6 January 2021

"What the actual fuck is going on right now?"

Edward winces. Much as with everything about raising her, we hadn't been able to keep Renesmee away from the complexities of language. There was no innocent childhood avoidance of "bad words," no sending her to her room for testing them out. Like most things, we chose not to hide them from her and instead to have adult conversations about situational appropriateness and how taboo words had changed over time, and let her choose the language she wanted to use.

That didn't mean either of us enjoyed hearing it.

"Hi, Monster." Edward's voice is flat. It has been a long time since either of us called her by that nickname, an odd one which had been the natural consequence of the shortening of her name to "Nessie," the comparison to which mythical beast her mother had hated. Bella, we both thought, would've been happy that "Nessie" had eventually fallen by the wayside, and we both hoped that the affectionate nickname bestowed upon her daughter by her Uncle Emmett back in the days when she had been separated from us was one which similarly would've pleased her.

"Are you even watching this?" These words are practically screeched. "This is a coup d'etat, Dad."

"Yes, I'm aware." The arm that isn't holding up his iPhone is crossed firmly over his chest, as it has been for nearly two hours now. We are even watching this, of course. The still-absurdly-large television I let Edward talk me into is currently showing six different domestic and international news feeds at once.

"How are you not losing your minds?"

Edward winces again, his free hand going to the bridge of his nose. He learned this particular gesture from me, and Rene makes fun of us both for it.

I take the phone. "Sweetheart, your dad's in shock. Give him a moment?"

Our daughter huffs and the call disconnects. A short moment of abject panic closes my throat—she's half-vampire; she's immortal, she's on the other side of the country; she's fine—but I've barely had time to draw a shaky breath when I hear the electronic jangle of FaceTime instead. I connect the call and pull Edward toward the large kitchen island and the tiny plastic stand we use for these calls.

Renesmee's hair is pulled back neatly, with only one stray lock trickling its way toward her left ear. She's wearing the dark blue scrubs that mark her as an employee of the University of Washington hospital, and she looks tired. Her eyes are red-rimmed and almost imperceptibly bloodshot. I recognize at once that she has been crying; Edward, hearing my thoughts, nods.

"Are you okay, Sweet?" I ask gently.

She draws a deep breath and exhales it before answering, "Yes. This is just—freaky."

I nod. Watching it play out in color 4K, six times over…it is freaky. News used to come more slowly; there was no phone to ping in my pocket, just letters that took sometimes weeks to arrive. Not this strange detached terror of knowing that the shouting and shoving and broken windows and tear gas are happening as I am seeing them, that the angry mob breaking their way into the rotunda of the Capitol—a building I recall having been built—are doing so in real-time while we watch in horror from two hundred miles away.

"I just can't believe this is happening," she adds. "It feels like"—she looks over her shoulder as if to assure herself she's alone—"the kinds of things Uncle Jasper talks about. When you can get him to talk about them."

Edward's eyebrows rise. Rene usually avoids bringing up this part of our family's past. Although she is close to all her father's siblings, she presses against all our ways of thinking in ways which are uncomfortable at times, and she and her uncle got into a shouting match in late 2017 in which he accused her of being too young to understand the true context of history and she whipped back casually that it must be comforting being a white supremacist.

We separated them for a year after that.

She's not wrong, however. I spent half the Civil War locked up in the same sprawling hospital, working the longest continuous shift of my life for over a year. I had remained, for the most part, detached from the fighting, safely in the Union, but the handful of times I had made it slightly south, into the field hospitals of Washington, what I saw and heard terrified me. Seeing the rebel flag hanging from the Capitol, where it had never before been, is shocking.

But it also feels familiar.

It's the same narrative, two hundred years later. Racial hatred. Convincing the white working class that at least they are superior to the black man. Falsehoods and fabricated grievances stoking anger to political ends; people willing to fan the flames, or at least let them burn, to hold on to power.

And we've been culpable, I think. If by nothing else, than certainly by doing nothing; by taking for granted our right to move at least somewhat freely. Some of that mask has fallen these years; there are places I refrain from holding my husband's hand. And our daughter—she makes us feel even more vulnerable. The fear that sliced through me, watching the crowd flood the barricades wasn't for me, or even for the Capitol Police—it is for her. For her loss of innocence. It's grief, I realize, that we're somehow powerless and that this is the country she'll inherit, at least for now.

Edward nods, and this doesn't go unnoticed by our daughter, who has despised these silent conferences since she was old enough to understand they were going on.

