29.
"You look different," Angela says, sizing me up, eyes roaming my face then downward, my chest, my apron, a receipt still in my hand, the cant of my legs, my boots with the toes of steel, the ones I can't give up, the reminder of my former life built on hands and knees. She quirks an eyebrow, waiting for an explanation, her arms crossed over her chest, a tapping foot, a caricature of thinly-veiled patience. An expectant, okay, spill it. Angela and I are becoming friends and in this way, these types of conversations, these divulgences, these petty secrets not-secrets, this order of operations, are all part of the deal. I know now of her first job packing people's groceries. I know that she left home one year early, at seventeen. I know she loves her mom but can't stand her stepfather, and I know that his name is Pete.
And she knows me. Or some parts of me, at least. And now she wants to know more. Why my concentration is drifting today, why there's a small smile on my face that I can't seem to strip, why I'm both absent and present simultaneously, thinking and reminiscing and remembering and reliving stolen moments between soft sheets, bare skin, stubble. Hands that roam. Hair: red/brown. Eyes: green. A face so similar to the picture on his license yet so different, a paint-by-numbers filled in after first seeing only a silhouette, the sun shining bright behind him, hand outstretched in the middle of the road, feet on the dotted line. I want to tell Angela everything. How my destiny grows before me, a living, breathing thing. How I've fallen into it and driven myself toward it even though I don't know how to drive. How I've manufactured this moment to accidental perfection, how I couldn't have dreamed up a better resolution. I want to tell her how Edward now knows every part of me, my beginning and my middle and my end.
But it is too much. So I tell her, instead, what she wants to know. I tell her about last night.
"Damn," she says, following it up with a low whistle through her teeth, almost like she can't believe it. "Right down the hall from Esme? I can't even imagine it." She shudders a bit, the rolling of her shoulders. "Reminds me of my high school boyfriend, sneaking around, trying to stay quiet so his parents wouldn't catch us or something."
"It was the middle of the night. No one heard," I reply, rolling my eyes. It seems silly, these experiences she speaks of that should be universal, like losing your virginity to a schoolmate, hidden behind the unlocked door of a childhood bedroom, parents playing Scrabble down the hall. These, to me, are foreign. Stories written down in books, tropes played out in movies watched on outdated videotape, rewinding the cassette at the end for safety.
"It was good then? I did always think he was kind of cute…" she trails off, winking playfully.
"Stop," I laugh, bumping into her shoulder with my own. "But yes," I continue quietly, "It was good."
"Then I'm happy for you," she says. A customer comes up, one of the regular campers, the kind I've come to know. Some of them practically live here, stationed at their preferred table or booth, coming up for refills at perfectly-timed intervals. They type frantically on their laptops, the rumble of buttons pressed like rain pattering on the roof. Others dawdle around idly, tabbing through social media, watching YouTube videos aimlessly. Some write in notebooks, some draw. Some take obnoxiously loud conference calls, then stew about them afterwards, angrily sipping green tea and crumbling apart pastries in their anxious hands. This customer is one of the laptop tappers. She has long, golden brown hair pulled back at her ears in two clips. She's very put together–cream colored pants, a button-down shirt, conservative flats–but her face betrays a tiredness that can't be put into words.
Angela begins to make the woman's usual order: a dirty chai with an extra shot of espresso. While she's busy, I hang up my apron and push my arms through my rain jacket. On the way out the door, I catch Angela's eye, mouthing the word pharmacy and signaling I'll be back in five. Angela just nods, the hiss of the steamer emitting its high-pitched squeal. I walk the few blocks to the nearest drug store as the rain splatters around me. Cars woosh past then stop, woosh then stop in the checkerboard pattern of the streets, the whole area cut up into little squares of walk, don't walk, walk, don't walk. It's cold inside the drug store and very bright, a carnival of color and sound, pop music blasting as customers rush around the aisles. I feel myself to be in slow motion as I look for the morning after pill, trying to remember its colors and the arrangement of letters on the box. Back at home, my mother kept them underneath the sink in the bathroom, behind the cleaning supplies, just out of sight. She showed them to me only once, a vague warning and a reminder that we are not helpless, that we have some power after all.
