Chapter 31

Edward

Ashland, WI – February, 1921

Having Carlisle step in and change Edward is a simple solution to the conundrum of his humanity. But when has the courting of Isabella Cullen ever been simple?

Isabella returns from her hunt in a near panic. Nothing has happened, apparently, but she is certain that something terrible has kept Carlisle away. Logically, Edward knows that her response is irrational – he has worked with Carlisle long enough to know the man's entirely capable of spending terribly long hours at the bedside of a patient, but Edward's new wife has him spooked, and he feels his gut tying up in knots of anxiety. Isabella only stops long enough to spread her fear to Edward, and now she is aiming to run straight into town and hunt her brother down by scent. She is nearly invincible, and Edward knows this, but a lifetime of acculturation has him ready to spring between anything dangerous and the woman he loves, so it's all he can do to not order her to stay put and seek Carlisle out himself. Edward compromises by exchanging his sleepwear for his travel clothes, throwing on his coat and cranking the motor in Carlisle's staid but reliable Ford. Obviously, Isabella can run faster than this poor thing can go, but Edward won't be left behind to stew in his imaginings, praying that she's wrong when he's worried that she's right.

And, dammit, she is. It's Esme.

Edward tracks down Isabella, who has followed Carlisle to Ashland's small hospital. Esme has been in labor for nearly thirty hours and her strength, and that of the child, is flagging. With Isabella's experience as a field nurse and Edward's as a medical assistant, the newlyweds are both ready to leap in and lend aid where they can, but there is little they can do. Esme's heartbeat is irregular, and Carlisle worries for the safety of both mother and child. He doesn't have to tell them this in words – it's written across his features, in the way he reminds Edward of a tightly strung bow. Bella coaxes Carlisle to the hallway at one point, while Edward holds Esme's hand and monitors her pulse. He cannot hear their words, but Edward feels the calm in Bella's voice seep into his shoulders, unconsciously responding to the comfort she tries to infuse into her brother.

Esme's cheeks are pallid and her brow is damp from the exertion of the last contraction, which has left her limp. Edward takes a damp cloth from the nearby table and gently presses it to her neck, hoping to soothe her in some small way. Her eyes crack open and a weak smile plays at her lips.

"Shhh," Edward admonishes when he sees that she is gathering the strength to speak. "It's alright. Carlisle's just in the hallway, speaking with Isabella. You're going to be fine. You and the baby will be splendid, just as soon as we convince him or her to join us." Edward extemporizes as he goes – his experience with childbirth is nonexistent – but she squeezes his hand, and Edward takes that as a good sign.

Out in the hall, Bella's tone has changed – Edward cannot tell for certain, but she seems angry. Carlisle's voice is hushed, but there's a sharp defensiveness there.

With his finger on Esme's pulse, Edward can actually feel the contraction coming before her expression tightens and her breathing increases in tempo. Esme's eyes lock onto Edward's, and it is fear that he reads there: fear of pain and, ultimately, fear of death. I cannot endure much more, she seems to scream silently, but I cannot let this child die without drawing a single breath!

Edward attempts to telegraph all the confidence and faith he can find within himself, even as he calls out in the least panicked voice he can muster, "Carlisle!" who is beside Edward in a breath, crooning over Esme's writhing form. Edward had sensed the way these two were drawn to one another, but never before has Carlisle's love been so transparent. Unfortunately, Esme does not witness it: her eyes are clamped shut, her body heaving with each difficult breath.

Isabella's voice is firm, and it startles Edward, "Carlisle! Enough!" Almost too fast to register it, Carlisle's face is terrifying in its fierce hostility, but the expression is instantaneously replaced by one of resignation. Both looks draw Edward up short, and he looks to Isabella in confusion.

"He needs to perform a Caesarian, but he's afraid. So many of the mothers develop an infection afterwards…" she is speaking to Edward, explaining their conflict, but her eyes are staring intensely into Carlisle's. Carlisle's reticence is obvious, but Edward cannot get a solid read on Isabella's emotions. Frustration? Fear? Worry?

Edward's focus snaps back to Esme as she screams, "Get! It! Out!" and this is the thing that propels everyone into action. Isabella is out the door, and Edward can hear her giving instructions to someone down the hall. Moving at an inhuman speed, Carlisle prepares Esme's bed to be moved into the surgery nearby; Edward simply tries to stay out of his way. With Carlisle's speed and dexterity, Edward recognizes that he would only be a hindrance, still, he scrubs up and grabs a gown from the closet, so that if, by some chance, Carlisle or Isabella do need him, he'll be ready.

