Writings

“I promise, we’ll be gone only a little while.” Jasper pressed his forehead to mine so that his hair fell forward and tickled my cheek. “A few hours. I just need to say some things to her, get her to see that I’m never coming back. Shake her off Peter and Charlotte’s trail.”

It made sense. But my stomach was all knotted anyway.

At the time, I thought the stomach knot was about Maria.

Jasper pressed his lips to mine. Briefly, his mouth opened and he sucked my tongue inside it. Our tongues wrestled against each other, and he exhaled softly onto my cheek.

“I love you,” he said. “Only you.” He reached his hand to my face, stroking my cheek with his thumb. “She’ll be gone soon.”

And then the door opened and closed and he was gone.

~End of Part II~

Part III
Back to beginning

Edward returned to Forks after only two days. He ignored Isabella for a month.

Then he stopped a speeding car in the high school parking lot. He said it was because if her blood spilled, we’d all be in trouble.

I knew better.

Rosalie drove us to the hospital, which looks less like a hospital and more like a long shed. Inside it still smelled the same though—iodine and antiseptic, and if you focus on those smells, you can get through the blood part.

Edward was just coming out of Carlisle’s office when we got there.

“I don’t want to hear about it, Freak,” was all he said.

Jasper voted to kill her to keep our secret. When I explained who Bella was to Edward, he recanted, but it didn’t make me less upset.

Carlisle voted that she’d stay alive. So she did.

None of us understood the mess we’d gotten ourselves into.

Edward, least of all.

Forward

Snow doesn’t bother vampires. That’s why Jasper and I were all buried in it, in the Montana mountains. Sometimes, he and I take off for a few days. It’s good for him. Recharges him. Jasper is an introvert; he gets his energy from being apart from people. I’m the other way entirely—I get mine from being in the thick of things.

But Jasper is mine, and he needs to go away sometimes to recharge, and that’s okay with me. It gives us reason to go together. Which was how we ended up in the mountains, lying in a snowdrift.

I leaned my head against Jasper’s chest and tried to imagine what it had sounded like, when he’d once had a heartbeat. What his body would sound like if it were full of whooshing blood instead of venom.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after a while.

“Nothing,” I muttered.

He laughed. “I’ll buy that one when you don’t come back with some important thing that’s on your mind.” He smiled at me and tucked my hair behind my ear, stroking down my neck as he did so. It made me shiver a little.

I leaned into him a little more, and thought about our family. This group I brought us to, because I saw us all one day, standing together and laughing.

I told Jasper that, back in Philadelphia, when we first met. He was important; he was a crucial piece. He was my piece. Without him, there was no laughing family. There was no future for me.

For him, there was a future, too. One of running after Emmett, taking out grizzly bears, playing guitar next to the fireplace while I leaned against his legs.

There was laughter in his future, too.

So once we had our pieces, we had to find this other piece, this bigger piece—the doctor and his wife, and the two sons and the beautiful daughter.

But we hadn’t lived my vision. Not yet.

Jasper let out a little sigh, which I know is his way of telling me he knows I’m feeling something I’m not letting on.

“You’re thinking about something,” he said.

“I’m a vampire. I’m always thinking about something.” I leaned up to him and kissed him on the nose. Then I scooped up snow and smashed it into his face, and took off running down the mountain with my husband on my heels.

Forward

“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

The way this story ends is that Edward is my best friend.

I know that’s not how you’re supposed to tell a story; it’s the kind of thing that annoys the snot out of Jasper, or would, if he had any to be annoyed out. But it’s the way I tell a story. Because I always know the end.

The Cullens—my family—are big readers. I think it’s because of Carlisle, who did nothing but read for two centuries. And the rest of them all follow suit, even Jasper and Emmett, who you think wouldn’t read much. But there’re a lot more books than there are TV shows and even vampires get bored with bad TV.

Reading doesn’t work very well for me, though. I see the final page turn, and I see the end of the book, and I see my reactions to the parts in the middle, and by the time I’ve picked something up I’ve decided to read, I already know the end. So if I read, I read differently—I read to appreciate the way the writer used her words, or the way he kept tension moving from scene to scene. I read to laugh at a funny line of dialogue.

I don’t read to know the end. I always know that from the beginning.

So the end of this story is that Edward is my best friend.

But that’s not how it begins.

Forward