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Edward doesn’t lie. He tells Bella that he loves her without bounds and he means it with a sort of fierce finality that it almost scares him. But there are always small omissions to his grand truths. He is a gentleman above all and sometimes there are things better told with kindness and restraint. So he promises Bella that she is the only one ever to touch his heart. And this is the truth and Edward doesn't tell Bella that someone else has come close once. Except the truth isn't always what he can remember.
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I. The Burial of the Dead
It was April the first time Edward came to Denali. The air was filled with the hush of the pervasive cold that he no longer felt. And all he could see was the snow. It covered everything in layers of forgetful white. There were too many things he was trying to forget.
Carlisle didn’t look Edward in the eye anymore. Edward knew why. Such sadness saturated the spaces between them but Carlisle didn’t blame him and Edward wanted Carlisle’s reproach more than his grief. Esme mourned the redness in Edward’s eyes and placed soft kisses against his forehead. She loved him too much to say anything but Edward heard it all anyways. I’m just glad that you are home with us.
Edward still felt the weight of his decisions. The fading heartbeats echoed in his ears. He would take a two hour shower and still smelled the human blood in his skin. Their ghosts lived with him in the red of his eyes and the flush of his cheeks. He was dirty now. There was blood everywhere.
The Denali family welcomed the three of them without question. The door of their small stone mansion of a house was left open like an invitation. “What a wonderful surprise! How have you been dear Carlisle?” Their greetings echoed through the valleys of the Alaska landscape. “Your family will always be our family.”
No one mentioned Edward’s previous absence or the color in his eyes that he carried like the scarlet letter.
*
The first words Tanya spoke to him were, “The past is not worth living in.” And they caught him off guard.
*
Tanya’s mind was a labyrinth: her thoughts like old velvet. She was from some old forgotten place, from some other time. She moved as a dancer while reciting 19th century German operas in her head. (Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu. Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?) [1] It was some ungodly hour of the night—her hair blazed red against the soft flickering flames of the fireplace and her eyes were piercing gold even within the darkness—and she took his breath away in a way that he didn’t think was possible anymore and he had to remind himself to keep breathing.
“Tristan and Isolde,” she told him when she saw him looking at her, hearing her thoughts. “I saw it in Vienna once and it was the most terrible, beautiful thing that I would have cried, if I could.”
Suddenly, Edward was struck with an overwhelming image of a young man standing on a cliff out looking at the stormy ocean churning beneath him. (Oed’ und leer das Meer.) [2] And the one he loved was gone, taken to her watery grave.
“Oh the tragedy,” she hummed.
Edward’s eyes followed her across the hall. Tanya walked in a light white gown made of some iridescent material that was thinner than the finest Japanese rice paper. The gown left very little to the imagination and swirled around her slender form like water.
Ghosts still haunted him, their faces frozen in the masks of horror from the moment of their demise. (So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.) He remembered the taste of copper on his tongue, sweeter than anything he had ever known.
“The tragedy,” Edward breathed into the night air.
*
Edward would run through the tundra so fast that everything passed him by in a blur, yet his memories stayed vigorously vivid, refusing to fade into the distorting landscape. Memory and desire; that was all he was. His kind had been damned to remember and damned to crave what cannot be taken. The blood that made his knees weak and his mind spin with lust. And no matter within what moral context he tried to justify his desires, his actions, everything fell short.
The dead should stay buried. Let them go. Her thoughts were comforting to him like old worn leather. She was his center, his stronghold. Bury your ghosts. And it takes nearly a month for the red to completely leave Edward’s eyes.
(April was the cruelest month.)
*
II. A Game of Chess
Sometimes, Edward wondered if Tanya could read his thoughts. She understood him in a way that terrified him, but he still drifted to her like gravity. Most of the time, he just wanted to be near her because her thoughts were like some ancient manuscript that he wanted to be lost in. The centuries that rolled in her mind, the millennia she had witnessed.
He rested his forehead against her temple. (Her hair spread out in fiery points, glowed into words.)
The silence between the two of them betrayed more than he intended, more than he ever hoped. Edward pretended that their families did not know.
