4,296Here we are. The final chapter. Yes. The swan song.
The completion of this story is my love letter to all of you readers. I never would have taken it up again (after nine years!) without you. Never would have persevered without you. And never would have brought it to honorable fruition without CindyWindy1, who has been the most steadfast and supportive and PATIENT beta anyone could ever wish for. Thank you, Cindy. And thank you to all who beta'ed, listened, nudged, and critiqued the first 62 chapters as well. Thank you to everyone, everyone, who has read and commented, past and present, all along the way You are the best.
The Tree with Roots in Eternity and Branches in Forever
We are in Alaska.
Guilt consumes me.
Bella has carved a blood-soaked swath from Alberta to the Yukon. Now we trail the caribou. Their calving is done, and they have crossed from Eagle, and the Porcupine River, northwards, into the Brooks range and beyond. The biting flies are left behind, and we can breathe and speak to each other again, without inhaling viscous clouds of tiny bodies.
Emmett had, predictably, deployed his quip about the flies with great gusto to Isabella's first-time ears.
"Don't crush 'em when you wipe 'em out of your eyes, Bella. They're kin!"
She'd indulged him with her laughter, as Rosalie and the rest of us rolled our eyes. The girl is kind that way. But afterward she'd become deeply silent. Alice had moved to hold her hand for the day, while Jasper wrapped her in safety and shelter.
Only a few weeks before that, we had stopped on our way out of Alberta and into British Columbia, to hunt in Jasper National Park. (Yes. Another of Emmett's hare-brained forays at humor.)
But such a stupid thing to do in summer, with a newborn in tow.
Campgrounds can be kept at a distance. Trails can be avoided. But hikers will always be a wild card. They seek adventure. They seek views that no one else has photographed. They also get lost.
Obstacles, terrain, confusion … and a last-minute decision that confounded Alice's sight.
It took all seven of us to drag Bella down and subdue her, piled on top of her, stuffing rocks and dirt into her mouth to muffle her growls and screams, squirming and grappling and pinning her for nearly two hours, until the small group were finally gone from her scent range. I caught traces of their thoughts as, screened from us by a mere hundred yards of intervening woods, and by no means out of hearing, they hurried past with fearful speculations about grizzlies fighting, or mountain lions mating. Or a chupacabra slaughtering a herd of mountain goats.
That day closed with dry sobbing, and the search for water.
We kept to the remotest places ever since, making our trek circuitous, and sometimes hungry … until we reached the caribou, and their calves.
.
None among us, not even in wildest of imaginings, could have ever dreamed the mad course that Bella took. But it was I who lay beside her, night after night, letting her believe — no, repeating to her, again and again — the lie, that we all were dead, and I was some sort of ghost, lingering between her world and final dissolution.
It was I who did all in my power to preserve in her the illusion, that we all were gone to smoke and ash. To preserve in myself the delusion that I could do such a thing, while stealing just a few more moments with her before tearing myself away for good. That there would be no … consequences.
When Carlisle saw Bella's wound, as she lay dying in my arms, his swift mind reconstructed from its shape, depth, and angle the scene of how she had dealt herself the fatal cut. As the image bloomed in his inner eye, it seared into mine as well.
Shadow of her, knelt in the ruins of our house, wrist clamped between her knees, knife carving down, hovers in double exposure over every glimpse and gaze I take of her.
The cloth and the ashes told their own story. First burst of her blood from her opened wrist, how she had stood and walked, up and down, up and down, to anoint the cloth with her life. It lives in the forensic memories of my family — snapshots captured as they all arrived pell-mell after me, to hastily cover the tracks of disaster.
Biting and biting, trying to inject enough venom to wrest Bella from the edge of the grave, I was too crazed to register the surroundings for myself. But afterwards … afterwards.
My memory is branded with every frame their eyes inscribed.
.
Bella knows nothing of this. Her guileless heart still lives in a world of love and faith and beauty. A fairy tale in which the blessed maid wove all the colors of the rainbow into a strip of cloth, and her blood let out upon it brought seven souls back to life from a scatter of ash.
A world in which — despite all that the change has brought to her, and all that it has taken away — unfathomably, miraculously, quiet moments between us have strung themselves like pearls throughout these fearsome months.
Tiny eternities of tenderness, when she leans so confidingly against me, or teaches me butterfly kisses, or pulls me to look at the alpine heather, that shows such brilliant hues and delicate leaf-veins to her new, new eyes.
What have I ever done, in this life or past, to deserve even one of these?
Guilt consumes me.
