THE REMNANTS

Chapter 2: Rosalie

Rosalie adjusted her wide brimmed hat and put her sunglasses back on her face. She rubbed the ruby red lipstick across her lips and gave a wide smile towards the pool where a dozen feet kicked and splashed in the water.

"Jimmy, don't punch another hole in the bottom of the pool," Esme yelled from where she sat on her chaise lounge, her own wide brimmed hat and glasses shading her pale, sparkling face.

"Bobby won't let me use the diving board," Annette whined. "He keeps freezing it as soon as I get on it."

"Bobby, what have we told you about that? No making ice in the swimming pool!" Esme chided. She removed her glasses from her face and gave the boy "the look". Esme's glare could cut through glass and make a grown vampire cower. It worked. The gangly boy cowed in on himself like a scolded puppy and batted his red eyelashes at her.

"I'm sorry, Mima," he whispered. Then he covertly stuck out a leg to trip his cousin.

Esme and Rosalie rolled their eyes at each other and sighed.

They would never exchange it. Not for anything. The chaos, the mess, the broken furniture, the upturned flower pots, the soiled carpets, the shattered windows-it was all part of the fullness that their lives had taken on after Alice's return on what they now referred to as "That Day".

Alice always had her secrets. Rosalie didn't begrudge her that, but sometimes she had the unsettling feeling that her sister kept too many. She had never thought about it in their first few decades together. It wasn't until Edward's "issues" that she realized it. Granted, Edward always had his issues, but his smug arrogance and irritating gift were small fish compared to his later "issues"-the real ones. Before then, Alice and Edward, why those two had been as thick as thieves with a sort of camaraderie born out of shared weirdness and shared secrets.

Rosalie never pried into it, not until after. It's not so much that everything changed that day as much as everything changed from then on. They went to school, as usual. They whined, complained, gossiped, and played, as usual. Nothing was amiss until they met back at Edward's car after school and the bastard never showed. When Alice joined them, she looked as surprised as they at Edward's absence. That was until she got another one of those fish-eyed, glazed looks on her face and was momentarily lost to the present. She gave a soft gasp and shook her head then lost herself again.

Jasper's face grew concerned and he grabbed her elbow. She shook herself out of it long enough to meet his eyes with an expression that mirrored his concern before she let her face go as blank as a fresh piece of printer paper.

"Let's go home," she said as she pulled out a spare key to the Volvo. "Edward isn't coming back tonight."

"Where'd he go?" Emmett asked as he took Rose's hand in his. They both knew. Whenever any of them disappeared without communicating first, it never ended well.

"Please. I need to think. Let's go home," Alice whispered, her voice uncharacteristically plaintive.

They complied. Alice vanished into her room with Jasper and didn't emerge until Carlisle returned from the hospital.

"Edward won't be returning to us for awhile," Alice said as he sat at their massive dining room table, the entire family gathered for her update. "He is going to go to Alaska to spend some time on his own."

"But why?" Emmett asked. "He seemed right as rain at lunch."

"It's hard to explain right now," Alice said. "His future-it's still…conflicted. He has so many different paths and I am not sure which he will choose. Please, I will explain more when I can."

"Is he going to the Denalis'?" Esme asked.

"I don't think so," Alice replied. "I think he wants to spend some time reevaluating his life."

So, they dropped it. Nobody asked any questions when he returned three months later and hid himself in his room. Nobody asked why he refused to reengage with them as he had before-not even Alice could bring him out of his solitude. Nobody asked why he suddenly couldn't read enough medical journals or attend enough conventions around the world or why he decided to leave them to attend universities…again…and again…and again.

On the outside, he remained polite, compliant, and everything he was expected to be. His golden eyes were keen and observant. He guarded the family diligently when he was around, but it was as if he were wearing a papier-mâché shell of the old Edward, the Edward he used to be, but was using it as a cover to hide what was really going on in his pompous head.

