The Other Way : Epilogue

I Hope You Love Me Too

-

I opened Alice’s envelope almost six months after it arrived.

It was smudged and crumpled, worn from its journey between her and me, half a world away. I kept it in the top drawer of my dresser because that was the drawer I seldom opened. There was a box of my mother’s last leftover paperwork, her death certificate and the police report in a manilla envelope, shoved way into the back. A black velvet tray with my grandmother’s jewelry, none of it nearly as expensive as what I’d received from Jasper over the years, but important nonetheless. The lingerie I’d worn underneath my wedding dress was folded in tissue paper along with the picture of Jasper and I, standing on the steps of City Hall, newly wed. Our marriage certificate from the entryway, which came down the day Jasper officially moved out, was folded carefully up beside them. I only went into the drawer to retrieve the deed to the house, the one on which Jasper had scrawled his name, signing it over to me. When my fingers brushed against the newest addition to my sort-of-forbidden collection, I couldn’t help but poed at freshly healed wounds.

It had been almost a year since she left. A year since my marriage dissolved like sugar into warm water and a year since Edward became my hummingbird, flitting around my head in search of sweetness. A year of redefinition and something that felt nearly like redemption.

The glue cracked off in my hands when I pried open the envelope. Her letter wasn’t even a letter, only a few pages torn from that pretty patterned journal she’d carried around with her. The first page was an entry from nearly five years ago, stuttered and disjointed as though she’d only written thoughts down when she had a moment to and put it away for later, the second written just before we all flew to that island.

I had half an hour before Edward was due home, and I don’t know why I ever thought that would be enough time.

---

Asela, Ethiopia
2008

---

March 2nd

He got here two days ago and he’s already sick.

What the fuck am I going to tell his parents?

March 3rd

It’s malaria. Fuck fuck FUCK.

He TOLD me he got his shots. PROMISED me, the lying fucking bastard. Part of me wants to just smother him with his pillow but he has fucking malaria and what does that say about me?

Even when he’s sick as fuck, he’s still beautiful.

March 6th

I can’t believe how bad he’s gotten, and so fast. We barely had a chance to say hello before it took him. He’s been tossing and turning like he’s trying to run somewhere. He has a new tattoo, a giant piano on his side but he’s not even with it enough for me to ask him about it.

March 9th

Why is he so fucking stubborn? He’s fighting it with everything he has, a normal person would have just let go already. He’s clinging on and it’s not that I want him to die, it’s that I can’t stand to watch him suffer. He’s been boiling hot for so long that I’m sure his insides have melted and I’m seriously starting to worry about brain damage. The fever is too strong for him.

I’m worried it might be too strong for me too.

March 10th

It’s been eight days and I haven’t slept. I’m terrified that the moment I do will be the moment he chooses to let go.

How long do you wait before you put someone out of their misery? Isn’t that just like murder? Is just thinking about it bad enough? I’m such a terrible person, but he reeks of death. He has one foot through that door already and a horrible part of me wants to just give him one final shove to get him through.

He can’t even cry anymore, there’s no water left in him.

I do all the crying for us.

Everything I learned in med school is a lie, or useless.

March 13th

I lay in his bed with him today. I don’t give a fuck if I get it. I spent all afternoon watching the sun move across our legs and listening to his heartbeat. It’s slow, but it’s strong. When I finally got up to start a fire, his eyes were open and he was watching me, but he was hallucinating . . . which is always the final stage and I went outside to cry this time, in case he could see it.

He called me an angel. Asked me to put my halo back on.

March 14th

He won’t let go.

Jesus christ, please just let go.

March 15th

The fever broke this morning, but he’s not conscious.

I’m afraid that the guy I knew left days ago and I missed it. That the fever has damaged him beyond repair. I have the same twelve lines of Bukowski stuck in my head and if he comes out of this intact, I

March 17th

He woke up today.

Told me that I looked terrible. Asked for food and a shot of something strong.

Thank fucking god.

---

Madama, Niger
2012

---

June 1st

I lost Jubilee tonight.

I lost Dayo.

I lost Edward.

His face, when she finally slipped away . . . I’ll never forget his face. He was so angry with me, I’ve never seen him so mad and he was terrifying. He flipped the table and overturned the cot and then left me there with her in my lap, still warm but not breathing and her heart so silent I couldn’t hear anything he yelled.

