From Hell to Breakfast

by Meghan Tifft

  “I hardly recognized you,” Lucinda says, almost as if this can stop him.

  “Yeah,” he says vaguely, pointing. “I need that.”

  She opens her mouth. She looks back. She feels her breath blow out in flimsy tatters.

  “You can’t have this,” Rory is already saying. “This is hers. His. Her boyfriend’s—”

  The apartment manager is shaking his head. “She’s damaging apartment property.”

  “What?” says Lucinda.

  “I can’t have you taking that up and down like that.” The manager peels his eyes at her. Then at Rory.

  “What?” she tries again. Lucinda is clutching her throat. It doesn’t make any sense. He can’t do this now.

  “It’s going into storage until Monday. You can check it out with me through the business office. We have a rule here about hauling equipment up and down the steps.” The manager plucks a paper from somewhere behind his ear—or in his hair. Suddenly he’s handing it to her.

  “Are you kidding?” Rory says. “What equipment? It’s not equipment.”

  “It’s in the lease.”

  Her fingers fumble to unfold the paper, and when they do she sees heavy black lead scrawled over its yellow surface. It’s a repair estimate, filled out by a business called Icon Ironworks, for two thousand dollars.

  “That wrought iron is fucked,” the apartment manager’s arm flings out. “It all has to be redone. Also, noise matters.”

  Beside her, Rory has begun to blow out battle-axes of breath, just like her father used to do, his raised elbow as he steadies the coffin brandished like a battering ram. “No way,” he says. “You can’t prove we damaged property.”

  “I can,” says the manager. He doesn’t elaborate.

  Lucinda, raising her eyes, sensing her great, everlasting futility, cannot seem to stir herself into the debate. It’s all over. Her heart swishes on some great pendulum, blowing vast distances in her chest. She can’t get her voice. It’s all her fault.

  “Oh come on,” Rory says, like it’s all a mad, elaborate scam.

  The manager tilts himself back. There’s a pause, a gritty shoe-scuffing silence, during which he seems to be ready for something to happen, and that is when Lucinda sees his dolly parked down the breezeway at the top of the stairs.

  “We won’t move it from the apartment.” She barely murmurs, wanting nothing more than to put it back.

  The manager shakes his head. “Too late. You already cost me money.”

  Lucinda looks at Rory. Rory’s face is a red, swarming gas, very small and dense. He is having trouble keeping the coffin steady. He looks floridly at both of them.

  “Time to move,” says the manager.

  Then Rory seems to step into a weightlifter’s stance, to peer cruelly over the edge of the railing.

  “Stop,” says Lucinda, thinking the worst.

  “I’ll call the cops,” says the apartment manager.

  Rory scuffs a brute breath. “I’m not helping you,” he says. He drops the coffin down.

  They watch the manager sidle up and carefully put his shoulder into the dinged buttery wood. He hefts the wobbling coffin to his own shoulder and stands for a moment, calibrating, his face caged in a look of concentration. Then he teeters over to his dolly. As he eases it onto the carpeted ledge and bungees it, Lucinda feels the need to reach out for the wrought-iron railing. The manager bumps his way down the stairs, hair sagging like a soaked sponge. Lucinda wants to wretch.

  Rory makes immediate haste to leave, and before Lucinda knows it he is lobbing out threats over the manager’s head, riding the sails of a last spat promise to her as he blunders down the other staircase. Lucinda can hardly keep up with him. He’s going home. He’ll confer with Lauren. There’s another one and he can use it. For a moment, watching him dash away, she feels lost. How will she get to the play? It’s starting in under two hours. Fumbling with the cold metal foliage in her hand, she can see the ugly hump of the couch through a crack in her curtains. He’ll be back.

  Now, reopening the door, Lucinda’s thoughts are guttering in and out. Just like that. It had passed before her with the incantations of a spell. Yet another craven nosedive into meekness. Each new circumstance seems to slap her more insensate than the last. Now what will she say to Dracula? Could another coffin even work? Lucinda wavers in the darkness. When she turns on the light is when she finds herself back once more in the wreckage of another ambush.

