Ithaka
I had a bad day. I shouldn't say that. My Dad came to stay with me at the hospital last night. When the nurse woke me up in the dark for neurochecks and vitals, there he was, sprawled in the recliner chair that wouldn't quite recline right. He was awake almost as soon as I was – up and out of the chair, grilling the nurse on every measurement she took. When she left, he asked me, too.
"You doin' okay, Bells?"
"I'm fine, Dad, really."
He ran his hand through his hair, then shoved both hands in his pockets. "No bad dreams or anything?"
"No."
"Okay. Well … it's normal if you do. Just want you to know that."
"I'm okay."
"Yeah. Well, better let you get some sleep." And his hand came out of his pocket to almost but not quite touch my face, my shoulder. "Carlisle'll be discharging you in a few more hours. I got all your stuff right here."
"Thanks, Dad."
He got back on the chair. It wasn't even big enough for him, let alone me, too. I remembered all the times Mom had let me get on the chair with her. The I.V. line I could have managed. But not my long arms and long legs that I have now. I went back and lay down on the bed, wondering why I wanted so badly to be held. It was probably Edward's fault. Holding me to him like that. And then letting me go.
In school, everybody mobbed me. Tyler was still in the hospital, so I got all the attention. Mike was doing his Igor impression, complete with clawed hands raised to the sky. "She's ali-i-ve!" I know he wasn't trying to be obnoxious. It's just his way of showing that he cares. But it still got old after the third time. And embarrassing. I wanted to be somewhere else, but I honestly can't say where. Not home, not even back in Phoenix – well, of course not back in Phoenix, my Mom doesn't live there any more. No place felt right. I had a bad day.
And then there was Edward. He was completely ignoring me: in the cafeteria, in Biology. Like I was invisible to him. Like I didn't even exist. Why should today be different from any other?
I know he has a secret. I can figure out that he'd rather no one even connect him with the van thing at all. I made sure to not breathe his name the whole day. I can keep quiet. I know how. But it still bothered me. I kept telling myself not to be stupid. I mean, what am I expecting, some kind of a secret handshake or something? It's stupid. But I still had a bad day.
The house is empty and dark when I get home. Dad's going to be working late these couple of nights. A lot of paper work, he said. I know what it's about. There was an announcement over the PA during advisory. Stay out of the woods.
My room is dark enough that the nightlight is flickering on and off, on and off. At three in the afternoon. That's Forks weather. I flop down on my back crosswise on my bed, with my legs hanging over the side. I see my Dad made it for me last night. That makes my heart hurt for some reason.
I should do my homework, but I can't even think about it. I just turn over and crawl straight and put my face in my pillow. Maybe this is some kind of PTSD that I'm feeling. Dr. Cullen had given me a little handout about it before I left. His face is so kind. And strangely sad. I wonder why. He squeezed my hand and told me to eat nutritious food and don't stay up late.
My pillow smells nice. It smells like Edward, actually. It's my imagination, I know. Thinking about his foster father made me think about him. I inhale deeply anyway. Pretending. Wishing.
It really, really does smell like him. Really. I pass my hand under it. His "coin" is still there.
And my pillow smells like him.
I feel like an electric bolt has shot through me. He's been in my room!
Somebody's been sleeping in my bed, and she's still in it!
I hang over the side of my bed to look underneath. Only dust bunnies.
This is crazy. I crush my quilt to my face. I'm back in the hospital room with his chest an inch from my nose. Incense. Is it sandalwood? No. Something different. Something transcendent and warm, even though the cold of outside is radiating onto me from his clothing. My whole bed smells like Edward.
Heart pounding, I jump up and burst into the closet. Darkness, and my clothes, and my suitcases. Faint, faint, ever so faint … maybe I'm imagining it. But I know I'm not. I sniff at the hem of my sweater. He's been here.
My thighs feel like water. I have to sit down. Grandma's rocking chair holds me. The wooden rungs smell faintly of him, too.
