Thank you for sticking with me readers, and thank you, torisurfergirl, for editing this chapter.
Chapter 31
The phone rang, setting Charlie's nerves on edge as he leapt for the handset. Renee had been calling every few days as they'd agreed, but her calls had become more frequent as of late. Every shrill ring sent another shard of fear through Charlie's heart. In his paranoia he frequently envisioned Drake calling from Renee's line, taunting him over the abduction of his wife and child.
When Renee's reedy voice echoed over the line, confirming everyone was fine, Charlie could have wept.
"We're packed," Renee said anxiously. "I loaded all of the bags with the garage door down. No one could have seen anything."
Charlie hummed in acknowledgement—taking some comfort in his wife's precautions. The last thing he wanted was for Drake to learn Renee was leaving town.
True to his word, Charlie had left Drake alone for since the day he'd raced up to Chelsea's apartment. The distance was intended to lull Drake into a false sense of security, but as a result, Charlie had no idea of the man's actions. For all he knew, Drake or one of his henchmen could have been stalking Renee and Chelsea as they spoke.
"Marcus will bring Chelsea to the airport tomorrow after her last final," Renee confirmed, pulling Charlie out of his thoughts. "The flight isn't until four, so even with traffic she should be there in plenty of time. I just hope she remembers her passport," Renee murmured distractedly.
Chelsea would remember; she was a responsible kid, but that wouldn't keep Renee from calling to remind her anyway.
"Is she anxious about her exam?"
The tremble in Charlie's voice was evident, even to his own ears. It was a weak way of answering Renee's unspoken question. No, he still hadn't heard from Chelsea. She hadn't spoken to him since he'd taken the blame for her four slashed tires. He tried calling her cell a dozen times, left a few voicemails on Marcus' answering machine—a number Renee had given him— but it was to no effect. Chelsea wanted nothing to do with her crazy father and was all too happy to have an excuse to go away at the end of the term without seeing him.
Renee let out a heavy sigh. "She'll come around, Charlie. It will be all right once this whole mess is resolved. Someday she'll understand that you lied to protect her and she'll forgive you."
Charlie grunted noncommittally.
Cradling the phone against his ear, he pushed against his kitchen table and struggled to his feet. Every ounce of his forty-seven years was suddenly weighing him down.
"Have you located Dwyer's granddaughter yet?" Renee asked, carefully choosing to change the subject. "She's the real victim in this situation."
It was true. Between Drake's conniving, Cullen's greed and her Grandmother's hubris, Bella was the clay—molded and formed to fit their desires, pulled in different directions and shapes, only to shatter in the kiln.
"Do you think the surgery would even have helped her?" Renee mused, breaking Charlie from his thoughts.
The unprecedented transplant surgery had too many risks to for Charlie to even try and consider the benefits. He shuddered as the cold fingers of a memory slid down his spine. His mine poured over the image of a thin waif of a girl who seemed barely able to hold her head on her shoulders.
If she ever got the chance to go through with it, I can't see how she'd survive it.
Charlie struggled to suppress thoughts of Bella's mortality. There was already one death plaguing him as he walked through a painted life. Whenever those memories stirred, his haunted thoughts conjured images of Chelsea or sometimes Bella in place of Bree.
Charlie struggled to keep his voice calm as he answered Renee. "It's an experimental procedure with incredible inherit risks, but the girl looked like she didn't have a lot of options. Besides, Isabella Dwyer probably had significant influence on her granddaughter's decision to opt for the surgery. Bella's parents died when she was little—more than a decade before she and Dwyer were in the car accident last year."
"Jesus," Renee breathed in a whisper. "Where does a girl like that find the strength to go on?" She was silent for a moment, then added, "I guess after loosing her parents, her grandmother and with her own failing health, what else was left to lose?"
Charlie frowned, what would Bella have to lose?
"It's almost impossible to comprehend," Renee mused, as though talking to herself more than to Charlie, "—going into experimental surgery with no one to support you."
Charlie was busy replaying the words what would she have to lose in his head but hummed distractedly in agreement.
"I mean, how do you undergo surgery to save your life knowing that even if you wake up you won't recognize your own the face in the mirror?" Charlie heard Renee's choked swallow. "I can't get my head around it. You could just disappear. It would seem like you'd have vanished. If all your family is gone who would be there to remember you?"
Renee stopped talking but Charlie didn't answer her. He couldn't, his mind had frozen in place.
"Charlie?" Renee called after a lengthy silence.
He heard her but still said nothing. He'd been struck dumb by the idea inadvertently spelled out before him.
"Charlie, did you hear me?"
"Renee," Charlie said in a shaky voice. "Say that again."
