Writings

In 1987 I got a vision of Edward getting married.

I didn’t tell him about it. Too many steps between here and there.

Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake not warning him.

Forward

The first time I saw Edward, he was running, which I didn’t realize at the time would turn out to be one of the only things he loved. He ran with his mouth wide open and his head thrown back, his hair flying behind him like a banner and the sun turning it bright red in parts so that it looked like it was on fire. And out of nowhere, a streak of gold cut across his path and tackled him, and they fell to the ground and laughed so hard the grass shook.

Fifty years later I talked to Carlisle about that. Asked him if it happened. He searched his mind for a while. Edward says that Carlisle’s mind is very organized, that dipping into it is like wandering into a doctor’s office, with rows and rows of neat files all labeled with colored stickers. When he needs something, he goes to his big filing system and spends a moment hunting, then pulls out the right file and tells you what he thinks the contents tell him.

“I do remember that,” he said after a moment, a smile spreading across his face. “He thought I was running behind him, but I was actually in the trees. I dropped forty feet out of a pin oak and tackled him from the side.” He chuckled. “One of the few times I’ve ever surprised him. He learned to expect that maneuver and listen for the rustling of the leaves after that.”

Carlisle smiles a lot when he talks about Edward. Edward is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. I can’t see the past, and the way it would have forked, but I can see the future, and as it turned out, the running day was in the future when I awoke.

To this day, I think it’s interesting that my first vision of them was to know for certain that Carlisle would be happy. That I saw him tackling Edward, and the two of them laughing.

Jasper wasn’t laughing when I saw him first. He was sitting on an upended bucket in the dark corner of a barn with his head in his hands. In fact, I couldn’t tell if he was crying—well, at the time. Now that I remember it, I know he wasn’t, because Jasper has cried a total of three times in the last seventy years. And one of those was on our wedding day.

But I knew that I was in love with him.

You know how they talk about someone causing you heartache? Jasper caused me heartache. Right from the very beginning. It’s a thing you can feel, a weird twinge in the area of your gut that seems to be radiating from where your heart is, even if you’re like us, and your heart doesn’t move. I’ve never asked, but I’m sure Carlisle would have some explanation for that, some discussion of the xiphoid process or the diaphragm or some something; the way your brain interacts with all those weird muscles that otherwise do things like keep your food down or allow you to breathe. He’s a scientist, and that means he’s always looking for the exact explanations of things.

Thing is, though, exact explanations can sometimes ruin what is otherwise a really good heartache.

So I knew from that heartache I was going to have to find the man on the bucket.

But I also knew I was going to have to find the laughing boy.

And I guess that’s as good a beginning as any.

Forward

I cornered Carlisle a month after my wedding. Every now and then he holes himself up in his study with his books, almost exactly the way Edward does in his room with his music. Jasper calls them a match made in Heaven.

That’s when punch Jasper in the shoulder.

Carlisle was reading some medical journal, turning pages so eagerly you’d think he was reading a thriller. When I entered, he flipped it over and sat back in his chair, his palms flat on his desk and his arms open.

Carlisle has this way of letting you know it’s okay to talk to him.

I slid onto the desk, one hip almost knocking over his pencil cup. It barely teetered; he caught it so fast I didn’t even have time to warn him.

“It’s funny how we sit,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “How we sit?”

“Not how we sit, I guess. That we sit.” I gestured to my lap. “I don’t need to sit here alone with you. You know I don’t need to sit.”

Carlisle chuckled. “You’re very good at the charade.”

For a long time, neither of us said anything.

“You didn’t come in here to talk to me about sitting, Alice,” he said gently at last.

“No.”

Carlisle just sat there, his eyebrows raised.

“What does the M stand for?” I asked at last.

“The M?”

“Edward. He has a lighter, up in his room, on his special shelf. E. A. M.”

“Oh.” A smile spread across Carlisle’s face. “Masen. Edward Anthony Masen.”

Edward Masen.

Just like Jasper had once been Jasper Whitlock, Edward was Edward Masen.

What had the Masens been like, I wondered. Did Mr. Masen look like Edward? Gangly and tall, with red-brown hair that looked like it was on fire in the sun? Did Mrs. Masen bake him cookies? They had both died, I knew that much. We all knew the story of how the Cullens started; Carlisle, alone in a hospital in Chicago, presented with the wild idea to create a companion and the orphaned boy who would be the perfect experiment. But what had the family been like before then? Who had they been?

Carlisle doesn’t push conversations, which is one of the nicer things about talking to him. If he sees you’re thinking, he just sits back and waits for you to ask a question or say more.

“What were they like?”

“They?”

“Edward’s parents.”

For a moment, Carlisle’s eyes glazed over, the way they do when he’s thinking about something that happened a long time ago. Or something that means a lot to him. In this case, I guessed, it was both.

“I didn’t meet his father,” he said carefully. “Not in any substantive way. He was delirious with fever by the time he was admitted, and he died within a few days. A lot of people did, then. It was such an awful disease.” He rubbed his temple, as though it was somehow possible for him to have a headache.

“His mother, though…” A little laugh escaped his lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever treated a more difficult patient. I could not get her to do anything that was even remotely in her best interest if it in any way ran counter to what she felt she needed to do for Edward. He was so much worse off than her-he was the one they brought in first. She got sick later, after she refused to leave the hospital and spent day after day exposed to the influenza.”

“She wouldn’t leave him.”

“She wouldn’t even entertain the idea.” Carlisle’s eyes glazed over again. “She loved him a great, great deal.”

“And you don’t?”

Carlisle chuckled. “Touché.” He hopped off the desk. “Why the sudden interest? Something isn’t about to happen to him, is it?”

He did a remarkably good job at keeping the panic out of his voice when he asked that.

“No,” I answered. “I just wanted to know. Thank you.”

Carlisle nodded. “Anytime.”

I started to make my way out of the room, but Carlisle called after me.

“Alice?”

I turned.

“He doesn’t really think you’re a freak.”

Then he leaned back in his chair and went back to reading his journal.

Forward

As predicted, Isabella turned up in a Biology classroom in Washington.

I’d thought it was Jasper at first, when I saw the classroom massacre that day in January. Twenty students slaughtered, blood spattering the walls like some kind of bad contemporary painting.

But Jasper was in my section of U.S. History , and I could see he wasn’t going anywhere.

Edward held it in check, and the vision disappeared.

I cornered him in the hallway after class.

“Go talk to Carlisle,” I urged him. “Now.”

Edward is a runner. By which I mean not that he enjoys running, although he does. But I mean he runs when things don’t go right.

But he’s also stubborn, and so he waited until after school.

Forward

Edward plays melancholy music when he’s upset. Sometimes, it’s the only way any of the rest of us have to even figure it out.

So I was expecting the minor chords and the slow dirges when they started up. He sat there, his hair falling over his forehead as he leaned in toward the keyboard with each press; his brow wrinkling like it was taking a lot of effort. Which was completely silly; it doesn’t take us effort to do anything.

Edward disappears like that, sometimes. It can be hours; he’ll sit at the keyboard pedaling and playing, and the whole house will ring with some sad song. I didn’t know music before the Cullens, but I know it know—Rachmaninoff is mad, and Liszt is sad, and Bach is content.

Joplin is for Esme.

But Edward rarely plays that.

I went in to sit next to him on the bench. The moment my bottom hit the wood, however, the piano closed with a thud, and Edward was gone.

Forward