Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer.
Recap: Last time, Raquel visits Bella in Forks, where they run into Raquel's neighbor Ben, who inadvertently lets everyone at the diner know that she and Bella are a thing; he is also approached by Angela, still crushing on him after all these years. At Thanksgiving dinner in LaPush, Seth falls hard for Raquel, and Billy and Sue seem amenable to letting Bella interview Old Quil. On a hike the next day, Jacob falls ill, and then refuses to return Bella's calls. Bella fulfills her chaperoning duties at the Holiday Hop, where she has an encounter with a drunken Justin Stanley and dances with Edward, who pleads with her to stop running from him.
The bits of French and Spanish are translated at the end. And if you haven't seen "Casablanca," spoiler alert (and go watch it ASAP!).
Thanks, as always, to Camilla10 and Mr. Price. And thanks to Gingerandgreen for her lovely rec on Rob Attack.
TaWfI is up for fic of the week at the Lemonade Stand, thanks to evilnat. The link to vote is on my profile page.
Chapter 9: Iamundernodisguise
Edward left shortly after we danced. I tried not to watch, but it was hard not to notice the four Cullens' departure, what with Alice gesticulating wildly, even angrily, in front of a blank-faced Edward. Perhaps he was making his sister leave the dance early. I spent a restless night at Angela's house wondering yet again if I should tell him to stop meeting me.
When we encountered each other the next day at church, it was as if Edward had said nothing unusual to me. He and I exchanged inanities along with handshakes as Alice watched. But when I jogged up to him as he waited on the trail that afternoon, I was surprised to see an odd, yet familiar, expression on his face.
"Do you smell something?" I blurted out, skipping the civilities. It wasn't quite the look he got when we first met, when it seemed that something about me nauseated him, but it was close.
He startled at my question. "Yes, something unpleasant. Do you as well?"
I breathed in deeply and shook my head. "No, but a friend who was here recently said he smelled a horrible stench around here. He couldn't pinpoint what it was." And of course, Jacob hadn't been back since then, or even called me since Thanksgiving weekend. I frowned and glanced over my shoulder back into my yard. "He did say it wasn't my compost pile."
"No, it's nothing to do with you," Edward said, sounding offended. "It smells like a wet dog that's been sprayed by skunk, but greatly magnified. It's revolting. Will you excuse me for a second?"
He pulled out a cellphone and sent a text, his fingers tap-dancing on the little keyboard, while I wondered what was wrong with my sense of smell. I seemed to be able to perceive Edward's own scent quite well when I had the opportunity to be close enough to him, though.
"Shall we?" Edward asked. He slipped his phone back onto a pocket of his track pants, and took off.
To be honest, I was disappointed that he said nothing more, even though I told myself I shouldn't be. I shouldn't want him to make declarations to me, to beg me not to run away from him.
On our long run, we always went through a patch of clear-cut slash that looked the same now on the cusp of winter as it had at the end of summer. The trunks and wood debris were packed so tightly together that nothing could grow, and the forest couldn't regenerate. Yes, I ran past a fucking metaphor for my romantic life every week.
My pace was sluggish, and Edward asked about it as we walked through my yard at the end of our run.
"I spent the night at Ms. Weber's house, and her mattress is a lot softer than my futon, so I didn't sleep well," I said, which had the virtue of being true, if not the complete truth. "You know how that is."
"Oh," he said, though he obviously had no idea what I was talking about. Which made sense, because 17-year-olds slept like the dead. Or most of them did – for years after Renee became sick, I slept uneasily, unable to stop listening for vomiting or falling or pain.
"I have a question today," I said after a moment of silence. "Favorite movie?"
"'Casablanca.'"
I grinned, delighted to have an opportunity to tease him. "So I get the cliché girly Austen novel, and you get the cliché film classic." I grabbed onto the porch railing so I could do a quad stretch.
"You don't approve?" He raised an eyebrow as I pulled my right foot up to touch my butt.
"It's a terrific movie, with lovely cinematography," I conceded. Like every other college student I had seen the movie at a campus film society showing. "But the ending's such a cop-out because way back then they couldn't have a married woman leave her husband for another man. You're supposed to think that Rick and Ilsa are being all high-minded, but what's happening is that instead of one person being unhappy, three are. What?" I said, seeing his dubious expression. "You don't think her husband is smart enough to know that Ingrid Bergman really wants to be with Humphrey Bogart?"
"But if she stayed, their happiness would be tainted by guilt."
"What's worse: no happiness, or guilty happiness?"
I meant it as a rhetorical question, but he answered, "The warm glow of rectitude will have to suffice for some people."
"So you think it's romantic, the ending." I said, even though I wasn't sure he believed what he was saying – there was something off in his tone.
"Not romantic, no, but noble," he answered. "The husband is fighting the Nazis, after all. Rick and Ilsa are sacrificing their love for a worthy cause." Yes, his voice was strangely flat.
I grunted as I changed legs. Were we still talking about "Casablanca"? I certainly wasn't. "Leaving someone you love is neither romantic nor noble. It's cowardly." My voice was harsh, and he didn't press.
"What's your favorite?" he asked instead.
"No, wait, I've been going on and on about my problems with 'Casablanca' and you haven't told me what you like about it."
"The cinematography is lovely," he said, parroting my words from before, "and so is Ingrid Bergman. She reminds me of you."
I didn't respond to that, because, once more, I shouldn't, and there was a silence that threatened to become awkward. I went onto the porch to grab the fleece I had started hanging on a nail beside the door so that my visible shivering wouldn't put an early end to our conversations. I had stopped offering him something to wear because he always refused.
