March 28, 2013 – Word prompt: Regret. Audio-visual challenge—Imagined image: (tunnel of love)
. . .
So used to Bella's phone calls, it always takes me faintly by surprise when my phone rings at night and it's someone other than her. "Edward?" My mother's voice holds an unmissable note of despair, and my heart clenches, thinking of all the different ways the next words out of her mouth could hurt.
"Mom?"
"Edward, honey." She doesn't say anything more, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I don't want her to. I want to exist in the bubble of blissful ignorance that I can already sense is about to be shattered. "Honey, Charlie Swan's been shot."
"What?"
"He was brought into the hospital tonight; Carlisle called from the ER. He's being airlifted to Harborview." A brief spark of relief at the revelation that he's still alive, at least. "I just…thought you would want to know." The hesitation is there, the uncertainty my mother always has when Bella enters the conversation; she doesn't know that where her name once speared me through the heart, now it patches the wounds.
"Does Bella know?"
"Alice said she's getting on a flight to Seattle."
A hasty goodbye, and I'm dialing Alice, who answers midway through the first ring. "United, flight 1243 out of SFO. Should land at about ten past nine."
"Who's picking her up?" I ask, wanting more than anything for it to be me.
"I am," she says. "But I suspect I'll have company."
"I can pick you up at 8:30."
"Okay."
That settled, I try Bella, but I get her voice mail. Glancing at my watch, I realize she's likely already in the air. My mind briefly pictures it: her passenger jet and Charlie's medivac helicopter flying toward each other through the dark night sky. An immediate pang of remorse spears me; of all the regrets I have about the way things ended with Bella, somewhere in the middle of that list is the way I disappointed Charlie. Silently, I pray that I'll have the chance to earn his forgiveness, too.
Ninety minutes to kill, and I don't know what to do with them. The textbook I'd been studying sits abandoned on the coffee table, a cup of coffee growing cold beside it. A yellow pool of light spills into the room from the lamp on the end table, and the silence inside these four walls is its own sound.
Restless, anxious, nervous. Wondering at the worst: who will be the man in Bella's life, if Charlie doesn't come back to her? I hope I don't get an answer to that question, as memories of Bella's dark eyes in another face come to my mind, the unconditional love and unwavering protectiveness in them things I'd naively thought I could replicate.
I'm on Alice's doorstep by 8:00; we're standing in the arrivals area of Sea-Tac a full twenty minutes before Bella's plane is scheduled to land. Her arm slips through mine, and for the first time ever, I feel like we're on the same page where Bella's concerned. Despite her fear, her pain, her anger, there was some part of Bella, I suspect, that was open to finding a reason to forgive me. Alice suffered no such compulsion.
When Bella's face appears behind a cluster of travelers wearily making their way out of the gate area, my throat constricts. She looks beautiful. Haggard, exhausted, panicked, grief-stricken, painfully beautiful. Her tiny frame weaves its way around people, head down and posture hunched, black straps of her backpack like an ineffectual harness trying to hold her back by the shoulders. When she lifts her gaze to scan for Alice and sees me, that beautiful face crumples. And with it, my heart.
. . .
I like Seattle. It's close enough to home that I no longer feel like I'm running from it but far enough away that I don't feel defined by it. It's a city big enough to lose yourself but small enough to find yourself, and I do both in equal measure. Law school is just hard enough to keep most of my brain occupied, and the weather is such that I remember what it means to appreciate the simple pleasure of sunshine. Here, finally, I work on becoming a man. Not a boy, and not some in-between imitation of a man forged by the illusion of independence that college affords, but a man who knows who he is and what he wants.
The latter has always been a foregone conclusion, even long after its impossibility became clear, but I work on redefining it. The former is a work in progress.
When my parents announce in my second year that they're renewing their vows, I take it in stride. My parents' love has always been front-and-center; they're the couple that is constantly embarrassing their kids with overly demonstrative displays of affection and borderline inappropriate innuendos in the kitchen. I try to pretend to be embarrassed by it instead of envious, but sometimes when I look at them I think of Charlie Swan, and the way he never even dated after Bella's mom left. I think about my brothers and their happy love lives, and I try desperately not to feel like the Charlie to their Carlisle-and-Esmes.
I try to imagine what my future happiness might look like, and I try not to let it hurt when I can't stop brown eyes from invading the pictures. Six years, and it isn't lost on me that Renee Swan has been gone for twelve.
And I may not know much, but I know I don't have the strength for six more years of hurt in me.
. . .