*
The first time they kissed, it happened so fast that Edward wasn’t sure if it happened at all.
It came and gone like some soft fleeting thing, like the last muting of winter at its ends.
*
The second time they kissed, it was all passion and lust and nails digging into skin and hands clutching at hipbones. When they broke apart, eyes full of shadows, breathing shallow and jagged, something changed inexplicably: some invisible boundary broken, some final line crossed.
It was as though Edward saw her clearly for the first time, and she was devastating. Tanya was the stuff of legends—the face that launched a thousand ships, the beauty that divided Camelot, the seductress who came to men in their dreams. (The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed in the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines.)
“Who are you?” he asked listlessly against the white column of her throat where her pulse would have been.
A wicked little smile played on her lips. Who do you want me to be?
*
Edward wrote her lullabies at the piano in the drawing room. The first one he wrote on a whim, a gentle ditty that brought a silvery laugh from her mouth. Edward started to write her songs almost every night. Pages and pages of music soon covered the shelves and tables in the drawing room, until finally her lullabies swelled to become a symphony with multiple movements.
She sat on the silk divan near the window and listened to him play for hours in the morning.
“Do I really need a symphony?” she teased him.
His fingers stopped on top of the irony keys. “Of course,” he answered immediately, getting up from the bench and moving towards her. “I want you to have a symphony.”
“You shouldn’t flatter me so.”
He kissed her with his hands reaching down her body. When they parted, he was lying with her on the divan—her body fit against his like cobblestones—and she smiled the smile that made him weak in places he thought had died when he did. “Thank you for my symphony,” she murmured.
Edward grinned, intoxicated by her gold eyes and her hair that seemed blond under the sun. His fingers traced the floral patterns on her white lace gown.
She held him like a lover.
*
Summer was a strange time in Denali. The nights grew shorter and shorter until the sun barely set—the sky was perpetually lit, replaced by hours of twilight. Everything was inundated in a dreamy silver glow.
They had taken a hunting trip together and hadn’t been home for over a week. As the sun descended to the lowest point in the sky, Edward looked into the smooth Alaskan scenery: the soft curving of the mountain range melted away into the pastel colored sky, curving like the lines of Tanya’s thighs, the arc of her back. She lay in the June snow still as a statue of a Greek goddess; her eyes closed, feigning sleep, her white dress sprawling about her small form like wavelets. Some soft 12th century Latin hymn was turning around in her mind like a poem.
“I almost feel like I’m dreaming when it’s like this,” she whispered to him, opening her eyes to the unearthly glow of the sky. “Do you still remember what it was like to sleep?”
(I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.)
And that was the moment when Edward decided that his favorite time of day was twilight.
*
But twilight always passed within a few hours. Then Tanya was glittering gold under the yellow light of the sunrise.
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III . The Fire Sermon
Edward’s mother had strawberry blond hair. The memory suddenly came to him one day in July: a flash of reddish amber, clear green eyes, and heaviness in the back of his throat. His human memories had become like mosaic glass, little self contained pieces with ragged edges that don’t fit against each other, sharp bits that at one time had formed a coherent whole.
“You have hair like my mother,” he told Tanya one night under the velvet light of twilight because that was when she was the calmest.
She was lying against moss covered stones like a wood nymph dressed in white gauze. Her eyes did not leave the painted sky and she laughed. “Is that why you love me?”
“I don’t need a reason to love you,” he replied gently.
Silence, then she murmured, “Oh don’t say that Edward!”
“Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?”
Her gold eyes fell on him. “Of course. All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—‘I love you.’” [3]
“But we live forever.”
She made a soft sound—somewhere between a sigh and a laugh—and turned back to the horizon. (My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart under my feet.)
*
Tanya didn’t believe in love. Love was for the living and she had died many centuries ago.
*
Edward could no longer decipher Tanya’s thoughts. She was always reciting the same French poem. (Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!) [4] Other times, her thoughts were completely in some archaic Slavic language that no one remembered anymore.
*
“Tanya—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I know what you are going to say and you shouldn’t.”
