What has gone before:
Edward has accidentally left his journal in Bella's room. His family knows.
The Ghost in the Wishing Well
I stand in the woods behind Bella's house. Silence surrounds me. It always does. Silence follows all of us, wherever we go, whenever we are away from the noises of humans.
The wild things know us.
"Bring it back, Edward. Just bring it back."
Carlisle's eyes were so urgent. He doesn't wish her harm any more than I do.
The place is completely dark, save for the nightlight that shines from her bedroom. Cold air has come down from the mountains, and a light snow is falling. My chest feels swollen from inside, and I ache through and through.
I scale the wall to her window without a sound.
Where is it?
"She never tells," Alice insists. "Never. I don't see a single future in which she tells on us."
"That could change in an instant. Any instant at all." It's Rosalie who says it, but Jasper is thinking it. Alice gasps as his half-formed thoughts translate into visions of him luring Bella into the woods. It is too easy. He finds her already outside, wandering restlessly in the yard at dusk. When she sees him she approaches him. She wants something. A question. An answer. He uses it against her, twists her puzzlement and longing into … something else. I am so appalled that I cannot even breathe, let alone speak.
The house is filled with human sounds: old masonry settling, father's and daughter's heartbeats and breathing, slightly off key and off tempo from each other, limbs moving and shifting under bedclothes, a mattress creaking. I lever Bella's window open and enter, as I have done so many times now. The curtains brush me as I pass between them. I close the window quickly so as not to wake her with the cold from outside.
"How could you?" Alice throws herself on Jasper, and it is only the complete bewilderment in his mind that stops me from doing the same, and ripping his head from his shoulders. He truly has no idea of the future that has sprung from his fears. "How COULD you?" Her sobbed accusation rings with grief and hurt. It is not a stranger that Alice sees entangled with Jasper, now. It is Bella.
"What did I do?" Jasper whispers, tensed in defense against her, and against me. Alice takes his head in her hands and puts her mouth to his ear. I stare at Alice's black hair, brushing against Jasper's blond, as she tells him what he does to protect our family.
It should not be possible for our kind to blanch, but I swear that Jasper does.
"She fights you. To the end. In the end you have to just kill her. And she's scared."
Scared is barely the half of it. Caught in Alice's vision, Jasper feels, and I see, Bella's unease, changing to desperate panic, as she scrabbles against the slick, inexorable slope of his gift.
He intends it as mercy, but for Bella it is not. She shies away from what he offers, and so she must be forced, until her body – her very feelings – are no longer hers. Her scream is barely a whimper, tainted by a wantonness she is powerless not to feel, as his gift and his arms wrap her to him.
Her bones break. Her blood is taken. He cannot help it. Even as a spectator to this mere figment, I, too, flame with thirst.
Bella's body is desecrated, to imitate the feeding of the rogue bear.
My chair is a shambles on the floor. Her skull, God! Her skull! Blood-matted hair against the pine needle litter ... I stand with my own arms wrapped tight around myself, every muscle locked. This has not happened. It has not happened.
Though Alice has barely breathed the words into Jasper's ear, of course everyone has heard. Rosalie sits like a stone, gripping Emmett's hand so hard that he is wincing.
Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit, is all that she can think. And then at me: It just keeps going from bad to worse, doesn't it, Edward? Do you still think you were right to save her from that damned van? From me?
Esme's face is in her hands. "Carlisle, you can't allow this, you can't!"
"I would never – " Jasper protests. But he and I both know that that is not entirely true.
Alice's arms are around his neck, and she is soothing him, though her whole body trembles from what she has seen, and told. "You won't now. You won't. It's past. It's over."
"Bring it back, Edward," Carlisle says. "Just bring it back."
I cast my eyes around the room. I see only Bella's things. Her homework is untidy on her desk. I see that her lab report for Biology is not complete. I dread to imagine why. How much has she read? Am I too late?
Moving around in her room like this is dangerous. I am silent, of course, but I cannot stop my passage from moving the air. And she is such a fitful sleeper.
Where is it? Where has she hidden it? I draw as close to her bed and bookcase as I dare, scan everything twice, just to be sure. Nothing.
Damn her!
No. That's not what I want at all.
Bella stirs, and I freeze in place. I should crouch, get below her line of sight from the bed, but I am in the wrong place for that. There is not enough room here, between her bookcase and where she lies.
She does not wake, and I wonder, is it perhaps under her pillow? With the medicine recipe. Parents are able to exchange quarters for baby teeth under pillows and sleeping heads. I should be able to do this ….
It is sometimes hard to know one's feelings when the body does not function as before. But I am fairly sure that if my heart could move at all, it would be pounding right now. Bella's scent is ever-present, of course. But this is more. This is worse.
I am terrified of waking her. And yet ...
It is absolutely imperative that I recover my journal. And yet … and yet …
The utter stillness in my chest is eerie, horrifying, unnatural. It is hurtful, in a way that I can neither describe nor properly comprehend.
All of my reverie is cut short by her sigh, as she turns to her other side. This is better. Her back is to me. The chance is mine. I reach to slip my hand under her pillow. Her hair spilled across it is clean and fragrant; the back of her head is whole. I stare, staked where I stand.
The pitiful crushed thing, left lying on its side, dead in the woods. Bitten open, bitten apart. My whole body wants to just curl itself around that form. To put back the blood, knit up the bones, to make her whole again, alive again, innocent again.
But she is here, not there. And she is alive, and whole, and innocent, right here, right now, right in front of me. None of that evil has happened, and I vow it never will, not so long as any part of me is not ash.
