The box is in Seattle.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, nothing."
The box is in Seattle.
The thought played in Bella's mind, again and again, as she and Edward passed the day together. A gnawing anxiety built within her as the hours passed. She tried to read, but the concussion she'd suffered still gave her headaches and made it difficult to concentrate on the words. She tried to nap, curled on the couch in the nest of blankets Edward made for her, but she couldn't get past her restlessness. He watched her with worried eyes.
"Are you in pain? Do you want medication?"
"No," she said.
The box is in Seattle.
She was in pain, but it wasn't as it had been, and she didn't want to drug this feeling away. She struggled to shift positions on the couch. She couldn't control her right arm, but there was still some feeling in it. The wrong pressure against it sent pins and needles up the limb. She cursed as she bumped her elbow and the needles started again. Edward bent to help her. She finally settled on her left side, her right arm supported with pillows. This position was better, but it did nothing for the twisting in her chest.
"What can I do?" Edward asked, sitting back on his heels and stroking her hair.
The box is in Seattle.
"Nothing. Please... I'm sorry. I'm just like this right now. It's not your fault."
He sighed and said nothing. A moment later, he got up and turned on the television - a new, flatscreen model - that Alice had added to Charlie's living room. He turned on a travel show, and Bella smiled, remembering her drunken declaration to him all those years ago. She was going to travel the world, see everything. And he remembered that.
"Is this okay?" he asked.
"Yes, thank you."
The program was about Ireland. She watched the images on the screen but didn't pay attention to the narrator's descriptions of the green hills and stone-walled villages. Her mind was in Seattle, in that small bedroom inside that small apartment. The box was in the bottom drawer of her nightstand. It was out of sight, but close enough that she could reach down, open that drawer, and lift out the box without ever leaving her bed.
Just ask him. He'll go, or send someone else.
But her mouth couldn't form the words. Seattle was a four-hour drive from Forks, and today was already going to be a difficult one for the Cullen family. Edward didn't speak of it, but she knew that his mind was with Carlisle, in Italy, in danger and out of reach. She knew he was afraid. Her little box of photographs and knit caps seemed ridiculous in the shadow of that concern.
The program ended, and a new one began. Now there was a host preparing to tour an active volcano on some island in the South Pacific. The man on the screen talked excitedly of the geological properties of the land. Bella held Charlie's afghan against her cheek and tried not to cry.
The sound of doorbell chimes startled and confused her. There had always been a doorbell button secured to the frame of Charlie's front door, but Bella couldn't remember a time when it'd actually worked. Alice must have installed a new one.
Bella pushed herself up on her elbow, but Edward was already moving toward the door.
"It's Alice," he said.
Bella winced as she managed to get into a sitting position. She started to run her fingers through her hair, trying to smooth down the unruly waves. Edward opened the door, and Alice stepped in. Bella forgot about her messy hair.
"You brought it. You brought it!" She gave a little hiccuping sob.
"I'm sorry you had to wait so long," Alice said. She hurried to the couch and placed the box on Bella's lap. She sat down beside her. "I saw that you were missing something, but I didn't know what it was. I finally said something to Esme, and she knew right away what it was. She has one, too, you see. It's smaller than yours, but..." She shrugged.
"Thank you," Bella breathed. She laid her good left hand on the lid of the box, spreading her fingers over the smooth, papery surface.
It was a pressed-board carton about twice the size of a shoebox. The outside surface was covered in fanciful illustrations of clouds and sunbeams, with sugary quotations scrolled liberally throughout. Let your dreams give you wings, it said. With love, there are no limits. Renée had found the box on clearance in a craft store and mailed it to Bella with her birthday gift the year before David had been born. Bella had rolled her eyes at the melodramatic inscriptions and set the box aside in a corner of her bedroom. It was silly, but it was just like her mother, and she hesitated to get rid of it.
A year later, when she'd returned from the hospital carrying a plain, white cardboard box inscribed with only the word "Memories," Bella had gone straight to that craft-store photo box. Silly or not, the box meant that her mother loved her. Her baby's things belonged nowhere else.
Bella realized that Alice was watching her, waiting to see if she'd open the box now. Bella didn't want to do that. She wanted to be alone when she took out David's things for the first time in weeks.
