Midday Clouds - The Charlie Swan Story

Chapter 5 (Twilight 5/11)

I had the dream again that night.

Renee was my wife, still is my wife. She's standing in the doorway, watching Bella pull up in her faded red truck. When she turns to me, her face is that of the 20-year-old woman I knew and loved.

"Charlie," she said. There's still love in her voice, her tone soft, yet there is also a hint of something uneasy, there, just under the surface. "We need to leave."

"Well, okay, sure. Where are we going?" Even though I know the answer, and had known the answer for 17 years, I still have to ask.

"Well, you're apparently not going anywhere," she says, her once cheery face turned to sorrow. "We've been over that."

"Ren, you know I can't just up and leave. My parents... I gotta be here for them, they're sick. You know that."

"I know," she says.

"Mom!" I hear Bella, my 17-year-old daughter, call to this younger version of her mother. "Let's go!"

"Charlie," Ren says again, pleading for me to join her and Bells on another one of her grand adventures. That spirit was what brought her to Forks in the first place, to this strange, nearly uninhabited chunk of coastal Washington. To me. And it's what was pulling her away from me now, just a few years later.

"You know I can't go, Ren. Just stay a while longer. Another year or two. They'll get better."

She looks at me with those eyes all over again. Teary, but brilliant, still shining like the sun even under Forks' cloudy skies.

"I can't. We can't. If we don't get out now, we'll be stuck here."

She walks out the door of our little white house and hops in beside Bella in the truck I'd bought her, and the two of them drive off towards sunnier skies and away from the rainclouds, from Forks, from me.

---

I woke up in a cold sweat.

I hadn't had that dream in a few years, and hadn't had it on a sober night in over a decade. It must've been triggered by Bella being back in the house, or maybe it was hearing Renee's voice earlier that week, but the recurring nightmare was different, now. Bella was the teenage version of herself, rather than the baby she'd been 17 years ago.

It was 6 am in the morning, and the sun seemed to be shining brightly in a way that Renee had always longed for. Well, maybe a few sunny days would be what it'd take to keep Bella around. I peeked into her room like I used to do when she was young -- usually I'd respect her privacy, especially when she was sleeping, but something about the dream shook me to my core -- and she was laying there, peacefully, a small spot of drool pooling on her pillow. I felt a sudden breeze rustle through the room, and noticed that her window was halfway open. I closed it for her, gave her blanketed toe a little squeeze, and then made my escape, closing the door quietly behind me.

I took off for work before Bells was up, and the majority of the day was spent going over the new missing persons reports from up in Seattle; asking the local business owners if they recognized any of the postered faces as hikers or travellers that had passed through recently. A couple times over the past few years had seen the kid on the milk carton being some runaway who decided to head to Forks. If they were over 18, I let them continue on their way before phoning it in -- if they were under, I tried to talk them into sticking around until their parents could come pick them up. They usually seemed to be running from something rather than running to anywhere in particular, though, so even though I passed a note along to Seattle PD that we'd spotted the kid in the area, I wasn't about to lock 'em up in the cell just for passing through.