"So, what is your favorite movie?" he asked finally.
"Hmm, it's a movie you're too young to have seen," I said with an emphasis on the adjective in that sentence, a reminder to him that he shouldn't be complimenting me by comparing me to gorgeous long-ago movie stars. "It came out a few years ago, and Esme and Carlisle are too responsible to have let you seen an R-rated movie then."
"Try me," he challenged me, seeming to find this amusing.
"It's called 'In the Loop.' It's a satire sort of about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and it has marvelous word play and the language … well, the language is filthy, but it's so clever that I loved it."
"I'll be sure to look for it," he said blandly.
"Wait, don't tell Esme and Carlisle I suggested it," I said, horrified by the possibility.
"Now that I'm 17 nobody will see anything wrong in my watching an R movie," he said, then laughed. He was such a bullshit artist.
"Time to go home, Edward," I said, making shooing gestures with my hands. He laughed again and loped away.
As he left, I realized that I had answered my own rhetorical question. I had to opt for no happiness – or rather, these few moments of snatched happiness – over guilty happiness. And, one day, like Rick and Ilsa, I would have to convince myself that I was right.
I decided that I didn't have to do that quite yet. And I wondered what Rick and Ilsa did after the war.
Bruce Clapp showed up in my classroom one day during my prep period, now devoted to wrapping up the semester and getting grades ready – though even before they took the test, I knew that Alice and Gracie Alvarez would get A's and Edward an A-minus, because of his dearth of participation points – to ask me to go easy on Justin Stanley.
"That's not fair to the other students, as you know," I said, standing up from my desk. Bruce had declined to sit, and I was uncomfortable with the height disparity. "And if I did it for him, why wouldn't I do it for the members of the volleyball team? Or the soccer team?"
"Everyone on the soccer team got deported," Bruce said.
I stared at him reprovingly. He was right - a big Border Patrol raid recently had emptied desks throughout the school - but he knew that wasn't the point, and I told him so.
"Look, not playing isn't going to improve Justin's grades," Bruce argued.
"You know, his brain might benefit from a break from the constant concussions." Bruce let out a sound of annoyance and I went on, "All right, I agree, he'd just use the time for sexting and getting drunk. But whether he plays should be up to Bob, not me."
Bruce rubbed his face with a meaty hand. "The problem with that is Bob Banner is a new, nervous principal and so is a stickler for the rules right now."
"That's Justin's problem, not mine," I said.
"No, if we don't win any games, that's my problem," Bruce muttered.
Sometimes it seemed to me that Edward and I were involved in a courtship from 100 years ago: two people who were attracted to each other but couldn't act on it because of society's rules, so instead of exploring each other's bodies, we explored minds. We talked about literature and movies, but also politics and history – Edward had a lot to say about the New Deal, for some reason. We even talked about ethical questions sometimes, like the lifeboat problem, though Edward had short-circuited that one by simply saying that he'd jump out of the overcrowded lifeboat first, even if it was filled with Nazi war criminals and future serial killers.
It turned out that Raquel was having an old-fashioned courtship of her own, of sorts. Our late-night calls became increasingly dominated by Seth. I didn't point out to Raquel that she was obsessing about him far more than she had any of her hookups in Tucson or Seattle, because she was already uneasy enough about her feelings for a high school student. Besides, I was someone living in a glass house when it came to younger men.
"Seth showed me some of his drawings on Sunday," she said one night. Although she had forbidden him to skip school in order to see her, she allowed him to stay with her on the weekends. They would run together in Discovery Park or on the Burke-Gilman Trail, and he kept up with her easily despite his lack of training - another freakishly fast resident of the Greater Forks area.
"Are they good?"
"Yeah," she said, sounding a little surprised, but also pleased. "He's got a lot to learn, but he has a fine eye."
"What does he draw – guys playing football?" I asked as I marked tests. The dictionary should just change the spelling of "minuscule," because it was impossible to get the correct version into kids' heads.
"Wolves."
"Wolves? Like real wolves?"
"Like really big wolves," Raquel said. "But they are a Quileute symbol, so it's, you know, organic, not like cartoon fantasy."
"Sure, but I guess they're not drawn from life."
"God, I'd hope not," she said. "Seth looks like a 25-year-old linebacker, but he really is a teenager in a lot of ways. He's … innocent."
That was an interesting choice of words. "You mean, innocent as in … innocent?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. And is this a condition that you're going to, um, change?"
She sighed into the phone. "He says he wants me to really know him first," she said. "And he wants me to be in love with him."
"That's kind of romantic."
"That's kind of frustrating." She huffed. "I think he would do it if I pushed him, but that would make me an asshole, to pressure him into something he isn't ready for."
"Just be careful when the time comes," I said, seeing a way I could tease her without being a hypocrite. "I don't remember if I told you this, but when Jacob came to talk to my class, one of his stories was about a Quileute woman giving birth to a litter of puppies."
"Yuck!" Raquel squeaked.
"That's the legend of their tribe."
"Okay," she said, laughing weakly, "contraception for the win. But speaking of legends of the tribe, Seth asked me never to get into a car with the Cullens again. Not that I would …" I could almost hear her shudder.
"Is that because of their boundary dispute or whatever that they were talking about at Thanksgiving?" I asked, skeptical.
"That's part of it, but Seth wasn't really specific. He just said that they were dangerous. And that I should tell you to stay away from them too."