"What did you just think, Granddad?"

I shake my head. "Just that you're right, Sweet. This…this is the same fight. This is all the same hate." I bite my lip. "But…I have to believe the law will hold."

I am saying this more for myself than her, I know. Edward clasps my hand and strokes it a little, and then looks back to our daughter.

"Pence will vote to certify, I'm sure of it. He's establishment." He looks up at me. "Exactly your grandfather's type."

I smack him gently. I haven't voted Republican since 1988. And as it has for so many people, the exigence of this moment has put my party allegiance into sharper relief.

"Mike Pence is hardly my type," I retort. "First, he agreed to be the vice president of this administration. And second, I could never abide someone who calls his sexual partner 'Mother.'"

At this Edward guffaws.

"What?"

He shakes his head, looking down shyly and still laughing. "I don't think we should talk in front of our daughter about familial terms you don't mind hearing in bed, Carlisle."

I can't blush, but I feel the embarrassed tickle in the pit of my stomach anyway. It slipped out, once, in the heat of an hours-long session when we'd had the apartment to ourselves all day. I had him against a wall and we had been at it vigorously when Edward abruptly threw his head back and shouted the diminutive of the term that he'd only called me maybe a half dozen times in the century we'd been together. The shock utterly short-circuited my brain and went straight to my groin, and in the end we'd needed to repair the sheetrock. He still doesn't use it often, but every now and again it slides through his lips and the effect is always the same.

Now it is me looking down from the camera shyly.

"Gross," our daughter's voice says as I stare at the granite counter, and Edward only laughs harder.

"Well, at least that will take your mind off this mess."

"Yeah, well. I will also need to bleach my brain later, thank you." She rolls her eyes, but at least now the light has returned to them; her expression is calmer, less panicked.

"It's good to see you, Sweetheart," I say. "And to hear your voice. I know you're fine, but…" I gesture vaguely in the direction of the television.

"No, I know, Granddad." She sighs. "I just wanted to be able to talk to you, too." She sighs. "You really think they'll certify?"

I look back across the room. Edward had thoughtfully muted the television as soon as his phone rang, but the angry mob is still there, shouting and waving flags and throwing things in utter silence. One would hope this is frightening; it certainly frightens me. I draw a deep breath.

"I have to believe that at least some of them still believe in the law, yes."

Renesmee's brow furrows a little bit, but she looks less troubled than she did. "I hope you're right." She looks over her shoulder and moves her phone just enough that we can see that she's in the on call room; it's empty. As if she, too, has come back to her sense of space, she adds, "You're both home."

I nod. "Sevens, remember?" Finally out of the crux of the pandemic, we have both shifted to standard emergency medicine schedules, stacking 84 hours into one set of seven days, and then taking seven days to regroup. We only overlap for four days of our seven, but they are blissful and calm days of walking through Central Park or the MoMA if it is cloudy, staying home and reading or binging The Mandalorian if it is not.

"Ah, right, of course." She draws a deep breath and exhales. "I…should probably get back. I've got a mom at six and an inducement who is at two and barely effaced."

I frown. "How far overdue is she?"

"Forty-one and a day."

"And her drip is set at?"

A short laugh. "Granddad. I've got this."

Edward smacks me playfully on the arm. "Let Dr. Cullen doctor, Dr. Cullen."

I hang my head and chuckle. "Sorry. Instinct."

"It's annoying, but sweet." The phone moves and we are suddenly walking into the bright light of the hallway. "I promise I'll call you if I actually need your advice."

I nod.

"Call me later?"

"Of course, Heart," Edward says. "We're always here. Love you so much."

"I love you, too."

The phone goes dark.

For a moment, neither of us say anything. Behind us, three feet tall and almost six feet wide, the riot at the Capitol proceeds in muted silence. Edward finally stands from his perch on the barstool and runs his hands through his hair. A moment later, he sinks onto the couch, dropping his head into his hands. I take up the seat next to him, putting my arm over his shoulders.

"Are you all right?" I ask, when ten minutes have passed without him moving.

He looks up at me balefully and shakes his head. "I feel like I'm going to jump out of my skin. She's in Washington for goddsake. The state. She's four thousand miles from this." He gestures to the television. "Why is this getting to me so badly?"

His head finds its way back into his hands, and he's clutching at his hair. I put my hand under his chin and lift his face to look at me.

"Edward. I want you to think back to every national tragedy that has happened in your lifetime."

