Isabel, her secret love M/L, M/M,I/?complete sep 22
Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2007 5:22 pm
Isabel
Title:Isabel
Rating: Adult sort of.
Canon pairing, M/L, M/M, I/?
Disclaimer: I do not consider the characters of Roswell mine in anyway. I simply try to bend the story at a certain point and see what happens. I, as always, hope I respect the characters from the books and the TV show. I give a little review to bring readers up to the point where my story begins.
I have long wanted to make a study of Isabel. Reading authors chatting of writing about her at an open chat on Roswell Heaven I decided I would try. My second Fic, I will Return For You, My Love had Isabel standing beside Max and supporting him as he won Liz away from an unhappy marriage. She was a strong supporting character. In the Fic, Goodbye Mr. Evans, Hey Max she was the manipulative cousin who set Max the teacher up with Liz the student. I wrote several AU fics where she always stood beside Max and also later stood with her lover when she found him. In the canon Fic You Can’t Go Back to Yesterday she was a strong supporter of Max but in all of these she was only in a supporting roll. I wanted to study her as an individual.
This story was stalled until I was chatting with the author Icalynn. She made a simple statement that made the story just take off. My story was at a point where Isabel was going to have a terrible life and I couldn’t see anyway to get her out of it. Icalynn suggested I make her a teacher and away it went. Strange that I didn’t think of it because as many of you know I was a teacher. This shows the importance of chatting with other authors. I hope you enjoy my story.
Everything happened just like the TV show up to the time when Jesse asked Isabel to marry him. You must remember that she at first refused then she accepted and then refused again. In the show she went to his house but in my story she waited and he had left to return to Boston by the time she got there. His mother was not too happy about the way Isabel had treated her son so she didn’t tell Jesse that Isabel had come to see him again for a long time.
Isabel
Isabel Evans stretched like the cat some said she was. Sometimes even she felt that was the best way to describe her self. She had been gone from Roswell for over three years. At the moment, she had no interest in ever going back. Roswell held a cornucopia of bad memories. First and foremost, there was her brother. How do you love someone so much and yet, hate them the same amount? She remembered the first day they had come out of the pod. She had emerged before him, but she had been unwilling to leave until he joined her. There had been another and he was already out exploring their surroundings. Isabel remembered like children remember things that happen to them when they are very young. She remembered more from their conversations about what happened than from the actual memories themselves. The first child didn’t feel just right. He was skittish and even pulled away from her. When the child who would soon be named Max emerged, it was clear too her, even in her infantile mind, that they belonged together. There was one other pod but they took no notice of it. The first child, who would be later called Michael, was already outside looking around. Isabel had waited for Max and he rewarded her by taking her hand. They were that way until almost throughout high school.
At that magical puberty age you no longer wanted to physically hold hands with your brother, as brother and sister was the relationship they had developed, she still accepted him as someone very special to her. They both had been adopted by a bright, upper middle class, lawyer family. They were raised as brother and sister and that feeling held through almost every thing that happened to them. The first child had disappeared only to reappear as the foster child of a troubled alcoholic. Throughout grade school and middle school, the three of them were very close. Isabel had always been more outgoing. It was almost as if she was born to society. Max had always been restrained and Michael had developed all sorts of tendencies toward depression, sometimes violence and rebellion, which was easy to understand looking at the life he found himself in.
She and Max had still maintained a close bond even though Isabel began to find superficial friends that she, at first, joined and, then later, allowed to follow her lead. Max remained secluded and shy. Where Isabel would share her interest among many different people, Max became fixated on only one girl. This was the source of their first clash. Isabel had always worried about letting people know her too well. She didn’t let any one person remain close for any length of time. Her girl friends never got to that sharing part of a girl’s life where they shared secrets and confidences. Boy friends, when she was old enough for her parents to allow her to date, never lasted long enough to really start a game of baseball, not to mention getting much past first base. With Isabel, you might only get a couple dates before you found yourself replaced by the next member of the guy of the week club.
