Besides a generic salutation, he hadn’t talked to another person in the last three years. And yes, he still considered himself a person. Two days ago he came out of seclusion and was ready to carry on. The truth be told, he was tired of hiding, tired of protecting himself, and tired of fighting his instinctual urges to kill.
Sangio spent the last three years living in a penthouse, in New York. Thanks to the internet, he was able to get everything he needed without wasting his breath on others. Internet banking, home delivery of medications from Canada, movies on Netflix, and endless books on his Kindle met his practical needs, as well as those for entertainment.
It’s not that he didn’t like people, it’s just that he spent so many years lying to people about who he was, where he was from, how he made his fortune, and, the most hard-hitting, answering questions about his family, or lack thereof. He was tired of lying. He was tired of not having a life to talk about. He grew tired of hearing his own stories while guarding his conversations so he didn’t slip up and admit to being alive during the Great Depression, or both of the World Wars.
Sangio was tired of mourning the children he never had, the wife he never loved, and the nieces and nephews he couldn’t play with. In the end, it all equated to a life he never lived and opportunities that were robbed from him by an immortal child. One would think that he had done everything; experienced more than a mortal. But he hadn’t yet lived, despite his existence for almost two hundred years.
Dogs, man’s best friends, sensed danger when Sangio was around and put their tails between their legs and cowered when he approached. Cats hissed. Babies, being great judges of character, cried with beet-red faces, climbing up their parents as if that would take them further from his threat. The parents would constantly apologize for their child’s strange behavior, unconsciously feeling their foreheads for a fever as a feasible explanation for uncharacteristic behavior.
Women of every age, nationality, size, class, and marital status found themselves drawn to Sangio. At first, it was flattering; but it only took a few months before it became tiresome. Sometimes the women were closer to the age of children, which bothered him more than when they were old enough to be his grandmother. The gifts, the flirting, the offers, the proposals, the bold (sometimes naked) gestures fueled the angry boyfriends, fiancé’s, and husbands. That alone was enough to send Sangio into hiding for the first year. It definitely was a motivating factor for his constant leap from continent to continent before coming back to the states.
Instinctively, Sangio wanted to protect the woman and headed towards the bathroom door that separated them, but rightfully hesitated as his fist was ready to rap on the door. He began pacing now, wondering if he could stand by and listen to the weeping.
What was this desire to protect a complete stranger, to trust another woman? Sangio laughed despite himself, considering the ridiculousness of his thoughts. How did he expect this to end?
The very thought of him rushing to the aid of this stranger, touching her with his cold hands and exposing his curse caused him to shake his head. She would thank him by screaming as soon as she realized that he was a product of the devil, forcing him to silence her by sinking his fangs into her neck, emptying her of blood, and releasing her body of its soul. Some protection he would turn out to be.
No, Sangio could not risk being discovered here. He needed time to think, to plan his return home, and to do so without leaving a trail of bodies in his wake this time. He could not take the risk of another human knowing he was a vampire. The last time he trusted a human, the first woman he ever loved, it cost him everything. He lost his father, brother, and his home when she revealed his existence. If his heart had still been beating, it surely would have shattered at her betrayal.
No, Sangio would not repeat the past. He set the brush down outside the bathroom door, and, with deep regret, ascended the hill and slipped back into his cove as quickly and quietly as when he descended.
Chapter 4
Jessie paused outside the bathrooms, picking up her brush that someone set down on the bench. She noticed a payphone at the end of the building. She laughed, despite her situation, at the fact that there were even pay phones left in America. She hadn’t used a pay phone since, well, she wasn’t even sure if she ever really used a pay phone.
The plastic casing on the pay phone was cracked and faded, with numerous spots of erosion from the salty winds, hard rain, and falling debris from trees, as well as the normal and abnormal usage from its patrons. The silver, square push buttons were faded so you couldn’t see the numbers, and rust seeped out of the crevices where the cord met the box, as well as the receiver. The phone was covered in graffiti from pens and various sharp objects used to mark names, phone numbers, slang, and also recording their own attendance in the phone's history.
