Ten days after I woke from the change, Alice sat me down and carefully applied a faceful of "invalid" makeup so I could Skype with Charlie. So far I had broken every item of furniture and every appliance I put my hand to, and so Edward set up the computer and typed in the call for me before leaving the room. I had to work to remember what conversations with my father were supposed to feel like—that was a little sad. Everything about my former life seemed to be hidden under a thick fog, and simple things like our father-daughter dynamic suddenly felt cumbersome and unfamiliar. I had talking points written down on a piece of paper in Carlisle's copperplate hand; this was to ensure that the updates my father received from the clinic matched what I told him personally.
"Bells!" he exclaimed, settling in his computer chair. He was still in his uniform; it was early evening and he must have just gotten home. "Jesus, kiddo, you look...um, different. What's with the long radio silence?"
"Sorry, Dad," I said. "I've been pretty low-energy. I feel great today, though. Dr. Royard says the treatment's working better than he expected."
"I'm happy to hear it," he said, his voice wavering. But when he spoke again, his words were as stolid as if I were still at home, without any fake illness to speak of. "Your friends have been pestering me for news. I had Jake and the Clearwaters over to dinner last night. He was askin' after you."
"What'd you say?" I asked apprehensively. Jake. I loved Jake. I missed Jake. Jake was...mad at me. Probably.
"Told him I'd let him know when I heard from you. He's been so tore up these days, I don't even know...I worry about that kid. I know Harry and Sue love him to pieces but they don't exactly show it like normal people… He's got a lot on his plate. He's just been a wreck every time I've seen him. Him and Leah're just barely holding on."
If my heart could twist in sympathy, it would. As it was, I promised to give Jake a call as soon as I could. Carlisle agreed that it should be sooner rather than later; they were sure to draw their own conclusions if I didn't speak up soon, and perhaps some transparency might help our cause.
A few minutes later, I had Jake on the phone.
"Are you still you?" was his only greeting.
"Of course I am," I said, but he didn't believe me. The luscious smoothness of my new voice gave it away.
"God dammit," he swore in a furious bellow. "They motherfucking did it! Dammit, Bella! You fucking knew about the treaty! Now we have to come down there."
"No, you don't," I said, struggling to remain calm. "The Cullens didn't turn me."
"Your voice is different," he said accusingly. "You're not you anymore. Don't lie to me."
"I know," I sighed. "I did...I was turned. But it wasn't the Cullens."
"Oh yeah?" he said, laughing humorlessly. "Let me guess, you just tripped and fell on a nomad? A mysterious nomad the pack didn't even notice blowing through?"
"No," I said. It was now or never. This was the only chance we had of staying; I had to pray we'd get off on a technicality, although Esme had made that sound less than likely. "It was...it was my daughter."
There was a drawn-out silence on the other end. I heard heavy breathing, static crackles in the phone.
"Fuck you," said Jake coldly. I recoiled at the ugly words; they didn't square up with his sweet voice. "You know what? Fine. Don't fucking tell me the truth."
"Jake, I swear it," I insisted. "That's why I had to disappear for a while. I didn't know how to tell you—I didn't even know if I'd survive it! I got pregnant when I went away, when James was here. We had no way of knowing what a half-vampire pregnancy would be like—"
"You know what, Bella?" Jake cut in. "I don't want to hear about your imaginary monster baby. Fuck that." Then, angrily, "Are you for fucking real?"
"Jake, please, you have to believe this. No one meant to break the treaty. We didn't even know if I would survive, but I did, and she did, and then she bit me and changed me."
"So you got knocked up by your creepy vampire boyfriend, and then turned by your creepy monster offspring," said Jake. "Sounds like a whole lotta not my problem."
"You can't drive us off," I said. "It was nobody's fault, Jake. She's just a baby, she had no way of knowing what would happen. Please, Jake, please—"
"Why would I even believe you have a baby?" he demanded. "You've been gone for like, three minutes and now you're supposed to have a kid?"
"Oh, so now you're some big expert on half-vampire pregnancies?" I said, more meanly than I intended. I knew he had every reason to be angry, but I really just wanted my friend back.
"No," he said. "I can't say I'm an expert on monster pregnancies."
"She's not a monster, Jake," I said. "Don't call her that."
"Whatever," he said. "I have to tell Tadi about this."
"Jake, can't you just—"
But he'd already hung up.
An hour after my phone call to Jake, Carlisle asked the family to assemble in the living room.
"Tadinanefer has contacted me," he said gravely. "She tells me to expect the entire pack at sunrise. She also recommends that we collect our belongings before they get here, as we will not be afforded the opportunity once they arrive."
