1988, Washington
Rosalie Hale applied another layer of hot pink lipstick and fluffed her permed hair one more time in the driver side mirror before she turned off the engine of her car. The growling of her cherry red '85 Ferarri Testarossa hummed to a silence and she put her keys into her purse. Her pink stilettos sank into the dirt of the pathway from the driveway to the house as she walked.
She hadn't returned to Forks since V-Day filled every newspaper front page with photographs of celebrations of the end of the war and soldiers kissing their girls as flags proudly flapped over bomb-scarred cities. It was a time of shifting and changing and rebuilding and proved a fitting time to start over again, start fresh, as they always did. The Cullens moved and began again in a new city, a new house, with new names and new identities.
They kept the old Forks house, though, just in case. The forest encroached on the clearing around the house, as it always did, constantly pounding the small moat of tree-less land surrounding the house with young saplings and ferns. The windows were boarded up with metal shutters and the furniture within was covered with white sheets, sitting empty and waiting for the next time the Cullens could return and fill it up with their strange, sleepless half-lives.
She left the rest of the family in Greenville, Maine. She received the call on a Monday. She never figured out how he got her number, but she wasn't really surprised. He always knew how to find her. Jasper would have been irate if he ever found out someone managed to track them, but that was exactly why Rose never told him.
"You need to come," came a rasping voice over the phone. "I have something for you."
She did not ask why or what or when. She hung up the phone, told Emmett she needed to get out on her own for a bit, got in her car, and drove.
He was waiting for her on the Cullen House porch when she arrived. She barely recognized him at first. His long hair fell as white as whale bone and deep furrows creased the planes and edges of his face like the bark of a cedar tree. Everything about him rattled as he walked. His clouded eyes could barely see, but he still recognized the sound of her footsteps when she approached. She did not allow a single reaction to mar her features when she saw him.
She towered over him, tall and strong and untouched by age.
"Nice car," he said and directed her to take the rocking chair next to him on the front porch. The layers of dust on the white wood showed the paths his feet had paced, back and forth from edge to edge, while he waited for her to come.
"Thanks," she said. Her shrug made her loose sweater fall over her right shoulder, and his eyes followed it, making her wonder if he was also remembering the kiss he had once placed there.
"You are well?" he asked.
"Of course," she answered. She couldn't bring herself to ask him the same question. By the unsteady, labored beating of his heart and the slight choking sound each time he sucked in a breath, she could tell he was not. Why else would he ask her to come? He knew it would be the last time.
"I never get to see you with white hair," he said as he looked her over from head-to-toe. "Would it be better to spend eternity as a bent, old woman or a beautiful, young one? I am not sure I envy you."
"I didn't exactly have a choice," she answered with a frown.
"No. You never did. I wonder what you would have chosen?" he mused. "Still, I would have liked to see you grow old, just once I think. You would have been a force to be reckoned with."
In his mind, he must have been resurrecting his faded daydreams of her as a white-haired elder, her cane thrashing erring boys who stepped on her roses and her home filled with reminders of long years spent in one place, living through each season of life, as she always longed to do. His sad smile overflowed into a depth of meaning in his clouded eyes that made her shift uncomfortably in her chair. She inhaled an unnecessary breath, his words cutting into a barely healed wound in her already sore heart.
"This is yours," he said, turning to the reason he had called her in the first place. "I have held onto this for too long. Now, it is your turn."
Sitting at his feet was a Quileute bentwood cedar chest. He thrust the box into her hands with a self-satisfied nod.
It was an ancient box, intricately carved on each face with the images of wolves and birds and whales. She ran her hands over the carvings before she lifted up the lid.
"What is all this?" she asked.
"You'll remember," he said. "I'm sure of it."
The first item she withdrew was an ancient, nearly faded painting on a piece of wood the size of a matchbox. If she held it into the light, she could just make out what appeared to be a Madonna with Child in what was once bright colors. She fingered the little painting again before replacing it in the box. She then took out a piece of antique white lace. It was attached to a tiny baby's dress, which was once white but was now yellow with age. She threw it away as if it were red hot and slammed the lid of the chest.
"I think you have lost your mind, old man."
"Oh, no doubt. No doubt," he answered with a chuckle.
But he wasn't crazy...and maybe that's why she was the one who had lost her mind.
He was always right about one thing, no matter how many times she tried to deny it. She knew him. From the moment she'd laid eyes on him that day in Forks, some part of her recognized him. The same way lightning knows the path from the dark storm cloud to the earth, she was drawn to him and the thunder of their meeting blinded her and shook her to her very core.