He blinks confusedly.

"Pearl Harbor. The Kennedy Assassination. 9/11. Where was I?"

"At work," he answers immediately, but almost as quickly I see comprehension dawn across his expression.

"And then you came home. Early."

I nod. "I came back to you. As soon as I could manage it. I made sure with my own eyes and senses that my family was safe."

He says nothing. His eyes flicker back to the television, and I see his Adam's apple move as he gulps. His answer is so quiet I almost can't hear it.

"But we can't die."

"Oh, Edward." I pull him to me and press my lips to the top of his head. "Sweetheart, that part doesn't matter. This"—I gesture—"things like these; they are terrifying when you have people whose well-being you're committed to. I can handle this happening in the world I live in. I can adjust to this. But for my children to have to see it? Bear it? No. That is nearly impossible to withstand. You're a father this time. That's why. "

Edward makes a choking noise but he doesn't reply, instead pulling his feet up onto the couch and leaning his whole weight into my side and letting me stroke his hair, like I did in a sparse tenement apartment off Michigan in 1918, like I did at a Bulls game nearly ninety years later.

We turn up the volume slightly, letting the news anchors go on in a strange muffled drone for nearly two hours before I whisper to Edward that there was always one other thing that helped my mood after those events. He isn't quite up to a full on smile yet, but he nods and accepts my invitation to go down the hall.

It's almost six hours later when Edward rolls himself to the other side of the bed, somehow breathless.

"Jesus. If that is what you're going to do after an attempted coup, perhaps 45 should stay in office," he mumbles into his pillow.

His words catch me by surprise and it takes me a second longer than it should to parse them. I swing my own pillow and hit him in the head.

"Oh, screw you," I say, laughing, and his response is to laugh even harder.

"You did," he says. "Rather hard, I might add." He rolls onto his back and flings an arm over his head, stretching up from his oblique muscle and causing his pectoral muscle to flex. It's been fourteen years since I allowed myself to admit fully that I found him beautiful in more than just a admiring way, and every now and then the sharp planes of his body still take my breath away.

Edward smirks, stretching again.

"Besides," I add. "They just certified the vote. He's out."

He shoots up straight, his hair still sticking out in every direction. "They did?"

I nod. "About twenty minutes ago." I lean in to place a kiss on his shoulder blade, but he shoves me back.

"You were paying attention to the news twenty minutes ago?"

I throw my head back and laugh a deep belly laugh. "I can attend to more than one thing at once, love. And attend to both thoroughly and completely." I think my way through to exactly what I was doing while I listened to Amy Klobuchar announce the results, bringing Edward along with me into my thoughts and sensations before I had relaxed into fully ignoring the television. He frowns and then shakes his head.

"I…don't think that Senator Klobuchar would've approved of being included in that," he says finally. "Thank god you tuned out Pence; I don't need him in our bedroom."

"As previously established; not my type."

Edward laughs. He rolls back over onto his side and gropes for something on his nightstand. A moment later, I see a faint glow from over his shoulder as I lie behind him. I prop myself up on my elbow to peer over his body, recognizing at once the bright blue background of the Zillow app on his iPad. The home he's begun browsing is large and contemporary, with a stunning view of mountains.

My eyes drift down to the address. "That ZIP code is outside San Jose."

He looks up, confused. "Why do you know that."

"Because I was alive before they were invented."

He presses his lips together and frowns at me. "So was I, but I did not see any reason to store that information, you colossal nerd."

I can't help myself and laugh as I jab my finger at the iPad. "And you are changing the subject. Why are you looking at houses in California?" My eyes flicker to the right hand side of the app, where a long string of homes are stored with little hearts. "And how long ago did you start looking?"

He shrugs, and the iPad is suddenly abandoned, face-up on the pillow. "I don't like being three time zones away from her," he mutters. "And northern California is south of Salish lands. We won't risk harming the tribe."

It isn't as though I haven't thought about it. At first, it felt freeing, sending our daughter across the country. That we were allowing her to grow up; to become someone who wasn't defined by us. But I'm lying to myself if I say I don't miss the still odd but welcome smell of a ham and cheese quiche baking for Sunday brunch; the sudden shock of an icy shower because she'd used up all the hot water not long ago; the sound of a key scrabbling in the lock unexpectedly, even the times it sent us diving off the bed at full speed for pajama pants and hair combs and our Kindles so that we would look as though we had been engaged in something else. Our lives and hearts are full and also extremely empty.

