Chapter summary: Rescuing a fragile human through a wolf can leave clothes rather icky, especially if you're a vampire. What to do? But there's a whole new problem making the fashion handicap suddenly trivial. Time to hunt. Fourth time this week, dammit!

I woke up in my bed and felt the warmth of the stove from the kitchen fill the whole house. Pa was cooking a stew or a soup. It smelled incredibly good. I sighed with relief. I couldn't believe how vivid the dream was that I had last night: it left me exhausted. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as I called out: "Pa? You would not believe the nightmare I had last night!"

Then things started not to add up. My throat felt really sore. I wasn't wearing my nighty — I wasn't wearing any clothes! — and my hands and arms felt like ice; my legs were cold, very cold, too. I was wearing a bonnet that was wet and warm. I had never in my life worn a bonnet. Also, my nethers were covered with a cloth that was wet and warm, too.

Oh, God! I really hoped I hadn't embarrassed myself last night, but the dream wasn't that sort of dream. The last time I had that sort of dream, Ma was still here. I helped her with laundry that day, feeling mortified with shame and with the extra work I had caused her.

I took my hands away from my eyes, and they came to rest on a blanket. I was bundled up in it like a mummy. That was strange...

But all of these details lost their significance very quickly when I registered what greeted my eyes.

"Oh, really? I'd be very interested to hear about it." Musical voice. White face. Eyes the color of apple juice, long flowing hair the color of straw.

Rosalie.

I shut my eyes and turned away. Oh God, oh God, oh God! Please, just make this go away. Please! I tried to control my breathing; I was hyperventilating. I couldn't stop gasping even after a few seconds of trying to calm myself, but Rosalie continued speaking, either expecting or ignoring my reaction, or, probably, not caring: "But it didn't sound like you were having nightmares last night. You sounded like you enjoyed taking care of your horse ... Dolly, was it? You sounded like you admired Edward's hand writing. And he got you flowers, did he? You liked those. Or was it you admired the giver? You know that you talk in your sleep, don't you? It made the night rather entertaining for me, much more so than how I expected it to be."

I hadn't thought, after what I first saw, that my day could have gotten worse than that. It turns out I was wrong. I covered my face with my arm, and I found out, much to my disappointment, that I couldn't die of embarrassment. What made things even worse was that somehow I knew that right now was just the beginning, and things were only going to get worse. I couldn't imagine living through that. But I suddenly realized I had an out.

"Look, you've said you were going to kill me, right? Would you please do that right now?" I spoke as distinctly as I could, as I was still turned away and was covering my face with everything I could find.

It was quiet for one second; I could almost hear the wheels turning in Rosalie's head. Oops! maybe she was going to take me up on my offer. Suddenly, my brilliant idea didn't seem all that smart. This wasn't going to help in my escape plans ...

When she spoke, she spoke quietly and calmly, but her voice rung with something like anger. "Last night, I had to save your life three times in less than one hour. I expended quite a bit of effort to get you, breathing, to this point. And, as much as I would love to take you right now, I am not going waste everything on a girl's silly whim."

Saved my life three times? I turned back to her to ask her about what happened, "Wh..." But my breath left me in a whoosh as if I had been punched in the stomach. For the second time today I had opened my eyes, and for the second time today what they saw shocked me beyond articulation. As predicted, my day did take an inexplicable turn for the worse.

Rosalie stood before before me. She wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing. Not one. I couldn't help but notice, incidentally, that she was a natural blond. I really, really, really, did not want to know this fact. Then I noticed after a time when I could gather my thoughts that I was staring at her open-mouthed. That's when I turned away again, squeezing my eyes shut as hard as I could possibly squeeze them, fully burying my head under my arms.

It didn't help. The image of her was burned into my retinae. All the things I had thought about her weren't exactly wrong, but they paled in comparison to the reality of what I just saw. She wasn't the personification of the Greek goddess Diana on Earth. No, Diana would kill to have a body like Rosalie's.

I thanked God that, even though I was in a similar state of undress, at least my modesty was wrapped in a blanket, first of all, and, second of all, modesty aside, I was thankful that I was covered, because if I was standing beside her in a similar state of undress, I would have saved her the trouble of killing me. If she wouldn't have killed me, my shame would have done the job. I was nothing next to her. Nothing.

After I worked on my breathing, again, I found I had to ask a different question than the one I was going to ask. "What happened to our clothes?"

"Ah, yes: that." She sounded annoyed. "First you decide to be wolf pack food, then you decide to stop breathing and stop your heart after going for a swim in the Belle Fourche, and then you decide to be so tantalizingly tempting with the taste of you in your mouth while I'm breathing air back into your lungs as you're wearing those clothes covered in wolf blood. Do you know how fortunate you are I had just found this abandoned cabin and had started a fire? I knew you would be cold, but I didn't expect you would be going for a swim. What is it with you? Are you Fortuna herself? First you conjure us, then the cold and hungry wolves, then this cabin. What will you bring forth next?"

