The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  “I’m just going to say hello for a quick minute,” Patricia said.

  Mrs. Greene inhaled through her nostrils. “I don’t think she wants to see anyone,” she said.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” Patricia said. “Did she tell you what happened yesterday?”

  Something confused and conflicted flickered through Mrs. Greene’s eyes, and then she said, “Yes.”

  “I have to tell her we can’t stop.”

  “Destiny Taylor died,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “I know,” Patricia said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You promised you’d get her back to her mother and now she’s dead,” Mrs. Greene said, then turned and disappeared into the house.

  Patricia stepped into the cool, dark house. Her skin contracted and broke out in goose pimples. She’d never felt the air conditioning turned this low before.

  She walked down the hall, into the dining room. The overhead chandelier was on but it only seemed to make the room darker. Grace sat at one end of the table in slacks and a navy turtleneck beneath a gray sweater. The table was covered in trash.

  “Patricia,” Grace said. “I’m not up to seeing visitors.”

  She had strawberry jam clotted in the corner of her mouth, and as Patricia came closer she saw it was a scab crusted around a split lip.

  “What happened?” she asked, raising her fingers to the same place on the corner of her own mouth.

  “Oh,” Grace said, and made her face look happy. “The silliest thing. I was in a car accident.”

  “A what?” Patricia asked. “Are you all right?”

  She’d just seen Grace last night. When had she had time to get in a car accident?

  “I ran to Harris Teeter this morning,” Grace said, smiling. It cracked the scab and Patricia saw wet blood gleaming in the wound. “I was backing out of my space and backed right into a man in a Jeep.”

  “Who was it?” Patricia asked. “Did you get his insurance?”

  Grace was already dismissing her before she finished.

  “No need,” she said. “It was just a silly thing. He was more shaken up than me.”

  She gave Patricia another enthusiastic smile. It made Patricia feel ill, so she looked down at the table to gather her thoughts. A cardboard box sat at one end, and its dark wood surface was covered in jagged, white shards of broken porcelain. A delicate handle protruded from a ceramic curve and Patricia recognized an orange and yellow butterfly, and then her vision widened and took in the entire table.

  “The wedding china,” she said.

  She couldn’t help it. The words just fell out of her mouth. The entire set had been smashed. Shards were spread across the table like bone fragments. She felt horrified, as if she were seeing a mutilated corpse.

  “It was an accident,” Grace began.

  “Did James Harris do this?” Patricia asked. “Did he try to intimidate you? Did he come here and threaten you?”

  She tore her eyes away from the carnage and saw Grace’s face. It was pinched with fury.

  “Do not ever say that man’s name again,” Grace said. “Not to me, not to anyone. Not if you want our relations to remain cordial.”

  “It was him,” Patricia said.

  “No,” Grace snapped. “You are not listening to what I am saying. I shook his hand and apologized because you made fools of us all. You humiliated us in front of our husbands, in front of a stranger, in front of your children. I tried to tell you before and you wouldn’t listen, but I am telling you now. As soon as I’ve cleared up this…mess”—her voice cracked—“I am phoning every member of the book club and telling them in no uncertain language that this matter is at an end and will never, ever be mentioned again. And we will welcome this man into book club and do whatever it takes to put this behind us.”

  “What did he do to you?” Patricia asked.

  “You did this to me,” Grace said. “You made me trust you. And I looked like a fool. You humiliated me in front of my husband.”

  “I didn’t—” Patricia tried.

  “You caught me up in your playacting,” Grace said. “You arranged this amateur theatrical event in your living room and somehow convinced me to participate—I must have been out of my mind.”

  The morning flowed into Patricia’s limbs like black sludge, filling her up as Grace talked.

  “This tawdry soap opera you’ve imagined between yourself and James Harris,” Grace said. “I’d almost suspect you were…sexually frustrated.”

  Patricia couldn’t stop herself. The anger wasn’t hers. She was only a channel. It came from someplace else, it had to, because there was so much of it.

  “What do you do all day, Grace?” she asked, and heard her voice echoing off the dining room walls. “Ben is off to college. Bennett is at work. All you do is look down your nose at the rest of us, hide in this house, and clean.”

  “Do you ever think how lucky you are?” Grace asked. “Your husband works himself to the bone providing for you and the children. He’s kind, he doesn’t raise his voice in anger. All your needs are catered to, yet you weave these lurid fantasies out of boredom.”

  “I’m the only person who sees reality,” Patricia said. “Something is wrong here, something bigger than your grandmother’s china, and your silver polish, and your manners, and next month’s book, and you’re too scared to face it. So you just sit in your house and scrub away like a good little wife.”

  “You say that like it’s nothing,” Grace wailed. “I am a good person, and I am a good wife, and a good mother. And, yes, I clean my house, because that is my job. It is my place in this world. It is what I am here to do. And I am satisfied with that. And I don’t need to fantasize that I’m…I’m Nancy Drew to be happy. I can be happy with what I do and who I am.”

  “Clean all you want,” Patricia said. “But whenever Bennett has a drink, he’s still going to smack you in the mouth.”

