Chapter Eight: Picture Imperfect
By:
Interest Me
Original plot and characters belong to Stephenie Meyer.
Renesmee left her family in the large Cullen house and made her way back to the cottage. They had all pretended everything was fine, but she knew they had been fighting. She also knew the fight was about her. Rosalie and Jacob had been at it again. Jacob had talked to her, but things were different. The ease was gone. Her Jacob didn't even want to touch her, and it was her fault. But he promised to take her to school, so maybe he didn't hate her.
Her heels clicked against the sand colored floor as she headed to her bedroom. She threw a sketchbook on her bed and grabbed her box of pencils. She drew her mother's face. Not her perfect vampire face and not the haggard ashen face of her birth memories, but the face she saw tonight. She had seen that face many times at Grandpa Charlie's. Her mother's school pictures were lined up on the mantel, a diary of the pre-vampire years. But this was the first time she'd seen it in person. Every one of her mother's faces was beautiful.
Renesmee mixed four browns to create the perfect chocolate color of her mother's eyes. She wove soft reds into the dark tresses, visible only in the sunlight. Final highlights to her mother's eyes and lips finished the picture. Perfect. Her mother wouldn't like it; she never saw her beauty, but her father would be dazzled, and she intended to frame the portrait and give it to him as a gift.
She tore Bella's portrait from the pad, and searched for her Jacob colors, deepest black for his hair, russets for his skin, darker browns for his eyes than she had used for Bella's. With a fluid and practiced motion she etched the side of his face expertly turning her wrist to mimic the curve of his chin. She stopped. Her mood blackened. Had she ruined her relationship with her Jacob? She ripped the page from the pad and threw it aside. Despair threatened to suffocate her.
She grabbed vivid greens, yellows and reds from the box. Under her swift strokes, the edges of a jungle appeared. Zafrina's jungle. She shaded birds and flowers in with bold color. Zafrina lived in the South American rainforest. Her talent was much like Renesmee's because she could project images into other people's minds. But Zafrina's images were more solid, and she didn't need to touch the person. She could also project the image to as many people as were in her range. Renesmee's images were translucent, like looking through a stained glass window, or so she had been told. Zafrina's images were opaque and unyielding. If she chose to project eternal blackness, her objects would think themselves blind.
Over the years, Zafrina had patiently entertained Renesmee with her beautiful pictures. Renesmee looked forward to her visits and her parents had even taken her to visit Zafrina's balmy territory a few times. Renesmee remembered the first scary picture Zafrina had showed her. It was more startling than scary. As Renesmee walked through the jungle of her mind a lizard jumped out at her hissing and lunging. Renesmee has jumped and then squealed with delight.
"What is she showing her Edward?" her mother had asked with a concerned look on her face.
"Every little one enjoys a scared belly now and then Bella," Zafrina had assured her.
"Do it again!" Renesmee had insisted.
"No." Bella said.
Zafrina had forged on. The lizard shot through the jungle toward the river. Without warning a crocodile cut the surface and swallowed the lizard. Animals didn't scare Renesmee, but the unexpected nature of the scene, unaided by scent or sound, astonished her. She let out a little scream and then rolled on the floor giggling.
"Edward," Bella said.
Her father's eyes lost focus and Renesmee understood he was searching her mind for signs of distress.
"It's okay Bellalove. It's kind of like when a human child rides a rollercoaster or visits a haunted house. It won't hurt her."
Images of monkey antics filled Renesmee's mind and washed away the delicious fear. Renesmee and Edward laughed.
As the years moved on, the scary images had grown more frightening to match Renesmee's growing skepticism. Renesmee now drew the latest monster that Zafrina had conjured. Teeth gleamed and dripped with saliva; teeth that could tear through vampire skin and claws to match. Flames flickered out its nostrils; flames hot enough to incinerate its dismembered victims. Bony studs projected from a tail strong enough to penetrate muscles that were harder than diamonds.
The monster in Renesmee's drawing held a pale figure in each claw. Red eyes widened in horror as teeth gnashed toward their owners' necks. Renesmee grabbed her whites now and sketched a hand falling from the mouth. She drew a head at the feet of the beast. Grabbing her purples, she drew lines of smoke throughout the picture; the color of vampire cremations.
On the edge of the scene, she drew an auburn haired little girl. The project was doing what Renesmee had intended; distracting her from the more real horrors of her life; from the thought of losing her Jacob. She grabbed more pencils and before thinking it through, she had drawn a russet colored wolf shielding the girl from the monster. His head was thrown back in a howl.
