Rags & Bones Page 12

  “There is a sharp pain here,” you told the doctor, touching just above the small swell of your breast. “I had a dream where a great catlike creature crouched over me, so I must be feverish. I feel so cold that my teeth are chattering. But I’m not nearly as sick as Millcara.”

  I lay beside you on the bed, sick with fear, sick with dread and with remorse, playing sick as I always did and hating myself for it. I blinked up at the doctor. “I’ll be fine. Just please help Laura.”

  The doctor laughed at our devotion to one another. I decided that I hated him.

  I heard him whispering to your father that it might be psychoemotional distress of some sort, but since the two of them had the same symptoms he was going to order an EKG, just to be sure there was no infection of the lining of the heart. And later, I heard your father on the phone with Mother, asking her about insurance cards and telling her that he was so sorry not to have taken better care of me.

  And we missed the funeral, of course, lying in your bed, watching Wizards of Waverly Place on television. You had come to the part of your illness where you were constantly thirsty. You drank gallons of orange juice, big bottles of Pellegrino, one after the other, mugs of tea, and glasses and glasses of water right from the unfiltered tap. You said you could taste the metal of the pipes in it and the minerals and the darting of the little killifishes in the river it came from.

  “Wouldn’t that be amazing if it was true, Millcara?” you wanted to know. “If I could really taste the past? If I could taste the dust on the moon and know everything there was to know about it—or if I could really take a bite from the sun and lick the rings of Saturn? Did you know that black holes sing? They do. So if it’s possible to hear the universe then maybe it’s possible to taste it too.” Your eyes shone with fever.

  That was when I made my decision. There would never be anyone like you again. You must not die.

  I waited until after midnight, when you were asleep, and snuck out, a jacket over my pajamas and flip-flops on my feet. I loitered around an apartment lobby across town, until a girl came down to get her mail. I asked her if she was bored. She said she was. I told her I knew a game. She followed me to the stairway, where I eventually left her.

  When I got back to your apartment, I tried to creep in, but your father was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with your uncle. His leather duffel was on the floor and they had a bottle of some amber liquor on the table along with empty glasses in front of them.

  “Millcara, where were you?” your father asked, sounding cold and mean and not at all normal.

  Your uncle turned around. And I saw in his suddenly narrowed eyes that he knew me—knew what I was as no one but my victims has ever done. I backed up involuntarily. He half-stood before he remembered himself and sank back into his chair.

  But a moment after it happened, I thought I must have imagined it. It must be guilt, I told myself, my own body slow with satiation, guilty at being caught creeping home from a prowl.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what happened. I woke in the bodega on the corner, but I couldn’t remember why I’d gone there. I think I was sleepwalking. I had the milk case open and was just staring at the bottles.”

  Your father stood up and led me back to your room. “Please, you and Laura have to rest. I know that Bertha’s death rattled you both. The doctor thinks that your both getting ill like you did might be a reaction to stress—but I can’t have you going out in the middle of the night, do you understand? Your parents aren’t here and I have to trust you to be responsible.”

  “I hate funerals,” I said with utter sincerity. “I hate them.”

  He put both his hands on my shoulders and regarded me with a kind of fond exasperation. “Go to bed and we’ll see how you’re feeling in the morning.” He smelled like booze and his eyes were red-rimmed, swollen with crying.

  I crept into your room, your uncle’s eyes on me. Once I was inside, I turned the lock and slid under your covers, reaching for your hand and twining your fingers in mine. Your breath was hot on my cheek and I was so happy for the steady rise and fall of your chest. I settled against you, closing my eyes and letting your languid warmth enter my limbs.

  A few moments later, you whispered against my neck, “Most of the universe is made of dark matter, but no one can see it. Can you see it?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what you meant, but it might just have been more fever talk.

  “Will it hurt?” you asked, your mouth moving against my skin, making me shiver.

  “Will what hurt?” My heart was pounding now, sleep very far away.

  “Dying,” you said.

  I wanted to tell you it wouldn’t hurt at all, your heartbeats slowing, counting down to the thudding moment of final forever stopping, the gulp of one last breath. I wanted to tell you that, but I didn’t want to lie. And that was all over anyway, I’d promised myself. I was never going to—not ever again.

  The next morning, you were much better. You put on clothes and ate breakfast with your father. I slept late, huddled under the covers, the scent of you in my nose. My stomach hurt from feeding too much and too quickly the night before in the stairwell.

  Then you came in, jumping on the bed. “Look,” you said. “Wake up and look at this.”

  See, when you told me to wake up, I did. I woke up right away for you and you better wake up for me. Right now, please. Pleasepleaseplease. Morning is coming, the sun is racing toward us, and your uncle will wake with it.

  But then what you wanted was for me to look at a black-and-white photograph your uncle had given you. In it, a woman was sitting on a chair and a girl leaned in from the arm. They were at a New Year’s Eve party in 1924—the year was marked on a centerpiece in glittering numbers. Confetti-covered tables and a band played blurrily on the stage behind them. The woman was wearing a shimmering beaded dress, her short black hair in finger waves and a necklace of eighteenth-century ivory theater tickets around her throat. The little girl had on a frothy lace dress that made her look younger than she was and a long strand of pearls. They both held champagne coupes in their hands. The little girl was me, of course, and the woman was Mother.

