Consequences

Tyler is out of the hospital. But he's not back at school yet.

"He doesn't want to be here all looking like the mummy," Lauren says. The teachers are sending his assignments for his mother to home school him for a while. Forks doesn't have any tutors. Lauren has been going over to his house every day to help him keep up.

"Does it still hurt?" I ask.

"Sometimes," she answers, "When they're changing the dressings." One of the wounds on his cheek was jagged and deep, and it still leaks through the stitches sometimes, and sticks even to the non-stick bandage. They have to be careful taking it off; otherwise it could tear everything open again.

"You really like him, don't you."

She gets an irritated look on her face, and turns away from me. "Why the hell is it so hard for people to believe that?"

"I believe it," I say.

"Yeah, well, you're Bella." As if that's a synonym for loony. Or maybe just different. The new kid. Chief's daughter. Charmed life. I don't really want to think of myself in any of those ways. But that's who I am.

It's eight days into February already, and time for a dance. Valentine's Day falls in the middle of the week this year, so the dance has been scheduled for the Saturday after it. I can't help but wonder if they will be mixing a George Washington theme in with all the pink and red hearts. I think it would be cool for everyone to go to the dance in breeches and waistcoats and hoop petticoats and tricorn hats. Or something like that.

Biology class is over. I've been religious about not glancing back at Edward's seat all week, so to be honest I don't know for sure if he was even in class. Certainly he's gone by the time I have my backpack together and am walking out the door. But my mind is on the journal he left in my room. The Edward who wrote it was only sixteen. My age. He's dead now – has to be – but when he wrote it he was sixteen. All excited about being allowed to sit at the adults' table at Christmas. No more squirt seat with his little cousins. He'd played the piano for the Christmas carols after dinner. His dad brought him into the drawing room with the men afterwards, didn't let him smoke, but gave him a snifter of brandy. He wrote that it burned going down, "but I believe that I acquitted myself well."

It's so strange to think that the boy who wrote that is dead. He seems so alive when I'm reading. I don't want to imagine him dead in a grave somewhere. I can't even bear to think of him old and sad and alone. Would he have been sad in his old age? I don't want to imagine that. I want to imagine him having had a good and happy life, surrounded by family, like he writes about in the journal. But mostly I want to just keep him in my mind, forever just the way he is in the words that I'm reading. Like a snapshot in time.

His handwriting is so much like Edward's that I'm beginning to think that he must really be Edward's great grandfather. Unless Edward's handwriting is like his because he copied and learned it from the journal. I can't tell. I wonder what 1917 Edward looked like? I can't help seeing him with the face of the Edward I know.

"So, Bella!"

Oh, Christ! I don't even know where I am in the hallway. Mike Newton is walking beside me. Where's Jessica?

"You kinda zoned out, there. You okay?"

He looks concerned. Somehow the whole town seems to think I really did get some kind of head injury in the van crash.

"I'm good."

"So, the Valentine's Day dance is coming up." Mike is looking at me with kind of hopeful, kind of uncertain eyes. This is horrible. All of Jessica's plotting and it's not Edward asking me out, it's Mike. The guy she likes. I think of myself dancing with Edward. I remember being held against him with metal screaming in my ears. I remember his hands steadying me from losing my balance, keeping my I.V. in place. I never landed a single kick on him. Maybe, just maybe, he could dance with me safely without getting stepped on. Would I say yes if he asked me?

"You wanna go?" It's Mike asking. He hasn't quite asked if I want to go with him.

"With me?" Now he has.

I should say yes. Do something normal, instead of pining over a diary, and a boy who said I stink; who ignores me … except when he's saving me from being a bloody smear on the side of my truck. Mike's not a bad guy at all. He's funny and kind of cute, and I think he really likes me.

I should say yes. It could be fun, even if there are no petticoats or tricorn hats involved. Except that it won't. Jessica will hate me. And Mike will probably end the night missing a toe. And I'll feel bad about everything. Most of all that Edward didn't ask me.

Mike is still waiting for an answer. I can see on his face that he knows he's already been shot down. At least he doesn't know that I'm choosing cowhide and parchment and faded brown ink over him.

"I can't."

"It's ok, no sweat." He doesn't even want to know why I can't, just wants to get away from this embarrassing moment as quickly as possible.

"Jessica … she – "

Mike is still within earshot, and courteous enough to turn back to listen.

