"And I told you to be patient. And I told you to be fine. And I told you to be balanced. And I told you to be kind. And now all your love is wasted? And then who the hell was I? And now I'm breaking at the britches. And at the end of all your lines. Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?"
-"Skinny Love", Bon Iver
Chapter Thirteen:
…
BPOV
"I warned you boy, if I ever saw you anywhere near my girl again I wouldn't hesitate to finish what I started last time."
The gravely voice of my father was the first thing that pierced the dark veil of night that existed behind my eyelids. Without opening them, I squeezed them even more tightly closed. I always hated when Daddy yelled, especially at night when mom and him thought I was sleeping.
"I swear I meant no harm-"
Another voice joined in, much more docile sounding and a flash of a little boy's empty green eyes flooded the darkness of my mind in bright luminosity. I relaxed my eyes and felt my forehead smooth from its abnormal creasing.
"Then explain why she's in the hospital after having a full mental breakdown in the middle of a goddamn baseball game!"
A third voice joined in.
How interesting…
"Dad, listen to me for just a minute! I barely even touched her I-"
Green-eye's was back and I didn't like the way he seemed to have to defend himself from the other two male voices.
"What the hell is that supposed to me, "you barely even touched her"? I should take you in right now for even admitting that you committed assault on my daughter…again. You're in direct violation of the restraining order I had filed against you."
"Oh go fuck yourself Charlie! You know I would never lay a hand on her again. You've received every piece of goddamn paperwork from everyone of my fucking shrinks, so stop acting like such a prick!"
There was a significant amount of shuffling in the hall, as people seemed to move towards each other abruptly.
"Hey! Hey, calm the fuck down Edward."
My eyes shot open as recognition came crashing down on me. The generic white tile ceiling I had spent so many times counting over and over again came to view and I immediately wished that I could close my eyes and wake up anywhere else than in a hospital room.
"Go ahead boy, I'll let you take the first punch and then I'll send your ass straight to jail like I should have done the last time. Trust me, age has not made me any less ornery."
My father's voice had me sitting up brusquely in bed. All the blood that had gathered in my head rushed down my body. I gripped the sheets and clenched my eyes closed, waiting for the bright white light to fade from behind my eyelids and the lightheadedness to clear.
"Well it's good to see you awake."
I opened my eyes slowly, not the least bit frightened by the spectator to my left making herself known. I was too busy trying not to pass out. When the ringing finally faded and I felt like I could open my eyes without vomiting all over the sheets, I turned my head to the corner of the room where a women sat in the armchair by the window.
"Shit." I took one look at her and collapsed back down onto my pillow, not caring to try and regain my equilibrium anymore.
If only for a moment I had thought that I was here, lying in this hospital bed once again, because of another drop in blood pressure or a low iron count, not taking into mind the screaming men out in the hallway, or the brief flash of my hysteria at the ballpark, Leah Clearwater's presence in the room confirmed that this was not just a simple in and out mishap.
"It's good to see you too Isabella." I hadn't seen my old psychiatrist's face in years. In fact, the last time we had been in the same room together, I was telling her to go shove her crazy Freudian theories about my psychological behavior where the sun doesn't shine. Not one of my finest moments.
I knew that her presence in this hospital room could only mean one thing…a psychological evaluation had been called.
I closed my eyes; the florescent light above suddenly felt like they were penetrating every layer of my skin.
"How's your head feeling?" I wished she would just stop talking. Violent flashes of the miserably exhausting sessions we had together in the weeks after I returned to Washington came to mind.
My throat felt like it was coated in a thick, suffocating phlegm that I tried to soothe by gathering enough saliva to swallow down and relieve the irritation. It was no use however, and I was feeling too vulnerable to ask my old shrink for the glass of water that was sitting on the tray table at the foot of my bed.
"Who-" I tried one last attempt to clear my throat as it cracked like a pubescent boy's. "Who called you?" I didn't bother opening my eyes and instead kept my chin pointed to the ceiling, whishing she would just disappear.
"Dr. Cullen called me as soon as you were admitted."
Taking a deep breath, I rolled my head towards the door were the four men had been arguing just moments before. When I opened my eyes after one more moment of hiding behind the darkness of my lids, they were no longer standing just outside my doorway. However, I could see them all congregated at the end of the hall. Carlisle had his arm placed on my father's shoulder while they stood watching the two younger men as they receded into the distance and rounded the corner, taking them out of my view, no matter how hard I tried to discretely stretch my neck to get a better look. I could have been miles away and still been able to recognize Emmett's distinctively massive build and his slightly goofy saunter, but even more familiar was the man whose shoulders he had wrapped up in his grip. Those copper colored tresses were just as notable as his profound eyes.
All of the yelling that had happened just moments before finally clicked together into a perfect harmony of sense in my mind as I replayed the dramatic events of the day over again.
