Chapter pic: bit(dot)ly/sotpm04-pic

Chapter music: bit(dot)ly/sotpm04-music

IMPORTANT: I really can't stress this enough. Music is important to this chapter, if for no other reason than Bella's lullaby is a piano piece that I doubt many of you have heard before. No Burwell or Yiruma here; this unique Bella and Edward needed to dance to their own music, and so they do. Please, please see the chapter playlist or at least bit(dot)ly/sotpm-lullaby for the lullaby. (Oh, and support Helen Jane Long's music if you like her.)

"SINS OF THE PIANO MAN"
CHAPTER 04: BLOODY MARY BIRTHDAY

"What you seek is seeking you."

Rumi

ISABELLA SWAN
The bed and breakfast Lauren and Angela reserved for us to stay at was like something from a postcard. The house itself was fairly normal on the outside—two stories, pale blue siding, Dutch colonial style with a simple white porch where three rocking chairs sat—but the gardens surrounding the house made it into a fairytale. Sweeping ivy vines crawled along white terraces that stood on the far ends of the house. Soft, pink roses bloomed among the various bushes at the front of the house, their scent wafting up to me as Angela and I got out of the car and made our way up the flagstone walkway.

With only a whispering breeze and the twilight songs of crickets, it was soothingly quiet here, which helped to take off the burning edge of the scary nightmare I'd just had in the car. Though I knew we weren't far from the bustling world of Seattle, The Rosebud Bed and Breakfast was separated on its own little piece of property in the outer suburbs. It wasn't touristy at all, really, which seemed to be in odd contrast to where we lived. Port Angeles was the kind of place where vacationers were always milling about along the piers, particularly in the summer and fall.

"Hello, hello! Please, come in!" a tenor voice called to us as we entered the house. We found Lauren with a tall, slender man who smiled brilliantly as we joined them in the living room. "I'm Ian," he said, introducing himself and eagerly shaking our hands. "My partner Gary and I own The Rosebud. I hope you'll enjoy your stay."

It was very hard to contain my smirk as I realized that Lauren must have been the one to find The Rosebud and book everything. Since living with her, I'd met more gay couples than I even knew existed in the Pacific Northwest, all because she liked to goad Angela concerning—in Lauren's words—her "far right, idiotic prejudices." I never quite understood why she thought that, considering most Lutherans—including Angela—were pretty liberal and didn't fuss over homosexuality, but then Lauren just liked to be needlessly combative like that sometimes. When she was trying to get a rise out of Angela, it wasn't difficult for me to remember the person she'd been when I first moved to Forks at seventeen; she'd been beautiful and popular and incredibly malicious. I didn't miss that version of Lauren, even if I did wish I could change the circumstances that had made her into the mostly-kind person she was now.

Lauren smiled all-too-sweetly at Angela as she handed me a room key. "This is your room," she said. "Ang and I have one on the first floor."

I was about to protest over the fact that they'd gotten me my own room, when Ian burst out cheerfully, "Oh, so you're the birthday girl! Great! Wait right here a moment, okay?"

"Okay," I said with a startled laugh as he quickly slipped out of the room, the white-blonde of his hair catching the soft glow of surrounding lamplight. The inside of the house was warm and comfortable, decorated with a surprisingly complementary collection of neutral-colored modern and antique pieces, with accents of bright blues and greens that were reminiscent of the pristine landscaping outside. I smiled, despite my reservations over having Lauren and Angela spend so much on my birthday. I decided that I should just shut up and be grateful. "Thanks, guys."

"Stop saying thank you," Lauren admonished in a grouchy tone. "You're like a broken record."

Ian returned a few minutes later, holding a white saucer with a yellow-frosted cupcake on it. "I like traditions, so I started one of my own last year. I try to make some sort of cake for people who come here on their anniversaries and birthdays. Hope you like carrot cake," he said with a small shrug. "Homemade. Organic. It's almost healthy for you, if you don't count the absurd amount of sugar. It's cane sugar, though!" he added, though I wasn't sure why that made a difference.

