Chapter 63 Chapter notes

Charlie Swan would have always had a hard time accepting the supernatural; now that he's faced with it at every turn, he's thinking about scheduling the nervous breakdown that he's been promising himself. Now seems a perfect time.

The chapter title belongs to R.E.M.

Chapter 63 Losing My Religion Sunday, November 5th

I walk Bella to Charlie's door. "I'll be back in about an hour. I'm going running." She kisses me with cold, trembling lips, takes a deep breath, and walks into his hospital room.

Once I'm about a mile from the hospital, I change my mind. I turn around, wanting to be nearby if Charlie refuses to hear her story and orders Bella away. When I get to Charlie's hallway, I can hear them crying together. His mind, almost always an opaque mire, opens up a little when he's upset.

And he's upset.

I get one word, thought over and over, as a question, a heartfelt statement, and a shout of desperation.

VAMPIRE.

NO!

She's told him, then. She's confirmed what Maya heard as whisperings and rumors.

"What you said the day that Edward left was actually true? That during the baseball game another one had threatened you?"

What? She'd actually told him already?

"Yeah, and because we were worried about you, we lured him away to Phoenix." I wait through the tense silence and I'm disappointed when she doesn't tell him the whole story, about how James had bitten her and I had sucked the venom back out.

"I thought you were losing your mind when you said that they were vampires."

"Yeah, I know. You said I was being ridiculous."

His breath hitches and he whispers, "Maya said they don't hunt…people."

"Nope. Just animals."

"Just animals," he says with a sigh, trying to imagine the well-dressed Cullens chasing down livestock for dinner. "Animal blood, just so we're clear."

"Yeah. Blood is the only nutrient that their bodies can metabolize."

"Of course. Of course. So, ah, can they go out in the sun?" His heartbeat and respirations are both elevated, and I smell many different chemical reactions within his body, some fear, some revulsion, and another that I can't put my finger on. Incipient madness? I don't know.

Bella explains that our skin reacts to sunlight, and because of the need for secrecy, we stay hidden from the populace on sunny days.

"Does the fact that Maya can turn into a Wolf change the way you feel about her?" Bella asks, her voice softer. He must have shaken his head, because she says, "Of course it doesn't, because you love her. It's the same way I feel about Edward, Dad. I fell in love with him before I knew anything about his family. That knowledge didn't change anything."

Physically, Charlie is very uncomfortable, which is completely understandable, as he's recovering from major surgery and a partial reconstruction of his shoulder. He shifts in bed, then his heart begins to pound in his chest. I hear him grunt as he moves, trying to lean closer to Bella, I think. He whispers, "What are your plans? Please tell me you're going to college. I have some money put away for your schooling, Bella, and I want you to go, right after you graduate." He sounds desperate.

There is a very tense silence. Here's where the rubber meets the road. Will she tell him? I wonder.

Bella takes a deep breath. "I don't know what Maya has told you about the Cullens, but I'm…I'm joining their family after I finish up with high school."

Charlie's mind is a swirling BLANK. "Join his family," he repeats slowly, his voice wary, unsure.

"Here's the thing, Dad," she blurts out. "I'm part of Edward's world now. I can't turn away from it. He can't be human with me, so there's no option for me but to join him."

The BLANK in Charlie's mind has filled with graphic images of movie vampires in black capes with dripping fangs, of cobwebs and dust. Of curses and evil.

Charlie gulps. "So you're leaving me with the image of Count Dracula, throwing you under his arm and carrying you to his castle? Does he also turn into a bat?" His voice drops to a dramatic whisper. "Tell me he sleeps in a coffin." He says this last bit through gritted teeth.

I lean against the wall outside Charlie's room and wonder how any of us made it through the last few months. What would I have done if Bella had succumbed to the subtle pull of the ocean, if one day she had said goodbye to life and walked into its depths? What action would I have taken if I had heard that her body, drained of life and color, had washed up on First Beach?

I imagine slaughtering the entire reservation and then disappearing to find a coven of vampires who I could bully into destroying me. The danger to my family would be extreme, without precedent. Charlie would have been utterly destroyed by Bella's suicide. His imagined life with Maya would never have materialized. He might have taken his own life, while Maya would have been distraught after losing the man that she loved, that she had waited for.

The Quileute wielded their power over us like a cudgel, never giving us a chance to prove our intentions. We were sentenced without trial, and were forced to obey their edict because the information they had and the threats they leveled promised consequences too dire to be ignored.

All of this can be laid at the hands of the Indians. I'm shocked when I realize that they acted out of conscience, just as I had with Bella. God.

Bella's answer is a little terse. "Of course he doesn't turn into a bat. And you've seen their house! Does it look like there are coffins in a place like that?" The images in his head are firming up and I see my house in his memory, a whitewashed, three-story affair right out of a picture book.

"Anyway, none of them sleep. At all. They're not cursed, you know." She leans close to him and whispers, "They're supernatural beings, just like Maya. If you want to think of Edward as Count Dracula, that's up to you, but he asked me to marry him after we graduate and then he's changing me. I've had months to think about this. I would have done it already but Edward refused. He didn't want me to make a decision that couldn't be walked back."

Struggling against the pain, Charlie sits up in his bed and I peek around the door to see his tortured expression. Mouth agape, brow furrowed, face screwed up in absolute agony as he valiantly tries not to scream and cry. He imagines jumping up out of his hospital bed, hunting me down, and shooting me point-blank with his service revolver, then dragging my body to the river.

I hang my head. Good lord.

He's frantic. His heartbeat soars as his breathing morphs into labored pants. Bella's heart rate and respirations have also increased and she says, "Calm down, Charlie."

