31.
Edward is gone by the time I get back from my shift, no trace scout's honor. Angela takes pity on me after our conversation in the store room and we stick around the shop, closing up and locking down the doors, shuttering the window shades, finding refuge in the darkened space with its hardwoods, its wrapped pastries, its scent of untapped coffee beans. I find myself leaning on her in a way I've never leaned on anyone, opening myself up, telling my darkest secrets, giving context to my life. She listens patiently, hardly asking questions, just taking it all in with a quiet, serious expression, her hand over mine on the table, the two corners of her lips turned down just slightly.
"I think you should call him," she says, hair tucked behind both ears, apron dropped to the floor, bell sleeves with fluttered edges, feminine and soft.
"Who, Edward?" I ask, hardly able to get his name out. Already I am pressing him to the furthest spot of my mind, sequestering him away, sectioning him out, taking the paring knife and pruning, pruning. It's the part of my head reserved for the unthinkable or the unbearable: my mother's smile in the early morning light, when she wakes me up just as the sunrise begins over the horizon, Jacob's booming laugh and that time he rode his hand-built motorbike over a ramp, surging through the air, clearing three empty oil crates, wild with abandon, or my father, his hand on the steering wheel, arm draped out the window in one of his carefree moments. Bella, crank that window down. Let some air in.
"No. Your father," Angela says as if reading my mind, the roots of me, the parts that must be dug up, unearthed, but cautiously, the careful brushing of an archeologist. When I'm silent, she continues. "I'm not saying you need to go back, but you should at least let him know that you're okay. That you're alive."
I make a noncommittal noise, something between acknowledgement and denial. She drives me home in her Prius, the cramped yet airy car seeming to glide over the wet pavement, spraying the excess water in its wake. I look out the window, watch the raindrops on the glass race each other to the window's ledge, shooting and stopping and gathering and shooting once more, my warm breath clouding in condensation, adding a dreamlike quality to the scene. Through it all, I swear I see him. Edward. In the passing bodies, their dark coats, their shoulders hunched beneath the rain. Hair: red/brown. Eyes: green. Birthdate: June 1989, the gentle descent into summer. Each time, the face is wrong. Too old, too young. Eyes blue or slate or angry. Not him.
Esme sits at the kitchen table, two steaming cups of tea before her.
"Bella, you want this?" she asks me as I take off my jacket, nodding to the other mug, a magazine in her other hand. "Edward didn't drink it before he left."
There is a pause, an overlong silence.
"He's gone?" I ask, surprised by how strong my voice is, how purposefully nonchalant.
"Yes, didn't he tell you? He's on the road, headed to… Houston, I think?"
"Austin," I correct quietly, remembering the final moments before his rejection. Boston. It's on the east coast, in Massachusetts. Austin, a city in Texas down south. In my head, Texas is just so. Southern. Cowboys. Cacti. A sun that seems bigger than the one behind the clouds above us now, and yellow hot unlike the whitish, diluted one outside of the window. I picture his truck, all 18 wheels of it, trundling along highways so long and flat that they seem endless in both directions, straight as an arrow and just as sharp. I swallow, and pack away the thought, paste it to a postcard and send it in the mail, a letter on the back with a simple, auto-generated:
wish you were here
"He'll be back in a couple of weeks he said," Esme mentions off-hand, still in the middle of reading her magazine. Like it's the most natural, obvious thing in the world. In an alternate reality, I believe her. In an alternate reality, I wait by the phone for his calls. I listen to his voice, that regular and deliberate cadence, the sound of the road beneath his tires behind him. Sleepy in early morning after driving through the night, bright with coffee in the evening, reading for a road shift. Echoey inside the rest stops, their cavernous structures making his voice bounce and refract.
Edward doesn't come back in a couple of weeks like he said to Esme. He doesn't come back at all. I fall into a pattern, something domestic yet comforting. I work at the shop most days of the week, the early shift, waking up before the sun rises and falling asleep just as it sets in the evening. Shifting my schedule to be the opposite of Edward's, slumbering through his nightly drives then waking up to open the shop right as he falls asleep in the morning. I come to memorize every possible order at the shop without referencing recipes, a second-hand learning that seems to accumulate naturally. I also memorize our customers, write down their faces in permanent marker in my mind. The man who always wears a bowler hat and orders a mocha with an extra shot. The woman who brings in her cat on a leash, but ties it up outside and buys a green tea to go. The groups of teenagers that all come in together after school's out, backpacks dangling with string and beads, laptop computers sticking out through the zippers, ordering the drinks with the most sugar and the least amount of coffee, gathering the tables together to create one mass of adolescence.
I lose myself in this, the waking up and the sleeping of it, the memorization of it. I learn letters and numbers and the way they commingle. I read stories about princesses and knights and fairies and sleeping beauties and witches and apples and mermaids and oceans and a new world discovered on a new horizon. I am a citizen of these places just as much as I am a citizen of Tacoma. They become a part of my landscape and I travel through them as if I am traveling through my own home, its walls changing and transforming like a chameleon around me.
