Just playing in Stephenie's field of dreams ...
A Bad Thing
I did a bad thing.
I peeked.
The last page of Edward's journal. I peeked.
It's completely blank.
So is the page before that.
And the one before that.
I went back five pages and still nothing, and then I got scared.
Because obviously something stopped Edward from filling this journal up.
World War I.
That can't be right. Edward's birthday was on June 20th. (That was a happy day. His mom threw a huge garden party, and his dad even let him and his friends shoot off some roman candles after all the eating and singing and birthday caking were done.) The point is, he would have not even been seventeen and a half when the war ended. Too young to enlist, even on Armistice Day. I checked.
But there were boys as young as sixteen who had fibbed themselves onto the boats and into the ranks. I checked that, too.
Oh, Edward.
Is that what he did? Run away from his parents and go to be a soldier? Left this diary behind? Never to be finished? I can't even bear to think about it.
His friend signed up. His best friend, Tommy Borden, the one who was a year older than him.
It had been the Fourth of July. Edward's family had gone to Riverview Park. That was a big, popular amusement park in Chicago – all shiny and new back then, just built in 1904. There are lots of old postcards of it on Google. One of them is pasted in my scrapbook now. They had a carousel and a scenic railway, and an exhibit re-enacting a naval battle from the Civil War. There was food and bandstands, and a Hell Gate and a Hades Entrance, too. Who knew people were so fascinated with death back in those days?
There had been a sunset concert with patriotic music. Edward had written about the crowd singing along, with songs like "Battle Hymn of the Republic", and "Over There." How the sound of all the men's voices was "stirring", how he wondered if his voice would someday be as deep as his father's.
His friend Tommy Borden was there, too; and under the fireworks he had pulled Edward aside behind the band shell, to tell him he'd signed up with the recruiter at the post office that morning.
I wonder if it was the same post office where those two boys (What two boys? I bet it was this Tommy, and another one of their friends) had stolen the poster of the pretty Navy girl.
Is that what Edward did? Is that why the last who-knows-how-many pages of his journal are blank? (I'm too scared to check exactly how many.) Did he run away to the war, to be with his friend? To watch his back like they'd always done since grade school?
Maybe he just put away the childish thing.
It's so stupid for me to be worried about this boy, who lived and died before I was even born. But I don't want him to have died young. In those horrible trenches, with the mud, and the artillery pounding all around them. I want him to have had a long happy life. If he had, he could have, maybe, just maybe, been alive still when I was born.
I want so much for there to have been a time – even if it was only very short – when this Edward Anthony Masen and I were in the world together. Even if it were only for just one day. It's not impossible. He was born in 1901. I was born in 1991. A man can live to be ninety, or a little more, can't he?
I'm lying on my bed, with the journal in my hands. It feels so familiar to me now. It feels like I've always had it. The leather is so soft. It feels nice when I rest my cheek against it. It smells like me now, more than Edward. And it smells like the cedar sprig too. That makes me sad. I don't want it to not smell like Edward any more. Even though he's not the Edward who wrote this. That boy's smell I'll never know.
Why does all of this hurt so much?
I'm afraid to read forward from where I've gotten to – end of July, 1918.
Instead I'm lying on my side, holding the journal to my chest and asking.
Please, God, keep him safe. Don't let anything bad happen to him. Send your angels to look after him.
Does that even work? Can a prayer reach back in time?
But God's time is eternity. There is no now or then. Only here. So I pray with all my might.
And turn the page.
I sit with the dead doe in my arms, her throat savaged open. But not bleeding. No. All of that is inside of me now.
Her body cools so rapidly. When I sprang at her, she had no time to run. Only to turn, and look at me with Isabella's eyes. Now, they all look at me with Isabella's eyes.
"Edward. Edward!"
Alice's voice frightens me.
"What do you see?" I ask her, frantically. Our whole family is united in the purpose of keeping Bella safe, now. And yet, what certainty do I have?
Alice laughs lightly. "I see you lost in thought." She emerges from the bracken, bending under the low-sweeping branch of a spruce. Here in the deep forest, with her small form and jet-black hair, she could truly pass for one of the fairy folk. Morgaine, reincarnated – and now immortal. Jasper emerges behind her, her tall Galahad. Their mouths are clean of the blood of their kills. I put mine down. They do their best to be polite, but I can see how odd I look to them, clinging to the carcass.
I am hunting with my family again. Hunting alone put me too much in mind of that other time I walked by myself – there could hardly be a worse remembrance to have before going to Bella's window each night.
"It's going to be all right, Edward. It really is. I'm pretty sure." Alice's and Jasper's hands have found their way to each other. They reconciled in private, but the wordless peace between them laps at us all when we are together.