Has he been stalking me? The thought makes me nauseous. I don't want him to be that kind of weird. Super powers are okay. Leaving me medicine on my porch is okay. Saving me from a blood mess end … I'm sure he could get into my room no problem. Through the window. Down the chimney. No, that would leave soot everywhere.
What does he want from me?
What does he want?
There is a book on top of my bookcase that doesn't belong.
I go over to pick it up. My hands are shaking, hard.
It's a journal, bound in leather. I almost can't breathe.
I bring it up to my face. It smells old. It smells like him. Just like him.
It's his journal. His.
He came to my house last night when no one was here.
Not to take.
To give.
He left his journal here.
In my room.
On my bookcase.
For me.
The secret handshake.
I forgive him. I forgive everything. My heart is thumping, thumping, thumping against his journal through my shirt as I sit down again on my bed. My bed that smells like him, now. His days and his thoughts are in my hands.
I lie down, with it under my cheek. The leather is soft and old, almost like an antique. Where did he get it? Did someone give it to him? It's special. I know it's special. And he left it here for me.
I'm not going to tear into it right away. That would be so greedy. So crass.
One must observe the proper rites. The Fox said that. To the Little Prince. I lost that book. We moved so many times. But I still remember what it said.
I keep Edward's journal safe under my cheek. Until I'm used to it. Until it's used to me.
I have watched Bella die a thousand times. In Alice's visions. In Rosalie's thoughts … and Emmett's, and Jasper's, too. In fire. By hemorrhage. Between a red truck and a green van. But most of all, worst of all, at my own hands, in my arms, under my mouth. I shiver with grief and sorrow. And, God help me, the thirst.
I wonder if that is why we still have to have this meeting, even though my family has already capitulated to me.
Last night, as they were drawing me back up from the water. As I bent over on hands and knees, hacking the wild sea up from my lungs. It will take a long while for me to dry out completely. I have a slight wheeze now, and faint, wet crackles when I breathe. Even to human ears, I sound like I have a chest cold. It cannot harm me, but it makes me remember what I had forgotten – the sensation of drowning in my own fluids.
"I guess nobody'll believe you did anything superhuman, now," Jasper had said, as he put a hand on my back, and calmed the terror out of my breaths.
And they gave in. I heard it in all their heads. Surrendered to my obsession with the Swan girl.
But I am holding a secret. As I coughed up the frigid brine, another thing rose with it. My journal: laid on top of the bookshelf beside Bella's bed. Thin, five inches by seven, sepia-brown leather, left at a careless angle across the cream-painted wood.
Everyone was of course anxious to get me home. Rosalie was reminding me that we had "forty-five minutes before we have to be reasonably dry and walking in the door at school." There was no time to do anything but comply.
I should have run back to fetch the thing during lunch. What would it have mattered if Alice had "seen" my errand? At least Bella would never see the journal, never suspect that anyone had invaded her room. And so what if no one is allowed to leave school without a pass, now? Mrs. Cope adores me. She would have let me go. Emmett would laugh at me, Carlisle would shake his head, but Bella would never know, and so she would be safe – from my family, at least …
I should have. I could have. But I didn't. I didn't.
And now it's too late.
It's past three in the afternoon as we all file in to the dining room. There was no flirting with speed limits today. Nothing to draw attention.
Even in that rattle-trap truck of hers, Bella is certainly at home by now, too.
What does she do after school? Does she fix herself a snack? Watch television? The chances of her doing her homework any place but her room are slim. I've seen her desk there, stacked with papers and books.
For all I know, she's in her room right now. How long will it take her to notice the one out of place thing?
I am doomed. She is doomed.