"Thank you," Bella said again. "I'll- I'll just put this upstairs."
"I'll do it," Edward said, taking the box from her. Her fingers tried to hold on for an instant, then let go as her eyes met his.
It was okay. He wouldn't look, not without her. She forced a smile and a nod.
"You went all the way to Seattle?" Bella asked Alice when they were alone.
"No, Rose did. I've been busy, with Sofia, and... you know, watching." She tapped her temple.
"What do you see?"
"Not much. I'm pretty sure he's going to come back alive. Beyond that?" She shrugged.
"Has he called?"
"No, but we're expecting it anytime. Jasper's waiting with Esme."
Bella nodded. She glanced back at the stairs.
"Alice, I was thinking. I'd forgotten to ask you - What did Edward promise you?"
"Hmm? Oh, you mean about you." Alice blinked at her, pulling her attention back from someplace far away.
"Yes, about me."
"Well, when Edward first met you, he was devastated. Not only were you very young, but you were human. His first instinct was to write you off altogether. He spoke of turning his back forever, leaving you to live a natural life, to find human love. He imagined it was the only moral thing to do. He imagined that doing otherwise would mean giving you less than you deserved."
Bella shook her head. "He doesn't think much of himself, does he?"
Alice smiled. "He's gotten much better, if you can believe it. But, at that time, no, he didn't. When you're alone for long enough, it's easy to believe that you yourself are the reason for that."
"So, he wanted to leave, for good."
Alice's smile faded. "No, Bella. He wanted to die."
Bella's stomach turned. "What? Why-"
"Because you were it for him. And, as far as he could tell, he couldn't be with you without ruining you. He wasn't willing to do that, and he wasn't willing to live without you. Dying was the only solution."
"Oh, god."
"But, of course, I wasn't going to allow that. I figured that, once you'd been Changed, he'd have no choice but to stay with you."
"You were going to-"
"What else? It was an obvious solution. I knew when your truck was in the shop that week, and which way you walked home from school. Remember that part of the forest? All those weird rocks? I was going to take you there. It's easy to get to wilder places from that spot. No one would have seen us. No one would have heard you."
Bella started to speak, but the words felt stuck. She cleared her throat and started again.
"What happened? Why didn't you?"
"What do you think happened?" Alice said. "Edward stopped me. I'd been so careful, staying away from him, keeping my thoughts from him. What I didn't count on was how closely he was watching you, even as he'd decided to never have you. He was looking his last, you see. Drinking in the sight of his beloved before he ran off to meet his end." She shook her head and laughed. "That boy. He found me in the woods, waiting for you. He heard what I meant to do. He didn't take it well."
"And so, what? You promised not to Change me, in return for...?"
"Not just that. I promised not to interfere with you at all. I promised not to stop you from living your life - your short, boring, human life."
"And what did he promise?"
"He promised not to give up on you, not while you yet lived." She leaned close, her eyes shining. "And he never did, Bella. He lived for you. I know it hurt him to do it... But he lived."
Bella turned away from Alice and sank back against the cushions of the couch. She was becoming well-used to this feeling, this humility in the face of a love so large. She wondered if these revelations would ever stop, if she'd ever not be staggered by what he'd felt for her, what he'd done for her.
"You said there were two promises," Bella said.
"Yes, because Alice knows how to spot an opportunity." Edward's voice came from behind them. His irritation didn't sound playful or put on. Alice either didn't notice or didn't care. She grinned at him.
"Damn right. And I just love weddings."
"Weddings?" Bella glanced between them.
"I promised her that, if you did come to me-"
"When you came to him," Alice corrected.
Edward ignored her. "If you came to me, Alice wanted to give us a wedding. I saw no harm in promising her that she could."
"Ah." Bella said. "I thought Carlisle said that vampires don't do marriage?"
"Of course we do marriage," Alice said. "It's just not the thing that makes us committed to each other. The human ceremony, the human contract - all that isn't necessary. Why would it be? Our commitment is in our bones, our skin, our hair and eyes and breath. We don't need marriage. It's useful, though, for appearances, and for saying important things. And it's fun, right?"
