February 4th, 2001
Chapter Three – Aggravation
The woods were different here. Better here, in my opinion. They were sparser, and the ground was clearer so there's room to zig and zag through the foliage without the risk of catching your foot or shoulder on a vine and ripping up a few yards of the forest floor.
I was not unaware of the irony of finding myself hiding in the forest once again, trying to find some space from the family that I had practically begged to be a part of six months ago. We were settled in Alaska now, all seven of us, and to my understanding there was another neighboring clan not far away, though I had yet to meet any of them.
But the truth was that I was out there because I was frustrated. I was angry with all of them and they knew it and I knew it so there wasn't really any reason to talk about it any further.
I knew that they weren't going to tell me. And they knew that I knew that they were hiding something.
And so there we were – at a stalemate.
Here was yet another example of how nothing had turned out as I'd expected. I guess I thought they would turn me away at the door honestly, but of course the Cullen family has more class than all that.
When I'd arrived with Carlisle seven months ago, I'd been greeted with hugs and handshakes, declarations of joy that I'd be staying while Esme casually herded our little party into the family room. My room was still there, I was a bit surprised and felt a little guilty for that.
Carlisle seemed happy with the welcoming party, but kept his hand on my shoulder for the first several minutes, either to offer comfort or to try to keep me in the room. I offered basic greetings and chit-chat, but I think Carlisle could see that my heart wasn't in it. In reality, I was still trying to process how familiar this scene was - how many times I'd witnessed it when returning to the Cullen Estate for holidays or when I'd been informed of new members that had joined the clan.
It was like nothing had changed. Like nothing had happened. Like it hadn't been over six years since I'd heard a word from any of them.
Alice was the last to greet me, jumping into my arms and wrapping her short little legs around me. I couldn't help but chuckle as I listened to the diatribe that was pouring out of her mouth at inhuman speed.
Behind the words she was saying, where I could usually hear the other – entirely different – diatribe of her inner thoughts, I found something odd. Names of shoe designers, some old, some dead, some not yet discovered, they all ran through her head with corresponding snapshots of pieces of all their work.
The train of thought was disturbing in its monotony, and I raised my eyebrow at her and asked, "Are you OK, Alice?"
"What? Yes, of course! But you know how I get when I'm excited, I just can't keep a lid on it! There's so much to discuss now, you'll need new clothes and a new driver's license and maybe later we can tell you all about how we go to school a –"
"Alice, wait!" I stopped her. I was going to ask her what was happening in her head but quickly realized how rude that sounded, so I hesitated for a moment and looked to Carlisle. Then it hit me.
For the last few days of travel, Carlisle had become more distant around me. He was still as friendly as ever, but he asked only a few vague questions about where I'd been and why I finally decided to call him the way that I did. At first I was grateful, but when conversation failed to progress much further, I couldn't help but notice how sad he seemed around me, how he seemed almost closed off. I knew then that Alice must have told him what had happened to bring me to finally call him. He must be exasperated with me at the very least. His sadness was harder to decipher, so I delved into his mind a bit deeper and realized he was concentrating very intently on a stream of sermons. Words from priests and reverends all over the world ran through his mind, one after the other, in languages both modern and forgotten.
At first I almost asked him why he was doing it, but I knew that it must be to keep me out, and the truth was worked very well so far. I was a bit hurt, because after living with my gift for over eighty years I feel a bit of entitlement when it comes to reading other's thoughts. But Carlisle was a good man and had always treated me with respect, so there must be another reason that he'd closed himself off to me, right? Maybe to protect me?
I slumped down into the passenger seat of the rental car – maybe he thought it best that I didn't know what he thought about me.
So I had let it go and we listened in silence as he remembered the retelling of a dream quest from a Shaman that he'd met nearly two hundred years prior.
I had let the diversion go before, but now – faced with two family members actively trying to keep me out of their heads, I was distinctly suspicious. I stared at Carlisle, hoping that he would be able to read my mind, or at least the look of baffled anger on my face, and tell me what all this shielding was about.
When he stayed silent, I finally turned back to Alice and accused her, "You're hiding something."
"What do you mean? Of course I'm not. Now come on, let's take your stuff up to the room that you'll be staying in and then maybe afterwards we can go explore the hunting territory around here."
She kept talking, but I tried to tune her out. It was obvious to me that the others didn't know anything about Alice and Carlisle's deception, they only stared at me, slightly confused by my outburst but blaming it on the 'lifestyle' I'd been living.
