24. Turn, Return

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

I drink to this demolished house

To all this wickedness,

To you, our loneliness together,

I raise my glass—

“The Last Toast”

(Anna Akhmatova)

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

“Ilse, look at the sky.”

We are young again, the deepest lines absent from Ilse’s smiling face as she humors me, raising her eyes to the heavens. “What am I looking for,Liebchen?”

“It’s a lamb,” I tell her, pointing to the shape. “See?”

“Oh, yes,” she agrees. “Very good.” ”

“What else do you see?”

“Nothing else,” she sighs, looking away from the clouds and affectionately patting my head. “Why would I look for lambs in heaven when I have one sitting on the ground in front of me?”

“I’m not a lamb,” I declare, scowling.

“Oh?”

“No. Lambs are stupid. Like the ones we saw the other day — they just stand there while the dogs run around and bark at them.”

“There’s not much for them to do about it, child. The dogs are faster and have sharper teeth.”

“The dogs are smarter. I’d rather be a dog than a lamb.”

“Little girls do not aspire to be dogs,” she admonishes. “Dogs are filthy, stinky creatures.”

“I want to be something strong. Like a bear. Or a tiger.”

She hums thoughtfully. “A lion, I think,” she suggests. “If you must be something, be a lion. The lion is the king of the beasts.”

“I don’t want to be a lion. I’d rather be a lioness,” I correct. “The queen of the beasts.”

“Every queen needs a king, Isabella.”

“I don’t. I’ll be a queen by myself, and I’ll eat lamb every night for dinner.”

Ilse laughs indulgently, her face tilted toward the sky and in the sunlight, she is beautiful.

+.+.+.+

My last evening in Sainte-Mère-Église is spent in the small den of Au Chien Pèlerin in the glow of a few lamps and the muted television. Caroline and Laurent have gone to tend to a calving in the barn, and I am alone with Ilse as the evening news’ images play across the screen in a silent tableau of people I’ve never met, events that do not interest me. Ilse works beside me, bent over her embroidery, an expression of intense concentration bunching the soft wrinkles of her face.

“It is a handkerchief,” she told me yesterday. “See now, I am making the lily— do you see the petals?” She smiled then, satisfied at my obedient nod. “Every lady should have a handkerchief.”

I’d barely noted her words then, distracted by the sadness that came with the sight of her laboring so diligently over what looked to be a plain scrap of linen.

And now she works, and I look away, as still as a waiting spider. Work, after all, does not change the way things are, the way they must be. Monsters do not sprout halos, and linen will never be silk.

But despite these thoughts, something familiar has begun to stir within like the sting of a fire shut up in brittle bones. My fingers drum against my thigh, anxious to write, to pin something of this feeling down and pick it apart on a page until it is a pile of bones and nothing more.

“Isabella.”

My fingers still at the sound of Ilse’s voice, and I tear my eyes away from the screen to meet her steady gaze.

“I must ask you something,” she begins, her weathered fingers motionless amidst the knotted daisies of her embroidery. “You must answer honestly, or not at all.”

I nod.

“Have you been happy here?”

The question is asked kindly, soft as a petal on a razor’s edge and my lips part to answer, but I do not have the words she wants.

I don’t know, I want to say. How could I know?

“I know you are restless,” she continues as if I had answered her. “You do not want to be an orchard worker for the rest of your life.” She looks down at the needlework in her lap, her face softening. “I wonder, do you remember your mother’s swans? We used to watch them on our picnics.”

“I remember.”

“I loved those picnics. You were a shy child, but there were moments when you would forget yourself, so fascinated by everything. Always watching, wide-eyed. I see traces of that still.”

I frown; she is not finished.

“Do you know what I think?” she asks after a moment. “I think your eyes stayed too big, Liebchen — you saw too much, too young. You took the measure of the world too soon and learned to see life as a bloodsport, and people as threats. Or toys.”

“You make it sound like I chose to be this way,” I intone bitterly, my voice breaking over the syllables.

“Didn’t you?”

I chose him, I want to say, and the words are bile filling my throat.

