Chapter thirteen
Later that night I called him.
Maybe I shouldn't have.
"Hello?" He answered just fine, though.
"Edward. Hey."
"Hey."
"How are you?" I asked, just diving right in.
"Fine. Stuffed. Just got back from dinner. What's up?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to see how you are. After today..."
"It's whatever."
"It is?"
"I mean, they say I gotta be there, so I'll go. They want him in prison, so I'll talk, but I don't give a fuck either way." I could hear him shuffling around in the background, and I wondered what he was doing. He'd been eating dinner, like it was just any other day. If it had been me, if I had been in a courtroom talking about... those things, I would be wrecked. I'd be curled up in a ball, whimpering. I'd probably be torn on wanting to see or talk to no one and wanting absolutely everyone possible that I cared about surrounding me, their presence comforting me. Offering to do anything, say anything, just to take away even one iota of the pain that I was in.
But it wasn't me, was it?
"How can you...not? Care, I mean?"
"'Cuz it's over," he said, and it sounded like gum popped in his mouth.
"Oh."
"Or not. After this, there are like, more to be prosecuted. I'm so over it already, you know?"
"I bet," I said with an uneasy laugh. "Um, who else?"
"His girlfriend, Vic."
"Like, because she knew?" I asked.
"Yeah. Conspiracy to whatever, I don't know. Don't really care. There might be his cousin, too. He told him I was his godson."
"He did?" I gasped.
"Yeah."
"And they just believed that?" I asked, thinking of our small town, the flyers, the local news, the national news.
"The guy wanted to believe it. And I didn't correct him."
"Why?"
There was a long pause and he sighed. I heard the glug of a bottle, the swish as it was swirled around or tossed around or hell, chugged around.
"Because you just...don't. I mean. He would've killed me. And I know it's like...it seems like there's no way he would've. Like if I said something, maybe those people would've just turned him in right there." He paused a moment to take a deep breath, and I heard the swish of the bottle but no accompanying chug. "But then you're living it and hanging out with these people and it just...it wasn't always this big torture ring, you know? It always sucked, but it wasn't dungeons and shit the entire time."
"Right."
"Vic knew, though. That bitch," he snorted. "She knew. She's a drunk."
"Really?" I asked, wondering exactly how drunk Edward was at the moment.
"Yeah. She's a nut. Maybe worse than him."
"I...didn't know that," I said.
"It got him off. Having her around me, and you know." I closed my eyes and swallowed down, hard.
"Are you okay telling me this stuff?" I asked, because he didn't want me at the trial and now he spoke so stoically, or maybe like he was discussing the weather or any other normal thing, but there were these tiny threads of hostility stringing each word to the next.
"You called me, Bella. You won't stop. So, if you wanna know...and even if you don't, this is shit you should know if you're gonna hang around."
"Is that what you want?" I asked carefully.
"I want to open my eyes and have it be two years ago." Me, too, I thought. But I didn't say that. It didn't seem terribly helpful.
"I can't...give you that."
"I know."
"I just want to know what to do, Edward."
"You keep waiting for me to give you some kind of answer or something, Bella," he rushed, and I had never heard him sound so frustrated with me before. "I don't have answers. I'm more fucked than even you. I want things the way they were before, or maybe I want things to be completely different. I can't go back. I can't go on like I'm me because I don't even know who that asshole with a baseball career is anymore. No clue. So. I mean. You tell me. And you wanna hang around like we're us...but Bella, that ain't me anymore. I can't be that kid again. Even if I wanted it."
"You think I'm the same?" I asked, desperate to keep the quaver out of my voice. "I'm not. When you..." I had to take a deep breath before continuing. "I'm forever different, too."
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
"Okay, what?"
"Jesus! I don't know! Why are we doing this?"
"I can't let go!"
"I'm already gone! You want someone who isn't here!"
"I'm coming over," I said.
"Bella, just don't-"
"No. This time, if you're leaving, then you're saying goodbye."
"Hey!" I shouted, trudging over in the dark, using the headlights of his father's car as a guide.
Edward was there near the old rotting fence, his bottle of liquor resting beside him, baseball bat in one hand with a big bucket near his feet.
He took a ball from the bucket, tossed it in the air and cracked it with the bat so far out that even in daylight I was sure it'd never be seen again.
"What?" he asked, picking up another ball.
"What?" I breathed. "You showed up the other night at my window and did...that. Then you tell me to forget it, and Edward. If I could forget anything about you, the past two years of my life wouldn't have been hell."
He cracked the ball again before looking at me over his shoulder.
"Yeah, Bella. Tell me how shitty things have been for you these two years. Why don't you go ahead and tell me all about it." His tone was awful.
