Meyer owns all
Edward: From Tanya's death to the happy hour at the beginning of Gothic
Edward didn't understand why the police were talking to him again. Or why his so-called lawyer was letting them do it. He'd spent two nights in jail. He'd been arraigned. They were going to try him for Tanya's murder. He was wearing an ankle bracelet to keep him from fleeing.
"What's your relationship with Isabella Swan?" the detective asked.
Izzy? "Is she dead too?" Edward asked, unable to stop himself. Jesus, if she was, he was over. No one would believe he was innocent.
"Just answer the question."
"We went to school together."
"You ever date her?"
What? "N-no."
"You ever hang out? Smoke a joint? Anything?"
"We were lab partners once, that's it."
When they told him that the charges were being dropped because Izzy had given him an alibi, he put his head in his hands and wept.
He knew.
Edward knew that Izzy hated him. And yet he sought her out, to thank her.
He wasn't surprised by her response.
He walked out of the diner, James laughing and oblivious up ahead. Edward glanced back at the diner, at Izzy in one of the booths, and collapsed.
When Edward came to his senses, he was sitting on the ground behind the diner. He was leaning against the dumpster, bubble gum and unwholesome things stuck to the ground around him and he didn't care, sitting there against the filthy metal. Only the chill in the air kept him from vomiting.
That was the first day that Edward had dared go anywhere in Forks after the charges were dropped. At first, he'd stayed home, spending most of his time at his piano, his fingers staggering across the keys. Broken notes clanging. A thousand aberrations surging against the harmony.
And all along he could feel his parents hovering.
"Why did it take that girl so long to come forward?" his mother complained.
"She didn't have to come forward at all," he said.
"Why would you say that Edward?" his father demanded.
Ignoring his parents' protests, he fled the house, and went hiking. He repeated his hike from the day that Tanya was murdered, going all the way to the meadow and sitting on the cold ground. He wondered if Izzy would appear, even though it was almost midnight. Was she somewhere in the woods? Did she come here often? Why hadn't she said something to him that day, to let him know that she was there?
He looked up at the sky. The light of the stars was dim, the radiance trembling, flickering as if a whisper of breath might cause them to be extinguished. Had they always been so weak? He'd sat in this very spot countless times, watching the night sky, marveling at the same stars, the shards of bright light. Now it was as if he was looking at them through a blanket. He could hardly see.
He went home and told his mother in excruciating detail exactly why he had no right to expect anything from Izzy. His mother didn't speak to him for two days. "How could you?" she asked him at last. He didn't have an answer.
Edward decided that there was something wrong with him. How else was he to explain it? His ex-girlfriend had been murdered, and all fingers pointed to him. His best friend had betrayed him, dealing drugs out of the apartment that they shared, and now the police were looking at him again with suspicion in their eyes.
Edward knew it was a mistake, but he hooked up with some guys from his program who were going to Mexico for spring break. They were trashed before their plane even took off.
It didn't take long for the partying to wear on Edward. He went to the train station and purchased a ticket to a town in the middle of nowhere. When the train stopped, Edward staggered out of the station, a little hung over still, and stared. It was barely a town, barely a square mile of modest clapboard houses and businesses and straggling vegetation. And it was surrounded by a vast, dry emptiness. There was only desert in the distance.
Ignoring the wondering glances from the locals, Edward set off for the tallest building in town, its rooftop cross easy to pick out in the midst of so much squalor. It was a plain church. Squat and simple. A false pediment rose from the front, with the cross at its peak, the sole attempt at opulence. The severity of the place, and the poverty of the surrounding town, suddenly made Edward uneasy. What was he doing there?
He walked slowly around the far side of the church, pausing beside the jumble of gravestones, and stared.
She stood on a small pedestal, in a clutch of graves, her arms held out as if to comfort the dead. He thought at first that the woman was alive, the likeness was so true, from the kindness in her expression to the grace of her pose. Her hands too, the fine fingers curved in a delicate gesture, posed to brush perhaps a burning brow, wipe away an errant tear, they were almost human. If only a lock of hair would escape the statue's cowl, he was sure it would curl over her shoulder in a soft wave.
He hesitated at the edge of the graveyard, reluctant to venture any closer to the statue, as if she might startle into flight. He felt a strange sensation gradually steal over him. It wasn't peace, but it was close to it.
No one bothered him there in the graveyard. The sun slowly began to set, the sky an orange-pink wound. When night fell, the statue shone, absorbing the light of the moon—giant in the vast emptiness—and radiating it back. The angel glowed.
The next day, he took the train to an airport and returned to school early.
Edward stared down at the staring eyes. They gaped, bulbous in the bloated flesh. The man had only been dead five minutes and already he'd taken on a waxy sheen. But he'd come in already half-dead. The end was inevitable, even as Edward had applied the paddles to his gray chest.
Edward was alone with the corpse now. Everyone else had left the room, hurrying away because they had other cases, or wanting to distance themselves from the miasma of decay. All the frenetic energy expended to keep this man alive, stilled in an instant, as if it had never happened. Just like this man's life.
Edward stared down at him. The whites of the man's eyes were milky swirls, the blackheads on his bulbous nose were dark pits, and the flabby flesh of his lips was a meaty paradise.
He was utterly grotesque.
He was utterly fascinating.
Staring down at the body, Edward forgot, for a whole thirty seconds, that there was an Edward. There was only the dead man and his spider veined skin.
A nurse burst through the doors and froze.
"Dr. Cullen, your shift was over fifteen minutes ago."
"Was it?"
She nodded dumbly.
Edward glanced down at the corpse and sighed.
"You did everything you could to keep him alive," she reassured him.
A strange gurgling sounded from Edward's chest and he jerked away from the table. Of course he'd done everything he could to keep the man alive. Was there any question of that?
Edward hurried towards the locker room, remembering that he was supposed to be meeting Jasper for drinks. Jasper was going to tell Edward all about his new job at the university.
You don't have to be normal, Edward promised himself as he slammed his locker shut. You only have to act normal.
He could do that, couldn't he?