Her Right Leg
She felt an itch there, sometimes. A few inches down her calf, just below the knee.
It was more a sting, really. Too deep to be an itch, for an itch stays on the surface of one's skin. It was impossible to ignore. Sometimes it kept her up at night.
She would reach down to squeeze the flesh of her leg with her fingers, hoping to cure it with the constant pressure. But it never faded. It often grew stronger when she spared it attention, the pain throbbing inside of her delicate bone.
That leg had been broken once, and only once. Her right leg had once been the stronger of her pair, until she had fallen from her tree in the summer of 1911. Nearly a decade later, the pain still haunted her at random hours of the night. It could even creep up on her while walking to church in the morning. She would have to sneak behind the vestibule during the service to remove her high heeled shoes and rub the back of her leg with her gloved hand until it went away.
Her husband wondered why she was so preoccupied with that leg.
His eyes glossed over with cool suspicion when he saw her nursing it in the corner of a room, or beneath the table during supper. She dismissed it as an inherited case of rheumatism, but it was difficult to excuse it as something of little concern. In the midst of all her other injuries she had accumulated throughout the years, an ache in the back of her leg was hardly cause for so much attention. Naturally, he wondered why she never squeezed the bruises on her arm or picked at the scabs on the back of her neck.
It was only her right leg. The pain never seemed to leave it.
Esme always struggled to protect that leg from Charles, more than any other limb. He could strike her cheek or shove her shoulder, or whack his belt against her back... but he could not touch that leg.
She would not have it ruined after all the care Doctor Cullen had taken to heal it.
But she could only keep that leg safe from Charles for so long. One night he touched it with his terrible hand – he grasped it with all the harshness that he grasped a bottle of ale, as if it would come freely and detach itself from her body. She shrieked at the pain that shot through her, racing all the way from the place he twisted her ankle up to her spine.
She had kicked him in the jaw by pure reflex, causing him to roar in displeasure as she yanked her leg back away from his devious grip. She cowered on the corner of the bed, holding her hands over her head in the protective way she had learned by her own experience.
"So you're going to be difficult tonight, are you?" he grunted out.
She bit her lip so hard it started to bleed.
But she would rather make herself bleed than let him be the cause of it.
"Esme," he said her name, but it was not as harsh as she had expected.
It began to rain outside.
"Esme." He said it again, this time even quieter.
The rain came down harder.
She peeked out from under her cupped hands.
His dark reddish hair was scruffy and hanging in his eyes. It had been months since he'd gotten it cut. Usually this made him look even more frightening to her, but right now he looked a bit like one of those poor neighborhood boys they'd paid to sweep the chimney. He looked confused, as if he'd missed some important detail. As if it made no sense for her to react to his violence with self-protectiveness and fear.
"You don't want to do this."
She couldn't tell if it was a statement, a question, or... if hope would allow her, a sign that he was letting her go...
She was too petrified to shake her head, so she stayed completely still, crumpled into a fetal position on the mattress, her eyes barely able to blink though they burned with tears.
Charles had that look he sometimes got in his eye. It was a kind of glint, more prominent in his right eye than his left. It was hollow, guilty, bristling behind a shield of frustration. Esme dared to wonder sometimes if this meant he was regretting his behavior. Sometimes his eyes seemed sad while his face was red with anger. Sometimes his voice broke when he tried to command her. Sometimes... she could see that her husband hated himself.
But this was the first night he let that hatred overpower his urge to use force with her.
And Esme was shocked, shaking, entirely in awe while she watched Charles toss the sheet over her body and whip a hand through his sweaty hair. He looked around the bedroom with bleary eyes, as if he were lost in the surroundings, as if he feared the walls were about to close in around him.
He took one last look at her before he fled the room, his suspenders clanking against his belt, and he spent the rest of the night someplace else.
She had not a single clue where he'd gone, but his absence was a blessing enough that she didn't care.