  First her knife on the table, a shiny wet blot in the light of the lamp. How did it get there? All day, she’s stayed away from it. Dracula was sealed in like a mummy, but then, abruptly, when she had come up from the parking lot with Rory he had not been taking his shower—he was simply gone. It both did and didn’t surprise her, after their last exchange. What was here, in abundance, was the paper plumage he kept folding and leaving behind. Lucinda picks one of the pieces up. When she unfolds it, she realizes it’s mail. The envelope is marked FINAL PAYCHECK, adamantly, as if to get somebody to open it. On the other side she finds her name, printed in wet black pen. There’s no stamp.

  Lucinda is all the way inside now. She wonders if Richard delivered this here himself, while she was out. She wonders if Dracula had been here to take it.

  “I thought you’d be here.”

  That was what he’d said to her the last time she saw him, when he’d tried to give her an envelope just like this. It was at Vanessa’s funeral.

  She had been shocked to see him, and to be there at all. Her friend was somehow dead, and here she was standing in death’s dim foyer. Richard was sniffing intimately at her, eyes red. She couldn’t tell, looking at his face, what exactly he was feeling.

  “What happened?” she said, not knowing what she meant. Then she regretted it. Richard was stuffed into his green shirt like an olive, his face a blue cheese oozing out the top. His coat was turned open at the zipper and his hand pulled at something that wanted to stay in the inside pocket. He got it out and jerked his head around before jabbing it at her. She had just barely gotten herself in the door.

  “You’re living with him,” he said, but she wouldn’t take the envelope. “The same thing happened to my daughter,” he said. “You need to get out of there.”

  Lucinda found her mouth too stiff to move.

  “Put it away.” Richard pushed up his glasses, grimly expecting something. “I don’t want him to see it.”

  Even as she felt her thoughts open to utter darkness, unable to croak out a question of any kind, a blot of shadow was softly beckoning for her, some peripheral swishing like leaves silent behind the window. She turned and saw that they were being summoned by a tall, spruced-up usher. Obligingly, they staggered into a room of milling people, lit by long, cloud-coated windows. Lucinda pushed the envelope back at Richard’s maroon tie and heard it dropping through his hands as she teetered in. She didn’t know why. He didn’t follow her at first. There were chair arrangements, little pats and strokes of speech everywhere, people smiling their hooks of humble greeting. Someone touched her arm.

  The lady smiled as if they’d already known each other.

  Lucinda smiled back then, holding her sleeves down over her wrists. There was some jam-up in her throat.

  “Are you a friend?” said the woman, nodding with a great big swish of perfume. She had a head of flaky brown hair.

  “Yes,” Lucinda managed to warble out.

  The woman’s smile was rather blank and flummoxed. “Good, I invited as many…” She nodded off into the room. “I’m sure you knew,” the woman said, “Vanessa was…” She continued to nod and smile as if her head were trembling on a spring.

  Lucinda nodded back.

  Now the woman seemed to have gotten her head stuck at a somewhat savage tilt. “So, you’re…?”

  Lucinda stared at the gazing face.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oh. Lucinda.”

  Richard was pacing the room’s periphery and periodically aiming a snout into th
e air, as if to keep her scent in range. Then he looked at something.

  “I’m—” said Lucinda. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Or at someone.

  “To do?” The woman crimped her mouth in confusion.

  “I’ve never been to a funeral before.” Lucinda tried to follow his gaze.

  “Oh, well,” the woman broke into a thistled look of sympathy. “They’re all—you know,” said the woman’s plunging voice.

  Lucinda nodded. The woman, as it turned out, was Vanessa’s aunt. Lucinda had hung off her left side, like an unwanted umbrella, until it was time to go in for the service—getting put down here and there behind chair legs and on windowsills, the woman’s look less and less tolerant of her own accessory miscalculation even as she resigned herself to carrying it around.

  Inside, she didn’t see anybody. There were heads and sniffs, and they had played that song, and Vanessa’s voice had greased the aisles like a dirty diesel glow, all the right words, slathering all of them. It was almost unbearable, the density of that voice. In the reception hall, digital copies were available to all attendees. Lucinda had skidded past them and now she was heading for the door.

  That was when Richard found her again.

  “Here. Now don’t,” he said, grabbing her at the wrist, down at her side, by the reception room door. This was a different room. There were tables of food inside. “I want to talk to you about this.” Lucinda had almost been feeling a quivery improvement in herself, like a bad stomach settling.