Jasper must have felt the nervousness that they were both displaying, and he damn sure must have felt my confusion and frustration. But he didn't say anything at all, choosing instead to trust in his wife.
Only Esme looked concerned, furrowing her brow as she stared at Carlisle. She reassured herself that the next time she was alone with her mate, she would find out what was going on.
I escaped from the family room as soon as I could after that, to the comfort of my dark bedroom, filled with the familiar smells of all the things that I had collected in my first decade of this life. I ran my fingers along the CDs that someone had eventually created from the gramophone records that I started with, and which were still housed in traveling boxes that lined one side of the closet space. I fingered through to sheet music left out artistically on the music rack of the piano in front of the windows. Eventually I meandered to the stereo system and found Ibert.
As Sarabande pour Dulcinée poured into the room that night I sat on my black leather couch and closed my eyes. I tried to find the strength to temper the internal voices that still grated heavily in my ears after so long in the forest alone.
Today was one of the worst days since that day, the day that I arrived. After all, in my eighty years of the life I'd never yelled at Carlisle before. But I couldn't help it. I couldn't stop it because the alternative was yelling at the person that I was truly angry at, which was Esme. I think Carlisle knew that, so he took my lashings with stoic sadness. But really, what else would one expect of Carlisle Cullen?
It had taken Esme months to crack Carlisle's secret, and when she did I thought that I would finally get to know what was so damned important to Alice and my father. Esme and I had practically agreed on it.
But when that day came – today – to say that I was surprised would be an understatement. As soon as they walked into the room together, it was obvious that he'd told her. He was guilty, and she bombarded me with something I was not at all prepared to hear.
A list of flowers, Latin names of course, alphabetical and only just beginning, chanting out Adenophora liliifoliav as she emerged into the room. Immediately I was angry, and I felt betrayed.
"Really, Esme?" I said, seething. I tried to keep my anger under control but this had been my best hope of figuring out this puzzle. At first I had only been annoyed, but now it went much further than that.
Now I was not only resentful, but I also felt deeply wounded by the people in my life who meant the most to me. Carlisle was my sire – my father – the man I emulated, aspired to be. Esme was viewed as a mother by the rest of the group, but to me she always seemed more like a sister. I was still rather new to this life when Esme joined us, and she's the only one of the Cullens other than Carlisle that I'd ever lived with before. When Esme was first turned, she and I spent a great deal of time together, and while I know that I hurt her when I struck out on my own, not even saying goodbye before I took a train to Boston, I thought I could at least count on her to tell me truth when I asked it of her.
"Now son, calm down." She is important to you; I know that you don't want to hurt her. Carlisle's thoughts implored me to accept this oppressive silence from them. To trust him.
Instead I turned on him. "No! I'm so damned tired of this! What's changed? What do you know that is so bad that you can't let me see it? It's about me, isn't it?"
Carlisle sighed and looked to Alice, who nodded somberly before turning to face me once more.
"I know that you are frustrated Edward, and I wish that I could explain all of this to you, but I have to be very careful." The statement infuriated me even more. Carlisle hesitated, seeming to weigh his next words heavily. It was all that I could do to wait for him to speak again.
"You aren't ready to hear the things that I know. The things that Alice has seen. You're right. It is about you, but you just have to believe me when I say that you can't know any more than that right now. You have to trust me, son. You have to believe that I want what is best for you, and that we wouldn't hide something like this from you without very good reason."
Esme was nodding her head beside him. But I was still angry.
"No! You don't get to make that decision for me. Just tell me what it is. Tell me what's going to happen to me! I swear to God, Carlisle, you better tell me right now!" I was scared and so, so angry. Even more infuriating is that even with all these feelings of betrayal and anger coursing through me I still felt just as empty as I ever did before. Nothing was any different here.
I picked up a flower vase sitting on the table and threw it against the wall with all my strength. It practically disintegrated and left a nasty gouge in the dry wall. Esme flinched and Carlisle pulled her closer, watching me with a mixture of guilt and fear on his face. Esme leaned into his side, as if I'd thrown the vase at her.
I saw myself in their minds eye, and the look on my face was one of fury. My entire body, from my fists to my jaw, was clenched, and my back was slightly bent. My breathing was heavy. Even though it had been over six months, my eyes were still not the same as the others. The red was fading, but right now my eyes were a muddy orange, like the color of dried blood spread thin on a microscope slide.