"I think she's hoping you might ask her. I mean, if you wanted to." I am so lame. Just shoot me now.

But somehow it's the right thing to say. I can see it on his face. She's not blowing me off; She's being loyal to a friend. That's not a bad thing. He'll take it; and so will I. Half a truth is better than none.

Jessica is running up to us now. "Jeez you guys, why didn't you wait for me?" I realize she must have gotten a call from Auntie Flo. We're at the door to English, and Mike is looking at Jessica sideways. She feels his eye beams and looks at him back. I wonder if he'll try to pass her a note during class. They both sit near the back. It looks like I'm off the hook for the whole dance thing, anyway. I feel relieved, but also a little strange, like I'm floating by myself in limbo.

Jasper is gone.

It's my fault.

Six days have passed since I returned from the futile mission to recover my journal. I'd found the house shockingly empty when I got back. Isolated and surrounded by forest as it is, the place had felt like some deserted and haunted mansion. I, a blood-sucking monster, had felt a shudder pass down my spine, as my steps echoed across the threshold in the lamp-less gloom.

The sky had been fish-belly grey by the time that Emmett and Rosalie, and then Esme, and finally Alice and Jasper had shown up. If it had not been a Saturday, we would have been in real trouble. The five Cullen "children" all arriving late to school is more conspicuous than we want to be right now.

Rose and Em had gone joy-riding to Seattle. Esme and Carlisle had spent the night in, of all places, Bessie's diner; sitting in a booth and pretending to drink coffee until Carlisle left her there to go to his shift.

Alice and Jasper had been strangely subdued on their return, barely speaking to anyone. The rest of us had put it off to the tension of the evening before. The meeting around the dinner table had brought us all too close, too deeply into each other's minds. We have so little privacy with each other as it is. Hadn't all of us sought some separate space that night, and the safety of a mate, to make peace with what had been said, and seen? But Alice kept hiding behind recitations of prime numbers and the decimals of pi, and I should have realized that not everything revolved around Bella.

In the days that followed, the two of them hunted apart from the rest of us, and soon, though Jasper tried to make a cyst of numbness around his feelings, we all felt the festering, like an open sore on our own bodies.

Alice had told on him, in front of all of us, there at the dinner table. When I gave Bella up. When Jasper saw the unacceptable risk, and Alice saw what he would do about it. She hadn't just flung herself on him in shock and grief. She had told him what she saw, right there where we all could hear, so that shame would shut the door to that future. I saw the purpose, the necessity, as it flashed through her mind; and Jasper must have felt it too.

Alice had protected Bella over him.

"You want her for your sister. I can feel it Alice. I've been feeling it. Just like I've been drowning in Edward's thirst for her. And still I've done everything you asked, everything you wanted, even without asking. Everything."

Conversations held deep in the woods played over and over in their minds each time they returned. Like the rest of us I tried to give them some privacy, but sometimes the injured words spiked through.

"I know. I know it's cost you."

"Don't! Don't humbug me like that. You were mad as a hornet when you saw. I felt you, dearest, and it wasn't even something I'd yet done."

"I'm sorry."

" 'How could I?' Like she's everything to you."

It doesn't matter that he himself had asked her what she'd seen. And it certainly doesn't help that everyone is letting the matter of the journal, and my nightly visits to Bella's house, go unchecked. We don't know what to do about that mess, and so we have done nothing. But for Jasper the double standard, the risk-taking, the passivity, is intolerable.

This morning, Alice returned alone, one scant minute before the last moment that we could leave and still be on time for school.

There was no time to do anything but simply go. I forged a note from Carlisle to cover Jasper's absence, and handed it in with perfect poker face to Mrs. Cope in the office.

Alice has no more strength to shut me out, and this entire day I have swum through her memory in its endless loop: Jasper running a silent, unhappy circle around Deer Lake, herself staying doggedly with him through the high, snow-locked woods, though his long legs took one stride to her every two.

He brings up short, so suddenly that she doesn't see it, and she nearly bumps into him. He turns to her, but doesn't put his hands on her. Like watching a movie with no sound, I cannot feel but only see.

"Don't try to follow me."

There is a pause, and it must be that he has blasted her with how truly and strongly he means it, because it withers her, right there in the snow.

And then he is gone. Not as fast as me, but fast enough to be out of sight in the blink of an eye.

