Thanks to the people who took the time to read, and to those who reviewed: edward-lover-456, Esme'sFAVORITE, flame of the forrest, Kitty-kat831, Nanda, seattlegrace90, , starrylove, and tragixlove. Your comments encourage me to continue. =)

Love,

Carol

Chapter 2: Recalled to Life

August, 1910

Esme's mother refused to let her tell Miss Lumley the good news for two days. "We wouldn't want to seem too eager," she insisted, as she kneaded the dough. Secretly, Esme thought that her mother just didn't want to allow the decision to be made final. But she complied, and walked as fast as she could two days later in the burning August heat towards the double-story house close to Milton where Miss Lumley boarded. Both pairs of eyes glittered with excitement. Each planned an exciting future—the academy would open in little more than two weeks.

When she returned, she found her mother slicing onions. "Oh, back, are you?" she said as Esme walked into the kitchen and tied an apron around her plain dress.

"Yes," she said. Esme took a knife and started skinning the carrots lying on the counter. "I told Miss Lumley."

Mrs. Platt didn't reply but started chopping the onions with more force. Esme continued with the carrots, and moved onto removing the husks from the ears of corn. A heavy silence fell between them.

In the end, it was Mrs. Platt that broke the silence. "And why exactly do you have to go to this school?"

"Because," Esme said as she peeled the silky strands off the corn, "I can think of nothing better than being able to read new books and learning new things."

"Couldn't you read at home? Miss Lumley always brings by new books."

"It's not the same!" Esme exclaimed. "School isn't very challenging anymore."

Mrs. Platt huffed. "You can read and write and do sums. What more do you need?"

"Well, what about literature? The body of written works is massive, the result of centuries of the greatest thinkers. And what about science? In the last century we've leaped into the modern era; look at the smokestacks outside of Columbus. I'd never learn those things in our little Milton school; it's so small, and the world so wide." Esme's impassioned voice took on a tinge of longing. "And going to college would be... a dream."

Esme's words rung in her mother's mind. Laura Platt had always held herself with pride. She'd grown up never knowing anything other than always fighting for the security just a little more money could buy; she'd learned long ago that money saved one from starvation, desperation, and humiliation. Marrying John Platt, who had nothing to his name but a mid-sized tract of farmland and devotion to her, had been the most romantic, and sometimes she joked to John, the stupidest thing she'd ever done. She'd tease her husband that she could've married George V and been Queen of England by then.

But, she'd never regretted her marriage. She wasn't so ungrateful as to see that life could've been much worse than marrying the man she'd been infatuated with since the first time she saw him in a friend's drawing room, the man she'd been in love with since the he rode his horse to her father's house to tell Laura he was going to marry her, rich or poor, parents' blessing or no.

It didn't prevent her from wishing there were more things, though. It was wrong to covet, true, but it'd be nice to have newer furniture, nicer clothes, needed parts for the tractor. Forty dollars was a fortune in her eyes. She'd never needed an "academy" education—college seemed extravagant.

But as she looked at her daughter absentmindedly peeling corn and fantasizing, she felt a pang of regret for so vehemently arguing against her going to school. It hurt Laura to think that Esme would go regardless of what she thought. When did her youngest daughter grow up? With a pang, Laura realized she didn't really understand Esme, headstrong, independent Esme, her daughter who seemed to want nothing more than to fly away into the uncertain world and boldly seek perilous adventure. Esme wanted everything Laura tried so hard to fight.

I can't stop her, thought Laura as she continued slicing onions.

"Esme, if you want to go to this academy so badly... well, I won't stop you."

Setting down her knife, Laura turned and gathered her daughter in a hug, trying to tell Esme all she couldn't put in words—you want to go into the world so desperately. But you'll find that world a hard-scrabble place, and when you do, I'll offer you the home to come back to. That's the most I can do, the most any mother can do.

It might have just been the onions but Esme thought she saw tears in her mother's eyes.

*~*~*~*~*

On those warm summer nights, Esme could hear the crickets chirping in sweet contentment. Usually she could also hear the light breathing of her sister sleeping. But that night, Celeste and Esme Platt sat awake on thin mattresses set together in their attic bedroom.

Although Celeste was little more than a year and a half older than Esme, all through their childhood the younger held the older in the deepest respect. It wasn't until later that Esme realized Celeste represented everything she admired but wasn't. Had Esme longed less to leap out into the world, she would've appreciated the homey comforts of Milton like her sister. Had Esme not been restless, she could've taken long walks through fields of barley or appreciated the still silence of evening. Had she not been impatient, she would've been content knowing what she had she had, and what she didn't have she didn't.

