Twenty Questions
Valentine's Day. He visits her on Valentine's Day. Technically, Valentine's night.
I'm already a vampire, she thinks. How all of her days have been blurring by, as if in a dream. It is the nights that are sharp and clear. The loom. The cloth. The closet. The boy. His every contour so familiar now. So known. So close to her heart.
Scent indelible in her bedclothes.
This night she has barely shut off her light when she feels the swirl of cold air, and then he is beside her. He keeps the quilts wrapped around her, and himself outside this time. Wordless, he just holds her. She wonders what he is thinking. Perhaps he is time traveling to this day a year ago, and Jasper, and the church. He's told her all of it. What almost happened. And why. The story doesn't frighten her. It just feels holy.
After a time, he joins her under the covers, which she loves best. His hands are on her face, tracing the edges of her brows, her cheeks, her nose, her chin. Lastly her lips. His mouth shapes her name against her forehead, and he wraps her close against him. She can tell from his stillness that he is not breathing.
Do ghosts breathe? she wonders. Is that a thing?
She thinks of the night after her fall into the sea. The drive back from their house. When he was still such an enigma to her. Running through all the questions she wanted to ask him. Finally only able to ask the single one — "Do you hate me?"
She knows now, of a certainty, that he does not.
"Where did vampires come from?" she asks.
The question startles him, and he is still for several heartbeats before replying. "No one knows."
The idea has caught her, and now she really wants to know. "Do you think there were vampires before there were people?"
"Animal vampires? Neanderthal vampires?" She can feel soft laughter in his chest. An indulgent smile on his lips at the edge of her hair.
"You say you live forever."
He stills again, and she wonders if it is because he has broken all the laws of forever to be here. Lingering on this plane with her, night after night. Making his family wait, mid-passage.
"The oldest anyone's ever met are the Egyptians. If there are any older than that, they're either very well hidden, or they've been killed."
She ponders the violence this implies. And the loss of the trail back to their beginnings.
"We're not natural, Bella. We're a curse."
"A curse? By who?"
"God, probably."
"The same One that made trees?" The grandfathers … The first souls …
"Bella."
"Why would anyone do that? Make life and then curse it? It doesn't make sense."
"You're so full of questions tonight."
She is.
"It's important. Where we come from is important. Who we are is important. What we choose … is important."
"What am I going to do with you?"
"You all live forever. You have super powers. It can't be for nothing. It can't just be for … for eating."
"And suffering." The assigned lot of monsters. To cause suffering. And to suffer.
She won't accept that as a final answer.
What he'd said before about never changing, until the damn sun burns out, takes a sudden shape. Vampires have changed. Edward's family are (were … were, but she hopes, can still be) that change. They made choices. And kept making those choices. Even when they stumbled. They're at war with themselves. It's a war they can never win. But they kept getting up. Persevering. Making something new for their kind. The choosing is what makes it matter. And they're not the only ones.
Until the damn sun burns out.
"Maybe vampires were … created (evolved? happened?) to preserve life, not destroy it," she ventures. "To bring life out from the earth when Earth can no longer be our home. Like … like generation ships, going out to the stars. Vampires could be the pilots. And the caretakers." Of all the ones whose lives are short. Because the journeys will be so long.
He is silent for a long time. Then, "Carlisle thinks … thought … as you do. Probably not spaceships, though. I doubt anyone else has, or does. The thirst … it's … it's everything. It fills our existence. Every moment. The most any of us can do is hold it at bay."
"But that's what makes what you are, what you're doing, special. You're choosing … to believe in, to care about, your relatedness to where you came from. Even when it's so hard. That's … new." She searches for the words to fit what she's feeling. "It's like you're … making a new path forward from all the ones who went before."
All the purgatories of temptation that he has described to her, seem like preparation, spiritual training — tempering their mettle for an undertaking that awaits in a distant future. If they choose to accept it.
She remembers the big wooden cross from the lost house. The stair beside it, like Jacob's ladder in the picture from the Bible book her mother used to read to her when she was small, with the angels ascending and descending …
It must be called up by doing. Like finding a path through the woods. Each choice will be the shaping of it.
She thinks of the cloth. How it started as a tiny little down feather caught in her hair. A possibility, an intention, beyond her sight. And here it is now, reaching toward completion. Isn't that what Edward's family, their choices, had been doing for the possible futures of their kind? A possibility, a cosmic intention beyond their sight, transformed by each action, each choice, into a branching of fate, that was transforming them as well.
As the cloth has been transforming her …
"Bella! What's wrong." She has begun to hyperventilate. Alarmed, he holds her.
A dizziness, a vertigo, surrounds her. As if the movement of the solar system, riding the spiral arm of the galaxy like a merry-go-round, had caught her in its gyre.
"Bella!"
"I'm here. I'm here."
"Me too!" And he snugs the quilts around her, rubs her back, echoes her, "Here I am. Here I am." Whispers her full name, which is special between them. "Isabella."
After a long while, she speaks again.
"Life is important."
"I know!" he answers quickly, "That's why —"
"Important for you, too! For your family. For everyone."
"Bella. We're not alive."
"Life is bigger than we know." Let it be so.
"You think vampires are … part of … life?"
"Yes."
"And we have a purpose? Like that?"
"Everyone has a purpose. A place. Where we fit. A part in the story." And at this she starts to cry yet again, because in all her life she has only ever moved from place to place and never yet found the one where she fit. And she knows the same is true for him as well. She clings to his frame, to keep herself from falling through the expanse that gapes in her mind.
He strokes her hair, whispering her name. "You'll find your place, Bella. I promise. I promise. Your whole life is ahead of you."
As his had once been.
The brown smear on the final page fills her sight, piercing her all over again. The mortal thread must be woven, to bind the magic to the cloth, by word and memory and love, to lead him back to his eternity, instead of disappearing into oblivion.
"Do you remember how it was? Lying down together? On that day? In that place?"
The mandala of the grass.
"Bella. Oh, Bella."
She feels him holding his breath again (still?), shaking in her arms, but knotted down to the tiniest shudders, because if he did not — that hideous strength would shake the bed to pieces.
"Everyone has a place," she insists. "A purpose."
Even vampires. Maybe, especially vampires.
But he won't have it. He can't. "You don't know what you're talking about, Bella. This isn't something that you can just … dream up. It's not … it's not romantic like that. We are cursed. And we are a curse to all that lives."
"I remember the gardens at your house."
"Esme."
"Was she a curse to the flowers?"
She feels his head move on the pillow next to hers, the exhale of his breath on her face.
"No wonder Alice loved you."
Author's Notes
"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." — Carl Sagan.
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Some images of Jacob's Ladder
i dot pinimg dot com / 474x / 55 / 36 / c8 / 5536c8ebee62b98d9c6bec6160282279-la-bible-in-the-bible dot jpg
i dot pinimg dot com / originals / 9d / ff / f6 / 9dfff6540781d6001d673ae92b3ca521 dot jpg
st-takla dot org / Gallery / Bible / 01-Old-Testament / 1-Books-of-Moses / 01-Genesis / Jacob / Jacob-s-Ladder-01 dot html