I definitely needed to ask Edward sometime what was the deal with his family and the Quileute. But the idea that I would – that I could – keep away from him … yeah, good luck with that, as I had discovered. "Tell Seth thanks, but Alice and Edward are just kids in my class, and they're not dangerous," I said, but even as the words passed my lips, I felt guilty for saying that Edward was just a kid.
As Christmas break neared, I skipped yoga and cooking in favor of test-marking and defrosted lentil soup with a side of heirloom apples. But I refused to give up my runs with Edward, even when I came down with a cold on the last day before vacation.
Instead of saying hello when I saw him on the trail, I sneezed.
"You're ill," he said as I sneezed again.
"Just a mild cold," I said. "It's not in my chest."
"Are you often ill?" he asked, raking a hand through his hair. He was more agitated than I had seen him for a while.
"Nah. I've been really lucky.'" I rapped on a young fir with my knuckles. "Which means that I'll be struck down by something major and lethal one day."
"That's supposed to be reassuring?"
"No, it's not." I looked at him curiously. Teenagers usually thought they were immortal – though again, my circumstances had made me an exception to that rule. "But that is life. Anyway, see if you can keep up with a sick person!" And off I ran.
It took a few seconds for me to realize that he wasn't following me. I turned around and jogged back to find him crouched over his shoe.
"Sorry," he said, "I needed to tie this lace." He stood up and stepped closer to me, so close that I could touch him if I wanted to be inappropriate, close enough that I could smell not sweat, since he didn't seem to sweat, but cologne or shower gel or whatever he used. I couldn't identify it, but it was intoxicating.
"And you should let me go first," he murmured, his lips close enough to me that I could feel the faint brush of air accompanying his words. "Don't run away from me."
"Okay," I said, compliant and blinking, and he was off on the trail ahead of me. I shook the fog from my head and followed.
As always, we stopped by my porch at the end. It had rained earlier in the day, and there was a small puddle by the stairs, mute witness to the hours we had spent talking and wearing down the grass there.
"What are you doing for the break?" I asked.
"It's up in the air, partly because of Carlisle's schedule at the hospital," he said. "Some of us, at least, will go to British Columbia, to Whistler and around there." For a moment, I contemplated how the Cullens must look on skis. Like impossibly graceful acrobats whooshing down the black diamonds, no doubt.
"Is Raquel taking you to France?" he asked.
"Oh, you remember that!" I said, surprised that he had taken Raquel's offhand comment seriously. "No, of course not - Raquel's brother Craig got the braces he really needs with the money from that painting. The Tohono O'odham casino payments are ridiculously small. Anyway, I'm going to Tucson with Raquel and to Laconia. Laconia's the sunniest place on earth, or rather Yuma is, and that's close enough."
He winced. "And this is one of the rainiest," he said, almost apologetically.
"It has its charms." And you are the main one, I didn't say. I wished I could hug him, have a touch to tide me over the next two weeks without him. "I'll miss –" I stopped what was becoming a too-frank goodbye. "Have a good vacation," I said instead, lamely.
He watched me steadily as I flailed. "Shall I carry you over this puddle?" he asked softly. "I don't have a cape but –"
"Yes," I interrupted him. I had crossed so many lines with this boy-man, why not this one? An instant later he had lifted me up, curling me against his chest, warm and sweaty pressed to cold and dry, like some mixed-up version of yin and yang.
But definitely male and female.
His jump was smooth and easy and effortless, and my heartbeat was louder than his landing on the wood floor of the porch. He let me down and I felt pinned in place as much by his gaze as by his hands trailing down my arms.
"A très bientôt, Miss Swan," he said. "Bonnes vacances." I tried not to sway as he moved away, but damn, his French got me every time.
And then I sneezed.
Raquel was waiting for me in a food court at Sea-Tac the next day, and next to her was a guy who looked like a 25-year-old linebacker and was gazing at her with what could only be described as adoration.
"Seth! I am so not surprised to see you here," I told him. I gave him a hug and he tentatively squeezed me back. It was akin to being embraced by a bear, he was so big and warm. He even smelled like the woods.
"So, Bella, what are you planning to do in Tucson?" Raquel asked in an overly bright tone after we settled at a table with coffees, and for me, a large cup of rosehip tea to battle my cold. We had a few minutes before we had to head to the security line.
I looked at her, baffled. She knew all this. "I'm going to hang out with you, see our friends."
"Are you going to see any old professors?" she asked significantly.
Oh, the light bulb switched on. "I was planning to see Professor Robles. I was going to talk with her about recording Old Quil, Mr. Ateara, I mean." I stopped, because Seth was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Raquel made circles with her hands to urge me on. "But I don't know, since I haven't gotten permission to do it yet, and Jacob won't talk to me, and Billy keeps saying I have to be patient."
"Look," Seth burst out, "it's not just up to me, it's up to the tribal council and the – - and some other people and there's been a lot of arguing about it ..." he trailed off as Raquel looked increasingly annoyed.
"Calm down, Raquel," I told her, and turned to Seth. "Is there something I can do? Someone I can talk to? Did I do something wrong?"
"Yeah, Jacob -" Seth stopped, and yanked at his shirt collar. Jacob had done the same thing sometimes, I remembered, as if his clothes had suddenly become too tight. "Listen," Seth started again, "it's nothing that you've done wrong really, but we want to be careful about what we tell outsiders."
"I understand that," I said, and I glared at my best friend. "And Raquel does too. Probably more than I do." She nodded reluctantly and slumped back in her chair, and I looked again at Seth. "Please, reassure anyone who needs it that I won't write up any stories that you don't want published. I'm trying to be a linguist, not so much an anthropologist."