She didn’t have any change, but she knew her parents would gladly accept a collect call from her. She knew they would drive all the way here to pick her up. She knew they wouldn’t judge her, but she didn’t want them involved. She watched her mother cry more in the last six months than she had ever seen in her entire life, and her father was using every last ounce of his energy to hold her mother up, since learning that their only child was moving away to another state.
They were a close-knit family, Jessie and her parents. Margie and Alan Greene worked together at the UC Davis hospital in Sacramento, California. That’s where they met. Margie was a nurse. She was assigned to the Children’s Psychiatry Ward. Alan worked in the Neurology department, where Margie would often bring her patients for sleep studies or brain scans.
Jessie could hear her parents telling her the story of how they fell in love, reminiscing about their romance every chance they had.
“Jess, your father was so good with the kids. I’m telling you, we would get to his unit, and if he wasn’t there I knew I was in for quite a night. The other staff thought it was funny to poke fun at my patients.” Margie shook her head in disapproval.
“It was the wrong thing to do,” Alan added. “They’d set the little ones off. Bragged about it all the next day.”
“He’s telling the truth. They thought it was so much fun to get these kids riled up, and then call security on them to have them restrained. It pissed me off!” Margie spoke as if the incidents were fresh in her mind.
“I saw the same thing from some of her fellow nurses though.” Alan pointed at a nodding Margie. “They would get the kids in our waiting room and start saying things that were degrading to them. Like, 'They're not going to find a brain, so this may take a while.' I heard one lady tell this itty, bitty girl that most kids didn’t survive the procedure, or that if she wet herself, drooled, or sneezed that she would be electrocuted in the machine. It was sick.”
“They were like that on the ward too. I’m telling you, practically all the meltdowns from those kids were egged on by doctors or nurses, if not other patients. I’m sad to say it,” Margie admitted.
“So I told your mom,” Alan wrapped his arm around Margie's shoulder, “I told her she was the only one of those nurses with scruples about her, and that it was a pleasure working with her.”
“He did! I told him the same thing. That he was so much more mature and treated my kids with dignity and that the only time I enjoyed leaving the ward with one of them kiddies was when he was on shift.”
“So, I started giving her a copy of my schedule every two weeks. I told her to schedule the tests anytime I was working, and if I could pick up some extra shifts here and there to accommodate those kiddies then I would.”
“What else did you do? Go ahead Alan, tell her,” Margie nudged.
“Oh,” Alan puffed out his chest, running his fingers through his thin, graying hair, “I started writing on the schedules, inviting her to coffee, lunches, dinners, there at the hospital. We had to have had hundreds of cups of coffee in the first year.”
“Meanwhile, I started getting old,” Margie complained.
“Old my ass! She w
as twenty-seven; that’s all. And as beautiful as a clean neurology report.” As usual, he was the only one who chuckled at his own medical joke while his wife and daughter rolled their eyes playfully.
“My point being, I got tired of coffee inside the hospital. So finally he handed me his schedule after a little over a year of flirting, and I handed it back to him after I circled a day that we both had off work. I told him he missed a date.”
“It didn’t take me long to figure out what this starched white nurse, with her hand on her hip and her nursing slipper tapping impatiently, wanted from me. So, later that night, she came down from her ward with her patient and I gave it back to her.”
“In tiny little letters he wrote, in the box that I was to be dressed and ready at nine am, for a day trip to Sonoma. We had the best time. We sampled cheese at the Sonoma Cheese factory, toured the historic museums, sipped wine and ate on the garden patio of this beautiful French restaurant. We bought books from a second hand book store called-"
“Chanticleer Books.”
“That’s right! I can never remember the name.”
“She called it Chandelier Books for the better of twenty years.”
