Wow. Again, I have to say how blown away I am with the response to this story. I have almost thirty reviews for just three chapters! You guys rock!! Also, this is really fun to write. I thought I would have nothing much to write about for the first few chapters, but Edward really has a lot going on in his head, even more than Bella sometimes. Again, I swear there was more I wanted to say in this AN. But I always forget. :P Oh, right, I got a request from luuna cullen to dedicate this chapter to her friend Lizzie whose birthday it was yesterday, so if you're reading this, Happy Birthday Lizzie(whoever you are :D)! OOh, also, that's right, Happy Birthday to Canada! (It's Canada day today) :D for any other Canucks reading this. :)
And now, enjoy!
P.s. Also, thanks to Night Rises Again for pointing out that Edward's birthday is June 20th, not 21st. :P My bad!
For some reason, I stayed in the cemetery for a while, just drifting. But then I realized how much time must have passed, and hurried back to the white house, wondering what Bella had done in my absence.
Not much, it appeared, as I found myself back in her house, having located her in her bedroom. Her bag from the cemetery was abandoned by her door, as were the flip-flop sandals she had been wearing. She was sitting on her bed when I came in, but soon after she got up and started pacing, only to sit back down fifteen minutes later. The process repeated itself many times over the course of the afternoon. Sometimes she would mutter to herself as she paced or sat, but I could never make out what she was saying. She would also occasionally make as if to look something up on her computer, but she always abandoned it at the last second, shaking her head.
This continued all afternoon, stopping only when she went down for dinner with her family, and then starting again immediately after. What was she doing? For some reason, the thought that she was so interested in the mystery that I presented made me slightly. . . happy. And again, I had no clue why.
Around ten o'clock, by the glowing numbers on her clock, Bella finally gave up and went to bed, although she lay awake for quite some time. After almost an hour of lying there with her eyes closed - I was unsure whether or not she was asleep - her eyes snapped open, and she made to get out of bed, reaching down under her mattress. Then she seemed to realize something, shook her head, and went to sleep.
The more I watched this girl, the more strange, and more fascinating, she seemed.
After that, she slept peacefully, not talking, so I went back to my room, giving her some space - even though she didn't know she needed it- only returning when she was back in her room after breakfast with her parents, which I had heard dimly through the floorboards of my room.
When she came back, I was able to make sense of her strange actions last night. First, she locked her door, then strode quickly to her bed, reaching under the mattress for my steel box of memories.
She opened it, but didn't touch the journals, and again I wondered why. Instead, she took out my pile of newspaper clippings, spreading them out on the worn floorboards.
She worked methodically, constantly, and quietly for the next few hours, but it took me a moment to realize what she was doing - putting them in chronological order.
I had no way to know what she was thinking as she did this, but I did see her taking note of the subject of the articles again, and her slightly surprised expression as she realized that they were all about the Great War. She also wrote down in a little notebook the range of dates, the first and last.
After she had them all spread out, spanning an area that covered most of her free floor space, she studied the clippings more closely, picking up one here and there, reading them.
There were a few she seemed more interested in than the others, two in particular. I moved behind her, to read the titles on them, and realized why she was looking at them. They were the two stories I had been so excited about, when the US joined the war, and when the draft was lowered. She studied them intently, running her fingers over the few words I'd added in the margins.
She sat there a while longer, she appeared to be thinking. Then, abruptly, she got up and placed them all back in the box, pushing it back under her mattress. Again, I wondered why she didn't read my journals. She had to still have questions, so why wasn't she trying to answer them?
As she sat at her computer, and brought up the webpage for the Chicago Public Library, I realized that maybe she was trying to find answers, in her own way. Why she wouldn't open my journals, though, I still had no idea.
She found the address of the Mapledale branch, and then gathered her things, preparing to visit it, I guessed.
As she - and I - approached the library, I realized that I recognized it. Mother had taken me there as a child, and I had looked up dates and names for history projects at school in the encyclopaedias there. I could even vaguely recall the opening of it, when I was four years old.
As she approached the door, I instinctively went in front of her, and my outstretched arm was inches from the door when I realized what I was doing. I let the arm drop, drifting through the door, then hearing it open behind me as Bella stepped through. Usually, me doing something like that would have made me laugh, but now, for some reason, I just felt sad.
I fell behind Bella as she made her way across the library to the desk where a pretty, middle-aged woman was sitting, her head bent over a thick history of the first world war entitled A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. So she was a history buff. Well, that would be helpful.
Bella looked nervous as she approached the woman - E. Cullen, by her nameplate- twisting and untwisting her fingers together in front of her. She didn't like talking to strangers? "Um. . .hello?" she began, her uncertainty making the words into a question.
"Hello!" the woman replied, looking up. Hmm, I've never seen her here before, but, yes, didn't she just move in down the street from the Webbers? "How may I help you today? You're new at this library aren't you?"
