Chapter Fourteen
Tristan
“Tristan, we have to go baby,” Elly’s voice floated down the hall.
I was sitting in the living room with one baby in my lap and the other sitting down by my feet playing with his blocks. Some days I woke up with this crazy urge to be a stay at home dad. It was getting so hard to leave them, especially since that they were old enough to notice and make a fuss when I did. It was also hard for me to imagine that my entire life I swore I would never make a baby. Bringing kids into the world was cruel and unusual punishment for everyone involved. I looked at them and realized how wrong I had been. I shuddered to think about what would have happened if I’d never met Elly and they’d never been born.
Little Eli started saying Dada first when they were about nine months old. I wish I could describe how that made me feel, but there aren’t any words for it. Patrick picked it up quickly after that, and when they know I’m leaving, they chase after me saying it over and over until I think I’m going to have to quit leaving and stay home with them forever. Either that or take them with me everywhere I go. I love them more than I ever imagined loving anything or anyone besides Elly. It was a different kind of love, but just as strong. Sometimes it made me resent my parents that much more for being able to do the things to me that they did. I could kill anyone that tried to hurt these babies in any way, with my bare hands…I was sure of it.
“Tristan!” Elly called out to me again. The house was big and she was probably making the rounds through it, looking for us. When she finally found us she said, “You were ignoring me, weren’t you?”
I smiled and said, “Absolutely. Can the boys go with us this morning?”
“I’m not sure they’d be too cooperative in that little green room over at ABC.” She came over and scooped Patrick up off the floor. He squealed as she started kissing him all over his face. They were teething again and he slobbered like a faucet. Elly didn’t care, she kissed him anyways. When she finished with him she handed him to me and picked up Eli, doing the same to him. “Brandi’s here,” she said then. “You’re going to be late.”
With a sigh, I picked up both the boys and kissed their little, fat faces. I carried them to the dining room where Brandi was putting their breakfast on the table and I sat them in their high chairs. I kissed them on top of the head one more time. I really didn’t want to leave them.
“We won’t be long, Brandi,” Elly told her as we were leaving.
“Take your time,” she said, “Good luck, Tristan.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
Brandy quipped, “It’s live television, so watch the potty mouth.”
“No one has any fu—”
“Tristan!” Since the boys were old enough to make sounds, Elly had made me promise not to say fuck in front of them, ever. It had taken some doing since that eliminated half of my functioning vocabulary, but that would have been my first slip in a long time.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just going to say none of you have any faith in my good sense. But since you knew how I was going to phrase it…I guess I can see why.” Brandi and Elly both laughed and the boys, thinking we were laughing about them since they were usually the center of all the action, giggled too. It was so cute I had to go kiss them again.
“Let’s go, potty mouth,” Elly told me.
Elly drove us to Burbank in her SUV. The traffic was pretty light since it was so early. On the way home, we wouldn’t be so lucky. I wanted to take the bike but she didn’t want me looking wind-blown on TV, she said. We’d be sitting bumper to bumper on the I-5 somewhere before the day is over and then she’d wish she had listened to me. The one thing I hated about L.A. is the traffic. When I was on the bike, I could make my own lanes most of the time.
We made it to the studio and into the green room where we were supposed to wait just in the nick of time, apparently. Everyone looked really nervous like they were afraid I wasn’t going to show, even my own band.
“Hey, guys!” I said when we sat down.
“Hey,” the three guys said back.
Carl, the drummer said, “That hot girl from that new comedy show is on right now.” He pointed up at the television and we all looked up.
I didn’t think she was all that hot. She had big tits and a nice ass, but her nose was funny and her hair looked fake. Elly was hotter, but if I said that right then it would have embarrass her, so I didn’t. Instead I said, “Why don’t you go for it, Carl?”
“Nah, she’s way out of my league,” he said.
“That’s what I thought about Elly,” I told him. “Just look at us now.”
Carl looked over at Elly and smiled. Then he said, “He’s right, you know. A girl like you is not supposed to be hanging around bad boys like us.”
Elly was nodding as she said, “I know but I’ve always had a thing for the bad boys.”
We chatted with the band for a while and when Hot Girl came back in the room, they called me out to make-up. Elly kissed me and wished me luck. I was praying that Jerry gave them the list of things not to talk about…one of which was my parents.