And so I'd left, ran into the forest where the animals were the only ones to judge me. At least I couldn't hear their thoughts. Their condemnations. Their half-truths and ramblings.
On the edge of my mental range, I heard the tinkling song of Alice's singing voice. She was humming and muttering to herself, some top forty song that I couldn't be bothered to try to identify. It was her way of signaling her approach, though why she was bothering with courtesy in this area when she was so lacking in others was beyond me. I waited on her with animosity, only sticking around so I could spew the remaining vitriol I had left in me after my spat with Carlisle.
When she finally began to climb the hill on which I'd been sitting, she started her apologies, at first only mentally but also out loud once she's drawn herself up to sit beside me on the fallen tree trunk.
I wished that it was anyone but her. The one who had started all this, who saw things and made decisions without even explaining anything to the rest of us. I sat rigidly on the trunk and waited for her to get her blathering out of her system. When I thought that she was almost done, I nodded my head and started to get up to get the hell away from her.
She grabbed me, pulling me back down beside her. I yanked my arm from her grip, eyeing her critically, and hissed at her, "What the fuck is the matter with you, Alice? Look, I sat here and listened to your self-centered apology, so what else do you want? Is there something that you want to hint about and then refuse to tell me?"
"You know that's not how it is, Edward. You know that I love you."
"Stop it. I can't understand why you're doing this to me Alice. I thought you trusted me."
She just looked down at the floor. Alice and I have been confidants for years. She was the only one of my faux-siblings that I had much of a connection to at all. While we all considered Carlisle to be our father of sorts, I didn't consider the others to be my real family. After all, I'd never lived with them or spent extended periods of time with any of them save Esme and Alice. But Alice and I had always had a connection. We could have conversations without saying anything, and over the years we'd shared many silent laughs, hidden underneath the more boisterous voices of the rest of the Cullen clan.
Seeing Alice sit on the log, so quiet and defeated, made me feel guilty and before long my anger was transforming yet again, falling into that deep, dark hole that I seemed to carry along with me in my chest. I realized that I'd begun to equate the throbbing need within me with this secret – that somehow knowing one would solve the other. I couldn't contemplate living with this gnawing pain forever; I had to convince myself that there was an end to it.
"Please, Alice." I begged one more time, expecting her to shut me down once again.
She was quiet for a long moment, but finally relented. "Fine. But just a little. I can't show you too much. You have to trust that." I was surprised, but I pulled myself together in time to witness the short snippet of a vision that Alice showed me.
It was barely a vision at all – more like a snapshot that had yet to be taken. Just a quick close up of my head and shoulders, my lips stretched wide with a smile that looked so foreign on my face that I barely recognized myself. Even odder was the look in my eyes, something that I couldn't identify. It seemed soft and content, but instead of making me feel peaceful like the Edward in the snapshot seemed, it just made the constant ache in me flare up to a nearly unbearable level.
"What was that?" I snapped, still reeling a bit from the burst of pain, rubbing my chest with my hand in an effort to soothe it. I guess I already knew that the point of her vision was to show me that whatever this big secret was, it would end up making me happy, at least for a while.
What I wanted to know was the price of that happiness – and what was the payoff? What was the duration of it? If my time on this earth had taught me anything, it was that eventually, you must pay a price for everything.
"Well?" I tried again when she didn't answer. "That doesn't prove anything without context, Alice. What does it mean?"
"I'm sorry, Edward. That's all you can see for now. I can't show you anything else."
And so now here we were again, back to the lying by omission. Back to the loaded silence.
"This vision, does it have anything to do with what happened six years ago?" Silence. "Does it explain why no one called?"
Still Alice said nothing.
"Was it one of you…at the window?" My voice was soft, but filled with pain. If she didn't know before, she'd surely know now.
She stood and walked slowly in a small circle, eventually facing me again. The familiar white noise still filled her head. She had run out of footwear designers days ago and had now moved on to reciting all Vogue magazines front to back, including all the ads. It was so much worse than the shoes.
"It was me." Her voice was barely as loud as my own.
Now it was I who was silent.
"Six years ago I had a vision of you with the Volturi. You were standing in their throne room, with guards at your sides. Aro told you that you had a choice. Become a member of the guard or die. That was the end of the vision, as that decision couldn't possibly be made yet.