"This looks great," I said while accepting the plate from him. I dipped a finger into the frosting and gave it a taste. It was buttery and sugary and fattening—exactly what I wanted, even if I'd had cookies and ice cream just hours ago. I needed salty and sugary comfort foods to tell me everything was going to be okay. "Mm, this is fantastic. Thank you!"

Pleased that I liked his cooking, Ian smiled at each of us. "Well, I'll just leave you girls to it. Feel free to roam about anywhere you like. It's a quiet time of year for us, but there's one other guest here at the moment. He brought a dog with him—Lucky. He's in the backyard, so just beware if you're not a dog lover! Don't worry, though, he's friendly as can be."

"What do you want to do for dinner?" Angela asked once Ian had left the room. "We can go out…or we can order a pizza and get started on the movies."

"And vodka," Lauren murmured.

I looked down at my dirty Forks' Finest t-shirt and suddenly felt incredibly grungy. "Let's order in," I replied with a tired sigh. "That'll give me time to shower and change into some of those awesome, clean clothes you guys tell me I now have."

Though I really wanted—and needed—that shower, I decided to snoop a bit when I got upstairs, so I quickly tossed my duffel bag down in front of my bedroom door and proceeded to look around as I stuffed my face with the cupcake Ian had given me. I'd always been a little too curious for my own good, and I liked to try to find and solve mysteries where there typically weren't any to begin with. There was just something about searching until you found a story beneath all the outer pretenses. Most people seemed to go through life, satisfied with only knowing the very surface of the world they lived in; I always wanted the details, even if that was where the devil might be found.

The second floor had four doors along its hallway; two led to bedrooms, as indicated by plaques on each door. Mine was the "Country Garden Room," which was across from the "Moonlight Sonata Room." I couldn't quite decide if the names were really inventive or kitsch.

A smaller, third door led to nothing more than a boring old linen closet, and then the fourth door, the one at the end of the hallway, was left wide open, leading to a reading and television room that had a large picture window overlooking the backyard garden. In the dying light, I could make out the shape of a cute, yellow-haired dog as he lay sleeping on the grass below. Too bad all dogs either seemed to love me so much they pounced on me, uninvited, or hated me to the point that they wanted to use me for a chew toy.

Most of the books in the reading room were scientific in nature—mainly about evolution, the climate and global warming, and how we were all going to die if we didn't recycle and take four-minute-long showers. As I somehow didn't think smiling Ian seemed the type, I assumed they belonged to his partner Gary. I found what I guessed was Ian's stash in three large, wicker-woven baskets; home and garden magazines were interspersed with Reader's Digest and nearly every tabloid imaginable. Babies, Lies & Scandal, the one on top said in bold, yellow lettering beside a picture of Sarah Palin and a sleeping, overly-airbrushed baby. I snorted. Apparently even babies were too ugly to leave alone these days.

Once I'd finished nosing around, I unlocked the door to my room and slipped inside. Between its light green walls, rich-colored woods and the patchwork quilt at the end of the white bedspread, it was styled charmingly, yet also had a subtle, modern touch that kept it in line with the décor of the foyer and living room downstairs.

I set my empty cupcake plate on the bedside table and dropped my duffel bag down on a trunk that was at the foot of the bed. My nerves were shot. Between getting fired, all the pressure that came with that, and the strange nightmare, I just felt like crawling into bed and sleeping for a day—or a year. But I knew Angela and Lauren wanted to give me a birthday night and help me get my mind off of everything, and I wasn't about to be an ungrateful little snot about that; they'd put a lot of thought and money into this. Unfortunately, Charlie's illness and getting fired just weren't things I was likely to forget.

I'd brought my newspaper and highlighter with me and had every intention of scouring it tonight, even if I did it drunk. I'd learned as a kid with a flighty mother that bills simply do not wait for you to be responsible. If I was going to see Charlie tomorrow, I needed to at least have some idea of whose managerial doors I'd be knocking on, come Monday morning.

Digging through my bag, I found Angela and Lauren had packed some of my favorite pajamas—a pair of oversized, hole-ridden, gray sweatpants and a floppy, black t-shirt from Peninsula College that I'd bought last year. I brought the clothing up to my face and breathed in. It smelled like the lavender laundry detergent we used. I'd almost forgotten that clean scent.