"That's easy for you to say."
"It's not. It's not easy at all."
I move away from the dead doe, wiping my mouth with my palm, remembering barely in time not to wipe that on my trousers, but to lick away the last stain from my life line with my tongue. There is no getting around it. We are creatures, beasts.
"Edward."
Did I say that out loud? Or did Jasper pick up my feeling, and transmit it to Alice? I could sift through his thoughts to find out. Or I can just speak.
"We're freaks. The three of us most of all."
"That's an unkind thought, brother. And ungrateful. Your girl would be dead without our gifts, all three of us."
When did it happen? When did she become my girl?
I don't need his recasting of that first day to know – if I were not a telepath, and Alice not clairvoyant, and if Jasper had no power to project grief and remorse – what a bloodbath it would have been, when that girl's scent first filled all my senses.
And how many times after that was I pulled back, again and again, because Alice could see, and Jasper could make me feel, and I could be shown, silently, secretly, with no one knowing but us?
Alice is melting into Jasper's side, brows knit almost into one behind her spiky bangs, lip almost trembling. She glares at me from the shelter of her mate's arms.
"We're not freaks! We're not freaks! "
My moment of revulsion must have leaked through Jasper to her, and right now he is making sure that I feel her distress right back, bright and clear.
"We're guardians, Edward, we're guardians. Can't you see? You're the guardian of our pasts. You've heard all our memories, and you hold them for us, keep them safe. And Jasper, he guards our present." That's why we need him so much. "He guards our hearts, and shows us to each other, so we don't hurt each other too much. And me … I … I guard our future."
Her face is turned into Jasper's chest, now. His fingers thread through her hair, and his lips brush her crown.
"Shhh, little bird, it's all right. It's all right."
"Oh, Edward, I'm so sorry! Can you forgive me? I almost lost our future, almost pushed Bella off a cliff."
My angry heart shocks me, with spiteful words still not spent. "How could you do it?" Right in front of them both, I say it, "If you had let me go right at the start I could have stopped Jasper."
"No, not stopped! Killed. You would have killed him. I couldn't, Edward, I just couldn't."
Mind yourself, boy. And he plays her anguish into me. But I am no stranger to anguish.
"You were ready to sacrifice Bella! After all your talk about how she was going to be your friend!"
"No, Edward, I would never! I could never! She's going to love me, want me."
"Then how? Why? What the hell were you doing?"
"There's a thing called faith, Edward." Her memories race through her head – years, decades, wandering; with nothing to lead her but the glimmer of blond hair and a soft voice, and a strange satori of herself pounced on a lynx, surrounded by kin with golden eyes.
"Sometimes it's all we have."
I snort in a way my mother would never have approved. "You think the world is really so kind? You think there really is a heaven … a higher power?"
"I'm talking about faith in people we love, Edward. Even if I couldn't see it, I had to … I had to believe."
Jasper holds her tighter.
"We're all on your side now," he says, "all on Bella's side. But you're as worried as ever. Why?"
How can I explain it? This horrible unease. Is it just because I had been given such a dreadful fright? Or is it because her blood still unravels me, will always be just a heartbeat, just a breath away, from carnage. I am so wretchedly desperate. Desperate to keep her safe. Desperate to keep her in this world.
A tiny glimpse leaks through my sister's mind. Like a flash of pale skin seen through a keyhole. And then she puts her hand over it.
"Alice, you can't keep hiding from me like this. You have to show me."
She struggles, debates, finally lets me see.
Bella pale. Bella cold. Bella bloodless.
Bella perfected.
I am appalled. "How long have you been seeing this?"
"Since yesterday."
Since Jasper said, "She's part of us now, Edward. For better or worse."
No, longer.
The vision had come to her as I had clung to the tree outside of Bella's window, transfixed by the sight of her alive.
None of that evil has happened.
And I still have a chance to make sure that it never will.
I plead with my sister. "You don't see her living a long, happy life? Loved by a granddaughter?"
Carrying my journal with her into the arms of the earth …
"Not any more, Edward. Not any more."
A/N: Here are the post cards of Riverview Park (along with some others). The renditions are from when Edward was a child, around 1908-1910. I wonder which one Bella chose for the scrap-book ...?
h t t p : / / chicagopc . info / entertainment_amusement_parks . htm
Here is the song, "Over There". People's voices and pronunciation sounded different in those days. The popular singer who is recorded here was a tenor, but one can imagine the voices of many men joining in at the concert ...
h t t p : / / www . youtube . com / watch?v=wbggEGUaE28
As always, heartfelt thanks to my midwives: averysubtlegift, WoodLily, malianani, SaritaDreaming
Thank you, dear readers for visiting this little tale.