Walls
November, 2020
Ashland, WI
To live with Esme Platt Cullen was to live in a carefully ordered chaos.
In more stable times, and in more stable homes, this chaos had been the chaos of their children, now six-almost-seven of them. Emmett and Jasper, enjoying a boisterous playfight. Rosalie and Edward sniping at each other in that odd way they did that was one part love, one part self-hatred, a third part disdain. Renesmee, when she had been younger, trying everyone's patience and most of all her parents'. The way the house would eventually rise to a fever pitch like a thrumming beehive and Carlisle would eventually retreat to his study, simultaneously craving solitude and also intensely grateful that, these days, solitude was so hard to come by. Eventually, his wife would come find him, standing next to his chair and raking her hands through his hair as she pulled his head to her bosom.
Solitude was, unfortunately, easier to find these days. With the children in Europe and the two of them alone in the house which seemed strangely too large without the omniscience of Edward's gift, quiet was their constant companion.
The chaos now, too, was different. Instead of the raucousness of their large family, this was the chaos of sawdust and century-old plaster, warped floorboards with haphazard nails—nails which couldn't hurt either of them, of course, but which still seemed to appear out of the ether in places Carlisle could've sworn they hadn't existed twelve hours ago.
He'd retreated to their bedroom, or what was left of it. His body remembered the route more than his mind did, up the staircase and to the right, through the second doorway. The footprint was still here; wall studs turned a deep brown with age and striped with the pattern of the lath boards which had been removed and carefully stacked in a corner. Esme had told him that he wasn't to touch them; she'd salvage what she could.
The house needed new systems. It had been built with only the most nascent plumbing, and while he'd run electricity, it was the electricity which had been able to be run at the time;; not what was standard now. Esme would restore it to its mid nineteenth century glory in the end, but first it needed bringing into the twenty-first. For now there were no walls, just an eerie skeleton of what once had been, with bright-yellow conduit dangling like vine, and red and blue flexible plumbing snaking its way to rooms which soon would again be the kitchen and bathrooms and making the house look like the anatomy textbooks Carlisle was more used to. Blue veins, red arteries. It made sense to him to think of the house like a body—helped him make sense of and honor his wife's diligent work.
Esme was on the roof when he slid into the remains of their bedroom, having shed his briefcase, his peacoat, and his white doctor's coat as he passed the foyer, the coat closet, and the hamper, respectively. She understood his desire to live as humanly as possible, and so she had warned him that the roof was coming off for a few days while she brought the trusses up to twenty-first century building code. But that hadn't happened yet, and for now, there was still this ghost of the structure of the home he had bought a century ago, when his only identity had been "sire" and sometimes, if he dared to think it, and Edward had allowed him, "father." And so he stripped down to his scrubs and sat, cross-legged, on the floor of the furniture-less bedroom. The sound from above him was rhythmic as his wife worked through the existing structure. First the scraping of the wrecking bar, then the quiet ping of the nail releasing from the roof, then the resounding thwap of the shingle hitting the ground two floors below.
Scrape. Scrape. Ping. Thwap. The repetition was meditative, and he allowed himself to get lost in it. He was so deep in his own thoughts that he missed the cessation of sound on the roof, the quiet sounds of tools being put carefully back into place, the opening and closing of closet doors in what was left of the frame of the house.
He finally became aware when he heard the thunk of the tool belt in the foyer, the toeing off of the unnecessary work boots. The soft padding of socked feet on the bare, stripped staircase. A moment later, the light shading through the patchwork of lath which awaited replacement revealed a feminine silhouette, arms crossed as she regarded him coolly.
"How much longer do we get to keep the roof?" he asked.
"I should have it off by tomorrow midday. I timed it with your long shift." The socked feet padded across the room and then she, too, had dropped into a cross-legged posture behind him. A split second later her lips were at the base of his neck. "That is, if you don't distract me too much while you're home, Dr. Cullen."
He smirked a little. "I know better than to separate you from a demolition."
She laughed her clear laughter, and he twisted a little so that their lips could meet. They kissed for several seconds, the gentle, familiar kiss of the long-married, her hand finding its way to his hip.
"You've had a bad day," she said when their lips parted. It wasn't a question.
He nodded.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not particularly." He looked toward the ceiling, or what once had been the ceiling. It was now, like everything else, bare beams, the odd mixture of new and very old, and he could see to the roof, where the removal of the shingles had exposed the places where the old roof boards had shrunk away from one another, letting in little slivers of daylight.
"I'm looking forward to furniture," he admitted. "How far in the future is that?"
She laughed again. "I'll get you some for Christmas. In the meantime…" She patted her thigh and, almost without thinking, he lay down, putting his head in her lap. In the same instant, her hands were in his hair, her fingertips against his scalp as she combed through it.
It had taken decades, this part of their relationship. He had been used to fending for himself, convincing himself that he was invincible. And Edward, as glorious as he had been, had only made this aspect worse, as every day, Carlisle had tried even harder to be Edward's rock. And so when Esme had joined them, it had taken him years to admit to even the slightest crack, and even longer to reach this utter surrender.
He closed his eyes, letting his senses be overcome by the feeling of fingers in his hair, the sound of breath, rolling in and out, the way the cinnamon-lilac-honey of his wife's scent was overlaid with the burned, chemical stench of decades-old roofing pitch.
"There were eleven today," he muttered finally, not opening his eyes. They'd moved because of the surge here, and he had steeled himself for it. Nothing he'd faced in the States held a candle to Italy, not even this, but the comparison didn't make it any easier. Sometimes, he'd walked out of the room; let a nurse in full protective equipment, looking like an astronaut hold a phone in a gloved hand as family members on FaceTime looked on while their parent or grandparent slipped away from life. Other times, he stayed: He was the one to hold the phone, to flick the ventilator to the OFF position, to witness the deep, rattling, final breaths.
His wife sighed sadly. "Eleven is so many."
"One is too many. This whole year is too many." One by one, the same progression, over and over. Ctyokine. Hypoxia. Multisystem organ failure. The same sequence, the same dread, the same point of no return. And if he thought too long or too hard, he could recall each and every face.
As assuredly as though she were Edward, seeing the images in his head, she murmured, "It will end, Carlisle."
He sighed. "I know." And he did know. Cholera, Typhoid, Scarlet Fever, Polio, and two times around the dance floor with H1N1—they always ended.
That didn't make now any easier.
Carlisle squeezed his eyes closed as one hand in his hair made its way to his back, the other to his arm. He let his body go slack as he let the day's pain slip away into her hands.
"Thank you," he breathed several minutes later.
"Thank you for letting me in," his wife answered, bending deeply and pressing her lips to his again.
He chuckled. "Well, it's hard to keep you out when we don't have any walls."
Carlisle felt, more than heard, Esme's answering laughter. It was a tiny cough of a laugh, small against the all the world was throwing at them.
But, he realized as he allowed himself to rest, it was also just enough.