What? "Ummm," I hummed into my pillow, "I really don't..." I started helpfully, but she continued, ignoring me.

"Much as I tried only to push air into you as I massaged your heart, still some of your saliva entered my mouth. I had to leave and breath clean air three times during your little resurrection. Each time it got harder. You couldn't comprehend what a relief it was, the sound of your cough, your heart restarting, and the air filling your lungs from the movement of your diaphragm. But then there were your clothes, reddened with blood as if you were my own little present, gift-wrapped. It was almost too much! Clothes covered in blood proved to be very distracting for me, so I had to get rid of them. The remaining shreds of them are by now miles downstream in the river you so inadvisably decided to dive into."

"I didn't decide to..." I tried to work in a word edgewise.

It wasn't working: "I am trying very hard not to be angry about that, and I am trying very hard not to be angry with you about that. Do you know my gown was a Chanel? Coco herself designed that pattern! Where am I going to find clothes like that in this backwater part of the country?"

She had to be making some kind of joke at my expense. Coco? Was she making up a silly name to shame me further in my embarrassment? But she didn't sound amused or silly. She sounded angry. I finally dared to turn my head and risked a peek at her through interlaced fingers, looking only at her face. She looked furious.

"Where?" she continued, "I'll tell you where! Nowhere! Canvas and denim and flannel is what you'll find here in Podunk U.S.A. Haute Couture? They don't even have ready-to-wear here! Has this area even moved into statehood? Or is it still a territory? God! I can't wait to get out of this stinking cabin filled with the stench of simmering pronghorn!" Here she waved at the stove, and my stomach clenched in sympathy. I groaned with pain. I don't remember the last time I had eaten. "I'm going to need to wash my hair at least three times to get thi..."

But then something happened. Rosalie looked like she was in the midst of her tirade, just warming up to the atrocities that had been heaped upon her by me and by rural American, when she suddenly stopped and stared at my midsection, her face frozen in blank shock. It looked like her pupils were completely dilated — in fear? — because her eyes had gone from yellow/gold with red-flecks to pitch black. She swayed in place and stumbled a step toward me.

I had never imagined that Rosalie, grace herself, would ever stumble. I looked at her in amazement as she came closer to me; she appeared to be moving in an hypnotic trance. But then she jerked back very quickly as if she were physically pulling herself away from me, swallowed hard, and startled me by throwing her head back and letting go with a sharp, keening scream. She ran out of the cabin in a blur, leaving the door wide open in her rush to escape. The winter air slammed into me even through I was bundled into the blanket.

I shook my head, not understanding a single thing that happened. First she was angry at me, then she ran away into the winter day stripped of her 'Coco' Chanel gown? What had scared her that much?

It looked like I'd better close the door, as I had no idea when Rosalie'd be back. If Rosalie'd be back. As if I'd be so lucky, I muttered to myself darkly as I unwrapped myself from my blanket and got up unsteadily from the bed. However, my own weakness from events from before — apparently I had nearly died three times recently — and the stomach cramps caused by hunger immediately knocked me over into a fetal ball by the bed, further exposing me as the cloth covering my midsection fell somewhere beside me.

"Ah!" The hunger cramps really hurt. It was really cold on the floor. And I was naked. But by this point I was way beyond caring. I crawled to the front door and shut it. A minor victory and a major relief.

I scootched away from the draft creeping from under the door and let the heat of the stove penetrate me again. Remembering my cold walk followed by a cold swim yesterday — was it yesterday? — the heat was a welcomed relief. I hoped Rosalie would be planning to keep me past summer, because an escape anytime soon was just too discouraging to consider right now. Then there was a problem of how to escape, as exposure to the elements seemed to be a major concern of the moment.

For me, that is. It didn't seem to affect Rosalie's decision one bit to bolt from this house all at once in her all together.

I knew I had to get up from the floor and back under the blanket and get something to eat and something to drink — I was parched! — and ... but I lay on the floor. I thought back over what just happened: Rosalie's rant and then her pupils widening in fear. What caused that? Suddenly I was transported to a memory back home.

...

I was thirteen years old. Ma had left years ago, and I was still going to school, so I was at home reading my history book, doing my homework on the Great War.

"Pa," I asked, "did you fight in the War?"

Pa looked at me and for a second I thought I had said something wrong. I thought he would respond the way he usually did, with silence. But after a time, he did speak, quietly. "Ya, Bella, I fought in the war." He looked away for a minute, then he looked back at me, waiting.

I looked down at my book, then I looked back at him. I guessed I had his permission. "What was it like? What was it really like?"

