Life was so normal for the little family that sometimes it was easy for Renee to forget that everything about the foundation of their being a family was built on utter lies.
She was busy in the kitchen preparing Bella's second birthday cake when the phone rang. She set the mixing bowl on the kitchen table, leaving it full to the brim with cake batter.
Renee stepped out of the room with the phone so that she could check a receipt. It was Sue calling, wanting to know exactly how much she owed Renee for picking up some groceries for her the other day, and Renee needed to check the receipt in her wallet.
What Renee didn't know was that little Bella had her eye on that cake batter, knowing exactly how delicious it would taste in her mouth. She pulled at the table cloth so as to bring it nearer to the edge so that she might reach up and grab the bowl; however, she overshot how far she needed to pull – as young children often do in these situations – and the bowl began to fall to the floor. Renee walked back into the room as it was beginning to fall, and she expected it to crash onto the kitchen floor, but it never did.
No one caught the bowl; that is to say, no one's hands caught it. But it didn't hit the floor. Instead, it simply hovered about an inch above it, on its side as to make the batter pour out, but the batter never dripped an inch.
That was the first time Bella's special abilities were manifest, as far as any eye witness knew.
"Bella?" Renee asked. "Are you doing that, sweetie?"
Bella ran out of the room, the bowl clinking against the floor as she did, and the batter spreading all over the linoleum.
Renee wasn't sure who to talk to about this. She originally wanted to call Sue because they were such trusted girlfriends, but she decided to call Violet instead. Surely she would know how this happened, being that she was the one who knew approximately when Bella would arrive and that it would be from the sea.
"You must pack up and go," was Violet's only response. "I'm sorry. I thought it would be years before these powers became manifest."
"What?" Renee gasped in horror. "We're not leaving. We can't leave. We don't have anywhere to go."
"That's not true," Violet said. "I've had a little place for the two of you set up before she was ever even, well, born. I knew this day would come sooner or later. I just thought it would be later is all."
"You knew?" Renee was livid that Violet still thought it necessary to keep secrets from her after all she'd invested into this scheme. "Why can't you ever just be plain with me? Why can't you ever just tell me the truth?"
"You always know as much as you're allowed to know."
"Allowed to know? Who do you think I am? I am that little girl's mother, and I deserve to know everything about her. You've kept things from me about her and now you expect me to just up and leave? How will I explain this to Charlie? What will he think when we go?"
"Leave that to me. I've already concocted everything. All you have to do is memorize a script."
"What are you?" Renee felt sick at the thought of having to once again lie to Charlie, and this time in a way that contradicted everything they built together. "A witch? A demon, maybe? What kind of monster would want me to tear my family apart?"
"You love this child, don't you?" Violet asked.
"With all my heart, but so does Charlie! He will never understand if we leave. His heart will break. My heart will break. And this little girl will grow up without the wonderful influence of a strong, loving father. I will not do this to us. You've reached a point where you've asked too much of us. My answer is no. I will not."
"Charlie will find out about everything if you don't go."
"If I lose my husband either way, then I'll lose him because I've told him the truth; not more lies. I will not lie to him again."
"Then don't," Violet hissed. "Just go and say nothing and let me do all the talking."
"I will not leave him."
"What if your child's life depended on it? Would you rather she stay here and die in Charlie's arms?"
"What are you talking about? Bella is entirely healthy."
"She won't be if her destiny isn't brought to pass. There are things at work you can't even begin to imagine, Renee. Her destiny holds more than what any of us can offer her. She is out of place here and always will be unless we do what needs to be done. You want her to grow up, don't you? And you want her to be happy?"
"But without a father?"
"She will always have Charlie. He will always love her."
"And what about me? Am I never to be happy?" Renee didn't feel at all guilty asking about her own welfare. She couldn't imagine a happy life without the love of her life by her side.
"I promise you that if you do all that is necessary to bring Bella's destiny about that you will have more happiness with Charlie than you can imagine at this time."
Renee knew Violet's words were the truth, even if she didn't want to hear them, or want to follow her plans.
"I don't know how I will be able to get through this," she wept.
