Writings

“It’s nice of you to sit and listen when Edward plays,” Esme said.

In Montana, spring is late, and so it wasn’t until June that Esme was outside weeding. She has this weird thing that she does, where she weeds the garden at human speed. She could, if she wanted to, have the entire plot done in under sixty seconds, but she doesn’t do it that way. She puts on knee pads, and kneels in the dirt, and spends the better part of an afternoon tugging on little plants and patting the dirt back down gently, like the earth will break. She always asks if any of us are interested in helping.

The answer is usually no.

But Jasper likes to read, and that day, he was involved in some giant book that Carlisle gave him, and so I told Esme I’d help her. And then I realized why she liked to weed: because Esme likes to talk.

She ripped a plant out of the ground, letting it snap between her fingers. I reached for one, and she made an odd sound in her throat, like a buzzer.

“That’s a carrot,” she said. “See how this part is curly? Different than this. It’s straight.” She yanked another one of the plants—which to me, looked pretty curly—and tossed it onto her pile.

“What is this plant called, again?”

“Onion grass.” She rubbed her hands together. “That’s why it stinks.”

“Carrots and onions. Aren’t those supposed to go together?”

She laughed. “Onions, yes. And there are some of those growing over there.” She pointed to an odd plant, with shoots that looked like thin green twigs shooting out of the ground. “But this is onion grass—a whole different matter. It takes over the yard.”

I tried, for a minute, just to pull up onion grass, but it was maddening. Inside the house, Emmett was playing Rosalie at chess, which seemed like more fun.

“You know, I’m happy to do this by myself,” Esme said gently.

“I thought Edward was the telepath?”

She laughed.

“Sometimes, it’s just written all over your face.” She tossed a fistful of onion grass onto her pile, and then leaned back on her feet.

“I like that Edward is letting you listen to him play,” she said quietly. “It’s good for him. He can’t limit himself only to Carlisle and me. I don’t know what it is that you do when you sit with him, but for some reason it works.”

I shrugged. “When I see he’s going to pitch a fit, just I don’t sit down.”

She burst out laughing. “I guess that does it” Gathering up her pile of weeds, she carried them to the edge of the garden, where she dumped them onto a heap of other weeds and pulled-up plants and grass clippings. The onion grass was already beginning to wilt, even in the scant few minutes since we’d ripped them from the earth, and it scattered on what little bit of wind bothered to blow in Montana in the middle of July.

“Why do you plant food?” I asked, as we walked back across the garden. She stopped.

“Why do I plant food?”

Esme’s arms crossed over her chest, and her feet stepped to shoulder width. She stared out over the garden like a land surveyor. Little green shoots in neat furrows, freshly upturned earth from where we’d just yanked out weeds.

She didn’t answer me for a long time.

“I guess I plant food because it’s a nice reminder,” she said. “I like that it’s something that humans do. Reminds me that once, I was one of them, even if it was a long time ago now.” She smiled, and rested her hands on top of her abdomen, which she does sometimes when she’s remembering her human life.

I can’t see the past, so it was a whole year after Jasper and I arrived that I heard the story of Esme’s baby. I try to imagine her like that, sometimes—holding a little baby, nursing him, rocking him to sleep. Carlisle said she had only four days with him, and that he died of something no one could do anything about.

When he says that, I think he’s assuring himself more than her.

“It would be nice,” I muttered, before I’d even realized I’d had the thought.

“What would be nice?”

“It would be nice to remember what human life was like. Eating food, working in a garden…” I shrugged.

Esme put her arm around me.

“That’s the thing about this,” she said. “You get to make new memories. It doesn’t make up for losing the old—and you lost more than everybody else—but it does make it a little more bearable, I think.” She gestured back toward the house. “Shall we? Unless you see some reason we shouldn’t.”

I shrugged and shook my head, and a moment later, we were back inside.

Forward

Edward is the most dangerous of all of us. Because he’s young, Carlisle told me once. When he thinks something, he just acts on it. The way the brain works when you’re a seventeen-year-old boy means that certain things just happen.

He chuckled and added, “I’d like to figure out what the vampire equivalent of adrenaline is.”

Adrenaline or whatever you’d like to call it, it’s what happens to Edward. Why one second I was sitting next to him at the piano, and the next, my bottom was on the floor, with the bench exploding into pieces as it slammed into the wall.

Usually, Edward’s M.O. was just to get up, close the piano, and leave. He liked me listening to him, I thought, at least until I thought the wrong thing; until I started imagining him with his mother as a boy. But this time, he lost it.

The next sweep of his arm took with it all the music—it hadn’t been nocturnes today, it was some concerto that he was trying to teach himself and so for the first time in a long time, he’d been using music. Calm, serene, playing something new.

At least, calm and serene until I sat down next to him and started imagining his mother again.

Edward threw me with enough force that it hurt, and I sat there, stunned, staring at him as he panted.

Esme started crying.

Jasper punched Edward so hard that his face literally began to shatter. Which of course got Carlisle upset, and then he was in the middle of it, too, pushing on Jasper’s chest and Edward’s so that they separated, snarling.

I sat on the floor, wondering what I’d done.

“Don’t think about that!” Edward answered, and he spat. “Just stop, Freak.”

