So, my mom dated a vampire, my dad used to morph into a giant wolf, my brother currently morphs into a giant wolf, and most of my best friends are vampires. It was a lot to take in for one week, to say the least. But I was generally okay. I was good with weird. Being a little odd myself helped with that a lot.
I could really care less that the majority of my friends and family were supernatural beings. I simply wanted things to return to normal. But the abnormalities weren't exactly caused by what my friends were. They were brought on by the past.
As long as I had known him, Edward had never seemed truly happy. The pain had seemed to lessen over time, until I found evidence of the past he had briefly shared with my mom. Now he was almost as zombielike as he had been at our first meeting. He had regressed. Now that I knew the cause of his depression, I had mixed feelings.
On one hand, I wished I had never reminded him of his obviously scarred past with those stupid pictures. That half of me wanted to try and distract him again, gently pulling him away from the past before he allowed it to consume him.
On the other hand, I was annoyed and confused by the root of his problems. From mom, I knew she and Edward had been seeing one another for only a few months when he left. I had found it somewhat ridiculous it had taken mom six months to recover from Edward leaving. But it was infinitely more confusing and frustrating that Edward was still hanging on to the memories of what they'd had after almost thirty years. That half of me wanted to smack him one (although it probably wouldn't hurt him much) and tell him to snap out of it.
Maybe I was being a little harsh. After all, what experience had I been through in that field? I'd barely dated, and the small experience I did have definitely did not fall into the lofty and confusing territory of "soul mate". Going out to dinner and a movie a couple times a year didn't exactly make me an expert in dealing with this problem. That was probably why what my mom had told me just sounded downright stupid. Okay, maybe not stupid. Maybe it was just a little too sappy and hopelessly romantic for me. I was definitely not a romantic. I had no delusions that Prince Charming would ride up on a white steed and whisk me off to his palace to live happily ever after. I was a realist. That Disney princess crap just didn't happen in real life. Real life was gritty and difficult, and not always perfectly romantic and accompanied by saccharine musical numbers. Not to mention, hearing someone say they found their soul mate at seventeen was ridiculous. I'd heard far too much of that from other girls my age, saying they were going to be with so and so forever. Sorry, but in my reality, "forever" usually lasts about two weeks.
And with any break up I've seen, the general protocol is to act depressed for…maybe a week or so, and then move on. There was no nine month or thirty year depression, no freezing your life until the other person deigns to take you back, and no obsessing over this person to the exclusion of practically everything else.
These rants ran through my head throughout the entire night after I heard my mom's side of the story. I just couldn't make sense of any of this. Let me rephrase my problems. So, my mom dated a vampire, my dad used to morph into a giant wolf, my brother currently morphs into a giant wolf, most of my best friends are vampires, and the dilemma with my mom's vampire ex-boyfriend was giving me a freaking migraine.
I wasn't exactly sure which road to take. But while I was deciding, I tried to act as if nothing was wrong. I tried to make things as normal as they could be considering the situation I'd found myself in, but he wouldn't cooperate. He had never been particularly talkative while I had known him, but now he was almost completely silent. We still spent time together, but he was merely going through the motions. I sensed he needed the routine to take his mind off everything. Personally, it just gave me time to develop my ever-present headache further.
All this dull, uncommunicative routine built up the pressure inside me. I was impatient. After a few weeks of this, I'd had about enough. I felt like a cork on an unopened champagne bottle, ready to explode. All I could hear was the soft crunch of dead leaves and stone under our shoes and my breath as we ran. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Pop.
"Oh for crying out loud Edward, say something!" I growled, stopping short on the trail. He looked at me blankly and my eyes narrowed with frustration. "Don't give me that crap! You've been completely silent ever since…" I searched for the appropriate word, "Bellagate!" I spat. That seemed to strike a nerve; he flinched, the most response I'd gotten out of him for weeks. "How you can obsess about one stupid mistake for the rest of your life is simply beyond me. It's been almost thirty years," I started.
"Twenty-eight years, seven months, two days…" he interrupted.
"What's wrong with you?" I snapped. Honestly, who keeps track of something like that? I didn't wait for him to answer. "You know what, I'll tell you. You've been obsessing over the same stupid mistake for decades now, and you're letting it eat away at you just as much now as you did then. What would you think if I was still moping about one of my spelling sheets not getting a sticker in kindergarten?"
