Everyday I Have the Blues- BB King
Good Days- SZA
"What d-do you mean?" Edward asked, immediately somber and serious.
"Let's go up."
He followed me into the cool lobby, the red carpeting only pushing up a slight misting of dust with Edward's heavier steps. We passed the concierge and then the check-in desk quickly, walking purposefully to the elevators and once we were safely inside, Edward turned to me.
"F-for the love of God, d-don't t-tell me she has another b-boy in her r-room. I don't think I c-could t-take it," Edward said lightly, but I could tell that he was terrified by the pounding of his heart and the free-flowing rush of adrenaline in his bloodstream.
"I don't know what happened. Just hold on," I promised, tapping my foot as the numbers grew while the elevator slowly slid up the shaft. Finally we were at twenty, the door dinged and slid open, and Esme was in the hallway, knocking at the door.
She turned to look at us, concern clear in her eyes.
"What happened?" I asked at the same time Edward said, "What's g-going on?"
Esme shook her head just as another thump came from the room, this time one Edward heard. He stared at the door, then rushed to try to pull the door open, though it was automatically locked as was standard in hotels.
"I don't know exactly what the trigger was," Esme explained, placing her hand gently on Edward's arm as he moved to pound on the door. "She was talking about the last time you two were in Seattle. I take it it wasn't a good experience?"
Edward shook his head. "They t-took us here j-just before we were allowed t-to g-go to Charlie's. To th-the hospital, for a physical exam. It w-was…" Edward looked up and swallowed thickly, then rubbed at his eyes- in frustration or exhaustion, I didn't know.
"I understand," Esme said, rubbing his arm comfortingly.
"Let me?" I asked, trying to move around Edward. I had the keycard in my hand, ready to open the door and survey the damage inside, though I was less than concerned about the mundane hotel room.
"Hold on," Esme said, pulling a small paper bag from her coat pocket. "Carlisle wrote a prescription. It's alprazolam, in case she needs help sleeping or calming down."
"Thank you." I took the bag, a bottle of pills rattling inside with the movement.
"Let me see her," Edward demanded, and Esme smiled sadly and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, hugging him down to her firmly.
"I don't think that's wise right now, dear," Esme said.
"Let her calm down first," I suggested, wincing as something else was thrown on the floor. Alice groaned in frustration, her voice hoarse and angry.
Edward wasn't happy, but he accepted it begrudgingly and let Esme lead him down the hall to the room he was supposed to be sharing with Emmett, though of course my brother was thoroughly enwrapped in and focused on Rose in their own room at the end of the hall.
I slid the card into the locking mechanism, which clicked and flashed green. I breathed deeply, glancing one last time at the door that had just closed behind Edward and Esme, then grabbed the handle and swung the door open.
The room was a disaster. Shards of glass littered the floor of the entire room the way the first snow dusts the ground in winter, twinkling in the fluorescent lights. It crunched under the soles of my shoes, and I could feel as one large fracture pierced the rubber and broke against the bottom of my foot.
It looked like Alice smashed every bottle from the minibar one by once, making sure to cover every inch of clean floor with pungent alcohol and glass. One of the lamps from the dresser had been thrown at the wall, leaving a gash in the plaster. I was surprised the guest next door hadn't called the front desk, but it sounded like whoever it was was sleeping deeply.
And there was Alice, curled in a ball on her bed with the comforter thrown over her haphazardly. Her breathing was steady, her heartbeat was slow and measured. By all metrics, she seemed to have crashed into sleep, but her eyes were wide open and staring blankly at the wall.
"Alice?" I asked softly, tapping her shoulder to no avail. She was actually sleeping with her eyes open, which I had only ever read about but was more disturbing than any novel had described. If I couldn't hear her heart… Well, it almost looked as though she had died and was laying limp and blank on a lumpy hotel bed.
Edward was showering in his own room at Esme's urging. She had insisted that she needed to hang up his pants before they got wrinkled, and managed to convince him that a shower would make him feel better.