“Stop what?” I asked.

“Just…stop!” Then he stalked off to his room again.

The door didn’t slam.

Jasper knelt down and pulled me into his arms, running his hands through my hair, such as it is. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?” When I shook my head, he turned to Carlisle. “You need to learn to control him.”

Carlisle took a deep breath and exhaled, like humans do. He has habits like that.

“It isn’t my intention to control him, Jasper,” he said.

Jasper frowned, but Carlisle simply crossed the distance between us and patted me on the shoulder.

“You’re all right?” he asked.

I nodded.

He turned toward the stairs, sighing. “I should go figure out what happened.”

“Leave me alone,” Edward called, and Carlisle looked despondent, but turned away.

I never did figure out what it was exactly that set Edward off so badly in my vision.

But when I saw him get out the sheet music that day, I did decide not to bother sitting down.

Forward

Maria showed up innocently enough, on a Saturday afternoon when the wind was blowing through town. Emmett said that means there will be a change in the weather. As a human, he was the son of a tobacco farmer. He knows those sorts of things.

When Jasper told me about Maria, I had pictured a statuesque woman, with long, dark hair. Maybe as tall as Jasper, and certainly every bit as strong.

Instead, she was a woman of my height, and almost my build; slight, wiry. Bossy.

It made me self-conscious at once.

Jasper said he was surprised to see her so far north.

Carlisle welcomed her in, but then left for work. He looked a little concerned, but when Esme whispered to him asking if it was a good idea that she visit, he reminded her that his friend Garrett, who doesn’t share our ways, visits all the time. And why shouldn’t Jasper have friends?

“It might do him good,” he said.

Carlisle is so rarely wrong about people; it caught all of us by surprise.

Forward

It was about two weeks after I saw the vision of him throwing the piano bench that I knocked on Edward’s door. Motown, today. Carlisle and he had gone to some sort of concert in Detroit some time earlier.

Jasper thought it was kind of odd. He’s a southerner; integration confused him. But there was no denying that Edward was happier listening to the records he brought back.

Edward’s room was at the top of the stairs, and when he played a record, the sound drifted down through the whole house. Sometimes the floors would pulsate. Esme pretended to be annoyed, but really, I think she liked knowing he was up there, listening to music.

We could pretend he was being happy.

I listened to the Temptations crooning through Edward’s door, and was steeling myself to knock when the door swung open and I almost fell into the room.

Edward looked slightly amused.

“Hi,” I said.

“Can I help you?”

“I was just figuring that out,” I told him, and he actually laughed.

“I know.” He tapped the side of his head. “You think loud.”

I walked into his room and sat down. Edward doesn’t pretend he has any need for a bed; never has. He’s big on nice couches, though, and this one was the best I’d seen so far. I plunked down on it, letting myself fall back into the cushions. The Temptations blasted so loudly I could feel my eardrums vibrating.

Edward crossed the room and turned them down.

“Thanks.”

He shrugged, and sat on a stool, with his legs splayed wide to either side.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. In my mind, I was busy replaying the vision. The bench shattering against the wall; the look on his face as Jasper shattered his cheekbone. Esme crying. Carlisle holding Edward and Jasper apart.

Edward blinked.

“What was that in answer to?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I was coming to ask.”

He put his hands between his legs, pressing down on the stool with the heels of his palms and pushing himself forward so that the whole stool rocked back and forth. It creaked a little, and made little thunking noises as first the front legs, then the back came free of the floor and then plopped back down.

I thought it would be nice to be able to read Edward’s mind. This got a titter of laughter from him. But then he went all solemn again and kept thinking.

Finally, he shook his head.

“I don’t know what it would have been,” he said. “I’m glad you stopped it, whatever it was.”

He blanched.

“Are you enjoying the Temptations?” I asked, and he smiled. Edward has this shy way of smiling, when he’s smiling for real. Where he looks up from under his eyelashes, and you know that he’s actually being genuine.

“We’re going to make small talk, now?”

I shrugged. “We don’t have to.”

He stood up. The stool made one last thunk onto the floor and sat silent.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later, Fr—Alice.”

I got up.

He plugged a set of headphones into the LP player, clamping them over his ears. The big silver discs dwarfed his head, making him look disproportionate to his body. Then he flopped down on the couch and closed his eyes. His foot moved in time with the music.

Alice.

It was an improvement.

Forward

Sky Harbor Airport

I always thought it was unbelievable, the way characters on TV behave when they find out someone has died. That they scream and howl and start running, and you have to fight to hold them still. Exaggerated for effect.

But when Edward stepped into the baggage claim at the Phoenix airport, he screamed. When he saw that we’d lost her. When he understood at once where she’d gone.

Right there, with all the passengers darting back and forth, and the loud speaker crackling on and off, and the baggage claims beeping and chugging, Edward came to stop, and then tipped sideways, and then fell to his knees so hard he rocked a little bit. Carlisle threw his arms around him, pulling him into an embrace, and Edward’s hands made a hollow thumping noise as he pounded against Carlisle’s chest.

“Let me go!” he screamed. “I have to save her! Carlisle, let me go!”

And he did save her.

I don’t know why I was surprised.

Forward