I scrubbed hard in the shower, adjusting the tap until the water burned as it pelted down on me. My pale skin turned disgustingly pink under the heat and steam until I looked like a cured Christmas ham.

Even after time and my shower, the dream was bothering me. I'd had similar ones since Charlie told me he had lung cancer. I thought they might represent how overwhelmed I felt, if I was to believe any of the mumbo-jumbo I had learned from my mother's cheesy dream dictionaries as a teen. (Although, if I was to believe those, all that water probably also represented my repressed sexual energy.)

But I had never fucking died in any of them. That was all sorts of creepy, and Renée's face was a new addition. Maybe my mother was the key to the latest dream. I probably needed to try calling her again, since I'd only gotten her voicemail yesterday, but then I felt indignant. She should fucking call me! It was my birthday. There was a chance she'd forgotten that, though.

I'd moved to Forks to be with Charlie when I was seventeen. At the time, Renée and Phil, my rather youthful stepfather, had recently married, and she wanted to go off with him as he pursued his budding career as a minor league baseball player. That was my mother for you; she had a gypsy's heart and wanted to go wherever it was willing to take her in the moment. It was endearing to me, until I realized how unstable it had made my childhood. Moving away had seemed the right thing for me to do, at the time—for her. It was only later that I realized it was the right thing for me, as well. She'd been so sad to see Phil go on his trips, to not be able to follow him, and I'd known I was the only thing holding her back. I always was. Kids were burdensome like that.

When I left Phoenix, I was convinced that Renée was my best friend, and I was heartbroken over our separation. But after moving to Forks and meeting Angela, I knew that what I'd had with my mother was never true friendship—just good old familial co-dependence. I'd depended on Renée for the most basic of mothering—money for food and shelter—and she'd depended on me to, well, mother her back. I'd paid the bills, balanced the checkbook, cooked and bought the groceries before I could even legally drive on my own. The longer we lived apart, the less we spoke, the less it bothered me and the more I came to understand our relationship from an objective perspective. She loved me, in her own way. I knew that, but I no longer tried to ignore the truth that came with it. I was her mistake, regardless of her love.

Phil was eventually signed to the Florida Suns, and when I didn't agree to move to Jacksonville to be with them, Renée didn't take it too well. All through my senior year of high school, she'd tried to guilt trip me into moving to Jacksonville, but she really upped the ante when I told her I'd decided to attend Peninsula College in Port Angeles after graduating; I'd received a scholarship to go there. I had thought she would be proud of me, but she was childishly annoyed. I'd never pegged my harebrained mother to be focused enough for vindictiveness, but boy, did she prove me wrong. She was offended that I would "choose Charlie" over her, and I'd been put through the silent treatment for well over a month.

We'd gotten to the point where we were now…where I was calling her a day before my birthday, to only receive her voicemail, and then to not hear from her on my actual birthday. No presents, either. Not that I wanted anything. I just wanted to be acknowledged… I wanted to be wanted—not just because having me meant that Charlie didn't.

In spite of my frustrations, I was just about to call Renée on my crappy old cell phone when there was a knock on my bedroom door. It was as good of an excuse as any to put off calling her for now.

"Just us!" Lauren announced on the other side. "And we have pizza! Ian said it was fine to bring it up."

I let them in and grinned when Angela promptly and sheepishly handed me a Bloody Mary—my favorite drink in the whole world. Angela walked over to the bed and removed the laptop bag she had on her shoulder. "I brought the laptop and DVDs for the movie night," she said as she began to set it up.

That brought a smile to my face. It was like old times in the summer after our senior year, when we'd curl up on a bed too small for the three of us and watch movies on an old, slow laptop.

I took a sip of my drink. With lots of hot sauce, it burned on the way down, a bitter vodka fire—just the way I liked it.

"Good?" Lauren asked as she nursed her own vodka and orange juice.

"It burns…so yes."

Lauren plopped down on the bed beside Angela. "Sure you don't want any, PK? I mean, you did buy three times as much vodka as I asked you to…there's plenty to go around."

"Shut up, heathen," Angela said with a good-natured smirk, using her own catty nickname for Lauren.

