Esme Cullen (born Esme Platt and later Esme Evenson)
is Carlisle Cullen's wife and the adoptive mother of Edward, Rosalie,
Emmett, Alice, and Jasper. 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.
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.
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.
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.