“Who?” Ilse asks quietly, her eyes sharp as ever and too late, I realize that I have spoken aloud.

Silent, I ignore her.

“Your father’s daughter,” my mother whispers, her face before me, and I see an entire future in the hollow spectre of her eyes. Cold, she called me, and I did not feel it.

But I feel it now, the elegant ghost of her hand running the length of my back. Dead, I tell her silently. You’re dead, and I’m still cold.

“Isabella.”

At Ilse’s voice, the shade of my mother dissolves in an instant.

“There are still so many secrets behind that pretty face,” Ilse muses, something sad in her voice. “Some day soon, you will tell me what they are. Until then, you must promise me something.”

Warily, I nod.

“Promise me that you will remember that you were loved here, and that you survived it.” She smiles my confusion. “It is both the simplest and the hardest thing I can ask of you.”

She turns back to her needle and thread without waiting for a response.

And the promise I’ve silently made is just another thread stretching from behind my ribs to the eye of the needle in her wrinkled, restless hand.

+.+.+.+

“Love is never enough,” my father tells me, a lone skeleton bound by ambition and waxing eloquent on the disadvantages of flesh and blood, his words echoing in my head.

Love in action, Dostoyevsky wrote, is a harsh and dreadful thing.

“What do you know about love?” Edward once demanded of me, but I only laughed like a lunatic, pulled him closer to feel my pulse, disintegrated in the flicker of a pagan flame as he took, and took, and took what was clutched between fingers of naked bone.

+.+.+.+

Generous to the end, Ilse pays me what she claims are wages earned, with more than enough to survive after the purchase of a plane ticket.

“it is no easy thing to work with Laurent,” she explains with a smile, and as she kisses me goodbye, I feel her hand slip something into the pocket of my coat. She stops me as I reach down. “For after you are gone,” she says quietly.

There is a cloud of dust as we pull away from the gravel of the drive, and then the road is as smooth as the wet tracks cutting a salty path across my face.

Laurent’s taciturn silence fills the cab of the truck as we make our way to the airport in Caen; farewells seem to be one of many things that do not ruffle him.

And so we are quiet.

“Goodbye, little stray,” he tells me when we arrive, handing me my bag. I leave him with the rickety old truck, covered with the dirt of Normandy, remnants of soil I can still feel under my fingernails.

I reach into my pocket as I walk through the terminal, only to find that it is Ilse’s handiwork — a pristine linen handkerchief, adorned with a lone lily. I run a finger over the even lines of the stitches, her words from the evening before echoing over the noise of the terminal, whispering over the eventual growl of the plane.

You survived it, she said.

And then the hum of the aircraft lulls me and dozing, I dream in splashes of violent color, my skin too small to contain me as I soar above the ocean cliffs of Normandy. Rocks jutting out of the surf below beckon to me, cold, sharp arms outstretched to receive and I can hear Edward’s voice, the whisper of his memory carrying on the wind in a thousand words he’s spoken and a few he has not.

A siren, he hisses. You led me to destruction, threw me into the sea’s gaping maw and laughed as I fell, flailed.

I wake with a jolt, blinking away his face until I am awake enough to open the neglected brown leather of my journal. I write myself senseless, nerves and fatigue and the pulling in my chest spill onto the page, things of the apple orchard, of how I shriveled,staring into a cadaver wildernesswith shrunken, sunken eyes and brittle skin stretched mawkishlyacross bones too sharp. I write of the reckoning within, how it sounds, growls like a thunderclap, grows louder with every traversed mile. I write of how my feet carry me back toward destruction.

My pen flies, words hemorrhaging from its bleeding tip as I suck in the rebel winds to fill my lungs, these sails that carry me closer to the edges and ends of the world.

+.+.+.+

I burst forth from the garden maze, winded, wide-eyed and covered in leaves and dirt when my father sees me.

“There you are!” he tells me, catching my ten year old body as I crash into him. “Bella—where on earth have you been?”

But I only shake my head, burrowing into his tuxedo-clad shoulder.

“Have you found her?” someone asks him.