"She's sleeping," I said, pitching my voice low enough so as to not disturb Alice, though it seemed as though I could march a New Orleans jazz band through the room without bothering her.
"She didn't need the medication?" Carlisle asked.
"No. She seems to be resting comfortably now, though the room is a mess. I'm going to try to straighten up in case she wakes up."
Esme was in the hall in front of our door immediately. "Do you need help?"
"Quickly."
I darted to the door and whipped it open and closed in a moment, letting Esme in before the hinges could creak or light from the hall could escape in. I flicked the light off and we set off to work while Esme detailed to me everything that had happened from the moment we went our separate ways.
By the end, I was just as confused as everyone else. I dusted the miniscule shards of glass from my hands into the wastebasket and surveyed the carpeting of the room, looking for what we could have missed while Esme discarded the broken lamp. From what Esme said, with Emmett adding in his commentary from his room, it had been a perfectly lovely, normal evening. Emmett and Alice played darts at a sports bar while eating chicken wings and mozzarella sticks, with Emmett painfully having to throw darts off target. He hated purposefully underperforming, but Alice had been having so much fun and they were laughing the entire night so he didn't mind. Emmett showed her how to play pool and she was comically terrible at it. They stopped to get ice cream on the way back to the hotel, and the moment Alice stepped foot in the room she absolutely lost it. At first, she had just been crying, but then she screamed and started kicking the furniture, then throwing. Esme said she didn't want to violate Alice's privacy, and Carlisle guessed that it was an expression of pain from a past trauma that couldn't be talked down and away.
So they let her rage. She smashed, she threw, she cried, all with my family mere steps away and listening to every movement and cry.
I looked down at Alice, sleeping still with her eyes open. The finger curls Rose had brushed through her hair had loosened from Alice scratching at her scalp so her dark hair looked stiff and stuck out on the side of her head. Her makeup had smudged and the black rings around her eyes made the green seem impossibly brighter despite the glassy unconsciousness that clouded them in sleep.
"I'm sorry," she said all of a sudden, blinking slowly into closing her eyes.
"Alice?" I sat on the bed at her side, the mattress dipping with my weight and causing Alice to roll slightly over. Esme stayed in the corner of the room, lamp in hand and waiting to see what she could do.
"I'll get a job. Pay for it all."
"That's not necessary, dear," Esme reassured, unable to stay quiet.
"M'kay," Alice mumbled, then rolled over in the bed and took the sheets with her, tangling herself in the fabric and crashing into an even deeper sleep, this time with her eyes closed.
Esme looked over at me, mouth slightly parted and brows pulled together in confusion.
I shrugged. "She's been off for months. I don't know what's happening, or how to help her."
"Mental health is a staggering struggle for humans." Esme sighed and gathered all the trash in her arms. "Let me know if you need anything?"
"I need to see Edward."
"You should stay with Alice," Esme said, shifting the lamp to her other arm so she could pull me into a half-hug. "I wanted to speak with Edward. You'll be able to hear if he needs anything, but for right now I think Alice would rather have you here."
"I'll keep her safe," I promised, moving to stand beside her bedside as though I was keeping vigil.
"We'll figure everything out."
I stayed standing, not needing to sit or rest to be comfortable, but then realized that if Alice were to suddenly wake I would look a bit awkward just staring down at her. I climbed into my own bed, on top of the stiff and unwashed comforter in which I could smell the intermingling scents of several past guests who had once occupied this room.
Humans were everywhere here. Their constant chatter, their fidgeting, their media consumption, it all faded into a background buzzing in which I had to compartmentalize away so I wasn't actively processing the mundanity of it all. Why did I need to commit to memory that the woman three floors below us was ordering a plain hamburger from room service for the rest of eternity? I understood why Amun and Kebi chose to live in isolation in the middle of the desert. The vast expansiveness of every minute memory over the course of millennia must be mentally exhausting.