Yes, some of the guys would invent stories about how they made it round the bases with Isabel, but she was so well known that no matter how they tried to embellish their story no one would believe it. Isabel was popular, and others wanted to be like her. Her friends never saw how smart she was. Her brother invested himself in Advance Placement classes and science, raising himself to be one of the smarter students in school. Isabel, who was just as smart as Max, preferred to take classes where she didn’t have to demonstrate her abilities. This kept the masses, who lusted for her body and for her friendship, always in the dark about what she could really do. Isabel never worried that anyone would get close enough to her to ever discover her secret. She, her brother and their very unlikely friend were aliens. They had hatched out of incubation pods at the apparent age of six instead of going through the normal birth trauma and those many years of helplessness. They knew they must have had real mothers sometime since they had navels, indicating at one point in their existence that they were within a womb. It took the combined efforts of the three of them to arrive at the knowledge that they had been part of the Roswell crash. A lot of things didn’t fit together, but every year they lived they became more and more convinced that this was their story. A story they shared with no one outside of their group of three. That is, until her tunnel visioned brother with his fixation on a single girl broke all the rules. Max saved Liz’s life. He told their secret and from that day forth, it seemed that the number of others sharing their lives had been growing. Isabel had to admit that there had been a lot of good that came from her brother’s confession, but a lot of grief had also come with it.
There had been that fourth pod. The one she and Max had paid no attention to. It had burst forth later and the remaining alien had fallen under the care of a servant whose only concern had been to return to their home world. Tess, the forth alien to be hatched from the pods, being abandoned by the others, had only the guardian as a guide. She became self-centered, selfish and even more myopic than Max. The servant was not a complete person. He hadn’t needed to be. He was to guard the children as they grew and to carry out their bidding. Tess. not knowing that he was only a servant, looked to him as a father. She looked to him as a guide, telling her the things she needed to know. Not ever having the other three in her development, she only knew what the servant, Nasado, told her.
When she finally met the other three, they were already involving themselves with humans. This was not in the program of the servant, so he used Tess as a wedge to attempt to get himself, along with the others, back to their home system. Nasado, all the time knew that their enemies would at the least kill Max and Michael and, maybe, even Isabel and Tess her self.
Nasado and Tess managed to destroy the lives of the others, but with their ineptness, did not get any of them back to the home world. Only Tess, maybe, or maybe not, pregnant with a child of Max took off. That was it. Max could cry and threaten, but Isabel had ever as much power as he and, finally, Max had to realize that the close bond they all had, was permanently broken. They, who once vowed that both of their worlds existed within each other, were now estranged. Isabel had to admit that the two women that had come into their world had, in the end, been strong supporters of herself. It was Liz, the girl who Max should have never given up on, that finally told Max that if he wanted to play king, he could do it in someone else’s sandbox. That freed Isabel from the demands of her royal brother, who abdicated the throne in real and figurative meanings.
It was Maria who brought laughter, music and, occasionally, level headedness to their group. She had toyed with the heart of the alien, Michael, neither of them knowing when the other would surrender to their passions. First Michael, in his youth not wanting to commit because he had worries of inadequacies in his loyalty to Max and Isabel. Then, it was Maria who, as she grew up, feared losing a dream of her childhood. Their biggest obstacle was in timing. Isabel felt that, eventually they would in fatigue, quit dancing around each other and settle down to a loving relationship.
Her clueless brother! They had been so close. It was she who had feared him sharing something with another. She didn’t dislike Liz. In fact, she was a little jealous of her. Where Isabel had been all about appearances, Liz was just what you saw. Where Isabel had created complexities about her self, Liz was just trying to be herself. When Max, in one of the breakups in a relationship that never truly was, got Tess pregnant or so Tess said, Isabel had began to fight against the tyranny she was seeing in Max. He was ruining his life and, then, he seemed bent on ruining everyone else’s along with it. There was a mountain of truth in the statement of power ultimately corrupting who ever wielded it.
In the three, almost four years she had been gone, she would call her mother and father occasionally. She had made it clear to both of them that she wanted to know nothing about what was happening to her brother or what was happening to Roswell itself. The Evanses knew that Max had screwed up a lot of his life and he would have to find his own way to straighten it. They, also, knew that Max had hurt Isabel in his almost psychotic humors that he had developed. The Evanses were trying to support Max, but they understood that Isabel wanted nothing to do with him.
