The Girl Who Was Taken (Renesme Cullens Twin Sister)

Twenty-six

Have this spontaneous behind the scenes look at the Cullen's! 

Edward

Bella was sitting at the dining room table. She'd been sitting at the dining room table for a couple hours now. Just sitting.

It had been a year since we got on that plane and Renesme had insisted she had a sister who was with the Volturi. Then she broke her own finger in the airplane bathroom. We visited the Volturi anyways, just as planned. There was no girl there. But I could hear their thoughts. They didn't make any sense. There was something they were all thinking that had seemed to be blocked from me. A blank space, constantly popping up the entire visit. And Demetri, their tracker confessed in front of everyone that the girl had died.

Bella hadn't said anything on the plane ride back. No one did. Everyone had been concerned and confused after our visit with the Volturi.

It turned out that everyone, aside from myself, Bella, and Alice, believed that I did have another daughter. But they confessed they believed she had died at sea, or was eaten by a vampire. That they had looked for her, and how could I not remember looking for her all those years ago? How could I just forget? And that block in the Volturi's minds, that shifting dark spot they all thought about, and the image of it, like a shadow of a person. Renesme even showed me with her gift she cupped her palm on my cheek and showed me an image of a girl who looked so much like Renesme, and how the Volturi locked her away in a tower.

"That must be your imagination," I told her.

She shook her head. "It was real."

But still, even ifI admitted that Renesme was showing me the truth, and that I did have a daughter who was locked away in a tower, we were too late. Because she was dead. She had thrown herself from the tower and killed herself before I could get there and save her.

I could not remember her. I suppose she looked like Renesme, but I couldn't picture her face. I had no recollection of her birth, despite having crystal clear memory of Renesme's. There was a blank spot in my mind where I knew she should be. Messily erased and fuzzy at the edges. And the more I tried to remember, the harder it was to even think.

I had a headache. But vampires couldn't have headaches. I hadn't had a head ache in the last ninety-three years. Nothing about any of this made sense. And yet, there it was, refusing to leave. Even after a year, after we mourned the life of a daughter I never knew, the thought of her wouldn't leave me. The knowlege that I couldn't remember her haunted me.

Renesme told me that I had been brainwashed. That her sister told her that her power is glamouring, to control other people. The existence of the power isn't too far fetched. But still, why would my daughter erase herself from my memory?

A piercing pain stabbed into my brain. I held my head in my arm, and made my way to a chair. I ended up slumping over the table. 

"Edward," Bella's worried voice asked, "what's wrong?"

I was breathing too hard to talk. I didn't need to breath, but it almost mades it bearable. Dulled the pain. She cupped my face in her hands. I grabbed onto them. As I let the idea of my dead daughter slip away, the pain eased.

"I don't remember," I whispered into the palm of her hand. I slipped off the table in my struggle. She cradled my head in her lap. "I'm sorry. I can't. I keep trying, but I can't."

I wished I could cry at that moment. I could feel dry salty dust slip under my eyes. Claw its way down my face. But no water.

I could feel her cold wedding band pressed against my cheek. I kissed it too. I opened my eyes to look at it.

My mothers ring. Elizabeth. 

And just a glimpse. A shred of remembrance. Elizabeth. That was what I named her. An image of holding her tiny body, just born, bloody and squished. And I had looked down at her in wonderment that there had been a second baby. It had been impossible to get an ultra sound. There was no way to see what had been growing inside Bella before she gave birth. But I had pulled the second child from the incision I cut into her uterus, and before I handed her off to Rosalie, I said her name out loud. "Jocelyn Elizabeth Cullen."

"What? Who's Jocelyn? Edward? Please. . ." I looked up at Bella's eyes. Golden. Wide and open like a doe's. My love. 

I pushed myself up to kiss her. "It's her name. Bella, I remember her name." 

"Jocelyn Elizabeth?"

"After my grandmother and mother." 

She combed her fingers through my hair, and then quietly asked, "Why did you never tell me?" 

I shook my head. "I don't know. I didn't want you to worry. That she was taken right under our noses while you were still transforming. We should have been more careful. Kept an eye on them closer. How could I not have protected them? My own daughters? I should have--" 

"Don't," Bella whispered, placing her lips on mine. "The past is the past." 

"She's dead now," I said in defeat.

"Shhh, " she hushes me, and looked over as the door opened and Renesme and Jacob walk inside. "We're still a family. Let's focus on what matters." 

Renesme was holding Jacobs hand. Her thoughts were a lull of nothing. I had noticed how as she got older, her thoughts became more guarded around me. She's wasn't smiling.

"Are you okay, Ness?" I asked.

She shook the daze away, and beamed a smile at us. "Yeah," she nodded. "I'm good."