When You Love Someone
Chapter Three
Isabella Renee
I can't stop looking at Edward.
It's as if my eyes are glued to him and every single movement he makes from the way he rolls his shoulders –mysteriously identical to the way Mason rolls his own shoulders when he's nervous –to the way he can't stop looking at me.
As if his eyes are glued to mine.
He's staring at Mason, too, but my brother is too absorbed in the chicken Alfredo to notice but, to be fair, Mason wouldn't have noticed even if there wasn't any food to distract him. His abnormal strength makes him aloof because he figures he can take on anyone that challenges him—and he can. So he doesn't notice little things that send me wondering, little things like the way Edward reached for my hand the moment he sat down and has yet to let it go, or little things like the way none of the Cullens have so much as glanced at the food Mason and I are eating. Don't they eat? Why would Alice invite us over for dinner if she herself isn't hungry?
"How long have you two lived in town?" Emmett asks. "And who are you staying with?"
"Bella and I have lived in town for, what?" Mason checks with me. "Has it been ten years yet?"
"No, it's been eleven years," I correct him, angry that he has forgotten one of my most vivid memories.
So I show it to him: us as children running up the blue porch stairs of the home we hadn't known then we would be sharing with Jennifer even now, years later. Arms that smelled floral, like freesia almost, wrapping around us as a voice like a bell tells us to be good for Jennifer, be good little kids for Jennifer, and I'll be back. I'll come back. Just be good…
"Mommy," Mason places the voice I have played in his head, and I nearly cry when he says the word. He sounds like he's four year old all over again. "She left us here eleven years ago. That's right. I forgot."
"Your mother is alive?" Edward's stare is inescapable now, so are the stares of everyone else in the room.
Wtf?
Why are they so thirsty for information? It's not like they knew my mom or anything. And then I realize I'm only angry because they are asking the question that still haunts me, that keeps me crying at night.
Is my mother alive?
Most kids can answer that question, but the truth is Mason and I honestly don't know. We only have a few surviving pictures of our mother locked in our memories, and even those we swap all the time to keep the details right.
We remember her face the day we were born: the sweat on her brow, the veins pressed so tightly against her skin they tattooed a web across her body, the hand that shook when it touched us where someone had lain us next to her, her lips that felt cold when she kissed us, and her smile that pronounced us beautiful at first sight.
We remember her watching someone else give us baths in a sink from where she sat in her special chair, surrounded by blankets and shivering all the time. But she always smiled at us, always told us she loved us.
And, lastly, I remember her the day she left us. Mason, apparently does not, but I do. I can see her clearly as ever in her black jeans and blue blouse, clutching that big white purse she had begun to carry around because it was the only thing big enough to fit all her pills. Her hair was cut short that day, but I don't remember why she cut it. I remember Grandma Renee crying over it and I remember Mason and I taking hold of the shorn tresses and making fake mustaches out of them –and I remember Mommy thinking we were funny –but I don't remember why she cut her hair so short. I only remember feeling at it the last time she hugged me, the sick feeling I had gotten in my stomach when I had thought I could wrap it around my hand as usual only to find it stopped suddenly, barely wrapping around my finger.
What if that strand of hair is my mother's life? Something meant to go on forever yet stopped suddenly?
"I'm sorry," Edward is apologizing, a look like agony on his face. "I didn't mean to upset you. I shouldn't have asked that."
"It's okay," I quietly lie because, of course, it isn't okay, and they know it. The looks on each of their faces as if each of them –even that brute called Emmett –night break down crying in a few seconds. "I don't know if my mother is alive or dead. Mason and I haven't seen her in eleven years."
"Do you know the circumstances surrounding your mother's disappearance?"
"You can back off now," Mason startles Edward and everyone else with the growl tearing out of his throat. I pinch the underside of his arm as warning, the signal we usually give each other when we publically start exhibiting non-human traits. He doesn't listen to me, though, and now I'm nervous.
"Don't be nervous," Jasper, Alice's foster brother/boyfriend, puts a hand on my shoulder and the feeling vanishes.
I stare at him in shock.
"How did you know I was nervous?" I ask. "And how did you make me not nervous?"
"It's Jasper's gift," Alice explains with a small smile. She's nervous, too. "He influences feelings. I can see small aspects of the future. Edward can read minds. Do you and Mason have any gifts like that?"
"Alright, enough!" Mason nearly throws his empty plate on the coffee table and surges to his feet looking sort of wild and untamable. Edward sees and loosens his fingers from mine for the first time since he took hold of them. He stands to meet Mason's challenge and, behind him, Emmett and Jasper rise as well.
This will not end well.
I am nervous all over again.
"When you wanted to play your little game of normal family new to the neighborhood, I humored you," Mason says to them. "I humored you even though you tried to corner my sister and get her to come here alone!"