She wished she could remember the dreams. He was right about that, too. She used to have dreams. They were a faint, hazy mist now, a lingering fragrance of her human life and one which she could only grasp onto like a vapor slipping through her fingers. She could no longer dream and her memories of the dreams had evaporated in flames and fires.
She did remember how, as a young girl, she always dreamt of one day seeing the Pacific. She told her parents, again and again, that she wanted to travel to the West and they could never understand how the notion crept into her head. Even in her new life, she had internally rejoiced when Carlisle said they would be leaving Tennessee for Washington, even though she didn't understand why.
She couldn't deny the draw the wild unknown held to her. She chaffed against the bridle and bit always restraining her and telling her which way to go. If, in another life, at another time, this man of Wolves and Warriors had come to her, would she have followed?
Absolutely.
Perhaps that is why, in every lifetime and every story, her loved ones worked so hard to ensure her bridle was unbreakable and her spirit was continually broken.
Was it any different now? She felt the gilded walls of the Cullen life soaking into her, like rum on cake. She was drowning in finery and fashion, mansions and adoration. It went to her head like fine champagne, anesthetizing her from the deep, inner ache within her soul that whispered it would never satisfy.
She basked in the love of her husband and eclectic family and she survived the tedium of her vampiric days with fleeting pleasures and small goals. Fast cars gave her a facsimile of the freedom she yearned for and she determined to thrive at everything she was told she would not be able to do, whether medicine or astrophysics or car mechanics. She insulated herself with a thick barrier of selfishness. If she only lived for herself and her immediate family, she didn't risk the piercing devastation of loss she felt calling her name from that cedar box.
She wore the adoration of others around her like a fur coat to protect her from the bitter wind of loneliness that sought to consume her. But adulation is a poor substitute for devotion and Venus was more often an object to be possessed than a woman to be cherished. A single glance from this old man's eyes sang of more devotion than a thousand pages of sonnets from her most devoted worshippers.
But she could not accept it. When this man spoke, it was another woman he praised. There was a woman who was kept locked deep within her heart and she shared the key with no one. It was the same woman now kept in the confines of an old cedar box, the one who could be something else, something other, someone of her own choosing. It was the woman whose words shook the earth like thunder and could carve hope out of cedar logs. Rosalie Hale was a far cry from the woman he believed her to be.
He hummed a tune under his breath in Quileute as he waited for her to speak again. He kept time with the steady squeaking of the rocking chair against the slats of the porch floor and she clung to the box as if it were a hot iron burning into her flesh and not a wooden chest. She mulled over a thousand different questions and clichés but they all vanished like ash on her tongue.
"Thank you," she finally managed to say. She didn't know whether she was thanking him for the cedar box…or for making sure she got the chance to see him one last time…or for one of so many other things she could have thanked him for.
He nodded and placed one warm, wrinkled hand upon her cold fingers.
"It's your turn now," he said. "I've said good-bye too many times."
He placed a slow, lingering kiss on her forehead before his cane helped support him to stand upon his shaking legs. He walked away from her to the driveway where another car sat with its engine idling, hidden from view by the trees. He didn't once look back.
"Good-bye, Rolling-Thunder," she whispered to his retreating back.
ooooooo
Rosalie Hale was not permitted onto the reservation for the funeral when the old man died. The Quileute of La Push permitted the old elder more leeway than most, but that was too far. Really, no one knew why he had requested to see her or speak with her at all. He was a bit eccentric in all his ways and his memory had sprung a few leaks and so they didn't question it too much. He kept muttering he "had something of hers" and "needed to sing one last time."
His neighbor indulged his whims, as she usually did, all the more diligently because she knew they would soon be buried with him. So, when he asked Maria Black to drive him to the old mansion by the Calawah River, she did so without hesitation. She knew the place. They all did. It was impeccably maintained by old Mr. Harvey from the hardware store. He had an extra key and was sent money every year to go check on the place and take care of the landscape and any upkeep.
But it sat empty. Year after year, the finest house in Forks stayed empty. Folks in Forks said it belonged to a wealthy New York doctor who bought it for his wife. He couldn't bear to keep it when she died there and her ghost still haunted it and that's why no one ever came.
Perhaps the old wives' tales were correct for when Maria Black picked up the old man from the driveway, sans box, he looked as pale and trembly as if he really had seen a ghost. He failed to utter a sound on the drive home and the only sign of life from the old man was a single tear which rolled down his cheek, accompanied by a deep sigh.
He walked to his trailer on the reservation even slower that day, as if he'd left a part of his spark and his gusto for life in that old box. He failed to wake the next morning.
oooooo