Chapter 11: The Truth
"What did you do to Celia?"
Her bone-white, perfect face froze. God, she must've been in raptures when she woke up and realized that the beauty was permanent and needed no maintenance… Jasper tried to calm himself, tried to remind himself that his mother's life had hardly been perfect, that the fixation on her appearance had been a desperate plea for attention, but the vision of the burnt-out shell of their house was haunting him. The memory of the charred baby doll (his heart twisted into painful knots) lying in the rubble and ashes…
"Jasper…" she said softly.
"Tell me what you did," he repeated in a low voice.
"Darling, I tried, but –"
"But what?!" Jasper spat out viciously. "You realized how much work it takes to actually take care of your child?"
"She was just so difficult," Margaret whispered. "She would not eat. She would not sleep. She would not dress herself – you know, when you were three, you could dress yourself – and she spent all day crying…"
"Did you ever think it might've been because she didn't know who you were?" he snarled. "I raised her."
"She knew who I was," Margaret defended herself miserably.
"You were some woman who lived in the main floor bedroom and who came out every once in a while," Jasper shot back. "She had no concept of you as her mother!"
"And where were you, if you were so worried about her?!" Margaret burst out angrily. "Some kind of concerned guardian, to leave her alone with a useless mother like me –"
"I was making sure you had a goddamn roof over your head!" he interrupted. "Or did you think being pretty would magically produce money to pay the lenders when there was nothing left to sell?"
"Lenders?" Margaret's voice was blank.
"Oh, my God…" he groaned. "Did you really not notice that the house was getting emptied?"
"Why would the lenders…"
"I don't know," Jasper sighed finally, closing his eyes to ease the screaming pain in the wounded one. "My best guess is that Father left behind some debts in town." After a second, he spoke again. "What happened to Celia?"
Margaret sighed in response. "You really are like a dog with a bone, you know that? It is most unbecoming."
"Excuse me for caring," Jasper muttered, before he started to get to his feet. He had to find Alice. Damn the fact he only had one functioning eye. He had two eyes. He only had one wife.
He'd barely taken a step before he stumbled. The ground had been closer, hadn't it?
There was a disgusted sigh from Margaret on his blind side, and he nearly whirled around and ripped her arm from her socket when she grabbed his shoulder. "Sit down, Jasper, before you get yourself killed."
"I need to find Alice."
"You are not catching up to her in this state," she reprimanded. "Sit down and let the eye heal."
"Oh, sure, now you're giving me medical advice," Jasper muttered rebelliously. "Never mind the four-year-old human with a broken arm. 209-year-old vampire with an eye that'll heal on its own – now that's somebody who needs help."
"Absolutely insufferable…" Margaret muttered under her breath. "Holding grudges will not get you any further in life."
"Holding grudges has kept me alive thus far," Jasper retorted in a low voice.
"I give up," Margaret finally sighed, going further away from him – still on his blind side, of course.
*~*~*
They sat there in dark silence for what must've been hours. Jasper kept trying to get back up and go after Alice again, only to stumble and fall once more.
Margaret was now thoroughly irritated with him – as she had always been in his childhood, he recalled, when he would attempt something again and again despite numerous failures.
"Oh, for the love of all that is holy, Jasper, just stop!" she finally exploded, shoving him back against another tree.
Pain exploded in his eye socket again as he felt the slight internal repairs come undone. "Goddamn it!" he cursed, slamming his hand against the wound again to try and ease the pain. "Keep your goddamn hands off me! Don't even speak to me," he added with a vicious snarl as he heard her take a breath as though beginning to talk.
"Jasper?" came a long-missed, familiar voice from his blind side: Esme. "What's wrong?"
"What isn't wrong?" Jasper murmured under his breath.
"Jasper, what's happened?" Carlisle's quiet, but assertive voice echoed his wife. "What's wrong with your eye?"
"Alice nearly ripped it out," Jasper replied tightly. "I think she tore through the optic nerve. It was healing, before somebody shoved me into a tree," he added pointedly. There was no reply from Margaret.
"She was headed west?" Edward asked. When Jasper nodded slightly, he said, "Emmett and I will keep going to catch up with Alice. We'll call when we get her."
"Be careful," Esme called after them.
"Jasper, I'm coming up on your left," Rosalie's soft voice came from his blind side. After a second or two, he felt her hands close around his wrist and lightly pull his hand away from his eye. She inhaled sharply. "Oh… Carlisle, you should take a look at this."
"Let me see," came Carlisle's voice beside Rosalie. "You're right, Jasper, she's sliced the optic nerve."
"It'll heal, give it time," Jasper said stubbornly. "I need to go after Alice."
"Oh, for the love of –"
Margaret's exasperated exclamation was cut off by Rosalie. "Jasper Hale, you are not going anywhere with that eye," his sister said sternly. "Edward and Emmett can catch her. Let Carlisle set it – the eye's practically turned around in the cavity. It's really disgusting and terrifically disturbing, actually. Jacob and Emmett would get a kick out of it."
Jasper snarled halfheartedly at her, sensing the confusion and suspicion in Margaret's emotional state at the sound of his new name.
"You try so hard to be intimidating," Rosalie teased lightly, though her grip tightened on his wrists as she switched to his right side.
Carlisle's light touch passed over Jasper's wounded eye with expert ease. Then he sighed. "Jasper –"
"This is going to hurt, isn't it?"
"Yes."