  “She looks just like you,” you said.

  Hazy with sleep, I nearly told you it was a picture from a costume party, before I realized how ridiculous that would sound. Maybe your uncle hoped that I would be stupid enough to do something suspicious. I’m sure he tried to warn you about me, at least insofar as he thought he could without sounding crazy. No one as reasonable as your father would believe the little girl snuggled up against his daughter was a fiend. And you, Laura, you loved me, didn’t you? You love me still. You have to—I won’t be able to do what Mother says and keep going on if you don’t.

  “Wow,” I said. “She really does. But like a younger me—and that dress is ridiculous.”

  “I wish there were still parties like that,” you said.

  At the party, dizzy with too much champagne, I’d met a boy a year younger than I was. We’d sat under one of the tables, like it was a play fort. He stabbed his fork into the swollen ankles of a society dame who stopped near it and told me all about his new puppy. Boys are loud and wild and gross lots of the time, but that night, I liked him. I think he died three days later.

  I knew then that your uncle knew even more about me and Mother than I’d guessed when I’d seen the way he looked at me. He did not just suspect my nature—he knew of my history and of Mother’s. He had come here hunting me. He knew what I had done to his daughter.

  I had never been hunted before, although Mother had spoken in dark whispers of suspicious men, and a need for care.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” I told you, and escaped into the attached bathroom with a sundress clutched in my hand.

  There, under the cold spray, as I watched my strange form, I knew I had to leave you. At the thought, I felt such a fierce possessiveness overtake me that I wanted nothing more than to run back to your bedroom, th
row my arms around you, and draw you down to me. Without you, the hours of my days would pass in an agony of nervous terror that you would replace me in your heart. You would share your confidences with another, finding some new beloved friend to tell your stories about quasars and the Marianas Trench being the very deepest part of the ocean. I could not imagine there was a girl in the world who would not hang on your every word, who would not give anything to lie beside you as you slept, her breath mingling with yours.

  In that state, I found my phone, unused and barely charged. I called Mother and in a voice tight with panic, told her about your uncle.

  “He gave Laura a picture of us—an old picture—but he hasn’t said anything to her. I heard his ex-wife say that it was his fault that Bertha was dead. I think she believes her daughter was killed in revenge for his hunting of—of things such as we are. I don’t know what he means to do, but I just want him gone.”

  “Laura? Bertha?” Mother asked. “There are too many names. Slow down, I can’t follow the story.”

  “Laura’s the girl you left me with,” I said, which seemed such a poor explanation for what you were to me. And I feared for you—Mother can be gluttonous and families can bring out an envious cruelty in her.

  “I’m coming right now,” she said. “Be ready to leave when I get there. Tell them your mother is taking you shopping and that she hopes she can take everyone to dinner later.”

  For a moment, the fiction seemed so normal that I could pretend it was true. We went to lunch and dinner with the mothers of your other friends all the time—they ordered salads and martinis and told us funny stories about when they were girls.

  But what she meant was that we were going to run—to another city, another string of fast friendships, and the emptiness of longing.

  “Okay,” I said in a whisper, wishing I hadn’t called her. Your father liked me, after all. If he thought that your uncle meant to hurt me, surely he wouldn’t allow it. No one believed in monsters anymore.

  But summer would end, it would drag on into the chill of fall and I would lose you to school and to your sprint toward adolescence. I would stay forever as I am, my breasts two mosquito bites, my baby teeth never fully lost, my body forever hairless under my arms and between my legs. Only my hair and nails grow, longer and longer, forever and ever.

  “Stay with the girl and her father,” Mother said. “Don’t let yourself be alone anywhere the uncle can corner you. Where are you now?”

  “In Laura’s room,” I told her.

  “Go into the kitchen and stay there.”

  I turned off my phone and tucked it into the pocket of my sundress. I could feel the other me, the night me, turning underneath my skin restlessly, but I shoved it down into the shadows and went out into the other room.

  You sat at the kitchen island, a glass of water resting by your left hand. There were dark circles under your eyes and you appeared very pale, but you were smiling all the same. You spoke to me, and even though I was so scared that I do not know if I made any sense I managed to cross the room to sit beside you.

  Because as I began to move, I saw that you weren’t alone in the apartment.

  Sitting at the dining table, your uncle had a steak knife in his hand and was using it to carve a long stick.

  Eventually, I dared to ask, “Where’s your dad?”

  “He went out to get some bagels. I told him I was hungry and he was so happy that he wanted us to have a big brunch. Lox. Whitefish. Bialys.”

  “You hungry, Millcara?” your uncle asked, and his tone was taunting.

  I looked a question at you, but you only shrugged in answer. The grieving are expected to act strange and everyone else is expected to ignore them.

  I thought about Bertha, who’d been nothing like the man sitting on the other side of the room—a man with the glassy, bloodshot eyes of someone who hadn’t slept in days. Bertha was nerdy and nice, full of life, obsessed with posting GIFs of her favorite TV shows to her blog and downloading British television. She’d been my friend and I’d drunk up all her strength until there was nothing left, and I hated that she was gone. All those things shouldn’t have been possible to be true at the same time, but they were.