Rosalie has scared every boy in the entire school with her beauty turned terrible in stone-lipped anger. Emmett does his best to comfort her, hardly letting go of her hand from first bell to last. "It'll be okay," he soothes. "Sometimes a man's jest gotta have him some solitude."

My own mind is a morass of fear, and I can only be grateful that Jasper is in fact too far away to discover me, too far to reveal my selfishness to the rest of our family. For the one I fear for is not Alice or Jasper or our family, but Bella.

All day I have tracked her to distraction through the minds of her classmates. All day I have scanned the tickling ether of thoughts for sign of Jasper circling back, or waiting for her at her father's house. Trapped as I am at school, that place is beyond my range, and all I can think of is Alice's vision somehow coming to bloody fruition before I can get there to stop it.

Jasper is gone.

It's my fault.

And yet, standing here in the parking lot, as the rest of the students depart obliviously around us, I don't want to admit it, don't want to take the blame. It doesn't matter. Everyone's eyes, and thoughts, are pointed at me.

Rose is right, Emmett thinks. This is just goin' from bad to worst.

"Who's going to bring him back?" Rosalie asks.

Too many thoughts, too many intentions crowd forth all at once. Alice starts to crumble.

"One at a time!" I hiss.

We can't do this in public, and I am beside myself to get it done quickly, for I have lost track of Bella once she left sight of the school. We drive in my car and Emmett's jeep. No one wants to go back to the house. This is cruel to Esme, but somehow Jasper's flight has become something that we want to settle among ourselves.

Bogachiel State Park is close by, with forest dense enough to hide us.

The first campground is deserted, and we take it over. There is a barbecue hearth, with soaked black coals, and a picnic table just sturdy enough for us all to sit at. Though sheltered, the park is in lowland like Forks, and last week's ice and snow are almost gone under the faint drizzle.

One at a time.

One at a time, each of us forms the intention to search for Jasper and bring him back. I can't concentrate, and so I lag to the last. Alice's eyes look hollow. She has been doing too much these weeks. I have known this. Just the hiding from me has taken a toll. But she soldiers on, stilling herself, opening herself, searching, for the outcomes of each of us in turn.

I watch.

Her visions are slow to come, forced and frayed when they do. The dripping green around us, the wet wood of the table, these are the things that are real. All the rest are phantasms – echoes of voices whose words are indistinct, floating faces obscured by fog and tree branches – and I can't help wondering if what Alice is seeing isn't just made up out of whole cloth in her head.

"Emmett. It has to be Emmett," she says at last.

I can't believe this. This isn't going to be a straight line run. It will involve casting back and forth over a huge area to pick up the trail. Unless Jasper is waiting to be found, I am the only one who has a prayer of covering the ground fast enough to find his scent before it goes completely cold; of detecting him at a distance; of running him down when I do.

I am about to protest, but Emmett shakes his head. " 'Course it's me. He ain't gonna let some damn Yankee come fetch him." I got no gift. He won't spook. And we both got difficult women. Emmett sighs mentally at his own thought. It's gotta be me, Ed-boy. Don't need Alice to see that.

He checks the battery on his cell phone, pulls Rosalie to him in a quick, hard kiss, and then he's gone.

Fine.

But before I can take a single step, Alice's voice rings out, "Edward, stop! "

"What?" I don't have time for this!

"You can't go to Bella's house in daylight!" The consequences reel out in her mind. I am discovered. A neighbor, returning home early from work, sees me skulking in the tree. A phone call is made. There are handcuffs. Chief Swan's eyes like flint. A hoosegow. It gets complicated after that. Very complicated.

"You selfish son of a bitch." Rosalie.

"Leave my mother out of this!" I roar.

"Your mother's dead, Edward! She's a pile of bones in a rotting wood box. Just like Bella will be some day. But we'll still all be just the same as we are right now. Exactly the same. Until the damn sun burns out. You can't love a human, Edward!"

I don't love her. I don't. I'm just trying to keep everyone safe. Not just Bella. Surely if Bella gets dragged into the woods and eaten … There will be an investigation. Her things will be gone through. The journal, the medicine recipe …

Rosalie's patience is at an end. "Did any of you think to call Esme and tell her what we're doing?" It's a rhetorical question, obviously. "Well I did. She's expecting at least some of us to come home." She glares at Alice and me. "I'm taking the jeep. Keep him on a leash, Alice. At least do that."

The jeep's engine dwindles into the distance, leaving the forest around the campsite dead silent. Even the pattering drizzle has stopped.

