Writings

Rosalie laughed when I told her I was concerned about Edward.

“He’s just going to go on being a mope,” she said. “Everything he does; he just trudges from one day to the next.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “How Carlisle could think I could ever put up with someone like that…” she trailed off, and then gave me a wan smile.

“Well, he loves Esme. He just…had high hopes.”

She snorted. “Carlisle’s a tyrant. Just a really, really polite one.” She slid back under the frame of Emmett’s car. She had a little light in a cage that was on a giant cord that stretched all the way into the kitchen. The light hung underneath the engine and made it glow from where I could see through the open hood.

“Would you hold this up for me? I need about two more inches above the jack.”

I looked at my hands, which Rosalie didn’t miss.

“You won’t get that much grease on them,” she said, and I could tell she was rolling her eyes somewhere beneath all the engine parts and belts.

I slid a hand under the car and lifted it up a few more inches.

“Thanks,” she said.

“So, about Edward.”

The only sound from under the car was the ticking of the instrument Rose was using to adjust whatever it was. It zipped and unzipped, like the sound our grandfather clock made when you wind it.

Slowly, the zipping stopped.

Rosalie pushed herself out from under the car. There was a little streak of oil or grease or something of that nature across the bridge of her nose and down the side of her cheek. Somehow, on Rose, that sort of thing just makes her look even more gorgeous.

“Honestly?” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I would stop worrying, Alice. All the rest of us have.”

We stared at each other a moment.

Then she shrugged, and slid herself back under the car.

Forward

Because Carlisle was an emergency surgeon, we had our own telephone line. And that meant that any time our phone rang, you knew.

By the time Carlisle hung up, I had seen the whole thing. The accident, which would go on for a half hour because of the fog. The highway, slick with blood and gasoline and oil, and littered with car parts. Carlisle, running between cars, grabbing bodies and carrying them to safety. In surgery all night, returning to us in the morning looking almost as tired as he might have if he were a human.

And, because they were running in the woods too near the crash, Maria…and Jasper.

Forward

Getting Edward’s photo re-framed cost five dollars.

I hung it up in his room with a note that simply said, “More Chopin.”

That night, he played for three and a half hours without stopping.

Forward

Edward saw my vision at the same time I did. He was just moving to sit down at the piano, but instead of the peace-filled expression I usually saw when he was ready to sit down to play, I saw his face twist in horror.

“Can we stop them?” he asked.

I shook my head.

But Edward is the fastest of all of us, and he’s also the most stubborn.

We left the front door open.

Forward

Edward didn’t ask me about the photo, nor did he thank me for it. But he played almost every night, and most nights, I sat with him, listening, watching. Trying not to think of his mother and how it must have been, her sitting there with Edward leaning into her side.

Sometimes, my mind would drift though, and then I would hear his fingers falter as my imagining of his mother appeared in my mind.

Listening to him trip over the notes, I squeezed his arm.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

He kept playing.

Forward