Carlisle teaches me to drive. I am horrible at first, misjudging the distances before me, braking too hard and accelerating too quickly. I clip a parked car and leave a note in shaky handwriting. We do circles around parking lots then city blocks, driving past a city desaturated by winter. The baby blues become a slate gray, the rich browns turn beige. Everything blends into each other until there are no distinguishing lines, the buildings fusing into the street fusing into the sky. I learn just enough to take the written driver's test, puzzling more over the words themselves than the answers to the questions, failing the first time then coming in just under the limit on the second. They print my driver's permit, my image in laminate. Eyes: brown. Hair: brown. I exist! I exist! I exist! Like a blinking neon sign, live girls! Live girls! Alive girl!
Mike asks me out on a date. He is patient and shy, so unlike his normal attitude that it takes me off guard and I figure him to be joking. Angela watches, a smile hidden behind her palm as he stumbles through the offer one day at the end of a shift. I'm hardly listening, distracted, filling an order, the steamed milk screaming before me, drowning out his words.
"So, uh, I was thinking, we could get some dinner?" he's asking me, hand cupping the back of his neck, blonde hair standing straight up in the back, pressed into the position from sleep.
"What?" I say, pouring the drink into a ceramic mug and calling out the order.
"There's an Italian place I know about, it's only a couple of blocks from here."
"What?" I repeat, turning my attention to him fully.
"A date. I was wondering if you would go on a date. With, uh, me." He grimaces, looking at the floor, the squeal of his work shoes against linoleum.
"Oh." I am deadpan, the pressure of history rising within me, forcing me to acknowledge it. Jacob, the baby fat still on his cheeks. Want to go to the river? Edward in Portland, it's pronounced tah-pah. I clear my throat, forcing them away. "I mean…"
"You can say no," he interrupts. "I just thought it would be fun."
"No," I begin. He grimaces. "No, I mean, yes that could be fun?" It comes out as more of a question than an agreement, but we go just the same. He picks me up from Carlisle and Esme's house like a high schooler in an 80s movie. Though spring is beginning to force out winter, it's still cold out and I wear a heavy, waterproof parka over a dress shirt and jeans. Mike is nervous, especially when Carlisle answers the door. I slip around them both, walking to Mike's car before any unnecessary conversation can take place, ignoring the flicker of surprise on Carlisle's face as I do so. What must he think of me? I don't wish to know.
We eat pasta of two different kinds. Diet Coke. The restaurant is warm, all yellow light and red, silken booths, white tablecloths and ornate chairs. It's fancy but not too fancy, primarily families and couples enjoying a bite after work. We talk easily. It's friendly and nothing more. We both acknowledge this at the end of the night, Mike's expression still hopeful as I let him down easy, ask to keep our relationship well outside the realm of romance. He agrees and we end the night cordially, perhaps even closer than when we started. We share a secret now, an attempt mutually ended, a failed experiment turned learning experience.
I buy a phone. It's cheap, plastic. Used primarily as a throwaway, paid by the minute. It's my own. I use it to call my father. The first time, there is no answer, just an endless, endless ring followed by an automatic voicemail box. The second is the same. On the third his voice comes through, crackly as if in another country, the robotic in and out of poor connection.
"Hello?"
I am surprised to hear him, surprised by how familiar the tone and tenor.
"Dad? It's me. It's Bella."
There is silence on the other end and I worry the connection has failed. But then, at the last moment before my hang up, he responds.
"Bella?"
We talk for hours, until my cell phone battery blinks in anger, threatening automatic shut off. I don't tell him my exact location, but I say I've driven north. That I'm safe. That I'm not with Jacob. In my father's eyes, Jacob is the villain in this narrative. The evil man that caused his daughter to flee the garden of Eden no apples, no snakes. In the story I have written, I have cast myself as the martyr and it has worked. I am careful now, defending Jacob's virtue, introducing the concept that I wanted to leave in the first place. That I needed it. My father doesn't want to hear it, continues his mantra of blame and frustration but ends it in begrudging acceptance. I am healthy. I am happy. I am safe. For the first time, many months after my original departure, we say goodbye.
In my free time, I borrow Carlisle's pickup and I drive. It's technically not legal, going alone with only a learner's permit, but I do it all the same. I leave the city and weave through the trees. I find gravel back roads, dirt two tracks, lines so narrow that the leaves and branches of foliage encroach on the car itself, tickling its edges and whipping its front and back. I drive until I lose myself. My familiar notion. I dissolve. I dissolve into the trees.
I think about my grandchildren, my grandchildren's grandchildren. Will they hear my story, will they think it fiction? How, when their ancestors were young, there were still roads hardly traveled! There were still places in this country built for the automobile that you could lose yourself within completely, potholed and graveled and dusty with dry dirt! Will they think it a myth, an old wives' tale, that anything could be so untamed? So wild?
It is during these times, with the vehicle bouncing beneath me, with my foot on the gas pedal and my hand on the steering wheel, with my heartbeat driving a car… it is during these times that I allow myself to think about him. Him, somewhere out there on the road, driving away and toward, endless and open. Everyone and no one. Alone yet so tightly interwoven with everyone in this country, a stitch in the quilt. Cut it and the whole thing falls apart. Only when I am on the road, driving when I couldn't drive, reading signs that I formerly couldn't read, that I think of him, exit hole entry wound no bullet.
That I think of Edward.
x
reco: Point & Shoot by BlueMeadow. if i'm being real it's a better version of this fic lol