by Lumi Laura
CHAPTER 19 The Medical Clinic
The evening following the reading of the will, Alex called Jaklin and had her and Mikhail come for a visit. She'd delayed calling to bask in being in her own home alone. She wished to follow Father Zosimos' advice and make it hers. She and her two friends spent a rather crowded night together in her small bed. Once again, the three intermingled their bodies and took their liberties, but it was a calm, slow process of savoring. It contained little of the urgency that had marked their first night of passion. This was slow and deliberate, a rather sad relishing. They slept, woke and cuddled again, slowly, sleepily. Alex felt a profound love for them. This must be what divine love is like, she thought. She shed a tear to happiness and contentment but still deeply felt the loss of her grandmother.
Sometime toward morning, they could sleep no more, so they slipped on their clothes and went down to the living room where they pulled aside the curtain and looked out over the sleepy little city's sparkling lights still enfolded in darkness. They sipped coffee, held each other and spoke of the play of light on the sparse clouds above, the darting car lights off to Braşov and Bucharest. Alex held Jaklin, and Mikhail put his arms around both young women. Such contentment within grief. Alex felt no urge to bite them, none of the craving or pain, or sickness. She felt normal again, as if her vampirism had all been a bad dream, and as if she were again just a human being, a girl in love, captivated by her lovers' affections. They returned to bed and slept until noon.
And so it was in the coming days. Alex felt normalcy return to her life. She didn't want either of them out of her sight, and complained when Jaklin had to work. Having Mikhail to herself consoled her, and she sat beside him all the time he blogged. He made some futile attempts to teach her Russian. Otherwise, the three were constant companions. They took over the master bedroom, her grandmother's, rearranged the furniture, and made it their own. Alex talked them into giving up their flat, and they moved their few possessions in with hers. They didn't press too hard about what all this meant, how long it would last, the nature of their commitment. They worked the garden on their time off, and it grew as if under professional care. Evenings they spent reading to each other, sometimes a short story and at others some philosophical work.
Mikhail was an obsessive blogger. Alex thought he looked quite studious in his short beard and glasses sitting before the fireplace working on a laptop. He also tried his hand at fiction, and whispered both Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy under his breath. She and Jaklin would curl up together on the bearskin rug at his feet, each hugging a leg, Alex reading history, Jaklin reveling in a romance, both reading from iPads.
Mikhail was an insomniac as was Alex, and she'd wake at night to find him in a chair by the window staring out at city lights, and she'd go stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder, the two lost in just being together while Jaklin and the rest of the world slept. Of course, Nălucă was always at their feet when they were up at night, and he had developed a particular fondness for Mikhail, the only other male in the house. Mikhail put up with him, although it was obvious he wasn't very fond of cats.
And Jaklin was the one who needed sleep because of her job at the International Conference Center, the ICC she called it. Although part-time, she took her job seriously and frequently had to leave in the middle of the afternoon or evening to put out a "bureaucratic fire" as she termed political crises. She must have been good at her job because they approached her with an offer of a full-time position, but she kept putting them off, unable to reconcile her desire to be with her lovers with that of professional responsibilities. It wasn't as if they needed the money.
They didn't talk of vampires or evil beings. Alex managed to hide her need for blood because her problem seemed to moderate and feeding became a matter of once every couple of weeks. She didn't crave anything but a delicious breakfast, a cup of tea and a pastry from the nearby bakery. She found that she had a newly acquired aversion to meat in any form. She lost her taste for most animal products and went on soymilk. They had candlelight dinners with fresh vegetables from the garden. It was a quiet time, halcyon days of adjustment and living a privileged life.
Alex became more concerned about her dreams. She visited dark places, saw deformed creatures milling about, but generally just felt lost in them. She was like an orphan roaming her own psychic world, unable to find her way.
As the days turned into weeks, Alex came to realize that she'd missed another period, two more in fact. Jaklin asked about it. She smiled. "Could you be pregnant?"
Alex admitted that she wasn't on the pill, but secretly believed it was because she was a vampire. Vampires don't bleed, she reasoned.
