I received a request for some headcanons about human Esme, Edward, and Alice riding on trains back in the day... here are some short little moments.
In 1908, seven-year-old Edward was trying desperately not to fall asleep on a late-night train ride home from Detroit. He had just seen the Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the very first time, beating the Detroit Tigers in game 5. Ed Masen, Esquire, usually far too busy for fun and games with his son, had taken the extraordinary step of canceling his appointments today and surprising his son with a train ticket to Detroit, Michigan to see the game.
Edward's day had been a whirlwind of sounds and colors and sticky candy and clambering up on Daddy's shoulders to scream in victory in the final moment. Ed Masen had already fallen asleep, his head tilted back on his seat as the train rolled on. Edward was slumped against his father, staring up at him with loving eyes that kept drifting closed. They had never spent so much uninterrupted time together before, or had so much fun. This had been the best day of his entire life, and he didn't want it to end. His new baseball cap—it matched his father's exactly—drooped over his eyes, and they finally closed against the arms of his father's suit jacket. The smile remained.
.
In 1919, Alice sat in shock in a train next to the town marshall of Biloxi. She knew things she wished she didn't know: that her father had paid to have her mother killed, and that only hours before, he had paid to have her taken away, as well. She had no idea where the train was headed.
"Hush now," the marshall said every time she began to cry again. "This is for your own good. You'll be staying with the best doctors there are, just until you feel better. Hush now." He'd given up after the second time, and now sat in awkward silence in the seat next to her.
Alice thought more than once about making a run for it at the next train stop. But her visions—those daydreams and nightmares that broke upon her mind without warning—stopped her, showing her why the attempt would be futile. But she was just as afraid to do nothing: she also saw broken glimpses of a dingy, windowless room, of men in white coats and nurses forcing her to lie still on a big table, straining to fit some kind of leather harness over her face. She saw a girl curled into a ball, thin and bald, whispering. She saw a man with red eyes working outside in the evening with a shovel. She saw a mouthful of sharp teeth, a canopy of trees flying by at an impossible speed. She saw her death.
And yet, somehow, she also saw that it would not be the end.
.
A year later, Esme had barely begun to unpack at her cousin's house in Milwaukee when the phone rang. Her cousin's husband answered, and, not having yet been told why his sister-in-law was "visiting," he told Charles that yes, Esme had just arrived. When he casually mentioned Charles's call later that day, Esme tearfully told him (the cousin-in-law) everything—about Charles's abuse, the baby on the way, and why she had come to "visit" last night. It was mortifying for her to say these things to a man for the first time, and she had little hope that he would sympathize, but he did. He and his wife, suspecting that Charles was already on his way to pick her up, rushed her to the train station and bought her a one-way ticket for the furthest town they could afford while still giving her some cash to start a new life: Ashland, Wisconsin.
After more tears and grateful farewell hugs, Esme boarded the train alone, clutching only a bag lunch and fifteen dollars cash. Her mind raced as the miles flew quickly by; she'd never been on the train before and the speed felt freeing as the scenery outside the window began to change. An older woman boarded at a later stop and took the seat next to Esme. Esme wanted to be left alone, but felt it was only polite to answer the stranger's curiosity about her traveling alone. It was then and there that she invented the story about being a war widow, pregnant and nearly penniless. The plans formed themselves as she spoke them for the very first time. "I'd always wanted to be a teacher," she blurted out to the older lady, "So I think now's the time to start a new life."