Chapter 30
Feeling satisfied hunger wise, I left the restaurant determined to sort out the shit in my head.
I decided to keep driving south but first I was going to turn off my phone.
I had received far too many text messages and phone calls and I couldn’t deal with them right now.
Roxy could assure everyone I was okay but needed space.
Still…I had messages and/or missed calls from my mom, my grandparents, Roxy, Cy…
and even though I only saw the first line of what he’d written, I knew he was really pissed.
I even had a message from Mick, meaning he must have made it.
We’d invited him to the wedding, not wanting him to feel left out, but we’d assured him he didn’t need to attend if he didn’t want to.
Jesus. I’d let so many people down.
There was radio silence, however, from Braden. Not that I’d expected to hear from him. Were the tables turned, I wouldn’t want to talk to him…maybe ever again. I’m so sorry I did this to you.
But now I knew it would have been worse to have gone through with it, to keep lying to him. He deserved so much more.
I turned off my phone, needing to ignore the world for now.
I should have probably sent a text to my mother at least, letting her know I was okay, and I decided to call her later, when my emotions were even calmer.
For now, though, I trusted that Roxy was handling the fallout.
God, I owed her big time. Maybe I’d pay for a vacation for her like I was my mom.
And, for just a brief moment, I felt queasy again, lightheaded and full of doubt. For the time being, the money was finally rolling in for Once Upon a Riot—but this…this could break up the band. In terms of money, that meant it would probably dry up pretty quickly.
But I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to first get my head on straight.
Buckling myself in Roxy’s car that, thankfully, handled like a dream, I began driving south again.
When I spotted a huge outdoor recreation store, I decided to take a chance that they might sell coats or jackets.
I managed to find a light blue hoodie that had sported pretty font and drawings of Colorado Wildflowers on the front.
Even though it was overpriced, I felt like it was worth every penny.
Then I got back in the car, driving farther from the wedding.
Soon I came to a junction. I could go east, west, or south.
East would eventually get me home to Nopal, following the path of the Arkansas River.
West would take me over the Continental Divide…
and a sign told me, if I kept going south, I’d be heading toward Monte Vista.
Why not?
Near the south edge of town, I stopped at another gas station and bought several bottles of water.
If I was going to drive for as long as I felt like I needed to, I’d need to be hydrated.
When I got back in the car, I pulled onto the road heading south and turned on Roxy’s CD player…
turning it right back off when Zack’s voice filled the car singing “Sweet Love.” Although it warmed my heart that my best friend clearly did like our music, I didn’t want to hear it right now.
Silence it was.
Besides, hadn’t I wanted quiet time for myself?
I’d barely left Poncha Springs before the road started to climb and I drove past a green-and-white sign that told me Poncha Pass Summit was seven miles away.
I felt nervous, because I’d never driven over a pass before but, as I continued to climb, I relaxed.
There were no sheer drop-offs on my side, and I loved feeling like I was in nature.
There was still plenty of snow everywhere but on the road, and the deciduous trees were still bare, not waking up from their winter sleep yet, but the conifers kept my journey full of pine green.
Ten minutes after getting in the car, I reached the summit and pulled over in the parking area.
The sign said I was just above nine-thousand feet—but it didn’t look like it at all.
The mountains were so close up. All I could see were peaks all around, many of them wearing snowy caps, and if I hadn’t just climbed several thousand feet, I would have found it hard to believe I was on a summit.
There was plenty of snow on the ground except where there was asphalt, covering the small flat meadows tucked inside the bowl of mountains.
I got out of the car to walk around a bit, wishing the clouds would go away. It felt fairly cold but the hoodie took the edge off. Maybe now would be a good time to call my mom. Fetching my phone out of the car, I turned it back on and waited.
But, of course, there was no signal.
Maybe it was better that way, because I hadn’t come to any conclusions about my rash behavior…or my decision to go it alone. Every minute I got farther away, I was beginning to form an idea of who I should be.