Alex could also tell that her abdomen was beginning to swell, and she thought she felt something move, just a little tickle. So she snuck out one day and went to the apothecary where she bought a pregnancy test kit. She took it into the bathroom, held one of the strips in her stream, and felt the blood drain from her face. She had to lower her head to keep from fainting. Her eyes opened wide, and she smiled. She shook her head. Vampires don't get pregnant.
Here was her dilemma. If she told Jaklin and Mikhail, they'd assume the child was Mikhail's. She'd never told them of being raped. Truth was, the father could be either. Alex did a little search on the Internet and learned that paternity could be determined by a noninvasive procedure, something called "fetal cell testing," as early as, depending on testing company claims, the fifth week following conception. They needed a little of the mother's blood, and a DNA sample from the prospective father. She surreptitiously gathered a few strands of Mikhail's hair from his brush and hit the road to the medical clinic. They drew a vial of blood from her arm, accepted the strands of hair, and, requesting a surcharge to expedite, told her they'd have the results in a week or two.
The morning she received the phone call, they wouldn't give her the results over the phone. "The doctor wants to talk to you," the receptionist said.
Alex was in a state of panic. Did they know she was a vampire? She made an excuse to Jaklin and Mikhail, "I'll explain all when I return," she told them, and quickly left for the doctor's office.
When she returned, Jaklin was waiting at the door. "What's wrong, Missy? Why the gloom and doom?"
"Get Mikhail," she said. "I have a confession."
Jaklin called him out of the garden. He'd become obsessed with clearing weeds. "You want to manicure it," is how Jaklin had chided him over his gardening.
When he come in, Alex sat them both down on the sofa. "One thing you should know, and I'm sorry to have kept this from you. I was raped a couple of nights before we slept together the first time."
"Who was the bastard?" asked Mikhail. "I'll take him down myself."
"I'm so sorry," said Jaklin. "Why didn't you tell us? You seemed so serene to have suffered an attack like that."
"Another unexplainable response. I keep telling you that I've changed. That this isn't who I am. But I now have trouble stacked on top of trouble. I'm pregnant."
"How far along are you?" asked Jaklin.
"Just eight weeks. It could only be from being raped, or from being with Mikhail."
"You should get a paternity test," said Jaklin.
"I did. It's not yours," she said, looking at Mikhail. "Sorry. I stole a couple of strands of your hair. It's quite conclusive."
"It's the rapist's?" asked Mikhail. "You should get rid of it."
"Mikhail!" said Jaklin. "Let her speak. Didn't you have a boyfriend in secondary school?"
Alex laughed. "If anyone had put a hand on me, I'd have broken his arm." She laughed again and looked away. "I've considered abortion, but couldn't convinced myself that the baby is an 'it'. Besides, the test wasn't so cut and dried. Something unusual about the results. Something they've not seen before. Still yet, the rapist is the only possibility if it's not Mikhail's, and they tell me it isn't."
"Does this have anything to do with the murder of that serial rapist?" asked Mikhail.
Alex didn'
t know what to say. Could she come clean about all of it? "I don't want to get into that," she said. "Trust me a while longer."
"Still..." started Mikhail.
Jaklin put her hand on his arm, then said, "Talk of vampires, rapists, and all of it on top of your grandmother dying. Yes, Missy, all the time you need. Whatever you decide, we'll stand by you. Won't we, Mikhail?" She turned to him, but he was noncommittal.
"I'm thinking of going to see Father Zosimos," said Alex.
"You know what he'll say," said Mikhail. "Don't let him dictate. Make the decision yourself. After all, it'll be your responsibility."
"But how?" asked Jaklin, "How could you destroy a child that's half you?"
"Exactly," said Alex. "Give me a few days. I want to get this right."
Alex could tell that Mikhail was drifting from her, but it seemed to draw Jaklin closer. Of course, the big problem was that someday soon she'd have to tell them that she'd killed a man and fed off another. Since then, she also had this string of attacks she'd committed to feed her vampirism. She'd have to come clean about all of it. That's what she planned to do when she went to see Father Zosimos. Her grandmother had said he was wise. She'd have to trust him with this.