As I sat between my two best friends, eating greasy cheese pizza and slowly but surely feeling the effects of cheap vodka, I began to get excited about B-grade movies. Really excited.

There weren't many things that my first (and only) boyfriend, Jacob, hadn't ruined for me emotionally, but I'd managed to retain my love for B-grade movies in spite of him. He'd ruined my favorite books by Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. He'd ruined all the heart wrenching words of William Shakespeare. He'd ruined romantic music and movies for me, to the point that I gagged by default whenever I heard Mariah Carey on the radio or saw Hugh Grant in some lame chick flick—and not just because both of them generally sucked. And, well, while I couldn't rationally put all the blame on him over my misplaced virginity, I often liked to irrationally. Love was definitely ruined. It had been two years, and I still couldn't imagine even casual dating.

But not even Jacob Black could ruin B-grade movies. I loved them, and they were funny enough that I was always too distracted to think of his honey brown, native skin and the way he'd unceremoniously dumped me. He had been the one to introduce me to a comedy show that made fun of bad movies—Mystery Science Theater 3000—shortly after I moved to Forks. We would sit for hours, either at his little red house out on the Quileute reservation down at La Push or at my house in Forks, watching ketchup blood, counting Wilhelm screams and laughing at awkward porno moans.

"Let's see," Lauren said, sifting through the DVDs she and Angela had brought. "We've got Transmorphers, The Touch of Satan and Troll 2. Your favorites, of course."

I looked between my two friends with a laugh. "You know what I'm going to choose."

Angela laughed and grabbed the DVD from Lauren to pop it in the laptop reader. "Troll 2 it is, birthday girl."

We sat back and watched what can only be described as the best worst movie ever, pizza and drinks in hand. When the movie—that doesn't actually have a single troll in it—ended and we were done reciting all the horrible catchphrases, we watched The Touch of Satan. It was 2:00 a.m. by the time both had finished, and Lauren and I were thoroughly buzzing. I felt like I was floating.

Floating was a whole hell of a lot nicer than drowning.

"Look what I brought!" Angela said girlishly after dipping a hand into her laptop bag. From my drunken haze, she seemed to move and speak a lot faster than was normal, but somewhere in my brain, I knew that she was the normal, sober one here. She waved a large, rectangular, blue-and-gold book in her hands. Forks High School 2006: Home of the Spartans, the cover read in crude Comic Sans typography. A devilish grin lifted her lips.

I groaned. "Senior yearbook? Really?" The movies had been so good, and now I was going to have to look at my horrible senior picture and all the youthful versions of the people I most hated bumping into when in Forks. To make matters worse, I hadn't known what day pictures were going to be taken that year, and the sweater I happened to be wearing on the day clashed horribly with the background, even in black and white print. It matched the ugly lump of curly hair that sat on my shoulder like a small and possibly feral animal.

Wow, I thought. That was over three years ago now. I felt like I'd aged considerably since then. I could feel it in my bones, and very little of it had to do with my physical age.

Angela, failing to notice my turmoil, was nodding eagerly. "Yep, and we're so going to look on Facebook to see what everyone's doing."

Lauren laughed a little into another steadily emptying glass. "We already know what they're all doing," she said. "It's Forks. Everyone knows what everyone's doing."

"But there aren't nearly as many drunken pictures involved in regular town gossip," Angela argued with another mischievous grin.

"That's true," Lauren conceded, slurring rather ironically in the process.

I had to smile. Angela didn't have a mean bone in her body, really, but in the last year, she'd developed a fetish for all Forks-related gossip. She didn't participate in, or perpetuate any of it beyond Lauren and me, but she loved to hear the sordid tales of cheating husbands and wives, unruly teenagers and small town corruption. I supposed it was just the natural order of things for Angela, who had every intention of living in Forks after college and marrying her high school sweetheart, Ben Cheney, whenever he grew the balls to pop the question. I had no doubt that they would get their picket fence, a cat and dog, and a couple of whiny kids who they'd drag to church every Sunday morning.

Forks cradled her life. She was set and happy with how it would all play out, even if I had no fucking clue how she could stand it. Forks seemed so…boring, so normal. Says the girl working dead end jobs.

