Hereafter

Oblivion

Tristan was alone behind the bar at the Thirsty Swan, methodically moving a white rag in circles over the dark wood surface. I hesitated outside the screen door, all the dashed hope and hot humiliation from that morning rushing back, and I started rethinking this whole idea. But it wasn’t as if I could avoid him forever.

Holding my breath, I pulled open the screen door and let it bang shut behind me. It was the first time I’d ever seen the place so still and silent, the only sound the even ticking of the fan at the center of the ceiling as it pushed the salty air around the room.

“Sorry, we’re closed,” Tristan said, looking up. When he saw me standing there, he paused, and a pained look passed quickly through his eyes. “Rory,” he said, dropping the rag. I found myself staring at his hands. “What’s up?”

Focus, Rory. Focus.

“Who’s Jessica?” I asked.

Tristan reached out and gripped the edge of the bar. His chest went concave, as if I’d just shot him through the heart. Wow. Lauren wasn’t exaggerating when she’d used the word epic.

“How…who told you about Jessica?” he asked finally, his voice a whisper.

I strode over to the counter, trying for cool detachment. All the chairs had been turned upside down and placed atop the tables, their spindly legs reaching toward the ceiling. Beneath my feet, the floor shone. I glanced toward the kitchen doors, the light glowing through the cracks, and wondered if anyone else was there.

“Lauren, mostly,” I told him matter-of-factly. “Right before Nadia showed up and accused me of being responsible for all this strange stuff that’s been going on. Any idea what that’s about?”

Tristan’s eyes flashed. “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’ll talk to her.”

I slid onto a seat. “So what happened between you and Jessica?” I asked, folding my hands in front of me.

Tristan sighed, pressing both hands onto the surface of the bar. Outside, a bell dinged mournfully as a boat made its way into the marina.

“Jessica broke my heart,” he told me, his jaw working. “I thought she was…perfect. But she turned out to be the exact opposite.” He took a deep breath and looked me over as if deciding whether or not he should say whatever was on the tip of his tongue. “She was the first Lifer to ever go bad.”

I felt as if the bar stool had just tipped beneath me. “What do you mean, go bad?”

Tristan turned his profile to me. He pinched his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, considering, then walked out from behind the bar, taking the stool next to mine. He turned toward me, and the outside of his thigh pressed against the inside of mine. My heart flip-flopped, heat radiating up my leg, through my chest, and all the way into my scalp. Then it flip-flopped again when he didn’t move away.

“Do you remember yesterday when we told you what would happen if you told your father and sister what was really going on here?” he asked, looking into my eyes.

“How could I forget?” I said, my pulse thrumming quickly in my wrists, my ears, my chest.

“Well, Jessica decided that it was…immoral of us to keep that secret,” Tristan told me. “She thought that the visitors deserved to know the truth. So she went from house to house…telling them.”

“What?” I breathed.

Tristan nodded, staring past me with a far-off look. “What happened next was not pretty. It was devastating, actually.” Suddenly his eyes welled and without thinking, I reached out and placed my hand over his. He froze for a second, his muscles tensing, then clutched me back. I held my breath, staring down at our fingers, feeling the warmth of his skin pressed against mine.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You have to understand this was a long time ago,” Tristan said, touching his leather bracelet. “The people who were here at that time…they’d died during the first World War—they’d seen their brothers and sons go off and never come back. Some had gone with little or no food for weeks on end, watched their children suffering. The population of Juniper Landing was generally…”

“Pissed off?” I supplied, even as I absorbed this new information—that Tristan had been here at least as long as Joaquin had.

He looked at me and snorted. “Yeah. Pissed off.” He blew out a breath. “So pissed off they formed a mob.”

I gulped. “A mob?”

Tristan nodded sadly. “Mobs were big back then.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“There was nothing much we could do,” he replied. “We tried to reason with them, but once angry people get together and are out for blood, they’re not satisfied until they get it. Fighting broke out and a lot of people were hurt, but eventually we got it under control.” He pressed his lips together, chagrined. “We Lifers knew the island a lot better. We had what Dorn would call a tactical advantage.”

My nerves sizzled at the mention of Dorn, and I thought once more of him whispering to the person in the silver car. “Was he here?”

Tristan shook his head. “Not yet. He’s a lot newer. Showed up during the first Gulf War.”

“Oh.” I said, doing quick calculations in my mind. How long had Tristan been here that twenty years felt “new”?

“Anyway, we had to round up everyone Jessica had told and take them to the bridge,” Tristan continued, his blue eyes dark with pain. “That was the worst part, sending all those people to the Shadowlands.”

A twisting ache filled my chest. “But it wasn’t their fault Jessica told them.”

“Yes, but that’s the rule,” Tristan said emphatically. “It’s there to scare Lifers out of telling people the truth and robbing them of their chance to resolve their issues, but Jessica clearly didn’t care about that, and once it was done, there was nothing we could do to change it. I couldn’t have sent them off to the Light at that point any more than I could have saved Jessica. It’s the coins that make the decision, and the coins knew. They were all damned to the Shadowlands.”

He released my hand and pressed his palms into his jeans, breathing in and out. He shook his head and glanced up at the ceiling with this look in his eyes, like he couldn’t believe any of this had actually happened, even though it had been almost a hundred years ago.

“But that’s so…wrong,” I said. “Is there any way to change the rules?”

He looked at me and scoffed sadly. “I wish.”

We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the fan tick, tick, tick overhead.

“What happened to Jessica?” I asked.

“Jessica,” he said, then looked me in the eye. “Jessica was sent to Oblivion.”

My hand went to my wrist, clutching my leather bracelet. “But you said there were only two destinations.”

“There are. For the visitors,” he said quietly. “Oblivion is a very specific, very awful region of the Shadowlands. It’s reserved for Lifers who break the rules.”

“So…wait a minute,” I said, getting off the stool, my feet hitting the floor with a thud. “If I had left you at the ferry landing yesterday and told my family what was going on, not only would they have gone to the Shadowlands, but I would’ve gone to Oblivion? You didn’t feel the need to share that little factoid with me?”

“I didn’t have to,” Tristan told me. “I knew you wouldn’t tell them. You love them too much to do that to them.”

“Is this why you…I mean—” I paused, trying to summon the guts to say what I wanted to say, what I needed to know. “Is this why you backed away from me this morning?” I fumbled out. “Because you think I’ll go bad? Because you don’t trust me?”

Tristan shook his head and stepped down from his bar stool. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to go bad. I just…what Jessica did…it killed me. It killed me that I didn’t see it coming. If I hadn’t been so blindly in love with her, I could have stopped it from happening and saved all those people,” he said. “Forget about trusting someone else. For a long time I didn’t trust myself. And I realized somewhere along the line that I was going to have to live with that pain and uncertainty forever.”

I breathed in and out slowly. For a long moment we just looked at each other, and all I wanted to do was sink into him. To hold him. To wrap my arms around him and tell him that I was different, that I would never hurt him, that I wasn’t Jessica.

But he didn’t move, and neither did I.

“This is what’s best, Rory,” Tristan said finally, formally. I looked into his eyes and saw hardness that cracked my heart in two. “It’s what’s best for both of us.”