by Meghan Tifft
Lauren heaves out a shaky sigh, squints an apologetic look, seems to sink into hesitating reverie. She wants to say something. Lucinda is sinking into reverie too. Is she mad about this? Furious? She can’t believe what she’s just heard. But is she mad? Why isn’t she more mad?
“It’s just been a rough year. My sister wouldn’t even talk to me about any of it. She just—” Lauren lifts a hand to her eyes. “My mom is—she’s got this autoimmune disease. Mo—he’s our stepfather—went septic after someone stabbed him. Out of the blue. Rory—it’s just—” she can’t finish. “And then Marty.” That’s an odd addendum. Lauren’s face squishes in. Lucinda, who unconsciously follows her dissolving gaze, finds herself looking back at the puppet. It is Marty’s, and it’s wearing a shirt that looks awfully like Vlad’s. It’s hanging from an open hole in the ceiling. She wants to say something to Lauren.
As much as she feels it, Lucinda finds her throat a dry canal, unable to cough up the wanted words. She repeats that name in her head. Amory. Is that the name of the sister? It’s the name on her mail, of the person who used to live there.
That’s when Warren comes in. “Here,” he says. He hands her a heavy rectangle.
“What is that?”
A mirror.
“It’s your piece of the party,” says Warren, tipping his head until his tassel touches his shoulder. He is all aglow with unknown antics. “You can have it. Carry it around,” he says like this is her special treat.
“Carry it around?”
Warren seems to notice her tone. He seems to notice she isn’t thrilled. “You can take it home after,” he says, as if this is her compensation. “Is your boyfriend around? I need him.”
“No,” Lucinda says, with certainty. There is no way Vlad would come here. He wouldn’t even know how to begin.
Lucinda looks at the mirror, its beveled edge that she tucks and clasps at her side, like a book. Lauren is sniffling, trying to smother herself into polite silence. She’s naked and painted at a party. Lucinda gets the wax of her hand to move toward Lauren. She does get a scrabble of fingers barely on her arm, cold and crumbly as a thornbush. Lauren flicks a lost smile. Is their friendship over? Lucinda wonders, but not in any pressing way. Maybe that means it isn’t.
It’s when Warren looks at Lauren that Lucinda decides to leave. She doesn’t like her brother in this moment. She doesn’t know why she’d ever introduce a friend to him. He’s a fish in the sink, smiling its dead eye at you.
While he and Lauren talk, Lucinda recedes, out of the room and down the hall, past some gory photos of Warren doing his art, to the entry with its fading vapor smell like the stale gasp off a test tube, and then outside. The night lusters up around her, dips her in its deep distilling eons. Rory cups his hands in the truck, right exactly where she left him. He’s grim and brimming.
“What’s that?” he says, when she gets in.
“Nothing,” says Lucinda. She puts the mirror between them. She forgot she had it.
Lucinda knows, from experience, that if she holds a certain look long enough she can stir the silence of another person. Tease them into speech. She did this with Richard all the time. She didn’t have to do it with Vanessa. It only works on certain people and she can usually tell, when she wants to, when and how. It’s one of the ways in which she is subtle. Just like Marty has said. Keep doing that over and over. She does do it over and over. It’s her only power.
She does it to Rory now. Perhaps she wants to punish him, to fault him unflinchingly, to make him dredge it up from his own self. Rory, though, looks like he’s being unspooled into a mess of different expressions. He looks afraid and overeager. He looks like he might be about to confess something else.
Lucinda looks away.
“Let’s go,” she says. She hears but doesn’t see him put the key in. She thinks but doesn’t say she can’t forgive him.
The Voice
There’s a bullhorn on the beach tonight, or else the voice is in his head. Dracula can’t tell.
At the party, Warren had given him a drink. “It’s reconstituted,” he said, not unkindly. This was after what happened with the birds.
Dracula wasn’t hearing the voice then. His ears then were full of the dull discoursing of waves, rushing through him as if he were Dracula but with the echoing head of a conch. Maybe a conch is what they’re using on the beach tonight.
