fic
I've known mornings
white as diamonds
silent from a night so cold
such a stillness
calm as the owl glides
our lives are buried in snow
… burdened bands gain strong hands
gaping holes where diamonds should be
must have been morning that stole them
a glint of white in the pocket of winter
- Alela Diane, “White as Diamonds”
~
Every Tuesday, Jacob Black follows the same ritual, as if faithfulness alone is enough to bring the dead back to life.
“You don’t have to drop me off,” Jacob says to Quil and Embry, as he does every Tuesday, the car idling in front of the hospital.
“Yeah, whatever,” Quil says, completely dismissing him, as he also does every Tuesday.
“Good luck,” Embry says simply, looking him straight in the eye, the way brothers do.
They all know that luck has nothing to do with it.
In the hospital waiting room, Jacob signs himself into the guest book, his name, the date, and time. The nurses wave him through; he’s a familiar sight, that handsome young man with the tired eyes for the patient in 402. Never misses a week, not in how many years. Bringing flowers, even.
Look at his shoulders, look at his arms, look at his hair, the nurses say, sighing.
They do not say, Look at how old his eyes are.
He feels like a boy again, foolish and sixteen and too tall. It’s ridiculous, really, the feeling of being on a date - knocking at her door, flowers in his hand, his jacket too tight, almost suffocating him.
“Come in!” she calls, and he steps inside.
Bella’s sitting at the desk that Charlie managed to bring from home. She’s been reading, as she usually is - a huge black book that she closes as soon as the door opens. Her face (always too pale) breaks out into a smile when she sees him.
“Jacob Black!” she says, and then, teasingly, “Been so long, I’ve almost forgotten your face.”
He summons a shadow of his old grin for her, as his arms slide around her tightly, as if to keep her and make her whole. “Silly,” he says lightly. “It’s only been a week, you know that.”
She pulls herself from his arms, her eyebrows knitting together. “Has it?” she asks. “Has it only been a week? Funny, it seems longer than that.”
The tension that coils around his heart gets a little tighter. It’s too early, yet, to say whether today is a good day or a bad day.
“I brought you flowers,” he says, remembering.
Her face lights up in genuine pleasure. “Tulips!” she says, burying her face in the petals, breathing deep. “Jake, you shouldn’t have.”
“From Emily’s garden. She says hello.”
“That’s sweet of her. Tell her I say hi back.”
Then Bella fingers the edges of the petals thoughtfully; she has that thinking face on, the one she gets when she’s reading a difficult Russian novel or trying to outline an essay, and this is the hardest part - that she looks and acts so much the same.
She’s still Bella. She’s still herself.
“White,” she says, “white tulips, for forgiveness.” She rolls her eyes at him. “You goofball, what’s there to forgive? And red, for…” A bit of colour creeps into her cheeks, and her mouth shapes the words silently : Love.
“Oh Jake,” she says again, her face softening. “You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “They’re just - they’re from Emily’s garden. They’re what she had. They don’t mean anything.”
“Everything means something, Jake.”
And the shadows come to rest in her eyes again, like crows alighting on a power line. He can hear the humming, he can hear the electricity rising in the air. He can smell a storm coming.
“You shouldn’t have,” she says. “I mean, what will Edward say when he sees them?”
Jacob closes his eyes.
A bad day, then.
“They really are lovely, though!” she says, too quickly. “I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s fine.”
“It’s just… Even if you are my best friend, I can’t exactly explain away getting flowers from another guy, you know? Especially since now that I’m engaged.”
His eyes fly open. She’s already at her desk, laying down the tulips, fussing about with her books and her pens, not looking him in the eye.
“… You’re engaged?” he says, his voice breaking on the last syllable.
She freezes at her desk, her back to him. She was always such a terrible actress. “Oh Jake,” and there’s something close to pity in her voice, sad and blurring. “I told you. I hate having to tell you over and over, but you…”
“You’re engaged,” he repeats. “That’s - good. I’m… Congratulations.”
The storm, crackling in the air. Coming close and closer, pressing down on him. His blood becomes the thunder, but there’s no rain, just yet.
And he forces - he forces himself to say it. “So, when’s the wedding?”
“August,” she says, turning to him, despite having hurt him, her face glows. “The thirteenth of August. Just a little before my birthday. And then…” She takes a deep, deep breath, as if gathering all her courage. “And then he’s going to turn me.”
Boooooom.
Crack.
Thunder and lightning, right on cue. His heart splits like a tree trunk, his veins turned to hot white scars of smoking wood.
It’s not supposed to hurt. It’s not supposed to hurt this much, every single time.
“So - ” he chokes the words out, Get it over with man, get the worst of the storm over with, keep her talking. “So you already told me, right? That you were getting married. When - when did you tell me? I must’ve forgot.”
“I told you weeks ago. I have it written down in my journal, here. I decided to write things down,” she says, confidentially, “because lately, you know, I keep forgetting things, and it’s really annoying. I forget things and I mix them up and sometimes - ”
Her face is clouding, and he can almost hear the rain beginning to descend.
