Chapter 19
~Bella~
As quickly as it began, as heavy as the start had been—a sudden squall of curiosity lust— it ended in a soft, slow roll that lapped its last breath against the sand at the edge of a very big ocean. Languid and slippery. Wrists and lips and the soft spots beneath ears. Kisses whispering out across shoulders and up necks, grass beneath heads and knees and palms. I pulled the yellow dress back over my head and we sprawled in the grass, the fawn plopping down beside us, munching chickweed and sneezing dandelion pollen, nose dusted gold.
"You given that thing a name, yet?"
"No. Nothing is sticking."
The fawn sneezed again, and Edward reached out to brush her nose clean, wiping his fingers on his pants.
I pulled a little green tin out from the pocket of my dress. I'd found it shoved in the back of a vanity drawer last night. The lid was stamped with an old image of Peter Rabbit, a bit rusted around the edges. The paint was flaking off, silver metal beneath it, and the sight of it had given me such a surge of remorse I almost fell over. That was only the first time I cried last night.
"Found this." I handed it to him, listening to him open the lid, the scent perfuming the air around us. Two decent looking bits of weed, some papers, a lighter. I wondered what he'd think.
His eyebrows perked. "Have you ever smoked before?" he asked.
"Sure. A lot, actually. With my mom." I took the tin from him, sitting up and getting to work, crumbling and rolling and licking, studiously ignoring him. He watched me do it, blatantly watched, and every time his mouth so much as moved, I imagined it on another part of my body.
"Your mom?" He had a right to sound skeptical—who smoked weed with their mother—but I shrugged, flicking at the lighter.
"It helped. Kept her head on tighter. Straighter. That's how I got so good." I held up the perfect little joint, and he grinned at me. A real honest, easy one.
"Maybe too good," he chuckled. He let me take the first hit, an inhale/exhale sigh. He studied my face for a long time, his eye scanning me, until his gaze finally landed on ground zero.
The bruise he'd left on my arm was going periwinkle and eggplant.
His face hardened, and he reached for me quickly, too fast, startling both of us. He lurched to a halt, hand in midair, before he heaved a deep breath and met my eyes, just as he put his fingers to my elbow. He eyed my bicep like I had some kind of jungle disease, a mixture of horror and fascination on his face. When the realization dawned, a slow build of light behind his eye, he dropped my arm as though it had burned him and hurled himself away from me. He sat in the grass, his back angled toward me, hunched over something in his chest.
"Fuck," he groaned. "I'm sorry. I'm just—"
"My arm is ok," I said. He wasn't ok, and the rough hands that gave me the bruise weren't ok, and I wasn't ok, either. But my arm was. "I shouldn't have gone up there; I'm sorry. I blame the deer." I poked at his back and held out the joint, feeling more than seeing him take it from my fingers.
"Sure." He rolled his eye at me and made a choking sound. "It's easier to blame someone else, isn't it?"
"It's the truth; I was trying to chase her down."
He looked down at the joint in his fingers, shaking his head. "I am sorry. No one should touch you like that."
There was a part of me that wanted desperately to feel his touch again, another part that wanted to touch him, but I didn't know how he would react on the heels of those bruises. Now that I knew what he felt like, I wanted more. The calluses on his hands and his back tensed up, breath wanting, heart thumping. There was a place below his jaw that smelled of wood and lemons. I knew how his fingers dug in and how his breath came out hard and soft all at once, and I wanted more.
"I'm sorry I touched your camera," I said, wringing my fingers together instead. "It looks expensive."
"It is." He took a drag and exhaled a halo of smoke around his head, gazing off toward his house as though the camera was singing to him from way up in his attic. Sneaking out through the clapboards and the shingles and the corners of its cardboard box. Through its black, padded casket. A hum only he could hear.
"Your photos, they're—"
"Horrific," he said, taking another hard drag off the joint.
"Not all." I shook my head. "Well, some of them are. But the others are… they're… "
"Memories," he stated flatly, smoke between his lips. "Most of them best forgotten."
"No." My own memories were tugging on my heartstrings from the floor of my bedroom, those books that hid the world between their pages, places so unreal I spent hours awestruck by the raw wonder of the earth I lived on. "The pretty ones are really something, but the ugly ones are important. Vital, maybe. The world needs to see them."
He almost laughed out loud but caught it back, sounding strangled. "The world needs far more of the pretty shit." He held the joint out toward me, still without looking at my face, shaking his head.
"Maybe. But that doesn't mean the ugly stuff is worth less."
"You'd be amazed what some people will pay for gore."
"Humans can be really terrible." I took a deep breath and flopped back into the grass, my mother pounding around in my head and drowning out all of the destruction in Edward's attic. She was his kind of disaster, my mother. One that left a mark. Full scale annihilation, with subtle, poetic omens of the end lurking in every corner. The ghost garden and the crumbling house and the baby doll broken in the corner. The stains in the carpet and in the air, the house heavy with the weight of her.
"I liked the one of the pink beach," I sighed.
I pulled myself there with another kiss of that joint, digging my toes into the rose-tinted sand of that shoreline, bright sun and salt wind. I'd seen a picture of it before, that pink beach, but Edward's image of it was different somehow. Honest and unassuming, taken on a bland, sunny day but so full of nuance and depth. An ache, something like longing, sprouted in my guts, curling around the base of my stomach.