"Get back to your house," Violet instructed. "You've got a birthday party to throw your daughter tonight. Tomorrow you leave. I have everything you need to get by: money, a house, a car, the works. All you have to do is take Bella somewhere and raise her the best you can. Things will not be as bad as you imagine they will be. You'll see."
Renee's heart ripped in two at hearing that tomorrow would be the darkest day of her life, and yet she knew in the core of her soul that what she was doing was actually somehow the right thing to do.
"And you know Bella's real name, I know," Violet said. "You must never speak it aloud to anyone. You must never tell anyone the name you heard in your heart the night she was brought to us, do you understand?"
Renee nodded her head because somehow, she did understand this.
She returned home and prepared the cake, threw the party, kissed her husband goodnight and also goodbye for work, then packed her bags and left for Phoenix, Arizona where she would raise young Bella until she would blossom into a young woman.
…
Bella didn't remember the day she and her mother left Forks. She knew hardly anything of the small town except for what she learned two weeks out of every summer when she stayed there with her father. Her powers manifested up until she was about five, but then they went away entirely one day and she had no recollection of them whatsoever. Renee never discussed them with her and so she never developed a memory of having them.
"Are you ready to lick the batter off the spoon?" Renee asked her.
"Yes," Bella giggled, "Always."
This particular day was her fifteenth birthday, and it would also be the night that she first dreamt of Edward Masen.
She dreamt of him every night until her sixteenth birthday. By then, she began to sketch his image in a notebook every morning when she woke up. She knew that the time period of her dreams was not the current time in her real life, so she began to research the clothes they wore and the way they had their hair styled. From what she could make of it, Edward and Bella lived in the early 1900s. Well, Bella lived there too in a way, when she was dreaming. She despised waking up every morning because it felt like she could never get enough time with him. All day long, thoughts of Edward swarmed through her mind and she often found herself doodling his name in her notebooks with little hearts all around the letters, and sometimes she would think the name Scarlett as she wrote his name, but she never actually wrote the name down. There was something in her, like an instinct that told her not to. However, this was the name Edward called her in the dreams she shared with him.
By her seventeenth birthday, she had sketched his face over three hundred sixty-five times; at least once a day. But whereas the evening of her fifteenth birthday brought love into her life, the evening of this birthday brought despair.
She drifted off to sleep, excited to see Edward once again, but this time they were not strolling through a park or walking along the bank of a city river. This time he lay in a hospital bed, the room overcrowded and everyone coughing and feverish. She looked out the windows and noticed it was dark outside and that she was the only visitor among the many patients. She realized that she must have been permitted to see him because he was preparing to die this night. She sat by his side, stroking his hand, begging him to stay with her awhile longer. She couldn't stand the thought of seeing him die and suddenly she knew she was dreaming – she just had to be, after all. Nothing this terrible could ever actually come to pass in her life, so she knew it was a dream. She willed herself to wake, but she couldn't. She was in-between her dream and her reality, and for a brief moment she actually felt her real body, though it was paralyzed – stuck in her bed.
"Please, Edward," she begged him as she drifted back into her dream, leaning over him to kiss his forehead. "Please don't die. I can't lose you. You're my true love."
"And you're mine," he said through dry lips, barely able to get the words out.
"I love you," she said, then began to cry.
"We'll see each other again," he promised.
She felt angry that he would say these things, wondering how he could believe it.
"Not if you die," she whimpered. "How can we see one another again if you die?"
"I won't die," he said, trying to squeeze her hand as best he could.
She noticed his lips were especially dry now, and she stood up and went to get him some fresh water to drink.
"I'll be right back," she said.
She noticed the doctor as she passed through the narrow rows of beds, all filled with sleeping patients. Were it not for their chests slowly moving up and down, she would have sworn that they were all already corpses. There was something very strange about this man, though she couldn't quite put her finger on what it could be. Something about him reminded her of the bodies around her, but he was obviously very much alive and well. He was certainly alert.
A nurse assisted Bella in retrieving a pitcher of fresh water and a new, clean glass, but when she returned to Edward's bed, he was gone.
"Where is he?" she demanded, sobbing. "Where is Edward?"