Edward. The baseball game. I had confronted him, all the stress of the week had finally seemed to snap inside of me and the harsh, insensitive words that I had been holding inside myself for so long finally came bubbling to the surface as throngs of strangers passed around us. The anxiety that had me hyperventilating in the elevator the other day was replaced with a verbal hysteria that demanded to be felt. But then he did something so completely unexpected it rocked my entire being. He reached out for me, the longing to touch my skin to his was evident in his eyes, and he said those four damning words, "don't run from me."
I could feel the palpations of my heart pounding against my chest just as they disappeared around the corner and Carlisle and Charlie turned back towards my room, walking down the hall, their footsteps in sync with one another. I felt like I was going to throw up again as my vision seemed to vibrate with a blast of white light that blinded me for a moment. I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out slowly through my mouth, a trick my mother had taught me. She claimed it was the perfect remedy for any sudden sickness, and one that she had used constantly when she was pregnant with me and had trouble keeping her breakfast from making a reappearance by lunchtime. The bright light faded away slowly, but the sharp beats of my heart continued to hit off the inside of my ribs.
Carlisle had his gaze on me as he walked towards the entrance of my room. His face looked even more worn down than the last time I had seen him mere days ago when he was sitting in my kitchen begging me to get help. I guess this was his 'in', his way of pushing Leah on me without ostracizing his doctorial authority and committing me. I quickly turned my face away from the pair of fraternal eyes that bore into me. I felt alone and weak and helpless.
They all think I'm crazy, that I had truly lost my wits. Carlisle didn't think I could talk care of myself, Charlie thought I was a defenseless little girl still, and Edward…Edward couldn't even look at me without seeing that flat chested, gullible teenager he used to push around like his own personal toy. The thought that he was just waiting around to wait for my developed backbone to snap in two, ran through my subconscious more than once since he strolled back into my life.
The realization of it all had a hot tear slipping from between my closed lids and sliding down my cheek. I pulled my knees to my chest and gasped as a sharp sting radiated from my wrist. In the vague and blurry moments of my incoherence at the ballpark, I remembered Edward advancing towards me, begging me to allow him to help. I fell to the ground just as I fell into the residual memory of the last time he had step towards me, hands reaching for me.
I cradled my left wrist against my chest as I clenched my eyes closed.
"Bella?" My dad's voice came from the other side of the bed.
"Why don't we give Isabella a moment to herself? She has a lot to process before discuss what happened today." Leah's words sent acid up from my stomach that quickly fell out of my mouth in a deep tone.
"Shut up!" I yelled, refusing to open my eyes and face the reality of the situation before me. "Stop speaking for me, like…like you know me."
The room lay quiet for a moment.
"Bella dear, we just want to help you. You had a full scale delusional breakdown today." Carlisle said, he placed his hand on my shoulder trying to sooth me, but his touch had the opposite effect.
I sprung from my position curled up on the edge of my bed, causing my head to begin spinning again, but I shook it back and forth quickly. Carlisle's hand fell away from its place on my bare shoulder where the hospital gown I had been dressed in fell way from my skin.
I saw red as our eyes finally met. My father stood just behind him, his hands stuffed into his pockets, a nervous habit he had been doing as long as I could remember. He never did figure out the right way to touch me, to comfort me in any sort of physical way, as I grew older. When he could no longer fit me onto his lap, or give me piggyback rides around the house, he grew physically distant.
Leah on the other hand was still seated in her relaxed position, watching my outburst unfold before her like a movie drama. I could imagine her taking in every detail of my behavior, from the way I fisted my hands into the blanket still draped over my lower half, to the way my face flushed and a few stray tears doused my cheeks in a new sheen of wetness.
"Why did you call her?"
I had every intention to ask this accusing question through gritted teeth, angry eyes, and a harsh tone that would match his from just moments ago when he berated his son outside in the hallway. Instead, it came out sounding tearstained and weighted down in so much anguish that my previous feelings of abandonment and loneliness outweighed the rage.
"I'm so sorry Bella…"He paused, his face looking like I had just broken his heart in two. "There was nothing else I could do. You need help."
I tried to swallow, the thick feeling back in my throat again.
"You've managed to repress all these toxic emotions and memories and tell yourself that you're better." He now had his knee up on the bed, giving him enough leverage to reach forward and grip my arms by the elbows. He gave me a little shake as he continued. "But, you're not better Bella, you're not okay. My son has left a large wound inside you and you just keep taping it back together and hoping it will heal instead of stitching it up properly."
I tried to take a deep breath in but my nose was stuffed up and my eyes blurred with watery tears. I turned my gaze away from the man I thought of as a second farther, my mouth slightly agape so I could take in a few short pulls of breath. His words were so truly that I knew there was nothing I could say to deny his blunt words. Yet, I couldn't just let him be right. I found myself shaking my head back and forth slowly, a stray tear dropped into my mouth and I could taste the saltiness.
