Chapter 16
~Edward~
I sat in the chaotic shed, sucking on my still-sore finger. Sucking at my wounds both physical and emotional. Wallowing like a baby who just threw a tantrum.
The gravel driveway was littered with my outburst, and my fingernails were tinged orange underneath from the years of rust on someone else's treasures as I threw them as far as possible. Some had landed in my ire more than ten yards away, easy. Staring at the smashed and broken relics laid out before me, I felt horrible guilt that I treated so carelessly something precious and saved by someone else.
Sure, it was mostly junk, but it wasn't my junk. I stood and started making neat piles of the crooked metal and cracked plastic, stuff to take to the dump, and stuff I might be able to get some use out of around the house.
A bent bicycle tire rim was a good find as was the axe with no handle. That I could fix well enough—there was plenty of good wood stacked tall in the corners that didn't seem to have termite or water damage. A few railing posts, chipped but unharmed, got saved too, just in case I needed to fix up the porch someday.
Someday. I was thinking about someday, surprised after all that happened the last few days that I was still in the mood to stay put long enough to think of the what-ifs and the just-in-cases. The thought made my mouth dry, and I remembered the jug I'd found in the kitchen. I filled it with the lemonade powder Rosalie had gotten me, thinking what I needed right now was to sit on the rocker, drink my drink, and stare out over the wildflowers and tall grasses. From my porch, if I were sitting, I didn't think I'd be able to see the sad house.
As the pale yellow liquid poured, making the ice cubes crackle and hiss, a few bumps from above made me stop mid-pour and stare at the water-stained ceiling. I waited, then took a few gulps from the half-filled glass as I continued to listen. Hearing nothing but the spirits of the couple before me, I was about to make my way back outside when I heard it again.
Footsteps.
But these weren't normal footsteps; these were the clip-clop of an animal. Hooves. And I knew exactly what those hooves belonged to.
Wiping my lemonade-stained mouth with the back of my wrist, I ran up the stairs, concerned the deer had gotten loose. It was scared and confused, wandering hallways looking for its ma in a house that mirrored its own but was completely different.
Once I reached the landing of the second floor, I slowed, not wanting to scare the thing more than it probably already was. I peeked out through the window in the hall over to the sad house to see if Bella was searching or calling its name, but not seeing her, I turned and waited for another clue as to where the deer might be.
A loud clip of a hoof made me turn sharply to where the sound had come from.
The attic.
The stairs leading to it were at the farthest end of the hallway, away from my bedroom and bathroom. I never went near there, as there was no door at the top to hold the ghosts in. I thought about yelling, trying to coax the deer down from the cemetery that lived above me, but worried that would only end in frightening it more.
Besides, I didn't know what to call it. Here, deer, deer. No.
Creeping over the faded, blue carpet runner in the hallway, my heart jumped as soon as I put my hand on the banister. Was it worth the trip up there just to get the stupid thing? I hadn't been up there since Rosalie and I shoved the boxes far into the corners, and I hadn't planned on going back up anytime soon.
The cobwebs up there weren't just from spiders.
Sighing and not wanting the deer to go on a rampage, destroying things in its attempt to get out, I walked up slowly, my head cresting the top step, and my eye peering just enough to get a location of the deer.
What I saw instead made my heart completely stop.
Deer Girl was standing in the middle of the floor, holding the one thing I was ashamed I had once cherished more than my own brother's life.
It was held up to her face, pressed against her skin and looking clumsy in her hands as she turned around and pointed the camera at me. Slowly, she lowered it from her eyes, now wide as she stared at me, caught, like a deer in headlights as I reached the top step.
Red is all I saw as I stood there, seeing with my eye but seeing past just the facts. Seeing more than a girl holding a camera wearing a dusty flak jacket. I saw my whole life laid out bare, splayed out around her, like a bloody trail from a horror movie.
My heart quickened then, with a fury unmatched by any gunfire that had ever enveloped me.
The growl that started in my chest rose like fire. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" My voice was low, shaky, menacing, as images of what I'd seen through that lens burned through my head, flashes of gray dirt soaked crimson from the blood of women and children.
The last image I ever saw in it bubbled up like bile in my throat as I noticed one of my dirty green footlockers open to her right.
