The images refined. Alice would go in alone, I saw, through the front door. She decided a dozen different places to look for an extra house key, then located it when she resolved to check under the eaves over the front door.
When we arrived at the house, it took Alice only seconds to follow the course she’d already set for herself. After locking the front door’s handle but leaving the deadbolt unlatched as she’d found it, Alice climbed into Bella’s truck. The engine grumbled to life with the volume of a thunderclap. There was no one home to notice it now.
The trip back to school was slower, hampered by the maximum speed the old Chevy was able to produce. I wondered how Bella could stand it, but then she seemed to prefer driving slowly. Alice parked in the space my Volvo had left open, and shut the noisy engine off.
I looked at the rusty behemoth, imagining Bella in it. It had survived Tyler’s van with barely a scratch, but obviously there were no airbags or crumple zones. I felt my eyebrows pull together.
Alice climbed into my passenger seat.
Here, she thought. She held out a piece of stationery and a pen.
I took them from her. “I’ll concede that you’re useful.”
You couldn’t survive without me.
I wrote a brief note, then darted out to leave it on the driver’s seat of Bella’s truck. I knew there was no real power to the action, but hopefully it would remind her of her promise. It did make me feel just a little bit less anxious.
15. PROBABILITY
“NOW, ALICE,” I BEGAN AS I SHUT MY DOOR.
She sighed. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to—
“It’s not real,” I interrupted, accelerating away from the parking lot. I didn’t have to think about the road. I knew it too well. “It’s just an old vision. Before everything. Before I knew I loved her.”
In her head, it was there again, that worst of all visions—the agonizing potential that had tortured me for so many weeks, the future Alice had seen the day I’d pushed Bella out of the way of the van.
Bella’s body in my arms, twisted and white and lifeless… a ragged, blue-edged gash across her broken neck… her blood red on my lips and blazing crimson in my eyes.
The vision in Alice’s memory brought a furious snarl ripping up my throat—an involuntary response to the pain that lashed through me.
Alice froze, her eyes anxious.
It’s the same place, Alice had realized today in the cafeteria, her thoughts tinged with a horror I hadn’t understood at first.
I’d never looked beyond the ghastly central image—I could barely stand to see that much. But Alice had been examining her visions for decades longer than I. She knew how to remove her feelings from the equation, how to be impartial, how to look at the picture without flinching away from it.
Alice had been able to absorb details… like the scenery.
The gruesome tableau was set in the same meadow where I planned to take Bella tomorrow.
“It can’t still be valid. You didn’t see it again, you just remembered it.”
Alice shook her head slowly.
It’s not just a memory, Edward. I see itnow.
“We’ll go somewhere else.”
In her head, backgrounds to her vision spun like whirling kaleidoscopes, changing from bright to dark and back. The foreground remained the same. I cringed away from the pictures, trying to push them from my mental eye, wishing I could blind it.
“I’ll cancel,” I said through my teeth. “She’s forgiven my broken promises before.”
The vision shimmered, wavered, and then returned to solidity, with sharp, clear edges.
Her blood is so strong to you, Edward. As you get closer to her…
“I’ll go back to keeping my distance.”
“I don’t think that will work. It didn’t before.”
“I’ll leave.”
She flinched at the agony in my voice, and the picture in her head shivered again. The seasons changed, but the central figures remained.
“It’s still there, Edward.”
“How can that be?” I snarled.
“Because if you leave, you will come back,” she said, her voice implacable.
“No,” I said. “I can stay away. I know I can.”
“You can’t,” she said calmly. “Maybe… if it was just your own pain…”
Her mind raced through a flipbook of futures. Bella’s face from a thousand different angles, always tinted gray, sunless. She was thinner, unfamiliar hollows beneath her cheekbones, deep circles under her eyes, her expression empty. One could call it lifeless—but it would only be a metaphor. Not like the other visions.
“What’s wrong? Why is she like that?”
“Because you’ve left. She’s not… doing well.”
I hated it when Alice spoke like that, in her strange present-future tense, which made it sound like the tragedy was happening right now.
“Better than other options,” I said.