"Isabella, listen to Carlisle, we both just want to help you-" My father started but before he could finish I whipped my head back to face them and quickly cut in.
"You think I'm crazy. If you wanted to help me you would just let me…let me worry about myself!" I cried out, feeling exasperated and exhausted. "Instead you called her," I turn my accusing stare to the women still sitting silently in the corner, "for a psychological evaluation that will end in me being poked and prodded until they decided to send me home with a new round of mediation that will make me feel like my chest is going to cave in. It will all go back to feeling so dull inside. There's no happy, no sad, I just walk around looking like everything is fine but inside…"I clutched my hand with the injured wrist against my chest where the palpitations continued, but even with all the wild emotions that I was feeling now, I would rather them to the leaden nothingness that I had known for so long. "Inside I know that I'm all torn up and broken."
Tired and hurt, all the lingering anger left my body. My fingers unclenched the hospital blanket and my hand fell away from my chest. I pulled my arms out of Carlisle's slackened grip before letting my body fall back onto the bed, turning my head away from my spectators' heavy gazes.
"Bella!" Michael's voice pierced through the painful silence that hung over the room. I cringed as I heard his Italian leather loafers enter the room. "What is everyone doing? Bella, are you okay sweetheart?"
I didn't respond to my fiancé's concern and continued to look at the wall that was next to the window.
"Michael, Bella needs a little space right now. Why don't we all head out into the hall and let her rest." Leah's voice was a solace for the first time since I woke up in this hell.
"What? What's going on?"
"It's okay Mike, let's just go outside for a moment." Dad's voice sounded thick with some emotion that I couldn't think about for fear that taking in anymore would cause me to explode.
I listened to their footsteps recede from the room and the door close behind them. Once I was sure that they had all left I slowly rose from the bed. I carefully and quietly scoured the room for my abandoned clothes, which had thankfully been folded and left on the table next to the chair in the corner. I quickly gathered them and padded over to the bathroom in my bare feet.
After I had finished putting on my clothes rather clumsily, my injured hand had gotten in the way more than once as I tired to pull the zipper up on my jeans and button my Mariners' jersey. After a few frustrating tries I ended up leaving my shoelaces untied and my jersey half unbutton, leaving my sweat-soaked tank top exposed.
I don't know what I had planned on doing when I walked out of the bathroom, whether I was going to grab my bag and run out of the hospital, or if I thought I could talk my way out of whatever seventy-two hour lock down they might put me under. However, all thoughts of escape were forgotten when I found Leah seated on the bed in front of me, Michael was just to my left standing in front of the door…blocking it. Carlisle and Charlie were nowhere to be seen.
"What are you doing Bella?" Leah spoke to me in a calm voice, crossing her legs slowly one over the other.
"I-I'm going home."
"Bella, darling, sit down." I glanced towards my fiancé who looked more like a prison guard then my soon to be groom. He wasn't asking, he was telling me.
"I'm going home." I repeated myself.
"Bella, you've seen how concerned your family is about you and considering today's events I think it would be best if you stayed the night and got some rest. I really would like to talk to you about some of the feelings you've been having lately." She rose from the bed and took a cautious step towards me like she was approaching a wounded animal.
I felt the tears welling up again and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep them from escaping. I refused to turn into a puddle in front of her again.
"You said you wanted to be the only one who could worry about you, well this is your chance to finally start doing a little worrying Bella." By the time she was done speaking she was a mere foot from where I stood, my back nearly pressed up against the bathroom door.
"I-", I was at a loss for words, shrinks always seemed to do that to me.
"Bella, please." Mike said from his spot where he seemed to stand like a brick wall, keeping me from leaving. The confusion and concern were blatant in his eyes that overflowed with the overwhelming feelings that were being thrown at him.
I only glanced at him briefly, afraid to let the idea of my emotional baggage finally crushing my fiancé from entering my mind. Instead, my gaze darted back to Leah Clearwater's dark, kind eyes.
"I want to go home." It came out sounding just as slathered in thick emotion as my outburst to Carlisle had just minutes ago. One lonely tear left my eye; it was all I had left to give. I wrapped my arms around my midsection wishing that it would be this easy to hold everything together.
Maybe Carlisle was right. Maybe I had spent too many years wrapping my arms around myself, thinking that if I just squeezed tight enough nothing would fall out. Maybe this day was inevitable. Whether it had happened tomorrow or on the day of my wedding, or not for another seven years it wouldn't matter, because it was just a matter of time before it did happen. I was holding together bullet holes with bubblegum and bandages. The worst part of it all was that I knew that I had left those bullets to feaster. A small part of me knew that I wanted it there. I longed to feel the pain every once in awhile.