I'm staring at the multi-colored medications, perusing them quickly, feeling so much like the teenage anecdote Angela described. I finally find it, relieved. When the bored-looking cashier rings up the Plan B without even a hint of judgement, I feel euphoric and struggle to keep from beaming in response. I have purchased it with my money because I need it. No one has stopped me. Moving forward, Edward and I will be more careful. But for now, I am autonomous and strange and fluid and adaptive. I am addressing my own wants and needs without barriers or questions or the ever-encroaching hands of others. I am small and large and free. The ding of the bell signals my departure and I am out on the road again, walking the sidewalks of this country built for the automobile. It strikes me with a giddy euphoria that I can go anywhere, right now. I can take the pill or I can not take the pill. I can return to the coffee shop or I can flee in the opposite direction. I can tilt my head up to feel the rain course its way through my hair or I can shelter under the nearest awning. I can learn to read and I can learn to drive. I can find the BIG SKY.
I'm still smiling with possibility when I open the door to the coffee shop. Edward's back greets me, his hair damp, the parts that touch the back of his neck curling. Even though he faces away from me I would know his form anywhere, the contours of him, where he stretches and where he gathers, the calluses on his fingertips, the bulge and notch of his wrist bone, his worn jeans, two inches deep with wet at the cuff. He turns to me, alerted by the jingling bell, and tilts his head slightly. A predator observing its prey, the furrow of the brow, the contemplation. I unzip my jacket, trying to read his unreadable expression, the torn nature of it, somewhere between relief and fear, the gray area between fight and flight.
"Edward," I greet, unzipping my jacket. "What's up?"
I watch the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallows. In his hand he clenches a piece of paper, wilting like a flower gone south, a crinkled accordion of sorrow.
"Hey," he says, then hesitates so briefly it's a miracle I notice it at all. "Can we talk?"
Over his shoulder, Angela looks up quickly, her face open with surprise. She meets my eye then nods her head toward the back room.
"Sure," I reply slowly, "Let's go to the back. Is everything okay?"
Some of the customers are looking up now, curious about what will unfold. Prying eyes over the tops of computers, lifted brows hidden behind the shelter of a paperback. One woman stares dreamily out the window, watching the rain, oblivious to it all. I long to be her, immune to the temperature of the room, how it seems to rise five degrees, too hot, until I feel sweat on my temples, until my heart thunders deep and loud in my chest.
Edward nods and walks past Angela. I follow, feeling strangely like a kicked dog. The final moments before my wedding, second-guessing all of my decisions up to that point. Fear and turmoil on the eve of what was meant to be the happiest day of my life. My mother, trying desperately for a child but hiding morning after pills. My garden of Eden, no apples no snakes, so perfect and all I wanted to do was escape from it, its utopia a prison. The dichotomies of my life thus far, cresting at this point, the summit of the mountain, the brilliant afterglow of freedom dropping down into this, into a Can we talk?
"I'm here if you need me," Angela whispers as I pass, taking the paper bag with my medication in her hands. I nod my thanks, blindly moving forward while searching mindlessly for the rewind button, descending into something unwanted yet undeniable, an inevitability. There are no free rides, quite literally, and as I look before me at his now-familiar back, at the man who was once nothing more than a foot on the gas pedal, two hands on the steering wheel, a heartbeat driving a car, I am stunned. This is the end of the line. Not Tacoma, not his route, not my story, but this. A storeroom overflowing with coffee beans, the rich aroma surrounding us like a warm hug, taunting us with options, with peace and happiness and joy, with an alternate future that goes any other way than this will.
He turns to me and I look at him, his downcast eyes, his face so different from the night prior. Colored over in shadows. I want him to make the first move, to say the first phrase in what is certain to be a chess match. But the words inside me boil over, yearning to be free.
"Is something wrong?" I finally burst out, the phrase echoing around us in the tight corridor as if yelled into a cavernous abyss, two hands resting on knees, leaning forward. Echo! Echo! Echo!
He opens his mouth as if he's going to speak but doesn't. Swallows again, that bob in the throat, the tightness in his shoulders. I grab his hand, the one not holding the mysterious piece of paper, unwind it with my own, his tendons tight, linked together like barbed wire, rigid and furious and hard as rock. I massage it into relaxation, until he leans toward me slightly, a weight removed from his shoulders, unburdened.