The entire front of my body aches to hold her. Her sweet, sweet softness. I remember hugging her pillow. I remember her snugged tight to my side as I stopped the van from taking her life. If I take even one breath, now, I am lost. She is lost. I retreat instead to the rocking chair. It is familiar to me, my refuge. My arms fold themselves tightly against my chest, hugging her scent and the emptiness of air.
It does not escape me that her scent and the air can survive my embrace, but she most certainly could not.
I draw up my knees, to make a cage for my nose, as blackness and silence descend on me. I am a blank. I am blind wishing, and nothing more.
The sounds of the house carry on around me.
I feel motion, hear creaking. Like a small boat upon the ocean.
I am rocking in the chair. How long?
I freeze again.
Did she wake?
No. But now I imagine it. Bella waking. Bella seeing me. In my mind's eye she is not afraid, but yawns and rubs her eyes, as she stumbles over and crawls sleepily into my arms. I welcome her so gladly. Somehow we manage it, the two of us, curled together here on the chair.
Isabella.
Isabella, Isabella, Isabella.
An owl calls in the dark outside.
Is – a bell – ahhh …
She stirs, the quilt slips, and I spy it. The edge of my journal. Just visible under her crossed arms, which clasp it to her breast. She sleeps, holding this thing of mine.
"What if we just leave her alone? What if we move?" Esme pleaded. "Alice?" She would do anything to avert the vision that Alice had told. Anything. Even leave this house that she has made so beautiful. We all considered it. Even I. Could I do this? I had failed in my quest to leave Bella for Alaska. But if my whole family were to spirit me away …
We all considered it, thought upon it, as Alice sat silent, back in her seat beside Jasper.
Minutes passed.
"What's that, Grandma?"
It was Alice's voice, but pitched high, like a child's. Her eyes were half-closed, only the whites visible, something that had happened only twice before since Alice came to us. All of us wondered again if she had done such things as a human. And what may have been done to her as a result.
"That's Edward's journal." None if us had ever heard Alice's voice old before.
"Who's Edward?"
"He was a boy."
"Did you know him?"
"No, sweet pea. He lived before my time."
A strange chill stole over me then – as if someone had stepped over my grave. It steals over me again, now, in this room, with this girl, whose voice will one day be old.
"Where did you get it?" Alice's hands motioned in the air, as if picking something up, turning it over.
"I found it lying around." And we all saw Alice's face … transformed. Gentle. Wistful. Sad.
"Will you read it to me?" The high, piping voice, asking so guilelessly.
"Come sit in my lap."
There was a long silence. But the spell was not yet broken. Suddenly –
"We're going to get in so much trouble!" A boy?
"She wanted to have it. She told me. We HAVE to do this." A girl … the girl … but not a child any more.
"You're crazy! She's dead already, what the hell does she care?"
"I promised! It was our secret."
"There's DEAD people in here!"
"Shut up. It's my grandma. She loved me." Harsh and urgent whispers in the dark.
"Which one is it?"
"This one, I'm pretty sure."
"I can't believe I'm doing this."
"Where's the lock-pick? Give it to me. … … Come on, help me here, it's heavy."
"Oh God, look at her, she's all … she looks like she's made out of wax."
"Shut up."
"What if they open the casket? They'll see."
"They're done with all that now. They're just putting her in the earth tomorrow." Alice's hands motioned again, as if placing something. "There you go, Grandma. There you go."
I saw all of it, of course, just as Alice was seeing it, as she sat there, speaking in tongues. Bella's hair nearly transparent in the dark, her face only recognizable by the structure of her bones beneath the spiritless flesh. A worn leather book lying under crossed arms, clasped to a shirt of white eyelet lace.
There is no way that I can pull my journal out of her hands without waking her. No way at all. This mission is a lost cause. Tomorrow is Saturday. I cannot stake out the house for two days on the chance it may be left empty at some point. Chief Swan's Quileute friends often visit on the weekend ...
I will have to sneak back here during school hours on Monday. But the distance between the school and this house is too great, and there is no path that does not cross human traffic. I will have to be tardy, or absent, or cut a class. There will be a conspicuous coincidence, between my absence and the disappearance of this journal. If Bella should speak of it, even if only to her father …
I hunch in on myself on the rocking chair. Jasper is right. The entire situation has gotten completely out of hand. Today, during school, before she could have discovered the journal, I had had my one chance to rectify my mistake safely. And I squandered it.
I sit motionless on the chair, lost in a river of images gliding through each other. Bella on her bier. This young girl before me. The roses, and the thorns. Myself, carried with her into the earth.
I want it. I want her. I want her to know me. I want her to keep me all through her mortal life, a secret whose truth she alone knows. And I want her to carry me with her, when day is done, to where I should have gone so long ago. Maybe this is why she came to Forks in the first place. To bring me to earth. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know anything any more, only that I must not make a sound. I let her breathing and her heartbeat be my own. Until first light edges the sky.
A/N: Under the bridge between my imagination and my words, there lives a very nasty troll. Said troll has been coming out to play, lately. A lot. Lucky for me I have been in the company of the best Nanny Goats Gruff anyone could ask for. Geo3: you believe when I don't. Averysubtlegift: good God woman, your patience knows no bounds. And you always speak up for Edward and Bella. Quothme: don't blush, you know I have to thank you here. Chicklette: I am just humbled by the things you say.
To all you readers, I also want to say a special thanks. Your visits, your reviews, your pm's, and in many cases your friendships, are such wonderful gifts that I never imagined until they happened.
Lastly,
The provenance of the chapter title …
If you could read my mind, love,
What a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old time movie,
About a ghost from a wishing well.
In a castle dark, or a fortress strong,
With chains upon my feet.
You know that ghost is me.
And I will never be set free
As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see.
- from the song, "If You Could Read My Mind", by Gordon Lightfoot
Happy Holidays to everyone. Update news on my profile.