I could imagine doing something similar with Edward in the distant future. I did enjoy being around humans- their spontaneity, their fervent but fickle passions- but if Edward planned to join me for eternity then we would have to find somewhere away from humanity to spend his first years.
I curled up on my side to face Alice and listened to Esme tell Edward what she had told me about their evening. I could see the wear of exhaustion on Alice's face, slack with sleep as it was. The eyeliner that had smudged with tears blended in with the dark shadows under her eyes, exacerbating the discoloration and making it look as though she hadn't slept in weeks. And I felt as bad as she looked. Though I could tell it wasn't a peaceful sleep from the tightness of her lips and the clench of her jaw as her teeth grinded together, I was jealous of her ability to enter into that unconscious respite.
Just a break from everything would be nice, but it was simply impossible. Especially while Esme was telling Edward her story, her human story. Edward knew the basics but it wasn't my place to elaborate on anyone else's private history.
Esme kept the story rather sterile, just implying rather than detailing the years of abuse at the hands of her first husband and running away to escape him, then losing the baby and feeling so lost and desperate in isolation and grief.
If any vampire in the world understood human mental illness, it was Esme, and Edward seemed to understand that. But when Esme gently explained that she needed to tell Charlie about this, and it needed to be reported to their therapist, Edward vehemently objected.
"Edward, they need to know," Esme said with a gentle firmness.
"B-but what if they t-take her away? I c-can't… I can't do th-that again. I can't."
"They're not going to take her away, but this is dangerous for Alice. We need to make sure she gets the help she needs, even if it doesn't seem like the right thing in the moment."
"She's already in th-therapy. For m-months she's been in th-therapy. Can't she j-just g-go more often?"
"Do you think that's what's helped you?"
"It hasn't hurt!"
Alice stirred, and I sat up waiting for a wakeup that never came. She just rolled onto her back, one hand resting on her stomach and the other next to her head.
"What if w-we j-just try harder? Alice… she's j-just different. She's always been d-different, and no one else understands th-that. Please, j-just give me time."
"Time for what, Edward? What more can you do? You're just one person, just one boy."
"All of us, then. M-maybe the reason I've b-been m-making more progress is because I h-have Bella? And you, and everyone else?"
"A support system, you mean?"
"Exactly! A s-s-support s-system. It's always been j-just me, and Alice n-needs more than just me. She n-needs a family."
"Edward," Esme sighed, and I could hear as she took his hand in hers. "We all love Alice, you know that. Bella and Emmett think of her as a sister. But Alice doesn't know about us, and she can't know. She just can't. And I worry that having her spend too much time around us, integrating her into this part of your life could cause problems. Alice is a smart girl, and observant, just like her brother."
"Alice would n-never t-tell."
"She can never know. It is illegal. The most sacred law of our kind. And Bella is already putting herself-" there was the slightest pause in Esme's speech as she discarded more loaded words, "-out there to go to Italy. Having anyone but you know the truth would be beyond dangerous. To even have someone else suspect would put us all in jeopardy."
"I know," Edward groaned, and I could hear as he pulled at his hair the way he did when frustrated. "I know th-that. I'm s-s-sorry. But I can't l-let anything happen to her."
"Anything that does happen will be in Alice's best interest."
"What about m-medication?" Edward said suddenly, his voice sharp.
"What do you mean?"
"Carlisle?" Edward called, louder than necessary. Carlisle was at the door to his room and knocking in the span of a half-breath.
"Did someone call?" he asked politely, peering around the cracked open door.
"Can you p-prescribe Alice s-s-something? The therapist we've s-seen isn't a psychiatrist, which m-means she c-can't prescribe medicine, right?"
"That is correct, but I'd imagine if she thought medication was in order she would refer Alice to a psychiatrist," Carlisle confirmed.
"But can't you d-do s-s-something for her?"