"I told Jake the treaty wasn't broken," I said angrily. "They have no right to do this. It wasn't one of you. The treaty never said anything about her." I jerked my chin at my daughter, who was slumbering peacefully on Edward's shoulder, drooling onto his shirt without a care in the world.
"Technically, the treaty includes all members of our family," said Edward gently, his hand rubbing rhythmic circles against our daughter's tiny back.
"If we're being technical, Esme told me the treaty just forbids any vampire with bad self-control," I pointed out. "You don't all have to leave."
"Now would not be a good time to split up," said Carlisle. "We should start packing at once. Alice, are you sure they won't be here till sunrise?"
"That's when my visions cut out," she said dully. "Well, come on, Jas. Let's go box up my sewing room." She trudged out of the room. Even her footsteps sounded defeated.
I didn't have much to pack and I couldn't trust myself not to mess all my belongings up anyway, so I took Laelia and followed Edward up to his room. I hadn't been up here much since I was alive, usually preferring to avoid the highly-breakable glass staircase to the second floor. Now I looked around, remembering the first time I'd seen it. My awe at his record collection, his well-stuffed bookcases. Jesus. We'd never even boinked in here. And now we never would.
"I'll have to leave most of these," he said, looking around. "I won't be able to fit most of them in my car." He sat in the middle of the floor and stared around him, trying to decide what to take and what to leave.
After a few minutes, realizing that Edward wanted to be alone with his musical memories, I went in search of other company. Jasper was in the garret talking Alice down from some sort of drastic measures that sounded like they involved setting fire to things. Rosalie was packing up all of her highly-breakable scientific whoosits and Emmett was in town taking care of the paperwork needed to shut down the kennel. This left Carlisle. When I poked my head into his office, he smiled and gestured that I should come in. I started out just watching him nest medical implements into boxes, but soon found myself blurting out every one of my fears and anxieties, right down to my certainty that I was destined to be a shit mother because I'd been turned too soon for the real mom stuff to kick in. If Esme had been around I would have said all this stuff to her, but Carlisle made a surprisingly good substitute.
"Let me get this straight: you're concerned that, without post-natal hormones giving you a push, you won't succeed as a mother?" he said after he'd sorted through my jumbled monologue. I nodded wordlessly. Carlisle considered a vacuum-packed container of full syringes and then regretfully laid them in a box that would be shipped after we'd gone. "Well," he said, "there is a great deal more to parenthood than hormones, Bella. Ask anyone who has ever adopted."
I looked up at him. Of course. "So you...you really feel like you're Edward's dad?" I said. "Even though you were already set in stone when he came to you?"
"Not only that, Edward was already a young man when I met him," said Carlisle. "He accepted Esme as a mother long before he accepted me as a father, because there was room in his understanding of the world for maternal love, but not paternal. In fact I think that he was my family long before I was his. Would you like to know how I learned that Edward is my son, truly, irreplaceably, eternally?"
"Tell me."
"When Edward left our home to live a more vampiric lifestyle—I'm told you've heard the story—I felt a hurricane of emotions unlike anything I'd ever experienced, in life or in death. Anger and disappointment, naturally, but even more powerfully I felt that I had failed him, that I had allowed him to go out into danger, that I had failed to protect him from bad choices and dangerous consequences. My sorrow was almost overwhelming during that period. My practice suffered. I became constantly irritable. Ask Esme sometime: I was not pleasant to live with during those years. I was desperate to find him, to shake some sense into him and then to never let him out of my sight again." He paused in his sorting to give me a long, searching glance over the edge of his box.
"Bella," he said, "not for one hairy instant did it even enter my mind that there was a single thing Edward could do that I would not forgive, unconditionally. It was a terrifying feeling. My heart had been hacked open and now a part of it is attached to him, forever, and nothing I can do will ever get it back. I have no pride where my son is concerned, no ego, no sense of self-preservation. For each of the others, at one time or another, I have felt this, and known at once the terrible burden and felicity of fatherhood. It has nothing whatever to do with genetics. It is not even related to my having sired him: I can assure you, my sire did not attempt to be a parent to me, and I have known enough of our kind to tell the difference between a coven and a family. I do understand your trepidation. This fear and uncertainty—it is unlikely ever to leave you completely. I do not know what it is like to be a human father. I never was one. But I have made peace with the fact that whatever fatherhood is to a living man, to me it is this burden of love and fear. Do you know this feeling?"
I didn't even have to think about it. Of course I knew the feeling.