“I’ve got her,” he calls, walking back toward the house. “I think she was stuck in the maze.”

I still am, I whisper now, and my skin still feels the prickle of the hedgerows.

+.+.+.+

We touch down at Heathrow and my fingertips freeze where they are pressed against the chill of the window. There is an odd twist in my stomach as the flight attendant welcomes us all to London, and I reach for where the folded itinerary rests in my coat pocket. I do not need to open it again to know that my father is now delivering a speech on Politics, Ideology and Media to a roomful of wide-eyed political acolytes at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He is scheduled to leave the event promptly at four o’clock, giving him a little over three hours to glad-hand, pose for photographs and return to his suite to get dressed for his evening engagement — a black tie anniversary party at a private estate outside of London.

“The Four Seasons, Park Lane,” I tell a cab driver long minutes later, breathing deep as we melt into the sea of traffic.

It’s half-past three by the time I enter the ornate hotel lobby, approaching the elevators with a steady click, click, click of my heels against the marble floor. The stilettos pinch painfully after almost two months of wearing nothing but muck-boots.

“How may I assist you?” the man at the service desk asks, pretending not to eye the rumpled grey silk of my dress under my open coat.

A few words, a smile and a flash of my passport, and I am given the key to my father’s suite.

+.+.+.+

I am seventeen, and the Tate Britain gallery echoes with my classmates’ whispered conversations.

Before me, a sculpture of lovers cling to one another in an erotic embrace, their figures pressed together, held not only by passion, but by the twine wrapped tightly around their frozen forms. Captivated, and captive.

“Rodin’s ‘The Kiss,’ re-imagined,” the curator explains. “Tate Britain is exhibiting it as a piece by Cornelia Parker. The artist wrapped Rodin’s sculpture in one mile of string to represent the ‘claustrophobia of relationships.’ You’ll notice the contrast of the two materials: the high culture of the marble, and the low culture of the twine.”

Now, my memory twists the features and lines until it is my own face staring back at me from beneath the stone.

+.+.+.+

The seventh-floor hallway of the Four Seasons stretches before me, dark, polished wood brightened only by the soft track lighting and the occasional floral accent.

And then I am standing outside the door of the Park Suite, key in hand and I breathe, gathering remnants of ice to me before sliding the key-card.

The door opens into a small foyer. To my right are a set of double doors, and to my left—

“What the hell are you doing here?” a man’s voice demands from behind me.

But I only smile as I turn to face him. “Hello, Paul.”

+.+.+.+

My mother, drunk and sulking in her favorite dress:

“He’s not coming back, you know.”

“Father?” I clarify, young and dumb and worried, the memory of my father’s disappearing tail lights running a loop in my head.

“Yes,” she snaps impatiently. “Why would he? Men only want one thing, Isabella, and he’s a man. He can do whatever wants, with whomever he can persuade to stay on her back long enough for him to finish. Look at you,” she spits, leaning closer, her hand coming up to my hair. She watches, fascinated as the brown strands fill her fingers. “You look just like him. My little souvenir from my marriage to Charles Swan. My little—” she snorts. “—love token.”

“Mother…”

But she does not hear me, lost in the dirge for her late youth, her lost husband.

“Ruined,” she mutters, closing her eyes.

+.+.+.+

Even astonished, Paul Strickland is as handsome as ever. Every crisp, clean line of him screams of my father’s favor.

“Don’t look so surprised,” I tell him, thinking of the paper in my pocket, of the dates and times and places within its creased folds.

He recovers, quickly schooling his features into a neutral expression. “I sent you the itinerary as a courtesy, not an invitation.”

“Oh?”

“I thought it only fair to warn you that he was going to be nearby. Your father knew where you were.”

“He doesn’t know where I am now.”

“He will. He’s due back here before six.”

“Thank you, but I didn’t come to see him. I’m here for you.”

He eyes me warily. “Why?”

“Because I need help, and you’re helpful.”

“I’m helpful to your father.”

I smile. “Of course. However, I’m attending an event tonight, and I need a few things from you.”

“Like what?”