Of course, if a taboo story gave me the vital clue of Quileute's connection to the Paleosiberian language it split off from 15,000 years ago or some such, I'd be shit out of luck.
We were silent a moment. Someone was making an final boarding call announcement on the PA system and I tried to figure out the language. Japanese, I decided.
"I'll tell the – um, I'll tell people that," Seth said. "And I'll let you know."
"Okay," I said, "but no matter what you guys decide about Mr. Ateara, Seth, tell Jacob to call me and let me know how he is."
He nodded, but he was already back to adoring Raquel some more. I stood up and moved away to give them some privacy.
Raquel's brother Craig picked us up at the airport in Phoenix, showing off his new braces. He was in the reservation running program that Raquel was an alum of, and was a star on the high school Division IV cross-country race circuit. Raquel herself was a star in Sells for running on the Arizona team - and for managing to graduate.
They dropped me off at the Amtrak station on their way to Sells. "See you in a week," Raquel told me as I prepared to board the train to Yuma. "Don't let Charlie and Laconia get you down. And when you're back in Forks, I'm sure you'll have a date with Old Quil."
People think teachers have it easy: short work days, lots of vacation time, leisurely summers. That's nonsense (or bunkum, as a certain student of mine with penchant for old-fashioned words might say). What people don't think about are the long hours spent marking homework, devising lesson plans, filling out forms for special services for students, overseeing clubs (without pay). They don't see teachers devoting their winter and spring breaks to writing syllabi and compiling grades. They don't notice that teachers pack their summers with mandatory workshops and the college courses needed to maintain their certification.
Which is all to say that I spent most of my week in Laconia working (which included sending in Justin Stanley's D. Sorry, Bruce). I did visit a few friends from high school who still lived in the area - all of them married and tired, their houses crawling with little Jadens and Kayleighs. I said hi to my old high school coach, now retired and succeeded by some washed-up minor-league baseball player named Dwyer, who Coach thought didn't know what he was doing.
I ran my old routes – across the elementary school playground, around the dusty central plaza, through streets lined with pickup trucks, desert scrub and little stucco houses just like Charlie's. I passed the old grocery store where I used to shop, closed now since a Wal-Mart opened up in the middle of nowhere outside town. The sun beat down on my back, the dry air sucked the sweat off my skin and the cold from my throat, and I missed my running companion from Forks.
And I went to church, to Iglesia Principe de Paz, to see the women who had saved me when Charlie abandoned me and Renee after her cancer diagnosis. They were grayer and shorter now, but still eager to hear about what I was doing, telling me that I looked beautiful and that they were sure I was a wonderful teacher; they were the doting abuelas I'd never had in my own family.
I wasn't sure I believed in God, but I believed in the ladies of the church.
After the service and coffee, the ladies let me alone to visit Renee's grave in the cemetery in back. As I stared at the headstone, with her name and the dates of a short span, I wondered if toxic chemicals were still leaching from her bones these many years later.
Charlie didn't have a girlfriend this year, which meant we didn't have to be social on Christmas Day. So we went hiking instead, getting up early to drive out to the Organ Pipe Cactus park.
For a break we sat on a bench on an overhang on the loop trail, miles and miles of scrub and saguaro before us stretching into Mexico, desert marigold making dots of yellow, the air and terrain so different from Forks. We ate our lunches in silence for a while, staring at the landscape, before Charlie pointed out a blue backpack in the distance, abandoned by choice or desperation by a border crosser. I told him about Tyler's frustration with the Border Patrol presence in Forks and Charlie complained about it in Laconia. The border agents were focused on just one thing, and that interfered with Charlie's job of keeping tabs on all the nefarious doings in town.
"On that subject," I said, "is there a drug kingpin or something like that in the neighborhood? I keep seeing a Mercedes S.U.V. with illegally blacked-out windows on my runs."
Charlie looked unnerved. "I'll keep an eye out for it," he said, and changed the subject. "I don't like you being so far away. Who'll take care of you if something does happen to -"
I cut him off. "I stayed four years longer in Arizona because you kept me from going to Dartmouth," I pointed out.
"We could never have afforded Dartmouth," he said.
I sighed. "As you know, with your income, I would have had a free ride. And even if I did end up with loans somehow, I could have paid them off when I got Mom's trust fund."
He made grumbling noise of disagreement, and I sighed once more. "C'mon on, Charlie, let's not argue about this again." There truly was no point in arguing, because the real issue wasn't that Charlie doubted Dartmouth's bounty, it was that he wanted me to stay in Arizona, and he didn't trust that an appeal based on paternal love would have kept me here. Love hadn't kept him around when I needed him, after all.
Anyway, I thought to myself, if I had gone to Dartmouth, I probably would have never ended up in Forks, never would have met Edward. And even though it was going to end in tears for me, I couldn't be sorry that I had been able to share a small portion of his life.
We fell into another silence that Charlie broke with characteristic awkwardness.
"So, are there any guys up there in Washington you like?" he asked.
"Are we going to talk about boys?" I said sourly, and bit into my sandwich.
It didn't take a psychiatrist, or even the perfunctory Intro to Psychology class I took at Arizona, to understand my motivations in my romantic life. I wouldn't let myself fall in love with Mike or Jacob or any of the guys I'd slept with in Tucson.
Part of that was altruistic: I would hurt them sooner or later. Part of it was self-defense: they would force me to make decisions I had vowed I would never make, and the statistical chances, as I knew from experience, were good that they'd hurt me too.
