The Girl Who Was Taken (Renesme Cullens Twin Sister)

Eighty

Almost a whole year had passed since I was here last. The leaves were back on the trees again, brand new to me, but already changing colors to red and orange. The pine trees bristled, evergreen, holding in the morning dew. I tried to let the anxiety roll off my shoulders the same way the clouds rolled along the sky. But there was so much of it that I couldn't keep it from burrowing deep within my muscles, clenching together at the possibility that Paul might take one look at me and decide I wasn't worth it anymore.

Still, I was back here for him, for the life that we could live, despite how much space there had been keeping us apart, how many words that had been left unsaid. Emily and Sam were driving down to the airport to pick the pack up and bring them home. Brady wasn't returning with them; his body had already been sent back in a box six months ago.

I waited at Billy's house, sitting on his front porch with the old man, whittling wood. I figurede waiting for him to return instead of going back to the airport I was just at yesterday would give him more space to breath, more time to be with his pack, his brothers. But as I carved the piece of wood down, chipping flakes away one by one, I wondered if it really was the right decision. He might think I was avoiding him, and maybe I was. Avoiding the inevitable, the fight that we were going to have.

I suppose that's why I didn't mind that he never called me back even though he said he would. It wasn't the kind of fight we could have over the phone.

"Why do you keep whittling the wood down to nothing?" Billy asked in his gruff voice.

I paused at my work, elbows resting on my knees, leaning over the small stick I had been working on. I looked closer at where my pocketknife was, cutting another large sliver out, with no vision of what the wood could look like. "I don't know."

"Don't you want to make something? It's not about making fire tinder. You can get enough of that in the woods."

I looked down at the pile of wood chips between my feet now. They would be good for starting a fire. It had been awhile since I burned anything. Perhaps watching dancing flames would calm my mind more than this. But I didn't take it to the backyard firepit, I stayed and looked up at Billy. "I don't know why I don't make them into anything. I just... It's just meditative, I guess." I frowned. He waited for me to go on, like he understood how lost I felt right now. "When I got here... When you showed me how to whittle and stuff, I just... I felt like my whole life, I was a piece of wood, you know? An empty canvas that could be made into something, and life was the knife, just whittling away at me until I turned into something else. It's a weird analogy, but that was what I was thinking when you taught me, and I just... When I started working the wood by myself, I just... It occurred to me that no matter what piece of wood you take, if you just keep whittling away at it, eventually it would end up being nothing and so I keep doing this because I keep thinking that eventually I'll just fall apart into a pile of dust, that someday, I'll keep going through it, and eventually there'd only be a sliver left of me..."

He nodded, understandingly. "Life does that," he agreed. "You can't get through it without changing. But you're not a finite resource like the wood we use to whittle into statues, Stormy. You're a person, and you're not the same person you were when you got here a year and a half ago either. But you're not less of a person. You're the tree that still has roots in the ground, still growing with leaves and branches reaching out."

I smiled weakly at him.

"Put that one down," he said, "Start a new one. Work slowly, find the image inside before you carve it away into nothing, and then stop. Let it exist, and if you still need to work more, get another piece to start on."

"Okay," I said. And I dropped the little sliver of wood down into the pile of woodchips at my feet and took another stick from the pile we had collected that morning. I worked the knife around the stick, peeling off the bark, finding the offshoots of branches and knots in the woods.