25.
I am thirteen years old when I find the magazine. My mother is newly dead, our house chronically empty, sporadically electric, the stars my power, the moon my sun. The pages of the magazine are frayed and water damaged, wet then dry, paper coated with plastic turned crinkly and breakable. I handle them with care as if it is an ancient tome in a long-sealed library, gathering dust, susceptible to even the slightest human oil, the gentlest fingerprint. I use the thinnest blade of a Leatherman to pry the pages apart, their reluctant stickiness counteracting my desperate thirst. I cannot read the words but I can sound them out, can look at the pictures and imagine myself there, in this strange world so far away, the distance unfathomable, of this earth or beyond it, in this world or below it, somewhere along the roads of the country built for the automobile.
It takes me an afternoon, but I sound out the letters. BIG SKY. BIG SKY. BIG SKY. I look above me as the sunrise begins its hesitant ascent over the horizon, leaking through the interlocked branches of snow-covered trees, feet of it beneath a layer of hard ice. It's a tentative winter light, as reluctant as the pages before me, only misshapen windows of sky between the sporadic forest cover of high desert. This is no BIG SKY. This is no endless sky. Not like the pictures, with blue up above and in every direction, the flat lands so impossibly large that the camera must switch to a wide angle to capture it all and still it is futile. It goes on forever and ever and ever, until the photo captures the great crescent curve of the earth as the land reaches and reaches. I trace my finger over the semi-circle, reflected in the sun, the moon, the lid of the bucket that captures rainwater, the spigot for the well, the steering wheel in my father's pickup truck, my forehead to my brown hairline, my nails and their white, white lunulae. I am one with the earth and the earth is one with me.
Where is this BIG SKY? It isn't above me. This isn't the same sky as in these pictures, there's no way. I know only one sky, not this cloudless, omnipresent entity. This living, breathing being. This companion, unable to be captured on film and printed in a water-stained magazine tucked beneath the backseat of my father's pickup truck, long forgotten only to be discovered by my greedy, hungry hands. I look up again, the dim, washed out blue reflecting the sun reflecting the snow. A blinding light, distant and untouchable. I want the pressure of BIG SKY. I yearn for it. But how to find it?
Outside my window, Tacoma's gray clouds are visible even in the dark. They are low and lazy, swirling above chimney tops, weaving in and around the stars. It gives off the feeling of being pushed down upon, like a weight resting on my chest. Not heavy, not debilitating, but just enough that I feel that steady force, that it slightly inhibits my ability to breathe. I remember the magazine, wonder where to find the BIG SKY. It isn't here, but it is along the road. Has Edward seen it? Has he swam its depths and felt overwhelmed by its relentless optimism? Its endless expanse? Surely, he has. In the truck I sat and slept in, criss-crossing this country built for the automobile like a toy on a track, fueled by a motor and two hands on a wheel and a foot on a gas pedal. Searching for the end of the line where there is none, only a cyclical loop underneath the BIG SKY. I rest my chin in my hand, elbow perched against the window's ledge, knees on the carpeted flooring. I can't sleep and I know what is keeping me awake.
It's like I can hear his heartbeat through the floor, up above from where he sleeps on the couch. I can picture it in my mind, his arm draped over his chest, shirtless, the steady rise and fall of it, slightly flushed, eyelids flickering, his other arm dangling to the floor, fingertips tickling the rug. His face when he held my ring in his hand, his face in the early morning dawn at a truck stop in a field of flowers, his face when I asked him about Tanya. That brokenhearted thing paired with the stubborn glint in his eye, the balance like fine wine. I allow him his secrets as he has allowed me mine. There are things he cannot know, things that will change the way he sees me, an unburdened lost girl, a runaway, guiltless and used, escapee, faultless, free. And maybe I will tell him the whole story, of Jacob and Sarah and the letter and my plotting and scheming and twisting. But it will not be tonight.
I descend the stairs slowly, mindful of the creaky spots, the photos that line the wall, Carlisle and Esme in various life stages. Teenagers. Newlyweds. Anniversaries. Each step to the first floor further into the timeline of their interlocked stories. Like I imagined, Edward is asleep on the couch. He looks peaceful and young, the blanket bunched up around his waist, twisted in his legs like he fought it down into submission. I approach slowly, cautiously, as if fearful of scaring a wild animal. But then his exhales are warm and his arms inviting and his eyelashes long and brushing against the thin skin beneath them and I am overwhelmed. I climb atop him, coaxing him into wakefulness, watch as he fumbles beneath me, floating in that distant, halfway place between unconsciousness and consciousness.
There is an exact, precise moment that he sees me, his body electrifying into awareness, all synapses firing. Like a wire coiled tight and twanging. His hands grip my waist tightly, the pads of his fingers pressing into the skin there, through the thin fabric of my tank top. He leans toward me, stomach muscles clenching in the effort, chin reaching out, searching, questioning. His eyes are dimmer in the darkness, moodier, an alternate Edward, the face on the driver's license, dark and troubled and questioning and wanting and needing and succumbing. I match his advance, wrapping my own hands around his neck, hair too long, the auburn locks tickling my palms and wrists.