We are in Alaska. The gorging on babies and afterbirths is behind us. The flies are behind us.
The sun is behind us.
Bella is less ravenous, and less messy. It is a relief to her. Yet just as stones emerge when water recedes, the retreat of her thirst has exposed to her another anguish. One that drives her more and more to seek solitary places. Seek me. (Yes, me.) For comfort.
Today, she and I sit in the lap of a tiny glacier that fills a sunward-facing saddle between two minor peaks rising from the North Slope, far above the Arctic Circle. She has fed. We both have. And so there is peace enough for her that we can sit, one with the dazzling white that holds us, and just watch the sun make its way around the sky. In a few hours, it will skim the horizon, dipping its disk just below the edge for half of an hour, before beginning the long sloping climb upwards again.
But the price of this truce overtakes all beauty.
Bella is wailing in my arms. "I can't remember!" Her face is pristine and dry. Lost is the solace of water and salt. Lost to me, in particular, the precious warmth and wet that I had touched or kissed from her soft cheeks, once upon a time. Only her voice remains, to carry the weight of what she feels.
She squirms deeper into my embrace, as if she would crawl into my ribcage if she could. God knows I would let her. Crack open my sternum, pull everything wide, take her into the cavity of my body. Hold her, for as long as she needed or wanted.
I would do anything for this girl.
And yet, how utterly I failed. To find, and do, that one thing that would have preserved her from this.
On days like today, I wish that we had truly died. Or at least that I had.
Bella lies curled in my lap, as we both lie curled in the swale of the glacier. Her breath and voice hitch uselessly, residual habits from a body still newly dead.
"I can't remember," she whimpers again, softly now, because not even a vampire can make the hills echo with keening ululations for hours on end.
"I can feel myself forgetting. My mom, my dad, Forks, the places I've lived before. My GRAN! Help me! Help me, Edward! I can't remember their faces. The sounds of their voices. The … the …"
Her voice moans like a wind through rafters. Like a ghost bereft.
"I promised! I promised!"
I know her promise, because Alice and Jasper had stolen into the evidence room and ransacked its contents — swift and silent as only we can be. The cedar bundle with its burden. The stone and the crochet scrap, the note written on the blank side of the flowered sheet of paper — all leap back to mind from Alice and Jasper's memories. This girl. This girl.
Promising to return if possible, but at least to remember, to carry all her people in her heart forever.
Until the sun burns out.
Now all her covenants shred and scatter, like that "Thank You" she once set among a bower of briar and rose, folded into a coin, fragrant with her singing scent, that I ripped and cast out over a cliff with all my strength.
We preserved her scrapbook. Of course we did. Bound together in that schoolbook cover with my journal. When this year is past, or perhaps a little later if her control is still shaky, we will restore it to her. The cloth as well. These are hers. Are her. When she can take them again into her hands without tearing them apart for the traces of her human blood-scent that they hold, we will restore them all to her.
And until then —
"We're here. We're with you. We remember. We'll remember for you. Your father. Forks. Your room. Everything in it. We'll help you. Carlisle was close with your father. And, we'll keep track of … your things. When it becomes possible, we'll recover them for you."
Because she had brought nothing with her. All of her life's mementos she had poured out for, left to, the ones she was leaving behind.
Bella's face is pressed into my chest, her voice a muffled whimper. "My mom. No one remembers my mom."
That is not entirely true. But she does not know this.
The sun slides slowly downwards, on its tangent path to the horizon. Soon, the uneven edges of the mountains will begin to bite into the bright disk. There is no cloud cover today, only the layers of atmosphere, scattering the rays into softer tones of mauve and wine.
Bella has fallen silent, and we just sit together, stilled in time, as no human ever could. I recall the thought from the edge of my meadow, so terribly long ago.
And now I want to clasp her about the waist and twirl her around me, and carry her to the center of this patch of sleeping grass, and watch together for an entire year as every color of sun and wind and rain passes across it, and the flowers bloom in their day, and the woods change their deep hues of green and brown and black, and the stars wheel above, and the mists rise below, until winter sets forth every dark branch with a white edge of snow. She cannot, of course, but I would. I could. Sit like a statue, as still as a stone. At rest, at last, from the frenzies of hunger and thirst. To just be.
With her.
With her, I would.
And here we are. It has come to pass, after all. The ache of it fills me.
The last sliver of sun slides down below the sky bowl's edge. At zenith, shy stars appear. The world is held in twilight. The in-between.
Across the lowland beneath us, a snowy owl glides past.