The sisters looked very similar. The same golden brown hair was either wind-swept or swept back and tied neatly. Light brown eyes either glittered with excitement or glowed with contentment. Pale, heart-shaped faces were either freckled and grinning from the sun or quiet and smiling.

The moon cast pools of silver onto the wooden floor and on the bedsheets. Celeste's legs were drawn up against her body. "So what's the very first thing you'll do once you get to Columbus?"

"Visit Uncle Thomas and Aunt Mary, I guess," said Esme. "Mother and Father will expect that."

"Do you think you'll go to parties? Isn't that what they used to do at finishing schools?"

Esme snickered. "I doubt it. It's not like I have any nice dresses to wear, anyways. It's a school, not a finishing school. Thank goodness it's not. I'll spend most of my time studying I think."

"Maybe it'll be like an Ann Radcliffe* novel—Gothic towers and mysterious romances."

"Right," whispered Esme. "When was the last time you saw a Gothic mansion around here?"

Celeste pretended to think. "Well... if you squint at the Milton general store—"

"And why were you squinting at the general store?"

"Oh... uh, no reason."

Esme laughed under her breath. "Were you thinking about one Richard Thor—"

"Shhh!" Celeste smiled.

"He's not too bad," grinned Esme. "You could do much worse than Richard. I bet he looks forward to Sundays more than usual lately!"

"You think so? We still sit in the same different pews."

"Celeste," Esme rolled her eyes at her sister and her incongruity, "he pays more attention to you than the Reverent Kingsley's fascinatingly staticky hair. When Oscar Marville walked by, the hair actually moved to the other side of his head."

"Not everyone is as easily amused as you are."

"No, really. He was definitely looking our direction."

"Well, maybe it was because the reverend was looking at you."

"Oh, bother." Esme shrugged her shoulders. "For all his croaky preaching, I still don't see why women shouldn't get the vote."

"The reverend says to his flock that women can't vote because we're mentally incapable, physically unable, and morally unfit."

"Hah."

"And besides—women might hide extra ballots in their sleeves and stuff the boxes*."

"As if men didn't wear sleeves." Esme snorted. "Never heard that one before."

Celeste shook her head of loose tresses. "You must not have been paying attention last Sunday then."

"Celeste!" exclaimed Esme, laughing. "You completely distracted me. What was I on... oh yeah, teasing you about Richard."

"Gosh, darn."

"Since you're not doing anything about this..." Esme said in a tone implying deviousness, "I have a plan."

"Heaven help us." Celeste rolled her eyes, and waited for the scheme. "Yes?"

"What?"

"What's this plan of yours?"

"You'll find out!"

"Esme, you're impossible. Tell me now!"

"It's a surprise—we can't ruin it now, can we?" Esme whispered, grinning in the darkness and congratulating herself on her perfect plot. Celeste would never have summoned the courage to talk to Richard Thornton, but all the two needed was the slight nudge from the ever-gutsy Esme.

A silence fell, colored with the cricket calls and a lone owl. Their merriment slowly subsided into a comfortable sense of togetherness from spending years and years of nights in their attic above the rest of the house. When they were young, the sisters clandestinely fantasized the attic was really a kingdom full of magic where the chair was the mountain lair of the witch queen, the walkway between their beds the chasm of doom. Celeste played the princess trapped stop the chair under a bedsheet of snow, and Esme saved her from evil as the Knight Valiant.

After awhile, quietly, Celeste ventured, "What will I do without you here?"

"Fall asleep faster."

"Esme! Really. It'll feel so empty up here."

Esme heard the tinge of sadness in her voice, and got up to sit in the pool of moonlight bathing Celeste. In that moment, Celeste, awash in silver light that changed the dust particles into glitter, could've been a real fairy princess with her ethereal beauty. "Celeste, I won't be far. It's only Columbus. You'll visit often. We can write even more often."

"I'll miss you—so much."

Esme hugged her sister. "I'll miss you too. You won't ever be too far from mind."

She smiled a small smile. "How sweet of you." Her smile turned into a grin. "But before you leave, you have to tell me your plan!"

"Never!" laughed Esme, ducking Celeste's pillow throw. Such were the happy last nights of the Platt sisters.

*~*~*~*~*

July 1921

She couldn't remember how long the agony lasted.