Carlisle was quiet for a moment, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. Carlisle was the most ethically upstanding person in existence, human or vampire there was no rival. Writing a long-term SSRI prescription was going to be more than a one-time Xanax prescription, and he wasn't going to be comfortable doing something like that for someone who wasn't his patient, especially without the consent and knowledge of her guardian. If it had been Edward who needed help like this, it would be a different story, but it was Alice. As friendly as she may be, Carlisle did not consider her a member of his family, and she never would be.
But Carlisle also didn't want to disappoint Edward, especially when he was asking for one thing. Edward had never asked for a favor, never demanded anything, and now Edward needed something from Carlisle.
"If Alice is amenable, I can prescribe Prozac," Carlisle yielded begrudgingly to Edward's relief.
"This m-means you don't have t-to t-tell Charlie anything, right? We c-can j-just give it time?"
"Edward-" Esme started.
"As long as nothing happens," Carlisle sighed, "We don't need to tell anyone else right away. But I'll be keeping a close eye on Alice, both to make sure the medication doesn't have any adverse effects, and also to monitor her behavior. And if anything else like this happens, Edward, I'm sorry but I'll have to tell Charlie."
"I understand," Edward promised. "But n-nothing else will happen. She j-just n-needs more time."
Time was something we had both too much of, and too little.
Alice was completely silent in the morning, back to her pattern of behavior only two days before. She rolled out of bed, trying to be quiet as I made a show of being asleep as it was still early in the morning, and I could hear her sitting on the tile of the shower and crying as the water pounded on her skin. Steam billowed out from the gap under the door, humidifying the air in the hotel room.
When she emerged a little under an hour later, she was shrouded in her familiar shapeless sweater and baggy jeans, looking like a little girl swallowed by her father's clothing. I rolled over to look at her as she rolled up the hem of her jeans, putting on the colorful mismatched socks that were so representative of Alice's eclectic style.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked.
Alice didn't even look over at me, and seemed unsurprised that I was awake.
"Thank you for cleaning up. I'm sorry I left you with such a mess."
"You don't need to apologize. It was no trouble."
"I'm still sorry," Alice said, voice small and choking in the back of her throat. "We got ice cream. And the social worker took us to get ice cream after. When we were in Seattle last time. It wasn't a good memory."
"I understand," I reassured her. "I'm still here if you want to talk about it."
"Thank you. But I'm good."
I didn't want to push, so I gave her the space Edward had continuously insisted she needed. I reached over to order a few different options for breakfast from room service, and asked that they take the same to Edward's room. He hadn't slept well at all, and from the sound of it would be waking up sooner than normal. And in the grand tradition of teenage boyhood, he was always hungry first thing in the morning.
And later in the morning. And in the early afternoon, and late afternoon, evening, late at night. A few times he had even rolled out of bed in the dead of night to slather white bread with peanut butter and eat it almost whole.
And while Edward seemed to appreciate the cart of trays piled high with gourmet waffles and omelets and warmed syrup, Alice was less enthusiastic about the prospect of eating. She looked at the plate I placed next to her in the bed and frowned, then hesitantly picked up the fork and speared a piece of egg through it.
I carefully picked at my own plate of food, depositing bites into a napkin hidden in the sheets in case Alice were to look over at me, but she didn't. She twirled the egg on the plate like it was a long pasta, then brought it up to her face not to eat it, but to stare at it as if she was inspecting it.
She squinted at the yellow blob of noxious food, then, all of a sudden I could smell the rush of acid in her stomach as Alice dropped the fork and attached egg on the ground and sprinted into the bathroom, throwing up the toilet seat to vomit into the ceramic bowl.
I followed behind her and pushed the hair from her forehead, the silky locks blackened with dampness and easy to slick back out of her face as she purged out the contents of her almost-empty stomach.
She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and I handed her a plastic cup filled with tap water so she could rinse and spit the water back into the toilet.
"Are you okay?" I asked, and Alice shrugged.
"It was a long night," she explained brusquely, shuffling back to the bed and curling up in the tangled sheets until Esme knocked on the door to let us know it was time for us to check out.