“Do you really think you could leave her like that? Do you think you wouldn’t come back to check? Do you think when you saw her that way, you would be able to keep from speaking?”
As she asked her questions, I saw the answers in her head. Myself in the shadows, watching. Creeping back to Bella’s room. Seeing her suffer through a nightmare, curled into a ball, her arms tight around her chest, gasping for air even in her sleep. Alice curled in on herself, too, wrapping her arms tensely around her knees in sympathy.
Of course Alice was right. I felt an echo of the emotions that I would feel then, in this version of the future, and I knew I would come back—just to check. And then, when I saw this… I would wake her. I would not be able to watch her suffer.
The futures realigned into the same inevitable vision, only delayed a bit.
“I should never have come back,” I whispered.
What if I’d never learned to love her? What if I hadn’t known what I was missing?
Alice was shaking her head.
There were things I saw, while you were away.…
I waited for her to show me, but she was focusing very hard on just looking at my face now. Trying not to show me.
“What things? What did you see?”
Her eyes were pained. They weren’t pleasant things. At some point—if you hadn’t come back when you did, if you’d never loved her—you would have come back for her anyway. To… hunt her.
Still no pictures, but I didn’t need them to understand. I reeled away from her, nearly losing control of the car. I stomped on the brake, and pulled off the road. The tires tore into the ferns and threw patches of moss onto the pavement.
The thought had been there, in the very beginning, when the monster was nearly unbridled. That there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t eventually follow her, wherever she might go.
“Give me something that will work!” I exploded. Alice cringed away from the volume. “Tell me another path! Show me how to stay away—where to go!”
In her thoughts, suddenly another vision replaced the first. A gasp of relief choked through my lips when the horror was removed. But this vision was not much better.
Alice and Bella, arms around each other, both marble white and diamond hard.
One too many pomegranate seeds, and she was bound to the underworld with me. No way back. Springtime, sunlight, family, future, soul, all stolen from her.
It’s sixty-forty… ish. Maybe even sixty-five-thirty-five. There’s still a good chance you won’t kill her.Her tone was one of encouragement.
“She’s dead, either way,” I whispered. “I’ll stop her heart.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant. I’m telling you that she has futures beyond the meadow… but first she has to go through the meadow—the metaphorical meadow—if you catch my meaning.”
Her thoughts… it was difficult to describe… widened out as if she was thinking everything at the same time—and I could see a tangle of threads, each thread a long line of frozen images, each thread a future told in snapshots, all of them snared together in a messy knot.
“I don’t understand.”
All her paths are leading to one point—all her paths are knotted together. Whether that point is in the meadow, or somewhere else, she’s tied to that moment of decision. Your decision, her decision.… Some of the threads continue on the other side. Some…
“Do not.” My voice faltered through my tight throat.
You can’t avoid it, Edward. You’re going to have to face it. Knowing it could easily go either way, you still have to face it.
“How do I save her? Tell me!”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to find the answer yourself, in the knot. I can’t see exactly what form it will take, but there will be a moment, I think—a test, a trial. I can see that, but I can’t help you with it. Only the two of you can choose in that moment.”
My teeth ground together.
You know that I love you, so listen to me now. Putting this off won’t change anything. Take her to your meadow, Edward, and—for me, and especially for you—bring her back again.
I let my head fall into my hands. I felt sick—like a damaged human, a victim of disease.
“How about some good news?” Alice asked gently.
I glared up at her. She smiled a small smile.
Seriously.
“Tell me, then.”
“I’ve seen a third way, Edward,” she said. “If you can get through the crisis, there’s a new path out there.”
“A new path?” I echoed blankly.
“It’s sketchy. But look.”
Another picture in her head. Not as sharp as the others. A trio in the cramped front room of Bella’s house. I was on the aged sofa, Bella beside me, my arm casually slung around her shoulders. Alice sat on the floor beside Bella, leaning against her leg in a familiar fashion. Alice and I were exactly the same as we always were, but this was a version of Bella I’d never seen before. Her skin was still soft and translucent, pink across the cheeks, healthy. Her eyes were still warm and brown and human. But she was different. I analyzed the changes, and realized what I was seeing.
