Luminosity (Book One)

Chapter 8: The Future

Edward was gone for about fifteen minutes, and I passed the time by writing out the plan I'd devised, with some trivial embellishments. I knew Edward would remember it all perfectly, but I didn't want to have to consult him every time I wanted to check up on a detail.

I was scribbling a list of possible Europe and non-Europe destinations in the margins of my notebook when Edward and Rosalie came downstairs. She looked disgruntled but basically peaceable, and Edward held his features carefully neutral. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and watched her approach me, and then went back up - I supposed at least one of them thought it was a two-person conversation. Rosalie's high heels ticked regularly against the tile as she walked towards me and sat down.

"Edward said he didn't tell you about what led to - this," Rosalie said softly, gesturing at her perfect, white face. I nodded. "It's not a nice story," she said. "It doesn't have a happy ending. I'm going to keep it short."

It had been 1933, during the Great Depression, and Rosalie had been eighteen and living in Rochester with her parents and two brothers. And beautiful. Even as a human she'd been beautiful. The Depression didn't affect her family very much - her father had had a secure banking job, and Rosalie was quite able to traipse about town in pretty dresses imagining that the poor people she saw had brought their fates on themselves. She made her own life sound like a fairy tale - she was the lovely, happy princess, who wanted certain things and had every reason to believe she'd get them. Accordingly, one day the son of her father's employer began to court her. She went on at some length about the lavish wedding planned to end their whirlwind engagement, and about his habit of sending her a bouquet of roses every day so her house overflowed with them and she always smelled of their petals.

Rosalie experienced one pang of envy: a friend of hers had married young, at seventeen, and a year later had a baby boy, adorable with dark curls and dimples. They were not as sheltered from the economic troubles of the world as Rosalie's family was. Rosalie's parents would never have dreamed of letting her marry a man like her friend's carpenter husband, while they approved of the banker's son. But Rosalie's friend had the pretty baby, the happy marriage. So Rosalie amused herself with mental images of her own fair-haired children playing on the wide lawns she'd have surrounding her house soon enough.

The way Rosalie told it, it sounded almost rehearsed, like she'd thought a lot about all of the details and knew just how she preferred to describe them, the exact best intonation and vocabulary. Everything sounded floaty, and far away, memorized as much as remembered.

She implied, but did not quite state, the unhappy ending she'd promised.

But I was able to piece together the events well enough.

Her fiancé and several of his friends had gotten drunk, found her walking home alone from her friend's house, and gang-raped her, leaving her injured enough to be dying.

That was how Carlisle had found her, broken and bleeding in the middle of the street under the unseasonable April snow. He'd brought her home and turned her - over, Rosalie said, Edward's objections (he thought she was too recognizable, Rosalie explained on his behalf; and if they'd met socially, I doubted he'd have been favorably impressed). Between her screams (which she informed me did nothing about the pain of the transition), they were able to explain what she was becoming; and finally, she finished, and finally believed them.

Rosalie then chose this moment to tell me, "You know, my record is almost as clean as Carlisle's. Better than Esme's. A thousand times better than Edward. I've never tasted human blood." She sounded proud.

"Almost as clean...?"

"I did kill them," she said, complacently, and I knew at once that "they" were her attackers, and I could feel no ill judgment towards her. "But I was very careful not to spill their blood. I knew I wouldn't be able to resist that, and I didn't want any part of them in me."