To Rosalie, she felt it was as if something happened that day at school which either lit or extinguished a fire within him. She could never differentiate which. The change bothered her. She knew Edward. She didn't like him most of the time, but she knew him. She'd lived with the man for decades. He had never been kind and polite and gracious to her. Maybe to others, but never to her (and she knew she hadn't exactly been a bed of roses to him in return).

Now, he was nothing but polite and gracious to her. He never bickered with her or made smug comments about her thoughts or teased her for her vanity. That's what really triggered her suspicions. This was not Edward. She decided she preferred the cantankerous old stick-in-the-mud to this false façade.

What did he hide behind his mask? What happened to him that caused the change? Only Alice and Jasper had any inkling of what could be found there, and they wouldn't share. She knew because she'd tried. She'd cornered them one time when she couldn't hold back anymore.

"What the hell is going on with Edward? He's not behaving as himself and you both know it. What's going on?" she hissed.

"He's just going through some, you know, stuff," Alice said with a half-hearted shrug-one that made Rosalie suspect she was trying to convince herself more than Rosalie. "He'll come through it ok once he's had some time. Just give him more time. There's still hope for him."

Jasper gave her a skeptical glance and remained silent.

"Hope? That implies there's a problem that needs the hoping. What is it?" Rosalie replied.

Neither answered her and she left in a frustrated huff.

ooooo

No one spoke of it again, at least not when they were together. Sometimes Esme and Carlisle whispered amongst themselves about it. Emmett calmly tolerated Rosalie's fuming rants and speculations, but very rarely responded with anything more than a shrug. Then, one day a few years later, Rosalie overheard a conversation she was not supposed to hear. Alice and Jasper were arguing and tempers were so heated that they paid no heed to how far their voices carried. All the way from the barn to the field where Rosalie lay under her truck, she could hear them clear as day. She didn't mind them at first, not until she heard the topic. Then she placed her wrench on the ground and held as still as a rabbit so she could hear.

"Alice, I can't do it much longer. I know you mean well and you think this is helping, but I don't agree. You have these rosy visions of a future that could possibly occur, but how many are those futures compared to the ones that he's got no business indulging? You see his future, I feel his present and the emotions he's feelin', darlin', I'm tellin' you he ain't ok. Honestly, with the brain and the talent the man possesses, he could become a living terror if he wished it and right now I trust him 'bout as far as I can throw him."

"He's just depressed over her, you know, The Human. She was his mate and he killed her. How is he supposed to get over that?"

At that Rosalie sat upright so suddenly she knocked her head against her truck and dented it. She unintentionally squawked in surprise before catching herself and listening in again.

"I've been around our kind that has lost mates. It's terrible and I don't wish that kinda pain on nobody. My point is I know darn well what they feel, and Edward? He don't feel that. I can tell you this, the things he's feelin', it won't lead him anywhere good. On a given day he blows back and forth between remembering something so sweet, he only wants to relive it in his memories, and crashing into a longing so desperate that he'd chew off his own right arm to get it again. The only emotions I've felt that were similar came from the tweakers down in the Main Street alley. And they ain't mourning a lost mate. I'm telling you, if there's grief there, it ain't for a woman," Jasper said.

"It's the guilt," Alice said. "He's struggled with guilt over it all. He could have had something so sweet and beautiful and he destroyed it. It's eating him up inside."

"Yeah, yeah, he felt guilt about taking the life of an innocent, something he swore he'd never do back in his 'high-and-mighty' days. But that was years ago, and it faded faster than the snow in spring. What has lingered and what is eating him up inside is a craving for more which gnaws on him like a bug laid eggs under his skin and made him twitchy. I'm telling you, he feels no more guilt than you'd feel a fruit fly landin' on your forehead. If he had the chance to do it all over, he'd no more spare the girl's life a second time than you'd wear second-hand clothes," Jasper said.

"He's getting better," Alice said, though more to convince herself than Jasper. "He's doing so much better with everyone and he's been coming out of his room more."