  “Listen,” Richard said.

  It was that song. That song was just a terrible coincidence.

  Lucinda yanked at her clamped hand and dodged into the foyer.

  She hadn’t been planning to go to rehearsal after the funeral. But sitting in the crusty quiet of her living room, imagining another bungled melodic interjection, she had turned on the TV, and the glib stream of images, that irksome buzz that only got louder the longer the TV was on, was even worse on her nerves. She decided to go to rehearsal. She arrived late and slipped in at the back during breathing exercises. It was so much better. Here was living flesh that looked just as pallid and immaterial under the lights, ready to be sloughed off. She was not sure why this soothed her.

  Maybe Rory noticed her, sitting there in her peaked gloom. But suddenly he was tilting back and clutching his pectoral with a brawny hand. “Do you need a ride home?”

  “Oh,” said Lucinda. She looked at the hand. That was the first time Rory had taken her to the apartment. He brought her all the way up to the door and paused, as if unsure of something.

  “Did you just move in?” he asked, doing a hollow sweep of the room.

  “With my boyfriend,” she said, doing a tin rendering of her voice.

  Lucinda remembers standing shivering in her apartment with Rory looking around. Lucinda is still shivering in her apartment as she looks around now.

  Lucinda is in the bedroom, yanking on double sets of leggings and cinching a bathrobe over her turtleneck sweater over her costume. The empty closet gapes at her like a gouged-out eye. She’s still not warm. Lucinda hugs her arms.

  Homelessly dressed and waiting, she goes twitching around the apartment like a bug with two broken antennae, unable to decide what to do or where to go. When will Rory come back? She needs to let Dracula know what happened to his coffin. She herself doesn’t know what happened. She keeps repeating her lines for the play.

  She thinks she might go open the front door, but instead, she finds herself tripping druggily the other way, to the bathroom. It seems so quiet here now. What had the Russian said to her, that other day?

  Go home, little girl. Does your daddy miss you? Does your daddy know where you are? Who puts the key in, you or your daddy? It was through the wall as it always was.

  Lucinda looks in the mirror. She sees the gray stretch of lips, the plum paste of her skin. My bad. I’ll fix. The note is still there. She pulls it down. Then, twisting and gagging, she is suddenly swinging off her own string, tingling again and too stiffly astringent for feeling. It only lasts a minute. You need to get out of there. That’s what Richard said. Go home. That’s what the Russian said. Rory said, Did you just move in?

  With my boyfriend. That was what Lucinda said.

  Lucinda spits in the sink. She has a feeling she is right now looking at something she doesn’t see. All she knows is she can’t stay here. That’s what Richard seemed to be saying. Under the running water is a sound like knocking. Is it pipes or him at the door? When she runs to it there’s nobody there. It occurs to her then, staring out, that before she leaves for the play she should really write Dracula a note.

  The Keys

  This is interesting. Dracula is turning into a dribble of mist. Pretty soon, if he continues at this rate, he’ll have to be kept in a jar. He’s sitting in the Russian’s apartment. His fingers tendril out beyond him, his nose drifts up in front of his eyes. Will he soon do the movie rendition of himself—his signature blast of steam? What will be left of him when he’s gone? It’s not an unfunny thought. To think that all his many eons are just about to end right here, in a bummy slouch on a stranger’s couch. He’s not even showered. Maybe it’s just the light in here. Maybe it’s his imagination.

  The Russian’s apartment is much different from his. Everything in his own is rickety and collapsed, like the battered props of an overused set. The one dining room chair. The lumpy couch, a mealy patchwork brown. That lamp that looks like an empty bottle, the kind you toss off a ship with a note inside. The Russian’s apartment has big, bovine chairs, burnished frames, leather tables stretched taut under ashtrays and magazines. There is an actual plant—some kind of spineless cactus. Dracula dabbles his forgotten fingers in the pot.

  The girl at the bus depot had asked him to come here.

  It turned out to be a good idea.

  At the bus depot she had said to him, “You’re some kind of spy.” She had come up to him and said this.

  Dracula was standing at the bulletin board, patting his pockets. He was looking for Lucinda’s play like her play was a lost dog. Where was the play? Was it tonight? Wasn’t it? There was not a flyer in sight. He knew he used to see them here.

