Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,129

know what it’s called. It looks like all the others, thorny, half-dead.” Her expression was suddenly full of longing. “But in the springtime, it has these yellow fuzzy blossoms that look like pom-poms.” She demonstrated the size, pretending to hold a blossom between her thumb and index finger. “They smell… amazing. Like nothing else. Really faint, delicate—you’ll get a sudden hint of them in the breeze and then it’s gone. I should have included them with my favorite scents. I wish someone would make a candle or something.

“And then the sunsets are incredible,” she continued, switching subjects abruptly. “Seriously, you’ll never see anything close here.” She thought for another moment. “Even in the middle of the day, though, the sky—that’s the main thing. It’s not blue like the sky here—when you can even see it here. It’s brighter, paler. Sometimes it’s almost white. And it’s everywhere.” She emphasized her words with her hand, tracing an arc over her head. “There’s so much more sky there. If you get away from the lights of the city a little bit, you can see a million stars.” She smiled a wistful smile. “You really ought to check it out some night.”

“It’s beautiful to you.”

She nodded. “It’s not for everybody, I guess.” She paused, thoughtful, but I could see that there was more, so I let her think.

“I like the… minimalism,” she decided. “It’s an honest sort of place. It doesn’t hide anything.”

I thought of everything that was hidden from her here, and I wondered if her words meant that she was aware of this, of the invisible darkness gathered around her. But she stared at me with no judgment in her eyes.

She didn’t add anything more, and I thought by the way she was tucking her chin just slightly she might again be feeling like she was talking too much.

“You must miss it a great deal,” I prompted.

Her expression didn’t cloud over the way I half expected. “I did at first.”

“But now?”

“I guess I’m used to it here.” She smiled as though she was more than simply resigned to the forest and the rain.

“Tell me about your home there.”

She shrugged. “It’s nothing unusual. Stucco and tile, like I said. One story, three bedrooms, two baths. I miss my little bathroom most. Sharing with Charlie is stressful. Gravel and cactus outside. Everything inside is vintage seventies—wood paneling, linoleum, shag carpet, mustard Formica counters, the works. My mom’s not big on renovations. She claims the dated stuff has character.”

“What is your bedroom like?”

Her expression made me wonder if there was a joke I wasn’t getting. “Now or when I lived there?”

“Now?”

“I think it’s a yoga studio or something. My stuff is in the garage.”

I stared, surprised. “What will you do when you go back?”

She didn’t seem concerned. “We’ll shove the bed back in somehow.”

“Wasn’t there a third bedroom?”

“That’s her craft room. It would take an act of God to make space for a bed in there.” She laughed blithely. I would have thought she’d be planning to spend more time with her mother, but she spoke as though her time in Phoenix was past rather than future. I recognized the feeling of relief this engendered but tried to keep it off my face.

“What was your room like when you lived there?”

A minor blush. “Um, messy. I’m not the most organized.”

“Tell me about it.”

Again she gave me the you must be kidding look, but when I didn’t retract, she complied, miming the shapes with her hands.

“It’s a narrow room. Twin bed on the south wall and dresser on the north under the window, with a pretty tight aisle in between. I did have a little walk-in closet, which would have been cool, if I could have kept it tidy enough to be able to actually walk into it. My room here is bigger and less of a disaster, but that’s because I haven’t been here long enough make a serious mess.”

I made my face smooth, hiding the fact that I knew very well what her room was like here, and also my surprise that her room in Phoenix had been more cluttered.

“Um…” She looked to see if I wanted more, and I nodded to encourage her. “The ceiling fan is broken, just the light works, so I had a big noisy fan on top of the dresser. It sounds like a wind tunnel in the summer. But it’s a lot better for sleep than the rain here. The sound of the rain isn’t consistent enough.”

The thought