But now I had allowed myself to fall for someone who was ethically, legally and perhaps emotionally unavailable to me, something I was contemplating more thoroughly in these days away from him, away from his beauty and allure and brains. I sometimes forgot that Edward was only 17, but it was a brutal fact. If I behaved morally, I would never tell him how I felt, and he would go off to college and never think of me again. If I didn't behave morally, I would be reprehensible - and he'd still go off to college and never think of me again.
And that was how it should be: Edward should leave me behind, and I had to be strong enough not to try to stop him.
"Bella?" Charlie asked as I coughed on a sob, and handed me the water bottle. I took a sip and cleared my throat.
"There are some nice guys there," I said.
"But none of them are for you?" Charlie asked. "Not even Officer Tyler, my brother in law enforcement?"
"No."
"Maybe you'd have better luck back here."
"Maybe I had a traumatic experience in childhood that's holding me back," I said, looking at him sideways in exasperation, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. Even Charlie could recognize that what he had done had fucked me up.
"You know, I loved Renee," Charlie said defensively. "And you."
Fine, if he wanted to talk about this now, I'd let him have it. "I believe you. And that only makes it worse," I said. "Someone can love you, and just skip out on you when the going gets tough. Why bother?" He flinched, but I continued on to the inevitable. "Because we both know it's going to get tough for me."
"I won't –"
"Don't make promises you can't keep, Charlie." He flinched again. I hadn't called him "dad" in 19 years. I stood up and brushed off my shorts. "Let's finish this hike."
Charlie had long ago shown me that men could be unreliable.
And Renee's illness had shown me that I definitely would be.
My antidote to Charlie's company was that of his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Pérez, Yolanda to me since high school, and my No. 1 favorite lady of the church.
Yolanda was in her 70s now. She had been a widow as long as I'd known her, but she had four sons, much older than I, who idolized her and came by frequently, these days with their own children. When I was little, I had so envied the love and warmth of this large family, a warmth they extended to the woebegone girl next door.
Yolanda put me to work right away mixing balls of masa and turning them into tortillas. They had been the first thing she showed me how to make, and it made sense, since they were the first thing her own mother had shown her how to cook when she herself was a little girl. Yolanda didn't see any reason that her hungry 5-year-old neighbor shouldn't learn how to feed herself.
As I pressed down on the tortilladora to flatten the dough, I told her about my exchange with Charlie on our hike.
"I don't know when I'll stop being angry about this," I said, grimacing. Yolanda was all about forgiveness, which I gathered was something she had to practice a lot with her husband.
Yolanda tilted her head toward her kitchen counter, where I had placed an envelope full of cash when I came in.
"You love your father even so," she said, "or you wouldn't do this, making sure that he was fed and taken care of."
The money was for my Christmas present to Charlie: I paid for Yolanda to cook a few dishes for him a week, thus assuring that he wouldn't eat every single meal at Sonic. I shrugged, because I didn't want to tell her that I did it more for her - money was tight, even with help from her sons - than for Charlie.
"There is love there," she went on, "and someday, you will be able to forgive and forget."
I thought about the word she used: olvidar, Spanish for "forget," with its kinship to "oblivion." How could I consign what Charlie did to oblivion? It was a part of me now, inextricable from how I viewed life and love. Sometimes I felt like a stone, my psyche petrified. What tectonic plates would need to shift to split me open, to disgorge my anger and mistrust?
"I don't know about that," I said. "I can understand what he did. I really understand it. It's so common, for a husband to take off when his wife becomes chronically ill. I've seen the statistics. And understanding that is a step to forgiveness, I suppose. But forgetting it ... no. I'm just not as good a person as you are." I shook my head and flattened another tortilla with unnecessary force.
Several days later, I was heading back to Forks, and in a shockingly good mood considering how early it was and how little sleep I was operating on. Thanks to the vagaries of airline schedules and fares, Raquel and I had landed in Seattle on New Year's Eve (an eager Seth waiting for us in the terminal, naturally) and made it to Raquel's apartment building to find a party in progress at the artists' commune; Angela and Ben were already kissing in anticipation of welcoming in 2012, Ben tilting his face up to meet Angela's. At midnight, I got a glass of cheap champagne and a sympathy peck on the cheek from the potter down the hall. As he kissed me, I wondered what Edward Cullen was doing at that moment.
Of course, I wondered that a lot, and my good mood had a lot to do with the fact that I was going to see him soon. I was riding back with Angela, the preacher's kid who needed to get to the church on time for service, which meant that I would get there too.
I had other welcome news as well: I'd gotten an e-mail from the Pacific Northwest Trust saying that Gracie Alvarez and Eliza Teague were finalists for scholarships. And Seth had told me that I had permission to interview Old Quil Ateara this very day. I mentally rearranged my schedule for the afternoon.
Edward was already in a pew with Esme when Angela and I walked in, and they looked as the Cullens did every Sunday, impeccably dressed and wide-awake, not at all as if they had spent New Year's Eve in debauchery or being kissed by a strange girl. When we shook hands at the exchange of the peace, I asked Edward in a whisper to meet me earlier than normal for our run, and he agreed, though he seemed a little put out by my request.
At our usual spot, I gave Edward a huge grin, warmer than what I could give him in church, and he answered it with a brilliant smile that made me forget all the time I had spent in Arizona contemplating our lack of a future.
Yet it turned out that it was the future that he wanted to discuss after our run. We talked for a few moments about our vacations – he hadn't managed to go to Whistler, he told me, and just "hung around" instead – before he asked, "What are you going to do after you're done with Forks?"
