"Are you ready, sweetie?" I call, standing at the foot of the stairs.
"Just a second, daddy!" my daughter's sweet voice answers. "No, Alice!" I hear her exclaim. "I hate those shoes!"
I chuckle quietly to myself. Leave it to Alice to insist on dressing up a six year old girl for a night out with her father. If you could even call it that. I was planning on taking her out to dinner at her favorite restaurant, and then straight home.
I hear her quiet footsteps descending the stairs and look up. She has a flustered expression on her angelic face. She's wearing a frilly pink dress that ends just above her knees, and black flats. Her long hair is down and curly.
She looks so much like Bella. From her brown eyes to her mahogany hair to the faint blush that always paints her cheeks. But I push that thought out of my head. If I dwell on it too much, I'll inevitably start to cry. Six years later, and it still haunts me. It still stabs a knife through my heart.
"You look beautiful, Leah," I manage to choke out. I reach down and take her little hand in mine, and lead her out to the car.
"Daddy, can I sit in the front, please?" she asks when she sees I'm about to open the back door for her. She looks up at me with those haunting eyes and pokes her lip out.
"Fine," I say. I can never put up a good fight when she pouts like that. "But just for tonight." I relish in the sound of her excited squeal.
We reach Lenny's Italian Bistro within twenty minutes. The place is unusually crowded, and we have to wait for fifteen minutes before the waiter leads us to a small secluded booth. "Chocolate milk for you, Leah?" the waiter asks with a smile. We come here so often that all the waiters know our favorite selections. Leah nods happily, and the waiter turns to me. "Water for you, Mr. Cullen?"
"Yes, please," I say. "And please, call me Edward."
"Of course, sir—Edward, I mean." He smiles and walks away to get our drinks, and I turn to my daughter. "Pizza, as usual?" I ask her with a teasing smile. She looks up from the menu and sticks her tongue out at me. I chuckle. "As a matter of fact, no," she says defiantly, and stubbornly flips through the menu.
"Here you are," the waiter says as he sets the drinks on the table. He pulls his notepad and a pen out of his pocket and eyes us expectantly. "Ready to order?"
"Yes," Leah says. "I'll have the mushroom ravioli."
I'm taken off guard. My mind is filled with images of Bella sitting across from me, wearing a dark blue dress and a blush, asking the waiter for mushroom ravioli. My heart aches, as it always does when I think of her. My current surroundings don't matter. I close my eyes and remember that conversation, trying to think up the exact sound of her voice.
"Sir, sir? Edward?"
I open my eyes when I hear my name, and just like that I'm broken out of my daze. "I'm sorry," I choke, unable to meet the curious waiter's eyes.
"Can I take your order?" he asks. He sounds nervous, as though he's talking to a crazed schizophrenic. "Just a salad, please," I answer. He nods while scribbling my order down, then hastily turns and walks away.
"Are you okay, daddy?" Leah asks as soon as he's gone. I force myself to look into her troubled eyes.
"I'm fine, sweetie," I murmur. She stares at me for a long minute. I feel as if her gaze is piercing a hole right through me. "I don't believe you," she finally says without breaking eye contact.
I sigh. She notices more than what I ever gave her credit for. More than I ever wanted her to. There's no denying it. She's a carbon copy of her. A mini Bella. The woman who haunts my mind, my soul. The one demon that I hold in my heart, that I battle against daily, is an angel.
"I'm sorry, Leah," I whisper. I look away from her eyes and focus on the table. "It's just that… well, mushroom ravioli was your mother's favorite dish…" I look up at her again. She looks eager, yet sad. I almost never talk to her about Bella. "… and it just reminded me of her," I finish hesitantly.
Leah is silent for a few minutes. She seems to be thinking about something. "Daddy," she says, uncertainty in her voice, "how did mommy die?"
I feel the breath whoosh out of my lungs. This is it. This is the one question that I would rather die than answer. How do I tell her? Will she hate me? Will she blame me?
Take the easy way out, the devil on my shoulder tells me. Lie.
So I do.
"Umm…" I say, scrambling for the most non-gruesome story I can come up with. The real story taunts me in the back of my brain.