As I have been doing all day, I concentrate on whatever claptrap I can think of, whatever it takes to not think, not plan, not feel anything, lest this horrible secret be discovered by my psychic sister, who sees every future that spins out from my thoughts. Or my dear brother who even now is wondering if there isn't something more to my agitation than the "general train wreck" that I have made of everything. For if my family realizes that Bella has something of mine in her hands, something that doesn't belong – not to this time, not to this place – a physical proof of how not normal I am … how not normal we are … won't even Esme bow to the necessity of … damage control?
If I can just keep this from them, somehow, I'll find a way to take care of it – steal it back, something … somehow. If she doesn't have it in her hands she has no proof. She's a quiet girl. She won't talk. She'll just feel puzzled. And sad.
But at least she will live to feel those things.
Carlisle is clearing his throat. He sees that my mind is wandering. Everyone is staring at me, as we all take our seats so dutifully, around a dining room table that is never used for dining.
"A house divided cannot stand," Carlisle says. "We must either trust each other, or go our separate ways."
Rosalie gasps as if she were still human. Emmett's hand instantly tightens around hers, and I hear his emphatic thought.
Y'ain't gonna lose me, Rose. Not never. Less'n you pitch me out on my ear.
Jasper, too, moves to contain and comfort her, but the first stab of her panic still passes through him and into all of us.
Perhaps my mind is exhausted by the endless days and nights of temptation that I have created by returning. Perhaps I am so tasked with concealing the journal from Alice and Jasper, that I have no power to do anything else. Whatever the reason, every thought, every image in the minds of each of my family members floods into me at once: surrounding, swirling, overwhelming.
Esme is transported back to 1927 and Fire Island. My silences. My absences. Just like now. Just like now. Until one grey morning I did not return. She is clinging to Carlisle, but her golden eyes are on me. Not again. Please, Edward, no.
Jasper's mind is like a war room, cataloguing alliances and hostilities, and how they might change if we truly did scatter. Would the Volturi leave us alone? Or would they move in to pick us off, one by one – for recruitment or destruction. He tries to focus on that, on whether we might individually find refuge in other covens – Denali, Brazil – and two faces come to his mind. Peter and Charlotte. He misses them. And with that thought, he - and all of us with him - are ambushed by the plangent ghost of his eighty-five years of human blood. We thirst.
Alice cannot stop the visions that come on the heels of that memory. She sees Jasper on his own. Gone from her, in an apartment with a woman wrapped around him. He is giving this stranger her heart's desire, or at least her body's desire. And – unknowing until it is far too late – she gives him his.
Carlisle takes in the absolutely motionless tableau before him - the rigid faces, the swirl of emotions, the burn of the pit that waits beneath all of our feet - and senses that something has gone very wrong. He meant for his words to bring us together, but instead we are scattering like birds. What have I done? What have I said? And how do I bring them back?
I see myself in his memory. Our parish church, pressed into service as a hospital in the worst days, when people were sickening by the thousands. My sweat-soaked sheets and wracking cough. And within that memory another, like the images of mirrors within mirrors. My mother's moist, white hand gripping his wrist. Her eyes pleading when her voice failed.
He bends, as though to kiss me …
His memories of Esme, and Rosalie, and Emmett flash in quick succession.
Was I wrong? Was I doing my work and not Thine? Was it truly Thy will that each of these should perish? Was I, not saving them for a higher purpose, but instead sinfully wresting them from Thy eternal embrace?
And is this, now, Thy judgment for my pride? For believing that I could make something new under the sun? Something good from what we are?
All of his years before Chicago fill his spacious mind. Decades, centuries, of solitary wandering. Ministering wherever he might; learning, always learning. And always anonymous and alone. A mirror image future stretches out in front of him, and he closes his eyes.
Yet surely it cannot come to this? Surely we are not so easily sundered. She's just a girl, a harmless and innocent girl.
Memories of my own flood me. The years after Carlisle turned me. I hated and feared what I had become, but I loved him. How could I not? He saw me, not as a demon, but as an angel burned with holy fire. Even if I could not share his faith in God and salvation, his devotion - to me, to all of us - he never stinted, never failed to believe that our choices mattered. I see it in his face right now, even as he suffers and doubts, afraid of what will happen in this house today.