"I'm sorry," one of the nurses said. "He is no longer with us."
"He's dead?" she asked.
Her heart, up until that moment, was running on hope. Now it was running on nothing at all, and it felt like it was withering up for good, never to blossom again.
"Edward," she murmured into the darkness, for the scene had faded away and all was empty and pitch black now.
Bella woke in the morning to her usual alarm, this time happy to be awake. She vividly remembered the dream and sketched everything about the hospital room, including the strange doctor. Before she had only ever sketched his face and hands, but never their surroundings. She regretted that now, wishing she had drawn up something of their past together, maybe the gardens they strolled through or the little shops they visited.
"Just look at me," Bella said to herself after her sketch was complete. "It was only a dream. All of this has only ever been a dream."
Still, though, she couldn't help grieving his loss. It was like someone in her reality really had died and she was going through all the motions of someone having lost a loved one. She went to bed that night hoping to dream of happier days with Edward, but her dreams were blank. They were without him for weeks when Renee asked to speak with Bella about something important.
Renee announced one night that Bella would go and stay with her father for the remainder of her school days. What Bella didn't know was that Renee received a call from Violet, telling her that it was time for Bella to return home. Renee had trusted Bella's grandmother with life changing matters since before Bella was her daughter, so that she again trusted the woman with something of this magnitude was typical by this point.
"Why can't I just stay with you?" Bella asked. She wasn't the type to argue with her mother, but she didn't understand why her mother would send her away like this.
"I would feel very guilty if Charlie didn't get to spend more time with you before you graduate," Renee explained.
Bella wasn't thrilled at the idea of going to live with Charlie in the small, rainy part of the world where she was told she was born. She was already having a difficult enough time adjusting to the loss of dreaming of Edward, and now her life would be flipped upside down even more. The thought of his loss again brought tears to her eyes, though she had never let them slip out in front of her mother before. She felt silly, but Renee felt guilty because she had no idea that the reason that her daughter was crying was because she had fallen in love with a boy from her dreams that she was no longer able to see. She imagined the reason she was crying was because she was being expected to do something she despised doing.
Bella agreed to go to Forks to spend time with her father, much to Renee's surprise. There were even times when she seemed excited about it, which if Renee was being honest with herself, it hurt her to see Bella even the tiniest bit happy to leave her. But she had asked her to go, after all – not that she actually wanted her daughter to go anywhere.
Bella decided to think of Forks as a new opportunity. As she boarded the plane to leave, she decided that she must also make an effort to leave the memory of her dreams behind too. She forced herself to realize that she will never again dream of Edward Masen and that had to be alright with her. As she took her seat on the plane, she longed to release her emotions, but couldn't find the energy to cry; she only suffered from the agony of a heavy lump in her throat.
Charlie was at the airport to pick his daughter up the Friday afternoon she arrived. By this time Charlie had been the Chief of Police in the small town and the surrounding townships for going on a few years. He was proud of his accomplishments, but always inwardly devastated that he had no one to share those achievements with. He never even thought of remarrying because he was still in love with the woman who left him nearly fifteen years earlier. He was a stoic man who let very little emotion slip through his tough skin, but everyone who knew Charlie couldn't be fooled. When he spoke of his daughter coming to live with him, he was obviously over the moon about it, no matter how hard he tried to hide that fact.
"Everything you shipped here arrived yesterday," he said as they went to grab Bella's two pieces of luggage. "I put it in your room. You just have to unpack it. You have the weekend to do it. I enrolled you in Forks High. You start Monday."
"I'm glad to be here, dad," she said, and Charlie felt the wetness begin to come to his eyes, but he huffed out loudly to get rid of them.
"And I'm glad you're here too, kid."
Bella understood the way her father was. She knew how happy her being here made him, and she was happy to see him so happy, though she was already beginning to miss Renee and the sunny home she left behind.