"Plus," Edward goes on, "I was thinking about what you were thinking about earlier. About Jasper, and—" he trails off and gulps.

I run a hand up his naked back.

"We're fully culpable in this, Carlisle," he says.

My mind reels. "We didn't vote for him," I reply at once.

"No of course not, but how many other people have we voted for? And how many times have we looked the other way? Pence is exactly the kind of person we both thought was right, for a long, long time. It's only when it became about us, and our daughter that any of this started to matter to us, and I just can't help wondering who got caught in the crossfire all those years that it didn't?"

I sit with that quietly. He's not wrong by any stretch of the imagination. It had seemed so much less consequential; so much more a thought exercise; so much easier until we fell in love and took custody of Edward's daughter. And then suddenly our lives were full of complication and so much more love but also so much more visible hate.

Edward nods. "I worry I might not have become more careful if it wasn't for her. For this. For us. And I don't know how to fix this, Carlisle. God knows I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to make the country safe for her again; how to undo what we helped do, here. But this part? The part where we're in New York and she's three thousand miles away? I can fix that."

I look again. The home in the listing he's opened has huge windows overlooking the woods which surround the home. The details say it's on almost eighty acres. "I like the river," I offer.

He jabs his finger at one photo. "The piano could go there. I might go back to composing." He looks up at me. "I'm sure there's work for you in San Jose."

I say nothing for a moment. I can imagine us there. I can imagine all of us, in fact. There's a wood stove with a pipe extending through the ceiling in the middle of the living room; Jasper materializes in front of it, strumming his guitar with Alice at his feet, leaning against him. The dining area would easily fit the hulking ten-seater mahogany table that my wife bought and which I put in storage the day we closed on the sale of the house in Forks. I can see Emmett sitting at it, putting together all four hundred plus Star Wars Lego sets simultaneously while Rosalie rolls her eyes from behind an issue of Car and Driver.

Edward rolls back over to gaze at me, one eyebrow cocked.

"You seriously think that would work."

I shrug. "It's been almost a decade and a half. They are used to this now."

"Uh, Emmett is still trying to figure out which one of us is the woman."

I can't help it; I chuckle. "Well, what's the new way they say this? 'That's a him problem'?'"

Edward laughs, and I point to the acreage in the listing. "We can just build two more houses. I'd rather they be out of earshot anyway." As if to demonstrate, I press my lips to the middle of Edward's shoulder blades, just at the top of his T1, causing him to shiver.

"So…we do this."

I nod. "We do. It's time."

But again he takes a moment to answer., rolling over and staring again at the ceiling. I've known him for so long, seen him grow from the scared seventeen-year-old, to the tempestuous young man who ran away from me in his late twenties, to the man who married Isabella Swan, and the man who married me, this man, who will turn a hundred twenty in a few months. He has always taken time, like this, to unravel to the root of his fear. And sure enough, when he speaks, it's to admit exactly that.

"Is it weakness? That I don't want to be apart from her? I feel like I should be stronger than that."

"Edward Anthony," I say quietly. "There is nothing stronger than doing what you need to do to be with your family. Never, ever, ever."

Reaching over him, I place the iPad back on the nightstand and then engulf his torso in my arms, pulling his whole body against mine and burying my face in the crook of his clavicle. "I'll call the listing agent as soon as it's morning there," I whisper.

He makes a soft noise that sounds like an affirmation, relaxes into my embrace, and we lie that way until the sky grows light with dawn.

Historical Note:

On January 6, 2021, after being roused into action by the words of the sitting president, Donald J. Trump, in a rally on the Ellipse behind the White House, an angry mob marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and over 2,000 protesters overcame temporary barriers and Capitol police to push their way into the United States Capitol, supposedly in support of false claims that the 2020 election which elected Joseph Biden as the 46th president of the United States was stolen. Rioters smashed windows, stole furniture, and caused destruction to the property to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Offices of sitting senators and representatives were looted and vandalized by the mob, forcing both chambers of congress, who were in the process of the usually-symbolic certification of the electoral results, to go into lockdown. Four protestors and one officer from the Capitol Police died during the attack and 138 members of the Capitol and Metropolitan Police were injured.

The president was impeached by the House of Representatives one week later on charges of inciting an insurrection, making him the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, and to date, nearly 800 people have been charged with misdemeanors and felonies in connection with the attack.

As of this writing, the United States House Select Committee is underway in a multi-part trial arguing for the culpability of the then-sitting president in the insurrection.