Isabel had thought about the men and boys she had know in Roswell. She shed a tear every morning for the fact that knowing Alex had cost him his life at the hand of Tess. That wasn’t Isabel’s fault, but she couldn’t help feeling that it had been a function of knowing her that had brought him into contact with Tess in the first place. There was Grant, a man who Isabel had mildly flirted with. He was much too old for her. The only reason that she had been interested in Grant had been to throw Alex off base. Later, Isabel had been so sorry. If she only had had foresight, she would have embraced Alex from the start, taken him to bed and made such passionate love that it, probably, would have scared the hell out of him. At the thought of allowing what she was sure was in Alex’s dreams from the start to terrify him, she had to smile, but then, she thought if he had to die, he should have, at least, tasted love once. If Alex had been allowed to become close, she wouldn’t have let the Grants of the world anywhere into her life. At the time, she told herself that as a femme fatale, she was using her sex and charm to get information from Grant that the others needed. Later, Grant was killed in a strictly alien related matter and that left the pain she had caused Alex on her conscience.
Later there was Jesse who was almost eight years older than she. He had been working for her father’s law firm. She had almost married Jesse. It had been her parents, her brother and her own indecision that caused her to call off the marriage. After that, her mother learned that she could not console her daughter. The best she could do now was be supportive from a long distance. Isabel thought about the other human in their group. Kyle had been a stud in high school. Maybe, even one of those who lusted after the beautiful Isabel. She had never dated him. At the end of school, Kyle was working in a garage with a dead-end future, much of which had been brought on by his and his father’s knowledge of the aliens. Kyle had wanted to get closer to Isabel, but he, finally, had to realize that she was so far out of his league that nothing could ever come of it. Could anyone imagine Isabel Evans going with an assistant garage mechanic?
Well, that had been her life in Roswell. Now, she was in Albuquerque. It was not that far away from Roswell physically, but in her mind, it was a different world. Isabel used the sight of the mountain that rose 5,000 feet above the already high altitude of the city to the east as a barrier to shield her from her memories. She imagined the single mountain pass as impassable and that none of the events or persons from Roswell could ever cross.
The first year had been so Déjà vu from high school. As most out of city freshmen, Isabel had lived in a dorm. It was so much high school done over. The cattiness of the girls, as they were learning to use their sexual powers in progressing their way through school, was like the social cliques of high school. The social life, the quest for mates and the drives in newly discovered feminists all were so like the past. Isabel dated with her three-date limit and she made it clear that a steak dinner was not a ticked into her pants. At first, she had been seen as someone to follow. Her perfect body, her perfect wardrobe and her perfect poise were all deemed to be marks of someone who was on her way. Her reputation of not putting out and not giving in to sexual persuasion was causing the in-crowd to start to pull away from her. Isabel was now determined that she was not letting anyone into her body until she felt right about them in her heart.
The second year she had met, through a name given by her father, a company involved in design. Since that was her major, she was able to talk her way into a summer job which led to the financial ability to get her own apartment. Isabel was also getting her teaching credentials in English. The design knowledge was putting her through school, but she would, in the end, be able to teach if that became necessary.
Isabel was now a senior at the university. She was dressing the part of a woman executive. Working on the same work that she was studying at school was doubly challenging. She had finished her student teaching and upon graduation, she would be certified to teach grades six through twelve, her subject, English. Isabel was, now, sure that she had two choices in her life. She could stay in a big city and either teach or work for corporations like she was doing now or she could teach which could lead to living almost anywhere. The social part of life would just have to be on hold for a while. At school she was, many times, mistaken for a woman much older that her age of just 21. She had been loaned to an architectural firm as a consultant in the layout of an office building. No one at the architectural firm knew that she was still completing her college work. Nor did they know that the tall blond was also qualified to teach.
On the first day she had worked at the architectural firm, she was greeted by many scowls by the women at the office. They expected her to be flirting her way up the office ladder. She was more amused at the looks of some of the middle-aged executives as they preened themselves like peacocks in her presence. Because they didn’t realize her age, they assumed that she would catch any handle given to work her way into more secure positions. They all felt the size of their handles would be grabbed gratefully. Isabel saw this job as an experience. She, in no way, intended to let her career end here. The year she spent working for this firm was, to her, an educational and life experience.