I'd help you. I'd help you. No judgments, just whatever it takes.
Alice and Jasper and Emmett and Rosalie: surrounding me at school, and afterwards. Keeping me safe. Keeping her safe, for all that. They didn't leave me to the sea. They searched until they found me.
A house divided cannot stand.
Could she really split us apart? Yes. But not her. I. If I continue as I have been. Ungrateful as I have been. Shunning my family. Sneaking out of the house every night. Don't ask, don't tell. Alice hiding from me. Hiding what she sees of me from the rest of them. But all of the hiding hasn't stopped the private thoughts they all have. Every dawn when I return, they smell where I have been. They worry. They judge.
And then there is Jasper, my keeper, drawn tight as a piano wire tuned too far.
Even in a human family, something like this cannot go on. It's not just the secrets, not just the lies - of omission or commission. It's the turning away from each other. The silences and the absences and the hidden thoughts. It is these things, the hoarding of private skeletons, that will break us apart.
I imagine us all, scattered, like leaves upon the wind. Reverting back – for eternity is such a very long time – to our original nature. All except Carlisle.
I can't. I can't.
And so I sell Isabella down the river.
"She has my journal."
"What?"
"My journal. She has it." And then I tell them everything.
My nightlight is shining steady now. It's not night yet, but dark enough that the sensor is committed to "lights on". Edward's journal is all soft and velvety-worn under my cheek. It's whispering in my ear.
"Open me."
And so I do.
The nightlight is not enough to read by, but just for the first page, I do.
.
Ithaka
When you set your sail for Ithaka,
wish your journey long,
with Turnings (many turnings) and Knowings (many knowings)
along the way.
The Laistrygonas and the Kyklopas,
angry Poseidon - do not fear these, my son.
You will never find such bars upon your path,
so long as your thoughts do not cast off their wings,
so long as body and breath receive the sacred passion.
Not the Laistrygonas, not the Kyklopas,
nor fierce Poseidon shall you meet,
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul should raise them up before you.
Wish your journey long.
May they be many, those magic summer morns,
with pleasure and with joy
that you enter harbors seen for the very first time.
Stop there, at Phoenician emporia.
Provision yourself with their finest goods,
corals and pearls, ambers and ebonies,
and every exquisite perfume -
yes, every lush fragrance you can find;
and to the Egyptian polises also you must go,
to learn and glean from the cultured ones.
Bear Ithaka ever in your thoughts.
To arrive there is your final shore.
But do not hurry the voyage thither.
Better to wander for many a year,
and when, white head, you cast your anchor last,
rich with all you have gained upon the way,
do not expect Ithaka to offer you wealth.
For it is Ithaka who has given you your journey.
Without her you would not have set out upon the wave.
Nothing more has she got to give you, now.
And if you find her threadbare, Ithaka has not deceived you.
Wise as you will have become, rich in Turning and in Knowing,
… you will understand (by journey's end) what these Ithakas mean.
.
~ If Mr. Kavaphes will forgive me such a translation,
and if my son will forgive me such sentiment ~
.
To my dearest Edward
~ from Mother
Christmas, 1917
.
It's all in fountain pen … delicate and faded and thin.
1917? Did I read that right? I turn on the light to read it again.
Christmas, 1917
There's a bookplate on the inside of the cover. It looks like a cross-section of a fossil nautilus, an umber woodcut on yellowing paper, with a simple border at the edge. In the space under the shell is a name in different handwriting.
Edward Anthony Masen
I almost think it's Edward's handwriting – but this Edward slants upward just a little bit.
And 1917.
Not Edward's journal. His grandfather's, then. But no, 1917 … I count backward on my fingers through the decades, trying to guess how old each parent might be before they had children. 1917 would be a great-grandfather. Maybe even great-great.