He shook his head. “Esme is getting restless here, I’m afraid we might be leaving soon. But I want to tell you that I’ll stay,” he smiled. “I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”
She was suddenly as still as a painting like Botticelli’s Venus rising out of the waves. Her thoughts were incomprehensible.
“Edward,” she said in tones only he could hear.
His smile faded. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
“You are so young,” she told him sadly; it was the only reason she gave him.
*
In September, Carlisle received a letter offering him a position at a hospital in Rochester and the family left for New York.
*
Edward came back to Denali alone a month later. It was a snowy afternoon and his sudden presence stunned her.
“What—” she exclaimed, hearing his footfalls behind her, but the words were lost when he crushed his lips against hers with a fire burning in his eyes. She fell against the snow covered rocks, the space between them disappearing; a dark chuckle rose in her throat. (Exploring hands encounter no defense.) It was rough and it was angry: the terrible sound of granite grinding against marble.
She moaned into the falling snow as he pressed his teeth against her throat and sucked at her collarbone. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she clutched at his shoulder blades. His fingers pushed against her pale skin hard enough to leave marks. The white satin robe was torn into pieces, a heap in the earth, indistinguishable from the snow.
The frenzied movements of their bodies made the rocks rattle. It was visceral and desperate and hateful and as it ended, he groaned her name into the mess of her fiery hair, like breathing into flickering flames caught in the cold wind against the icy ground.
Finally, he pressed his forehead against her temple like he always did. The urgency was gone. His body softened and melted to fit against hers. Everything was still.
“Hey,” he said; it was a foreign sound.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and brought his face to rest against her chest, where her heart would have beat. “Hey,” she whispered. (Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.) [5]
*
The sky was violet as the sun set and they tried again.
The two of them moved in rhythm, forehead pressed against each other. This time it was slow and deliberate and gentle. This time, her name never left his lips. But as she looked into his dark onyx eyes, she saw all the things he never said.
Edward stayed until twilight, until the last light left the cloudy wintry sky and everything plunged into darkness. He left where he came.
(Burning, burning, burning, burning.)
*
IV. Death by Water
When Carlisle’s family visited again, it was immediately after the addition of their fifth member. They arrived in the dead of night hastily, cautiously, just ahead of a coming blizzard; the band of them with their gold eyes wary except for one, whose eyes raged blood red.
The new born was strong. Stronger than anyone Tanya had known in centuries. She watched him curiously, his tremendous body twisted under the others’ grasps like some animal. It took all four of them to hold him down.
Carlisle muttered apologies to her between his calm words to the new born. “I’m sorry to come to you like this but you are the only one who can help us.”
Tanya nodded mutely and allowed them to enter the house.
She peered at Edward as he walked by, almost obscured by the other vampire’s distorting body. He looked exactly the same. Nothing changed: he had the same disheveled bronze hair, the same eyes. Except nothing was the same at all.
*
“Oh Carlisle,” she murmured sorrowfully. “What have you done?”
Having successfully returned from a hunting trip, the new born finally subdued. The family was at last calm for the first time. The frenzy from the night before had died away. Edward and the other female—a precarious pretty thing—were away in the guest room, still keeping a watchful eye on the new born.
“Two new vampires within three years? Carlisle, you know better than that.”
Carlisle sat hunched in the chair, looking haggard for the first time in a hundred years. Esme was making soothing lines across his back.
“I know Tanya,” he said. “But you should have been there. She was so young and lovely. Just full of radiance and beauty; it was such a terrible waste, such a horrible, awful waste. And him—I can’t—I just couldn’t—I had no choice.”
Tanya was silent for a long time. “There’s always a choice,” she finally said and turned away.
*
Winter in Alaska was full of darkness and snowstorms. The sun stayed low on the horizon and stayed only a few hours. Clouds and winds swept through the magnificent landscape like currents under the sea.
The house was silent most of the time except for Emmett’s thunderous laugh and brief soft conversations in the parlor and the winds that whistle through the cracks of windows and doors. Edward barely left the library, reading books under the candle light because there wasn’t electricity in that part of the house.