“Sometimes I remember thing that didn’t happen at all. I think I’m remembering the past but it’s not, it’s all different and horrible, like a bad dream, a nightmare - ”
She’s beginning to babble, pitterpatter pitterpatter, her words small and hard and fast, not just like rain, but hail.
“ - Like the bad dream I had this morning where it was snowing except I looked closer and the snow was all this tiny bits of crystal, just shattered crystal, floating in the air like powder, and there were a million tiny rainbows and I woke up screaming.”
“Were you in Italy in your dream?” he asks, before he can help himself.
She gives him a look like a cornered animal and says, in almost a shriek, “No! No, I wasn’t in Italy. I wasn’t anywhere at all.”
Then she calms down. She goes back to her journal.
“I don’t like snow,” she says, decidedly. “The only time it should snow is at Christmas. It looks really nice when you’re coming out of church, after Christmas mass, you know, but after that, it should just wash away.”
“You don’t go to church.” He wonders how long he can keep doing this, how long he can stand in the storm daring the lightning to strike him down.
“No,” she says. “No, not really, I don’t like church. I don’t like those big boom boom boom that the bells make.”
“Bells?”
“Yes?”
“No. I mean, bells. What bells? There aren’t any bells in the church here.”
“But I can hear them,” she says. “The bells in the clock tower. I hear them all the time. I can feel it… you can feel the echoes rising through the floor, you know. You feel it through the soles of your feet. The sound of it shivers right deep down to your bones.”
“There’s no clock tower here, Bella.”
“But I can hear them!”
“There’s no clock tower here, Bella. There are no bells,” he says, with infinite gentleness, and instead of the terror rising in her face again, this time it’s the rage.
“You should go, Jacob.” Her voice is ten degrees colder. She turns her back to him like a child, clutching her black journal to her chest. “I think you should go now.”
“All right,” he says, moving for the door. “All right. But Bella - ”
“Yes?”
“… Edward must’ve come back from Italy, then?”
“What?”
“For you to get engaged,” Jacob says. “For you to get married. He must’ve come back from Italy.”
“Oh. Yes,” Bella says. “Of course.”
“Then why,” and he feels a sick twist of laughter rising in his throat as his questions go round and round and round, circles within circles within circles of hell, “why don’t you remember it?”
“I - !” She whirls on him, and her pale skin is even whiter, her brown eyes even darker, almost black. “I was really tired! It was a long flight! I’m sure I just - the confusion, of the travel - and I was so happy to see Edward, I was very emotional - and I wasn’t too late!” Her voice is shrill, no swansong here, just a crow’s dying shriek. “I stopped him from dying, didn’t I! I stopped him!”
“Of course you did,” Jacob says, still gently. “Of course you did.”
“It’s written in my journal,” she says. “So it must be true. Even if I don’t remember it. It’s written in my journal.”
She sits on her chair, staring straight ahead, not seeing him, her hands still clutching at her journal so tightly that her knuckles are turning white. Her lips shape the words over and over again, not even making any sound : It’s written in my journal. So it must be true. It’s written in my journal.
Then she suddenly seems to remember he’s there and she says, with a suddenly bright smile, “Thank you again for the flowers, Jake. They’re really lovely. I think I’ll press them, and maybe paste one on the cover of my journal. Brighten it up a bit.”
“That sounds like a really good idea, Bella. A really good idea.”
“So I’ll see you next week?” And the hopeful longing in her voice - gods, he could swear that it’s real.
“Of course,” he says. He drops a kiss on her forehead, and she beams up at him. Like a child. Like Bella.
“I’ll write it down in my journal,” she says, importantly. “So that I don’t forget.”
“Of course.”
He’s practically at the door when he hears her whisper of “Jacob?”
He thinks of that one story that Bella told him, about that Orpheus guy. They told him - they told him not to look back, and he did anyway.
Jacob understands that guy perfectly.
“Yeah, Bella?” he says, his voice very soft in his throat.
Her face is dead pale, drained of light. Her eyes are huge and dark and her voice is just a thin thread as she says, “It was snowing. In my dream. The snow was like diamonds. It made tiny rainbows everywhere. I hate rainbows. Jacob, it was snowing. Why was it snowing?”
And because Jacob loves her, he says, “Because it was winter, honey. That’s all.”
~
Embry and Quil are waiting for him outside the hospital and Quil asks, as he does every Tuesday, “So where to?”
Jacob wonders if today will be the day he says, That bloodsuckers’ museum, and step on it. If he will break pattern of his weeks and months and years, and torch down the Cullen mansion where, in his mind, a doll Bella wanders smiling through the empty white halls in endless figure eights in an empty attempt to capture infinity.
He wonders, if he burned the house down, if it would free her ghost into the air.
Maybe, then, he could stop circling back to that hospital room where drugs slipslide sluggishly into her veins and she rewrites the past with a happy ending but still wakes up screaming from dreams of snow.
And Jacob knows : he could torch the place, turn every square inch into ash and memory.
But her ghost would still live in his bones.
So instead, he says to Quil, as he does every Tuesday, “The nearest bar. And step on it.”
end.