Bella was not a girl, but a woman. Her legs looked a little longer, as if she’d grown an inch or two, and her body had rounded subtly, giving a new curvature to her slender frame. Her hair was sable-dark, as if she’d spent little time in the sun during the intervening years. Not many years, maybe three or four. But she was still human.
Joy and pain washed through me. She was still human; she was aging. This was the desperate, unlikely future that was the only one I could live with. The future that did not cheat her of either life or afterlife. The future that would take her away from me someday, as inevitably as day turned to night.
“It’s still not very probable, but I thought you’d like to know it was there. If you two get through the crisis, this is out there.”
“Thank you, Alice,” I whispered.
I put the car into drive, and pulled onto the road again, cutting off a minivan chugging along under the limit. I accelerated automatically, barely registering the process.
Of course, this is allyou, she thought. She was still picturing the unlikely trio on the sofa. This doesn’t take her wishes into account.
“What do you mean? Her wishes?”
“Did it never occur to you that Bella might not be willing to lose you? That one short mortal life might not be long enough for her?”
“That’s insanity. No one would choose—”
“No need to argue about it now. Crisis first.”
“Thanks, Alice,” I said again, caustically this time.
She trilled a laugh. It was a nervous sound, birdlike. She was every bit as on edge as I was, almost as horrified by the tragic possibilities.
“I know you love her, too,” I muttered.
It’s not the same.
“No, it isn’t.”
After all, Alice had Jasper. She had the center of her universe safely at her side—even more indestructible than most. And his soul was not on her conscience. She had brought Jasper nothing but happiness and peace.
I love you. You can do this.
I wanted to believe her, but I knew when her words were built on sure foundations, and when they were no more than ordinary hope.
I drove in silence to the edge of the national park and found an inconspicuous place to leave the car. Alice didn’t move when the car stopped. She could see that I would need a moment.
I closed my eyes and tried not to hear her, not to hear anything, to really focus my thoughts toward a decision. A resolution. I pressed my fingertips hard against my temples.
Alice said I would have to make a choice. I wanted to scream out loud that I’d already decided, that there was no decision, but even though it felt as though my whole being yearned for nothing but Bella’s safety, I knew the monster was still alive.
How did I kill it? Silence it forever?
Oh, he was quiet now. Hiding. Saving his strength for the fight that was coming.
For a few moments, I thought seriously about killing myself. It was the only way I knew to be sure that the monster didn’t survive.
But how? Carlisle had exhausted most of the possibilities in the beginning of his new life, and had never come close to ending his own story, despite his very real determination to do so. I would have no success acting alone.
Any of my family would be capable of doing it for me, but I knew that none of them would, no matter how I begged. Even Rosalie, who I’m sure would claim to be angry enough to do it, who might bluster and threaten the next time I saw her, would not. Because even though she sometimes hated me, she always loved me. And I knew if I could trade places with any of them, I would feel and act exactly the same way. I would not be able to harm any of my family, no matter how much pain they were in, no matter how much they wanted out.
There were others.… But Carlisle’s friends wouldn’t help me. They would never betray him so. I could think of one place I might go with the power to end the monster very quickly… but doing that would put Bella in danger. Though I’d not been the one to tell her the truth about myself, she knew things she was forbidden to know. It was nothing that would ever bring her the wrong kind of attention, unless I did something stupid, like go to Italy.
It was too bad the Quileute treaty was toothless these days. Three generations ago, all I would have had to do was walk to La Push. A useless idea now.
So those ways of killing the monster weren’t possible.
Alice seemed so sure that I had to go forward, to meet this head-on. But how could that be the right thing to do, when the possibility that I would kill Bella existed?
I flinched. The idea was so painful, I couldn’t imagine how the monster could get past my aversion to overcome me. He didn’t give anything away, just silently bided his time.
I sighed. Was there any choice but to face this head-on? Did it count as courage if one was compelled? I was sure it did not.
All I could do, it seemed, was cling to my decision with both hands, with all my strength. I would be stronger than my monster. I would not hurt Bella. I would do the most right thing that was left to me. I would be who she needed me to be.