"Poppycock. He don't want any of us to see what he truly thinks or feels. That's why he treads around all careful and perfect-like; he's a cat on his tiptoes so we don't have no reason to ask questions. And do you know what it's like for me to feel those emotions all the time? It'll drive me batty right along with him. I'm telling you, I need to take off before that happens. You think you can save him or fix him, but I'm telling you, it ain't gonna happen. He's gonna do what he's gonna do and ain't nobody gonna change his mind."

Alice broke into a stunted sob. "I just miss him so much. He's never been the same since…and he could have had something so beautiful."

"I know, doll. I know," Jasper said, his words muffled by what Rosalie assumed to be Alice's hair.

Rosalie pretended she'd never heard a thing. She could keep her secrets too. Still, she meant to watch Edward with new eyes and keep careful observation on his actions. She never got the chance.

ooooo

Jasper never left. He never had to. Within the week, Edward announced he would be taking a medical research position in North Africa, pursuing some new stem cell research program to aid humanitarian efforts in the region. Maybe some of the family believed him, but Rosalie never did.

Still, she helped decorate for his going-away party and gave him such a saccharine-sweet good-bye, she was surprised he didn't call her as fraud as a counterfeit bill. No, he spoke sweet words of missing them all and keeping in touch and all the necessaries which Rosalie was convinced to her toes he didn't mean and said his good-byes. If he was being honest, he'd have said "I'll miss everyone but Rosalie," or "you all will miss me, but most especially Rosalie," or something along those lines, and give her a kiss on the cheek and she'd know he was both happy and sad to be away from her. She knew the honesty in his sarcasm and teasing. This was not honest and she didn't know what to do with it.

He left on a Thursday and no one knew it or even suspected it, but they never saw his face again from that day on. Maybe she'd have said something else if she'd known, but she didn't. It was supposed to be like the other times. He'd come and go, just like the rest of them liked to do from time-to-time, but in the past, they'd always come up with a reason to come back together. She didn't like it when the family wasn't together.

In the beginning, he called on holidays and special occasions to inquire about all of them and give some b.s. stories about his "research". But his calls became less and less frequent, his details of his work more and more vague until one day, he stopped calling altogether.

Esme would ask, especially on Christmas, if Alice had seen him, if Jasper had noticed where he'd spent his funds, if Carlisle had tried to reach out to him, if Emmett had sent him their latest address. It was always in vain, but they'd try not to admit it to her outloud. Emmett tried once. The hours of tears that followed didn't exactly set the "holiday mood" and no one tried it again after that.

Rosalie didn't know the details, but she suspected Jasper had cut off Edward from the family finances. He never mentioned it and he kept faux records on hand in case anyone asked, but she could tell. And Alice-Alice's answers to Esme came in one of two camps: either "he is busy working on this or that research in a lab," Or "I haven't seen anything new lately." Both of which, Rosalie suspected were just as b.s. as Edward's story.

Rosalie could see Alice's discomposure after some of her visions-how Jasper would cling to her and pull her into the bedroom where she wouldn't emerge for days. Other times, she looked as if she were fighting against seeing certain visions and painted a faux smile on her face, batted her eyes, and made sure Jasper tapped her to distract her from what she was about to see.

All Rosalie figured was he'd gone rogue again. It wouldn't be the first time. He decided he'd prefer the wild life of a nomad and no one had the heart to speak it out loud and bring their suspicions to the light of day. They all preferred the pretense. Rosalie wouldn't begrudge them that. She had her own pretenses to keep up. Still, she preferred calling a spade a spade instead of dancing around it like an elephant in the room.

A day came when Alice fell into a depression so thick it might as well have been molasses in January. The woman didn't smile for months, the light vanished from her eyes, and she kept herself to her room to only see Jasper. Jasper's smile went away with her. They kept up their secretive whispers, their little talks, but they kept their knowledge to themselves.

ooooo

It was nearly a year later when Alice left without telling anyone a thing. Jasper said she had some business to take care of. If he knew anymore, he never let on. She wasn't gone long. A week later, she returned with a forced smile on her face and a heart that looked as heavy as a piano.