"This is my route," he says, offering me the paper, not addressing my question in the slightest. I let go of his hand to take it and watch as his fingers flex once, twice, before he shoves them deep into the pocket of his jeans. I puzzle over the words, some recognizable, others not.
"Boston?" I sound out. He nods in acknowledgement. "Where's that?"
"It's on the east coast. Massachusetts."
"The opposite side of the country?"
He nods again. "But first through Austin, which is a city in Texas down south."
"And you have to leave soon?"
Another nod. "Tonight."
"That doesn't give me much time," I reply, trying to gather my thoughts. I haven't told Esme, or gotten any cover shifts for the coffee shop, or said goodbye to Angela or Carlisle or Mike. I need the books I've been working on and the clothes I've amassed in the dresser drawers. I still don't have much, I think there's enough room back behind the driver's seat in the cubby, perhaps if the bed folds up and there is storage beneath it. I am thinking all of this through so quickly that I don't notice the transformation in Edward's face, the way he locks down again, cold and sterile as stone. He clears his throat, voice tight.
"I'm going alone," he announces in monotone. I step back automatically, a reflex response.
"I don't understand," I reply, my voice shakier than I'd like, weak and young and malleable.
"You want more, Bella. I can't give you that. I have nothing. I don't have a home, or… or a bank account or life insurance or spending money or anything like that. Fuck, Bella, I don't even have a name."
"You do. You do have a name," I say, emphatic. "Your name is Edward. I don't care about that other stuff. I care about you."
He stiffens, his whole body taut, an arrow ready to launch.
"You deserve more than what I can give you. You've earned it," he says. "You can learn to drive and read and go anywhere in the whole world that you want to go. You can leave. Leave and find more."
"No," I protest, launching myself at him, burying myself in his chest. At first, he is limp, his arms still stapled to his side. I grab him tighter, fist his shirt within my hands, curl them until the grip is angry, until it is a threat. If I could, if I were larger and stronger and meaner and better, I would hold him here. I would threaten him. I would dig a hole into his skin, split his ribcage and live inside him, right up near his heart. So I could feel the warmth of him, the rush of blood as it pumps and pumps and pumps. The trembling taste of him. The salt and the brine. He is one with the earth and the earth is one with him.
I feel his cheek press into the top of my head, his hands, which at first pull me tighter, which squeeze me so hard I feel the breath push from my lungs, which begin with grasping transition and twist and end with pushing. With loosening. With removing. He extricates himself from me, his face implacable, his focus not on me but on somewhere else in the middle distance, somewhere above my right shoulder.
"So that's it?" I ask, angry now, the heat in my cheeks and my voice. My impending accusation rises within me, an unstoppable force. "You're just going to leave me like you left Tanya?"
That gets him to look at me, the ringing finality of it, her name and her story.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he says quietly, just another dichotomy, that soothing seriousness to my climaxing rage.
"Get out," I snap, though the only exit is behind me. He gives me a long look, those green eyes so penetrating, holding more than I can imagine beneath them, a deep well of longing. I can't see it. I see only the rejection placed before me on a platter, no other options given. Enjoy your meal. He slides past me, close enough that I feel the warmth of his exhale against my cheek, the brush of his jacket on my bare arms. Close enough that I nearly lean into him, wrap myself around him again, drag him down to the floor of the storeroom and chain him to the shelves. Close enough that he can see my eyes flicker with want and with fury and with sorrow. He walks out and he doesn't look back. The jingle of the bell upon his departure. His silhouette dissolving into the rain.
Angela finds me a few minutes later, shocked to stillness, one hand gripping the handle on the door just to stay standing.
"I love him," I whisper to her, the words a shock to my own ears even though I am the one who's thought them up and spoken them into existence.
"I know," she replies, pulling me against her. My forehead lands on her shoulder, my arms wrapped around her, my hands interlocking behind her back. We stand like this for several moments, frozen and uncomprehending as I replay the last few minutes, their finality and their heartbreak. There's another jingle as a customer enters the coffee shop and it's as if I've woken up from some type of hypnosis and everything hits me all at once, a semi-truck whose brakes did not catch, my oblivious face searching for a wedding ring on the dotted line, my beginning and my ending and my everything.
Angela threads her fingers through my hair, their texture a field in summertime. She holds me tightly as I cry. As I weep. My tears, a river. I bleed.
x
i'm sorry... stick with me...