  All the information he needed was at home on the fridge. But he couldn’t get in. Where were his keys? Dracula can’t seem to think at all anymore. He feels like he’s swirling in a slow, broken drain. His thoughts are caught in the clog. He can actually smell them.

  The girl can too. She makes an egg face. “I know what you’re doing here. You don’t have to pretend.” She has brown short hair, blown back in a swoop, and now she’s noticing his shirt.

  “I don’t think—” Dracula is thinking of Lucinda. He looks at the bulletin board. He’s not pretending anything. When he woke up tonight she was gone without her stuff. Then when he came back from the trash she didn’t answer his knock. Was it his fault? Had she left already? I think we should stop seeing each other. He is beginning to take this literally.

  “I’ve seen you,” the girl says.

  Well, who hasn’t. Except of course himself. He peels his lips. “I’m not following.”

  The girl shakes her head, as if to reprimand that expression away. Dracula can hardly stand it. His head has been hammering all the way since yesterday. “I know you live right over there. You’re following me. And he’s following you.”

  “Right over where?” he scoffs, “Who’s following me?” He knows at least that’s true.

  “Dracula,” she says.

  It’s the closest corroboration he’s gotten yet of who he is. And yet it’s not.

  “I’m Dracula,” he says.

  Now, it seems she was talking about the Russian.

  It’s funny. When the cop had walked Dracula to his door last night, he had peered pointedly at the next-door window, black as a boxed ocean. Dracula wondered if he’d heard something about the Russian’s accessorized departure. There was gossip here like everywhere.

  Now, he is
in the Russian’s apartment, looking through the glass darkly.

  The rest of the conversation with that girl had been even worse.

  She shook her head. “You can’t leave me alone. You’re not letting me get away.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why were you there all those times?”

  “I was where all those times? Maybe it was you who was there all those times,” he countered recklessly into the void. The girl’s cheeks looked swollen, rolled into biscuits right under her eyes.

  “I mean you—”

  “Maybe you were following me.” Suddenly he wondered—is this who’d been following him? Or was it Dracula? Or the Russian. It was impossible to make any sense of it.

  The girl looked at him. “I need to get into my old apartment,” she said, cutting through the confusion. “I need something.”

  Dracula didn’t understand. It was odd. That’s exactly what he needed.

  “Your apartment,” she said.

  “Wait a second,” Dracula said.

  She almost rolled her eyes. “I—no, I need to get in. Can you let me in?”

  Seriously? She wanted to get into his apartment? After accusing him of following her and spying for somebody she wanted personal access now to his private domicile? Dracula skipped the incredulous questions of why and what and went straight for the cinch. “Actually,” he said, patting his pants. “I don’t have keys.”

  She scuffed a breath, like she didn’t have time for him or his lame excuses.

  Dracula put up his hands. “That’s what I’m doing here. I’m locked out.”

  He had gone to take the trash to the bin. The shirt that he put on in the dark was the stale vomit one from the night before. He left it—he was about to take his shower anyway. Lucinda, when he came out, was nowhere to be seen. Her bag for going to the theater was packed and on the arm of the couch. He walked to the dumpsters and then on the way back he saw the truck. Idling.

  Dracula looked up at his window. His ears were suddenly fuming. Were they up there? His hand fit right into the crevice of the cracked window, and he pulled the lock. That’s when the door opened. That’s when he got in and jerked into place and pushed the metal clutch and yanked the gearshift into reverse. It was like driving for UPS. He gave the gas a nasty stomp. The engine roared and he jolted forward. He gritted his teeth, thinking of Lucinda sitting in here, thinking of her taking his coffin with whoever it was. Then, when he was drifting toward the exit, whoever it was was flailing after him. Dracula plowed the beast out on the road and for several blocks floored the gas. When he was done doing what he was doing he swerved into the gateway for the cemetery. There was a pylon in the way. Then his head hit the wheel and he looked, stunned, out the cracked windshield. Again, in the same spot. His head detonated. He got out with the keys and threw them in a slovenly manner. Then, with some onlooker laying on their horn, he scurried across the street and walked home. That was how he’d gotten locked out.