“Are you going to ignore me for the rest of eternity Edward?” she finally asked, watching him from the library door.
His eyes did not leave his book; it was a treatise from a 17th century rationalist philosopher, an old thing Tanya picked up centuries ago when the family lived in Europe. She stepped closer—she was wearing a thin white lace gown, the one he loved—and placed a soft kiss in his hair.
“Edward,” she said again. I never meant to hurt you.
A sound in the hallway made her look up: Rosalie, blond hair in perfect curls, stared at the two of them with ill-concealed contempt. “Irina wants to speak to you,” she said, her eyes studying how close they were, with Tanya’s hand on his shoulder, fingers brushing the hair around his ear.
Tanya left the library, and Edward never moved from his book.
(London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.)
*
“Don’t waste your time with Edward,” Rosalie said one day when he was away hunting.
Tanya raised an eyebrow, half amused, half surprised. “Is that so?”
“He’s not interested. He’s never shown any interest in any female,” Rosalie said with a vain little smile on her pretty lips.
The information startled her. “Really?” Tanya said faintly, her mind suddenly racing.
*
The winter passed slowly through Denali. Come April, Emmett was finally ready to go back. Rosalie was jubilant and kissed him fiercely on the mouth candidly.
*
The first words Edward spoke to her were on the evening before he left. They crossed paths in the taiga—she was leaving for a hunt, and he was returning from one. They stood within sight of each other for a long time, neither of them moving. The Alaskan wind howled around them: the cold they were no longer aware of.
“You broke my heart,” he finally said.
The words startled her. But her surprise quickly dissolved into anger. “What heart?” she asked pointedly, ironically. “This hard stony thing that no longer keeps a beat?”
“Tanya,” he pleaded.
She shook her head. “No Edward, you foolish boy. You confuse love with need and you cling to your guilt like it’s your skin. So don’t you dare blame me.” Her voice was rising.
His eyes widened, and he looked away, stunned.
But she continued: “Love? Redemption? Forgiveness? Is that what you want? Because you’ve forsaken your God when you became this? I’m sorry but I can’t give you what you seek,” her words hit him like daggers.
There is nothing for you here. Her thoughts like knife cuts.
Edward did not speak for a long time. Something had died between them. A part of him died and he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes. So he walked to her and kissed her temple. “Goodbye Tanya,” a soft voice in her ear as chilling as the winter wind and he was gone.
(A current under the sea picked his bones in whispers.)
*
The next day, Tanya watched from the window as Edward and his family departed for Washington, and somehow, in that moment, she knew that she had lost him forever to that nameless place.
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V. What the Thunder Said
Time had no meaning for Tanya anymore and the years slipped away like minutes. Wars were fought and ended: the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War. The great moments in history lay in front of her like chapters in a book: the assassination of President Kennedy, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly, Tanya found that yet another century had gone by.
The fourth time Edward came to Denali, it was January. It was the January that marked the millennia for Tanya and her sisters. The January of the year that represented ten centuries of human history they bore witness to.
Tanya felt the weight of her permanence against the terrible evanescence of human life. (He who was living is now dead, we who were living are now dying with little patience.) Time had always eluded her.
Edward came in a great hurry; his car skidded to a swift stop in front of the small stone mansion. He was alone and he looked like a dead man in the foyer.
Tanya took him into her arms, and held him like a child. “Edward,” she said softly. “I’m glad you are here.”
*
They watched the fireplace in silence. The flames made shadows dance across the silk wallpaper of the drawing room, allusions to the warmth that they no longer recognized. The night passed soundlessly into the morning; it was nearly noon when the sun appeared in the sky, hovering low on the horizon, caught perpetually between sunrise and sunset. The fire died with the hours, died into the quiet spaces between them and into the hanging words they could not voice.
“How have you been?” he finally asked.
She smiled in spite of herself. “Fine, and you?”
It took him just a few moments too long to reply. “Fine.” He kept his eyes away.
(Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air.)