She was to graduate and her parents were to be there to see her. She didn’t care about her brother or any of the others she had left behind. The phone call came right after she received her diploma. Isabel hadn’t seen her parents, but she was sure they wouldn’t miss this for anything. The crowds were gathering outside the “Pit”, that semi-famous basketball arena. Isabel was walking around in her cap and gown looking for the familiar faces when she felt the vibrations of her cell phone. It was Liz. Isabel’s father had had a heart attack. They hadn’t even made it out of Roswell. They had called, but the excitement of about the greatest event of her life had masked the subdued alarm of the phone. Yes, she would come home tomorrow.
Isabel arrived at noon the next day in Roswell. She went straight to the hospital. There she embraced her mother. She nodded to Liz, who was standing with Max, but she could only glare at her brother. Diane and Isabel went into the room where her father was fighting for his life.
Max turned to Liz. “She could have at least spoken to me.”
“Max, you tried to take over her life. You were making threats about her reputation and threatening to demean her with your parents and her teachers. Max, you did everything possible to stop her marriage. You can’t expect her to just forgive you like I did.” Liz stated.
Max sullenly replied, “It was for her own good! We needed her to stay close to us. Jesse was all wrong for her.”
Liz was firm. She loved Max, but it had taken her sometime to learn to divert his bull headiness. “Max, it was for your own good. You never gave a thought to what she wanted or what she needed. It was for her to make mistakes or good choices. Her marriage to Jesse should have been strictly her decision not yours,” Liz explained. There would have been a time when Max would have stomped away from such a rebuff. Liz had come back to him in spite of all of his faults. She had, for herself, forgiven him for what he had said and done to her. She had extracted a price for this. She told him that when she came back she would always speak her mind. If he wanted her back, he was going to have to accept this. Max, to his credit, realized that she had become his conscience. While she was apart from him, he had made some of his worst mistakes. One of them was in losing the bond he formerly had with Isabel.
Isabel and Diane exited the hospital room. Isabel was crying and, without acknowledging any of those waiting, they proceeded to her car and then to the Evans home.
The doctor came in to talk to Max and Liz. “You father is resting now. We will just have to wait to see how he does. He has a fighting chance and we all are hoping for the best.” With that, he left. Then, Liz and Max returned to the Crashdown where they were staying with the Parkers.
Title:Isabel
Rating: Adult sort of.
Canon pairing, M/L, M/M, I/?
Disclaimer: I do not consider the characters of Roswell mine in anyway. I simply try to bend the story at a certain point and see what happens. I, as always, hope I respect the characters from the books and the TV show. I give a little review to bring readers up to the point where my story begins.
I have long wanted to make a study of Isabel. Reading authors chatting of writing about her at an open chat on Roswell Heaven I decided I would try. My second Fic, I will Return For You, My Love had Isabel standing beside Max and supporting him as he won Liz away from an unhappy marriage. She was a strong supporting character. In the Fic, Goodbye Mr. Evans, Hey Max she was the manipulative cousin who set Max the teacher up with Liz the student. I wrote several AU fics where she always stood beside Max and also later stood with her lover when she found him. In the canon Fic You Can’t Go Back to Yesterday she was a strong supporter of Max but in all of these she was only in a supporting roll. I wanted to study her as an individual.
This story was stalled until I was chatting with the author Icalynn. She made a simple statement that made the story just take off. My story was at a point where Isabel was going to have a terrible life and I couldn’t see anyway to get her out of it. Icalynn suggested I make her a teacher and away it went. Strange that I didn’t think of it because as many of you know I was a teacher. This shows the importance of chatting with other authors. I hope you enjoy my story.
Everything happened just like the TV show up to the time when Jesse asked Isabel to marry him. You must remember that she at first refused then she accepted and then refused again. In the show she went to his house but in my story she waited and he had left to return to Boston by the time she got there. His mother was not too happy about the way Isabel had treated her son so she didn’t tell Jesse that Isabel had come to see him again for a long time.