"It's not the same!" he yelled. Good. Even an angry reaction is helping…I think. I resigned myself to a long, pent-up speech. "It was hard enough when I had to leave her at first. It was absolutely agony for months on end…and every second felt like an eternity. And then I come back to find out not only did my leaving fail to protect her, but it harmed her." He paused, taking a shuddering breath, out of habit I suppose. "But beyond even that pain, knowing that I'd caused her the same agony I'd forced myself to experience, was the pain of seeing her move on." He laughed humorlessly. "That's what I'd actually hoped for when I left, that she'd find some way to forget about me and live a normal, happy life. I thought that would be the best for her. My…condition put her into needless danger and robbed her of precious experiences, things she would never have been able to experience with me…intimacy…children…but even in the same beat I wished her to move on, I secretly, selfishly wished she would not be capable of doing so. When I saw she was capable of moving on…it broke me all over again. I had thought we were soul mates, bound together forever, no matter the physical distance separating us. But I was wrong." With that, he sank to the ground next to a tree and buried his face in his knees. This was going to be more difficult than I'd thought. I sat down next to him, slinging a comforting arm around his shoulders. "You say it's ridiculous to still feel the same way about someone after decades have passed, after they have so obviously moved on without you? Well, time hardly has meaning to me. When my kind changes, which happens only rarely, those changes are set in stone. They do not disappear or fade over time, but remain potent and central to our lives centuries later." I was at a loss. It seemed there was no convincing him. He simply refused to let go of my mom.
"Nothing is ever impossible. And you have to stop looking at everything that has happened in the past years and automatically stamp it 'my fault'. Besides, you're a vampire, you're immortal…do you really want to be saddled with this type of pain forever?" I asked, hoping he'd see reason. He laughed darkly, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and goose bumps to spread over my skin, even on this hot day.
"I don't plan on living with this forever." he stated simply. Well, this sounds promising…and kind of suspicious.
"What exactly do you mean?" I asked cautiously. He lifted his head from his knees and stared at me with a sad, resigned half smile.
"I wouldn't say a few more precious decades qualify as 'forever'," he said cryptically.
"Edward, what the heck are you talking about?" I asked, starting to get rather annoyed. He took another steadying breath.
"I don't plan on living with the pain forever simply because I don't plan on living forever," Wait, what? "I never planned on outliving Bella." My brain stopped dead. I looked like a deer caught in the headlights as I stared at him in shock. He was planning on killing himself? As I tried to process this, he continued, "I plan on going to the funeral and paying my respects, then I'll go straight to Italy and force the Volturi to end my miserable existence." My shock finally passed as his words echoed through my mind. My face contorted with anger and I stood up quickly, staring him down. Oddly enough, he looked the most at peace he had been for years. It made me nervous seeing him so…calm. No one should be calm about their own death, especially if they were planning it.
"And just how does this solve anything?" I asked menacingly.
"Allison, I don't care if she doesn't love me that way anymore. I cannot live without her."
"But…what about your family? Did you ever stop to consider how this might hurt them? What about me, Edward? You're my best friend…how do you think that would make me feel?" I ranted. He just stared at me, pain in his eyes again. He had obviously thought of this before. There was no reasoning with him. "What am I supposed to do now, Edward? You've just told me you plan on killing yourself. Do you really expect me to just smile and wave and go home like nothing's happened? Do you expect me to accept this? Well I can't!"
"Why not?"
"I just can't!" I growled illogically. There was probably a more eloquent response tucked away in some deep recess of my brain, but I was really in no state to search for it. I vaguely realized I sounded childish and irrational, but the fact was, I was barely past childhood and had just been asked to shoulder a huge burden. None of my experience could have ever prepared me for something like this. I didn't know what to say. I had no idea how to convince the crazy man twenty stories up on the outside of a skyscraper not to jump. I took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoroughly confused mind, and said the first thing that came to me.
"I won't let you," I said calmly, matching his tone. To my surprise, he laughed, almost genuinely.
"As if you could outrun me! As if you could fight me! What do you expect to do? There is absolutely nothing you can do, Allison. I know you have good intentions, but you know which road they pave," he said. I started walking away from him. I was tired of hearing this. I turned back for one moment before I began running back home.
"I won't let you," I repeated grimly.
As soon as I got to Charlie's, I ran upstairs and dialed home on my cell phone. Mom picked up on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Mom, it's Allison," I said.
"Is everything alright?" she asked.
"Absolutely not!" I answered immediately.
"What's wrong?" she asked urgently. I paused for a beat and tried to find the best way to summarize what I'd just heard.
"Mom, do me a favor and don't die today, alright?"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"It's…kind of hard to explain," Yeah, that was definitely an understatement. I heard her pause on the line and could almost see her gesturing with her hand to make me spit it out. I sighed. "Listen…I kind of want to talk about it in person. I know it's late tonight, and it can wait one night, so…maybe I'll come over tomorrow?"
"Are you sure you don't want me to come over right now?"
"Honestly, I can't risk the car crash right now. I'll explain everything tomorrow."
"Okay…come over around dinner time, alright?"
"Okay. I love you, mom."
"I love you too."
I hung up the phone and spread myself on the bed with my arm over my eyes. What was I going to do? As much as I hated to admit it, Edward was right. When he was actually trying, there was no way I could outrun him or keep him from hurting himself. His words kept echoing through my head. I never planned on outliving Bella. As if you could outrun me! As if you could fight me! Something gnawed on the edge of my consciousness as I thought about these words. Then it occurred to me…a possible solution. Oh crap. I dove for my phone and dialed Alice.
"Allison?"
"Alice, get away from Edward as fast as you can!"
