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LadySharkey1 rocks my world by being the most amazing, kick-ass beta I could ever imagine.
Rosslyn Harbor, Maine
Monday, March 19, 1951
11 AM
Heaven looked a lot different than Edward had imagined.
Not that he'd actually spent a whole lot of time pondering the afterlife or anything. When he came to his senses, the first things he became aware of were the sheets tucked tightly around his body and the stark white ceiling that was slowly becoming visible as his watery eyes opened.
Strange.
"Edward?" There was no denying that the first voice he heard definitely belonged to an angel, though.
His angel.
"Edward, can you hear me?" Her sweet voice whispered.
He fought against the strain of something trying to pull him back to sleep; the light so bright it was almost painful to behold as he struggled to open his eyes. "W-where…" he managed to croak as his eyes lost their fight against his weakness.
He simply lacked the energy to be conscious of his surroundings and take them in at the same time.
"You're in hospital on Rosslyn Harbor," Isabella's soft voice answered as a cool cloth was pressed against his forehead. "It's been three days since you were brought here. There were times when we didn't think you'd make it."
Thinking very hard—something that took considerable effort—Edward managed to remember his desperate fight with Mrs. Cope; the feeling of steel penetrating his body; the sense of sheer despair, thinking his final hour had struck right at the time when life was starting to look up again.
"The…boatman." His voice sounded feeble, his words barely audible unless someone was hovering as close as propriety allowed.
Like Bella.
"Yes," she whispered, her cool, steady hand enclosing his cheek. "Fortunately for us, it turned out that not only did the boatman have a perfect understanding of naval flag signaling, he also used to be a medic during the war. He managed to stabilize you enough for you to be transported to land."
Edward nodded slightly, his whole being focused on her voice as Bella prattled on. "By then, Rose and Jasper had made it down and between the four of us, we somehow managed to keep you from dying. Esme's in the room next door, by the way. She's doing much better."
Edward smiled, a huge wave of relief settling over him as he allowed sleep to pull him under again.
They were okay.
Well, him, not so much yet, but he could feel he would be with a little time and care.
They had made it.
oOo
It was dark the next time he woke up.
Feeling stronger, he tried to lift himself up to take in his surroundings. Groaning against the pain, he managed to scoot up against his pillows just enough to get a grasp of the room around him. The chair next to his bed was empty but, even though he felt a pang of worry and disappointment at waking up alone, he could hardly expect Bella to remain by his side twenty-four-seven.
It was smallish; the contours of it dimly lit by a single lamp left on to aid the nurses as they did their nightly rounds. In the distance, he could hear the ocean and if he breathed in deep enough, he could almost smell it above the scent of hospital that clung to everything that surrounded him.
Rosslyn Hospital.
Right.
That explained the ocean.
Remembering some of what Bella had told him he lifted his arm, his fingertips exploring the wounds his eyes could barely make out. There was one on his shoulder; a heavy patch of bandages obscuring it from the eye. But the pain it caused was enough to let him know it was deep and angry. Then there was one on his side too; more superficial if the dull ache he felt from it was anything to go by.
On the other side, his stomach was smarting underneath a similar covering as the wound on his arm, and with a sharp sting of pain, he remembered how that had been the wound that had almost done him in.
He was safe.
Breathing in and out, he tried to get his anxiety under control in the same way he'd used when he was in the army.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Visualize the place you wanted to be.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Think of the people you wanted to be there with you.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Try to remember that unique smell of home and love and breathe it in like you were there.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
"Ah, you're awake!" Edward was shocked out of his exercise by a nurse coming in to check on him. "My name's Nurse Dawson and I'll be looking after you tonight. How are you feeling, Mr. Masen?"
"Like I've been stabbed to within an inch of my life?" Edward offered, not exactly up to speed with the common practices of hospital etiquette.
The nurse chuckled. "That sounds about accurate. How about we get you back into a horizontal position? You've lost a lot of blood so it's better not to strain yourself too much. You need to give your body every chance it can get to heal again. You were very lucky that madwoman didn't have better aim. Your wounds may be severe but you'll live."
Edward nodded, already feeling the toll of sitting up for even as short an amount of time as he had. "Bella?"
"Your lady friend?" The nurse asked, waiting until he nodded before she explained, "We sent her off a couple of hours ago. Poor thing was running ragged. You know she hasn't left your side for all of the three days you've been in here? When they tried to make her leave after visiting hours, she claimed she'd buy the hospital if we didn't let her stay with you. I think that was the most time she actually spent apart from you. We put a cot in here to allow her to get some rest but I don't think she used it for more than a couple of hours."
Edward sighed. "Sounds like the Bella I know."
"Things caught up with her after you woke up and the Charge Nurse sent her back to her hotel; well, forced her out kicking and screaming is more like it." Nurse Dawson snickered, remembering the quite heated stand-off between her boss and the very determined Mrs. Black. "She's not to enter the hospital before eight this morning, which, before you ask, is another five hours from now."
Edward nodded, feeling his fatigue upon him again.
The nurse, obviously, saw it too as she pulled his blankets up to cover his arms. "Sleep. It will make the time pass that much faster."
oOo
She was back, the next time he woke.
It was afternoon, and he was feeling much stronger than he had the first couple of times he'd woken.
"How are you doing?" she asked, helping him as he struggled to sit up.
He groaned as his stitches strained against the movement but managed to settle onto his pillows in a somewhat comfortable position. "A little better, believe it or not."
