I'll be home for Christmas

Chapter 3

She held Josh's hand as they went inside the Black house. Josh looked at the ramps and obvious signs of the residence of a disabled man and raised his eyebrows questioningly. Sam and Jake followed them in.

Bella understood. It occurred to her to wonder how she always seemed to know what Josh was thinking. "Billy has diabetes. The nerve damage got so bad about six years ago, that he was confined to a wheelchair." She suddenly thought of something. She turned looking for Jake. "My red truck?" she asked him.

"He sent it to the scrap-yard," Jake replied. "Before he bought that insanely overpriced Mercedes thing."

She didn't need to know which 'he' Jake meant. Edward had always hated that truck; mostly because it was built by Jake. Almost as much as she had hated Edward's pre-change purchase; that obscene display of wealth that had pretended to be a car, the Mercedes Guard. The pack would have shown Jake memories of her stalling that car incessantly. She couldn't even drive it properly. The only good thing Edward had ever done with her truck was pull a dent out of the fender one day when she was washing it, but probably because he wasn't thinking about it at the time. And besides, he had made the dent in the first place when he had shoved it out of her way in the school parking lot before Tyler's van hit her. Starting the whole crazy chain of events.

"Oh." She felt oddly disappointed. A scrap-yard.

"I rescued it," Jake added.

"Really?" Then she suddenly felt guilty for being so overjoyed about her truck being okay. "Oh, um," she added, "That's good. I loved that truck."

"Yeah." Jake grinned at her. For just a second she saw the boy of her youth. The rascally boy that had got pleasure from irritating Edward Cullen. Mostly just by not wearing a shirt around him.

"Thanks, Jake."

"You can't have it back. It's Embry's red truck, now."

"Oh, that's okay. I am sure Embry will look after it."

At the mention of his name, some heavy looks were exchanged between Sam and Jake. "Embry," Jake repeated. Sam just nodded. Bella squeezed Josh's hand.

"What is wrong with Billy? What are his symptoms?" Josh asked. Bella suspected that he had changed the topic of conversation deliberately; maybe he just wanted to get on with it. He can't have known about Embry, could he? He'd already left the reservation before Embry was born. She thought Embry was a little older than Jake, but only by a few months. She frowned as she tried to do the math in her head.

"We don't know," Jake answered. "It started with body pain and an elevated temperature. We thought he had an infection but nothing showed up in the tests. Then he went into a coma."

Bella snapped out her calendar reverie, "Oh, Jake. No."

"That was two days ago. The medical center makes sure he's medically looked after, but we all felt he would be happier here." He paused. "And it was Christmas." He shrugged. "Paul and Rachel have gone to collect Rebecca from the airport."

"Yes, of course." It was that serious that Rebecca had come from Hawaii. Billy must be dying.

Josh was staring at the floor. "Two days," he repeated.

"What?" Bella asked.

"Dream. He was in my dream. Two days ago."

"Who was?" Bella checked. "Billy?"

Josh nodded.

"Was he walking?"

"Kind of," Josh answered enigmatically.