quickly. "We were hiking, and I tripped over a rock."
"Since when do you hike?" Charlie asked skeptically.
"Working at Newton's was bound to rub off sometime," I pointed out. "Spend every day selling all the virtues of the outdoors, eventually you get curious."
Charlie glared at me, unconvinced.
"I'll be more careful," I promised, surreptitiously crossing my fingers under the table.
"I don't mind you hiking right there around La Push, but keep close to town, okay?"
"Why?"
"Well, we've been getting a lot of wildlife complaints lately. The forestry department is going to check into it, but for the time being…"
"Oh, the big bear," I said with sudden comprehension. "Yeah, some of the hikers coming through Newton's have seen it. Do you think there's really some giant mutated grizzly out there?"
His forehead creased. "There's something. Keep it close to town, okay?"
"Sure, sure," I said quickly. He didn't look completely appeased.
"Charlie's getting nosy," I complained to Jacob when I picked him up after school Friday.
"Maybe we should cool it with the bikes." He saw my objecting expression and added, "At least for a week or so. You could stay out of the hospital for a week, right?"
"What are we going to do?" I griped.
He smiled cheerfully. "What ever you want."
I thought about that for a minute—about what I wanted.
I hated the idea of losing even my brief seconds of closeness with the memories that didn't hurt—the ones that came on their own, without me thinking of them consciously. If I couldn't have the bikes, I was going to have to find some other avenue to the danger and the adrenaline, and that was going to take serious thought and creativity. Doing nothing in the meantime was not appealing. Suppose I got depressed again, even with Jake? I had to keep occupied.
Maybe there was some other way, some other recipe… some other place.
The house had been a mistake, certainly. But his presence must be stamped somewhere, somewhere other than inside me. There had to be a place where he seemed more real than among all the familiar landmarks that were crowded with other human memories.
I could think of one place where that might hold true. One place that would always belong to him and no one else. A magic place, full of light. The beautiful meadow I'd seen only once in my life, lit by sunshine and the sparkle of his skin.
This idea had a huge potential for backfiring—it might be dangerously painful. My chest ached with emptiness even to think of it. It was hard to hold myself upright, to not give myself away. But surely, there of all places, I could hear his voice. And I'd already told Charlie I was hiking…
"What are you thinking about so hard?" Jacob asked.
"Well…" I began slowly. "I found this place in the forest once—I came across it when I was, um, hiking. A little meadow, the most beautiful place. I don't know if I could track it down again on my own. It would definitely take a few tries…"
"We could use a compass and a grid pattern," Jacob said with confident helpfulness. "Do you know where you started from?"
"Yes, just below the trailhead where the one-ten ends. I was going mostly south, I think."
"Cool. We'll find it." As always, Jacob was game for anything I wanted. No matter how strange it was.
So, Saturday afternoon, I tied on my new hiking boots—purchased that morning using my twenty-per-cent-off employee discount for the first time—grabbed my new topographical map of the Olympic Peninsula, and drove to La Push.
We didn't get started immediately; first, Jacob sprawled across the living room floor—taking up the whole room—and, for a full twenty minutes, drew a complicated web across the key section of the map while I perched on a kitchen chair and talked to Billy. Billy didn't seem at all concerned about our proposed hiking trip. I was surprised that Jacob had told him where we were going, given the fuss people were making about the bear sightings. I wanted to ask Billy not to say anything about this to Charlie, but I was afraid that making the request would cause the opposite result.
"Maybe we'll see the super bear," Jacob joked, eyes on his design.
I glanced at Billy swiftly, fearing a Charlie-style reaction.
But Billy just laughed at his son. "Maybe you should take a jar of honey, just in case."
Jake chuckled. "Hope your new boots are fast, Bella. One little jar isn't going to keep a hungry bear occupied for long."