Isabel
Isabel Evans stretched like the cat some said she was. Sometimes even she felt that was the best way to describe her self. She had been gone from Roswell for over three years. At the moment, she had no interest in ever going back. Roswell held a cornucopia of bad memories. First and foremost, there was her brother. How do you love someone so much and yet, hate them the same amount? She remembered the first day they had come out of the pod. She had emerged before him, but she had been unwilling to leave until he joined her. There had been another and he was already out exploring their surroundings. Isabel remembered like children remember things that happen to them when they are very young. She remembered more from their conversations about what happened than from the actual memories themselves. The first child didn’t feel just right. He was skittish and even pulled away from her. When the child who would soon be named Max emerged, it was clear too her, even in her infantile mind, that they belonged together. There was one other pod but they took no notice of it. The first child, who would be later called Michael, was already outside looking around. Isabel had waited for Max and he rewarded her by taking her hand. They were that way until almost throughout high school.
At that magical puberty age you no longer wanted to physically hold hands with your brother, as brother and sister was the relationship they had developed, she still accepted him as someone very special to her. They both had been adopted by a bright, upper middle class, lawyer family. They were raised as brother and sister and that feeling held through almost every thing that happened to them. The first child had disappeared only to reappear as the foster child of a troubled alcoholic. Throughout grade school and middle school, the three of them were very close. Isabel had always been more outgoing. It was almost as if she was born to society. Max had always been restrained and Michael had developed all sorts of tendencies toward depression, sometimes violence and rebellion, which was easy to understand looking at the life he found himself in.
She and Max had still maintained a close bond even though Isabel began to find superficial friends that she, at first, joined and, then later, allowed to follow her lead. Max remained secluded and shy. Where Isabel would share her interest among many different people, Max became fixated on only one girl. This was the source of their first clash. Isabel had always worried about letting people know her too well. She didn’t let any one person remain close for any length of time. Her girl friends never got to that sharing part of a girl’s life where they shared secrets and confidences. Boy friends, when she was old enough for her parents to allow her to date, never lasted long enough to really start a game of baseball, not to mention getting much past first base. With Isabel, you might only get a couple dates before you found yourself replaced by the next member of the guy of the week club.
Yes, some of the guys would invent stories about how they made it round the bases with Isabel, but she was so well known that no matter how they tried to embellish their story no one would believe it. Isabel was popular, and others wanted to be like her. Her friends never saw how smart she was. Her brother invested himself in Advance Placement classes and science, raising himself to be one of the smarter students in school. Isabel, who was just as smart as Max, preferred to take classes where she didn’t have to demonstrate her abilities. This kept the masses, who lusted for her body and for her friendship, always in the dark about what she could really do. Isabel never worried that anyone would get close enough to her to ever discover her secret. She, her brother and their very unlikely friend were aliens. They had hatched out of incubation pods at the apparent age of six instead of going through the normal birth trauma and those many years of helplessness. They knew they must have had real mothers sometime since they had navels, indicating at one point in their existence that they were within a womb. It took the combined efforts of the three of them to arrive at the knowledge that they had been part of the Roswell crash. A lot of things didn’t fit together, but every year they lived they became more and more convinced that this was their story. A story they shared with no one outside of their group of three. That is, until her tunnel visioned brother with his fixation on a single girl broke all the rules. Max saved Liz’s life. He told their secret and from that day forth, it seemed that the number of others sharing their lives had been growing. Isabel had to admit that there had been a lot of good that came from her brother’s confession, but a lot of grief had also come with it.
There had been that fourth pod. The one she and Max had paid no attention to. It had burst forth later and the remaining alien had fallen under the care of a servant whose only concern had been to return to their home world. Tess, the forth alien to be hatched from the pods, being abandoned by the others, had only the guardian as a guide. She became self-centered, selfish and even more myopic than Max. The servant was not a complete person. He hadn’t needed to be. He was to guard the children as they grew and to carry out their bidding. Tess. not knowing that he was only a servant, looked to him as a father. She looked to him as a guide, telling her the things she needed to know. Not ever having the other three in her development, she only knew what the servant, Nasado, told her.
When she finally met the other three, they were already involving themselves with humans. This was not in the program of the servant, so he used Tess as a wedge to attempt to get himself, along with the others, back to their home system. Nasado, all the time knew that their enemies would at the least kill Max and Michael and, maybe, even Isabel and Tess her self.