“Excuse me?” Dracula swivels around.
He did the same thing at Warren’s. It was when Warren had given him the drink.
“I said it’s grape juice.” It was Lucinda’s mother who said it. Yelled it, mightily, over the kitchen counter and his vast internal expanse. Because Dracula wasn’t hearing anything. His shock came just as much from seeing her there. What was she doing in Warren’s kitchen? Now Dracula was supposed to believe she was back here doing drinks the whole time. It took him a minute to see that it wasn’t so preposterous. He sometimes forgot she was also Warren’s mother. “Drink,” she said—yelled—at him. Dracula sipped his drink like a seasick captain. He still didn’t like that she was there.
So many people were there. As it turned out. Lucinda’s mother. That mailman. He thought he saw the apartment manager. A thatch of towering blond that reminded him of the Russian. Were these friends of Warren’s? He even saw the cop.
The cop was shrugging out with all the others through the back door, looking livid and clench-jawed, jostling away from the breaking static and stiff footfalls of his officially dispatched associates—now entering the other rooms, matriculating deeper and closer amid the manic disarray of foot traffic, to mutters of where’s my purse and am I bleeding. Hissed pronouncements of hasty escape. The cops are already here. People slinking away through this kitchen door without their coats. Lucinda’s mother holding the door open. “Come to dinner Sunday,” she said. Dracula got out too.
Now he’s here, taking the quick way home.
Dracula clutches the stale dog in his pulsing mitt, feeling huge as a vengeful deity, dented as a day-old doughnut.
This dinner is dreary. This life is weary. He can’t decide if he’s getting made fun of or being invited into some allegory of the night. I must resolve my father’s ash.
“Excuse me?” Dracula swivels around.
It’s unreal here, on the beach. He can’t tell if there’s an event or if everyone is sneaking home the same way. From the party. From all the parties. Some fanatic out here speaking conveniently to their moral dissolutions. Is that what this is? The voice is somewhat lost and recurring, like a sermon, or some hoax recording blasted on a grainy loop. It does not help him. Is he part of whatever this is or interloping as usual? The voice talks him into circles of evasive pursuit. I am the mouth that molts. I am the dog that floats. Dracula looks at his dog. Is it the dog doing the voice? Weirder things have happened. Tonight even. I am the bone the bird flew home. Well, it’s a puzzle. Because Dracula’s not. But he is going home.
The voice, whatever it is, seems to be having some kind of loopy fun at his expense.
Above him, the stars are the frozen dice of the sea, tossed up in that dastardly gamble. The problem here is that the other people besides him are all together in formations, here with each other in clumps and clusters that seem to make him the odd man out—couples clutching, bright vociferous youths in migratory flocks. He blunders by and they shrug him away like sea mist and shadow.
Is he even here?
“Found something!”
Dracula just did too. It’s Lucinda’s father, bending intently to his industry. The only other lone figure. He recognizes the pattern of hair swept across the head, the large lofted bottom, swaddled in sturdy fabrics.
The man glances up. “This is where we lost her,” he grunts, possibly not recognizing him. Dracula squats down. He dips his hand into the hole. He pulls up three rusty nails, black as a mine mule.
“These are mine,” he says, thinking of the three holes in his coffin. It took some wear and tear moving it in.
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“You,” says the man, looking sidelong, like he’s just gotten some unwanted glimpse of his own sloppy reflection. “You’re here?”
Dracula notes the big heap of seaweed nearby—a hole beside a knoll. He remembers this landmark from some other night.
“Get some light on the water!”
Dracula looks out over the water. Don’t you remember?
“No,” says Dracula. “I mean yes” is what he says to the man.
“The missing,” says the man. “They’re here.”
“The what?” Is this a search party? Which missing?
“All of them. We’re looking.”
It does and doesn’t look like a search party.
