CONTENT ADVISORY: Self harm. Proceed with caution.
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Overheard by the Soul and Undertook by the Heart
The day is here.
She wakes before her alarm. Before her father's alarm. Heart already beating too fast.
Clinging to the warmth of the quilts, the soft, enclosing weight of them, she remembers how it felt to lie under Edward. The way his forearms captured and sheltered her shoulders. How his breath played across her face. The way he kept dipping his head beside her ear, putting his face into the splay of her hair on the pillow. Kissing her brows, her eyelids. Yes. Her mouth.
The helpless endearments he whispered.
The quilts are too light.
She has not seen him since that night. But he promised. Solemnly. Pinky swear. That he would stay until the very very end of today. He promised. Wherever he is, he has not gone over yet. Will not. Until the very end.
She has to get up. Everything must be in readiness before she leaves for school.
The cloth is finished, cut from the sticks last night. The fringes falling from the rainbow borders at its ends have been tied into tassels. Leaving the covers before daylight is shivery, but she gets up, pads barefoot to the closet, to take the cloth from it hiding place. It is folded and rolled already. Just as she had left it the night before. She tucks it now, into the bottom of her backpack.
The note is written as well. Last night. She adjusts it carefully in the cellophane envelope that had held her scrapping papers, and puts it in her backpack, too. She cannot leave it out yet. Though Charlie may leave before she does in the morning, she cannot take the chance of him stopping back home — for lunch, for something he forgot, for anything — and discovering the note before she is gone.
So she will return here, one last time, after school, before heading to the Cullens' house. A necessary detour.
The day of classes is like any other: gray with intermittent drizzle. It crawls. She wonders if her sped-up heart is slowing down time. She remembers what Edward had told her about the change, the sensation of his heart running away. The blinding, unescapable pain, burning down every fiber of his being. The three days of it, stretching without beginning or end.
Miss Valdez' voice calls her back, asking her to translate the paragraph on page 163.
At her locker, she has to make excuses to the "prom posse" — about grocery shopping and making dinner, and she'll catch up with them tomorrow.
When she pulls into the driveway of the house where her life began, she is shaking. Her father doesn't leave the station until 5:30 at the earliest. She has two and a half hours. Maybe three, if he gets held up. Which certainly happens. Even on routine days. She hurries upstairs to put the note where he will find it easily. Places on top of it the two mementos that she hopes he will recognize, and remember.
The made thing she had left for her mother in Arizona a year ago (a lifetime ago) passes behind her eyes.
It's Dad's turn now.
Don't cry don't cry don't cry.
She flees. Down the stairs, and the fourth step's reproach. Past the kitchen with its yellow cabinets and curling handprint, their colors dingy from years of fish fry. To the closet where her father keeps his tackle box. For the very last time, she steals her father's knife. The heavy leather sheath makes it easy, and safe, to tuck slant-wise into the back of her waistband.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
There is nothing left now but to put her backpack on one shoulder, walk through the door, and lock it after her.
Her footsteps echo hollow across the porch where Edward had left the medicine for her. The red monster waits, encloses her, and carries her away.
… … …
The pit where the Cullen house had been is completely hidden by the tangled meadow that has taken over the yard. The gazebo, with its twisting bones of wisteria, sits becalmed against the backdrop of deep evergreen and white ghost aspen that stand beyond the weedy edge.
The truck stops at a crack in the drive, and Bella turns off the ignition. She is here.
The good luck grass swings gently from the rear-view mirror.
She opens the door, slides off the seat, pulling her backpack with her, and turns and steps down from the running board.
The faded red side-panel next to the cab door is warm to her hand. Wax on, wax off.
There is one last leave-taking to be done.
Getting another bag of Starlight peppermints (sugar free) at the Superette last week had been easy. But tobacco … she hadn't dared to shoplift in broad daylight again. Finding the half pack of cigarettes on the school tarmac two days ago — dropped from where it had been crammed in someone's too-shallow pocket — had felt like a sign.
She'd freed the tobacco from the cigarettes, wrapped the fragrant little pile in a scrap of colored paper, and put it with a small handful of the mints, and two checker pieces, onto a leftover strip of cedar skin. The thin bark had folded just right, making a closed pocket, that she'd wound and tied with a bit of grass. The rest of the mints she had shared with her friends. It was the best she could do.
