Faces

Fall, 1934
Amherst, MA

It was an utterly ordinary afternoon. Rosalie and Edward had recently returned from university, and the sounds of their bickering rose up the stairs. Why the two of them did not find their peace elsewhere, she didn't know. She might send them off to hunt, she thought. Perhaps in different counties.

Yet there was something familiar about the way the two of them had fallen into rhythm as siblings. Edward, older and younger brother at once. Rosalie, full of disastrously-won wisdom and always aggrieved, unwilling to listen to Edward's point of view. There was no sign that they would ever be the partners Esme's husband had once imagined, hoping that a woman might solve the same hole in Edward's heart that Esme herself had solved in his. And yet there was a camaraderie in their arguments and insults, a rhythm to their family dynamic that somehow made it more whole. They were true siblings—occasionally quietly bonded over the latest news from Chevrolet, more often sniping like children about closed bedroom doors.

Carlisle, though—he was more difficult. Rosalie had snapped at him before he'd left for work. Her resentment knew no bounds, exacerbated by the knowledge that even in his moment of profoundly foolish savior-complex, he had been thinking of Edward, and the pain that still burned in his own heart, two years after their prodigal son had returned…

Esme wasn't sure Rosalie would ever forgive him.

She wasn't sure Rosalie should.

Her husband didn't know how to relate to a daughter, Esme understood. His son had completed him so fully—unlocking with his gift the centuries of solitude which made Carlisle Cullen who he was. Like everything of importance Carlisle did, he had turned Rosalie rashly, without regard to the effects on anyone else.

Rosalie was just strong enough to force him to pay the price for that.

Esme recalled her husband's slumped shoulders as he exited the house after the latest round of berating from his daughter. The look in his eyes of utter defeat.

"She'll cool off," Esme had whispered to him hours before, but she hadn't—as usual, she had taken her discomfort out on Edward. And as Esme listened to the voices reaching a fever pitch downstairs—a back and forth which grew increasingly intense but did not reach a point where she needed to intervene—she selected charcoal, her hand flying across the paper on her easel before she even knew what she was beginning. As so many times before, it was her husband's face which began to emerge. She had drawn him how many dozens of times in the ten years between the time she had met him and when she had awoken to this new life. The high cheekbones, the square jaw, the singular lock of utterly unruly hair at his temple which seemed to exist only to prove that there were some things Carlisle Cullen could never control. She had forced herself to recall those features over and over, to render them in more permanent forms—charcoal, pencil, oil pastel. Over and over she had drawn him until his face had been committed not only to the memory of her mind but also the memory of her fingers.

She had never planned to have a daughter. She had known, somehow, from the moment she felt the first strange sensation in her abdomen. Not a kick or a flutter or any of the things that her girlfriends had told her to expect, but instead as though some of her internal organs simply…flipped over. She had touched her own belly in awe, and had known right then, without thinking, that it was a male child. Perhaps a daughter would have softened her husband, but she knew, somehow, that a male child was in greater danger. That he would not be protected; that he would be pushed, that the expectation upon his barely-formed shoulders would be impossible. It had been this conviction that had put her on the Great Lakes train, whisked her to a state she'd never seen before, and which later drove her from her cousin's to the very northern tip of the country.

Then her son had been born, with his tiny body and his squalling voice and his perfect smell, only to be ripped away fewer than two days later. And she had reached out in despair and found not her son, but the gentle face she had sketched for a decade, staring down at her.

Today, as she laid out the roughest outline of her husband's familiar form, Esme was not fully aware that somehow, she had softened the beautiful severity of his cheekbones, that she had added subtle curvature to the sharpness of his jaw. But she had done so, and it wasn't Carlisle's face which was emerging.

It had been an entire year, now, that their family of three had been a family of four. And a scant single score of years that the hardened bachelor and his beloved son had welcomed any feminine presence into their lives. She had worried about being a bother to them both, and she knew, that sometimes, she was—the way Edward's eyes would narrow from time to time, the way Carlisle shadowed him when he was upset.
And so she tried. She tried to reach to Rosalie. She tried to bridge the shared elements of their past, only to be met with the coldest of shoulders. This family, Rosalie seemed to say, was the world of the men. Rose hated Carlisle for his hubris, hated Edward for his gift, and if she didn't hate Esme, it was only for Esme's shared experience of these two things.

So, as she thought of her daughter, listened to bickering give way to quiet conversation, and then to silence, and then to the gentle chords of a sonata, the cheekbones softened, the jawbone became subtler, the high forehead became heart-shaped with a widow's peak. The nose became thinner, the lips softer, and the single unruly lock of golden hair became dozens, spilling onto shoulders which sloped more gently.

It was difficult for vampires to get fully lost in work, and so she heard the front door open and close. Edward was still playing, and wherever Rose had moved to—her bedroom, if the distance to her scent was to believed—she was quiet. So Esme knew that her husband was home even before she heard a briefcase drop gently to the floor and before the waft of smoked cinnamon made its way to her nose. She had a split-second to consider this fact before warm lips had buried themselves where her neck met her collarbone.

"What are you drawing," her husband muttered, and she shook her head.

"Nothing."

"It's never nothing." He stepped back and appraised the easel, reaching out with one hand. She laid down her charcoal and smacked his arm playfully.

"It isn't nothing. But I'm not finished yet. Go bother the children."