Alice didn't even look at anyone else on the elevator ride down to the lobby, and left Emmett to take her suitcase while she strode out to the cars already waiting for us at the valet stand. Without hesitation, she climbed into the backseat of Carlisle's car and pulled her hands into the baggy sleeves of her sweater as she folded her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them.
Edward turned to look at me, silently asking if I knew what had happened, but I had no words for him. I could only shrug helplessly and accept what came.
With Alice in the Mercedes, Rose joined us in her M3, content to drive her own car. She told Edward about the nitrous tank she installed in the combustion to push the bounds of speed of the car in an attempt to distract him, which seemed to work for only a few minutes until he lost interest and stared out the window, watching the rain shatter on the glass.
Rose caught my eye in the rearview mirror and smiled sadly, understanding that there was nothing she could do. All we could do was wait, and give it time.
Alice stayed in the car on the ferry ride, and Edward was quiet as he watched the Seattle skyline grow smaller with distance as we powered through the bay back to Bainbridge Island. The boat jostled with the bumping waves as the water was churned up by the storm, and the wind made the downpour of rain sharp and piercing even against my impenetrable skin. I reached over to tighten the windbreaker around Edward, making sure the tender skin of his neck was protected since he seemed to want to stand in the rain without any cover.
"I'm fine," he insisted, pushing my hand away. I bit my bottom lip, trying to keep the hurt from my face but of course Edward noticed. He sighed and shook his head, looking down at me. "I'm s-s-sorry. I didn't mean it, I'm j-just tired."
"I know," I said, folding my hands in front of me so I could manage to keep my hands to myself. Edward frowned and reached over to grab one of my hands and thread our fingers together, bringing our adjoined hands up to his mouth to kiss my knuckles gently.
"I'm hungry," Edward announced, and I couldn't help but laugh.
"What's new," I joked, pulling Edward under the cover of the tarped overhang where the stairs were to go down to the snack bar on the main deck.
I folded a plain muffin into a napkin for Esme to take to Alice, but when we returned to the car just before the ferry reached the dock Alice refused the food. Esme sighed and started to try to insist Alice eat something, but Carlisle set his hand on hers and shook his head briefly. "Don't push."
It went against Esme's nature to not hover and mother and nurture, but she nodded in acceptance and faced forward in the front seat, leaving Alice to herself in the backseat.
Emmett tried his hand at distractions with a little more success than Rose. He was turned entirely to face Edward in the backseat, unbound by such human constraints as a seatbelt, and showed off some old fashioned sleight of hand magic.
He started with pulling a coin from behind Rose's ear, but when she swatted him away he tried it on me, flicking two quarters out. Edward clapped politely, which only egged Emmett on so he pulled out a dollar bill and folded it quickly in a way that made it seem like the paper was levitating, with a quarter hidden in his palm to act as a counterbalance.
"Cool," Edward complimented.
"Oh, man, if I had some cards I could show you some real moves," Emmett groaned. "I'll grab some when we get home. I can do this one where it looks like they're flying."
"Oh, now you've done it," Rose mumbled, pressing her foot down so the pedal hit the floor of the car.
"Are we opening this can of worms again?" I complained.
"More like opening this rabbit in a hat," Rose added, the corners of her lips twitching up in a concealed smile.
"What?" Edward asked, lost. "Has he d-done this before?"
"Oh yeah," Rose said, then bursting out at the memory I knew she was thinking of.
"It got to the point that he bought one of those cheesy tuxedos and made us sit in the living room while he performed for us," I told Edward. "He even talked Esme into getting into one of those fake boxes for him to cut in half."
"I wouldn't do it," Rose said.
"You would've looked so hot in that assistant's outfit, baby," Emmett pouted.
"How l-long ago was th-this?"
"The early nineties. We went to the Houdini Museum when we were living in rural Pennsylvania and Emmett was 'inspired'," I told him.
"You sure h-have a l-lot of hobbies."
"Gotta find some way to pass the time," I shrugged, and Emmett snorted and turned back in his seat.