If anyone else had asked me that, I would have claimed surprise at the idea that I would leave Forks, not wanting word to get back to Principal Bob. But I wanted Edward to know. "In a couple of years, I'll be able to afford to go to graduate school, to a linguistics program," I said.
"To M.I.T., with the Chomsky acolytes?"
"No, to Penn, I think. Chomsky is too theoretical, and I want to do research in the field," I answered, not saying, you shouldn't know who Chomsky is. Myself, I didn't much understand Noam Chomsky's work, with his Transformational Generative Grammar and his argument that since at bottom, all languages were the same, there was no point in trying to study any language but one's own.
His face encouraged me to go on, and I did. "I don't know if you remember, but my friend Raquel grew up speaking O'odham as her first language," I said, and he nodded that he did remember, leaning against the porch railing as he liked to do. "So one day at school I went with her to see Professor Robles, who studies Uto-Aztecan languages and wanted to record her - not many people speak O'odham as a whole, and Raquel speaks an even rarer variant of it. So I watched, and I started thinking about what would happen when O'odham disappeared. How languages were like lives - they live and die, just like the people who speak them. And when they're gone, we lose all the knowledge and memories and stories they told."
I started pacing as I talked, stirred by his eyes on me and by the subject. "All around us, languages are dying. There are 7,000 in the world and half of them are in danger of becoming extinct. Scores of them disappear every year. And when they're gone, when the last speaker dies, there's nothing left except what's written down and what's recorded. All the stories, all the names, all the knowledge. Of course, sometimes even when it's written down it's lost - look at Linear A in Crete, ancient and still indecipherable."
I could see him becoming amused by my volubility, but I didn't feel he was amused at my expense. "And think about it. You know, in your copy of 'Bel-Ami,' there's an Ex Libris for someone named Elizabeth Anthony. Whoever thinks about her today except for you and me when we see her name on the inside flap?" I admit it, I got a little thrill saying "you and me" even in this banal context.
"Perhaps she has children and grandchildren who remember her," he objected, straightening up from his slouch.
"Maybe, but unlikely, since it's so long ago," I said. "I mean, I never even met my grandmothers and it was a lot more recently that they died. In any case, in 50 or 100 years, there will definitely be nobody who knew her, or even heard about her, but someone will see her name as long as that copy of 'Bel-Ami' survives. The lives of people die with them, but the words they say and write can live on after them if we make the effort."
I stopped pacing and stood in front of Edward. "It's funny that we ended up talking about this, because I'm going to do something related today," I said. "I'm going to LaPush to interview a speaker of Quileute – it's an isolate language that's on the brink of death. Maybe I'll be able to save a story."
At that, Edward became absolutely rigid, his expression distinctly uncomfortable. "That's why you wanted to run early today," he said, and I nodded. He ran a hand through his hair. "Don't believe all the stories they do tell you."
"Why do the Quileute hate your family so much?" I asked, the words bursting out. I winced, regretting my impolite phrasing.
If he thought I was rude, he didn't show it. "Boundary disputes," he said, just as Seth's friend had said at Thanksgiving. "We have better documentation than they do, and it angers them."
"I've been invited there, so I can't be seen as an intruder," I said firmly. I was a grown up, and I wasn't going to be part of this weird childish feud.
"I should let you go then," he said. I wanted to protest, but he was right, it was time. "Please - " he hesitated, and seemed to change his mind. "Stay safe."
I followed Seth's directions, and I expected to meet him there. But he wasn't the towering young man waiting on the porch of Old Quil Ateara's small, isolated house.
"Jacob?" I said happily. "It's so good to see you! How have you ..."
The words died in my throat at the cold expression on Jacob's face. Close up, he looked sullen, so different from the cheerful, joke-cracking guy I'd met in my classroom. He was even taller and more muscular than I remembered, his lovely long hair now cropped close to his head.
"Bella," he said tonelessly, stepping aside so I could knock on the door. "Old Quil is waiting inside."
The living room was crowded with a sagging sofa and a well-worn recliner just like the one Charlie had back in Laconia. One of those vividly hued pictures of Jesus hung over the television - Mr. Ateara lived with his daughter-in-law, who was, this afternoon, at the Pentecostal church in Forks.
He and I chatted as Jacob sat by silently and I got out my supplies, provided by Professor Robles: a tiny portable recorder, a microphone and a sheaf of papers that I laid out on the coffee table. Mr. Ateara was a retired commercial fisherman like Billy, retired recently from the tribal council as well; his words were cut occasionally by a wheezing cough, the cause suggested by the smell of smoke that hung in the house.
And, I discovered to my disappointment, Old Quil wasn't that old at all. He seemed old, with his long white hair and his face weathered by years spent on the water, but he had been born only in the 1940s. And while he did learn Quileute as a child from his parents, he admitted that he had forgotten some, since there was no one left to speak it with – which surprised me a little since Seth and Jacob seemed to speak a good amount of it. It was a tribute to the language program in the reservation school.
On the other hand, I realized ruefully, given the low life expectancy of Native American men, Not So Old Quil might be the oldest person on the reservation. I had to work with what I had.
"So," I announced after I had my equipment set up, "we'll start with a Swadesh word list for the Pacific Northwest – "
"What's the recording going to be on?" Jacob interjected, breaking his silence.
