different, but the major points were all the same. I’d broken up with Wren, so she came out here and if I were to find her, she’d just send me packing, though not before thanking me for—inadvertently—setting her life on a new course.
“I realize that’s probably not what you want to hear,” the cab driver continued, “but I am just struck by the similarities. We can hope that your ending goes better than mine.”
“You’re still out here,” I said. “Why did you stay?”
“At first I stayed because I thought she’d change her mind. We’d been together for so long, had so many good memories together, I figured she just needed some time to be angry at me, to punish me, and then we’d get back together. But . . . that never happened. She meant it when she said she had moved on. It was the biggest mistake of my life, and one that I wasn’t able to undo.”
We sat in silence for the rest of the drive. I didn’t know what to say other than his little story had completely freaked me out, because of course that’s exactly what was going to happen to me, too. Even though this whole time I told myself it didn’t matter if she turned me down—what mattered was just telling her, regardless of her response—that was bullshit. I wanted to tell her and have her say she forgave me and she wasn’t planning on staying out here forever and we could go back to Colorado and pretend that whole thing had never happened.
But I knew it didn’t work that way.
You couldn’t erase the memory of something no matter how hard you tried, or how much you wanted to. Even if you were able to scrub it from your waking thoughts, it would resurface later as a dream. That was something I knew all too well.
When we got to the park, he wished me luck, gave me a look that might’ve been pity or maybe empathy, and then drove off. I stood there for a moment, trying to get my bearings. What I needed to do was forget about that whole conversation, but that was impossible. I felt as though I’d just had a dozen cups of coffee in quick succession. I started to walk toward the Conservatory, which was a large, white, dome-shaped greenhouse with smaller buildings flanking both sides. Beds of brightly colored flowers set amidst the vibrant green grass. It would be easy enough to get distracted by the scenery, so I tore my eyes away from the flowers and looked at the people. None of them were Wren.
I climbed the steps and went into the greenhouse. General admission was eight dollars, which would be worth it even if I didn’t find Wren here because the whole place felt like you had stepped into another world. I felt myself start to calm down a little. I had no idea what most of the plants and flowers were called, but you didn’t need to know specific names to appreciate the beauty. It felt soothing to be there, and I figured if Wren was going to be anywhere in the park, there was probably a good chance she was here.
I wandered through the different sections, each room representing a different climate. The room with the orchids was warm and humid, and though the flowers were beautiful, I could only stand to be in that temperature for a few minutes. I looked at each person’s face as I made my way through. No Wren.
Being in there lulled me into a sort of waking dream, where it felt as though I could just wander amongst the plants forever. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to face the reality that maybe I’d come out here for no reason, maybe I wouldn’t find her, or, if I did, she’d tell me to go to hell.
Finally, though, I made myself leave.
After I left the greenhouse, I walked down the steps and then followed one of the paths to the Dahlia Garden. I looked at the brightly-colored flowers and tried to think about where I should go next. There were other places in the park, but I didn’t have a map. I figured I could just start walking, and maybe end up walking the entire city, if I had to.
But as I was passing the stairs that led back to the entrance of the Conservatory, I stopped in my tracks.
There she was.
Sitting there on the steps, looking down as she dug through her purse.
I walked closer but stopped a few feet away. She continued to rummage, oblivious to the people passing by.
“Shit,” she said, under hear breath, but loud enough that I could hear. “Of all the days to forget my phone . . . .”
I took another couple of steps, close enough now to touch her. “You can use my phone,” I said.