We did "girl talk"—at least that's what I had always been told this sort of gossiping was if you were female. We talked about how some old classmates were prettier or fatter, married or divorced, or off living in Europe. We talked about the aloof and beautiful Cullens who, while I saw a few of them on a regular basis, due to their relationship with Charlie and me, were still rather aloof and reclusive and—as came as no surprise—didn't have Facebook profiles.

We talked about baby-faced, blonde-haired Mike Newton and how he never could figure out that I wanted nothing to do with him. We found a picture of him passed out on a blue couch by his own vomit, which was aptly tagged "Former Pizza." Facebook was like that sometimes. So, apparently, were the students of UC of Santa Barbara and the fraternity he'd joined.

Then there was Jessica Stanley, who we naturally gravitated toward after looking up Mike, given their on-again-off-again high school romance. Jessica's profile was filled with colorful, annoying notices and comments from people who made me wonder if English was going to be the latest dying language. Her picture was one taken in front of a bathroom mirror, and it showed off her stretch-mark-ridden, seven-months-pregnant belly. Better you than me, Jess, I thought with a grimace.

"Jesus, look at that stomach," Lauren muttered. "She's fucking Shamu. Wonder if she knows who the dad is."

"Lauren," Angela chided, but we were all chuckling a little.

Our laughter abruptly stopped when Angela turned a page in the yearbook and ended up on a poorly-constructed collage of pictures, one of the most noticeable in the bunch being Tyler Crowley's smiling face. He was never supposed to be featured so prominently in the yearbook after he was found guilty in the trial, but the school had already ordered the print work by then. I looked over at Lauren's ashen face and reached out to touch her shoulder.

At the contact, Lauren sucked in a ragged breath. "Put it away, please," she begged in a whisper.

Angela shut the yearbook with a smack. "I'm so sorry. I didn't—"

"Let's not talk about it. I knew there was a chance I'd see him in there when you suggested the yearbook, but I thought I could handle it." Lauren shook her head and took a large swallow of her drink. "Guess I was wrong," she said quietly, and then said no more. She didn't talk to anyone but me about that night. Not even Angela knew the details.

I understood that it was hard to know how to talk about it; that night still confused the both of us. Lauren had been a lot like Jessica when I first came to Forks—beautiful, amazingly bitchy and somewhat known for her promiscuity. Her on-again-off-again relationship had been with Tyler, one of Mike Newton's jock friends.

At a Christmas party in 2005, during our senior year in high school, there had been a lot of drinking and, unbeknownst to me, some drug use. I'd sort of missed all that. Being a goody-two-shoes at the time, I'd probably been the only sober person there, besides Angela.

Tyler had a lot to drink that night. Everyone knew that he was a "bad drunk," prone to aggressiveness, but no one stopped him, because if there's one thing teenagers are bad at doing, it's saying "no"—especially to each other. Apparently combining Tyler's drunken aggression with other substances was an even worse idea.

Under the effects of all that was in his system, he forced himself on Lauren that night. I wanted to believe that the boy who had sat at my lunch table for a year, laughing and smiling and being an average kid, never would have done that, if not for the drugs, but who was to say? We would never know what came first—the inclination to harm or the lack of control that came with being under the influence. All I knew was that when I found Lauren that night, naked, crying, and alone on the floor of the Newtons' upstairs bathroom, both our lives and Tyler's had changed forever. Lauren and I had been friends ever since, and it was only because of me that she'd reported what happened.

An awkward silence fell between the three of us, but it wasn't entirely unexpected, I felt. I couldn't remember a single birthday in my life that didn't have some sort of awkwardness, embarrassment or downright tragedy.

This had certainly been one hell of a birthday.

"I'll just leave the laptop here… I think I'll go to bed," Angela announced as she got up with the yearbook in her hands. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek sweetly. "Happy birthday, Bella." Glancing over at Lauren with a still apologetic expression, she whispered, "'Night. I'll leave a light on for you." She smiled tiredly at us before closing my bedroom door with a click.

Lauren turned beside me and placed her empty glass on the nearest bedside table. "So. How you holding up?" Her words slurred slightly as her eyes closed.