"It wasn't supposed to happen this way," Alice says at last, in a very small voice.

My own mind can only echo her wretchedly. It wasn't supposed to happen this way at all.

I put Bella on the chopping block to keep our family together. Instead we're only falling apart.

"Maria used him," I say, because I don't know what else to say. "Used him hard. He was with her for a long time."

"I know. He told me all about it."

I know that she knows. But I also know that he has never opened to her the dark Pandora's box of how it felt: sixty years buried under lust and thirst and hate and fear and pain – not only his own, but those of all the others around him, vampire and human alike; the lucid moments of horror at what he had become; the despair; and the ways that his maker had used all of these things to bind him to her.

Jasper has sheltered Alice from all of that.

"I know," she says, answering the question that I might have asked. "I know he held back. He wanted to be a hero. My hero. That's all he ever really wanted, you know? To protect the women and children. How could I not give him that? How could I force him to share the ugliness?"

"All these weeks he's been doing things against his better judgment for you. He's served you. Served your dreams."

It's what he's always done, right from the start. Alice sees forward, but I've seen Jasper's memories, things he's never told her, because her pain would be his pain. And I've seen his present, too, how much of his gift he uses on himself. I wonder if Alice knows, if she even can know, how much she has asked of Jasper for the sake of her visions: to find our family, to stay with us and keep our ways, and now, to guard some impossible love that she feels for a human girl.

Alice balls up her fists and pushes the heels of her hands against her eyes. "Bella was going to love him, too, Edward. She was going to love all of us." Her voice falls to a whisper. "She's a nice girl. He would have felt horrible afterwards, if he'd hurt her."

"Is he going to hurt her now?" I ask. I just can't help myself.

"No. That future is gone. It's gone."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure." Her mind is blank of anything except the here and now, and I don't know what to believe.

"But she can't be completely safe any more, can she?"

"Humans are never safe, Edward. You know that. Even we can be killed, if someone sets out to."

"But I've made her less safe than she would have been."

"You don't know that, Edward. You don't know that at all."

Nonsense. Of course I know it. As if my uncontrollable thirst for her weren't enough, I have step by step brought Bella closer and closer to the veil that separates our world from hers. Rosalie thinks that in saving her from dying I ripped that veil altogether, and now there is no fate for Bella but death.

How is that fair? How is that in any way fair at all?

I sit in silence. So much more has happened since that moment in the parking lot. Rose is right. It's all gone from bad to worse.

Alice is far away, searching for the outcomes of Emmett's chase. "Take me home, now, please, Edward," she says. "I want to go home."

I find Esme in the meander of garden that winds throughout our yard. It is winter; hardly growing season, but that does not stop her from tending. If you want to find springtime, you need to search for it in winter. It's one of her homemade little sayings, and she is thinking it now, in response to my approach.

"Hello, Edward." Her hand reaches up as I squat down beside her, and she sifts her fingers through my hair. If Jasper were here, the motherly tenderness of that gesture would have warmed all of us.

I don't answer, just take my place beside her as she works her way through the garden which is also a path leading from one hidden oasis of beauty to another. It is her child, as much as any of us are. She tends it at human speed, never hurrying. Even without Jasper, I can sense the peace that it brings to her mind.

"Oh, look, the meadow rue is coming up. It's early." Esme's thoughts linger over images from last fall: this patch of soil warmed by a bit of Indian summer sun in early November, the pointed little seeds falling from her hands. Now her fingertips loosen the cold mulch around the tiny green spikes, as she envisions fluff-like balls of pink and mauve stamens that will be its blooms, come May.

I can see and hear her searching for the words she wants to say to me, and it makes me feel the need to apologize. "I've caused you worry."

"Oh, Edward." My sweet boy. She wants to hold me, but forebears. Her hands are plying the rich dark of the soil, and she knows how fastidious I can be.

"Everything we do has consequences."

She doesn't mean it harshly at all, but God, how her words have teeth.

She crab-walks a few steps, to comb and trim the stand of ornamental grasses that shelters this bend of the path. "You left your journal in Bella's room."

Not on purpose. It wasn't on purpose …

But Jasper is gone.

He kept calling me a loose cannon. Now there are two of us.

"Edward." Esme looks at me softly, bringing me back from my thoughts. I can see her wondering what could have happened in Bella's room that would make me forget my journal. I don't want her to know. I don't want anyone to know.