He sighed. "They're fighting."

"They've been fighting all afternoon. It's quieter, now."

Her husband chuckled, pressing his lips to her neck again. "I apologize for leaving you alone all day with that."

She shook her head. "Edward plays impromptus when he's angry with Rose. It's good background." It had been Fauré , today—the impossibly fast descending scales across the keyboard, sounding like water. Esme had never bothered to learn the details of classical music before, but now it was impossible not to—she marveled at times at the way her mind was able to store the names of styles and composers and even the actual beats of the music itself. She hadn't cared, before, but with Edward, it became a thing about which one cared. To love Edward was to love his piano, and that meant that all of them learned to understand it.

"Give me another half-hour?"

Her husband nodded, kissing her neck again and then disappearing. The piano stopped mid-phrase, and she heard only one-sided murmurs which told her that Carlisle and Edward were engaged in one of their desperately intimate conversations. If she strained, she could hear them, no doubt, but she chose not to, letting her hand bring shape to the face whose provenance she now understood. She kept the long eyelashes, and the light-hued eyes. She made the lips ever so slightly fuller, and drew the slightest hint of a bosom at the bottom of the page.

It was longer than a half hour before Carlisle returned. From the subtle addition to his scent, it seemed likely he had been sitting with Edward at the piano the entire time. Edward could read Carlisle's mind, of course, but after a decade and a half, it often seemed that Carlisle could read Edward's almost as surely. They often sat in silent companionship, Edward playing, Carlisle listening, bonded by their thoughts and impenetrable by either Rosalie or Esme.

Carlisle kissed her before even bothering to look at the easel. She let herself fall into the kiss, the way her husband's supple lips moved against her own. It was only several minutes later that he seemed to remember what he had intended to inquire after, and pulled away to appraise the drawing. His head cocked to one side as he gazed at it, his mouth falling open slightly in recognition.

He had revealed this sad fact in their very first conversation. She, half-delirious from the laudanum, he, trying bravely to keep his demeanor professional. Yet even with her hazy, opiate-influenced human memory, she recalled the encounter with nearly the same crystal clarity that he did. As she'd asked after his name, and after receiving his title, asked his first name, which he had, to his own surprise, volunteered.

"I've never met a Carlisle before," she'd told him, and he'd only smirked.

"Nor I an Esme. One wonders why you are not a Mary, or a Margaret."

And she'd returned his smile and his gentle banter. She had inquired where the unusual name had come from, and he had answered that perhaps it was his mother's maiden name, and then she had asked after his mother, eliciting the same pained, faraway look that graced his features now as he explained how and when she had died...
"Not knowing what your father looked like," Esme offered as he stared silently, "I wasn't sure which of your features to subtract, but…"

The gulp was audible. "No," her husband said quietly, "I imagine this is about right." Another deep swallow, then: "What brought this on?"

She shrugged. "I'm not even sure myself." Involuntarily, her right hand opened and closed, feeling the ghost of the charcoal still in her fingers. She sighed.

"Rose," she said quietly.

Carlisle shot her a quizzical look.

"I suppose I was thinking about Rose. And how you left with her still angry."

There were two stools in Esme's studio, one before each easel, both unnecessary in the strictest sense, but they encouraged the right posture for sweeping her arm across wide paper or canvas. Carlisle pulled the second one near her and sat down, his lips suddenly pressed tight.

"She hates me," he muttered.

Esme nodded. "Sometimes, yes. You don't always make it easy for her."

He thrust a hand into his hair, and the unruly lock fell through his fingers. When he spoke again, his voice was clipped with frustration. "I just want her to be happy."

"You can't force people to be happy, Carlisle."

To her surprise, he chuckled. "You'd think that after what happened with Edward, I'd know that."

She laughed in answer. Two years on, their mercurial son was beginning to recover from his shame and anger. Gentler songs came from the piano more often than not, and every now and then, even an original composition. Slowly, month by month, arpeggio by arpeggio, he was coming back to them.

"I suppose…" she began. When she hadn't finished her sentence a moment later, Carlisle prodded.

"You suppose?"

She gestured. She had drawn the woman with the same tired but indulgently kind eyes her husband had. Eyes that suggested that whatever the person being looked on was wont to do, they would be forgiven. They would be loved.

"You have a daughter now," she said gently. "I suppose I thought it might be helpful for you to remember that once, you had a mother, too."

Her husband's thin lips pressed together even more tightly, and she saw his adam's apple move yet again. She stood up, brushing the charcoal off her fingertips against her skirt as she leaned in to kiss his cheek. She laid a hand on his shoulder briefly, then went down the stairs.

It was nearly two hours of listening to the piano later, watching Rosalie read and pretend not to care what Edward was playing, before Esme bothered to creep back up to her studio. The door was still open a crack, and the air was still thick with her husband's scent as she peeked inside.

Carlisle sat alone in the utter dark, his legs crossed, the moonbeams shading in through the window making his skin a translucent blue white as he gazed up into the portrait's kind, pale eyes. Slowly, his hand crept from his side to reach out, the pad of his finger tracing the jawline she had sketched. And then it hung there, index finger outstretched, as though it was not the strong, assured hand of a surgeon but the beseeching hand of a child, reaching, desperately, across space and time.

Smiling to herself, Esme pulled the door closed and went to find her daughter.

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