And then suddenly, as I thought those words, it didn’t feel so impossible. Of course I could do that. I could be the Edward that Bella wanted, that she needed. I could grasp hold of that one sketchy future I could live with, and then will it into being. For Bella. Of course I could do that, if it was for her.
It felt stronger, this decision. Clearer. I opened my eyes and looked at Alice.
“Ah. That looks better,” she said. In her head, the tangle of threads was still a hopelessly confusing maze to me, but she saw more in it than I did. “Seventy-thirty. Whatever you’re thinking, keep thinking it.”
Perhaps just accepting the immediate future was the key. Facing it. Not underestimating my own evil. Bracing for it. Preparing.
I could do the most basic preparation now. This was why we were here.
Alice saw my action before I took it, and she was out her door and running before I had opened my own. I felt a shallow sensation of humor and almost smiled. She could never outrun me; she always tried to cheat.
And then I was running, too.
This way, Alice thought when I’d nearly caught up. Her mind was ranging ahead, looking for quarry. But while I caught the scent of several nearby options, clearly they weren’t what she wanted. She disregarded everything she saw.
I wasn’t exactly sure what she was searching so minutely for, but I followed her unhesitatingly. She ignored a few more flocks of deer, leading me deeper into the forest, angling south. I saw her searching ahead, seeing us in different corners of the park—all of them familiar. She drifted east, starting to curve north again. What was she looking for?
And then her thoughts settled on a slinking movement in the brush, glimpses of a tawny hide.
“Thanks, Alice, but—”
Shh! I’m hunting.
I rolled my eyes, but continued following her. She was trying to do something nice for me. There was no way for her to know how little it all mattered. I’d been force-feeding myself so much lately I doubted I would notice the difference between a lion and a rabbit.
It didn’t take us long to find her vision, now that she was focused on it. Once the movements of the animal were audible, Alice slowed to let me take the lead.
“I really shouldn’t, the park’s lion population—”
Alice’s mental tone was exasperated. Live a little.
There never was much point in fighting with Alice. I shrugged and passed her. I’d caught the scent now. It was easy to shift into another mode—just let the blood pull me forward as I stalked my prey.
It was relaxing to stop thinking for a few minutes. Just to be another predator—the apex predator. I heard Alice head east, searching for her own meal.
The lion hadn’t noticed me yet. He, too, was heading east on his own search, looking for something to hunt. Some other animal’s day would end better, thanks to me.
I was on him in a second. Unlike Emmett, I saw no point in giving the beast a chance to fight back. It would make no difference, and wasn’t it more humane to do it quickly? I snapped the lion’s neck and then quickly drained the warm body. I wasn’t that thirsty to begin with, so there wasn’t any real relief tied to the action. Force-feeding again.
When I was done, I followed Alice’s scent north. She’d found a sleeping doe, bedded down in a nest of brambles. Alice’s hunting style was more like mine than Emmett’s. It didn’t look like the creature had even woken up.
“Thank you,” I told her, to be courteous.
You’re welcome. There’s a bigger herd back to the west.
She got to her feet and led the way again. I bit back my sigh.
We were both done after one more. I was too full again, my insides feeling uncomfortably liquefied. I was surprised that she was ready to quit, though.
“I don’t mind continuing,” I told her, wondering if she’d seen that I would sit the next round out and was being polite.
“I’m going out tomorrow with Jasper,” she told me.
“Didn’t he just—”
“I’ve recently decided that more preparations are necessary,” she said, smiling. A new possibility.
In her mind, I saw our home. Carlisle and Esme waiting expectantly in the front room. The door opening, myself walking through, and next to me, holding my hand…
Alice laughed, and I tried to bring my face back under my control.
“How?” I asked. “When?”
“Soon.” Possibly Sunday…
“This Sunday?”
Yes, the one that comes after tomorrow.
Bella was perfect in the vision—human and healthy, smiling at my parents. She wore the blue blouse that made her skin glow.
As for how, I’m not entirely sure. This is just an outlying chance, but I wanted Jasper prepared.
Jasper at the foot of the stairs now, nodding politely to Bella, his eyes light gold.
“This is… through the knot?”
One of the threads.
