Descending Star

SOJOURNS

Edythe slipped in and out of Ben's house, to pack the car, while he slept. Charlie was beginning to rouse and would soon cross the landing to the bathroom for his morning shower.

Ben should have been up long ago. Edythe would have to adhere to the rules of the road for this daylight drive. They would not reach Yosemite before dinnertime. Edythe's preference would have been to be on their way hours ago. Ben could have napped in the passenger seat. He softly snored in bed, just midway through his typical sleep cycle, with no sign of waking. If Charlie stepped outside first, he would see the Cullen family's Volvo, and its presence would be complicated, without Ben up and about to run interference. She considered the possibility of sitting out in the driveway, to greet Charlie herself with the lame excuse that she was letting Ben sleep and waiting for him to awaken.

The other option, to carry him out to the car and take him while Charlie showered, might also backfire. In truth, she needed him to awaken, yet she also dreaded it. Inevitably he would open his eyes, look into hers, and know instantly that she had not fed last night. Then she would have to explain it. She would have to explain how she had clung to the roof of a small diner in one of the villages down the 101, miles beyond her perceptual range, helplessly torn between her thirst and her craving for him. She had dug her nails into the roof's rubberized asphalt, paralyzed herself, held on for dear life, to prevent herself from racing back to his house. Thirst, and feeding, yes, those compulsions had been present, too, but a distant second, a recessive drive that her body had dismissed. She wanted Benjamin alone, to the exclusion of anything else.

When he awoke, he would see that. Her weakness. Not only the debilitated state she'd put herself in with this inadvertent starvation, but also her weakness for him, her inability to function, persist, survive without him.

Her craving for him brought her to the other aspect that she dreaded. The blackout last night, that gap between Colleen's departure and Ben's call, and what it meant. She had sensed Colleen's withdrawal from Forks, for Tacoma. Edythe's head had snapped up to watch Colleen passing, and the ancient's departing thought had been, Please God, let this time be the one. Edythe needed to know what Colleen had meant, by that thought, and she had expected to learn the context from Benjamin.

But then, the blackout, the silence: his neglect to call.

Last night she had released her grip on the diner roof, had turned to face Ben's house fifteen miles to the west, back in Forks, and she had moaned plaintively, awaiting his call. But it had not come. She had promised to Colleen that she would not return to Forks until Ben called her back.

She had made herself busy, while waiting. She had run northwest, to her house, for the Volvo. On the way she had called Emelia, at SeaTac, who had been exhorting Rex to calm in the departures terminal for the past four hours.

"Colleen's on her way," Edythe had told Emelia.

"Rex will be glad to hear it. And what about you? Still committed to escorting Ben down to the girl who's been promised to him since childhood?"

"It's not like that."

"So that's a yes, then. Tell me. Rex and I are dying to know. Clytemnæstra finally deigned to open her mouth and speak. Was it worth the wait?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there, and Ben hasn't filled me in."

Emelia chewed on that for a second. "Okay... well, doesn't that come first? Before you resolve yourself to this surreal roadtrip?"

Edythe seethed, "I've been instructed to return to him only after he calls me back."

"Alright, well what's taking so long?"