Moving at human speed, Edward is a bit surprised to find that all the haste of a few minutes prior seems to have stalled. Isabella holds a gauzy mask to Esme's face; the blur in Edward's peripheral vision is Carlisle pacing, waiting for the anesthesia to take full effect. Finally, although it's only been five minutes since he entered the room, Isabella calls out a clipped, "Now." Lightning quick, Carlisle is hunched over the prone form of his love, scalpel in hand. Edward has a fleeting thought – that only love can ask so much of a man – before the scientist within him elbows out the romantic, and he's all eyes and ears, trying to absorb the details of a procedure done with the economy of the supernatural.

As Carlisle passes the child, a boy, to Isabella and efficiently completes the sutures, Edward has another surreal moment: he realizes that he's been standing, watching two vampires carve open an essentially helpless woman, and instead of feeling horror, he's been taking notes in his head. Shrugging off the oddness of his life's path, he turns to face his bride to ask her why, if Carlisle was capable of such an effective intervention, Esme was allowed to suffer so.

Patting the eerily silent child dry, Isabella obviously reads Edward's expressions more adeptly than he does hers, as she answers his unspoken question regarding the unnecessary delay, "Esme refused the Twilight Sleep* – she was convinced she'd never wake. It was such a long labor…" Edward wonders, in that moment, if Isabella is remembering the birth of her own child, so long ago. There was no anesthesia then to make the process less painful. She continues, "As I said earlier, Carlisle didn't want to perform the Caesarian Section if it could be avoided – there's still so much we don't understand about the mortality rates of women who give birth in hospitals. Still, he was going to lose her for certain if he didn't take immediate action, and at least this way, he has the time to tell her the truth about himself, see what she says."

"So she doesn't know – about the two of you?" Edward anticipates her head shake, but he has his doubts. Esme Turner seems to Edward a rather perspicacious woman; she may not know that she loves a vampire, but like Edward once did, she surely knows that the Cullens are more.

Edward turns his attention to the child in Isabella's arms. Rather thin and spindly, in Edward's admittedly amateur opinion, the child has yet to make a noise and his eyes are shut tight, but his fragile looking arms flail about. "Is he supposed to be that color?" Edward asks, genuinely curious. He hopes she won't think him rude, but the medical student in him is voracious, cataloguing a vast body of new knowledge.

Isabella smiles at this shift in the conversation, and it's her subdued smile more than her hesitant nod that puts his mind at ease. Edward reasons that she wouldn't be looking at him with an expression of fond indulgence if Esme's child were in immediate danger. She swaddles the newborn snugly in a nearby blanket as she answers his questions about the birth, the surgery, and the difficult recovery that Esme will necessarily undergo. Edward doesn't know if it's instinctive, or if Isabella has extensive experience with small infants – there's still so very many things about her unnaturally long life that he doesn't know – but it's mesmerizing: the image of her standing with a tiny baby in her arms.

"He's asleep," she whispers, and seems to be listening intently. She glances up and catches Edward staring. The soft expression she's wearing vanishes, replaced by a studied blankness that delivers a punch to her new husband's solar plexus. Oh. He supposes he should have known. Her body isn't technically alive. It's illogical to think that it could bring forth life. And he didn't – think it – really, but he didn't not think it, either. So it's more of a recognition than a realization, one that changes nothing, makes nothing void, cancels nothing out because she is everything.

Her stillness thaws as she watches in wonder: his love is that large, it will absorb this truth without flinching.

The moment between them is broken as Carlisle comes to take the baby from Isabella's arms. A silent conversation quickly passes between Isabella and her brother; both wear grim expressions that ratchet up the anxiety in Edward's gut. Isabella steps into the hall, but immediately returns, accompanied by two nurses who appear rather nonplussed at Carlisle's unorthodox methods. Still, they dutifully wheel Esme out of surgery and back to her room. Edward is not sure that his and Isabella's presence is needed any longer, but he is also unsure how to play this new role of husband. Does she want to stay, talk to Carlisle alone? Should he take charge, suggest they return home together? For the first time, it really hits Edward that these two siblings have spent nearly a century living as a pair, but now he must graft himself into their family. The thought leaves Edward equally apprehensive and excited.

When they catch up with Carlisle and Esme, the little one is safely ensconced in what Ashland calls a nursery. Both mother and child will be sleeping off the heavy anesthesia, apparently, but Edward doesn't have to ask Carlisle if he's staying. It's obvious he'll be here as long as Esme remains. It's what Edward would do if it were Isabella lying unconscious in that tiny bed.