He called me an idealist and a daydreamer. Accused me of pandering with death, of being the demon the locals all thought I was. Condemned me for forcing him to stand by and watch.

He’ll never forgive me.

He told me not to do it. Told me to get her hydrated before we tried anything and he’s always accused me of being too stubborn. All I did was prove him right. All I did was kill a beautiful, happy little girl because I wanted to be part of her family so bad. I thought that if I saved her they way they were used to, I’d finally be accepted.

That they’d stop thinking of me as a witch.

Now, I’m worse than that.

I can hear them, the village, and I know they’re coming for me, but I don’t want to leave. I want them to burn me. I want them to cut me open and destroy me so that I’ll only ever be here. I don’t want to exist as another person, pretending that this part of me never happened so that no one will ever see me again without knowing what I did.

I want it inked into my skin.

I want it gouged into my bones.

I want it scarred into my face.

---

I cried for ten minutes before I could bring myself to breathe.

There were two photographs in the envelope.

Alice and her tall, dark prince. Him scarred around the face and her sort of scarred everywhere else, standing in the brown grass with a big blue open sky behind them.

She was in a piece of thin black fabric that wrapped around her body and trailed out behind her, face freshly scarred in a delicate tribal pattern around her eyes, her hair adorned with an elaborate headdress of golden chains that hung down around her cheeks. A million beaded necklaces looped around her neck and her arms were full to the elbows with bracelets.

Dayo was naked except for a draped cloth around his waist, his night-sky skin painted with a milky way of white stars and his brilliant white smile . . . oh, his smile . . . made my heart ache and sing for her.

The other photo made my heart stop completely.

It was shot low to the ground, through the grass, capturing a hollow spot made by a giant lion. Its fur was the same tawny color of the grass, sleeping peacefully with a frantic mane of hair haloing its face and a tattooed boy sprawled up against him, sleeping just as soundly.

With hair to match.

Alice’s familiar handwriting etched across the back:

I hope you know that I love you. And him.

I hope you love me too.

I tucked the photo of Alice back into her letter, back into the envelope and back into the drawer I never opened. The photograph of Edward and his lion was going to hang in the front hallway.

In that empty space my marriage certificate had left behind.

Next

The Other Way : Thirty Four

In The End, Even Pavlov Fell For It

-

I must have fallen asleep in the clover.

I could smell it everywhere when I woke up, the soft sharp bite of green melding with the mellow sweetness of half-gone flowers. My mouth tasted briney, as though I’d swallowed sea water, and the taste of it was painfully familiar but no amount of daydreaming was going to warp reality in my favor. I was in my room, the one at the end of the hallway. In my bed, the sheets speckled with patterned rose petals and the walls a dusty pink. Not at all where I was hoping I’d wake up.

An island on the other side of the world. Lavender breeze and mosquito netting. Pearly white sand and sapphire water.

I gulped down a stinging mouthful of regret, chest aching. Suddenly wallowing through things I’d thought I put away, memories rushing back like a tidal wave without Jasper there to deflect them. My go-to mask was gone and I was back at the beginning.

My mother killed three people. Maybe not on purpose, maybe without specific intent, but the fact of the matter would just never go away. They were dead, and because she took herself out with them, all that guilt had nowhere to turn to but me. The guy had two kids. The teenager had been accepted to Oxford one month before and the lady who was walking her dog had just finished her last round of chemo that morning.

The only survivor was the dog.

It went to a shelter and probably ended up somewhere shitty or not at all, put down because no one wanted an old dog with possible radiation exposure.

It was safe to say that I hadn’t spent single second of the next three years alone. Those people tagged along for everything. Every boring daily chore and superficial special occasion. Every lonely night in bed and every dreadful day at work, until Jasper showed up, almost three years to the day and I’d given up on fighting them off a long time before that. Let them just come at me and I was drowning under the weight of them, piled one on top of another like wet sacks of flour.

My mother, suspiciously absent. The dog, always there.

Jasper had been my drug of choice for years. He allowed me to play pretend so efficiently that I was able to practically become a different person altogether with him. Was able to let those people and that damn dog go, injecting a potent concoction of tender, numbing fantasy into my veins every time I hurt. A year into our marriage I started feeling incredibly guilty that I was using him in such a way, on an hourly basis, to soothe my pains and admitted it all to him in a stinking, drunken fit of tears. He offered himself up, blood and bones and heart, without hesitation.