“Anyhow,” she waved off her husband’s teasing, “we spent the rest of the afternoon on a blanket in the grass reading books. It was the best first date in my life.”
“And the last first date.”
“What can I say? He swept me off my feet.”
“What can she say?” Alan stiffened his collar. “I’m just that type of guy!”
“Over the next year we planned our dates out by swapping schedules. We never asked one another where we wanted to go, we just planned it. They weren’t always as extravagant as Sonoma-“
"Although, sometimes they were more extravagant,” Alan bragged.
“But they were always lovely. One day,” Margie began, beaming from ear to ear, “he printed his schedule and handed it to me. The first thing I noticed was that it was the wrong year. I was just about to hand it back to him when I realized it was blank, except for one week, starting on a Sunday afternoon. The first thing he wrote was 'Alan and Margie’s wedding' with a question mark after it. The second week had 'honeymoon' scrawled across it.”
“She stood there for five minutes,” Alan shook his head. “The longest five minutes of my life. She kept staring at that piece of paper, saying nothing at all. Then she asked me for a pen, and she turned the question mark into an exclamation point!”
“After we were married, we still kept using the schedules to plan little surprises for one another. The next best one being about two years after we were married. I gave him my schedule for nine months later and circled a date with a pink highlighter, and then circled it again with a blue highlighter and wrote, 'Due Date!"
“Yep! That was the first and last time I ever cried at work.” Alan and Margie shared a cute smile, and a soft kiss.
Jessie had spent years reading and rereading her parents old work schedules, and now, being a nurse herself, she used her own schedules as a sort of diary, mailing them back to Sacramento to her parents with cute notes, stickers, and other embellishments she could stick onto the paper. She cut pieces off tickets, receipts, playbills, and printed thumbnails of photos from her cell phone to keep her parents updated, and to carry on the tradition of their schedules.
Jessie went to the craft store and bought wedding embellishments to announce the date of her wedding, and cut out a picture of a house from a realtor’s magazine showing that she would be moving.
Margie, being the sensitive one, broke down when she saw the outline of the Colorado Mountains affixed underneath the picture of the house. Jessie wasn’t there to see it, but the tears over the phone were heart wrenching enough.
She did see her mother break down as she left for her honeymoon.
“Everything will be just fine,” Jessie promised her mother as they wiped each other’s tears away.
“I’ll take good care of your daughter,” Dave lied, though everyone believed him at the time.
“You better!” Margie joked, sort of. “I just got used to her being in another city, let alone separated by so many states.”
“She’s in good hands, Margie.” Alan pulled his wife into his arms as Dave pulled Jessie into his. “She’s in good hands.”
Jessie drove off to her honeymoon destination with a heavy heart for whom she was leaving behind, but also with renewed excitement for what laid ahead.
Jessie wondered how long she stood there, staring at the payphone when a pimply-faced teenage girl chomping gum, occasionally cracking a small bubble in a pocket of her tooth, grunted next to her.
“Don’t even bother trying.” The girl rolled her eyes hard, reminding Jessie more of a seizure than an attitude.
“I’m sorry?” Jessie asked.
“The pay phone. Yeah, don’t bother trying. It doesn’t work. My fricken parents took my cell phone, so I had to try it. How the hell am I supposed to let my boyfriend know how I am?” She pushed the edge of her shoe into the dirt, creating a tiny puff of dust, and crossed her arms tightly across her undeveloped chest.
“Thanks!” Jessie remembered those torturous days when she was finally more interested in boys than vacationing with her family. She remembered hating her parents for forcing her to go. She spent more time trying to figure out how to reconnect with civilization than putting in the effort to have fun. Thank goodness that was a short-lived rebellion. “Good luck, then.”
“Good luck?” The girl mimicked a seizure again. “Obviously you don’t understand relationships."
"Obviously," Jessie agreed.
"He’s going to think I don’t want to be with him anymore. My life is over! My parents fricken suck!”