  Grace stood, frozen in shock. Patricia couldn’t believe she had said that. They stayed like that in the freezing cold dining room for a long moment, and Patricia knew their friendship would never recover. She turned and left the room.

  She found Mrs. Greene dusting the banister in the front hall.

  “You don’t believe this, do you?” Patricia asked her. “You know who he really is.”

  Mrs. Greene made her face perfectly calm.

  “I spoke with Mrs. Cavanaugh and she explained to me that y’all wouldn’t be able to help anymore,” Mrs. Greene said. “She told me everyone in Six Mile are on our own. She explained everything to me in great detail.”

  “It’s not true,” Patricia said.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Greene said, smiling dimly. “I understand. From here on out, I don’t expect anything from any of y’all.”

  “I’m on your side,” Patricia said. “I just need some time for everything to settle down.”

  “You’re on your side,” Mrs. Greene said. “Don’t ever fool yourself about that.”

  Then she turned her back on Patricia and kept dusting Grace’s home.

  Something exploded red and black inside Patricia’s brain and the next thing she knew she was storming into her house, standing on the sun porch, seeing Korey slumped in the big chair staring at the TV.

  “Would you please turn that off and go downtown or to the beach or somewhere?” Patricia snapped. “It is one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Dad said I didn’t have to listen to you,” Korey told her. “He said you were going through a phase.”

  It touched off a fire inside her, but Patricia had the clarity to see how carefully Carter had built this trap for her. Anything she did would prove him right. She could hear him saying, in his smooth psychiatric tones, It’s a sign of how sick you are, that you can’t see how sick you are.

  She took a deep breath. She would no
t react. She would not participate in this anymore. She went into the dining room and saw the Prozac in its saucer and the bottle of pills next to it. She snatched them up and took them into the kitchen.

  Standing by the sink, she ran the water and washed the pill down the drain. She unscrewed the bottle, and looked at it for a moment. Then she got out a glass, filled it, set it down, and began to take the entire bottle of pills, one by one.

  CHAPTER 23

  The sweet reek of boiled ketchup crawled up Patricia’s nostrils, slid over her sinuses, and coated her throat. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, and tasted a bitter film coating her teeth. Her skull lurched as her upper body jerked forward and she opened her eyes and saw a nurse cranking up her bed. It had white sheets and a beige rail. Carter stood at the end of her hospital bed.

  “We don’t need that,” he told the nurse.

  Patricia saw a burgundy plastic tray on a rolling table in front of her, and a covered dish stinking of boiled ketchup. The nurse lifted the lid and Patricia saw three gray meatballs sitting on a limp pile of yellow spaghetti covered in ketchup.

  “I have to leave the meal,” the nurse said.

  “Then put it over there,” Carter said, and the nurse placed it on a chair by the door and left.

  “Tell me you mixed up the dosage,” Carter said. “Tell me you made a mistake.”

  She didn’t want to have this conversation right now. Patricia turned and stared out her window at the late-afternoon sunlight slashing across the upper floors of the Basic Sciences building and realized she was in the psych unit.

  “Do I have brain damage?” she asked.

  “Do you know who found you?” Carter asked, resting his hands on the bed rail. “Blue. He’s ten years old and he found his mother having a seizure on the kitchen floor and you probably would have brain damage if he hadn’t been smart enough to call 911. What were you thinking, Patty? Were you thinking?”

  Hot tears squirted from her eyes, one at a time, tapping her nose, streaming over her lips.

  “Is Blue here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Patty, but I swear we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

  He made her feel like an essay question on one of the children’s tests, but she didn’t have a right to object. Blue must have been terrified when he found her twitching on the kitchen floor. It would haunt him for the rest of his life. The hot, gristly smell of meatballs made her stomach twist itself tight.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said, her jaw clenched.

  “No one’s listening to you anymore,” Carter said. “You made a serious suicide attempt, however you try to explain it away. They have you on a twenty-four-hour involuntary hold, but I’m going to check you out of here first thing in the morning. There’s nothing wrong with you we can’t solve at home. But before any of that happens, I need to know right now: was this about James Harris?”

  “What?” she asked, and turned to look at her husband.

  His face was stricken, open, and raw. His hands fidgeted hard on the bed rail.

  “You’re my whole life,” he said. “You and the children. You and I have grown up together. And suddenly you’re obsessed with Jim, you can’t stop thinking about him, you can’t stop talking about him, and then you do this. The woman I married would never try to kill herself. It wasn’t in her character.”

  “I wasn’t…,” she said, genuinely trying to explain, “I didn’t want to die. I was just so angry. You wanted me to take those pills so badly, so I took them.”

  His face instantly closed up, and a steel door came down.

  “Don’t you dare put this on me,” he said.

  “I’m not. Please.”

  “Why are you fixated on Jim?” he asked. “What’s between the two of you?”

  “He’s dangerous,” she said, and Carter’s shoulders slumped and he turned away from her bed. “I know you think he hangs the moon but he is a dangerous person, more dangerous than you know.”