"I can think of better ways to pass the time," he mumbled, and I kicked the back of his seat.
"You're the one who was doing the magic, not me," I reminded him. "And the bear training, and the ballet classes, and the swing dancing, and the trapeze artistry."
"He's l-like a one man c-c-circus," Edward joked, and Rose laughed out loud and looked over at her mate, who was sitting next to her with his arms crossed over his chest grumpily, which made all of us laugh even harder.
It was a brief moment of joy, though, cut short by the interruption of a scream from the car behind us. Edward was still laughing, but when he noticed we had all gone quiet he did too, looking around to see what had happened. Rose adjusted the rearview mirror to try to see what was happening, and I turned in my seat to look out the back window through the dark tint of the front of the Mercedes.
Esme had climbed into the backseat and was trying to hold Alice, who was screaming and scratching at her eyes. Esme forced them down before she could draw blood, but there was red and irritation all over her face.
"What's happening?" Edward asked, turning to look at the car behind us but likely unable to see anything.
"I don't know," I frowned, staring at Carlisle, who had his hands on the wheel but his head turned to look back at Esme and Alice, who had stopped screaming but was hyperventilating. He glanced up at us and looked bewildered, indicating he had no idea what had been the trigger. "I think Alice is having a panic attack."
"Is she okay?"
"Esme's is coaching her through breathing," I started, narrating everything that they were both doing to help Alice calm down.
"Bella, you have the alprazolam," Carlisle said, and I nodded in understanding.
"I'll be right back," I promised Edward, unbuckling my seatbelt to open the door after grabbing the pill bottle from my travel bag at my feet.
Edward clutched at my hand with all his inconsiderable strength. "What are y-you d-doing?"
"There's no one around, I'm just going to take this back to them. Carlisle asked for it."
"Let me go," Emmett insisted, plucking the bottle from my hands and throwing the front door open to tumble elegantly onto the wet pavement. Alice had her face buried in her hands, and Esme was hugging her into her side, but even still Emmett was quick, tossing Carlisle the pills through the cracked window and darting back into his seat beside Rose in seconds.
"Woah." Edward seemed impressed, not totally following Emmett's movements but nonetheless amazed.
Carlisle didn't force the medication on Alice, but she did readily accept it and dry swallowed it the second it was offered, and was asleep and sagging into Esme's arms within minutes of ingesting the pill.
"Do you know what could have happened?" I asked, but Edward shook his head and seemed clueless.
"I have n-no idea. We're j-just in the car in the m-middle of nowhere. I don't know what c-could have happened. Did Esme or Carlisle s-s-say s-something?"
"No, they were just listening to the radio. And it was just the easy listening station. It's boring and drab, but Carlisle likes it. He says it reminds him of the chamber music he grew up listening to in church, which, in my opinion, is an insult to seventeenth century choruses."
Edward looked deep in thought, his brows pulled together as pinched the bridge of his nose. "I c-can't think of anything," he said finally, still at a loss.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the alprazolam knocked Alice out for hours. Emmett carried Alice up the stairs, and she looked so small and childlike in his massive arms. Charlie jumped out of his chair and started to follow Emmett upstairs, but Carlisle caught him and shook his head.
I watched the silent exchange curiously, wondering why Carlisle wasn't immediately reassuring Charlie that Alice was just sleeping and not dead or dying or anything. Edward bounded up behind Emmett, dragging me in tow. Emmett gently placed her in her bed, her head lolling to the side and her body limp from the drugs.
"Alice needs help, Charlie," Carlisle started, speaking quietly and explaining what had happened the night before, and then again in the car on the drive back. Charlie listened silently, his only reactions a huff of breath or a burdened sigh.
I understood why Carlisle had waited. He didn't want Edward to know that he was going against what he had said the night before, when he had promised not to tell Charlie. But, like Carlisle had warned, things had changed. If Alice had returned to normal in the time it took her to adjust to an SSRI, Carlisle would have kept quiet.