“It’s a dinghy! No—something—”
Lucinda’s father springs straight and goes striding. Dracula tosses a squeamish look over his shoulder as the voiceover commences. I felt evicted in my bones as my bones reposed. The girl on a whim got inside. She looked at the stars, cold in their muffs of frost. Dracula looks at the stars, cold in their muffs of frost. She let out her breath and imagined herself dead.
Now Dracula is walking. One foot in front of the other. He has a strange sense he knows something. He knows the voice. Is it the voice of his dreams? The coffin he lost? He’s always losing coffins. Where does this idea come from? Dracula can’t begin to remember.
He almost walks right up on two unsuspecting bodies. They are twined on a blanket and his foot touching it almost scares him witless. That’s how close he is to them.
“Oh holy shit,” says a voice.
Dracula is struck with a sense of unsettling déjà vu. The bodies, abstract and indistinct until now, jump apart.
“Oops,” he says, with a swift intake of breath. He stumbles on ice-brittle limbs and swerves right into the seaweed and then face-plants into another long depression. He coughs sand out of his mouth and climbs out, sheepish. “Don’t go that way,” he says, stepping away. “There’s a pit.” They are already scrambling to pull on garments in the dark. The moon is hung between heavy clouds like a big bare hook. “It’s going to rain,” says Dracula.
“Hey would you get the fuck out of here?”
“Oh my God,” says the girl, shining her flashlight into his dazed face.
“What—are those…? This isn’t Halloween, man.”
“That’s him. That’s the guy,” says the girl in a yanked-out voice.
“What guy?” His voice veers toward her in a protective way.
Dracula’s never seen her before in his life.
“I know him,” she says, shining the light defensively, like a torch to jab him back with. “He’s the one I keep telling you about.”
The man looks confused and unable to say it. Clearly he hasn’t been listening. Clearly her voice is not being heard.
Clearly it’s time for Dracula to run.
The Joke
Lucinda, looking out her window, feels like she is driving past a car accident. She has rubber neck. Except what’s causing it is here in the car with her. She can see it in the reflection of her window. It’s Rory, pretending to be Rory.
Who is this Rory person? Clearly sometimes he is acting as Rory when she thinks he’s just being Rory. Everyone does that. She does it too. Not on purpose. It’s hard to tell the difference.
The silence they have lapsed into is loud. Lucinda prefers it this way. There’s not much time or space to talk in Rory’s truck. The music is blasted, and the interior is bare and the kind of metal and cracked plastic that reminds her of outdated play equipment—shrieking merry-go-rounds and weather-beaten swings split like old gum, every squeal of protest loud. Lucinda sits on a flattened bench pad that barely buffers the frame and does nothing to absorb impact and sound, so they drive in a rattling echo chamber that funnels the wind through, and Lucinda has to hunch deep into her coat, and Rory is busy jerking the stick shift, making a motion just jarring enough to trench through any little conversation they may attempt and break up both their thoughts and words. It’s always like this. Rory would rather pay attention to the physical feat of his own driving than have a conversation. Lucinda can sense the bodily attention it lets him pay to himself. She usually finds his absorption, right in front of her, fascinating—boorish in an almost good way. Tonight not so much.
She can hear the coffin rattling in the back—much louder than Dracula’s—and it reminds her of something else. That she’d much rather be with him right now than Rory.
Once they got over the hump of his being Dracula, he was really the opposite of what she thought he’d be—an actual buffer to the pricks and pains of life, a thick and helpful hide. Lucinda is maybe realizing this right now. She seems almost to be learning some other way of being from him, now that she thinks about it, partaking bit by bit in a different kind of intuition. Is she finding a new and tentative faith for something? Whatever it is, it’s not really Dracula that’s the problem so much as his inkling of self, a smoky rendering that’s not exactly ever complete. Slowly—in his own dark—he seems to be unfolding it, taking all the pain and haste out of it. She trusts him now because he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. This is why she loves him. She does.