Nasado and Tess managed to destroy the lives of the others, but with their ineptness, did not get any of them back to the home world. Only Tess, maybe, or maybe not, pregnant with a child of Max took off. That was it. Max could cry and threaten, but Isabel had ever as much power as he and, finally, Max had to realize that the close bond they all had, was permanently broken. They, who once vowed that both of their worlds existed within each other, were now estranged. Isabel had to admit that the two women that had come into their world had, in the end, been strong supporters of herself. It was Liz, the girl who Max should have never given up on, that finally told Max that if he wanted to play king, he could do it in someone else’s sandbox. That freed Isabel from the demands of her royal brother, who abdicated the throne in real and figurative meanings.
It was Maria who brought laughter, music and, occasionally, level headedness to their group. She had toyed with the heart of the alien, Michael, neither of them knowing when the other would surrender to their passions. First Michael, in his youth not wanting to commit because he had worries of inadequacies in his loyalty to Max and Isabel. Then, it was Maria who, as she grew up, feared losing a dream of her childhood. Their biggest obstacle was in timing. Isabel felt that, eventually they would in fatigue, quit dancing around each other and settle down to a loving relationship.
Her clueless brother! They had been so close. It was she who had feared him sharing something with another. She didn’t dislike Liz. In fact, she was a little jealous of her. Where Isabel had been all about appearances, Liz was just what you saw. Where Isabel had created complexities about her self, Liz was just trying to be herself. When Max, in one of the breakups in a relationship that never truly was, got Tess pregnant or so Tess said, Isabel had began to fight against the tyranny she was seeing in Max. He was ruining his life and, then, he seemed bent on ruining everyone else’s along with it. There was a mountain of truth in the statement of power ultimately corrupting who ever wielded it.
In the three, almost four years she had been gone, she would call her mother and father occasionally. She had made it clear to both of them that she wanted to know nothing about what was happening to her brother or what was happening to Roswell itself. The Evanses knew that Max had screwed up a lot of his life and he would have to find his own way to straighten it. They, also, knew that Max had hurt Isabel in his almost psychotic humors that he had developed. The Evanses were trying to support Max, but they understood that Isabel wanted nothing to do with him.
Isabel had thought about the men and boys she had know in Roswell. She shed a tear every morning for the fact that knowing Alex had cost him his life at the hand of Tess. That wasn’t Isabel’s fault, but she couldn’t help feeling that it had been a function of knowing her that had brought him into contact with Tess in the first place. There was Grant, a man who Isabel had mildly flirted with. He was much too old for her. The only reason that she had been interested in Grant had been to throw Alex off base. Later, Isabel had been so sorry. If she only had had foresight, she would have embraced Alex from the start, taken him to bed and made such passionate love that it, probably, would have scared the hell out of him. At the thought of allowing what she was sure was in Alex’s dreams from the start to terrify him, she had to smile, but then, she thought if he had to die, he should have, at least, tasted love once. If Alex had been allowed to become close, she wouldn’t have let the Grants of the world anywhere into her life. At the time, she told herself that as a femme fatale, she was using her sex and charm to get information from Grant that the others needed. Later, Grant was killed in a strictly alien related matter and that left the pain she had caused Alex on her conscience.
Later there was Jesse who was almost eight years older than she. He had been working for her father’s law firm. She had almost married Jesse. It had been her parents, her brother and her own indecision that caused her to call off the marriage. After that, her mother learned that she could not console her daughter. The best she could do now was be supportive from a long distance. Isabel thought about the other human in their group. Kyle had been a stud in high school. Maybe, even one of those who lusted after the beautiful Isabel. She had never dated him. At the end of school, Kyle was working in a garage with a dead-end future, much of which had been brought on by his and his father’s knowledge of the aliens. Kyle had wanted to get closer to Isabel, but he, finally, had to realize that she was so far out of his league that nothing could ever come of it. Could anyone imagine Isabel Evans going with an assistant garage mechanic?
Well, that had been her life in Roswell. Now, she was in Albuquerque. It was not that far away from Roswell physically, but in her mind, it was a different world. Isabel used the sight of the mountain that rose 5,000 feet above the already high altitude of the city to the east as a barrier to shield her from her memories. She imagined the single mountain pass as impassable and that none of the events or persons from Roswell could ever cross.