It spun out again in her mind, the long ropes of possibilities. So many converging on tomorrow… not enough emerging on the other side.
“Where am I at?”
She pursed her lips. Seventy-five-twenty-five? She thought it like a question, and I could see she was being generous.
C’mon, she thought as she saw me hunch in on myself. You’d take that bet. I did.
Automatically, my lips pulled back over my teeth.
“Please!” she said. “Like I was going to pass up such an opportunity. This isn’t just about Bella. I’m relatively confident that she’ll be fine. This is about teaching Rosalie and Jasper some respect.”
“You’re not omniscient.”
“I’m close enough.”
I could not match her joking mood. “If you were omniscient, you’d be able to tell me what to do.”
You’ll figure it out, Edward. I know you will.
If only I could know that, too.
No one but my mother and father were home when we returned. Emmett had no doubt warned the others to make themselves scarce. It didn’t matter to me one way or another. I didn’t have the energy to care about their stupid game. Alice, too, ran off in search of Jasper. I was grateful for the thinning of the mental conversations. It helped me a little as I tried to concentrate.
Carlisle was waiting by the foot of the stairs, and his thoughts were hard to block, filled with all the same questions to which I’d just begged Alice for answers. I didn’t want to admit to him all the weaknesses that kept me from running away before any more damage was done. I didn’t want Carlisle to know the horror that would have come to pass if I hadn’t come back to Forks when I did, the depths to which my monster would have sunk.
I gave him one tight nod in acknowledgment as I passed him. He knew what it meant—that I was aware of all his fears, and that I had no good answer. With a sigh, he nodded back. He followed up the stairs more slowly, and I heard him join Esme in her study. They didn’t speak. I tried to ignore what she thought as she analyzed his expression: her alarm, her pain.
Carlisle, of all the others, even Alice, understood best how it was for me, the never-ending chatter and babble and commotion that was the inside of my head; he’d lived with me longest. So, without a word, he now led Esme to the large window we often used as an exit. Within seconds, they were far enough away that I could hear nothing. Silence at last. The only commotion in my head now was of my own making.
At first I moved slowly, at barely more than human speed, as I showered, cleaning the residue of the forest from my skin and hair. As before, in the car, I felt damaged, impaired, as if my strength had been drained away. All in my head, of course. It would be nothing but a miracle, a gift, if I could somehow truly lose my strength. If I could be weak, harmless, a danger to no one.
I’d almost forgotten my earlier fear—such a conceited fear—that Bella would find me repulsive when I revealed my true self in the sunlight. I was disgusted at myself for wasting even a moment over that selfish concern. But as I looked for fresh clothes, I had to think of it again. Not because it mattered whether she was sickened by me, but because I had a promise to keep.
I rarely gave what I wore a first thought, let alone a second. Alice stocked my closet with a wide variety of items that all seemed to go together. The main point of clothing was to help us blend in—to embrace the current time period’s fashion, to downplay our pallor, and to cover as much of our skin as possible without looking shockingly out of season. Alice pushed the limits within those constraints, offended by the idea of trying to make us look unnoticeable. She chose her own clothing and dressed the rest of us as a form of artistic expression. Our skin was covered, its pallid hue was never put in contrast with deeper tones, and we certainly were up to the minute with current style. But blend we did not. It seemed a harmless indulgence, like the cars we drove.
Alice’s forward-thinking taste aside, all my clothes were, if nothing else, designed for maximum coverage. If I were going to fulfill the spirit of my promise to Bella, I would need more than my hands exposed. The smaller my exposure, the easier it would be for her to compartmentalize my disease. She needed to see me for what I was.
At that moment I remembered a shirt, stuck in the back recesses of my closet, that I’d never worn.
The shirt was an anomaly. Usually, Alice wouldn’t get us anything that she couldn’t see us wearing. Typically, she was quite strict in following the letter of the law. I recalled the afternoon, two years ago, when I’d first seen the shirt hanging with a new lot of Alice’s acquisitions, tacked on at the very back, as if she knew it was all wrong.
“What’s this for?” I asked her.
She’d shrugged. I don’t know. It looked nice on the model.