"You have been frozen in a young woman's body," said Carlisle. "The transformation erases nearly all markers of prior pregnancy, just as it erases all childhood scars, all signs of human frailty. But it cannot erase what is in your mind, in your heart. So you feel like Laelia's mother, yet you still feel like the old Bella? Who's to say you should not be both? There is room inside you for many different identities; they need not be at war. You are you and you are Laelia's mother and you are Edward's partner and you are Alice's sister and you are Charlie's daughter and a thousand things besides. There is no test that you will someday take and pass and then say, 'Aha! This is it! I feel it now! Now I feel like a mother!' What you feel is already what motherhood feels like. Your role is to be the net beneath her as she struggles to fly in this world. Another word for this, Miss Swan, is love."
"But will it be enough?"
"My dear, since time began it has been all we have."
By three in the morning, Edward's car was neatly brimming with boxes of his favorite records, his old Dual, Laelia's stuffed animals and several outfits for her to grow into, and all the books I'd brought from home. Rosalie and Emmett had squeezed as much as they could into her 'Stang, and the Lexus held Alice's most sentimental fabrics and sewing supplies, along with whatever Carlisle and Jasper had been able to fit in alongside.
"We'll send for the rest as soon as we're settled," Carlisle was saying, stroking Alice's short hair as she huddled wordlessly in his arms. "You'll get your McCardells back, dearest, I'll make sure of it." Alice was apparently too torn up at the loss of whatever a "McCardell" was to say anything. She looked up suddenly, her eyes blank, then reached for Jasper's hand.
"They're here," she said. "This won't take long."
As she finished speaking, an unpleasantly doggy odor blew into the yard and the Cullens leapt to their feet, noses wrinkled. I understood their feelings exactly: this could only be the reek of werewolves. It was a lot more abrasive than the kennel-smell, which I was becoming quite used to in a Pavlovian sort of way. Laelia stirred in my arms but didn't wake, bless her little heart.
Four figures strolled into the yard. Three of them were massive, gray wolves. I could tell immediately which one was Jake: I would have recognized those eyes anywhere. At the fore was a well-built black woman with long, fluffy hair floating around her face like a cloud. Her full lips were set firmly, her slanting black eyes wary. She didn't look cruel or malicious, but she looked determined.
"Carlisle," she said, striding forward to shake Carlisle's hand while the wolves stayed back. "I appreciate your cooperation. We will not forget this."
"Tadinanefer," said Carlisle, inclining his head. "We don't wish to fight, and as you can see we are prepared to go at once. But please consider, before we part ways: the treaty forbids the turning of humans by any member of our family. But I think that even you will admit that there are certain extenuating circumstances at play here." He gestured to me and I stepped forward, the other Cullens forming a phalanx around me and the baby. Tadi stared down dispassionately at Laelia, who calmly filled her diaper and then smiled in her sleep.
"This would be the half-child?"
"Yes," said Carlisle. "As you can see, her mother, only a newborn herself, is well in check. Already once she has scented the blood of a human, by accident; no harm came to that human, both because of our vigilance and Bella's stern sense of self-discipline. We know also what to expect in the way of behavioral patterns as the infant grows older. You must know that it was Laelia who turned Bella. An accident, nothing more. A breaking of the word of the law, not the spirit. There is no reason for us to depart in such haste."
"I am sorry, Carlisle, but I do not see it that way," said Tadi. "Before, the youth of the big one was enough to justify your temporary departure, and he was no longer even a proper newborn. Now you ask me to allow both a true newborn vampire and a potentially dangerous halfling infant to stay?"
"Laelia's not dangerous," I said, stung. Tadi turned to look at me unblinkingly. Without meaning to, I flinched under her iron-hard gaze. Good god, if she and Esme ever got into an argument the world would end.
"She has already turned one without meaning to," she said, her tone even and her poise unbroken. "What guarantee can you make that she will never turn another, that she will never once err as a toddler, as a youth? This is not a punishment, child. It is a precaution." She turned back to Carlisle. "We have descendants here. We have ties to this community. When the child and the baby are older, more settled, you may return. This is in full accordance with the treaty. Both the letter and the spirit. Will you go?"
Carlisle looked at me and Edward apologetically. "We will go."
The wolves watched us pack ourselves into the three cars. I let Edward handle all the complicated baby-seat straps. The Jake-wolf was staring at me; when I caught his eye, he bowed his head and turned away, his tail drooping.