"Say what? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, just—just repeat what you said about Bella."
"What about looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself? God that sounds terrifying."
Terrifying was exactly right. That was the look he'd seen plastered across Bella Dwyer's pasty white face the day he burst into her hospital room. The girl had been completely terrified. Charlie always thought it was fear of what terrible news her doctor would give her when he entered the room.
"She was—it was, but that's not what I mean." Charlie tripped over his own words, speaking too fast to get the words out clearly. "Tell me again what you were saying about the family."
"I just meant that it's your family who holds your memories. You and I are the two people who remember everything about Chelsea from the time she was born. We remember everything from the little things to the big things. We're the ones who watched her grow up. Without people who remember you like that, friends, family, loved ones—your history would just disappear."
Your history would just disappear.
Through the shadow of a memory, Charlie was reminded again of his one and only visit with Bella Dwyer. He re-examined her expression through the lens of Renee's logic. Bella's face was nearly as pale as the white sheets surrounding her. Her eyes were wide but Charlie didn't see shock or despair over the death of her grandmother. He saw fear. That had made no sense. Why would a girl whom he'd never met before be suddenly terrified at sight of him? Like a movie reel, pictures flashed before Charlie's eyes. Isabella Dwyer demonstrating her skin's elasticity to Charlie at CGI, the Mii lying under the cover of tubes and wires, the image of Dwyer's wrecked Mustang on the local news, and the speedy court order to destroy the Mii.
We all have a shell, agent Swan, Dwyer's voice rang out, as the soundtrack to his memories.
A shell.
When Charlie first laid eyes on Bella Dwyer the sight of her wasted pale skin and shrunken muscle made him sick. The girl looked barely alive. He remembered thinking about the girl and how pale and sickly she had looked. As though she'd never seen the sun. Charlie's eyes grew wide. Bella's head had been bandaged, her hair shorn off—a sign of recent surgery.
"Brain surgery…"
"Charlie?" Renee asked in a confused and worried tone but he couldn't answer. His mind was in lockdown over the remaining thread that had finally unraveled Dr. Dwyer's shroud.
Bella's hair had been shorn off, giving her the appearance of something out of a horror flick. What little that remained of it had been brown. Just like the color he'd seen floating against the stark white sheets on the gurney that had held the Mii.
Her skin had been akin to translucent tape over bone. Something was truly wrong with this girl. Charlie clearly remembered thinking that. Bella Dwyer had held the ghostly image of a woman who'd been in a hospital bed for months or years rather than five weeks.
"Charlie!" Renee shouted when he didn't answer the second time. "What's going on? Is everything all right? You're scaring me."
Charlie couldn't process it all at once.
"Renee," he said, trying for calm but failing, "I have to go. Keep yourselves safe, and call if you need me."
"Ch—" Renee began, but Charlie cut her off with a click.
Charlie threw the phone, stalking out of the kitchen and down the hall. He registered the sound of it skidding across the kitchen counter and crashing to the tile floor but didn't halt his stride. He reached the office in ten paces, threw open the door and shoved his office chair aside with anxiety akin to one of his worst panic attacks. His fingers fumbled with the combination lock, misdialing several times before he caught his breath and worked one number at a time. After a frustratingly long search, Charlie finally put his hands on the Mii project file.
Page after page skittered across his desk until he found his handwritten notes from that first meeting with Isabella.
10/17 visit: Observed fully mature human shell grown in laboratory setting … According to CI, the Mii does not think or feel. It cannot move on its own and does not experience pain. CI describes it as a shell, created to extend the duration and quality of human life by replacing the part that degrades the fastest.
"Bella's the shell."
John Varner's signature was on the order, verifying all of the material under his control had been packaged and sent for destruction, but Varner didn't have control over the Mii. He only had control over the stem cells. Newton had the Mii. Charlie's fingers flew through the paperwork once more but he already knew Newton's signature was nowhere to be found. They didn't destroy the Mii—the Mii is Bella.
Charlie collapsed into his chair as the sickening realization struck him like a club to the head. She did it. She did it to herself.
Holy hell, Charlie thought, she did this to herself.
She was the one who created the clause in the consent form. She wanted to remain anonymous but how could she keep that a secret? If it was her clone wouldn't someone figure it out? Cullen, Drake, Newton? How could they not know? The truth was staring Charlie in the face.
"They knew." Charlie growled, tossing the pages onto the desk, his fingers itching for a glass of scotch.
They all knew and were in on it from the start.
He pieced it together, now the question is, where will the revelation take Charlie? I'd love hear your ideas.
Thanks for reading.
-FirstBlush