"Right," Bella said. She remembered marrying Jacob. She'd tripped on her dress in the aisle. Charlie had caught her before she'd fallen on her face, but she'd been beet red for the entire ceremony. Jacob had asked Quil to be his best man, and he'd been drunk for the toast. Renée had cried while hugging Bella and whispering sex advice into her ear at the end of the reception.
Bella had liked marriage just fine, but the wedding...
"I don't think I want a wedding."
"That's fine," Edward said.
"Of course you want a wedding," Alice said.
"No, really..."
"If she doesn't want a wedding, there won't be a wedding. Bella didn't make any promise."
"You don't mind?" Bella craned her neck back to look at him. He didn't look disappointed. He looked smug.
Alice glared at him. He grinned back and bent to kiss Bella's cheek.
"You're wonderful, you know that?" he said.
"If you say so," Bella said.
Alice huffed.
"Don't pout," he said. "You didn't keep your side of it, anyhow. You're a willful brat who doesn't deserve to dress up her doll, not this time," Alice started to protest, but he cut her off. "Don't even start. Mindreader, remember? You really thought the yearbook stunt was too subtle to count as interference? You put it in her hands yourself, and scared her on purpose doing it."
"She figured most of it out on her own," Alice protested. "She'd even have found the book on her own if it weren't for Renée."
"What do you mean?" Bella asked. "You said that before, when you brought me the book. Something about 'mom stuff.'"
"Yeah. I didn't expect your mom to warn you about spiders - the brown recluses in Charlie's attic. If she hadn't, you'd have gone up there yourself. You'd have gotten curious, opened one of the boxes, and there it would have been. You'd have looked through it right up there in the attic, surrounded by all that spooky clutter. I saw it years ago. It only changed after you called Renée."
"When did you take it? Before Quil and Jackson came over?"
"Oh, no. I took it years ago, when you left it with Edward at Jessica's party. Once you went with Jacob that night... Well, I knew our window had closed. It was a good thing I'd taken out some drama club insurance, wasn't it? I put the book in Charlie's attic after you left for college with Jacob. He boxed it up a couple of years later. You should have found it yourself. It would have been enough. So, I slipped up there and took it. You didn't hear a thing."
"You broke your promise," Edward said. "Admit it."
"I'll do no such thing," Alice said. "I only made it possible. I made it fair. I didn't make it happen. If it hadn't mattered to her, she wouldn't have been led so easily. And, anyway, do you really want to kill yourself now?"
He started to answer, but Alice's phone rang inside her purse. She had it out in a flash too quick for Bella's eyes to follow.
"Jasper," she said, not waiting to hear him speak. "Thank god. Oh, thank god. I'll tell them. I love you. Oh, I love you. Tell Esme..." She stopped, but Bella couldn't tell if Alice was listening, or just thinking. "Tell her that they won't kill him. I'm sure of that. There's more to all of this... and I just don't know. But they're not going to kill him. I still see Bella, eternal, with us. I still hear Edward laughing." Jasper said something, and she laughed. The sound was both startling and beautiful. "Yes, I know! The way ahead... I don't know. But it's still open. Tell her."
She put the phone away and let out a long breath. The careful calm in her expression had fallen away, and Bella realized just how worried Alice had been. Edward crossed to the other side of the room and stared silently out of the window. He fisted his hands at his sides, and slowly relaxed them.
"He... Carlisle. He really would have died for me," Bella said, needing to say the words out loud, needing them to know that she understood what she was costing them. Edward looked back at her, concerned. He composed himself quickly.
"He didn't," he said. "He's coming home. It's going to be okay."
Alice spoke as though Edward hadn't. "Yes. He would have died for you. Are you beginning to understand, Bella?"
"I am."
After all, understanding the fact of something is not the same as understanding why it was true.
Silence held the room as the three of them busied themselves with their own thoughts. Once again, it was Bella who broke the quiet.
"I'll have a wedding, if it will make you happy, Alice."
Alice's expression stayed grave, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
"Esme will like it, too," she said.
Edward sighed.
"I'll have ten weddings," Bella said.
"Please don't say that. She'll hold us to it," Edward warned, shaking his head. "We live long, and she never gets tired of weddings. Never."
