CHAPTER TWO
"To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself." – Henry Ward Beecher
Home was the same, yet startlingly different. The scent of pine still greeted her in the mornings when she woke. The roof still made a racket beneath the pitter-patter of rain. The old cabin was a bit of a mess, but the same embarrassing pictures still adorned the kitchen fridge, and her mother's paintings still hung proudly on the living room walls. The house was just as Rachel remembered, or at least as she expected.
The people, though, had changed. The elders had grown older, the kids now big and tall. And there was something about the community that didn't feel as familiar as it ought to. Almost everyone seemed more suspicious these days, watching each other's movements out of the corner of their eye. It was strange, and it did not help any that so many of Rachel's questions were consistently met with vague non-answers. Trying to get to know everyone again was proving to be harder than she anticipated.
It was Saturday, about a week since her return. Rachel had made plans to meet up with Leah, one of her closest friends growing up. They had started growing distant in high school, when a smitten young Leah, in love for the very first time, began having less and less time for her best friend. Rachel had felt abandoned at the time, but they remained on friendly terms, and after so many years, she really didn't care anymore. She was just looking forward to reconnecting with her old friend again. The last time she had heard from Leah was when she rang up announcing her engagement to Sam Uley. This was later called off, as Rachel had found out during a brief phone conversation with her father. Rachel had tried calling her then, but Leah hadn't wanted to talk to anyone.
After parking her white sedan outside the diner in Forks that they had picked as their meeting spot, Rachel headed inside. It was not particularly crowded that afternoon, not that it ever really was. Still, Rachel took a little longer than she should to pick Leah out. In her mind's eye, she was picturing her friend as she had last seen her, young and fresh-faced with bright eyes and braided hair. It took her a while to register the fact that the young woman waving at her from the table by the window was in fact the same girl from her memories.
"Leah!" Rachel exclaimed as she made her way over, giving her friend a warm hug before taking a seat across from her. "I almost didn't recognise you. Look at you, you sexy thing!" It was true. Leah had always been pretty, but she was drop-dead gorgeous now. Her cheekbones were more pronounced without all the baby fat, her heart-shaped face framed perfectly by short dark hair. She looked like a supermodel – exotic, tall, and toned.
But there was something else about her that was markedly different. Something about her eyes, Rachel thought. Just like Jacob.
Leah chuckled, her dimples peeking out for just a second before disappearing again. "I could say the same about you, hot stuff!" She wriggled her eyebrows teasingly as her hands drew an hourglass pattern in the air. "I have to say though, I kind of miss the glasses and braces. Nerd."
"Bitch."
"You know it," Leah said with the devilish grin that she had perfected in high school. "So, how've you been? I hear you've been up to some serious globe-trotting."
Over lunch, Rachel fielded all of Leah's questions about college, work, and backpacking. As she told her former best friend all about the last few years of her life, Rachel thought she saw a mixture of awe and longing in her eyes. It made her feel like she was gloating, somehow, so she decided to gently steer the conversation away from herself. "Anyway, enough about me. What about you? What have you been up to?"
Leah rolled her eyes and shrugged, as if she felt she had nothing interesting to contribute. "Oh, you know. I've been tutoring for a few years. Math and science for high school kids, bleurgh. Not much else, really." Her tone was flat. She didn't seem keen to go into much detail about her own life. Rachel was a tiny bit surprised. She remembered Leah being an ambitious young girl who was great at basketball and determined to get a scholarship to college and become a medical biologist. Or was it a microbiologist? Some sort of scientist.
Obviously, something had changed her mind, but Leah didn't seem to want to talk about it. Or about Sam. Or about anything to do with herself, really. Rachel had to respect her friend's wishes. After being estranged for so long, she didn't really feel like she had the right to dig too deep. The rest of the afternoon was spent chatting about their families and mutual friends and reminiscing about their childhood escapades. They parted ways after making a date to hang out again at the beach next weekend, which, in hindsight, Rachel thought might have been a bad idea. She was glad to have met up with her old friend again, but she suspected that they might have already run out of things to talk about.
As she made her way home, Rachel wondered, for the first time since she arrived, just how long she'd be able to last back in this place. So much had changed. So little of what it used to be still remained. It was still home. It was still where she wanted to be. But she wasn't entirely sure if home still wanted her. Not anymore.
The following week, she would start her new job as a social worker at the hospital. She only had just over a year's worth of proper work experience, but she was keen to learn and confident that she was more than capable. The truth was that she was looking forward to finally being able to support her aging father, who had sacrificed so much for her over the years, including his own happiness by letting her go. Every time her determination wavered, all she had to do was look at Billy and her decision to stay was reaffirmed. She not only wanted to make him proud; she wanted to make him happy.
: : : : :
Paul was not happy. Not that he was ever truly happy; he wasn't sure he even knew what happiness was supposed to feel like. But over the last few days, he had been positively miserable, for no obvious reason. It wasn't as if anything had changed. His daily routine was as it always was, an uninspiring balance of work and work. He was still only getting four hours of sleep on most nights, five if he was lucky. The chipper thoughts of lovestruck wolves still annoyed the crap out of him. Actually, pretty much everything annoyed the crap out of him. That was hardly abnormal.
But lately there was a nagging feeling that he just couldn't quite shake off. It curled around his frustrated thoughts. It ate away at the little peace that he had. It followed him everywhere; it was there, always, tugging incessantly at his chest whether he was out running or in sleeping, or trying to lose himself in the throes of a one night stand. At the back of his mind, he knew to dread what was imminent, but at the forefront he had erected a wall of denial. He didn't know what was wrong with him, but it would surely pass. It just had to.
It did not.
As the seconds and minutes and hours ticked by, Paul began to lose track of time. He could hardly tell when the day ended and the night began. His entire world was closing in on him, leaving him desperate for air. But he did not know where to find it, this air, this substance that he needed to sustain life. It was sucking everything out of him, bit by bit, and it was driving him crazy. He wanted it to stop. He needed it to stop. But he knew that to make it happen, he would have to sacrifice the little of himself that he still possessed, and he was not ready to do that.
In a feeble attempt to avoid having to face the soul-sucking alternative that he was dreading, Paul made it a point to keep his eyes lowered as much as possible. He assumed that if he didn't look, he wouldn't see, and ignorance was bliss. Well, maybe not. This desperate need to fill the growing hole in his chest was not bliss. But it was far better than the torture he would have to endure otherwise, of that he was certain.
Nevertheless, it was going to happen. Whether he liked it or not, he could feel it looming over his head like a dark cloud ushering in a storm. His final nightmare was fast approaching.
It was on a Thursday evening as he drove into town to run some errands that it struck him again. He was perfectly fine until a white car drove past him heading in the other direction, causing him to turn his head for reasons he could not explain. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but that oddly familiar scent was suddenly permeating the air once again, launching a brutal assault on his senses when he was least expecting it. He couldn't concentrate on anything else, didn't know anything else, and it was crazy because he fucking hated peppermint.
Paul felt his mind descend into a swirl of haze as he veered off to the side of the road as if intoxicated. The car collided with a tree. The engine sputtered and died. And the angry young man let out a howl of rage as he slammed his fists against the steering wheel, splitting it in half.
Completely oblivious to what had just happened behind her, the woman in the white sedan thought she felt her chest constrict, but only for the most fleeting of moments. She shook her head, certain that she must have imagined it.