"I didn't mean that!I know you had it worse-"
"You tell me about how you worried... while you were in your own damned bed every night. You tell me about how you couldn't even be happy around your friends- well, do you wanna know what I was doing?"
I took a step back, arms over my chest, rocking myself for some kind of comfort before I exploded.
"If you want to tell me, then yes," I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
"Fuck," he laughed, picking up another ball. "Go home, Bella."
"I want to be here! For you! With you! However you want me to be!" I cried.
He cracked another ball clear off the property and grabbed the bottle behind him.
"I can't be with anyone, okay?" he said, then took a sip from the bottle.
"We can do whatever you want," I said, "you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, or-"
"You don't get it."
"Yeah, well. You're not explaining it."
He set the bottle back on the post and pointed the bat at me.
"I can't do this with you."
"Edward, don't. Don't say that," I said, clutching at my stomach. "Please. Don't say that...we don't even have to be anything but friends, just please..."
I just stared at him, and then it was there- a faint flicker of anger, of indignant, seething rage- at all of it. At the entire world. I tried my best to tamp it down because I knew the minute I opened my mouth and shouted the feelings roiling up my throat that I might never, ever stop. And he was the one person on the whole fucking planet that least deserved to have my pent-up feelings of the last two years vomited all over his hurting body.
He didn't seem to notice my inner turmoil and continued to speak at me in his terrible, emotionless voice. "I thought I'd come back, eventually. I thought of it a thousand times. I thought I'd come back and it'd be just so easy. And happy. But it's not. I don't even want to be here," he said, a humorless chuckle falling from his mouth before shaking his head. "I can't even stand to be here."
"Where do you want to go?" I asked, just to keep him talking as I swallowed my emotional vomit back down to the pit of my stomach where it belonged.
"I want the hell out of this head and out of this body, but I can't outrun myself, can I?" he asked, a spiteful, angry smile on his face.
"It's just gonna take time," I said weakly. "It's just all so new, Edward. And you've been through so much and-"
"I talked to that lawyer. Hell, there were like twelve of them, right? It's this hotshot team...everyone wants the case because, you know. I'm a fucking celebrity. They want the entire world to know what went on in that house."
I nodded, sniffling and wiping at my eyes.
"And I had to tell him everything, right?" Edward asked, and I hated that he was drunk. I hated that he was being mean, trying to shake something loose in me. But I stayed.
"And you know what?"
"No."
"Toward the end, I was alone all the time."
"What?"
"Yup," he said, picking up another ball. "I mean, I was in that house by myself. Probably the last three months or so, he'd leave me there. All the time."
He said it almost boastful, smug.
"Okay," I said slowly.
"Okay. So they ask why I didn't take off earlier. And say it, Bella. You're thinking the same thing."
"Why?" I said it, I played this game.
"I have no fucking idea. It became home. Hell, but home. After awhile, I just lost the will to leave? Or I wasn't even sure if the world was the same. I wasn't even sure if I'd made all of you up. And he fed me. I played cards with the guy. I laughed with him sometimes."
"Edward," I said. I was confused...and I was exactly what he figured I would be. Not getting it.
"You just get so lost that you don't even know your way around your own mind. And so all these lawyers are looking at me, like...what the fuck? This kid just blew this case. Why the hell didn't you leave? Right?" he asked, grabbing another ball, this time just tossing it out.
"And this psychologist my dad roped in is trying to tell everyone this is normal. That this is how it goes with 'this type of victim.' That it's normal I stuck around there after so much time."
"I've heard it is," I shrugged, and the bat went sailing through the air. He turned to me, his gaze tormented and blurred.
"Does this look fucking normal to you?!" he screamed it, making me jump.
"I don't know, I don't know," I cried, backing up, holding on to myself.
"Jesus. Don't cry. Just go. Please. Just go."
"I can't leave you again," I said, and it was true. I wanted to run like hell...but I couldn't. I just could not make myself move from that spot.
"I don't want to leave you out here like this. Here. In this spot," I said. And we both knew why.
"What's the worst that could happen?" he asked, holding his arms out. "And I used to walk you home to prevent rape."
I blanched at his bluntness, the harshness of all of it.
He sighed and turned around to light a cigarette as I stood there, feeling unwanted but not un-needed. I wanted to light every candle in the world, to drop every breadcrumb to lead this boy back home. And if that wasn't possible, maybe I just wanted to introduce some kind of light in his darkness. Maybe this is how to love someone when they cannot stand to be loved by you, but you can't make yourself stop loving them anyway.
"Mr. Chase finally got shit-canned for growing weed in the greenhouse," I blurted out, not thinking of a damned thing to say that wouldn't cause an issue.