Bella shook her head.
"I don't care. I wish I could do something else, anything, to make this feel like it's okay. It feels so wrong, everything you've given me."
"You know what you can do," Alice said. "You can-" Her words cut off as she blinked twice and gasped. "Really? Why didn't I see it before now?" She jumped up from the couch. "When, Edward? Oh, we can do it tonight. Carlisle's plane lands at eleven-"
"Just wait," Edward said, holding up a hand. "We need to hear everything the Volturi said. Do you really think they just gave Carlisle their blessing and sent him home?"
She frowned. "No, of course not. I just... Time matters here. I can't even tell you why." She ran her hand through her hair and shook her head. "God, Bella. Whether that damned tribe claims you or not, it has you. I can hardly see you. You're like a ghost in here. Something out there knows that you're Quileute, at least a little."
"Tell Billy that," Bella said.
Alice snorted, then shook her head.
"Forget them. I need to hear you say it," she said. She sat down beside Bella again, took both her hands. Bella's paralyzed hand wasn't entirely numb. There were still patches that tingled and could feel the cold of Alice's flesh against hers. Alice pulled Bella's hands against her chest, pressed them to where her heart would be beating if she'd been human. "Say you want this. To be like us."
"It's what I have to give to you," Bella said. "It's what I can do, and no one else can." She looked at Edward, his eyes full of that dizzying, alien love. "Whatever's left of me, whatever I still am... It's yours. If it can... I want it to matter. I want to matter."
Alice's eyes were far away, then they refocused on Bella. Her smile was a little sad.
"You're not so different from that girl we found at the high school last decade." She released Bella's hands and cupped her cheek, smiling. Alice's eyes sparkled, gold and black splintered together like crystalline galaxies. "You just use a lot more words to say the same thing. But, just once, tell it to me in a few words. Will you do that? I've waited, maybe not such a long time, but, then, I'm not such a patient person." Edward coughed; Alice ignored him. "I'm ready to hear you say it. Say you'll leave humanity behind, for once and forever."
Bella almost laughed. She'd left humanity behind a year ago. Didn't they understand how strange, how half-formed this person they wanted so badly was?
She laid her hand over Alice's where it still touched her cheek. This was another of those moments, one that called for weighty, lovely words she didn't have. She searched for them, but came up empty. She had to say something. Alice had given her Edward. Surely, Bella could give her a few pretty words.
She looked down at her lap, at Charlie's afghan. She remembered sitting beside him on the back pew in the First Baptist Church. They'd only gone together a few times; Charlie didn't believe you needed a building to worship ("or a collection plate, for that matter," he'd say). He liked the songs, though. And he liked the scriptures. He said the good ones were like poetry, and he quoted them back to Bella the same way he quoted Homer or Whitman or Neruda.
Alice would have loved Charlie.
Bella's heart hurt at the thought. She met Alice's eyes seriously with her own, and gave her what she asked.
"'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and whither thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'"
Bella felt her face turning red, but she didn't look away.
Alice nodded slowly. She pressed a kiss to Bella's cheek.
"Amen," she said.
Alice didn't stay long after that. She was anxious to return to Jasper, to wait with him and Esme for Carlisle to return home. She offered to sit with Bella while Edward hunted, but he declined.
"You didn't need to hunt?" Bella asked him when she'd gone.
"I could have hunted. I would have, if she hadn't been alone, and if she hadn't been thirsty."
Bella remembered the blackness in the galaxies of Alice's eyes.
"You can go now."
"I can wait another day. When Carlisle comes tomorrow, I'll go."
"I don't need to be watched all of the time, Edward. It... it makes me feel strange."
"I'll stop when you're better," he said, but he sounded uneasy.
Bella didn't want to take the drugs anymore, but, by sunset, her pain was undeniable. Upstairs in her bedroom (their bedroom?) he helped her change her clothes, but she had to stop him, again and again, so she could breathe through the throbbing and pulling that had spread everywhere.
"I'm going to get your medication," Edward said. He helped her sit down on the bed and turned to leave. She grabbed his arm, stopping him.