Pa got up. I thought he was leaving. Sometimes, those days, he went out alone into the surrounding woods for a ride on Patches. It still hurt him, even years later, Ma leaving us. But then he didn't head for the door: he went to his rolltop desk, dug through the ever-present pile of papers to some particular piece toward the bottom that he seemed to know by feel. It looked like a letter. He unfolded it and read it out to me. It was a poem, I guessed, because I could almost hear the rhyme and cadence. Pa had never read a poem to me before or since.

I don't remember particularly how it went, but it was something about the boys crying "The gas! The gas!" and one boy not getting his mask on in time and drowning in his own blood on a wagon they threw him on.

It was so sad! But Pa read it so calmly. I asked him if he wrote that. He told me no. I asked him if that really happened. "Ya, Bella, that happened sometimes."

"It didn't happen a lot?"

"No."

I thought, then: "Why not?"

He looked at me. "The gas was like the war, Bella. It didn't care if your name was Charlie Swan or Jerry Kraut. When the Jerries set out the mustard gas, it was just as likely to blow back on their boys as it was to kill ours."

"My history book doesn't talk about this. It just talks about guns and battles and trenches."

"There was that, too." Pa answered, nodding, "But mostly there was the cold and the waiting and the hunger and the boredom. It made the surprises all the more awful."

"Surprises?" I asked.

"Ya. The sudden gun-fights, the mustard gas ... but at least with those you had fair warning from the reports of shots or screaming. Sometimes you didn't have that. Like if a sniper targeted you, like one did to the boy on lookout right next to me. His name was Jerry, ironically: Jerry Jones. We used to tease him about his name all the time, ask him to tell us when his brothers were going to open up. He always laughed it off, telling us he'd check. There he was, one minute he was smoking a fag, the next minute the cigarette and half his face was gone. We both hit the dirt at the same time; I was fast. But the difference between us was that he never got up again."

He reflected on that close call for a minute and then continued. "There were other surprises, too, like the other gasses they used."

"What other gasses, Pa?"

"I don't rightly know what it was. The Jerries were always experimenting. But we were in a troop movement one day, and suddenly our point man stopped checking back. We threw on our masks — it was a reflex action for those who made it out — when we got to him, his name was Sean McClellan, he was sitting upright, mouth and eyes wide open in shock, his pupils were so wide they covered his irises. All you could see of his eyes was black, as if you were looking right into where his soul used to be. It was one of the scarier things I saw, because before his eyes were a pretty green. Sean was quite the looker. He would be the first to charm a French country girl right into his, ah, heart. So, seeing his eyes all black like that ..." Pa stopped and shook his head.

"What happened to Sean?"

Pa shrugged. "He was dead, of course."

I thought for a while. "Pa, why did you fight? Was it because of pro patria mori?" I asked him, remember the last words of the poem he read me from the motto that urged him and his friends into what he described.

He shook his head. "No, Bella, not even then. What does that history book call the War?"

"The Great War."

"What else?"

"The World War."

"What else?"

"The War to end all wars."

"That's why I fought, Bella. We've learned our lesson now. We better have. Never before was there a war like that. And there never will be again. We fought so that no generation after ours would ever fight again. It was my price to pay, and I paid it, so you won't have to. Your husband or your son won't have to come home in a box."

...

Gas? I took a tentative sniff. I didn't feel fear — that is, any more fear. My heart was hammering a mile a minute, but that was pretty much how it went now, anyway. I didn't smell anything odd either. But Pa didn't tell me if it had a smell, whatever it was. He didn't tell me if mustard gas had a smell, either, but I imagined that it would smell like rust and salt as my lungs filled with my blood.

Pa's stories! I shivered, perhaps it was a bit from the cold on the floor. Time to get up and eat something! my stomach pains and the aroma from the food reminded me of that. I got up, headed toward the bed to wrap myself back into the blanket, staggering as best I could.

On the way, my foot kicked the rag that had been my loincloth. I noticed that it was a ripped piece of my denim Levis. There was blood on it. Rosalie wiped the blood from herself with this rag? I asked myself. But there wasn't that much blood on it, and the blood looked relatively fresh, still a bit wet. There were the tell-tale spots that I recognized from my pads from each of the months past.

In all the excitement of the Platt/Hale/Cullen family and Lillian/Rosalie, I hadn't been keeping track of the days. My stomach cramps from today weren't just from hunger. My unusual irritability and proceeding exhaustion should have told me the obvious.

I had gotten my period today.

Chapter end notes:

The poem Charlie reads to Bella is "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen in response to the poem of the same name by Roman poet Horace used some 2000 years later to urge young men into World War I.

The first line reads: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
My translation: "It is sweet and right to die for one's country."

Owen fought and died in the Great War.