Everyone was right about me. Carlisle could see it in my eyes the day I woke up from the coma, Charlie knew the moment I left home never to return the same daughter he raised from diapers, and Edward knew the moment he step into that sunroom on that Sunday afternoon on a warm day in August.
So why couldn't I see it? Why couldn't I just say what everyone else knew?
That I was broken, depressed, stressed, and overwhelmed by my past. That despite years of sitting on couches and telling doctor after doctor my sob story, I never really dealt with any of it. That I like to relive that night in my mind sometimes because it is easier to find blame in a nineteen-year-old Edward and a foolish teenage version of myself than blaming myself for the way I am now.
And that when I saw Edward's face, all jawline and scruff, my heart beat a little harder than it ever had when I was wrapped in the arms of my fiancé.
"Please." I begged. "Just please let me go home."
~ ooOoo ~
My eyelids drooped halfway over my eye as I watched Mike unlock my apartment door with the blue sparkly key I had decorated for him as a joke when I first moved in after graduating college. I couldn't help the small smile that tugged at my lips. We seemed so much younger then. Michael was a little more impulsive and I was just a bit more enthusiastic.
He used to call me and spend hours talking about how he couldn't wait to get out from underneath his father's thumb, how he was counting the days until he had enough saved up to move us both to move to some small villa in Tuscany, where we would spend our days drinking homemade wine, eating too much pasta and making love with such fierce passion that we couldn't tell were his body ended and mine began. I would chatter back about my plans to write novels and publish children's books all from the comfort of my favorite armchair that sat just in front of a pair of French doors that were always open to the warm summer sun of the northern Italian countryside.
All of that seemed so far away now that it could have been a different lifetime.
Lately, if we ever called each other on the phone it was to confirm dinner plans with his parents or discuss last minute wedding details in tones so dull that we both knew the other would rather be doing anything else. Mike spent less time trying to break away from his father's law firm and more time working on gaining enough rapport with current clients to take over the business when his dad finally decides to retire. And I couldn't even remember the last time I spoke about writing a novel or even thought about publishing anything, let alone children's books.
When did we stop being the Bella and Mike that we were in college?
I can only assume it happened sometime in the last year as the anxiety overtook me most days and the nightmares drowned me at night. I was so busy trying not to be eighteen-year-old Bella; I had seemed to skip right passed twenty-something Bella.
"Why don't you go take a shower and I'll make us some tea." Michael said as he walked into my living room, a place that I felt like I hadn't seen in days rather than hours.
The moonlight peaking out from behind the clouds, and streamed through my window sending the shadows back towards their corners. When it had turned from a bright sunny afternoon to a dark, brisk night I couldn't be sure.
It had taken almost an hour for me to convince Leah to let me leave the hospital and go home to my own bed. Michael pleaded with me to just stay the night, but I wouldn't hear anything of the sort and couldn't be consoled until I heard the words come out of her mouth.
She agreed, finally as the sun grew low in the sky, that in light of my quickly approaching nuptials she would discharge me into the arms of my fiancé with a few nonnegotiable conditions. One, I am not be left alone under any circumstances tonight. Two, I was to call Leah in the morning before I went to work and seriously discuss returning to weekly sessions. And three, I was to take all of my medication in full until we could work out a better combination of prescriptions.
I stared at the ceiling listening to her demands, feeling Michael's eyes heavily on my face, biting harshly into the soft flesh of my bottom lip to keep the frustrated tears from leaking from my eyes, before I finally sucked up my pride and dignity and agreed with a single nod of my head. An hour later my wrist was wrapped once more, my head poked and prodded to rule out a concussion, and Leah signed my discharge papers, leaving me in the confused and overwhelmed presences of my fiancé.
I walked to my bedroom feeling so drained that each footstep felt like a ten pound weight had been strapped to each foot. I walked straight to the bathroom, too tired to even remember the loose piece of paper that still stuck out of my typewriter, and closed the door securely behind me. I pulled my clothes off just as haphazardly as I had put them on and stepped into the shower, longing to feel the spray of the water against my skin.
As the water cascaded down my body it loosened every muscle that had pulled itself taunt throughout the day. I felt like a slug, my body bent like Jello in the glorious steam of the hot water. I collapsed to the floor of the shower; my limbs too limp to hold myself up anymore. I stared blankly at the shower fall, watching water drip down the tiles. The bandage of my wrist felt uncomfortably heavy as the water soaked through the dense material.
I placed my face into my hands and began to sob as the weight of the day fell from me and was carried down the drain with the rest of the water. I couldn't tell if the warm wetness on my face was a product of tears coming from my well-spent ducts or if it was just the gentle cascade of water droplets that poured form the shower head above.
A/N: I hoped you enjoyed reading. Leave me a review and let me know what you think. I love to hear what my readers have to say.
F.