Jasper took a deep breath, clenched his fists as tightly as he dared and said, "Okay." Rosalie's hands were practically fused around his wrists by now.
Carlisle echoed his deep breath.
And then his head exploded with pain.
*~*~*
The pain was so fierce by now that he felt feverish, unable to escape the throbbing, swollen sensation on the left side of his face. Carlisle had forced his eyelid shut and taped it down securely, followed by a bandage wound tightly around his head. That eye wasn't moving for a good long time.
Esme was sitting by his side, stroking his head lightly as he moaned softly again. Her gentle love and sympathy soothed the pain somewhat, but what he really wanted right now was Alice's fingers combing through his hair as she nestled his head in her lap, feeding him love and devotion.
"I'm sorry, Jasper," Carlisle murmured from beside Esme. "I wish there were some way to give you painkillers."
Rosalie and Bella were silent on Jasper's other side, Rosalie's fingers still resting lightly around his wrist in a wordless show of comfort. A century of playing twins had created an indescribable, subtle bond between them. Finally, Rosalie said softly, "They haven't caught up with her yet. Edward called a little while back, said they were in France."
He hadn't heard anything from Margaret in a while, he realized.
"Jasper, don't strain yourself," Esme warned quietly as he struggled to right himself, his good eye opening slowly to the darkening woods around him. "You've been badly injured, let your body heal."
"Where did M – Margaret go?" Jasper asked, one hand automatically drifting up to the bandage.
Carlisle caught his wrist swiftly. "Don't touch it. She's still here."
"M – Margaret, tell me what happened," he said, a little louder, as he searched the area with his one good eye. He finally spotted his biological mother standing across the clearing, watching him with a sullen, unhappy expression on her face.
"Jasper," Rosalie started to say soothingly, as Margaret began muttering under her breath again about pigheadedness and unseemly behaviour. "Maybe your memory's a little blurred from the last little while, but she won't know –"
"She knows what I mean," Jasper cut her off tersely.
Margaret sighed and came out of the shadows. There was a sharp intake of breath from the rest of his family members as her features were thrown into the dying light and in focus. It became evident that the lifeless blond locks of hair tumbling past her shoulders were precisely the same shade as the ones falling into Jasper's face. It showed off the similar structure of her face, the same small dimple in their cheeks…
"What. Happened?" he asked again, dangerously.
"I told you…" There was a slight plaintive tone to her voice.
"You didn't get to the part where you burnt your 3-year-old alive," Jasper said icily.
"Jasper," Esme warned softly, "that's a very serious accusation."
"That's a very real event," Jasper replied stubbornly.
"What are you talking about, Jasper?" Margaret asked.
He lost his patience. "I came home not even three months later! The entire house was burnt to the ground!"
"Well, I do not know anything about that, Jasper."
Jasper cursed in frustration. "You were her f–" he stopped at Rosalie's sudden squeeze to his wrist, and checked his vocabulary. "Goddamn it! How do you not know that your own goddamn house is burning down?!"
Margaret hesitated, abashment and shame flitting across her face. "I… I left her there. I –"
"You what?"
"I tried, really, I did," she repeated, slinking back into the shadows as the other Cullens stared, shocked, at her. "But she would not stop crying, and she would never leave me alone, and…"
"How long?"
Margaret's voice was barely audible, even to a vampire's ear, when she finally answered. "Perhaps a month after you left…"
"Jasper," Rosalie warned under her breath as he tensed, growling softly. Her grip tightened on his wrist, pinning it to the ground. Carlisle moved slightly, ready to restrain his adopted son at a moment's notice.
"Don't," he murmured. "Your eye…"
"Damn the eye to hell," Jasper growled.
Bella's phone rang just then, jolting everybody out of the tenseness of the situation. Quickly, she snatched it up and said, "Yes, Edward?" She listened to his reply, and then smiled. "Excellent." Holding the phone out to Jasper, she said simply, "It's Alice."
Jasper nearly tackled Bella for the small device, scrambling to get it to his ear. "Lissy?"
"Jasper Whitlock, you keep that temper in check," Alice's hoarse, exhausted voice came crackling over the connection. "Vengeance will not gain you anything, and you know it as well as I do."
"Are you coming back now?" he asked hopefully.
Alice paused, uncertainty in her next, soft words. "Not now, Jazz. There's something I need to do before I come home –"
"Please?" he interrupted pleadingly.
"Jasper, please let me do this," she said.
"Alice, please…"
"It won't take long, baby, I promise. I love you." With that, there was a quiet click on the other end of the line.
*~*~*
"I don't think you should've done that, Alice," Edward said quietly as he pocketed his cell again. "I think it would be better for the two of you to work this out together."
"Edward, it's not fair of me to take him into this," Alice replied softly, trying to shake off another tremor attack. "I don't know if I'm having visions, hallucinating, letting my imagination run away with me… I don't know if I'm actually thirsty, if I'm imagining it, if I'm blowing it out of proportion… I'm not even entirely convinced this conversation is really happening. This is something I have to do by myself."
Edward sighed. "Alice, you have to know this is going to kill him. You aren't talking about a few days' absence, here. When was the last time Jasper willingly spent more than 72 hours away from you?"
"I don't really like it either, Edward," she murmured. "But it's necessary. Let me figure out if my brain is still in one piece before I come home."
Finally, Edward and Emmett reluctantly turned to head back towards where they'd left the rest of the family, and Alice waited until they were gone before she began to run in the opposite direction, muttering to herself,
"I hate lying to him."