But something was broken, and I agreed with Carlisle. She needed more help than just Edward could give her, and something was fundamentally wrong. With every breakdown and panic attack Edward had had, there was always a trigger, an explanation for his reaction. And through the days and weeks and months, he had only gotten better. There were marked milestones in his own personal growth and within our relationship, and I could easily track each portion of progress while Alice reverted back to nightmares and sunk into obvious depressions.
It seemed like we were in something of a waiting game, an uncertain limbo where the floor was made of eggshells and each step could set off a reaction.
Alice was in a fog the whole next day, still drowsy from the sedative and possibly also from the panic attack. I knew Edward was always exhausted after, to the point that he would stay in bed and bury himself in blankets until I coaxed him out of bed and back into the world, and Alice seemed to be in the same routine.
I reminded myself that regression was a normal part of coping with trauma as I watched Alice stare into a bowl of soggy cereal in the middle of the afternoon. Charlie gently pushed it closer to her, trying to get her to finish at least one meal, but she just swiped her tongue out to wet her chapped lips and swallowed heavily.
Edward was silent. He had spent the entire day just staring at Alice, his eyes boring a hole into her forehead with the intensity of his gaze. It looked like he was trying to stare into one individual pore of her skin, and he never let up. I wondered what it was that he saw that was so alarming that it deserved hours of scrutiny, but I couldn't ask him from my perch on a fragile bough in the tree just outside.
"What happens now?" I asked quietly.
"I wish I could tell you," Carlisle replied, emerging from the dense brush that lined the backyard. I had heard him coming, probably to check in on me. Rose had stopped by in the early morning, but had wordlessly appraised the scene before her, with me sitting in a tree watching in on a fragile human home, and simply circled the perimeter before returning home.
Carlisle had just come from the hospital- whether he was just on a break or returning home, I wasn't sure. The smell of antiseptic and dried blood clung to the silk of his cream-colored dress shirt, permeating my little bubble as he jumped up to join me on the precariously balanced branch.
"Why does anything have to change?" I asked. "Edward's been through similar moments. It's a typical response to trauma, no matter how long ago. Like Edward suggested, we should just give her an antidepressant and give it time to work."
"I'm sure if the therapist thought an SSRI would work, she would've referred her to a psychiatrist," Carlisle repeated. "And Edward has us. Alice doesn't. Not in the same way."
"She could," I said sadly.
"No. No, she can't."
I knew that. I knew that there was no way Alice could have access to the same kind of support as Edward. And no matter the similarities of their childhoods, their futures were different. Alice was living in the same kind of unknown as every other human in the world, where something could change in a millisecond and there were no assurances.
And Edward was probably the only human in the world who had that kind of reassurance. There were very few who knew about any kind of supernatural existence, and the others were all likely the ones working for the Volturi. And chances were that none of them would be seeing the end of the year, much less eternity.
"So what now?" I asked again. Alice had trudged back up the stairs, steps uncharacteristically heavy before she collapsed onto the mattress and curled into a ball under the duvet. Edward and Charlie were still at the kitchen table, staring at the open doorway Alice had departed through with a full bowl of completely saturated cereal between the two of them. Charlie seemed lost and at a loss, but Edward looked pained.
I wondered how Charlie couldn't see it. He was so consumed by Alice's lack of presence that he didn't notice Edward sitting right next to him, completely destroyed but with no one to hold him, no one to talk through everything building up with him. Edward liked to keep all of his fears and worried bottled in to fester and grow until he exploded in a frantic panic- unless someone talked him down.
The branch splintered under my hand as my fingers dug into the bark, anchoring me outside.
"I lost a patient today," Carlisle said, drawing a fraction of my attention away from inside.
"I'm sorry."
"I liked her. She reminded me of you," he smiled sadly, staring up into the leafy foliage above us. "She was clumsy. Her whole medical file is stacked with broken bones and stitches, but no one caught that she had cancer and that's what made her so breakable."
"They're all breakable," I said sadly. Edward was picking at the flaking crust of a slice of dry toast, his fingers long and elegant an so alluring.