Esme pressed her cheek to her cold pillow, her eyes swelling with salty tears. She sobbed in silence, the idle thump of her heart and the sound of her teardrops landing on the pillow the only sounds in the dark room. Outside the house, the rain poured steadily off and on into the night.
She would cry like this almost every night. The only reason she supposed some nights passed without a tear was that a woman could only produce so many tears in a day. Sometimes she was bound to run dry.
With a heavy heart, Esme imagined a better life behind her closed eyes. While half asleep and alone in this room, she sometimes indulged in a childish fantasy where a teensy fairy would come through her window on a moonlit night and cast a spell over Charles, turning him into a pile of dust while he slept. Sometimes she dreamt that a group of angels with fiery golden wings would descend from the sky before dawn and invite her to join them in the heavens.
Sniffling like a melancholy child, Esme reached across to open her nightstand drawer. She dipped her hand inside and searched until her fingers found the small cluster of lilacs she'd picked that morning from the neighbor's garden – a little old lady who never noticed that she had a regular trespasser. Esme inhaled the flowers' sweet perfume, and more tears flooded from her eyes. Her fingertips adored the delicate bunch of lacy purple and pollen, and her touch was filled with tenderness, with the kind of love she was never shown. And as her fingers danced around the fragrant blooms, Esme remembered the one person in her life who had touched her like she was a flower.
These days it was practically taboo to think of...him.
Yet she all but hungered to see him again. As her memory recalled him, he had been an absolute vision; so beautiful. She wanted to keep to herself his rarity and fineness the way she had collected colored stones and small bird's feathers when she was younger.
In her younger years she had forgone the guilt of her hopeless infatuation with Doctor Cullen. In the days before she was a married woman, it was acceptable to dream about her long lost doctor.
She had not thought of him in so long. That dashing young blond man who wore black gloves and spoke with a mysterious accent.
If she had been any younger when she'd broken her leg, Esme was sure she would have believed him to be a prince in disguise. She recalled vividly the way he had come into her parlor, his coat drenched from the storm, his face more handsome than she was taught science would allow. An entire novel could not suffice to describe all of the features of this enigmatic physician whose hands held magical powers. Not the stroke of a paintbrush or the smear of an oil pastel or the scratch of a pencil could do his beauty justice. He had been perfect. Too perfect to have been real.
The years had taught Esme to question and criticize. She had been exposed to so many shades of black, so many dark situations. As her mind grew and changed over the years, Esme began to doubt that Doctor Cullen had ever truly existed. She had been taught by experience that dreams would always be blown away with the next gust of wind. No thing of beauty ever lasted.
But in the night when she closed her eyes, Esme saw her dream again.
It was a delirious dream she had that night Charles had struck her right leg. She had been crying for hours, leaving her eyes swollen and her head aching terribly. The pain diffused with the coming of slumber, but it did not depart. Her leg still stung from the places her husband's hand had hit. If she looked down she could see dull blue bruises dotting the pale skin of her calf, like spots of mold on clean white bread.
Ashamed that she had been careless enough to let harm come to her beloved right leg, Esme reached down to cover the bruises from sight with her hand.
Before her palm could touch her skin, however, the room around her was lit with a balmy golden glow, almost like candlelight, coming from an unseen source.
The window across from her bed shone brightly, long rays of light filtering through to touch her feet. At such a late hour a light so bright was impossible. It was like a false sun she saw streaming through the glass.
She blinked over and over again, rubbed the tears from her eyes, brushed tendrils of her hair out of her face. But nothing would take the spectacular vision away. The light poured on into her room until every wall was glowing softly and her sheets looked to be made of fine golden silk.
Esme sat herself up against her pillow, lifting her sleeves to check her arms for signs that she had been infected by this mystical golden aura. But her skin was just the same, pale and dun, peppered with familiar scars and scrapes from the years before.