"I couldn't sleep," I confess in a breath and his strength is there, a flag of surrender, desperate and urgent and pulling me to him until our chests meet as one. He holds me tighter than I anticipated, with a clawing sort of urgency, a man trapped on a rock in the middle of a tumultuous sea, grasping for dear life, the only thing standing between breathing and drowning, between everything and nothing, between life and death. After a moment he retreats, that same question in his eyes, the seeking of information, of confirmation. There is a dreamlike state to all this. I have fallen asleep unexpectedly and now, blissfully, I drift.
I nod and he has me in his arms again, carrying me up the stairs, mindful of the creaky spots until we are in my room once again, until the cool fabric of the jersey sheets are beneath my back and he is hovering over me, his necklace dangling down between us, rocking, floating, waiting and wanting. There is more of him than I expected, the solidness of him, the reality of him, his presence, the heat of his breath, the texture of his skin, soft in some spot and coarse in others, the calluses that match my own, the life we've both built on hands and knees. His pajama bottoms slide down to rest in the crevices of his hips, their narrowest point, the V of him, the bob of his Adam's apple, the humanity, the moles and marks and scars. There is one scar beneath his lowest rib, in the shape of a crescent, that same crescent of the earth, its half-moon shot by a wide angle lens underneath an endless BIG SKY, the semi-circle reflected in the sun, the moon, the lid of the bucket that captures rainwater, the spigot for the well, the steering wheel in my father's pickup truck, my forehead to my brown hairline, my nails and their white, white lunulae.
I trace my fingertip over it, the puckered flesh, and he arches into my touch, his mouth falling open slightly, unhinged, hair over his forehead, letting me explore his chest and lower, letting me dip into the elastic band of his pajama bottoms until I find the hidden parts of him, more of the soft and the coarse, until he bucks against me, into my hand, an apologetic grimace. I remember the first time we kissed, on the couch, in the dark, in a storm. Now there is no sound outside, only the chorus of our breathing, our inhales and our exhales, his lips brushing over my own, hesitant and then insistent, the lines of him pressing into the lines of me, sharp angles and edges and dips and curves.
"Can I?" he asks, hands hovering over the edge of my tank top, waiting, watching. I nod again, the words lost in my throat, sticky as the pages of a magazine, only to be chiseled out by the smooth, thin edge of a blade. He unravels me slowly, the unwrapping of a delicate present. I lift my arms over my head, give him access to slide the fabric off of me until I am half bare before him. I fight the urge to cross my arms over my chest, to shield myself once more, even as he examines me thoroughly, first with his eyes then with his hands then with his mouth. I am panting now, searching for him even though he is right before me, needing more even though I am beside him, beneath him, through him, within him. I want him inside me and the truth is simple and clean and true and undeniable. I am restless now, arching against his skin, pulling at his pajama bottoms, using my nails to claw and scratch. He makes small, wanton sounds in my ear, coaxing me to him mindlessly, again in that dreamlike state, part of this world and part away, the haziness of lust and need and desire.
"Please," he says, and I don't know what he's asking for but I'm begging for it all the same. He pulls my shorts and underwear down my legs where they weave around my ankles, my feet shuffling as I try to get rid of them, the full expanse of me meeting the full expanse of him, the endlessness of two BIG SKIES, one above and one below, the heaviness and the openness of it. I feel him waiting, holding back, a half-second of hesitation, of peremptory regret.
"Please," I whisper, mirroring him, He drops to his elbows, his exhales washing over my face like tepid bathwater, the line between his green eyes pursed in concentration, the trembling of his shoulders as he holds himself aloft, above the waterline, breathing, gasping for air. He slides into me quickly and I swallow, the familiar yet foreign feeling of fullness enveloping me. His head drops to where I can't see his face, his lips at my collarbone, kissing and sucking. It is not smooth. It is not practiced. It is urgent and desperate and overwhelming and spastic. He's barely holding on even as he thrusts, the untempered movements chaotic and raw. I clutch his neck tightly, holding him down to me, feeling the slide of our sweaty bodies one against the other, the friction of it, the heat. It isn't long before he comes, the shuddering mess of it, no condom, I realize belatedly, a problem for the morning after. I nearly laugh at the mistake, one I've never made, not in my whole life. My diligent certainty, my practiced control. No children. Not with Jacob. Children are glue and I yearn for BIG SKY.
A fearful, surprising thought courses through me, an imagining of a younger Edward, eyes: green, hair: red/brown. I swallow it down reproachfully, bury it deep. It is too much for the darkness, for our bodies tangled together, legs in legs and arms in arms. I feel his heartbeat against my own chest, fast, fast, fast, then slow, then slower still. He breathes in deep through his nose, out through his mouth.
"Are you okay?" he asks, his voice beside me, close yet far, his finger as it curls a wayward strand of hair around the shell of my ear, his eyes searching for mine once more.
"More than okay," I reply, curling into him, my knees up, arm out.
"I'll clean you up," he says, moving to stand, disrupting the stillness of our pond.
"Wait." I grasp his hand before he can leave. "Stay."
He looks down at me at an angle, canted, his face cloudy yet open, the window to a storm. He hesitates for a moment, then relaxes, wrapping his arms around my waist, pulling me to him. Despite the double meaning, despite knowing what I'm asking without asking, despite it all, he stays.
x
big sky, montana