“A car. I’d like a nice dress, as well.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. But I need these things in the next few hours, and I need my father to pay for them.”

Paul huffs a disbelieving laugh. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t give you his money— your father cut you off once he realized you left.”

“He canceled my card, yes. Yours still works, I’m sure.”

“You should leave.”

“I will when I get what I came for, and I can’t unless you help me.”

“Helping you before was a mistake,” he sighs.

I smile. “It’s one you’ll only make twice.”

+.+.+.+

A Selfridges manager falls over himself assuring me of how glad he is to see Charles Swan’s daughter, offering his condolences on my mother’s passing before introducing me to Paige, a personal shopper with cornsilk hair and a perpetually ecstatic expression.

The driver that Paul arranged meets me outside, and I am ensconced in the sleek confines of the car as the ribbon of the road winds behind until the trappings of the city die at its own borders.

Soon, I see a familiar stone wall running parallel to the road, its length leading us to the wrought iron gates of the Masen Estate. They are open tonight, a breach in the moneyed barricade made to welcome the arrival of guests and the happy thought of twenty-five more years of wedded bliss.

The car pulls smoothly down the winding drive, gleaming beneath the glow of picturesque the lamp posts that lead to the main house and I force myself to breathe slowly, hands tightening around the black silk of my skirt as the building comes into view. It is as regal as ever, its windows spilling light into the chilly evening air: the rooms inside are brilliantly lit, bountifully populated with the glittering friends of the happy couple.

I am closer and closer and then, before I am ready, we pull to a stop. A valet opens the car door and I stare ahead, breathing deep and steady.

“Ma’am?” he prompts, waiting.

Finally, I step out, looking up to the imposing brick facade of a home burned into my memories, its four walls trapping me still.

Carnal apple, Neruda wrote. Woman filled, burning moon…

A step and a step and another step, and my feet leave the sand and gravel of the drive, stiletto heels sinking into the landscaped lawn. Muted music plays from the other side of tall windows as I walk, each step carrying me further away from the welcome awaiting each guest at the house’s front entrance.

Summers spent roaming the grounds with Ilse unfurl before me. As I walk, the embers in my bones are a full-blown blaze and I think of Neruda, of how he might smile and tell me that the moon lives inside the lining of my skin.

+.+.+.+

“What is like to lose your mind?” a boy at school asked me once, and he’d been joking.

“It’s at least as easy as keeping it,” I’d replied, and meant every word.

+.+.+.+

I’ve been the duckling.

I’ve been the girl in the corner, the one who watches and waits, wishing.

I’ve been the un-captivating captive, shackled and slain by that chronic compulsion, the niggling need to belong, to belong, to belong.

I’ve been the prey, praying for a way out of mazes of my own making. Weak, wanton.

Helpless, hopelessly enthralled by the hunter.

And I’ve hunted, Athena soaring across the sky in a blaze of stars and arrows, bearing down on game for sport. I have been the predator, merciless and sharp, picking through the minds and bones of those that would consider themselves my betters.

I’ve devoured as Ammut did, pulling men in with a cold smile and a wet kiss, the warmth of my arms and my breath surrounding them until they gasped and cried and cursed me.

I round the house, finding the pale stones of the terrace spread before me, the clean lines of the garden maze just beyond it. They are both smaller, somehow.

Pulse pounding, I find my old way — the kitchen door, left ajar to ease the heat of the room. Only a few of the catering staff bother to glance my way as I head for the service stairs.

The third floor has been redecorated, the butternut panels and dark carpets lightened to varying neutrals, as if time has whitewashed the place in my absence. The new floor does not creak as I make my way to where I used to hide, young fingers clutching the railing as I watched the the grown-ups enjoying their own society.

I keep away from the farthest part of the landing; to anyone who would see me I am only another guest, taking a break from my tour of the house to survey my surroundings. In the open rooms beneath me, people talk, milling and moving about, kissing each other in greeting and politely laughing at stale jokes as they sip their champagne.

There is Carlisle, sleek as ever, his hair more grey than gold now against the black of his tuxedo jacket.