Oh, to be there. Anywhere but here.
"Komodo, Indonesia," he said, taking the joint from my fingers. He slumped back onto his elbow beside me, face to the sky, looking for all the world as though his tension was unraveling, knots in his muscles unclenching, grip of his jaw loosening. "Home of the living, breathing dragons."
"And the flowers? On the mountain?" My heart whisked away to a yellow-petaled alpine. The faint bite of winter that never really left: the still, clean air, and the sun bearing down on you from just an arm's length away.
"The yellow ones? Near Lake Geneva. The Globe flower, not actually a rose, but still pretty." He said that at the same time as he looked at me, and I felt just like that flower. Not a rose but still pretty.
"The harbor? The one with the lighthouse and the tide gone out?" I asked.
"Washington. Bellingham. Late fall. The harbormaster let me get on an anchored buoy to get that shot."
"You're really very good at it."
He didn't answer, just stared off at the clouds for a moment, the sunshine burning his hair
before he tapped a single fingertip to the eyepatch three times, tap tap tap.
"I was. And then I got very, very bad at it."
I stopped in front of the mirror in the back hallway, the one right inside the door. The girl staring back at me was something wild and windblown and joint-high, kissed silly-stupid, with a strange light behind her skin. Prairie rose cheeks and bluebell eyes and the soft browns that belong only on tree bark and in deep dark soil and rocks hewn from the very center of the earth. I had a river in me, a primordial forest. I looked older than the oldest mountains. Looked prehistoric and worn down by time and gravity and rain.
I looked just like her.
Edward was painting his house. I didn't trust the ladder a single bit, but he said it was solid, and he wanted to get the job done before the next round of storms hit. He left me in our field after a flurry of four kisses, each harder than the last, loping off through the grass toward his half-naked house. I picked myself up and stood in front of the mirror for six minutes before I fled the house.
I couldn't do it. Couldn't stand to be confined in there, not now. The pink beaches and the flowered mountains were still echoing in my ears.
We ended up in the garden all afternoon, the fawn and I.
It took an hour to pick through the spring strawberry patches, and the first of the blackberries were no better. I gouged and spiked myself into a prickly mess, digging through the bramble, and searching for canaries in a thorny goldmine. I picked the first sprigs of mint and soft green prairie onions. I found a patch of bittersweet and stumbled across a cache of eggs from the flock of chickens that had escaped the Henry's place a few years back. They now roamed the grasslands, often congregating in the garden for refuge. There was a small hole they ducked through in the back corner, a wrench in the wire fencing. It seemed like an even trade-off, the fenced-in protection for a small fee.
By the time I'd dug through the last of the garden, it was dusk.
I went to Edward's with everything I had to give. I had berries and herbs from the overgrown garden. Six eggs, all sage and cream and pale blue. I had half of a bottle of whiskey from underneath the sink. I had a bruise in the shape of a boomerang on my arm. I had a fawn who liked licking my knees and stepping on toes.
I had a heart like a hand grenade. A head like a swarm of bees.
It wasn't much, but it was something.
I called his name through the open door, echoing down the hallway. His head appeared in the far- off doorway, ushering me in with a swing of his chin and a half-smile cracked across his face. I nudged inside, crawling along the invisible pull that kept tugging me toward him.
I stalled just inside the kitchen. The light was fading against the walls, and the air was warm, with something that smelled delicious simmering in a pot on the stove. He was chopping an onion, the sting reaching my eyes as they landed on the box.
That box.
Sitting on the kitchen table, unassuming as a nuclear bomb.
I gulped and stared at him, fingernails digging into the basket in my arms. He said nothing, just tilted his head toward the table and arched a big eyebrow at me like I should be able to read his mind. I stepped closer, heart hammering.
"I brought whiskey. And strawberries," I stammered, staring at the box again. My arm throbbed, and I didn't dare take my hands off the basket, lest I do something stupid. Like touch that camera. Or him.
He set down his knife and stepped toward me, taking the basket from my vise grip. His eye found mine and then the box, his mouth puckering before he glanced back to me.
I shook my head "You don't have—"
"Open it."
He retreated to the counter again as I took a deep breath and pulled the box closer. My fingers brushed the now-closed zipper on that big scary case, a thrill of fear burning the ridges of my fingerprints.
"Not that one," he said, flat and stern, and I snatched my fingers away. I chose one of the several smaller bags beside the big heavy case of doom, sitting down to open it in my lap.
It was small, simple, a little dinged-up around the edges, and old.
"Open it up. The lever on the side."
I found the tiny arm and flicked it up, the entire back of the camera popping open. Edward talked me through loading a roll of film as he sliced strawberries. I fumbled along after his instructions, finally snapping the back of the camera in place, the gears grinding soft and even as the film rolled.
I held the camera up to my face, Edward in the little box of light before me. The tiny vision of him standing at the counter, the last ray of sun slicing across his chest, the shadows embracing his back.
"Next?"
"Well…" Edward shrugged, eye on his knife, stained red with strawberries. "Point and shoot."
Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.
Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!
HB&PB