"I went to see Edward," she began, her eyes falling to the wood of the dining room table and her gloved hands tumbling as if rolling a piece of wheat. "I could tell there was something wrong. I didn't get to speak with him before he...well...I was there to light the fire for him."

There was a collective gasp in the room as the implications of what she was so indirectly saying sunk in. Alice pulled herself taller, obviously pressed with more news for them.

"He has left us a gift to remember him by," she said and lifted a small basket to the table, covered in a blanket. She drew back the blanket and revealed the last thing any of them expected: a baby.

A baby girl, barely able to sit upright, with fiery auburn hair and dark brown eyes stared back at them-all rolls and dimpled hands and wiggling toes and a full-toothed smile. They could hear her strange heartbeat and the scent that filled the air was like nothing any of them had ever met before.

"What...the...hell?" Emmett finally said. He broke the silence that had fallen over the room, as if they were all enchanted into stillness and he was the one to finally break the spell.

"She is a half-vampire, half-human baby-Edward's child," Alice said with a forced half smile. "Edward has left her for us to raise."

"That's….not….possible….," Carlisle began but stopped when Alice waved her hand towards the child.

"Not probable, but apparently possible," Alice said.

Rosalie let out a huff and placed her arms on her hips. "That's it. I'm gonna say it. I'm done with y'all tiptoeing around this as if speaking the truth was gonna burn your tongues. We all knew Edward fell off the bandwagon again and has been off vamping around the world. Alice, be straight. What you're saying now is our virginal, goody-two-shoes brother has been off jumping into some kinky hanky-panky with human women. That is, until another vamp got mad and took his head."

"In a manner of speaking," Alice said, her eyes falling to the floor. "But not exactly. He found his mate, but she was a human, and things became...complicated."

"Oh no. This is even better. A human mating with a vampire?" Rosalie continued, feeling her mouth take off like a stampeding bull. "We all know our kind doesn't just 'get sick' or 'die off'. Tell us all the real story...Oh, I have it. Since he left us, he's been off living a good, moral, chaste, 'vegetarian' life working for the 'good of humanity' just as he told us. During his 'medical research work', he fell desperately in love with a human and he eloped with her-that is, until she finally managed to seduce him. She accidentally got knocked up, since no one managed to explain the 'birds and the bees' to either one before they hit the sack. After she died in childbirth, he committed suicide because he couldn't bear to parted from his one true love. That's what really happened, isn't it?"

Alice gave a long sigh and ran her hand through the light fuzz on the baby's head. "In a manner of speaking, but not exactly. Please, don't ask any more questions. You will not like the answers."

It didn't make any sense. It had to be near a hundred years since Rosalie first heard Alice mention this mysterious 'human mate' that he had somehow 'killed'. Their kind mated once and for life. Yet, here was a supposedly half-human baby. The mother could not be his mate, thus Rosalie found her first scenario the more likely. Edward's so-called 'humanitarian work' and 'medical research' must have involved testing the limits of human-vampire relationships, in a way the Denalis would be proud of. Maybe they'd even given him tips. She'd have to call to ask. Still, no one had ever heard of the possibility of hybrid children. Just how much science was involved in the creation of the little one in Alice's arms?

"Like hell I'm not!" Rosalie shouted. "What have you been keeping from us? I think we deserve to know the truth!"

Alice turned to face the wall, a sob racking her throat as she fought back her emotion. Jasper stood to stand by her side, his face impassive, though his eyes overflowed with deep emotion.

"The truth? The truth wouldn't have helped!" she finally whispered. "If I told you what I knew, it wouldn't have made it better. It wouldn't have stopped him and it only would have led to one of us dying."