Whether it’s the effect of this or just the fact of going home after a long night, it’s there before she can help it—this glub of elation that rises in her and then stays right there, sludging off her breath. She does and doesn’t like the feeling. It’s the kind of thing Lucinda almost wants to tell somebody about, but the only person she would tell would be Dracula himself. It’s not that she needs to tell him or anybody. She also likes keeping it to herself.
Rory, who only enjoys talking smack about Dracula, would obviously not want to hear about it. She wouldn’t want to tell him either. Especially not after tonight. He doesn’t like to imagine her and Dracula as a couple. He tends on drives with her to recite little bits of research he’s done—how Dracula killed this mother beside her baby’s cradle, how he infested that village with rampant bloodlust, how he did away with this whole cloister of cheese-making monks. That’s been a common theme lately. Rory is doing research.
Lucinda clears her throat. He has just fiddled the music down with an unsure opening of his mouth. She doesn’t really feel like going into it or anything else he might be preparing to say.
“So.” Her voice is a little bent and battered on the night’s escapades. Why is it so worn? “Opening night,” she says.
“Yeah.” Rory blows a sigh. It sounds tired. “I really fucked up,” he says. She’s pretty sure he’s talking about the play.
Now she’s thinking about the play. She’s thinking about how she made it, all the way through. Marty had hugged her right offstage, in the wings. He even pinched her cheek. He was never going to make a curtain speech.
“What do you think of Marty?” she says.
He throws the truck into third. “He’s my uncle.”
“What?” Excuse me? Why was this whole family continuing to grow like some creepy infestation, right in front of her?
“You didn’t know?” he says with a smile. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.” Now she can’t say what she was thinking. “He looks like your mother.”
“Yeah. Because they’re twins.”
Well. There’s an explanation for everything. Lucinda doesn’t mention how his mother was in the play. Neither does Rory.
“He says you’re really talented,” he says, chucking this out into the roaring silence. “Is this your first play?” The way his eyes scatter over her like dice makes her think he’s embarrassed.
Lucinda is embarrassed too. She can’t help it. She feels oddly bereft when she thinks of Marty saying this. Especially since he seemed to steal the play. Nodding in the dark, she realizes she needs to answer out loud. “Is it yours?” She knows it’s not his.
“I did plays in high school.”
“What plays?”
“Guys and Dolls. Streetcar Named Desire. Oliver. Grease. Our Town. My sister
and I used to compete to see who could get more roles.”
“Really?” Lucinda is pretty sure she’s already heard this from Rory, or something like it. “That’s a lot of plays.”
Rory jams the stick into fourth and wipes his palm on his leg. “I always got dibs on the dumb sidekick or the goon. I was the fat guy in high school.”
“Huh,” says Lucinda, putting these two pieces together as though they were mysterious or unexpected. She can’t tell if it bothered Rory to say that or not.
“Well not always,” he says now. “I got some good parts.” She suspects he wants her to ask.
She nods instead, a slow, contemplative up-and-down that seems to give him leeway to keep going.
As he goes, Lucinda thinks about this play, the one they’ve finally surrendered to the world. Rory is not exactly playing a goon, and his stature is closer to mythical than fat. He is a sad, sepulchral angel who has been browbeaten down from his princely perch and dropped into a dirty schoolyard full of scamps (one of which is played by Lauren). The children taunt him as they barrel up the slide and cross the monkey bars over his head, clearly affronted and terrified by such a lugubrious presence in their place of play, and they drop litter and pocket contents over him in their dismay at having an adult refuse to do anything about its wretchedness right in front of them. He is very pale. They might suspect he is an ethereal being but they have no idea that he used to be a pop celebrity. It wouldn’t even matter if they did. The point is that every dead icon is a past occurrence, and even sometimes an embarrassment to the new generation. They apply their perspective back and can’t understand. Even if they try, and want to, they can’t. Nothing human is truly immortal or everlasting. Rory plays his role with profound self-pity, as opposed to the bleak existential surrender Lucinda would have presumed appropriate, but Marty seems to like this. Lucinda finds it a bit sticky. It’s very Rory.