"You look a lot better," Bella assessed, handing him a glass of cool water; a drink had never tasted as good. "You have some color in your face again. And, well, you're awake, which is more than could be said for a long time."
"You look good, too," Edward chuckled, noting that Bella did still look tired but not worn out as she had looked, according to the nurse.
"They told you, huh?" Bella smiled wryly, hiding her blush behind the curtain of long, brown hair.
His feelings for her created a heaviness in his chest that wasn't altogether unpleasant. He loved her, even more than he had before, but their weekend was coming to an end, he didn't know what was going to happen between them. "Thanks for sticking by my side. It was more than I could have asked, given how I treated you in the past."
"It was the least I could do after you saved my life," Bella insisted, her eyes wet with tears. "I was so scared we were going to lose you. You were lying there on that jetty and it looked like—"
"Hey." Grabbing her hand, Edward forced her attention away from those painful memories. "We're here now…and we're both safe. But shouldn't you be with your son? I can only imagine how anxious you must be to see him again."
"He's here." Bella smiled the warm grin of a proud mother as she wiped away her tears. "Jake and his nanny are at the hotel right now, but if her accounts are anything to go on, she all but had to chain him to his bed yesterday to stop him from coming to see you. He's quite eager to make your acquaintance, you see."
"As eager as I am to meet him, I guess," Edward replied, unsure but hopeful about the direction their conversation had steered in. "That is…if you still want us to meet. I'll do anything you want!"
"I want…" Bella averted her face, looking out the window as she tried to organize her thoughts. "I'm scared, Edward," she finally admitted, still not daring to look at him. "Right now, my feelings for you are as strong as they were back in the day but, just like I said before: this time around, mine isn't the only heart on the line. And if you hurt my son…" Pressing her lips together, she managed to keep herself from crying as she pressed on, this time looking straight into Edward's deep green eyes. "Before I bring him, I need to be really sure that you aren't going to pull another stunt on me this time…that you're in this for the long haul."
Edward nodded. "You need time."
"I need some time," Bella emphasized, knowing she was only playing with a limited allowance to get her fears under control. Given the state he was in, the hospital was bound to keep Edward for a few more days at least but it wouldn't last indefinitely. All too soon Edward was going to be released from hospital and after the bleak picture he'd pained to what life was like for him in Hollywood, Bella couldn't just let him go back home to loneliness and hired care.
Just then, the arrival of a nurse cut their conversation short. As she took Edward's vitals, she announced that a police officer had just arrived and wished to talk to the two of them. Apparently he had some new information about their case.
The officer, it turned out, was a young rookie who, judging by the star struck look on his face as he gazed adoringly at the patient, was well up to date on his Hollywood productions. The news he brought them, however, was nothing if not baffling.
"She was his mother?" Edward gasped as Bella sat speechless next to him.
The police officer nodded. "She had him young…very young, it turns out and conception wasn't very, uh, conventional. She was a kitchen maid in some mansion and her employer had a habit of…" Here, the young officer pulled off his hat, looking apologetically at Bella as he left his audience to fill in the blanks he was both too bashful and gentlemanly to explicate. "Anyway, she put her child up for adoption, which was how Michael Newton came to live with his adoptive parents who, as you probably know, died young and left him an orphan."
Bella nodded, recalling the sad story of poor Mike. "But then how did she know him?"
"From what we've found, she began trying to locate her son about a decade or so ago. Our colleagues up in New York were polite enough to forward us a report in which she stated she was forced to give up her child and in which she demanded the police to take action and locate him as well as punish the people responsible." Here, the officer smiled wryly as he added, "You won't be surprised to learn that not an awful lot was done to further her plight."
Bella sighed, feeling a slight pang of compassion for the poor mother in search of her child. "But she did manage to find out who he was in the end," she stated, knowing their whole ordeal wouldn't have happened if poor Mrs. Cope had been none the wiser.
"She befriended a private detective—he's actually the person who came forward with most of the information we have on the woman. He was willing to do some digging into her case in exchange for her…oh, um," he paused uncomfortably looking at Bella, "services." Blushing, the police officer avoided Bella's gaze as he went on. "He managed to find out Michael's name and from there, it was easy to make the connection to Broadway."
"But not in time for her to meet her son." Bella felt so sad, knowing Mike, who'd always felt so alone and left out, had a mother out there somewhere who was looking for him but who, in turn, wouldn't find him until it was too late and despair had driven her son to take his own life.
"By the time she came to New York, the case had already been closed and all that was left was a cheap grave marker in Woodlawn Cemetery and a stagehand who told her what little he knew about her son's final days. That was probably how she got the idea," he concluded. "We know very little about what happened afterwards but we hope that Mrs. Platt can shed some light on how Mrs. Cope managed to enter into Mr. Cullen's employment, if she recovers."
The young officer left them with that; a stunned silence lingering long after his departure.
It was Edward who, in the end, was the one who spoke first. "I know it may sound strange and completely inappropriate given the way that woman almost succeeded in killing us, but…in a way, I almost feel like we deserved her wrath."
"How so?" Bella frowned, her mind still too full with the revelations that had just been shared and the pieces of the confounding puzzle slowly sliding into place.
"What we did to Mike…" Edward sighed, utterly ashamed of the callous, cruel way his younger self had acted towards a person who had been in need of his compassion and friendship. "What we did to him was monstrous. So it's not entirely without logic that through our cruel acts, we created a monster."
Thoughts?