Renesmee whipped her pencils across her room. Some shattered, but one hit its mark and embedded in the wall. She shredded her drawing.
"He should just let the monster eat me," she said out loud.
She knew Jacob would never let anything hurt her. He wasn't a monster like she was, and she had hurt him. But he promised to take her to school her first day. Maybe he still loved her. She didn't deserve it. She buried her face in her pillow and cried herself to sleep.
Almost immediately, she found herself in the jungle. The image from her drawing came to life and sounds added to the reality. The screech of ripping stone filled the air, and the monster tore bodies apart. She resisted looking at their still faces, but the force of the dream exposed them to her anyway. She didn't recognize anyone. Relief flooded over her, but then the monster turned its attention to her. It stalked forward, sweeping its tail. Its claws dug into the forest floor, and trees creaked and snapped as it cleared its path. A reddish brown wolf stepped in front of her and snarled at the beast. It was no match for the monster. Renesmee could see this clearly. She grabbed the wolf's fur and pulled herself onto its back. The wolf carried her away.
He transported her away from the sounds of ripping stones, away from the roars, away from the dense jungle to a calm meadow bathed in sunlight. She climbed off the wolf's back, and his rich brown eyes stared into hers. He nudged her with his snout, but she turned away. He wagged his tail and made a playful gesture. She didn't want to play. He frolicked among the flowers as though trying to show her his intentions. He wanted her to follow and skip among the birds that scattered in his wake. It was all too childish for her, and she scowled. He leaned his weight on his forepaws with his rump in the air still wagging his tail, inviting her to join in the games. She refused to watch anymore.
The wolf whimpered. Renesmee stayed silent. A howl broke the silence and the wolf ran away. Renesmee panicked and followed, but for every step she took the wolf took a half step more and the gap between them grew as the howls became fainter. The wolf was gone. Renesmee ran calling for her friend, but she couldn't form words. Nothing but screams escaped her lips, but they rang hollow in the empty forest that had morphed from a sultry equatorial rainforest to the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. The screaming didn't stop.
"Shhhhhh," she heard under her screams.
"Wake up, Renesmee."
An icy embrace cooled the fires of her distress. She opened her eyes, and her father smiled. She crawled into his lap and he cradled her like a baby. He rocked her and continued making comforting sounds. His cool chest felt good against her hot cheek.
"I want to grow up Daddy," she murmured.
"I know," his musical, comforting voice answered.
"I don't want to grow up."
"I know."
"How can that be?" she asked.
Edward hesitated and seemed to collect his thoughts.
"I don't remember much about being your age," he said for lack of a better word, "but I do remember when the world was engulfed in war. I wanted to be soldier, and my mother wouldn't let me go. So I tried to enlist behind her back, but she found out. I was angry that she wouldn't let me grow up."
Renesmee had heard this story before, but she sensed that her father was going to reveal another layer.
"I was angry at her and planned to enlist the day I turned eighteen. I spoke brave words in her presence, and my father supported my decision. But I was afraid, Renesmee. I was afraid of growing up and leaving her. One minute I wanted to run away from her because I felt suffocated, and the next I wanted her to sing me to sleep."
Renesmee wrapped her arms around his neck and snuggled in as though she were a small child. He rocked her again. He understood even if his understanding was cloudy.
"Then my father got sick, and he died. I so wanted to be a little boy with both parents, living in the safety of their protection. But I also felt the need to be a man more than ever, to protect and care for my mother. Then I got sick and I knew I was dying. I couldn't remember why I had wanted to leave my parents and my boyhood so badly. My mother got sick and I knew all dreams of security had vanished. I wanted my childhood back."
"I'm sorry, Dad," she clutched him tighter. The excruciating pain the thought of losing her parents brought forced tears to trail down her cheeks.
"It was a long time ago, and I have Carlisle and Esme now. You have your mother and me."
"There is no replacement," she insisted.
"No, I suppose not, which is why my fuzzy memory is one of the good things about this life."
Jacob hates me, she thought.
"If that were true, and I would know, don't you think I would have snapped him in two?"
"What is he thinking?"
"No Renesmee. I won't tell you that. You must ask him."
Renesmee knew that was the rule. Her father would share many thoughts with her, but not the ones she had no right to. Not the ones that it was her duty to extract.
"I'm a monster."
Her father's soft chuckle tickled her ear.
"Yes, but only by half," he said. Then he sang her a song. She recognized it as a song he had composed for her when she was born. And there in the cold embrace, rocking gently in the security of his arms and surrounded by his angel's voice, she drifted into a peaceful sleep