"I just don't want to sleep through this," she said, and she wasn't sure if she meant these hours in the dark with Edward, or this night before David's first stolen birthday. "It isn't right."
"You are allowed to rest," Edward said. She looked away. He touched her forehead where it was moist with sweat. "Please, Bella. Rest."
She took the pills, and he helped her settle into bed. He pulled the blankets up over her. His smile was weary, but relieved.
"It'll be better soon," he said. "I'll lie down with you while you wait for them to work."
She watched by the light of her bedside lamp as he changed out of his clothes. When he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, she wanted to ask him to stop, to take those off as well, to let her see him. He'd seen all of her, but she'd never seen him completely naked. She didn't stop him, though. It seemed an imprudent time to ask. She was hurting, after all, and certainly not up for more than looking.
Plus, he hasn't been able to hunt today.
He put on the soft clothes that Alice had left in the house for him. Bella thought it must be strange to own pajamas you know you'll never sleep in. She tried not to think too much about how elaborate a human charade he lived for her sake.
When he was done changing, he switched off the bedside lamp.
"You don't have to lay down if there are things you need to do," she said.
"I'll stay with you." He lifted the blankets and slid into the bed behind her. "The rest can wait."
He pulled her close to him, his chest hard against her back.
"Are you too cold?" he asked.
"No." The pain was still making her sweat. She closed her eyes.
"It will be better soon," he said.
Needles of pain shot through her dead arm. Her hips throbbed. Her belly twisted and pulled. She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly, her gaze fixed on the small alarm clock beside her bed. It was 8:42 p.m.
8:43... 44.
David had been born a little after midnight. The pills would work soon. She wouldn't be awake to mark the hour of his birth. She hated the relief she felt at the realization.
You are allowed to rest.
"Tell me a story, Edward."
He barely paused before he started speaking. She wondered if a vampire's mind moved as quickly as their body, for him to be so ready to tell her a story. It would have taken her a week to know how to begin.
"I was in the Philippines eighteen years ago," he began. "I was hunting in the forest. It was the wet season, and I wasn't worried about meeting humans. So I was very surprised when I saw some distance from me a woman, alone. She was foraging, and doing a bad job of it. I could see that right away. She was frustrated, desperate. Sometimes the more you need something, the worse you are at finding it.
"I stayed well back from her, because I was very thirsty, but I was curious, too. Who was she, so far from the cities and villages? Why was she alone? When had she eaten last? I imagined her hunger to be like my thirst. I imagined her loneliness to be like mine. That thought made me want to get closer to her, so I dared to do so, still being careful not to be seen.
"When I was a couple hundred yards away from her, I could see that she was very young, not much more than a girl. And I saw that she was pregnant. I hadn't noticed before because she was so thin, and her dirty dress was too large for her - it hid the roundness of her belly. She was sitting on the ground, resting, maybe. She didn't cry. I saw at once that there wasn't enough hope left in her for crying.
"Looking at her made me despair. This was the world I'd come to know, one where a pregnant girl will struggle and starve, alone in the forest. This, I understood. It did not surprise me, but it made me despair.
"I left her then, to hunt. She was too weak, you see. If I hadn't gone then, I would have stayed and taken her for myself. I didn't want her to suffer, but I couldn't kill her, either.
"Later, when my thirst had been quieted, I found her again. She'd built a shelter of fallen branches, pieces of plastic, old tarps. She had some empty jugs for water, pieces of broken plywood to give her a place to lie that wasn't in the mud. She was sitting on a dirty towel that I suspected served as her bed. She was drinking water from a plastic cup. She wasn't crying.
"I was close enough to hear her thoughts then. She was thinking about a boy, the boy she'd made her baby with. She wasn't sure if she loved him or hated him, but she was sure she wanted him there. She wanted that so much."
He stopped talking. Bella's arm still hurt, but her curiosity made her forget it.
"Where was he? Why was she alone?"
"Even today, I'm not completely sure why she was there, but I do know that the boy who'd been her lover was dead. She kept thinking about the last time she'd seen him. He'd given her an orange. Then he'd laid his hands on her belly, bending to touch his forehead to it. It was like he was praying, but she didn't know whom he'd been praying to. Maybe it was to the god they'd been guided toward as children, but she thought it was more likely that he was praying to their own child, asleep inside her. Perhaps he was praying to her. She kept thinking about that moment, when she was holding the orange and he was bowing to her. She'd been either a diety or an altar in that moment, and she'd never know which, not now. She was so sad. I didn't know how she was able to not cry."