Jessie retreated up the hill, trying not to offend the drama queen by laughing in her face, and reminisced about the times she thought her life was over because of some trivial rule her parents enforced. If it would have done any good, Jessie would have taken the time to explain, to the ungrateful brat, how it was the boys who sucked, and that her parents were actually the good guys. However, she wasn’t dumb enough to expect a lecture to change the mindset of a teenager.
The entire exchange just made her realize how much she wanted to hear her parent’s voice. Her world was collapsing around her, and she wanted her mother. She wanted to sit on the couch, wrapped in one of her mother’s knitted blankets, sipping coffee and watching her dad read the obituaries, his newest pastime, with his wire rimmed reading glasses hanging off the tip of his nose.
Jessie stole a look into the man’s cove on her way back up the hill, knowing he was the one who left her brush outside the bathroom door. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment when she didn’t see him, but oddly she felt his presence. This gave Jessie a sense of peace she knew did not truly belong to her.
Sangio watched her from the protective shadows of the eucalyptus trees, knowing she was searching for him. He saw her shoulders fall when she didn’t see him, and he was intrigued to learn that she was just as curious about him as he was of her.
To hell with better judgment. Sangio smiled and knew he would learn more about this beautiful, sad woman. He needed to know her more than he had ever needed anything in his life, or death.
Chapter 5
Before she saw him, Jessie heard her husband.
“I was just about to come see if you got locked in the shower stall.”
Jessie could hear the misplaced concern in his voice as if he expected her to have fled, or worse yet, call the police. It hurt just as much as getting hit. Possibly worse.
“Nope. You're safe.” She looked ahead at the tent, never giving Dave the satisfaction of making eye contact to manipulate her into pretending as he was doing.
“New hairdo?” Dave pointed to the towel on Jessie’s head, joking as if nothing happened last night; as if they were the same Dave and Jessie that left Los Angeles for their honeymoon yesterday.
Jessie couldn’t even find the w
ords to respond, and forgetting her resolve, she turned to him with her mouth agape. She wanted to fling sand in his eyes, or drop to her knees and cry, or run screaming into the woods. How could he just sit in the damn chair, sipping on a beer, poking at a fire, and talk to her as if he hadn’t just robbed a dream from her? He took everything she believed in, including faith in her own judgment. She didn't even recognize herself anymore.
“What?” Dave asked innocently. Nervously. “Why are you staring at me that way? Is it because of last night? Are you still upset about that?”
"I'm sorry, what exactly is the time-frame for holding on to anger when your husband beats you up mere hours into your honeymoon?" The words came out louder, and with more anger than Jessie expected, and for a moment she worried that she may set him off again.
Jessie didn't want an answer. She rushed past him into the tent, throwing her pile of clothes onto the floor. She took several deep breaths, trying to hold back the swell of anger.
Dave came up behind her, reaching around her and caressing her. He ran his hands down her hips and up her shirt, rubbing her stomach, kissing her neck. Where she once would have melted into him, her body now became rigid. She felt like vomiting, but the contents of her stomach felt as if it was compressed into a stone.
“I’m sorry!” Dave whispered. “I’m so sorry, Jess. I can give you a hundred reasons, but none would make it ok. I drank way too much, and with the stress of the wedding and planning this honeymoonand my parents almost losing everything, including Dad's life. It was too much. . . just too much. I've never felt so overwhelmed. I couldn’t handle the disappointment in your eyes, Jess. I already felt like I failed you with the wedding.” Dave was squinting his eyes hard, rubbing his fingers against them, perhaps in an effort to produce tears and redness.
“What do you expect from me? I don’t know what to say. I can't even believe I'm having this conversation. I should be asking for a fucking tropical drink, but instead I'm talking to you, my husband, about the abuse I endured at your hands. You hit me Dave. You beat the shit out of me.” Dave’s apology brought no relief and his tears brought no sympathy.
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