Just saying this one time for legality's sake…I don't own Twilight.
October 14th, 1994
Prologue - Relief
I was standing bare-legged in the cold, feeling the first icy mists of rain when the idea first struck me.
Leaves were blowing across the mostly empty parking lot. I watched them bouncing before me with the intensity that only small children can muster for such mundane things. They made an abrasive, urgent whispering sound as they danced across the pavement, like hurried Christmas shoppers. My loose hair was beginning to feel damp, even though I was standing under the tin awning that ran the length of the sidewalk. A young teacher I'd never seen before was standing a few yards further down the corridor, eyeing me with a mixture of unease and concern. It was the confused look in her eye that really stunned me, that caused the idea to rise in my conscious and pop like a soap bubble.
Maybe my mother isn't coming.
If I were a slightly older child, you might judge me for the feeling of relief that flooded my six year old body.
The entire night before, my mother had been chattering about the cruise she was taking, about how we were going straight to the mall 'to get a few things' after she picked me up. My father and I weren't going on the cruise; she told me proudly that it was really a work trip, but that we would all go together when I was older. She didn't really need to comfort me - her weeklong absence and my exclusion were also met with a hint of relief. Not even the huge red slide or the hysterically happy children on the brochure I found could outweigh the queasiness of being stranded on that huge floating city with her.
The pretty but harried-looking teacher and I were the only ones left on the sidewalk now. About an hour ago the area outside the gym had been teaming with the brays and absurdities of young children. The buses left quickly, like always, leaving packed parking lot behind. At first the lines of sedans and SUVs seemed endless, but by four o'clock cars were able to pull right up to the few remaining clusters of children. It was almost 4:30 now, and I was on the verge of turning to the young teacher for guidance - for assurance - when we were both distracted by Ms. Cope pushing through the gym doors.
She was a short round woman with a wide face that always seemed haughty behind the principal's reception desk. But the look on her face was very different now, and it finished the sentence that had started in the young teacher's eyes. Something was wrong. Something was different and urgent enough to change the routine that we all so strongly relied on. Ms. Cope spotted me almost instantly and quickened her already hasty pace. Her jaw was so tense that her lips had became thin pink lines. I turned to face her. Even at six I had a very stoic soul, the kind that only forms because of experience, and gives no consideration to age. As soon as she was within shouting distance I heard her say to me "Bella, darling, I think you should follow me inside."
I can remember every single thing about waiting outside for my mother's Expedition to pull up to the curb. Like a movie, I can slow it down and speed it up; I've never forgotten the look of vague worry on the pretty teacher's face, never mixed up the muted colors of the leaves which finally came to rest where the asphalt met the sidewalk. I've thought about it hundreds of times, I've told the story probably a dozen, and maybe that's the reason that I feel as if a small part of me will always stay underneath that cold awning, waiting on a woman that I'll never see again.
My photographic memory fails at this point though, and I remember much less about Ms. Cope leading me into the dark gym, mentioning that she had called my father and that he was coming for me. I recall that she didn't mention my mother and I remember how uneasy that made me feel. I calmed myself by thinking that she has probably decided to go to the mall without me. At least this situation seemed better than going to the mall, so I sit quietly. Even after Phil, my father, arrived and walked across the shiny-slick floor as he whispered with Ms. Cope, I sat in an orange plastic chair shoved up against the chilly wall, trying my best to be invisible.
I remember that for a very long time, I stared at my hands. My nails were short from constant chewing; the light pink polish was chipped mostly away. My mother had painted them a few days before, and any gratification she got from decorating them was answered by my eagerness to eat it away. My mother's nails, until the very end, were long and thick with product, always slick with polish. I didn't fight it when she began the manicures - although I think that given time and a little more age and I would have begun to - but it was clear that I didn't enjoy it. I sat rigid while she worked and wrinkled my nose at the sting of the acetone smell. But my mother painted my nails almost every week, especially on our special weekends, and I endured it because even at six years old I understood that some things are just not worth the fight.
After we left the gym we got into Phil's truck and rode in silence. I could tell that he was only silent on the outside - that inside his mind was chattering or maybe even screaming. I sat in the same way that I had waited in the gym, with my ankles crossed, head down, hands resting in my lap. Phil cleared his throat a few times, like he wanted to break the silence, but he never did. We rode all the way home in a strange tension that almost seemed to press in on us. Along the way he swerved in to the McDonald's, stopping abruptly in an empty handicap space. He remained silent as he pushed open his door and got out, but his brows were less furrowed when he got back in a few minutes later with a grease-stained bag. When we got home we ate in different rooms. Since my mother was not there, no one asked me if I had homework, and my book bag stayed hunched in the floorboard of Phil's truck. The evening drug by slowly and I spent it on pins and needles. I kept waiting on him to break this silence, to finalize what was happening, to make it relevant to me. At seven I began the trek to my room. As I climbed the stairs I finally heard Phil's voice, distant in the garage.
I would learn later that Phil had tried not to scare me. He later said that he waited to start the inevitable phone calls until I had gone to sleep - until he had given my mother every opportunity to come home. Maybe what he did was right, because when I retired to my small upstairs room, I was not scared.
Even with his silence, I had absorbed his mood while we rode inches apart in the truck and it would stick with me long after the chaos of the 'searching days' started. Phil and I were on the same wavelength from the very beginning of my mother's disappearance, for very similar reasons. Phil and I were both anxious, definitely shocked and overwhelmed, but as soon as there was hope that she wasn't coming back, we both felt mostly relief.
That was the last night of true sleep that I got for quite some time. After that night, it seemed like there were hundreds of bodies in the house all the time. Dozens of people, mostly relatives, were sleeping in the rooms, splayed on couches and hunched into pallets of blankets on the floor. The adults referred to the house as 'home base' in some strange attempt to rationalize what our small brick house had become. I had never slept well when surrounded by people, some subconscious manifestation of my fear of crowds. When mother and I went to the shows together, being backstage was the always the worst part.
But that night, alone in the house with Phil, I slept deeply. And even though the day of my mother's disappearance had been the most bizarre day of my life (and would hold that distinction for a full ten years – until my tragic sixteenth birthday) I slept like the dead and dreamt no dreams. When I awoke fully rested the next morning, I could still feel the tension sitting in the air like it had hung in the truck the day before.
But that night, I breathed deeper than my six year old lungs had breathed before, and I was filled with calm that I had no idea even existed in this world. It was my first taste of peace.
My first, cognizant moment of relief.