"'Bout time," Edward said, leaning against the rotten fence, looking off into the dark, maybe to see the baseballs he'd lobbed out into the distance.
"Jessica and Mike broke up like, four times, and the third one it was because she thought she was pregnant."
"That idiot," Edward snorted.
"Lauren Mallory actually did get pregnant."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. It's a boy. Um. Waylon's put a new Reuben sandwich on the menu and they catered your vigil. It was nice."
With a cigarette paused halfway to his lips, he looked at me from the corner of his eye. I shrugged and held my palms up.
Then he started to laugh, softly at first, slow and quiet, but soon, I started laughing with him...and then we were just laughing together. I edged forward so, so slowly, coming to rest next to him on the fence. He was laughing too hard to notice or shrink away from me.
"I'm glad it was nice?" he said helplessly, still laughing.
"You would've liked it. They had baskets of curly fries."
"At my funeral?" he asked, quirking his eyebrow.
"Well. It was like this memorial thing? So people all wanted to be surrounded with your favorite things. Like, uh. curly fries."
"What else?" His face was full of soft amusement, and for one moment, I allowed a pang of longing to choke my throat.
"Everything was all baseball. And I got all pissy about it because, well. You're more than that, you know? Like, oh, Edward. Baseball. I don't know. I hated that."
"Thanks," he said quietly, turning the tip of his cigarette around to watch it burn.
"Yep."
"What did you bring?" he asked, bumping my shoulder with his.
"I didn't bring anything," I said lamely.
"Oh."
"I wore tights."
He was quiet for a second then laughed again, a short, bark of a laugh, shaking his head.
"I missed you, weirdo," he said, then looked down at me while I looked up at the sky.
"You have no idea," I sighed, just as my phone buzzed.
It had to be my parents, probably freaking the hell out.
I took it from my pocket to reveal a text from Jake, accompanied with his picture, in which he was half-ass planking on his kitchen table:
i'm board. geddit? call me.
I slid my phone back in my pocket, hating that that just happened. Because I hadn't done anything wrong, but it felt like i had? Or it felt like I should've said something before. But when? It was just coming out all wrong.
"That was, uh, Jake. He moved here about-"
"You don't have to," Edward said quickly, putting out his cigarette, smoke billowing from his nose.
"No, no. I want to. I...don't love him."
"Bella. It's fine," he shrugged. "I didn't expect to waltz in here and marry you."
"I know, it's just, I'm saying..." What the hell was I saying?
"You think I was exactly faithful?" he asked.
"Edward," I gasped.
"Come on. Let's call it for what it is. I'm not returning as the virginal baseball hero I was before I left, okay?"
"I know, but it's not-"
"There was Vic, too. He liked alllll kinds of stuff. And I must've too."
"What?" I asked, completely bewildered now.
"I got it up," he shrugged, like it was nothing. "I might have been hating it in my head but my body worked just fine, so what the hell do I even do with that? I don't know. It happened. Okay?"
"Edward, that doesn't mean you weren't...raped? Or...it doesn't mean you wanted it..."
He picked up the bottle and took a large gulp, then smiled at me.
"I have no idea what's okay and what's not. Go on home. Call that guy. I'm gonna be okay."
"I don't want him. I want you."
"No, Bella. You don't. You have no idea what I am anymore. I'm not sure I even do. But trust me...you don't want whatever I've got left. Go. Don't cry, yeah? Just go, call him. Please?"
"No, Edward-"
"I'm crawling outta my skin, here, Bella. I don't want you here. I want to pass time by myself. I'm going to listen to some shrink and I have to repeat a year of school. I have to figure out how the fuck to stop drinking without killing myself. I can't worry about you when everyone else is worried about me."
"But I worry about you." He ignored that one.
"Go. Go be with that guy. I'm someone new. You don't even know me. It's a good thing. Go."
"I can't just-"
"You can," he said with a laugh. "You don't have to deal with any of this, not anymore. So. I'm letting you go."
"I'm not ready to be let go of."
"Silly girl. I'll see ya around, okay?"
I stepped over and cautiously pressed my forehead to his chest, listening for the boy I used to know.
"Goodbye," I whispered and he wrapped his arms around me tightly, to humor me or what, I wasn't sure.
"Bye bye, Baby," he said. I thought I felt the brush of his mouth against my forehead but maybe it was just his hand or my imagination. Then he was stepping away, turning his back on me.
I didn't go home.
I went to that bench with his name and no dates, where I cried and said goodbye all over again, this time certain he was dead.
You know, I've been telling some of you that this is my favorite chapter, and now that I've read it, I mean... it still is, but damn. What does that even say about me? Sheesh. Hey, thanks for sticking with me!