  I looked at your uncle and I felt all the shame of my fiendish self, doomed to be ever separate from the world. And the bright sun coming through the windows made my head pound. I thought longingly of the shadows of your bedroom, of hiding under the covers of your bed like the child I would never truly be again.

  In that instant, all I wanted was my mother.

  The doorbell rang, and you jumped off your stool to answer it. Even though you were still sick you must have been tired of being cooped up inside, languishing in your bed. You wanted to move.

  “Hello, Laura,” Mother said, as though she remembered you. “I’ve come to take Millcara shopping. Is she ready?”

  Even though I am not quite a child, I have always been child enough to need her, to see her as children see their mothers, as safe harbor, as a wonderful and indestructible sanctuary. I never could grow past that need.

  Her face was what I saw, coming in with the light, on the first day of my new life. Hair black as the shadows that became my home, lips curved in a politely charming smile. She had saved me then and she would save me now.

  Those are the things I thought in those moments.

  Your uncle was on his feet, striding toward her. And in that split second, I saw the mistake she was making. She didn’t remember you and she didn’t remember your father, so when she saw a man in the apartment, she made an assumption.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of my daughter.” She took a step forward, past him, disregarding him on her way to me. She was always good at passing things off, my mother, acting as if everything she did was perfectly ordinary and that she expected the whole world to go along with her wishes.

  Her eyes went to me, bright and clear.

  I heard her gasp, a small soft sound, and I saw her eyes change. I had not seen his hand move.

  Nobody knows better than I that death can come swift, and quiet, and ordinary as a knock on the door. But not for us, Mother had always said. Never for us.

  She crumpled around the stick he had shoved into her back, sagging forward, and fell on her face. I heard you suppressing a cry, but I could not look at you. I could look only at her shining hair spread out on the rug, and at his cold face and the stake in his hand.

  His work was not quite done.

  But you raced past him, grabbing me and pushing me toward the door. And I ran, ran through the carpeted hallway, racing down the stairway, down twenty-eight floors to dash across the marble foyer, past the security man at the front desk and out onto the street. I ran for the park, running until I found a cool, dark place. I shook uncontrollably. I felt lost, so utterly and completely lost that I couldn’t even really think anything but animal thoughts. My other, darker self took over for days.

  When I came to myself, I thought of you.

  And that is why I crept back into your room, all these weeks later. Seeing you was a balm to my heart: your eyes closed, your hair spread over your pillow like a halo of gold, your mouth as red as poppies and your skin—

  Then your eyes opened.

  I slid away from you, but you only smiled.

  “I heard footsteps,” you whispered. “I kept my eyes closed, so you wouldn’t know I heard.”

  I just stared at you, dumbfounded, my happiness that you were still my friend, still my Laura, making me feel as though I were drunk.

  You sat up, nightgown puddling in your lap as you pushed away the sheets. “Are we going to run away?”

  “Yes,” I told you, barely able to say more than that. I forced myself to go on. “But you can’t come with me the way you are. Do you understand?”

  “Just do it,” you said, leaning forward and shutting my mouth with your own. “Don’t explain. If you explain, I’ll be afraid.”

  You told me it was okay, so wake up. WAKE UP
.

  Wake up, because we can do anything now. We can dive in your deep seas and walk across the sands of your moon.

  Wake up, so I can show you all the mysteries I promised you.

  Wake up, so we can drink secrets together.

  Wake up. I love you. The stars are shining down on us. The taste of you is still in my mouth. The sun is coming. Wake up and run through the streets with me, run through the world with me. Wakeupwakeupwakeup.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE …………………………………

  I can’t remember how old I was when I first read Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic novella, Carmilla. I couldn’t have been older than thirteen, because that was the year I obsessively researched vampires for the footnote-filled paper that would allow me to graduate from middle school and enter high school. In my memory, Carmilla is just always there, a defining piece of my inner vampire mythos. In rereading it recently, I was struck by how much it read like a dark, hothouse fairy tale. I absolutely adore the language—all the hot lips and languid, gloating eyes—that made me fall in love with vampires in the first place. I always wondered what the story would have been like from Carmilla’s point of view, though, so in this story, I decided to try to puzzle it out.

  Figures of Earth (1921). Richmond, Virginia–based author James Branch Cabell wrote his exquisitely crafted, imaginative tales during the age of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. So it is little wonder, then, that mainstream popularity came his way only once, when his novel Jurgen was brought before the Supreme Court on charges of obscenity and for a time his name was indeed on every reader’s lips. But his sophisticated, mildly erotic adventures filled with mysterious wizards and gods that steadily give way to yet more great and powerful gods were never the stuff of popular taste, and so his writing has been relegated to the obscure and the antiquarian. But this tale of the pig-keeper and very reluctant hero Manuel is a colorful romp touching on all the finer points of chivalry and heroism. Falling into and out of beds and bedrooms and high adventures and quests at every opportunity, Manuel molds, as his mother has told him to do, a fine figure of himself from every available material at his disposal.