Now, she leaves the small cedar bundle on the seat where she had been.
Thank you, Uncle Billy. Jacob.
Jacob.
She hopes they will understand.
The clouds above her have lifted up high. The day is still grey, but brighter than at morning, the air drier. She hopes it is enough to raise the ash from its resting places. Into her cloth.
Covered by grass laid flat and matted by winter, the walk of stones is only found by stubbing her toe. She stops and sets down her backpack. Ahead is the place where a threshold once stood. The cloth unfurls in her hands and a light breeze. She lays it across her shoulders, hanging down past her fingers. Like wings. The knife in its sheath is a stiff diagonal across the small of her back.
Her heart hammers. It is time.
The weaving drapes her – cedar and blackberry, aspen and owl, the lovers and the fishes, red skin and silver scale, standing tree and drifting mist, the circles of grass and sky and rainbow, raven wing and orca breach. She wears them, and walks to their sound. Lift the cloth. Wheel and pivot. First to the right, then to the left. Making the circuit around the burned crater. Colors shimmer against the grey. Threads catch the breeze, and all that it carries …
Her throat is a bone flute, sending her voice keening and high, wordless except for their names. Crying and dancing, sweeping the air and the grass with the cloth and all the grandfathers, she makes her way around the edge. Once. Twice. And again.
While earth and sky turn in their slow arcs.
Chilled, voice hoarse and spent, she stops and huddles under the cloth, in the grass where she began. It's time to find a way down, into the dark well where a basement had been.
She finds the remains of a stair. Blackened, many steps missing, frame and railing charred and gapped. There is no way to know if it will take her weight, or send her crashing down into soot and debris.
Standing on the bared foundation, she winds and ties the cloth bandolier-style around her shoulder and torso, then gets down on her stomach, to let her legs dangle over the edge.
Each groped foot and handhold is a guess, a prayer, a scare. But she is making her way down. The smell of burnt everything is powerful here. Even after an entire year. Suddenly, the step under her foot gives way and she grabs frantically at a handhold gap in the riser in front of her. She is truly hanging now, and the charred wood won't hold. Looking down scares her, but if she jumps instead of waiting to fall, she may get away without a broken ankle.
She lands feet first, but off balance, and falls backward. Hands and seat and much of the cloth are blackened. She is becoming a being of ash. And mud. But she is here. Where everything, and everyone, have fallen into. She unwraps the cloth and begins the final circuit.
The ruined basement is large, and swallows her roughened voice, not even returning echoes. Bird has become frog.
At the end of her circle, something hard stops her foot. She bends down to brush away the cinders. Ivory and ebony peek through. She has found a fragment of the keyboard. This is the place. Where she will lay down the cloth.
It takes time to make sure it is open and unwrinkled across the uneven debris. But she accomplishes it, and kneels in front of her handiwork. The basement is dark, and her awareness has narrowed down to just the woven thing in front of her. That and the weight and stiffness of what lies against her back.
She pulls it out now, and draws the blade from its sheath. She's thought this through. She will only have one chance. She knows she doesn't have the strength or courage to dig for the artery if she misses on the first cut. She's always been a chicken about pain.
Hold the knife in right hand.
Left arm straight, clamp the wrist and hand between your knees.
Hold steady.
She brings the blade tip to her wrist. Lightly, because it is very sharp. Her dad was an Eagle Scout.
The sound of her heartbeat fills her ears. She can feel her pulse bounding under the knife tip where it rests on her skin, each push traveling up through the blade, into her right hand.
Hold steady.
Hold steady.
Don't shake!
Eyes closed, just feel, tie the point to the pulse.
She takes a deep breath and pulls, down and towards her.
Author's Note:
Readers may recognize the title of this chapter - it comes from the song "Be" by Neil Diamond, composed and written for the 1973 movie, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull". One of my all time favorites.
Huge and undying thanks to everyone who has followed this long and winding story - your readings, your comments, your questions, you worries (meep! sorry!) and speculations have made my days, weeks, months.
And to my beta, CindyWindy, who has midwifed these chapters with such loving care - hearts, flowers, chocolate, and puppies!
And thank you, seymourblogger, wherever you may be now, for that wonderful review, so long ago, in which you gave the naming of the fated moment -
"Kairos ... when your Destiny line and your historical line make that rarest of all crossings ..."