I frowned. Apparently her idea of avoiding the elephant that had just plopped down in the bedroom was to focus on my problems. "You have a clue," I said evasively. "And I lost my job today, so you know…I could be a lot better."

A moment passed before she opened her eyes and stared at me carefully. "You know you can tell me anything, right? Anything."

I nodded. "You can tell me anything, too."

"I mean it," she continued. "I feel like you and I get each other on some deep level. We've been through shit. Maybe not the same shit, but shit nonetheless. Ang doesn't get that. Not many our age do."

She had that last part right.

"Thanks," I said, but I didn't unleash any of my problems on her, just the same; especially not now, just mere moments after she'd faced Tyler's picture. I preferred to reflect in private, if crying into my pillow on most nights could be called reflecting. Hopefully I was quiet enough that it was at least private.

Sharing my problems with Lauren was strange, anyway. We were close—she, Angela and I—but the things that had bound us together—high school, similar classes, the same group of friends—were slipping through our fingers. We were growing up and apart, somewhat.

Sensing that I wasn't interested in sharing, Lauren rose on unsteady feet. "I'm sorry things went to shit today," she said candidly. "I hope you're at least having a good time here."

"It's been great. Really."

She nodded. "Good. We wanted you to just…I don't know…be your fucking age for once. You've always been so fucking mature, and you've put too much stress on yourself since…well, since Charlie—" She cut off that line of thought and finished, "We worry about you, is all."

"Please don't." I hated the thought of causing them concern, when they were so good to me. Why can't I just handle everything? I wondered. I certainly wanted to. Maybe I was just weak.

"You want us to stop worrying?" she asked, and I nodded. She shrugged. "Not gonna happen, so get over that." She patted my shoulder, a sleepy, drunken smile on her lips. "I'm gonna hit the sack. You get some sleep, 'kay?"

I smiled back. "Will do."

Exhausted, despite waking late and resting on the drive here, and uncharacteristically calm thanks to several Bloody Marys, I lay in bed, staring up at the smooth, white ceiling as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. Fuck job searching, I thought. It can wait. Well, not really. But it would. So would everything else, apparently. I couldn't even summon the energy to go brush my teeth, even though I really wanted to after that pizza.

Time seemed to pass over me as I fell in and out of a fitful sleep. Fragmented dreams with swirling faces and whispered voices danced behind my closed eyes, only to be ripped away from me moments later as I randomly woke. I repeated this dreadful process over and over again.

It could have been minutes or hours that passed, but at some point I began to hear piano music. The notes were soft—a haunting, drifting melody that made my heart ache in deep sorrow, even as my brain struggled to keep up with the emotion.

My eyes shut once more, and I saw Charlie, pale and bald, right down to the hairless upper lip that circumstance had thrust upon him; he'd had a mustache for years…before. He sat in the white-backed chair at the hospital, the chemotherapy tube hooked up to the little round port catheter that lay beneath the skin of his right breast. He didn't look like the man I'd come home to four years ago. He was gaunt, with dark circles around his eyes; his lips were cracked. The lilting, heartbreaking music played as a soundtrack to my father's primarily unspoken pain—the weakness, the coughed up blood, the vomiting. Most of all, the music told of regret.

I wish I'd done things differently, it seemed to say.

As Charlie wished he'd never smoked, wished he'd gotten more time than he knew he was going to get, wished there was some god or devil he could bargain with.

And as I wished I'd been a better daughter during his healthy years. If only I'd gone fishing more, complained less, or spent more than a summer month with him when I'd been living with my mother. I'd been such a whiny pain in the ass, complaining about Forks, just like Renée had, until Charlie had been the one to travel to see me. What a selfish brat I'd been.

I've made so many mistakes, the music wept. And I can't change a single thing.

I felt myself crying in my dazed half-sleep. It wasn't like when I cried alone in my attic room. This was a deeper mourning, a truer feeling than I'd perhaps ever experienced before. What the hell was in those Bloody Marys Lauren made? the cynical side of me wondered at one point.