I got all made up and prissy like a girl and then they called me out. The studio audience was a lot smaller than a concert one but it was still cool that they all got to their feet for me when I came out. I waved and blew kisses and played to the crowd like Elly told me too. It was an older crowd, but they still seemed to like me. I had to hug or kiss all five of the women hostesses of the show before we all took a seat at the big dining room table on the center of the set.
“So, Tristan, we hear you’re making a new CD,” the lady who was a retired news anchor said. “What can you tell us about it? When’s it coming out?”
“It should be out on the Tuesday before Halloween,” I told her. “I think it’s my best one yet. My band is just amazing and, best of all, my wife agreed to do a duet with me on this one.”
“Aw, that’s sweet,” one of the other ladies said. “Is it a song you wrote?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of a song about us. I think it’s going to be the best one on the CD.”
“Tristan, we heard you had twin boys! What’s that like?” asked another woman.
I couldn’t see myself on the monitor, but I’m sure my chest was puffed out and I was beaming as I said, “It’s indescribable. They’re so amazing, I can’t stop looking at them some days.”
The ladies smiled and then one of them said, “Do you have any pictures of them?”
Elly and I had tried to keep their little faces out of the media, but the paparazzi had caught us out shopping or eating more than once and snapped pictures and printed them without our permission. We talked about it before I came on the show and decided that since those pictures were out there, it would be safe to show them off now. I took one of them out of my wallet that had been taken on their first birthday. One of the ladies handed it to the camera man and within seconds my handsome boys were on the big screen.
“Oh, Tristan! They’re beautiful!” The ladies told me. I knew that already, but politely thanked them anyways.
“Tristan, I’m going to ask you something, and it’s okay if you don’t care to talk about it…” I was thinking, fuck! She’s going to ask about my parents or the boy band. Instead she said, “I hear you’re about five years clean and sober now. For some of our young viewers who might be struggling with addiction, maybe you could share your secret.”
“Honestly, I don’t have a secret. I owe my sobriety to my wife Elly. She’s the one who made me realize that my life was worth more than that. Once I realized it was worth more, I wanted more. I’m a better man, a better human being than I ever was and I owe it all to her.”
“Well, they say behind every great man is an even greater woman.”
“That’s my Elly,” I told her, honestly, “Only she’s not behind me, ever. She’s always beside me. She’s my biggest inspiration, my biggest fan, and the love of my life all rolled into one.”
The ladies at the table were all saying, “Awwwww….” and so was the audience.
“I have a question,” the lady who used to be a stand-up comedian said. “I heard that you flew out to New York a few months ago to visit a sick little girl in the hospital.”
“Yeah, her name was Becca and she was twelve.” It made my chest hurt to talk about her. I’d only met the little girl once at the urging of my agent. He was only interested in the publicity it would generate. I saw how brave she was and how beautiful she was and it really affected me. She died about a month later. It still hurt me to be reminded of that. “She loved math and animals and soccer. She was an example of the kind of person I wanted to be. She had acute lymphoma and she told me she knew she was going to die. She passed away about a month after I saw her.
“That’s so sad,” the news anchor said.
“Yeah, it was really sad for us as humans because it’s one less good person in the world. In twelve short years I think she had learned more about human nature and compassion that most of us learn in our lifetime, or she was just born with it. Either way, the world was lucky to have her, if only for a little while.”
“That was a good thing you did,” one of the other ladies said, “You must be one of those good human beings yourself.”
“I hope so, but the truth is I owe my life to the love of a twelve year old girl.”
They looked shocked by that and one of them said, “What do you mean?”
“Elly always tells me she was twelve when she fell in love with me. I’m glad she didn’t know me then because I wouldn’t have been deserving. But she held onto that for a lot of years and that’s why I’m alive today, I guarantee you. So, like I said, I owe my life to the love of a twelve year old.”
I was glad after they took their break then they said it was time to perform. I joined my band up on the little stage in the corner of the set and I was back in my element. We did one of the songs from the new CD and the audience loved it. After we performed, the ladies had a few more questions for me, nothing major, and that was it. I walked off that stage realizing that this talk show thing wasn’t as bad as I’d been afraid it would be. I knew one of these days someone was going to ask me about my parents….or worse yet, interview them. For the moment, I was just thankful they didn’t.