"I—" she started, but I didn't let her finish.
"Who the fuck do you think you are." Not a question. I slowly got closer until I was standing directly in front of her, my fists shaking along with my knees.
"I wasn't… I didn't mean…" She curled back on herself as I towered over her, and the hand holding my camera gently lowered so it was resting at her side. That's when I noticed the coat slipping off her shoulders.
The plastic and metal burned my fingers as I grabbed the camera from her, wrenching the strap from around her neck, so it pulled at her hair. I yanked the coat down, so it lay in a puddle around her feet, revealing a short, yellow dress.
"Do you have any idea—" I barked, my voice dry with the fury. "Just who do you think you are?"
"The deer ran up here, and I wanted to get her—I was coming to see you, to apologize or something, I don't know—"
"Fuck you and that deer. Coming into my house. Tearing through my things." She opened her mouth again, a bit of offense in those brown eyes of hers. "Don't say a fucking word." I grabbed her bare arm then, pulling her forward. She grunted a little at the force, but I was too mad to even consider not physically removing her from my attic.
I pulled her towards the stairs, my grip too firm as I led her down, the deer background noise as it clomped after us. She wisely said nothing, just let me pull her, as we wound our way to the bottom floor.
Out the porch door she went with a bit of a shove from me as I released her, and she had the wits enough to not look back as she ran across the field, back towards her pitiful house with the deer hot on her heels.
I'm not sure how long I stood there by the back door with my eye closed, trying to calm myself and stop the flashes of guilt and anger and remorse and so many other things.
No one knew what those boxes held. No one but Rosalie and me, and we could both pretend they didn't exist. We could talk to each other without ever having to mention the boxes.
I busied myself with the kitchen, cleaning up spilled lemonade and washing the mostly unused glass. Scrubbed my hands and nails with a Brillo pad, watching the rust run orange with the water and soap until it swirled down and around the chipped farmhouse sink and slipped into the drain.
I peered out the window as I rested my damp hands on the sink edge and looked at the mess on my driveway. Mess down here, now mess up there. Sighing heavily, my head dropped as I felt dizzy from the adrenaline and anger slowly seeping from me. I imagined it flowing from my feet and burrowing through the cracks in the linoleum, soaking the sub-floor to pool under the crawlspace of the porch.
Rosalie would be happy to know I'd used one of her beloved "coping mechanisms".
Rosalie.
When I had finally returned home, broken and reluctant, out of excuses and delays from red tape, Rosalie was the last person I wanted to see. The meeting was forced upon me, and I stood in the chapel waiting for furious fists to pound at me and rip the hair from my head. Waited for the inevitable slaps and scratches, the kicks and screams that would rip out what was left of my shriveled heart.
Instead, as I stood there, stony face to the floor, ashamed of myself and what I'd let happen, the sweet arms of my sister-in-law embraced me and coaxed my head onto her shoulder. I stood numbly, wishing that all the tears I'd been building up would finally spill out and down the back of her black dress.
Rosalie was the one who helped me heal the little bit that I had, helped me come to some half-assed resolution within myself that I wasn't a complete monster, when she could've punished me more than anyone.
The man responsible for her husband's death.
Pushing myself off the counter, knowing I wouldn't be able to sleep under that attic with the foot locker open to let the ghosts out to play, I grabbed the bottle of whiskey and headed up the stairs on leaden feet, like a man shuffling to his execution.
I half-expected to see her back up there, fiddling with stuff, and I felt a pang of guilt at how I'd led her down, my grip too tight on a girl that fragile. But that only lasted a second as I put my bottle on the spot brushed clean of dust from her feet. My eye caught a glint of silver, and I knew the Zippo had fallen from the pocket of my jacket. It was just lying there in the dirt, so I quickly scooped it up and dropped it back into its home.
Glancing around quickly to find other evidence of her meddling, I saw the framed photos not neatly stacked as I'd left them, but flipped open like a rack of records someone lost interest in halfway through.
My mouth ran dry as sawdust when I looked at what she'd seen. The images were disturbing to me now, horrific as they stared back at me. Black and white, brown and gritty, pitiful and something no one should see. Certainly not something someone should make a living from.
They were no longer something to be proud of.