And now he was gone.

My life, as I knew it, was over. A big fat black line had suddenly sprung up where it hadn’t been before, but it didn’t separate one part of me from another. Didn’t show where the old me died off and the new emerged from some sort of chrysalis like a damp butterfly. Didn’t mark the boundary between the past or the future. It ran right up through the middle.

It’s not possible to live with half a heart.

A bisected brain.

A single lung.

I rolled over in a fit of pain that felt sort of like death and came to bone-numbing contact with an octopus. Dandelion seeds and two black lip rings. Lavender eyelids and a tiled floor fluctuating restlessly over his breathing. A wild tempest of bronzed hair across the rose petal sheets and I pulled stealthily away. He must sleep on his back because his arms were thrown out to his sides just like the last time I’d found him like this, face turned into the pillow, pulse thumping steadily in his neck. His lips looked bitten raw, chapped and peeling, as though he’d been chewing on them a lot more lately. His shirt was discarded and there was a bandage taped to his side, sprawled errantly across several keys of his piano.

He was half naked and last night was a blur.

I wasn’t naked, only peeled from that stupid gold dress but left in my bra and underwear. The thigh highs I’d been sporting had spent all night digging indented bands around my legs that reminded me too much of Alice and I yanked them off, tossing them away from the bed and struggling out of my bra. There were more indentations sunken into my ribs and the undersides of my breasts. I was really starting to believe that my other life marked me just like tattoos did.

The fact that they eventually faded away didn’t make them any less permanent.

Edward woke with a start as I was rubbing the marks away, a ragged gasp of air and his fingers clenched into the sheets, bolting upright in mere microseconds, panting roughly. He glanced wildly around the room and I have to admit I cringed a little in response, clutching the sheet up around me. He looked ready to bolt, practically shimmering with nervous energy and for half a moment I fully believed in spontaneous human combustion. I think I saw the pale blue flicker of flames ripple across his skin. When he’d deemed the room empty of anyone but me, he collapsed back against the bed with a groan.

“Jesuschrist. I didn’t know where I was for a minute.” He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, sinking his fingers into his hair and then back over his face. He looked so out of place, polychrome and painted over against the girlish cotton sheets and when he set his hand down on my leg, all the tension flooded out of me. I eased back against the headboard, his grip remaining firm as though he was using me to ground himself. “I saw you, when I was coming back,” he spoke through his fingers.

“Me?”

He nodded. “I woke up on the plane in the middle of the night, over the middle of the ocean, and I could have sworn you were sitting right there next to me. I don’t know if I was hallucinating or dreaming or . . . I hadn’t slept much, but . . .” He shook his head, eyelids fluttering closed and voice sounding almost painful. “You were so beautiful. And you didn’t say anything to me. I just sat there staring at you until the stewardess came along and asked me why I was crying.”

“And then?”

“I flipped out. I probably ranted incoherently and I definitely freaked her out, but I was trying to tell her that I didn’t give a fuck about Alice, that girl and her emotional baggage belong to someone else now. I wanted to tell her about you, that you’d been sitting there watching me for hours and you wouldn’t even talk to me, but I couldn’t get it out without completely losing my shit. I woke up in Chicago feeling like I drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. You were gone.” Edward swallowed and looked at me. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip, dampening the dry skin. “You might be more beautiful than I even remembered.”

“Thank you for taking my dress off.” I blushed like mad, not sure what to say and settling on something stupid, apparently. It was draped across the squishy grey chair near the closet, folded carefully, a golden edge spilling to the floor. All those sequins would have been terrible to sleep in.

“That was him.” Edward bit his lip, wanting to say more. He probably would have left it where it landed, which said a lot about where his priorities lay. “I can completely understand his infatuation with you, regardless of his preferences. I had to let him do it.”

“He’s not infatuated,” I shook my head and Edward nodded right back at me.

“I’m not the only dog,” he said, stoically.

“If he’s a dog, then he’s deaf.”

“Maybe, but in the end even Pavlov fell for it.”

I shook my head, wondering what the fuck he was talking about and his mouth curled into that perfect lopsided smirk, twisting around his lip rings. He shrugged.