"When is the last time you hunted?" Isabella asks. And just like that, the reality of this odd plane of existence Edward has wandered into reasserts itself.

"Just after the wedding," Carlisle answers as quietly as she inquired. "I will be fine for a while longer."

"No," she contradicts him in the same tone she uses on Edward – remarkably stubborn, yet perfectly well meaning. "Go now. She's sleeping, and she's going to be sleeping for some time. I'll stay with her. Go back to the house with Edward. Hunt. Bathe. Come back refreshed and ready to be the support she will need." Edward tries to follow the subtext in this conversation, but he can tell there's a message here he can't decipher.

Carlisle seems inexplicably defeated for a man who just saved his true love and her newly born child. Edward decides to passively go with Isabella's direction in this – Carlisle's far more likely to explain what is going on than this sphinx of a wife Edward's recently procured.

Sure enough, as Carlisle parks the car Edward borrowed/stole back at the house, the older man takes pity on Edward, despite the pain that it obviously costs him. And, even as Edward hears Carlisle's heart breaking in his voice, the young man thinks: this is Carlisle's essence, this ability to set aside his own pain for the good and edification of others. Edward has admired him heretofore, but as of now, he loves him as a brother.

"Isabella fears for the child's health. Even making allowances for the anesthesia, his heart rate was too low and somewhat erratic, his lungs sound a bit weak. He may have simply suffered too much trauma. I don't know. Isabella fears that Esme too may have suffered some kind of trauma – not just tonight, but before – before she moved here. There's so much we don't know, and even more I fear. If the child were to die—" he cannot continue. It is one of those moments that defy words; Edward grips Carlisle's granite arm tightly, overcome by emotion.

A few tears slip down Edward's cheeks just as dawn breaks. From the moment it was clear that Esme's pregnancy was in danger, Edward has been haunted by the words Isabella wrote him so long ago now: "The child which I bore as a reminder of my 'infamy' died. I grieved for him, but truly, I grieved largely for myself."Esme's child seems doubly important to Edward now, as though his little life might redeem the one that was lost, along with the other sons Isabella will never bear. The two men sit together in silence for some time before Carlisle exits the automobile and leads them into the house.

Edward bids Carlisle good-night, in spite of the sun's recent appearance, and shuffles off to his bed. Exhausted with an abundance of emotion, he doesn't bother undressing – just slips off his shoes and pulls the blankets over himself.

Hours later, he wakes to an odd sound, opens his eyes in a room he's never before slept in, and finds himself rather disoriented. Still, the clicking buzz of some contraption continues, and it's only as Edward opens the bedroom door and orients himself as waking in Carlisle and Isabella's home –his home now-that he realizes that the sound he heard is that of the telephone that Carlisle had installed just a week before the wedding.

He lifts the earpiece from its cradle and speaks tentatively into the telephone's base. "Hello?" he asks, naively hoping that Isabella is merely ringing from the hospital to tell him that all is well.

The connection is poor, so it takes a couple shouted "Pardon me's" in order to hear the young woman on the other end, who is definitely not his wife.

"Sir, it's Dorothy, sir! Miss Margaret's lady's maid!"

"Yes? Is everything all right?"

"Oh, yes, quite alright!" Edward only now dares to breathe. "I was simply calling to inquire—" A great deal of static overtakes the connection. When it ceases, there's only silence.

"Hello? Dorothy? I couldn't hear that. What was it that you needed?"

The clarity of the call now seems to underscore her response: "Oh, sir, I was simply calling to inquire when we might expect Miss Margaret to return." The woman began to ramble on about shipping more linen or some such, but Edward's brain has derailed and it takes him a moment or two to catch up.

"Dorothy," Edward interrupts with a muted desperation, "am I to understand that my cousin never arrived home following my wedding?"

A/N: Hey, look at that - posting in a timely fashion! Extensive thanks go to my prereaders, CindyWindy and miaokuancha, who actually straight up beta-ed this chapter with their eye for grammar and their medical know-how. Any remaining errors are entirely mine. Speaking of errors - I love constructive criticism (It's the only way I know how to get better at this), so please let me know if you find things that might be improved, or let me know if there's something in here that actually works.

*Twilight Sleep is actually the name for the concoction that doctors gave women in labor (I can't tell you how tempted I am to change it just to dial down the cheese factor here, but my commitment to historical accuracy forbids it!) – it not only put them under but induced temporary amnesia. It didn't go out of fashion until the early 50's. You can Google it. ;)