"It didn't start there, you know. Leaving your journal has had consequences, it's true, but it is also the consequence of something else." She stands for a moment, to look off into the woods. "You took your journal with you when you left your room that night."

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

"You wouldn't have been in her room with your journal in your hand, if you hadn't saved her life that morning, Edward. Would you take away that cause, so as not to have its consequence?"

No. God in heaven, no.

"And you wouldn't have been here to save her if you hadn't chosen to come back from Alaska, to endure this dreadful tug of war with yourself."

"It doesn't matter where I am. I've smelled her. I'll always be one step away from hunting her down and killing her." Any breath that I take could be her last.

Esme's hand lingers among the flag-like heads of the grasses. "I know." The face of the man that she killed in '44, long after she had thought herself safe from such things, rises behind her closed eyes. "I know."

"Esme, I didn't – "

"Shhh, Edward it's alright. I've made my peace. Not with him, I can't ever presume to that, but with what I am, and what I did. We all must." She wipes her hand on her work apron and squeezes mine firmly.

"Bella was living in Arizona, yet she came here to Forks. We were living in Alaska, but we came to Forks, also. All of our actions have had consequences, haven't they? Who could know that we all would meet here? Not even Alice."

Esme draws in a slow breath, and I am transported to a cliff overlooking frigid grey water.

And rocks. The rocks below are sharp and clear. A damp wind pulls, tugging insistently toward that last step into emptiness. The thin coat with its flapping hem offers no warmth. Fingers and hands are already numb. The wind pulls, but it cannot pull out the ache of breasts too full of milk, heart too full of loss.

"I thought all my consequences would end there. But they never really do. The world goes on, one way or another. Sometimes we go on with it, too."

She pauses, with no thought at all, only feeling. If Jasper were here, I would know what it was. Now, I can only guess. After a time, she turns back to the garden, squats down again to tend it.

"You know, I still remember when I first met Carlisle. That is almost the only thing that I remember of my former life."

Carefully teasing the dead growth from the living, she crumbles it in her fingers and then works it back into the soil.

"That first sight will always feel like yesterday to me. Sometimes it is even more real to me than my real yesterdays. Those keep changing. But this memory remains the same.

"He was so beautiful to me."

Her words are surrounded by her memory. Windowpanes framing heroic clouds. The sun setting over her father's wheat fields. A slim, dark figure hurrying through the waist-high waves of amber and gold, not bothering at all to follow the road, or the long wagon track that led to the house.

"He was dressed in black, not white, but I still thought he was an angel. He held my hand when he talked to me. That had consequences, too. I will always believe that God led me to Ashland so that Carlisle could save me from my folly."

Esme pauses again, and takes my hand in both of hers, crumbled earth and all.

"Alice still says this will all work out. I choose to believe her. You should, too, Edward. You should, too."

Bella has pretty ankles. They are slender and sweet: not too bony, yet not too soft, either. She is lying on her stomach on her bed, knees bent, ankles aloft, crossed one over the other, as she reads my old journal.

I had thought she would be asleep by now, but she is not.

Seeing her light on, I should have gone home, but I did not.

I should have at least stayed in the forest, well away from her yard, guarding her from a distance, but I did not do that, either. Instead, I am playing squirrel here in the tree outside her window, clinging halfway up, keeping the trunk between her and me, peeking past it to watch her.

I cannot see what page or date she has read to. All I can do is be mesmerized by her ankles, bared as they are by loose pajamas that sag to her calves.

Her feet are like a pair of doves, nestled against each other there in mid air. I want to hold them in my hands. Even if they are the coldest part of her body, Bella's feet would still feel warm to my hands.

And my hands would feel cold to her feet.

Who wants to have their feet held by cold hands? Not even I.

Not even I.

A/N: There are so many people who make my writing possible, I just want to say thank you. My employer, who gives me enough livelihood that I can have the free time to do this. My family, who tolerate my disappearing into my woman cave to write. Averysubtlegift, who is absolutely tireless in reading, critiquing and encouraging. Geo3, who somehow sees beauty where I can only see a mare's nest of disorganized thought, Woodlily and Chicklette and Quothme who have held my hand SO much as I struggled with this breech-birth of a chapter; and every one of you wonderful readers who have been so patient, and have pm'd me and who just make all of this so worth while. Thank you all so much. Special heartfelt thank you also to Stephenie Meyer for creating this world and these characters who have enchanted me so.