"I smelled it the minute I met her," Carlisle continued, ignoring me. "That rotten smell that goes with cancer. Primary leiomyosarcoma that had metastasized to the bone. No one caught it before she came into the emergency room with a wrist that had broken in two from just tripping on the front step of her parents' house. I did everything I could. I resected the bone mets and carved out half of her abdomen getting to the muscle tumors, but it was too far advanced."
"It's a rare cancer, isn't it?"
"Virtually nothing is known about it."
"You're going to learn everything about it, aren't you?"
Carlisle smiled sheepishly and pulled apart a leaf, remarkably mirroring Edward's fidgeting inside.
"Her parents gave me permission to harvest bone and muscle samples and pathologize the affected organs."
"If you need a second opinion, you know where to find me."
Carlisle reached over and squeezed my hand, pulling my fingers from their respective holes in the branch, his skin warm and smooth against mine.
"They're so fragile, and they don't even realize it until it's too late," Carlisle observed. I looked up at him, away from Edward. He was staring up at the second floor window where Alice was laying in bed. Though we weren't at a vantage point to see her, it was easy enough to discern that she had been rubbing her temples with the butt of her palms repeatedly.
"Is it too late then?"
"They're strong, too." Carlisle shook his head, hair falling out of place so one pale strand fell in his face, the ends curling around his collar. I reached over with my other hand to brush the stray hair out of his face, the sun softly shining through the trees and grey clouds and casting a glimmering glow on his pale skin. The circles under his dark eyes were unmistakable and prominent, spreading lavender and pearly purple bruises up to the sides of his nose in a show of thirst that I knew I matched. I hadn't hunted since everything had fallen apart with Alice weeks before, and it seemed like Carlisle was experiencing the same burning thirst that I was.
"Are they strong enough, though?"
"She never gave up," he said suddenly, an imperceptible tremble of emotion in his voice. "My patient. There's a resiliency they have that we don't. They have an opportunity for growth, a strength of spirit that we can never experience. She never gave up. Not after the diagnosis, not after I gave her the prognosis. Not when I removed her uterus. Not even in her last days did she resign herself to the inevitable."
"So is this a death sentence?"
"They've all been sentenced to death. It is the only supreme truth."
"The dreamless sleep," I said wistfully.
"More Heidegger than Socrates, I think."
"And Sartre?"
"Oh, you and Sartre," Carlisle scoffed.
"Was he wrong? Is that not what you said just said? 'Death by being revealed to us as it really is frees us wholly from its so-called constraint.'"
"My patient wasn't Pablo Ibbietta. Her sentence wasn't commuted."
I frowned and squeezed Carlisle's hand. "Was she afraid?" I asked.
"No," he shook his head, another hair falling away which I tucked back in place. "They're never afraid. Their families are afraid, their loved ones are afraid. But at the end, they never are."
"She's afraid," I said, looking up at the peeling blue paint of the window pane of Alice's window.
"Because it's not the end. She's afraid because it's not the end. And whatever is needed to help her, we'll make it happen," Carlisle promised, shaking our hands together. "Social services aren't exactly flush with funds, and neither is Charlie Swan. If it's needed, you know we can always set up a blind trust fund to assist in whatever they need. If there's a specialist who needs to be brought in, or some kind of extra care that needs to be paid for, we'll make it happen."
"I just hope it's enough."
"So do I." Carlisle unthreaded our hands and clapped his palms on his thighs and hopped up, balancing on the branch on the soles of his black dress shoes. "I need to get back, I just wanted to check on Alice, and on you. Is there anything I can do?"
"Can you cure whatever's afflicting Alice?" I asked hopelessly.
"If I could cure mental illness, I would have done it by now."
"I know," I sighed, blinking back the burning promise of unshed tears.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, leaning down to kiss the crown of my head softly before jumping down to the long-dead flower bed that lined the house and running into the forest behind me, looping around before heading in the direction of the hospital.