Every cell in her body ripped itself apart struggling vainly against the invading poison. Those nearest her veins crystallized first, each one a tearing stab, each one added together a universe of raw pain. It was slow, exquisite torture. She was encased in suffocating torment with no way out and no end. Her ears couldn't hear if she screamed. She smelled nothing. What she saw she didn't recognize. Every sense was consumed completely. This must be death, but she was being eaten alive.

Her self, that part of her that made her Esme and no one else, was drowned by fire. The self is slave to pain, and while under its thumb, everything is pared down to not the feeling of pain, but pain itself. How could one think when the very flames of hell were burning through the body in everlasting torture? And what humanity is possible without the mind? She had wanted to forget, but she was left with nothing but agony; she had forgotten, but at the same time forgotten who she was. It was fitting that what changed a human to something altogether inhuman forced the self, the soul, whatever determines who one is at heart, to be ripped from the corporeal world and to hang in a precarious balance.

And who was there for Esme but Carlisle? The lamp had never strayed from the bedside table and the flame glowed persistently, shining in the night and through the day as the heavens tried to drown Ashland in torrents of angry rain. Through the torturous minutes that she fought the hellish demons, he kept vigil at her bedside. He held her hand as she writhed in torment. His heart, that superfluous and silent organ, echoed with her cries until his entire body rung with the pain he inflicted.

The endless hours were spent fighting himself about his decision. Sometimes he was filled with anticipation that she could again be the girl whose smile was as wide as her heart. Sometimes he was torn with anguish over forcing his own existence on someone who so obviously had chosen to die. And underneath it all, Carlisle was afraid to admit to himself he feared her waking up and hating him for what she would soon be.

Through the whole ordeal, he spoke to her. He told her of his work in the hospital as he checked her clammy skin. He told her of Edward, how he was a student in the nearby high school. Never did he speak of the life she'd wake up to. While wiping her forehead of sweat, he never asked any questions about the last ten years of her life.

He didn't mention that it'd been a decade but still he had thought of her occasionally through the years, a complete stranger who in his mind had remained forever sixteen. She'd said his name in a moment of sanity, but he'd hardly dared to believe it was anything more than her drawing on a memory buried deep in the piles of events that happened since. Esme Platt wove through his life, he realized, as a wraith of his memory that had somehow come back to him.

And he kept on talking. He spoke in a low murmur, telling her stories he'd never told anyone else. This complete stranger, this girl turned woman.

He didn't know she was listening. Not consciously, but she knew that voice, the timbre and feel of it.

There was a moment at the peak of pain where Esme's soul could have easily chosen to simply give up. It had already once before, and unlike other vampires, whose innermost selves still thirsted for each drop of life during transformation, her soul had entered the turning already quit of all mortal ties. Yet in that world of pain, right at the moment she would've given up, the sound of Carlisle's words cut through to her very core. She didn't hear him; no, instead it was something altogether divine. His voice carried within it the promise of something different from the suffering she'd lived, and it drew her back from the cliff over the chasm of nothingness and back to existence.

After two days, Esme opened her eyes to Carlisle's face lined with worry. At the sight of her scarlet red eyes, his features melted into relief, and the lines were washed away. A smile spread across his mouth, familiar light returned to his eyes, and after two nights of breathless worry, all was made right again.

Esme would try in later years to remember what the transformation process was like and understand why, but she could only remember the excruciating pain. However, she didn't need to understand, she simply knew it. For all of eternity, Esme would know with unshakable certainty that there was no sound in the world as beautiful as Carlisle's voice, for his was the voice that had recalled her to life.

Notes

1. Ann Radcliffe was an 18th century English novelist who is regarded as one of the founders of Gothic romance. Her books include The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, novels that inspired comedic retellings like Austen's Northanger Abbey and dark heroes like Charlotte Brontë's Mr. Rochester.
2. In our modern conviction of women's suffrage, few think of the anti-suffragists, in particular, women anti-suffragists. These women believed in separate spheres of influence, political and domestic, for the genders like the men anti-suffragists. However, to lambast these women for not supporting their own rights is to disregard that they firmly believed the status quo worked well, a viewpoint not inherently wrong. I find it fascinating that these women, often upper-middle-class, would volunteer and run charities and education while declining the vote. It seems hard to reconcile. This is an example of how ingrained some ideas are in our culture that I could never doubt the right of a woman to vote or a black man his freedom, and also how history is like a foreign country—they do it differently there.