Thiswas apparently the wrong thing to say. He's on the very edge of totally losing control. Charlie leans over and whispers, through his tears, "You're joining his family? So, what, he's poisoning you? That's what Maya said! To turn you into a…a creature like him?"

"Not poisoning me. And what would you have me do?" Bella hisses. "Stay human? Get older, while every year he stays the same?"

"What do you mean, 'get older.'" There's a tense pause and he gasps. "What, they don't age?"

Before Bella can respond, he says, "Human?"

That was the wrong word to use. Bella blows past it. "I couldn't cope when Edward left! I nearly killed myself! I love him. And he loves me. And we're going to be together. Forever. Yeah, they don't age! Big deal! Maya doesn't either, or didn't she tell you that?"

In Charlie's very disturbed thoughts, I see in the jumble of his thoughts a hopeless, helpless man. The words human and don't age bounce around in his head, as he reaches for an anchor, a safe haven, only to find himself adrift in a sea of uncertainty and dread.

Bella glances around, frantic. "This is all a big secret!" she whispers as she grabs his arm. "You can't tell anybody about it!"

I hear Charlie whisper through his tears of misery, "Who would believe me? Who would believe any of this?"

I've retreated back into the hallway, but in his mind, I see a commotion in his bed as he thrashes around for a moment, then swipes at his food tray, sending everything flying into the air. A water jug, his phone, some books—all hit the floor. Water splashes in all directions and Bella hops up quickly and retrieves his phone from the deluge.

I hear soft footfalls padding down the corridor. A nurse named Jenny has heard the disturbance and she bolts past me and into the room to find Bella, white-faced and gasping. Her patient is berserk. He's screaming and writhing in his bed, then goes limp. For one heart stopping moment, I think he's had a stroke.

The nurse hits the emergency call button and a crash card thunders down the hallway as medical personnel respond to the alert. As soon as Jenny's white uniform whips out of the door to assist with the cart, I edge past it and find Bella at the back of the room.

Someone snags the blood-pressure cuff and slides it onto Charlie's arm. A nurse holds out his limp wrist, feeling for his pulse. Another studiously reads through his chart. When a tall doctor who I've never seen races in, Bella falls onto me, shaking with emotion.

Charlie is horror-struck at what she's revealed to him, but below the horror is the realization that she's made up her mind, and there isn't anything he can do about it. I get brief glimpses of Bella, screaming in the night, lying on the floor of her room, hair in a snarl, crying my name.

I have to fill in the blanks, but he's thinking that there will be no future for her that he can plan for. No thrill of sending her away to college. No normal life.

No grandbaby to rock on his knee.

The doctor and the nurses poke him; they prod him; they peer into his eyes, take his temperature and check his reflexes. He lies as if unconscious and doesn't help them or acknowledge them in any way. He's still thinking about his daughter and her frightful, terrible declaration.

No more Bella. He'll miss her fragility, her endearing clumsiness, the blush that colors her cheeks at the slightest provocation. I think that's what he's thinking, as I'm getting just fragments of images. Bella, slipping on ice. Bella, her face a bright crimson.

Those are things I'll be missing as well. Because as much as Bella loves the otherworldlinessof my kind, I love her fleeting humanity.

I take Bella by the hand and we walk out without a backward glance. Once in the hallway, she collapses. I carry her to the waiting room and sit with her as she utterly breaks down. I hold her while she sobs. She reaches out a trembling hand to me and I clutch it carefully, bringing it to my icy lips.

"How long were you out there?"

"A while. Did you tell him everything?"

"Maya told him most of it," she says, as she fetches a tissue from a jeans pocket. "I filled him in." She swallows a few times and says, "Will he be okay? He's not about to have a heart attack or something?"

I wish that I could reassure her. My impulse is to say that he's upset but that he'll be fine. That he's a strong, healthy guy. But I heard his body's processes go wild, heard the chaos in his mind. I don't perjure myself with a mendacity worthy of a politician, but I use some verbal dexterity. "Um, he's processing what you told him right now, and it's come as a shock to his system."

I hear Bella's teeth snap as she pulls back and glares up at me. "Tell me something I don't know."

Grrr. All right. Truth. Goddam it, Edward. TELL IT.

"He suspected that something was going on with my family. Maya apparently confirmed it. But your revelation that you're joining the family has rocked the foundations of his life, Bella. This revelation, combined with his girlfriend being a shapeshifterand his horrible injury, has unnerved him. He's questioning everything that he'd always believed to be true. If things like vampires and Shapeshifters exist, then he wonders what else is out there, unknown, waiting to reveal itself."

"But is he about to die? To keel over?" She takes a deep breath and whispers urgently, "Is this going to kill him, Edward?"

I look out to the hallway, listening through all the layers of conversation, picking out the voices I'd heard in Charlie's room. Several members of the team have departed. A nurse and doctor remain, questioning their patient. "He's calmed down, Bella, but I don't think you should continue your conversation today. They've medicated him so he'll sleep."

We sit for a few more minutes. I hear that the doctor is called away. The nurse checks vitals once more and then she hurries to another patient's room. Bella and I walk back down the hall and look in to see Charlie's eyes closed. He's not asleep yet but I don't reveal this. He's still thinking about what his daughter, his only child, has told him.

He's thinking about horror movies he's seen. That Bella is enchanted by the strangeness of it all, that she's making a mistake. I lead a stunned and tearful Bella down the hallway. I ask her to wait while I pull up the Volvo, because it's raining, but she ignores the request, grabs my hand, and tows us into the deluge.

We run to the car and I pull her door open just as a jagged bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, dark with heavy clouds. The thunder cracks above us and Bella slides onto the leather seats. I appear beside her and we sit for a moment, watching the thunderstorm play out. It's a particularly violent storm for this part of the country, for this time of year.

Somehow, it feels prophetic.