"What did you do?"
"I watched her. After a little while, she lay down and slept. I got closer, and then closer still. I came so close that I could have reached out my hand and touched her. You see, I thought..."
He stopped.
"What?"
"I thought she might be you." He glanced away from her, embarrassed. "I thought that about everyone back then, even though I tried very hard not to. But this girl was lovely, and she was strong. I wanted a reason to help her."
"Did you help her?"
He was quiet for so long that she didn't know if he'd say anything more. When he spoke again, the sound was small, even in the perfect quiet of the bedroom.
"I brought her meat, a wild pig. I killed it for her. I... I only meant to leave it for her. I never meant for her to see me."
"But she did," Bella guessed.
"Yes. I set the pig on the ground, a little ways from her shelter. She was asleep. I was turning to leave when she called out to me. I turned back, and she was standing. She came out of the shelter. She was so angry, Bella. She was so angry that she shook."
"What did she say?"
"She told me, in her own language, of course, to go back to her father, to tell him she'd never return to him. She told me to take the meat with me, that she didn't want anything from him. She told me that she loved the child she carried more than her father would ever understand loving anything. She told me that she would survive, and her child would survive, even if it meant she had to steal or to kill. They would survive even if they had to sleep in the dirt and eat insects. She shouted these things at me, her hand on her belly the whole time."
"She wasn't afraid of you?"
"Oh, she was very afraid of me. And she was angry that I'd made her afraid. She'd have killed me just for that, I think. I'd never encountered a creature so fierce. Her thoughts... they were so pure, so simple. Her love for her child and her hatred of me, of whomever she thought I was, it made every thought in her mind clean and certain. I envied her so much."
"You envied her?"
"Yes. She was dirty, in rags, starving, but she was. Every part of her was alive and knew why it lived. She had purpose in a way I'd never known for myself. If she'd died in that clearing that day, it would have been with complete certainty."
Bella understood. She envied the girl, too, now.
"What happened to her?"
"I don't know," he said. "I told her that I hadn't come from her father, that I was only a stranger, but I wanted to help her. She didn't believe me. I left the meat anyhow. I spent a lot of nights after that guessing about whether or not she'd eaten it. I imagined her staring at it, her stomach twisting with hunger, her eyes full of hate and determination to take nothing from the man who'd killed her lover. I imagined her satisfaction as she watched it rot."
"You never went back?"
"I did, about a week later. She was gone, and so was the pig, but that told me nothing. If she'd left the pig, the wild things in the woods would have eaten it. And if she'd died in that place, they'd have eaten her, too.
"I looked for her for a while after that. I never found her. I found a dead campfire about a week later, and I wanted to think that it was hers, that she still lived. For years, I thought of her and imagined her life, the life of her child. Her life was like mine, you see. She was both alive and not alive. She'd died in the forest, and she'd escaped and birthed her child. She was no more, and she was somewhere, cradling her infant, watching him grow. Both things were possible. Both were true."
"How was that like you?"
"Because I didn't know if I'd find you or not. Sometimes I believed I would, and sometimes I did not. And it was the same when I remembered her. There were days when I believed she lived, and her child lived. There were days when I was sure she'd died that very night. Both things were true."
The first warm tendrils of the drug's affect touched Bella's mind, and she knew the pain would fade soon.
"How did you know she wasn't me? I mean, not me, but the person you could love?"
He laughed, a low, close sound. He kissed her behind her ear.
"I knew," he said. "It's... not a questionable thing for our kind."
She paused.
"That must make it so much easier," she said. "For people - humans, I mean - we have to guess, at least a little. We have to guess about everything. We feel what we feel, but it doesn't tell us everything. It can lie to us, even. It never tells us everything."
"That's true for us, too," he said. "We never get to know everything."
The fuzzy, floating sensation of the drugs started to spread through her body. Edward had been stroking her hair; he paused.
"Are you guessing now?" he asked. "About me?"