Was this long-ago person Edward's namesake?
System kids, my Dad said. It's not a happy life. Especially if you're different. The kids at school say that Dr. Cullen collects different.
All of them have problems. They were the ones nobody wanted.
Even though they are each so beautiful.
Gossip still turns to them, when people are bored.
When the coaches first saw Emmett they were all hot to have him join the football team, or wrestling; but he can't, because he has a (air quotes) condition.
Mike was saying it was sickle-cell anemia. Tyler corrected him, because he would know. Not sickle-cell. Hemophilia. Emmett could bleed to death if he ever got tackled.
Alice has epilepsy.
Sometimes she just zones out, right in the middle of class, and the teachers don't even yell at her.
Jasper has a hole in his heart.
That's why Dr. Cullen adopted all of them. 'Cause they all have problems.
So what's Rosalie got?
I don't know, a broom handle up her butt?
I imagine Edward as an odd little boy – too strong, too quick. I imaging him being passed from family to family like a hot potato, until finally Dr. Cullen took him in. I imagine the journal wrapped and tucked into his swaddling clothes by … someone. Or maybe he grabbed it from the trunk in his grandmother's attic, where he was hiding when CPS came for him. I imagine him reading it with a faltering flashlight under the covers at the state home, trying to find himself in an ancestor he never knew.
And now it's my turn. The poem swirls around in my head. From a mother to a son. I wonder if Edward ever knew his mother. Or is this poem – from another mother to another son – all that he has?
For it is Ithaka who has given you your journey.
Who can follow a road on water? It's always changing, moving; you can never quite see it for sure.
… you will understand (by journey's end) what these Ithakas mean.
I close the journal again, and put it back under my cheek. I can't believe that Edward left this water road for me, to follow where he walked and searched. But he did. And I will.
A/N: This chapter owes literary debt to some of the best stories I have ever read:
(1) Fire Island and Edward's departure in 1927: please read belladonnacullen's The Newborn. www . fanfiction . net/s/5367016/1/The_Newborn As far as I'm concerned her version of Tanya and Edward's history, as well as his hegira away from the family in the late 20's, is canon better than canon.
(2) Jasper going back to his bad-ass ways: the image (slightly modified) comes to me from Chicklette's Fighter. www. fanfiction . net/s/5514944/1/Fighter That story really got under my skin. I have a feeling more reference to the themes it raised may be coming in future chapters ...
(3) Carlisle's concept of Edward (or vampires in general) as angels burning with holy fire: holy hannah that comes from the amazing mind of Edward A. Masen in her My Lost Youth www . fanfiction . net/s/4855866/1/My_Lost_Youth A story whose beauty and poetic insight moves me to tears on a regular basis.
(4) Lastly, I have always felt very strongly that the story of the Little Prince has so many connection points with Edward and Bella. I had conceived tying it in almost from the start of when I was blocking out my chapters. Then I read halojones' Last Rites www . fanfiction . net/s/5225668/1/Last_Rites and although I was thrilled to see The Little Prince worked in so beautifully to her story, I felt a little sad, too, since, how can I use it now that she has? And yet, the Fox insisted on speaking to Bella, and so I have allowed it here, with a bow to halo's wonderful story.
P.S. The poem, Ithaka, by Constantine P. Cavafy was probably first written in 1894, revised in 1910, and first published in its original language of Greek, in Alexandria, in 1911. The earliest published English translation was in 1924. I am supposing Elizabeth Mason to have been a somewhat scholarly woman, perhaps with a spinster classmate who traveled to the Agaean / Near East, and may have sent her a copy of the Greek poem collection. Which she has translated here for her son ... Elizabeth preserves the Greek spellings of the poet's name, as well as mythological creatures such as the Cyclopes, and Laistrygonians.
Edward's bookplate is here: http(colon double slash)www(dot)madlion(dot)co(dot)uk/images/Fossil(dot)jpg