“Eventually . . . every time he heard a bell, he must have had the uncontrollable urge to feed a dog.”

He was making jokes?

Now?

I slapped at him, managing to drag my fingers roughly right across that bandage taped to his side. Edward groaned and pulled away, his mouth curled in pain and a mumbled motherfucker into the mattress. It took him more than a few minutes to calm his breathing before he finally rolled onto his back again, looking a little ashen around the edges. I settled against his side, watching as he peeled away the edge of the bandage to look underneath and I only got a glimpse, but that was all I needed. There was a ragged gash slicing across the piano tattoo, through all the delicate skin that lay thin over his ribs. A neat line of stitches traipsing across the keys.  

“What happened?” I choked, pulling my eyes away as he grimaced and pressed the bandage back down.

“I got chased down by an elephant. Caught myself on a branch. The bastard almost got me.” He winced as he fingered the tape. It was obviously still painful.

“You got away though?”

“Barely,” he huffed. “12 stitches doesn’t exactly qualify as Scott-free in my mind.”

“Who sewed you up?”

“Alice. She enjoyed it more than she should have.” He seemed hesitant to bring up her name but I gave him a lopsided smile, knowing that this wasn’t the last time we’d ever talk about her. Even though I didn’t want to think about her right now, I certainly wasn’t going to stop missing her. I’m sure he felt the same way, but a hundred times worse.  

“Your keys will be broken now.” I traced my finger gently along the edge of the bandage, five keys afflicted in varying degrees.

“It doesn’t actually work, you know. It’s just an illusion.” Edward grinned slyly down at me, hair in his eyes and mouth finally curling into something that vaguely resembled a smile.

“Will you teach me?”

“Of course I’ll teach you, although my mother has a real version we could use.”

“I like yours better,” I sighed, ignoring his attempt at logic and using my index finger to tap tap tap my way up the entire board, a wash of goosebumps flaring up behind my morse code message. He shivered before hissing in pain and trapping my hand against his ribs to stop me. That must have hurt.

“Take it easy on me, I’m wrecked in more ways than one,” he murmured. Not talking about his stitches. Not talking about his skin stretching as his muscles tensed, tugging on the thread. Talking instead about his body armor and his surly demeanor. I pulled myself to my hands and slipped my leg over his waist, careful to keep my knee away from his wounds. Edward watched me silently, hands rubbing my thighs and tracing his delicate white-ink tattoo as I tried to tame my hair. He gripped me tightly, fingers biting into my skin and I let my hair tumble down around me, distracted by the look on his face.

That hungry, hollow-cheeked stare. Painful eyes and tightened brow.

“Please don’t tell me to leave again,” he nearly stumbled, stuttering over his words. I put a hand to his chest to steady myself, his heartbeat beneath my fingerprints and clutched my other hand around my neck to help coax the words out. I could barely breathe and when I finally coughed them up, they weren’t exactly what I was expecting.

“The swan, why did you pick it?” I traced my fingers from one dandelion seed to the next, the sprawling wings of the bird across his shoulders.

He licked the inside of his mouth, eyeing me warily. “I don’t know. I just needed it.”

“It’s my maiden name. My name. Again,” I stuttered.

“Swan?” he questioned and I nodded hesitantly. “Who are you?” He sounded nearly mystified, as though I’d stepped into the sun and all my skin turned to diamonds. As though I was a deep dark hole in the ground and I was so fucking grateful that he’d stopped to search for gold in the mouth of a coal mine. Sure for a moment that he was my yellow bird, the one I was supposed to take into the abyss with me and I wanted to do nothing more than just fall in, feet first.

“I’ve been someone else for so long . . .” I shook my head.

“Who do you want to be?”

A daredevil.

An impulsive madcap. Wild and reckless and full to the brim with things I couldn’t decide if I only wanted, or desperately needed. In love with a boy who tested all of my limits and taught me to ask for more. Flying my kamikaze plane recklessly low, daring him to shoot me down. For once, I was sort of grateful for that giant-ass hole in my filter.

“Yours.” If you still want me.

I crash landed in an explosive inferno. Baptized by fire.

“Bella . . .” he exhaled, pulling me down and wasting all his words in my mouth.

There was something electrifying about the way he said my name.

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