Flipping them up carefully to close the gap and shield the horror, I turned them so they faced the musty rafters. My hand stilled on one before I flipped it, the image jarring in its beauty after the terror that it laid against.
Argentine, Patagonia. The Perito Moreno Glacier. Blue and heavy, you could almost touch the picture and feel the cool ice as it stung your fingers. I traced the hollowed ice cave with my thumb, the millions of blues my lens captured making my eye explode and ache.
Setting that one aside, the next was less stark, less formidable, but stunning nonetheless. The poppy-covered fields of Antelope Valley spread out for miles of red, caught by my low angle just kissing the blue sky as they rose majestically towards the sun.
One of my very first.
The next few were much the same, a landscape in Oregon, an old silo covered in modern-day graffiti in Oklahoma, a lone cactus clinging to life in Death Valley.
I hadn't looked at these images in years. I smiled at them, remembering what it felt like to find beauty with your naked eye, then try to capture it behind a small glass lens, and have it be just as breathtaking on paper once developed. This was what made me love the camera: the wonders of what God or whoever put at our feet to enjoy, captured so flawlessly.
The whiskey sat forgotten, as much as my fear, and I went through the next stack. Kids playing basketball on a blacktop in Atlanta. Aging, wrinkled men sitting on a park bench in Central Park, smiling as they shared a laugh. A young boy, shirtless, with the sun behind him, driving a high tractor as sweat ran down his head onto his shoulders in a Missouri field.
There was always the hope of a small paycheck in my pocket if an odd magazine would buy a pretty nature scene here or there. But those last few were when the change came: from shooting for pleasure to shooting with a mission. It became something I wanted to be the best at, so I started shooting people exclusively. People found other people much more interesting, and the magazines agreed.
A man wearing a blood-soaked apron outside a butcher shop in Italy, a big cigar in his mouth. A small Siberian girl running in the snow, her pigtails sticking straight out behind her as she smiled in her fur-lined, embroidered, animal hide jacket. A female punk singer covered in tattoos in Moscow, performing at an underground club before it was raided.
My popularity grew, and my name became one that people started to recognize, but it wasn't until I turned from taking feel-good images to capturing the ugly side of life that I got what I thought I wanted.
Money. Lots of fucking money. Which in turn gave me the credit and acclaim I'd been working so hard for. It only heightened my need to become one of the most sought-after photojournalists in the world.
So I shot the ugly.
The poachers in the Congo carrying an illegally slaughtered gorilla on a thick log across their shoulders, both smiling for my camera, and giving a thumbs up like what they had done wasn't horrible. Two little girls clinging to dirty rag dolls, their stuffing spilling out from missing fabric arms and legs, in a makeshift shanty town in India.
When I got to the one of the half-burned boy in Croatia, I knew it was time to stop.
I left the pictures where they were and moved to the camera, gently put it away—shut up tight in its leather bag—then closed the foot locker with a muffled thud. Picking up the whiskey, I saw the dust-disturbed circle of footprints in the middle of the floor and felt a pang of guilt.
She didn't know: a girl like her probably had no idea what existed outside of her little meadow. She probably did follow the deer, and who wouldn't be curious about closed boxes and foreign objects?
It didn't give her the fucking right to look without asking, but I could've handled it better.
Wishing again that there was a door to close and lock, I trudged down the stairs, heavy with remorse. It'd been a long time since I was with civilians, especially pretty little things who probably expected gentlemen callers and lemonade on porches.
Spying the lemonade pitcher on the counter, I knew what I should do. I should go over and apologize, say I'm sorry for grabbing her like that and tossing her around like she was an object. Sorry for my fury and pain and for all the needles I shot into her from my eye and words.
But I didn't, not just then. Instead, I made a quick trip out to my toolbox on the porch before coming back in. I held the one picture I brought downstairs with me and looked at that long, blank wall, littered in shadows and faded paper. Holding the frame up against the plaster, I picked a spot and drove the nail in before placing the picture carefully on the nail head by its thin, silver wire.
The first glimpse of sunrise began its yellow, red, and orange dance across Lake Ballard in Australia, warming up the metal sculpture of a woman left there in the middle of the water. The title of the award-winning photograph was handwritten on the white border: "New Beginning" by Edward Cullen.
Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.
Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!
HB&PB