It is time. Time to stop running. Time to stop hiding. Carlisle has braced me on this a dozen times, offering me strength without reproach. Esme, in her love, has offered to take this cup from me. To explain it all to Bella in my stead. But I could not allow it. Cannot. Such cowardice would be the final seal on my betrayal of this girl.
The hour is here.
I confess myself to her. In story. In whisper.
Of the desperate race back to our house. Praying that James and Victoria and Laurent would stay on my trail. Not turn aside at the promontory where Bella and I had stopped so briefly.
Of the battle at the house. The destruction. The brutality. The fire we set, to erase all that had been …
Bella shifts in my arms at this. Freezes, for the longest moment in recorded history.
A tremor runs through her, but she only makes a small cry. A wordless why.
I tell her my resolve to stay away, to let her move on with life. She punches my chest.
I tell her how Alice's vision of her collision with the aspen came too late.
How her condition stumped even Carlisle. How the constant presence of the nurses and her family had barred us from simply stealing her away. And even if we could, to what end? We had no way to revive her. Even if we changed her, would she waken? Or would she be locked in a vegetative state for eternity? And what of her family? We had no right. We had not even her own consent.
Bella is grown quiet again. Only shivering against me.
Alice saw Bella taken to La Push. Renee's resolve on that had been so powerful that the vision had rung in my sister's consciousness for days.
But once Bella crossed into Quileute land, we lost her. We were blind. Even after her parents took her home to Forks. She, and her future, was invisible to us.
"The tattoo?" Bella asks. "It kept Alice from seeing me?"
"Yes," I whisper. Until her blood broke the spell.
"But you came to my room. All those nights. Why? What were you doing there? All those nights."
"I couldn't stay away."
The sky has darkened as far as it will go. In a small while, the sun will begin its long slow slide back up past the purple mountains. But now, there is only the pale rim at the edge of the land, and twinkling stars in the cobalt vault above.
"I had to know that you were ok. That you would … recover."
"How could I?"
"I know. But I wanted … I thought … I …"
Everything chokes in my chest. I can feel the full realization taking her, curling and clenching and shaking her whole body.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. What I've done to you."
"You could have just told me the truth!"
That's all I've ever wanted. All I ever asked.
"Instead of pretending to be dead!" Yelling now. "We could have figured it out together. Together, Edward!"
She's pummeling my chest again with her fists. It hurts. A lot. She is quite a bit stronger than I am right now. I let her. It's a feeble penance, but it's all that I can give to her.
"I could have said a proper goodbye!"
"You could have lived your life! And never had to say goodbye to anyone. If I had only … only … " Even the whisper sticks in my throat. I wanted … I thought …
"I thought you said you wanted me." Her voice also, is breaking with sorrow. And fear.
"I did. I do. More than life. Forever." … How many times have I broken inside for this … "But I wanted you to live even more."
She claws all the layers of my parka and shirt into her hands and shakes me.
"What about me? You didn't even ask. You never gave me a chance. We could have figured it out together, Edward. That's what people are supposed to do!"
I have no answer to that. There is none.
She quiets again, and we lie, in our separate miseries.
A breeze, brought by this space of night, pulls tiny grains up from the snowpack, swirling and buffeting us, making us crystalline.
But the earth still turns on its axis. We cannot stop time. Gradually, the stars fade, and soon the bright limb of the sun will play hide and seek from behind the uneven edge of the world.
"I didn't tell you what I was doing either," she says softly.
If I had known. Oh God, if I had even guessed …
But this is an olive branch. Even in this broken faith between us, she is determined to repair it. Together.
"I thought I had to. Keep it secret. In order for it to work. To bring you back to life."
"Oh Bella." I can't help myself. I have wrapped her up in my arms again. Am kissing her all over her face. "Bella. My Bella."
How many souls are there like this in this world? One. Only one.
And yet. I have to ask the question. I will have no peace until I do. And perhaps no peace after.
"If … if I hadn't gone back to you … if you'd had nothing to hang your belief on … would you still have … ?"
She is motionless against my chest. "I … I don't know." Looks at me. How can either of us pierce a 'what if' that never came to pass? "I don't know," she says again at last. "I … " Shakes her head, and heaves a sigh from the depths of her ribcage.
The air around us brightens and moves. Another swirl of the tiniest ice crystals lifts from the glacier around us.
Now she is holding my face in her hands, pressing her forehead against mine.
"We are the STUPIDEST Romeo and Juliet EVER!"
And suddenly we are laughing. Lying on our backs with arms outstretched across each other. Like snow angels. Yes. We will make snow angels here, before we leave. As the sun breaks free. We will.