  And for a moment, she thought about telling him what she’d read all those weeks ago. After she’d read that passage in Dracula about him needing to be invited into a home, she’d sat down and read the entire book again and halfway through she’d come across a sentence that brought her up short and made her hands turn cold.

  He can command all the meaner things, Van Helsing told the Harkers, explaining the powers of Dracula. The rat, and the owl, and the bat…

  The rat.

  In that moment, she knew who was responsible for Miss Mary’s death. Rarely had she known something with such certainty. Patricia thought about what Carter would say if he knew that his friend had put his mother into the hospital, one hand stripped of its skin, the soft tissues torn from her face. She also knew with certainty that if she said that to Carter he would never let her out of this room.

  “I wish you were having an affair with him,” Carter said. “It would make your fixation easier to understand. But this is sick.”

  “He’s not who you think he is,” she said.

  “Do you know what is at stake here?” he asked. “Do you know the toll your obsession is taking on your family? If you continue down this path you will lose everything we have built together. Everything.”

  She thought about Blue coming into the kitchen for a snack and seeing her convulsing on the yellow linoleum and all she wanted to do was hold on to her baby and reassure him she was all right. That everything would be all right. But it wasn’t all right, not as long as James Harris lived down the street.

  Carter walked to the door. He stopped when he got there and made a big production out of talking to her without turning around.

  “I don’t know if you care,” he said. “But they’ve put together a search committee to replace Haley.”

  “Oh, Carter,” she croaked, genuinely upset for him.

  “Everyone heard you were on a psychiatric hold,” he said. “Haley came down this morning to tell me I need to focus on my family right now and not my career. Your actions affect other people, Patricia. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

  He left her alone in the room, and she watched the sun creep across the Basic Sciences building and tried to imagine life ever being normal again. She had ruined everything. Everything anyone knew about her had been destroyed by what she had done. From now on she would be unstable no matter what she did. How would her children ever trust her again? The smell of meatballs made her feel sick.

  A clatter at the door and she turned back to see Carter ushering in Korey and Blue. Korey slumped forward, hair hanging in her face, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and her white jeans with rips over the knees. Blue wore his navy shorts and a red Iraq-na-phobia T-shirt. He carried a thick library book called Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Korey dragged the only chair across the floor and dropped it as far away from Patricia as she could get. Blue leaned against the wall beside her.

  Patricia wanted to hold her babies so badly and she reached out to them and something yanked her wrists. She looked down, confused, and saw that her wrists were tied to the bed with thick black Velcro straps.

  “Carter?”

  “They didn’t know if you were a flight risk,” he said. “I’ll ask to have them taken off when I see the doctor.”

  But Patricia knew he had done this on purpose. When she was unconscious, he had told them she was a flight risk, because this was how he wanted the children to see her. Fine, he could play his games, but she was still their mother.

  “Blue,” she said. “I’d like a hug if that’s okay with you.”

  He opened his book and pretended to read, leaning against the wall.

  “I’m sorry you saw me that way,” Patricia said to him in a low, calm voice. “I did a stupid thing and I took too many of my pills and they made me sick. I might have gotten brain damage if
you hadn’t been brave enough to call 911. Thank you for doing that, Blue. I love you.”

  He opened his book wider, and then wider, pressing its covers toward each other, and from across the room, Patricia heard its spine crack.

  “Blue,” she said. “I know you’re angry at me, but that’s not how we treat books.”

  He dropped his book on the floor with a thud, and when he bent over to pick it up, he lifted it by the pages and several of them tore off in his hand.

  “You’re mad at me, son,” Patricia said. “Not at the book.”

  Then he was screaming, face red, shaking the book by its pages, the covers flopping back and forth.

  “Shut up!” he screamed, and Korey stuck her fingers in her ears and hunched lower. “I hate you! I hate you! You tried to kill yourself because you’re crazy and now you’re tied to the bed and you’re going to be sent to a mental hospital. You don’t love any of us! All you care about are your stupid books!”

  He grabbed the pages of his book in one hand and frantically tore them out, letting them fall to the floor. They slid across the room, beneath the bed, under the chair. Then he threw the cover, now just cardboard, at Patricia. It hit her in the leg.

  “That’s ENOUGH!” Carter bellowed, and Blue stopped, stunned into silence, his face twisted with rage, cheeks mottled, snot running from his nose, fists clenched by his side, body vibrating.

  Patricia needed to go to him and take him in her arms and take that anger from him, but she was tied to the bed. Carter stood by the door, not moving, arms folded, surveying the scene he had created, not going to comfort their son, not unstrapping her arms so she could do it instead, and Patricia thought, I will never forgive you for this. Never. Never. Never.

  “Can I get money for the machines?” Korey mumbled.

  “Sweetheart,” Patricia asked. “Do you feel the same way as your brother?”

  “Dad?” Korey repeated, ignoring Patricia. “Can I get a dollar for the vending machines?”

  Carter looked away from Patricia and nodded, putting his hand in his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. The only sound in the room was Blue crying.