"Uh, yeah," Bella answered her, looking as if she wondered how the woman knew.
"I'm here pretty much full-time," Ms. Cullen explained, although leaving out the bit about having seen her move in, so as not to make her more uncomfortable than she already seemed. "I figured I would have seen you at least once before now. Are you new in town? Would you like a card?"
"Yes, please," Bella replied, taking the papers the librarian gave her and filing them out.
After a moment, she handed them back, and the librarian glanced at them, then looked back at Bella. "That's all in order then, dear," she smiled "I'll have your card ready in about half an hour. Is there anything specific you'd like to look at while you wait?" She was the kind of person who was eager to please, not in the way most people are, but simply wanting to help people out.
Bella sucked in a deep breath, like she was working up her nerve - she must either be going to ask something kind of odd, or she just really didn't like talking to strangers - before replying "Um, yeah, I was actually wondering, do you have old issues of the paper?" Ah. I knew exactly how old she was talking about. Well, that was a bit of a strange request. Not to me of course, but Ms. Cullen would wonder why.
"Certainly! How long ago are we talking about? Yesterday? Last week? June?"
"Ahhh. . ." Bella chuckled, contemplating her shoes, "Nineteen-eighteen, actually."
"You weren't joking when you said old!" Ms. Cullen replied. She was eager to help, and glad that she could, sensing a fellow WWI enthusiast. "Of course, it wouldn't make sense for us to keep paper copies from that far back, but our electronic archives date to 1905. Is there a specific date in 1918 you're looking for? And what paper?"
"The Chicago Herald," she replied, naming the paper that all of my clippings had come from. "And, from the beginning of september, I guess, to maybe early October?" So she was trying to find out how I died, I guessed. It made sense.
Oh, not the war, the Influenza! "So you're interested in the Spanish Influenza, then? Why didn't you say so?"
Bella looked confused. "The Spanish Influenza?"
"The Flu epidemic at the end of the First World War," the woman clarified, and now it was her turn to be confused. Not the Influenza? then what? "Hit Chicago right around the dates you mentioned. It killed more people world-wide than the war did. Of course, you won't find much in the papers, because all the countries involved in the war censored the news, kept them from putting too much about it in the papers, to keep morale up. That's why it's called the Spanish Flu. They were neutral, so free to report the news, and, because of that, everyone thought they were the hardest hit. But, is that not what you're looking for?"
"No, it is, I think," Bella answered, and I wondered what story she would have. "I just didn't know that it was. I was walking in the cemetery the other day, and I noticed that an awful lot of people died around then, and they also all had the same headstone." Her story was a little bit odd, but Ms. Cullen didn't care, more concerned with sharing her vast amounts of knowledge with Bella.
She explained to Bella that there wasn't much about the Flu in the papers, but then found her a few big books on the subject, which Bella settled in a corner to read.
She sat there for quite a while, reading about what had become my fate, and looking sad and shocked. I felt the urge to comfort her, to tell her it was all okay, and again wondered at the reason behind these impulses. I'd never really noticed much about the humans before, much less been interested in what they did, or how they felt.
After about half an hour she seemed to think she'd found what she needed, getting up from the table and collecting her new card from the librarian, whose name I learned was Esme, and leaving the library.
I was about to leave her - I'd felt slightly bad for the fact that, even if she couldn't know, I never gave her privacy - when she surprised me by turning the opposite way from where she'd come, from the direction of the house.
At first I worried she was lost, but her tread was purposeful as she went into a little grocery a few streets from the library, buying a bunch of yellow roses from the floral section, then heading back out.
I was completely confused as to what she could possibly be doing as she walked, still away from her house, not realizing where she was going until we reached the gates of the cemetery.
She walked straight through the rows, stopping at our family plot. My grave, to be specific. She stood there almost frozen for a moment, until she removed the paper from the flowers, and laid them tenderly on the neatly manicured grass in front of my stone.
It was odd, what I felt then. Mother had always been upset that we had seemingly disappeared without a trace in the Influenza, no one close living to remember us. It had never bothered me, but now, seeing her there, caring enough about someone she didn't even know, it would have brought tears to my eyes, if such a thing were even possible. I drew in a breath to steady myself, try and shake the feeling, and she must have heard, as she whipped around, searching for the source.
For a second, I actually considered letting her see me, but then realized how bad an idea that would be, instead following silently after her as she left the cemetery and walked home, throwing glances over her shoulder, as if she sensed my eyes on her.
Well, there it is!! Again, thank you, thank you, thank you all for the reviews, and please, please tell me what you thought of this chapter! :D Next is the exciting one, I know, and hopefully I'll have it up saturday. I'm about to leave for a two-day camping trip, so that's the soonest it'll be up.
And now, rrrrrrrrrreview! :D
-SkySong