"Um, there's a memory card in there," I said absently, tapping the side of the recorder and looking over the word list. Linguists were divided on the usefulness of the Swadesh list, which was supposed to help researchers figure out if languages were related, but Professor Robles thought it was a good ice-breaker in a recording session.
"Ready, Mr. Ateara?" I asked, and he nodded.
The words on the list were the most basic: pronouns, animals, body parts, colors (Quileute, I found, was among the many languages that didn't have separate words for blue and green), numbers (the one after "five" was "many"). Mr. Ateara remembered many terms for salmon.
"Great," I said, after he had provided Quileute versions of several dozen words. "Let's move on. Seth says that there are stories you heard when you were a child that you could tell me - is that right?"
"Yes," Jacob answered for him, and abruptly stood up. "I'm going to go check on my dad." He stomped out without ceremony, and I watched in puzzlement.
After the front door closed behind him, Mr. Ateara looked at me from his recliner.
"You aren't pining for Jacob, are you?" he asked.
"No," I said, taken aback by at Mr. Ateara's bluntness. I did like Jacob, or at least the old version of him, but my affections were fixed elsewhere.
"Good. You are not right to be the mother of wolves."
"Or dragons either," I joked, only to be met with a blank look. Not a "Game of Thrones" fan, apparently. "Um, about wolves," I went on, trying to get this session back on track, "Jacob told me a few stories about wolves earlier. Do you have some?"
He did, and he started with the creation story, alternating between Quileute and English. The words came more easily to him now, his memories reawakened by the rhythm of the tale: a wandering Transformer changed the Quileute from wolves into humans, the sort of metamorphosis that was a common motif in Native American mythology.
The story cycle continued, with some of the men of the tribe able to shapeshift back into wolves in times of danger to protect their families. The biggest danger, apparently, was from strangely beautiful stone-fleshed demons who drank human blood and raided Quileute and Makah settlements for victims. The men were the warrior-wolf heroes, but one story was about a nameless wife who disemboweled herself to save her husband from a red-eyed "Cold One." These were tales I hadn't discovered in my research, and I wondered if they were novel enough to be published on their own.
Then Mr. Ateara's story took a decidedly bizarre turn. "For a long time the tribe was left in peace, but then the new Cold Ones came," he said. "My own father saw them before I was born and told me. The blond leader and his mate, the giant blond woman and her mate, the red-haired one who looks like a boy – they hunted in our woods and turned the young men into wolves even though generations had passed. We prepared to fight them off, but the leader offered a treaty."
Mr. Ateara had stopped giving me the Quileute-language version of his story, but I didn't mention it. Suspicion and dismay were roiling my stomach now as he talked.
"We would divide the forest, one side for us, one side for them. They said that their gold eyes meant that they were keeping their promise to kill only animals for blood."
He had to pause and wheeze for a moment, while I waited in an agony of impatience. "Carlisle Cullen left after a few years, when World War II was started, and after a while the wolves returned to being ordinary men. I watched my father change the last time, when I was a boy." He stared into the distance before continuing, "There was an attack by Cold Ones seven years ago, not on us, on a family in Forks, but they left too quickly for us to respond. But now the young men have changed into protectors again because Carlisle Cullen is back, with an even bigger coven - "
"Carlisle Cullen?" I repeated dumbly. "The doctor. Carlisle Cullen."
He nodded solemnly, and that sealed it for me. I pushed the stop button on my fancy University of Arizona recorder. Mr. Ateara coughed again, even harder than before.
I stood up and went into the kitchen to get him a glass of water, but by the time I came back, he was asleep, his head lolling to one side. So I stared out of his living room window into the mass of trees, my jaw clenching as I thought. Suddenly, I heard the recorder being rewound, Mr. Ateara's last words being repeated, then cut off.
I turned around. Mr. Ateara was snoring softly in his chair, but Jacob was back. He pulled the memory card out of the machine and held it up.
"It's a story we don't want published," he said, using my words to Seth. I opened my mouth to argue, but he cut me off. "You promised, remember?" He slipped the little square into his pocket.
"Why?" I said.
"Why have you been going into the woods with Edward Cullen?" Jacob said, and my anger turned into fury.
"That's none of your business," I hissed. "The real question is, why did you lure me here on false pretenses? And con this sick old man into telling me some wild story just because you have some 'border dispute' with the Cullens? Did you just play an elaborate practical joke on me as a way of getting back at them?"
"You don't believe us? You can't see the truth of it right in front of you when you look at that … that tick you run with?" Jacob sounded genuinely incredulous, but I was simply growing more furious.
"When I look at Edward, I see an extraordinarily smart, shy guy who has saved my life twice," I said, stepping over to Jacob. "And when I look at you—" I jabbed my finger at Jacob "—I see a sneak and a voyeur. A spy."
"A spy who's trying to keep you from having your life sucked out," he said, his face darkening with his own anger. "I'll show you."
He grabbed my wrist and yanked me toward the door, ignoring my loud protests. I tried breaking his hold by twisting my arm up and around, but he didn't even seem to notice, just slamming the screen door behind us and dragging me across the yard and toward the woods. I was no weakling, but I stopped struggling because it seemed likely that this Jacob could break my wrist without realizing it.
He dropped my arm at the tree line, and said again, "I'll show you."
Jacob stripped off his clothes in a second, and I got a glimpse of bare brown muscles before he crouched, leapt, and there's was no other word for it, exploded. Exploded into a law-of-physics-defying russet-brown wolf the size of a bear that touched down gracefully, silently, on the forest floor.