She tried to shrug, forgetting she couldn't.
"I suppose I am. It's the only thing humans can do. We don't get magic for this. We get... chemicals in our brain. We can feel as though we're sure, but, still. We always know the truth."
"And what is that?"
"That being sure is no guarantee."
She felt the pressure of his hand on her arm, but her skin couldn't feel the touch. She felt his lips brush her hair.
"I know that you're right," he said. "I know it's different for me. I'd never known real surety in human thoughts before that girl in the woods. I think that's why I remember her the way I do. It was so unusual. I still don't understand it."
"You don't?" Bella asked, yawning.
"You do?"
"Of course I do. It was her baby, Edward. Her baby. It's the only thing we don't have to guess about. It's the only love that doesn't come from someone else. We don't make it, either."
"Where does it come from?"
"When you hear a sound in the dark, and you're alone... That fear? That falling-down feeling? You know?"
"I know what you mean," he said, and she felt foolish, because of course he wasn't afraid of sounds in the dark.
She tried to explain another way.
"When you're so hungry, when you're so thirsty, and your mind imagines the thing you want the most to eat, or the coolest water..." She shook her head. She was speaking in human terms again.
He helped her.
"Like, when I've had to wait for too long, four or five days. When the animals are hiding because there's snow on the ground or a quake coming. When I can almost taste the blood, but I can't find it."
"Yes," she said. There was no pain anymore. She floated, unworried, distantly aware that she should be worried about... something.
It didn't matter.
"When you're underwater, and you need to breathe, and your lungs hurt-" She stopped. "Do you breathe?"
"Yes," he said. "But not for oxygen. We breathe to sense our surroundings. To take in scent. And, maybe, out of habit, from when we were human."
"But you don't need to?"
"No."
"Huh."
She forgot for a moment what she was going to say. Something about oxygen...
"Right, yes!" she said, remembering. She thought she felt his chest rumble with laughter against her back. "Where it comes from. The love."
She saw David's face, the scrunched, red wrinkles. She could hear him, feel him. That weak, livid cry. His skin, his hair - warm, wet velvet. Nothing before or since had felt like that.
"The truth is... it doesn't come from anywhere."
"It doesn't?"
"No. It's in us, all the time. It always was. I didn't have to learn that I needed to breathe, to eat and drink. No one had to teach me to fear the dark. And... my baby. I loved David before I had a David to love. It was always there. I found you, Edward. And I love you, so deeply. I found you, and then I found that love. But, for my baby... My baby..."
He helped her turn so she could press her face to his chest and weep.
Sometimes it hurt to cry. Sometimes the tears burned inside her, made trails of fire as they spilled over. It didn't hurt now, though. It felt easy and right, the same way it felt to draw breath. It felt just like loving her baby, because it was.
Tears always run out, even when it seems impossible. When she'd dried the last of them on Edward's shirt, she turned up her face to look at him, a dim shape in the darkness.
"The girl ate the meat, Edward. Don't wonder anymore. She ate it because she was hungry and her baby needed it. She was proud, but her pride was nothing next to her love for that baby. When she'd eaten her fill, she carried off as much of it as she could, and she left the place as quickly as she could, probably that same night, so you couldn't come back and find her. She found another place, and another. She did whatever she had to, even if it was awful or scary. She lied and stole and begged. She prostituted herself, and she dug through piles of trash. She did these things for as long as she had to. She saw that baby born, and she fed him. She washed and kissed him and wrapped him up. She found safe places for him to grow. She saw him live. She did. She did."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because it's the thing we don't have to guess about. The only thing."
He pulled her closer as sleep came near. This place, in his arms, in her bed, in her bedroom, in her father's house... She felt as though she were at the very center of everything that had ever been, layers and layers surrounding her, buffering her against the chaos and fury of the universe.
Charlie's town, the peninsula...
The dark sky and distant stars...
Edward stroked her hair, her back. The careful pressure of his hands moving against the fabric of her t-shirt made a whispering sound in the stillness of the room.
"We matter so little," she said. "And things still matter to us so much. I'll never understand it. I'm a speck. Why does it hurt so much?"
His hands went still as sleep claimed her.