A sigh of disappointment rose and died in her throat as her eyes again fell upon the gleaming window. To her shock the glass pane burst and shattered, as if the pressure of such a burdensome light had grown too much for it to bear any longer. But the shatter of the glass seemed to happen in slow motion and without a sound. The crystal shards floated outward from the window with the whimsical grace of bath bubbles, spreading into a star-like shape as they dispersed into the air. And in the very center of that star, shining brighter than the sun, was the image of her handsome doctor.
Only angels entered a room with such grandeur, Esme thought. Dream or not, she could not help the awestruck tears that flowed down her cheeks at the indescribable sight.
His body became more solid as the feather-light shards of glass pieced themselves together, forming his figure like an exquisite mosaic of colored glass. His hair, his skin, his clothes all shimmered in soft golden hues. And his eyes, just as she remembered, were the most striking gold of all.
At last the force of the wondrous light settled into something her eyes could receive without squinting. When she looked toward the window now, she saw Doctor Cullen, plain as day, still silhouetted by that transcendental light source beyond her reach. He stood proudly before her, an alchemy of lights, a brilliant vision composed of stardust and snow-white flesh.
Esme's heart began a brutal battle with her ribs as her unexpected guest neared her bedside. This was not the first time she had been visited by Doctor Cullen in her dreams, but it was certainly the first time he had been illuminated from head to toe like a radiant angel, and right inside her very bedroom... reaching out to her.
Not for one second was she afraid to offer him her hand.
Her skin was yielding when he touched her. Warmth more exquisite than a Meridian sunrise enveloped her hand like a salve. A sensation like wild fire chased the fear straight through her arm and right out of her body as he held her hand. Never had she felt more protected, more assured of her safety than she did in his angelic presence.
"Don't cry," he whispered to her, his voice like a gentle lullaby. "Don't cry, Esme."
Sadly, his soft-spoken command had the adverse effect. When she looked up into his face, the purity and hope she saw there beckoned more tears to drown her eyes. Exhausted from her crying, Esme let her head fall against her angel's chest, resting where his heart should have beat.
His other hand rose to cup the back of her head, holding her to him while she let the sobs seep through her, encouraging her to offer all of her troubles and burdens for his willing shoulders.
She spent the rest of her tears on him, let the droplets melt into his shirt... and he savored her tears as if they were a sweet spring rain, or spray from the sea.
Her relief shuddered through her, leaving her breathless and limp with his arms tight around her. Once she had fallen silent he laid her gently back on the bed and perched himself on the very edge where he could hover over her, a lantern that would never burn out.
"Doctor..." The title left her lips, but she never heard it make a sound.
The frustration of having no voice never consumed her. Instead she took comfort in knowing that Doctor Cullen knew too well how to communicate with nothing more than touch and gaze.
As his fingers passed over her blemished skin, the hue of her youth returned, fair melanin like a fresh apricot in summer. Beneath his fingertips, each bruise vanished instantly, like when one stares at a star for too long in the sky. But this was not an illusion, at least not in her dream. She did not need to fear looking away, for when she looked back, her skin would be as clean as milk.
His caress traveled the complicated terrain of her body, restoring strength and feeling where there had once been weakness and numbness. He erased the markings of her childhood accidents and the evidence of every one of Charles' beatings. Doctor Cullen was an artist and he was painting her with purity.
At the end of his journey, his fingers congregated over the curves of her cheeks on either side of her face. His hands felt large and protective, like warm white shields that hid her eyes from the world. She stared willingly, straight into his eyes for as long as he held her, his touch filling her with tranquility and love and comfort. His thumbs wiped away rogue tears that spilled from her eyes, but no matter how many times he chased them away, they always came back.
It made her heart ache in the most torturous but wonderful way, knowing he would gladly continue to collect her tears for the rest of the night, never looking away from her eyes. He would be utterly content to sit with her in her bed and watch over her until the sun rose... and maybe even beyond that.
For as long as he stayed by her side, she noticed, the pain her right leg was gone.