When You Love Someone
Chapter Six
Edward
Mason put Isabella Renee under house arrest after that. She goes from her room to school and back again. Sometimes, she doesn't even come to school, just waits until he brings home her books and the notes she missed instead. I know, because I have been spying on the both of the them for a week now, the same way that I used to spy on Bella before…
I can't help but grimace at the memory of what I did to her, the only memory my son has of me. I can't tell whether or not Mason has erased Isabella Renee's memory yet, but I'm beginning to doubt it if my daughter's persistent failing health is any measuring tool. She seems ill very often lately, getting pale and losing her appetite even for the small cups of blood Mason milks from their pet dog, a huge brute of a thing named Bear. Isabella lays around most of the time, sulking in her bed, but over what I cannot understand. Mason treats her well and gives her everything she wants, yet she cries when she's alone –sobs, really. It's as if she's lost someone, as if there has been a death of some sort.
It isn't until Jennifer, the woman who takes care of them, intervenes that I can, from my hiding place in Isabella's closet, discover the truth.
Jennifer is tall and thin, covered in an unfortunate sack of a dress and often tosses her mane of yellow hair. She's tanned as if she spends most of her time outside, and her hands are strong as if she gardens and weeds a lot. How does she know Bella? I cannot help but wonder. Strange I did not think until now that, of course, Bella already had friends before she moved to Forks. Who were they? What did they all think happened to her? Did any of them know about me? Who is Jennifer that Bella would see fit to entrust our children to her?
"For six days now," Jennifer fingers some of Isabella's locks behind her ear, "I have dreamed of a boy standing in the shadow of your heart, shivering and lost. What's his name?"
"Don't make me talk about it," Isabella pleads and my cold, dead heart crumbles inside me. A boy? Isabella Renee dates? Has crushes? It seems so wrong, so unbelievably wrong. I just found out about her, making her my baby girl, but now I have to realize that my baby girl isn't a baby.
I missed that part of her life.
I missed the days when she needed me to take care of her, missed the days when she needed to be protected, missed all the moments in her life I feel an overwhelming need to be part of now. It's too late. She's grown up. She's been lying in her bed for a week now lovesick over a boy.
I can kill him, the thought flies into my mind subtly, harmlessly. I can find out who he is and kill him, and then this entire situation will disappear…
…what did Jennifer mean when she said she dreamed of this?
"Holding in all this negative energy is really unhealthy for you, Bellie," she continues trying to coax Isabella into talking to her, and I can't help but find it cute that she addresses my daughter as "Bellie". Was that Bella's idea? I wish I could ask her. "Are you sure you don't want to talk about it?"
"I just can't!" Isabella insists, wiping tears from her cheeks. "It hurts too much! I feel like my heart is going to burst! I feel like huge pieces of me are missing, like someone stole them, and I can't take it! Is this what love is like? Is this what my mother felt when my dad left her?"
I flinch. I can't help it because Isabella is right. This must have been exactly the way Bella had felt when I did the Abominable Act. At least, this is how Mason remembers her feeling.
It takes ten more seconds before I am disturbed at the idea that my daughter loves someone the way that Bella once loved me. Again, I think to find this boy and kill him.
"I can't do this. I can't keep going on like this. Make it stop, please, Jennifer."
"Well, since you won't tell me his name," Jennifer sits her up and carefully helps her to her feet, "the only thing I can do is offer you some extra sweet lemonade with a side of my extra yummy lemon pie. Want some? It's on the table in the kitchen. Eat some before Mason gets home from work and there's nothing left! Go on. And Edward," she says only once Isabella is gone and far out of earshot, "you can stop hiding now. Come on out here."
Sheepishly, I do as she asks, feeling like a complete idiot, of course, all the while. But, more than anything else, I am curious. Jennifer dreamed of Isabella's mystery boy, and now she sensed my presence in Isabella's room? What kind of woman am I dealing with?
"I'm sorry," I feel obligated to apologize for my scandalous behavior. "I realize how very foolish I look hiding in Isabella's closet this way."
"Who am I to judge?" Jennifer shrugs and plants herself in one of Isabella's swivel chairs. "She's your daughter. If you want to spy on her, isn't that your fatherly right?"
And now I am in absolute awe.
"You know that I am Isabella and Mason's father?" I question her. How is she not having a meltdown at the sight of my seventeen year old self claiming to be the father of two fifteen year olds? "Did Bella tell you that?"
"She told me everything as it pertains to you, Edward Cullen," Jennifer confirmed with a quiet nod of her head. "I hope you don't mind, but she needed to trust someone, someone who wouldn't judge her, and I'm great with suspended judgment."
"So, you're Bella's friend?"
"We met in pre-school when she tripped over her shoelaces because she didn't know how to tie them. I knew how to tie shoes, so I showed her. We were inseparable ever after until she spent that year in Forks and came back pregnant."
The amusement I had felt at the anecdote quickly lifts away in light of another question I have yet to ask.
"Jennifer, what happened? After Bella found out about the twins, where did she go? What did she do? Why didn't she try to contact me?"
