First Sights
Forks is just like I remember it – a dripping, misty, dark, little one-horse town. Without horses, of course. This is the twenty-first century, and no tourists come here to make it worth anyone's while to keep a real stable.
Lots of trees, though. Mostly pines and firs and spruces. So it's dark. If the sun shone on it, I guess you'd see the green inside the black. Green pine branches above. Green ferns down below. The spaces between the trees are wide, like the aisles of a cathedral. The branches closing above are the roof. And there's rocks and streams and thickets in between. And moss – making dewy green fur on everything. When a tree dies, it lies down in the aisle and makes a window above. The moss is already there on the trunk; the ferns come right after, then little trees, growing up. That's why all the trees are in rows, growing up from the bodies of the dead. If the sun shone down, all those greens, and the rusty pine needle carpets, might blaze like stained glass between the black frames of trunks and limbs. But the sun is a stranger in Forks. And without the sun streaming in through the big rose window, what is a cathedral but a tomb?
A highway runs through it.
They have a few traffic lights, the usual pit stops and cafes, a town hall – a library, thank God – and the schools of course. I doubt anything was built here after the Great Depression. Well, maybe in the Fifties, who knows? To someone my age, it's all pretty much the same. Before my time. Before my parents' time.
Getting there takes a few hops. Hop off the plane in Seattle, hop on a little prop plane – a really little and jiggly prop plane – to Port Angeles. That takes an hour. Then hop off that plane and into my dad's cruiser. Yes, cruiser. As in black and white, with a bar of flashing red lights on top. My dad is the Chief of Police in Forks. With the cruiser his to use 24/7, he never did feel a need to get any other car. And I guess he wouldn't think it makes his daughter look like a convict to be driven around in it.
The drive takes an hour and some. We have to stop for a deer that has been smashed by what I guess must have been one of the big logging trucks. My civic-minded dad has to haul it to the side. He puts his police light on, so no one will go speeding past and run him down while he's wrestling the carcass. There is blood. But he keeps most of it on the tarp that he uses as a kind of apron-slash-body-bag.
We don't say much. We never do. Just the usual awkward hug at the terminal gate when he picked me up. You know the kind – one armed, with our faces both turned away. I've wondered whether that was one of the reasons Mom left Dad. Was he always giving her one-armed hugs after they got married? But I'm the same way, and she never left me on any church doorstep.
It's quiet and dark and drizzling, when we pull in. The drip, drip, drip from the trees and the eaves is everywhere. The porch still smells a little moldy. Not enough to give anyone allergies – just wet, wet wood, that hasn't seen paint quite often enough.
"I got a surprise for you, Bells." Dad never calls me Isabella. It just wouldn't sound right coming from him. He's not an Isabella kind of guy.
I can see the shadow of a hulk in the driveway, so I have a pretty good idea what the surprise is. But I am surprised, since I'd made sure to take driver's ed early and had pooled my life's savings with a little extra from Mom for just this thing – or something, anyway – so I keep quiet.
"You remember Billy Black, down at La Push?" La Push is the little postage stamp of an Indian reservation down on the coast. The wild, wet, black-cragged coast. The place with a hundred little streams rushing down to the sea. Streams with deep, rocky pools at their bends and pauses. Pools where slim, silver trout hide in the coolest water.
"You remember he'd go fishing with us those summers, don't you, Bella?" I do, but I don't want to. Even when I was tiny, I always hurt for the fish. The steel hook through the lip, the thrashing against the unbreakable line, the staring eye, the suffocation in thin air and having its back broken on that one, convenient anvil of rock. They were still alive when we gutted them; I knew they were, because the eye was still bright. And still, my mouth just stubbornly watered when the fillets hit the hot oil.
Dad's still talking. He knows I don't answer much, anyway, so it's all the same.
"Old Billy's in a wheelchair, now." Was it the diabetes, I wonder. Did he have to get that foot amputated after all? "So he can't drive. Offered to sell me his truck real cheap."
The hulk. "Does it run?"
"Sure does." Dad has my all of two bags out of the trunk and slung on one shoulder and is ushering me into the house. "I'll show you in the morning."