Eventually, the music changed again—this time to a more hopeful piece with stronger, louder notes—and with the change, I woke with another jerk. My stomach roiled and grumbled in protest, unhappily coping with cheap vodka, hot sauce and greasy pizza. Hello, heartburn. The discomfort didn't stop me from getting up, however. I had to be closer to this music.

I rose and stumbled to my bedroom door, feeling pulled by the flowing composition, as if the notes were drifting from the other room to mine, only to wrap themselves around my wrists and ankles, to drag me along like a broken, clumsy marionette. Who was my puppet master? I wondered.

I sat on the hardwood floor outside my room, resting my back against my bedroom's closed door while I looked at the "Moonlight Sonata Room." The hallway was dark, lit only by a nightlight that cast a soft, blue glow into the darkness. The piano music lay behind the door opposite my own, and the wood and white paint and quaint little plaque were somehow an almost unbearable separation to me.

One song bled into another, and though I fought it as much as possible, I continued to slip in and out of sleep. My bottom went numb, and my fingers and toes got cold, but still I sat, entranced as I listened to sad tale after sad tale. The pieces I longed to hear most were those that were not so sad, the ones that had tinges of hope sparsely littered in them, almost as if by mistake. That hope was beautiful, and I wished there were no barrier between the mystery musician and me, that I could tell him or her that this music alone was reason enough to feel hopeful. It was beautiful and real and alive in a way that I'd never heard music be.

It conjured up images from my life, little mental slideshows of my parents or friends, of brown Arizonian scrub, golden Californian sunshine, and wet Washington pine. And I saw faces I didn't know—men and women who seemed to surface in my imagination, purely at the will of the notes that the musician chose to play. I saw round faces, tear-filled eyes, blonde-haired girls, suited businessmen, black skin, white skin, golden and fake tans. Each person I imagined had a complex story that, for whatever reason, I couldn't quite grasp; it slipped past me, just barely, into the misty world of dreams and imagination. In my mind, all of these imagined individuals were somehow wrapped up in the musician's heartfelt apologies, one right after the other.

The last piece the musician played was a lullaby that, despite its soothing notes, had me wide awake and sitting up straight. It was more hopeful than all the other songs, and I once again felt myself weeping, but this time for joy. I heard peace and acceptance in this lullaby. There were no apologies cradled in these notes—no sorrows or regrets—only a celebration of life and rebirth. My cheeks hurt as I smiled uncontrollably into the blue-tinged darkness, tears streaming down my face. They fell warm and wet onto my sleep shirt.

When the music stopped, I scrubbed my face and sat in silent awe. I'd just gotten a concert in the most unlikely of places. Was anyone else even awake for that? The music hadn't been quiet, but I doubted that something so beautiful could have disturbed the sleep of anyone else in the two-story house. I guessed that I'd only woken because I never slept well after drinking.

With stiff joints, I rose from the floor—only to knock the back of my head against the doorknob. "Shit!" I hissed, covering the top of my head with a hand. Great. Just what I'll need to get through tomorrow's hangover.

Fast-paced footsteps suddenly sounded in the room across from mine, as if heading for the door. I panicked, fumbling for the doorknob and rushing inside my room, shutting the door behind me before I could get caught in my pajamas. There was probably a reason the musician was playing at night; perhaps he or she wanted some amount of privacy to practice. At the very least, I was positive that music like that wasn't made for an audience of girls in holey, oversized sweatpants.

I brushed my teeth and stumbled back to bed. As my thoughts became bleary once again, an echoing memory of beautiful piano notes wandered through my slowly forming dreams. I cuddled close to a pillow and smiled against its feather stuffing. It was as if the lullaby had been written for me.

Author's Notes (July 14, 2010): Special thanks go to Aleeab4u for pre-reading and helping me make some big decisions for this story. You can thank her for setting me straight on a major plot point about Edward's past... (But my lips are sealed on the details, so no trying to wheedle it out of me!) Thanks also to Project Team Betas yellojello13 and dinx.

Self-indulgence abounds here. All the B-grade movies mentioned in this chapter exist. All of them are hilarious and should be watched. Consider it the most awesome homework you've ever had. Start with "Troll 2."

Author's Notes (January 25, 2011): Cleaning house / editing.