She turned to face the room again, her voice rising in octave as she spoke. "I tried. Every different scenario I thought of led to failure. Carlisle, you would have pleaded with your compassion and your sound morality. Esme, you would have come with tears and outstretched arms to embrace him and bring him home as your beloved prodigal son. Emmett, you would have pounded his face in and Rosalie, there is no wrath like the one you would have poured upon him if I had spoken about what I saw. None of it would have helped and he'd have rather killed or died than surrendered.

"You didn't need any of that. I carry enough guilt for all of us and it won't make you feel any better to have to carry part of it too. The things I've seen, I wish I could unsee. You would never forgive yourselves, never live down the grief, if I told you everything. It was for your good, the good of our family that I didn't speak.

"Just know, it didn't have to be this way. There were other ways, other paths that could have saved him. But he ignored them all. Chance after chance, he refused to change. He destroyed himself with his own hands and there was nothing left to save by the time I found him. It was the only path left and it's better for all of us if we bury it in the past and never speak of it again," she pleaded.

The entire room fell into a tense silence. Rosalie swallowed down a thick lump in her throat that felt like she'd swallowed a frog. Those were not the words she'd expected to hear and it rang with a dark underbelly hinting at circumstances far worse than she'd ever imagined. She decided she'd stop her conjectures and keep her big mouth shut. She'd rather not know any more after all.

Esme was the one to break the silence. In her own way, she spoke what all of them where thinking without actually saying it. Let's leave the past in the past and move on with our futures.

"Does she have a name?" she whispered.

"I thought we could name her Isabella," Alice said.

"And her mother?" Esme said.

Alice shook her head sadly. Rosalie released a hiss. She could put enough pieces together to know Alice was right. She would have torn Edward limb from limb if she got her hands on him. Since he was already dead, she figured she ought to be more sober and forgiving about it all, but she felt too conflicted and it hadn't all sunk in. It was a lot to take. She'd lost a brother and gained a child (niece? Daughter? What was the little imp to her? She didn't know) all in one day. She supposed she'd feel sad once it did, but she still felt numb from shock.

ooooo

The years passed. Baby Isabella grew too quickly. Their house, their lives, their family had never been so full, vibrant, and joyful. Isabella grew to womanhood and bore her own children and grandchildren and their home continued to be indescribably and beautifully full of life and change. It was the possibility for newness and the break from the mundane that Rosalie treasured the most.

Esme still grew quiet with a heavy sadness, especially around Christmas. She never could bring herself to give away the piano. Alice, from time-to-time, gained a lost look that revealed her eyes were looking backward and not forward and she'd give a soft sigh to no one in particular. Carlisle, when it came time to initiate the latest brood of Cullens into the Cullen family history, kept the story of his firstborn as brief as possible and left out a great many details (which the children could always pry from Uncle Emmett or Uncle Jasper later). Rosalie, as far as she went, after a time of bitterness and anger, she forgave her bastard of a brother for the hole he created when he left and the pain he caused them all. She could let it go because he also left them with the sweetest of balms to heal their sore hearts. The gift to them was the very best parts of him that remained in his daughter who could not help but fill the hole he left.

As Rosalie looked across the pool at the six grandchildren who had come to visit them for the summer, she couldn't regret it. True, sometimes she thought about Alice's words, the ambiguity around the circumstances of the death and the birth, and she wondered if she should ask and find out the truth. Still, she had no cause to hurry and could always do that on some other day.

She screeched as a wave of cold water crashed over her magazine. She peered out over her glasses to meet the sheepish expression on Jonathan's face and she glared at him before breaking into a wide, menacing smile.

"Oh, you are asking for it, little boy!" she said and cannon-balled into the deep end, sending a tidal wave of pool water across the length of the pool. Six little voices shrieked with joy and swam to chase her across the pool.

Yes, Rosalie very much preferred to live in her "today" and leave Alice with her secrets. In the words of Scarlett O'Hara, she'd "think about that tomorrow."

ooooooooo