"She went to Phoenix," Jennifer shrugged as if that was the logical answer. "She needed to clear her head. Her mom, of course, quickly stopped traveling with Phil, her stepfather –did you know about him? –to help her, but Bella being Bella knew that Renee wasn't the motherly type and hated being cooped up in the house with her. So, again, Bella left and went back to Forks where she had the twins."
"She wasn't supposed to live through that," I almost whispered the scary truth. "She was supposed to die that day, Jennifer. If you really do know all about me, then surely you know what I am."
"A vampire," Jennifer nodded –not with distaste, though there is a bitter aura of displeasure that is unmistakable. "Yes, I didn't need Bella to tell me that. With the way she went on and on about you, I knew she must've been under a spell of some sort, and I found out soon that she was under your spell: the spell of an incubus."
And there is that bitter displeasure. I can't help but wince with the sting of it.
"Still, I can't be angry with you. You being what you are allowed me to finally be truthful with Bella about what I am."
"Excuse me?" It never crossed my mind in all this time I have known Jennifer existed that she can possibly be anything other than human. Honestly, what else can she be? She smells human, looks human…
And that's when the door to the room shuts softly behind me without anyone touching it. That is when I dare to understand.
"Are you a witch, Jennifer?"
"A good one, though. Don't worry," she winks in a way I know means she's good to everyone except vampires who inadvertently kill her best friend. "I'm the one who cast a spell to save Bella, but, novice witch that I was when she had the twins, I didn't know to cover certain bases of her well-being.
"You see, spells are tricky; it's like they don't want to be cast. If the wording isn't perfect so that there are no loopholes, the desired result will only be partial, temporary, like what happened to Bella. I cast a spell that she would outlive the twins' birth, but I didn't put a time limit on how long her life after would be, leaving it open ended to Fate. And I'm sorry," Jennifer dips her head in true, silent grief. "I wish I had known better, but…oh, well. Spilled milk, I guess."
"What happened?"
"When you and Bella…you know…created Mason and Isabella Renee –some of your venom went inside of her, like a parasite taking a new host."
Again, I winced at the truth. I hurt my Bella. Every moment I had ever shared with her, I had always hurt her, had always put her life in peril. Small wonder my son hated me. In times like this, I hated myself, too.
"In a way, you did her a favor," Jennifer continues. "Your venom mutated her genetic makeup enough to help her carry the twins to full term and have them traditionally. Compounded with my spell, she had a safe if somewhat especially trying delivery without the gore. You know –the bit about vampire babies chewing their way out? Bella didn't go through that because of you and me. It was only after the twins were born that everything fell apart. My spell was null and void. By surviving one second after the birth she had fulfilled it, making it useless, and that venom you gave her? It started eating at her from the inside out in a form very close to cancer, all around her heart."
How ironic. How horribly ironic.
"I stayed with her for the summer at Mr. Swan's house when Renee left, but then school started and I had to go to college. We kept in touch, of course. I came back to see the babies baptized and me named godmother. She named this guy as godfather, a friend of hers named Jacob Black. You know about him?"
If I had blood, it would be boiling.
"She did what?"
"He's a wolf. Literally, a shape shifter. I told her that was risky with the way those animals fail to control their tempers, and not to mention it's unlucky to make wolves any type of guardian. They're naturally tricksters and harbingers of disaster. Doesn't everyone know that? She wouldn't listen, though, and Jacob Black was all too eager to be the twin's daddy-figure anyway. He loved Bella. You know that, though, don't you?"
"I never thought it would be an issue," I tell the empty truth, the pain I have brought on myself. "I thought I would always be there to keep them apart."
"I don't know what happened between them, if anything happened between them at all. All I know is she named him godfather and me godmother on the twin's first birthdays, and the year after that, neither of us knew where she was. She disappeared, none of us knows where. The next time I saw her, the twins were four years old and she was all bones, her hair chopped off, and your cancerous venom eating her to death. She came here and begged me to take the twins. Why not your parents, I asked? No, she said, because they wouldn't understand if the twins wanted blood instead of cereal for breakfast. What about Jacob, I asked? No, she said, but she didn't give a reason for that one. As you can see, I agreed to take the children. Renee and Mr. Swan see them for Christmas and a few Thanksgivings depending on their schedules."
"And what about Bella?" I can't hide how irrelevant all other information is to me. "What became of her? Where did she go? What was the last news you heard about her?"
"She gave me the number of the place where she would be staying for round-the-clock treatment," Jennifer tells me quietly, and already I know I don't really want to hear what she's about to say. "I called for her because it was Easter and I wanted to know if she could come up here to dye eggs with the kids. They missed her so much, you see. But the lady that answered the phone told me there was no one in the place registered under the name Isabella Swan and there never had been."
"Bella lied?"
"Apparently. The question is, why? Renee and Mr. Swan had fake numbers, too. We don't know what the real story is or where Bella really went. Why would she lie to the people who loved her? I don't get it. If she's dead, I want to know she's dead. At least that puts an end to it, but this unknowing is torture. She could be anywhere…or nowhere at all. We don't know."
"Does Jacob Black know?"
"Jacob Black?" Jennifer frowns at me. "Oh, you don't know? He's dead. Yeah, some vampire chick named Victoria tore him to shreds."