*
When he told her about the human girl, in a tight unrecognizable voice, she could only laugh; it was dry and sardonic and it made him wince.
“You were always an emotional cutter, Edward,” she dared him to contradict her.
He drew in a sharp breath. “I’m going to kill her,” he whispered. His voice was cold with horror; he remembered his ghosts.
Her hand drifted to his cheek. “There’s always a choice, Edward,” she said.
*
Tanya had known Edward well enough to know that it was the things he did not say that made the difference. Edward picked at the truth until it became some idealized, cheap imitation of itself.
She listened to his sparse words and heard everything else.
“I miss you,” he said and she heard I need you.
“Bella,” he said and she heard absolution.
*
When vampires were born, they were born from their deaths. From their broken bodies, they came alive like some terrible afterthought of life, except it lasted forever; a mockery of what they used to be. They existed in between, caught in a perpetual twilight amid the radiance of day and restfulness of night, between life and death. Everything about them was frozen from the moment of their death, the moment of their birth; everything about them remained unchanging.
Tanya died a thousand years ago. She had died out of the betrayal of her lover and she was born with love dead in her empty chest.
Edward died in the night as his human body gave in to the plague and when he was born again, it was with the sickness inside him. It was still inside him, like guilt, like resentment—like the regret that saturated his marble tissue like an illness.
(These fragments I have shored against my ruins.)
*
He spent hours looking out the window. In January, the Alaskan landscape was a waste land of snow and ice, full of white like the dresses she wore and barren like her heart.
Tanya never loved him.
*
Edward asked again to stay, asked again for the things she could not give. For a moment she wanted to say yes.
“Go Edward,” she finally said. It was a command and it cut through everything like the sound of thunder during a storm. “Go home to your family.” (Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.) [6]
He nodded, solemn. His hand was still in her red hair and he pressed his lips against her white throat. He tried to hear her thoughts, but they were too diverse, too perplexing, too many different languages. (Quando fiam ceu chelidon.) [7]
“This is it, isn’t it?” he asked desperately even though he already knew the answer.
“The beginning and the end,” she replied anyways.
*
Edward left after a week. He drove so fast the tundra and taiga blended into each other. Each moment was both a death and a rebirth.
(In a flash of lightning, then a damp gust bringing rain.)
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When Bella asks about Denali, the question hangs in the air like a bad dream. He tells her she’s being absurd; he says there’s nothing to tell; he only gives her small pieces of the truth. Because he doesn’t lie, because he still wonders about the truth, and because he never quite understood it to begin with. Why Tanya never loves him, why he needs her, and why he keeps Tanya with him in a place between heart and stomach.
Years and centuries from now, Edward will find himself back in Denali or wherever Tanya is. And each time he finds her, he finds his center because she is the point of constancy which he revolves around. In the future, he will understand and it will be nothing like a bad dream, or like the horror of Tanya’s name falling from Bella’s lips.
Someday from now, Tanya will kiss him full on the mouth with her hair blazing like fire and for a moment he will forget about Bella’s brown chocolate hair. For a moment, he will surrender himself to the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. [8]
In the future, he will understand and everything will start again, returning like swallows in the spring, like the first rain after the dry season, like their beginning and their end.
(Shantih.) [9]
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Footnotes
[1] “Fresh blows the wind to the homeland. My Irish darling, where do you linger?” German. From Richard Wagner’s 19th century opera, Tristan und Isolde.
[2] “Desolate and empty the sea.” German. From Richard Wagner’s 19th century opera, Tristan und Isolde.
[3] From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Off-Shore Pirate.”
[4] “And, O those children’s voices singing in the dome!” French. From Paul Verlaine’s poem Parsifal.
[5] “Then he hid himself in the fire that purified them.” Italian. From Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVI 148.
[6] “Give. Sympathize. Control.” Sanskrit. From the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad.
[7] “When shall I become like the swallow?” Latin. From Pervigilium Veneris (Vigil of Venus).
[8] From T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes.”
[9] “The peace which passeth understanding.” Sanskrit. A formal ending to an Upanishad.
**Everything in brackets is quoted directly from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.**