"Mason, what are you talking about?" I hiss at him. He barely glances at me.
"But now," he resumes his rant to the Cullens, "now you want to poke around our mother's memory? Now you try to get inside our past? Why? What does a coven of vampires want with my baby sister?"
The room falls completely, deathly silent.
I can't help that my eyes swivel immediately to Edward needing to know whatever comfort he can give me. Surprisingly, it isn't the thought of being in the presence of vampires that sends me running toward him. It isn't even Mason's confirmation of what I have been suspecting for years now –that he and I are vampires. Never before has the word been spoken between us until now, but that isn't what sends me running to Edward.
I run to Edward because a feeling like a rubber band stretched too far has just popped inside my head, and memories I'm not sure are totally mine are pouring into my mind.
A glade filled with flowers and sunlight…
A song, a lullaby, flowing from a piano…
A voice calling over and over again, "Bella, I love you. Bella, I love you"…
"Why haven't you said anything?" I demand in a voice choked with tears. One look at my face and he knows that I know who he is, the reason why Mason and I look so freakishly like him. "This entire time we've been sitting here, and you haven't said anything about this!"
"I wanted to find the words to say it right," he tries soothing me by rubbing my back and he looks genuinely sorry, yet there is some amusement behind his eyes.
"What?" I challenge it, and now he openly chuckles.
"Forgive me, Isabella Renee, but you look exactly like your mother when you are upset."
"Do I? Do you have any pictures of her I can see? Jennifer only has a few and they're from a really, really long time ago."
"No, I'm sorry," he shakes his head as if he has admitted his greatest sin in life. "I never took pictures of your mother. I…I never thought I would need them. I always thought we would be together."
"You are a liar!" Mason's growl is heavier now, loud enough to shake the glass in the windowpane.
"Mason, stop!" I command him, taking his wrist in my grasp trying to anchor him. "Mason, look at Edward. Don't you know who he is? He's our father. We found our father, Mason, isn't that perfect? Now we know why we have vampire tendencies –it's because of him! We're not freaks; we're like our father!"
But Mason is unmoved.
His jaw is clenched so tightly, I swear he's going to break it. It's going to take some serious hunting and battling with an especially angry bear or something to cool him off from this. He is fuming where he stands, absolutely livid with a hatred I swear I can hear hissing, steaming, wishing he could rip Edward to pieces.
Why?
"Thank you for your hospitality," he remembers his manners even though his words to the Cullens drip with derision as he locks my arm in his death grip and drags me to the door to leave. "Bella and I must be getting home now."
"Mason, wait!" Edward runs toward us, visibly begging us not to leave.
I want to stay.
"Mason, please wait! I can explain everything. I can explain why I've been away, and I can explain what happened between your mother and me. You don't have to be angry."
"Edward didn't know about you, Mason," Carlisle comes to his son's rescue.
Whoa. Carlisle must be my grandfather, isn't he? It strikes me all of a sudden how amazingly well preserved each of the Cullens is…how creepy it is. Edward himself looks about seventeen, doesn't he? How is that? It makes me start walking willingly beside Mason as icy dread lodges itself in my shoulder blades.
Something is very, very wrong here.
"Mason, I assure you," Carlisle is speaking again, following us even when Mason puts me in our car and slams himself into the driver's seat. "Had your father known about your existence, there is no way he would ever fathom leaving you."
"It's true," Edward appears outside Mason's window now, staring earnestly through the glass. "I love you, Mason. You're my son! Don't leave. Come back inside and reason with me. Talk to me. If nothing else, please just hear me out, but don't drive away. Mason?"
"Do you know what Isabella Renee remembers about you?" Mason quirks an eyebrow at Edward as he lets down his window, wanting his words clearly heard and that's a problem. The Cullens have no clue, but I know that Mason's wrath is nothing to mess with, and not even I, his twin, can do anything to rein him in now.
"Isabella Renee remembers you the way our mother remembered you," Mason blasts a look of shame onto Edward's face, "the lullaby, your voice…that's what she remembers. You want to know what I remember about you?"
Mason must have sent Edward a mental visual because not another word left his mouth, yet Edward's face is going ashen, starkly pale, and he stands still as stone, horrified. That is the only word to describe him, actually. Horrified.
"I…" he opens his mouth to apologize probably, but lapses off as if no apology in the world can ever make amends for whatever Mason has shown him.
"Let me in," I tug on Mason's sleeve. "Please? Tell me what's going on."
"I'll let you in when we get home, but for now let's get this straight while everyone is here to witness it. You and I don't have any dealings with the Cullens, Isabella Renee. Do you understand?"
"But Mason…!"
"Wait until I tell you the truth about our wonderful father," he smiled sadistically and he started the engine and prepared to drive away from the Cullens for what felt like forever. "You'll definitely understand then."