Slowly and carefully, so that no one would think I meant him harm, I walked over to him and placed my hand gently on his shoulder blade. I had about a hundred feelings clamoring for my attention right now. Mostly, I was furious that my friend hadn't done more to stop this. But I was also thinking of what Carlisle had said, that I could be many things at once. I could be seething with self-righteous fury and still love Jake, even knowing he'd written me off, even knowing my friendship meant nothing to him now that I'd changed. Whatever his faults, however much I hated this betrayal, I didn't want to part in anger. Because I did still care for him. I always would.
At my touch, he slumped to the ground, his tail tucked. I crouched beside him; the other two wolves advanced a few steps but didn't attack.
"You're still my friend, Jake," I whispered, "even if I'm not still yours." Then I flew back to Edward's car and got in, and we peeled out of the driveway, one car after another. I looked back and saw Jake, huge and human and huddled on the ground, surrounded by giant gray wolves. I didn't look back again.
We drove all morning, heading north. When we stopped for a rest break (mainly for Laelia's benefit, since she was hungry and required a diaper change), Alice phoned Esme. We all heard both sides of the conversation, since Alice didn't leave earshot. We heard Esme inviting us to come to Ireland, explaining that she couldn't leave yet and that we would be as safe there as anywhere. We spent the rest of the day making plans. Carlisle had to charter a small plane, since there was no possibility of me stepping foot on a commercial flight packed with steaming tasty humans. Then Jasper had to work some kind of red-tape magic to make it legal for him to pilot, since he was the only one who knew how to operate the type of plane available to charter. Then we had to load up and do the whole hurry-up-and-wait on the tarmac at Vancouver International. Finally we made it into the air, where Laelia proceeded to scream bloody murder for twelve hours straight because her ears hurt. Jasper couldn't make her feel better and fly the plane. All in all, not one of our better days.
We touched down at Belfast International two midnights after we'd left Forks, and then it was time for me to hide behind dark glasses, bury foam-wrapped lead balls in my ears, wedge cotton balls soaked in kerosene as far up my nostrils as they would go and get pushed through customs in a wheelchair. Even with the kerosene, I didn't dare take a breath the whole time, which was fine since the phony paperwork Jasper'd finagled for me had me down as a blind deaf-mute. This was the riskiest part of the whole trip, and even though we'd taken care to schedule our landing for a time when there wouldn't be too many people around, I knew that if I didn't keep a tight lid on my self control I'd put the whole airport in danger. Luckily, with the kerosene, lead earplugs and my eyes taped shut under dark glasses, I was never more than vaguely aware of the humans surrounding me. All the same, I'd never been so relieved as I was when we found Esme waiting for us outside, arrangements already made to pick up our luggage the following morning. We were all so antsy from the journey that it was a relief to run all the way across the north of Ireland, through Glenveagh National Park and more than one bog, avoiding human settlements. Eventually we found ourselves on a series of ferries that got us to Oileáin Aonair, Siobhan's home in the North Atlantic. The others talked as we ran, but I tuned them out and just cuddled Laelia quietly. She was completely tuckered out, her hair plastered to her face and neck with sweat and tears. I held her hands and watched her dream.
I'd never been so far from home.
I know a lot of people complain that the packs overstep the bounds of the treaty by failing to make allowances for humans who want to be turned, as Bella did. And to a small extent I agree: it's Bella's body and her choice. And no one in canon is seriously claiming that Bella can't make that choice, only that she can't make that choice and remain in Forks. But when people (such as Bella herself) argue that Bella's choice to be turned is none of the packs' goddamned business, and that this technical violation of the treaty is not in fact grounds for the packs to attack, all I can say is hey, do you not understand how treaties work? If the packs hear Bella's case and wish to amend the treaty, they can; but they are by no means required to do so just because Bella wants to have her cake and eat it too.
In fact, I don't think the packs should make an exception for Bella. In the books, the treaty is worded to protect individual humans from being bitten by the Cullens; it is also apparently intended to keep the wolf gene in check, by keeping the Cullens far from the rez. But there is (or should be) a third aspect to this agreement: the Quileutes and the residents of Forks will be in terrible danger if the Cullens create a newborn and allow that newborn to remain in the area. Even if that newborn is someone like Bella who wanted this, even if that newborn knew what she was getting into. So I've reworked the treaty somewhat to be more encompassing: Instead of a simple ban on biting humans or entering the rez, the treaty prohibits the proximity of any vampire lacking self-control. A lack of self-control will be assumed if a vampire bites a human without that human's informed consent, or if the Cullens fail to honor the geographical boundaries laid out in the treaty; lack of self-control will also be assumed in vampires of extreme youth, or who have given up human blood only very recently. This treaty makes more sense to me than the loosey-goosey pinky swear in the books, and it establishes fairly concretely that the Cullens have no business staying in Forks while Bella learns control.