"Not even two hours later you called to tell Carlisle that you were on your way to see us. I was sure that whenever you decided to come to see us, you had put yourself on a path to the Volturi. So I came to the airport meet you but you must not have flown like you planned. You never arrived."
"I didn't fly." I choked out.
"Well, you headed to Port Angeles, but by the time I saw that you were nearly there. I tried to hurry, but by the time I arrived you were already inside the house. I was scouring the neighborhood when I heard the gunshot. All those damn houses look the same, you know? I barely got to the window in time to see you kill the second man. I knew that the woman was the reason you would be identified, and I planned to kill her myself if I couldn't stop you in time. I ran past the window towards the basement door and when you spotted me…well, everything changed."
"What changed?" I asked.
But she only sighed. "I can't tell you anymore, Edward. I shouldn't have told you as much as I did. They'll be consequences for that I'm sure."
"Fuck, Alice. Are you serious? Well can you at least tell me why you never came inside? Why none of you ever asked me what happened?"
"I told Carlisle what happened, the rest don't know."
"Now Esme knows," I pointed out accusingly.
"Yes, I suppose you're right about that."
The silence sat heavily on us as we both absorbed what had been said, and what hadn't. Eventually Alice broke the silence. "Carlisle agreed with me after you never showed up at the house afterwards, he said it was a sign that you would rather be left to process what happened alone.
"We didn't call you because it was obvious that you wouldn't be ready to face us. I knew that you would want time."
I scoffed at that. "Bullshit. You didn't want me around because you wanted to keep your secret, and it was a lot easier to do when I was avoiding you all. You think that your visions give you some sort of power over us, Alice, but they don't. You shouldn't get to decide what path I take in life."
She merely nodded, but didn't say anything.
"Does Carlisle know about the vision you had at the house? The one that 'changed everything'"? I sneered my words at her, putting air quotes around the last two.
"Yes, he knows. Though I didn't tell him until a few years ago. Whenever I was sure."
"Sure of what?"
Another sigh. "You know I can't tell you that, Edward."
"Fuck this!" I shouted, slamming my hands down on the log and standing up abruptly. "I can't take it anymore, Alice. You must know what this is doing to me. And if you do, then surely you must understand that I can't take much more. What could be so important that you would put me through this?"
Alice sniffled and rubbed her nose - a habit left over from her human days. She only shook her head.
"I'm out of here." I snapped and started to walk into the wilderness. I didn't walk toward the cabin, and I knew that Alice had seen my intentions when I heard the slight gasp that passed between her lips.
You can't go. Please don't go.
Her thoughts begged me to stop but I continued to tramp through the forest, leaving her sitting on the fallen log with her elbows resting on her thighs. I'd decided that I'd had enough of this secrecy, this subservience, all of it. I needed to run. I needed to get away from the hole in my chest that was threatening to engulf me - all of us.
Alice shouted at my back. "I've watched for you. Ever since I met you, I've kept an eye on you. And when I could, I always tried to help you. I hope that someday you will see that."
I snorted and kept walking. "I wish you would stop helping." I snapped back over my shoulder.
The walls she had carefully built were beginning to crumble, and on page 147 of Italian Vogue Volume 14 Issue 8, her internal monologue began to stutter. I got a few hazy flashes of her true thoughts before a vision suddenly consumed her, which I devoured hungrily in the hope that it would give me some hint as to what this huge secret really was. But again I only saw my own face, mouth grim and eyes burning scarlet red.
I saw Alice make a decision then. It's obvious that it's a last ditch effort; whatever flimsy plan she had hobbled together before did not include this scenario. But she was desperate, and it was that vulnerability that allowed me to snake my way into her head and see the dread inside of her. With her decision made, she bolstered up her defenses, resuming the flawless Italian monologue about acceptable work skirts in the spring, and she stood up from the log, knowing that I'd turn to face her.
I did.
"I know about the girl." She said resolutely, and for a moment I' was confused. Of course she knew about the innocent life that I took. Hadn't she already admitted as much? I opened my mouth but no words came out, because in that moment I heard Alice say something to me in her mind that was so terrifying that it left my jaw open and slack.
Alice's next thought caused a chill to run up my spine, but even more curious than that was the way in which the heavy weight on my chest seemed to pulse when I heard it.
I know about the doll, Edward.
It's impossible.