I staggered back with a squeak of shock. My eyes went from the small pile of clothing that Jacob had discarded, and the huge animal pacing in front of me. For a moment, I stupidly wondered what the state Fish and Wildlife Department would advise. Bear: Back away slowly and avoid eye contact. Mountain lion: Wave hands and throw rocks. Shapeshifter: Pray and hope it's over quickly.
One swipe of the wolf's paw could eviscerate me.
"C'mon, man, this is so not cool," a voice complained to my left. Seth stepped between me and the wolf. "Jake, get a grip and put your clothes back on," he said, his words making white clouds in the cool air as he started speaking in Quileute, which got him a growl in response. I jolted at the sound.
"Bella, let's go," Seth said then. He took my upper arm to pull me back, but I shook him off, not in any mood to be manhandled - wolf-handled - again. I turned away from the creature Jacob had become, its silhouette blending into the darkness of the forest.
I trudged back to Mr. Ateara's house, thinking about how Jacob - and presumably Seth, Billy and Sue - had engineered this revelation. Wordlessly, I gathered my papers and the recorder from the coffee table even though they were mere useless props now. Mr. Ateara still dozed in his chair, unaware of the drama that had played just yards from his window.
Seth was waiting outside, his usually open expression worried, and I gave him a hard stare as I walked to my car. He tried to apologize, to tell me that Jacob's intentions were good.
"Jacob really likes you, Bella," Seth said, his words rushing out, "and he just wants to protect you. Hell, I like you too, and you're Raquel's best friend, so I want you to stay safe and stay away from that guy. Jacob decided that this would be the best way to do that and protect the tribe at the same time, and he had to argue with Billy and my mom –"
I cut him off in disgust. "Do you really expect me to believe that Carlisle Cullen would come back here under the same name when he supposedly has this big secret?"
Seth swore under his breath. "Old Quil wasn't supposed to say the name," he muttered. "We figured you'd get it without it. "
"Right. Maybe you should have rehearsed him better. And besides, it's up to me to decide who I spend time with, not you."
He started to protest again, but I made a slashing motion with my hand and asked, my voice harsh, "Have you told Raquel what you are?" His face dropped and he shook his head. "Hypocrite," I said, and slammed the car door behind me.
As I drove away from the reservation, I didn't really see the narrow road in front of me, but instead replayed scenes from the last four months, and, ironically, the closest thing I had reference material I had on the subject, the detestable "Dracula."
That Jacob was a shapeshifter – well, after what I had seen I had to believe that. But that didn't mean I had to believe the other part of the crazy story Old Quil had spun.
Yet, yet … I had always thought there were medical and psychological grounds for Edward's unusual qualities – just as there were rational, scientific reasons for comets and eclipses and disease – but now that a supernatural explanation had literally been shoved in my face, it made so much sense. The Cullens' paleness, their unusual eyes. How Edward and Alice seemed to avoid the sun. Their incredible range of knowledge.
Edward's speed. His strength. He didn't sweat, didn't drink, didn't get cold. His archaic words. If he was here in the 1930s, he would be at least in his 90s? Or maybe centuries old?
But certainly not 17. I shoved the implications of that aside and my mind raced on to the conversations we'd had. Lifeboats. The New Deal. His love of "Casablanca" and Bach. How much liked "The Beautiful and the Damned." How much he hated "Ulysses."
Oh my God. Why he hated "Ulysses."
"Joyce has no idea how people's minds work," he had said on one of our first runs.
"And you do?"
He had raised an eyebrow. "Maybe I can read minds."
Maybe I can read minds. He always seemed to know what I was thinking, he always gave me the right answer. I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and stopped the car, so I could stumble out and throw up on the asphalt.
"Bella? Bella, are you all right?" Edward was there, materializing from the trees lining the road, in jeans and a down jacket like a normal teenager - but he was not a teenager, and he was not normal. His words did not make white clouds. Inside he was as cold as he was outside, as cold as the air around us.
"You can't see the truth of it right in front of you when you look at that tick?" Jacob had asked, and now I wondered how I had been so blind.
All this time I had thought I was the predator, but the truth was that I was his prey.
I stared at Edward, at his perfect concerned face, in horror. "How could you?" I spat at him, wiping my mouth of burning bile. I never, never wanted to puke in front of anyone. "Get away from me."
He stepped back, his perfect face now an expressionless mask, and I lurched back into my car. He was still standing in the middle of the road as I jammed my foot on the accelerator and jerked away.
He had begged me not to, but now I was running from him.
Chapter title is from the song by School of Seven Bells. (Lyrics: I am neither breather ... nor sleeper.)
As Camilla points out, I'm doing violence to canon (and maybe common sense!) here with the reveal. But then, this Bella isn't exactly canon either.
So those of you who wondered what Charlie's sins are now know: he's not evil, but weak and human. In that way, he's like a lot of guys (sorry, Mr. Price).
The story about the soccer team is true.
Colors: The Quileute word for blue and green is "thlopa." Other languages that have the same word for blue and green include Vietnamese, Korean and Zulu. At least one language (Jalé, in New Guinea) distinguishes only between dark and light.
The French: "A très bientôt" and "Bonnes vacances" = See you soon and have a good vacation. This version of "see you soon" implies that speaker is counting down the minutes until the listener returns.
The Spanish: "abuelas" = grandmothers; a tortilladora is a tortilla press; Bella attends Prince of Peace church in Laconia. "Masa" is cornmeal dough.
If you haven't seen "In the Loop," hearing Peter Capaldi ream someone out is a thing of beauty that linguists can appreciate.
Thanks for reading and reviewing!