That notion was still in its infancy, though, and I’d need to spend more time not doing anything—not driving, not looking at scenery—to figure it all out.
And then I remembered something from my childhood.
The Great San Dunes were somewhere south of here, near Alamosa.
I remembered loving trekking up and down the dunes, splashing in runoff that constituted a makeshift creek, pretending like I was on a beach somewhere.
I also had a memory of my grandpa renting a snowboard so I could slide down the dunes at high speed.
I’d loved it there…and maybe that was where I could reflect and figure out my mess of a life.
Soon, I was back in the car, feeling like I finally had some purpose.
This side of the pass seemed easy enough to drive down without feeling like I had to keep braking, and it wasn’t long before the view took my breath away.
Suddenly, I was in a huge valley that appeared to widen the farther south it went.
It was prairie-like, but not like the prairie where I’d grown up.
There was a lot more brush here and fewer cacti—but it still felt like Colorado.
The clouds were starting to blow away, and I felt myself smile as I gave the car more gas to go the speed limit as the road flattened out.
Then my phone rang.
Oh, yeah…I’d left it on. Before picking it up to see who was calling, I prayed it wasn’t Braden. I wasn’t ready to have a conversation with him yet. I knew I’d have to at some point—and I’d deserve every ounce of his anger and grief—but I wasn’t strong enough right now to handle it.
It was Zack.
Shit.
I hadn’t really had time to process at all…and it would have been so easy to blame all this on him—but I knew he didn’t deserve that, any more than Braden had deserved my treatment of him. All Zack had done had been to expose the lie I’d been telling myself over the past two years.
And I realized it would be easier to talk to him than Braden—but I would have to be smart. If he asked me to talk to Braden now, I’d have to decline. So I slid my finger across my phone to answer the call and then tapped the Speaker button—trying like hell to keep my voice steady. “Yeah?”
“Hey…are you okay?”
“I have no idea,” I said, watching through my rearview mirror as a big truck approached quickly and then zipped around to pass me.
He was probably going at least eighty, familiar with these roads.
Even though this one seemed to be flat and straight, I was driving slower than I had when I’d escaped my fate.
And I realized…I was beginning to feel some weird sense of inner peace—something I’d never felt before. Maybe when I was five years old…but it was a foreign sensation, one I hoped to hold onto.
“Can I…come talk to you?”
I pondered it. This man and I, we’d been through so much together: some good times, a shit ton of bad ones, some downright nasty.
But, through it all, I realized he was still my friend.
Even had I not been with Braden, I knew we’d never work as a couple, because we had far too many flaws that we’d never be able to work through.
But he would always be my friend…and maybe right now I needed one.
“Yeah, okay. I’m heading to the San Dunes. I’m not sure when I’ll get there, but that’s where I’ll be.”
And, with that, I landed in the Great Sand Dunes National Park a little over an hour later, ready to figure out my life.
Although the sun was finally out in full when I parked in the lot at the San Dunes, having paid the admission fee, I kept the hoodie on.
There were lots of cars there as well, so I expected it to feel crowded.
But as I walked past the leafless trees bordering the sand and the sign announcing I had arrived, I realized that the people there were scattered, few and far between.
There was a desert of sand that looked to be between a quarter and half a mile before the base of the dunes, and I had to cross several small streams of water just past the trees, just like I’d remembered from childhood.
All I had with me were Roxy’s keys, my phone in the big pocket at the front of the hoodie, and a bottle of water in my right hand.
Why I took the phone was a mystery, considering I didn’t have a signal, but it was perhaps a bit of a security blanket.
As I looked ahead, I decided to scale the dune directly in front of me.
There were so many, making me imagine I was in the Sahara Desert, a place I’d only ever seen in movies and documentaries, and I was filled with awe that such a beautiful place existed in my home state.
Over the past few years, I’d been eager to see the world, visiting places I never would have were it not for touring with the band…
and yet there was so much breathtaking beauty and wonder so close to home.