In 1911, Esme broke her leg falling out of a tree she’d climbed. Her
family lived on a farm on the outskirts of Columbus. The local doctor
was away, and it was after dark by the time they got her to the small
hospital in Columbus. A Dr. Cullen treated her. It was his last month
in town. She never got over the experience. (PC1)
Esme
was the last of her friends to marry. She was thinking of moving West
to be a schoolteacher, but her father didn’t think it was respectable
for a lady to live alone in the wilds. The son of a family friend, a
man with good prospects, wanted to marry her, and her father pressured
her to accept. She was indifferent towards Charles Evenson, but not
opposed to him. She married him in 1917 at the age of 22, and quickly
found that this had been a bad decision. Charles’s public face was very
different from his private face; he abused her. Her parents counseled
her to be a good wife and keep quiet. When he was drafted to fight in
WW1, it was a huge relief to her. When he came back in 1919, it was
terrifying. (PC1)
Shortly
after his return, Esme discovered she was pregnant. The pregnancy was
Esme’s catalyst to escape. She couldn’t let a child be brought into
that home. She ran away in 1920 to live with a second cousin in
Milwaukee, and then moved further north when word of her whereabouts
leaked to her parents. She blended in easily, pretending to be one of
the many war widows. She taught school in a small community outside
Ashland. When her baby died in 1921 from a lung infection just a few
days after he was born, she had nothing left. She had no idea that
Carlisle was working in the little hospital in Ashland when she jumped
off the cliff outside the town. Carlisle remembered her, of course, as
the happy girl she had been at sixteen. He didn’t want her to die and
so he saved her. (PC1)
When
she opened her eyes, in all that pain, and saw the face that she’d
never forgotten in a decade, she was relieved. She was not really that
upset to find out she was a vampire, but she didn’t take it as in
stride as Emmett had. Still, she was happy to be with the man/vampire
of her dreams. She did always have that maternal ache, and, as the
physically oldest of the Cullen’s, she fell into a mothering role. (PC1)