And Esme beside him, tastefully nipped and tucked and trim in a svelte grey gown.

I even spot my father across the room, paler and thinner and older, worse for the wear as he engages a man I don’t know in a conversation that looks gravely serious.

The house is full of music, the tinkling of silver and glasses, and the absence of one man in particular. I scan the space below again but there is no stir of young women, no flash of copper hair.

My fingers curling again around the balustrade, I wait.

+.+.+.+

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing up here by yourself?” Edward asked me once, coming behind me as I stared down at the adults from my perch.

“I want to watch the party,” I answer quietly, cowed by the presence of this boy, by all he represents with his arrogance and looks and the lines of his tuxedo.

And then he made a joke, gave me his last name, and I gave him mine.

“Swan,” I told him.

“Not yet, you’re not,” he laughed, starting down the stairs again. “Maybe someday.”

Then I watched him play his game, smiling and touching and talking until he lured his prey through the green halls of the garden maze.

And as always, I followed.

+.+.+.+

Cocktail hour is ending, and there is no sign of Edward Cullen.

I am seething with impatience, tendrils of it polluting the air around me with every breath.

Anger, as I consider that perhaps I am always wrong where he is concerned.

Where are you? I want to scream, longing to draw every set of glazed eyes up to the third floor balcony and demand an explanation.

There is desperation in the sinews of my fingers as they flex against the banister, and oh, how far have I fallen? To wait here like a wallflower at a dance, icy reserve and thundering pulse, waiting for just a glimpse of him. I want to cling and claw, repay raw nerves with raw flesh. Punish him for the pull that brought me here, keeps me watching—

And then:

From my vantage point, I can see the group of three young women near a corner facing the entrance; they’ve done nothing this evening but make eyes at rich divorcés and young waiters.

As I watch, the boredom flees from their features, slender backs straightening and manicured hands subtly patting elegant hair, smoothing silk over bony hips. Lips purse, shoulders come back and, their own conversation forgotten, they eye the door beneath me with smiles I understand. Something has their undivided attention, has them wanting.

I cannot see the object of their stares without bending over the railing, but I do not need to. I know a bitch in heat when I see one. The space around me begins to hum, the air crackling with anticipation.

A familiar fever burns at the base of my spine. My fingers flex, waiting.

+.+.+.+

“I am not afraid of you,” Edward told me once, angry and quiet.

Subdue, or sever, my mind screamed in the moments that followed. Put a slouch in that proud, private school posture.

+.+.+.+

In the space below, the hum of conversation carries on, men giving cursory glances and greetings and the women pausing, looking through caked lashes and I hold my breath.

Patience, I breathe.

Patience.

…and breathe again.

My eyes catch the dark copper of his hair as soon as he comes into sight, the strong, straight back of him as he moves through the room toward his father.

He does not slouch, not even a bit, and I swallow back the hunger snapping within, pangs left unsatisfied by memories and starving for flesh. Desire stretches across and into my skin, covering bones as it loosens and curls, plumes of a filthy fire filling the chambers of my weak and terrible heart.

I’ve dreamt of him, of having him, of stretching across his body like a blanket just to feel the lift of his breath, the warmth of it on my neck and in my hair and everywhere else. Consuming, being consumed, swallowing him whole like an ancient god swallowing the sun.

Surrounded by his friends, Carlisle smiles as his son approaches and it is nothing more than the baring of teeth, gleaming like blades as he shakes Edward’s hand, leans forward to say something in his ear that makes the younger man’s proud posture stiffen further. All around, people smile and laugh and look.

Carlisle’s conversation with the men beside him resumes. Edward turns to acknowledge something said and my lungs pull a sharp suck of air at his profile, eyes feasting on the strong, sharp lines of his face. How many times in the past have I caught sight of him below, moving through the crowd with the insouciance of an entitled aristocrat? Pampered, predatory.

I watched him here as a child, fascinated by the brutality of such a beautiful hunt, by the way his eyes would gleam, his mouth twitching upward in a mocking smile, a brilliant smile that does not betray its harsh bite.