The first year had been so Déjà vu from high school. As most out of city freshmen, Isabel had lived in a dorm. It was so much high school done over. The cattiness of the girls, as they were learning to use their sexual powers in progressing their way through school, was like the social cliques of high school. The social life, the quest for mates and the drives in newly discovered feminists all were so like the past. Isabel dated with her three-date limit and she made it clear that a steak dinner was not a ticked into her pants. At first, she had been seen as someone to follow. Her perfect body, her perfect wardrobe and her perfect poise were all deemed to be marks of someone who was on her way. Her reputation of not putting out and not giving in to sexual persuasion was causing the in-crowd to start to pull away from her. Isabel was now determined that she was not letting anyone into her body until she felt right about them in her heart.
The second year she had met, through a name given by her father, a company involved in design. Since that was her major, she was able to talk her way into a summer job which led to the financial ability to get her own apartment. Isabel was also getting her teaching credentials in English. The design knowledge was putting her through school, but she would, in the end, be able to teach if that became necessary.
Isabel was now a senior at the university. She was dressing the part of a woman executive. Working on the same work that she was studying at school was doubly challenging. She had finished her student teaching and upon graduation, she would be certified to teach grades six through twelve, her subject, English. Isabel was, now, sure that she had two choices in her life. She could stay in a big city and either teach or work for corporations like she was doing now or she could teach which could lead to living almost anywhere. The social part of life would just have to be on hold for a while. At school she was, many times, mistaken for a woman much older that her age of just 21. She had been loaned to an architectural firm as a consultant in the layout of an office building. No one at the architectural firm knew that she was still completing her college work. Nor did they know that the tall blond was also qualified to teach.
On the first day she had worked at the architectural firm, she was greeted by many scowls by the women at the office. They expected her to be flirting her way up the office ladder. She was more amused at the looks of some of the middle-aged executives as they preened themselves like peacocks in her presence. Because they didn’t realize her age, they assumed that she would catch any handle given to work her way into more secure positions. They all felt the size of their handles would be grabbed gratefully. Isabel saw this job as an experience. She, in no way, intended to let her career end here. The year she spent working for this firm was, to her, an educational and life experience.
She was to graduate and her parents were to be there to see her. She didn’t care about her brother or any of the others she had left behind. The phone call came right after she received her diploma. Isabel hadn’t seen her parents, but she was sure they wouldn’t miss this for anything. The crowds were gathering outside the “Pit”, that semi-famous basketball arena. Isabel was walking around in her cap and gown looking for the familiar faces when she felt the vibrations of her cell phone. It was Liz. Isabel’s father had had a heart attack. They hadn’t even made it out of Roswell. They had called, but the excitement of about the greatest event of her life had masked the subdued alarm of the phone. Yes, she would come home tomorrow.
Isabel arrived at noon the next day in Roswell. She went straight to the hospital. There she embraced her mother. She nodded to Liz, who was standing with Max, but she could only glare at her brother. Diane and Isabel went into the room where her father was fighting for his life.
Max turned to Liz. “She could have at least spoken to me.”
“Max, you tried to take over her life. You were making threats about her reputation and threatening to demean her with your parents and her teachers. Max, you did everything possible to stop her marriage. You can’t expect her to just forgive you like I did.” Liz stated.
Max sullenly replied, “It was for her own good! We needed her to stay close to us. Jesse was all wrong for her.”
Liz was firm. She loved Max, but it had taken her sometime to learn to divert his bull headiness. “Max, it was for your own good. You never gave a thought to what she wanted or what she needed. It was for her to make mistakes or good choices. Her marriage to Jesse should have been strictly her decision not yours,” Liz explained. There would have been a time when Max would have stomped away from such a rebuff. Liz had come back to him in spite of all of his faults. She had, for herself, forgiven him for what he had said and done to her. She had extracted a price for this. She told him that when she came back she would always speak her mind. If he wanted her back, he was going to have to accept this. Max, to his credit, realized that she had become his conscience. While she was apart from him, he had made some of his worst mistakes. One of them was in losing the bond he formerly had with Isabel.
Isabel and Diane exited the hospital room. Isabel was crying and, without acknowledging any of those waiting, they proceeded to her car and then to the Evans home.
The doctor came in to talk to Max and Liz. “You father is resting now. We will just have to wait to see how he does. He has a fighting chance and we all are hoping for the best.” With that, he left. Then, Liz and Max returned to the Crashdown where they were staying with the Parkers.