She spent the evening unpacking the ten boxes she had shipped. She was very meticulous in arranging her room just so, and once she was done she grabbed her notebook with her sketches. She couldn't help but look at the pictures of Edward she sketched. She ignored the one of the hospital scene. She could never bring herself to look at it since she drew it, and she hated the sharp memories that twisted her emotions when she thought of that awful night. She preferred remembering the happier days, especially the very first ones she ever drew. She looked out her windows and started sketching the trees, but gave up half way through. She'd never had a knack for sketching anything other than Edward Masen, and she knew he wasn't in the trees outside her home.
"He isn't anywhere," she sighed, "Except in my head."
Charlie knocked on her bedroom door a few minutes later. He explained that he was going fishing with some friends on the Reservation and asked if she would like to come down there with him. He said that a lot of the kids on the Reservation were getting together that night to tell ghost stories and roast marshmallows. Bella agreed to go, deciding that there wasn't really anything else pressing for her attention around the house.
Everyone on the Reservation already knew Bella. She was there almost every day that she visited Charlie in the summers, plus many of them remember how she was born in Sue's house.
"First baby I've ever delivered," Sue joked once, "And the last one too."
She recognized most of the kids sitting around the camp fire, but one in particular stood out: Jake Black.
He was Billy's son and Billy was Charlie's best friend, so it was natural that they hung out most of the time during those past summers; however, Jake wasn't there last time she visited. He was out of town staying with his sister, Rachel, who went to college in Seattle. He stayed up there the entire summer working a job to earn some money to save up to rebuild a car.
"Bella," Jake smiled as soon as he saw her. "I heard you moved into town. I'm glad we'll get to see more of each other. I was sad to miss you last summer."
"I'm happy to be here," Bella said with a blush. She knew that everyone had their full attention on her since she arrived there and the way Jake talked made it sound as if they were more than friends or something; a thing she knew would not go over well. She knew full well that every girl on the Reservation who wasn't related to Jake had their eyes on him. He was, after all, quite the stud.
Charlie and the other grown up men went out in the boats for what they called a midnight catch while the guys around the campfire tried their best to scare the girls and to scare one another with stories. One of the stories that stood out was called The Legends of the Cold Ones and it involved some of the people who lived in Forks – a family known as the Cullens.
"Sounds a lot like vampires to me," Bella said when one of the boys finished his thrilling tale.
"Sounds exactly like vampires," Jake laughed. "I guess you just have to ask yourself whether or not you're willing to believe in those kinds of things, huh?"
"What are you guys doing?" asked a tall, solid guy who was probably in his mid-twenties. He seemed angry for no reason.
"Just telling the usual lore," answered one of the boys named Quil.
"Yeah," said another named Embry. "No big deal."
"Did you forget that she's among you tonight?" asked the tall guy.
Bella felt a flush of self consciousness immediately rip through her. She was embarrassed that she was singled out as an outsider, and she wished she could shrivel up and disappear without being further noticed.
"I think I need to get back to the house," Bella said quietly, obviously embarrassed by Sam's aggressiveness.
Jake immediately stood up to escort her.
"Don't worry about Sam," he said. "That guy's a total douche. He's been acting like he's bigger and better than everyone else here since he's turned all beefcake on us. He may look threatening, but he's just a nineteen year old punk."
"Wait," Bella stopped him, "Sam is only nineteen years old?"
"Yeah," Jake scoffed, "But he acts like he freakin' runs the place or something. Those are our Tribe's legends, Bella; not Sam's legends. We can share them with anyone we want."
"When did he go all, um, beefcake?"
"A few weeks ago. He shot up a foot and just got all muscley like that. If you ask me, I think he might be on steroids or something. That would explain the mood swings, I think."
Jake laughed to try to further break the tension, which sort of worked. Bella laughed too, trying to brush off Sam's rude attitude toward her. It was her first day here and she wasn't going to let the entire experience be ruined by one mean Res bully.
In fact, Bella returned to the Reservation on Saturday evening as well as on Sunday afternoon. Both times she hung out with Jake, who gave her tours of the trails and the beaches. As she walked across the waters, she felt a strange familiarity with the water, though she knew she'd never been there before – or at least that's what she believed.
She allowed the Reservation to become a sort of safe haven for her and decided that no matter what happened Monday at school, she could always come back here and have a true friend in Jake Black.