"Edward! Put it out!"
"It was the middle of winter…" I begin slowly, still unsure of my story.
"It's okay, Bella. It's just a small flame," I try to soothe her. I take off my jacket and beat at the small fire in the oven. I was supposed to take the cookies out an hour ago.
"Your mother was driving by herself on a narrow road…"
Despite my efforts, the inferno grows and licks up the cabinets, spreading around the kitchen. "Find a fire extinguisher!" I cry, desperately trying to control the flames.
She disappears for a few minutes. "I can't find one!" she calls.
"Call 911!" I call back. I abandon my attempt at controlling the fire. It is now blazing out of control, spreading from the kitchen to the living room, to the bedrooms, to the stairs.
"And she was driving too fast…"
"My battery's dead!" she wails. "What do we do, Edward?"
"Calm down, love. Everything's going to be fine," I try to soothe her. "Go get Leah, okay? I think my phone's in the kitchen."
"Be careful!" she cries.
I dart in the kitchen quickly, spot my cell phone, and dart out just as Bella emerges from Leah's room with the three month old infant in her arms.
"Come on!" I say, putting my arm around her shoulders and leading her to the front door.
"She didn't see the deer run out of the woods…"
It's too dangerous. A wall of fire blocks our way from getting to the door. Bella lets out a desperate sob. I dial 911 as fast as I can and hold the phone to my ear.
"Seattle Fire Department, how may I help you?" a voice says.
"My house is on fire!" I say. "You've got to help us, we're trapped inside…" I hear a beep. I look at the screen. Dead battery, it says.
"It was a big deer. Huge. With giant antlers."
The fire grows larger, if that's even possible. It's sucking the oxygen out of the air. I can barely breathe. Bella and Leah are having a hard time breathing, too. They're both hacking and spluttering. My heart breaks into a million pieces. My mind is clouded. I can't think right. I quickly pick up Bella, Leah still in her arms, and rush them up the stairs.
"He ran right into your mother's car."
That's when I see the window. I use every ounce of strength I have left and fling my fist at it. The glass shatters. The oxygen from outside fuels the fire even more. Bella collapses. Leah bawls.
"He hit the car so hard, he knocked it over on its side."
If I could, I would. I would save them both. But I'm not a foolish man. I knew I barely had any strength left. I could hardly stand on my own two feet by this point. Saving Bella would be difficult, but not impossible. She was tiny, barely a hundred pounds. If I saved her, I wouldn't be strong enough to save Leah too. But if I saved Leah, there wouldn't be enough strength left for Bella.
What if I flung them both through the window, and stayed here to die? But as I looked over them both, in the condition they were in, I knew neither of them would survive the fall by themselves.
I could only save one. Who should I save? Who should I leave to die? My wife, or my daughter?
I loved Bella more than anything in the world. She was everything to me. I would never be able to bear the pain of losing her.
But Leah was just three months old. How do you leave an infant, your own daughter, in a fire to die? She hadn't had a chance to live. She had her whole life ahead of her. And also, I knew that's who Bella would want me to save.
A tear runs down my cheek.
"She died on impact."
I take Leah into my arms. I can't bear to look at the lump on the floor that is my wife. I push away as much broken glass as I can, and step through the window. I make sure to keep Leah on top of me during the one story fall. We land safely in a bush. But my exhaustion makes itself known, and I black out. When I wake up I'm in the hospital. One look at the doctor's sympathetic face and I know. I know that the firefighters got to the house too late. I know that Bella was dead.
I feel warm tears slide down my cheeks. I can't stop them. But somehow, I'm unashamed. A father should be a crying shoulder for his daughter. He should always remain strong for her. But falling apart in front of Leah feels right somehow. At least she knows how much I loved— still love her mother.
"Don't cry, daddy," Leah murmurs. I meet her gaze. Her face is sad, pained. She seems to have bought my story. She gets out of her seat and walks around the table and climbs into my lap. I wrap my arms around her small frame and hold her close. Tears slide down her cheeks to mirror my own. She rests her head on my chest and we cry together.
Maybe someday, when she's older and smart enough to understand, I'll tell her the truth.