He is older now, his features bearing a hardness I have not seen before.

You are for me, are the words that whisper through my mind.

Soundlessly, my mouth moves around the one thought that pulses, the underpinning beat of a drum:

Mine.

The word is barely formed when he turns, eyes snapping up to mine as if I’d commanded it. I freeze.

Carlisle is laughing at something, grabbing his son’s arm. Edward does not look away from me.

Any moment now, his father will wonder why his son ignores him in favor of staring up at the landing of the staircase, and I will be seen. I move back, disappearing into the shadow of the hallway, the barrier of the wall breaking our gaze.

+.+.+.+

I spend my summer days in the Masens’ garden, half-listening as Ilse tells me stories of people long past, of how Abram gave his wife to the pharaoh in exchange for money and safety, of how he made God angry.

“You know that’s not right, don’t you?” she asks me earnestly. “That you are more than just some bargaining chip for silly rich men?”

And I tell her that I know, impatient to explore.

“Can I go in the maze now?” I ask her.

But she only shakes her head, a faraway look in her eyes as she tells me to stay away.

+.+.+.+

My limbs are light, shaking as I gather my skirt and run down the service stairs, every inch of me singing with pleasure, with exultation.

He has seen me, and he will come.

I am flying, flying, flying — through the kitchen, and out the back door, too flushed to feel the bite of the winter air, too exhilarated to stop running. My footsteps are loud here, sounding against the terrace like the beat of a funeral dirge. And then there is sod, and they are silent.

Hedges loom ahead, silhouettes of dreams and memories waiting within.

Come inside, they beckon with the whisper of a breeze. Come and claim.

A moment later, my name is a shouted sound from the terrace, a burst of fury and disbelief.

Catch me, I want to call, but all that sounds is a mocking laugh, and I keep moving.

Freedom! the night sings,

freedom,

freedom,

freedom,

and the sound is a jubilant howl as I breach the waiting walls of the garden maze.

+.+.+.+

“Who is Edward Cullen to you?” my father asked me once, and I refused to answer even as I knew.

He is my prey and my prayer and my captive, my spoils of war, my conquered city and my friendly fire.

He is the thief of my skin,

my monster in the maze,

my sun god, grounded.

He is mine.

+.+.+.+

It has been years, but my feet know the way of a path well-traveled in dreams. After a series of turns there is a left, another left and a quick right, and I am here.

Time and the winter have borne down upon this place in the heart of the maze. The grass beneath my feet has been browned with the cold, and patches of branch show through the shrubs’ sparse leaves.

But the stone bench remains the same, immutable as an altar.

The memory plays out behind my eyes: Edward fucking some girl laid across the stone seat, his ridicule rendering their tryst as impersonal as a handshake—

“Isabella.”

He is here.

And the world is on fire again.

I take another deep pull of the frigid air before turning to face him.

Tall and straight and beautiful, with enough scotch in his gaze to make him blink as I meet his eyes.

“Edward,” I say, cursing the shake of my voice.

“Isabella,” he repeats flatly.

“It’s good to see you again.”

Touch, my fingers demand. Touch and grab, clutch, keep.

Black tuxedo, black tie.

His breathing is labored, eyes sweeping down my body and back up, staring hard into my face. The only thing I’ve heard him say thus far is my name, but now silence overtakes us, settling into the small clearing like a fog, and I cannot look away from him. Drunk with proximity, my eyes cling to his face, a heavy brow over brittle eyes, a strong, straight nose and the downward turn of his mouth.

And now he speaks, stone words falling onto a still-living breast:

“You need to leave.”

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

Everyone’s reviews have been a huge shot in the arm as this story nears the finish line. Thank you to everyone who took the time to leave them. And (broken record, but it’s true), thank you to Myg, whose wunderbar work “Osa Bella” is still one of my very favorite stories. She’s been a huge encouragement, and I’m grateful that I get to hear her thoughts on these chapters before they are posted.

I am still tweaking/filling out our next update. Here’s hoping to have it on your screens next week. (If that changes, I’ll let you know via my twitter account hollelujahs.)

Thanks again!