It was only after they were outside into the dark and the rain that Donald realized they hadn’t paid for the meal. Chrissie told him it had all been taken care of.
They didn’t talk much on the way back to the hotel. No, that’s not true—they talked about lots of things, Donald hoped that the weather would be better for tomorrow, and Chrissie translated all the advertisements on the metro—but they didn’t talk about anything important.
“I’ll use the bathroom first,” said Donald, quite cheerfully really. He locked the door behind him.
He got undressed and changed into his pale blue pajamas. He brushed his teeth and then brushed them again, hard, very hard. He studied his face in the mirror, and it didn’t look any different than it had before. Then he sat down upon the toilet lid and began to draft a letter.
I’ve made a terrible mistake, he wrote. I’m sorry. He couldn’t get beyond that sorry—it was meant to be the floodgate for everything he needed to tell her, so why on the page did it look like an ending? He started when Chrissie knocked upon the door: “Are you going to be much longer?”
While she undressed, Donald got into bed. He’d pretend to be asleep. He might even fall asleep if he were lucky, and then he wouldn’t even have to pretend. He closed his eyes and stared at the blackness in his head. When the bathroom door opened, he couldn’t help it—he looked at her. The pink dress was gone, the lipstick, nail varnish, all gone. She was wearing her Disney pajamas again, and she seemed so sweet, and so young, and so easy to understand. She smiled. He smiled back. He watched Tigger bounce gently in the gap between her breasts.
She climbed into bed beside him.
“Well, good night,” she said.
“Good night,” he agreed.
She turned out the light.
He closed his eyes once more, once more pretended he could sleep, that he even knew what sleep was or how it could ever be reached again.
He wondered if she still might say anything about what had happened in the restaurant, and his body tensed in the expectation of it. But minutes went by, and then he heard her breathing regularly, and he relaxed, he’d got away with it.
He didn’t even sense her moving closer until he felt her hand around his penis.
At first he wasn’t even sure that it was her—at first, stupidly, he wondered whether it was one of his own hands creeping between his legs unawares—at first, stupidly, his impulse was to lift up the sheets and check. He didn’t lift the sheets. He lay there, rigid.
The hand didn’t flex. Now that it had found the penis, its mission seemed accomplished. It held on to its prize firmly, through his pajama trousers. Not so firmly that it demanded anything from it, firmly enough that it couldn’t escape.
The slightest extra pressure of the fingers—the very slightest squeeze—and that would have been different, that would have been something Donald would have needed to address. Donald would have had to turn on the lights and sternly remind Chrissie of the boundaries he’d set up for their mutual protection. So he diligently waited for it, waited for that little pressure, for the slightest flex—he lay there focused, intent only upon his penis and her hand and any change of relationship vis-à-vis the two of them.
His penis swelled a little, the blood rushed to it in blameless curiosity, and the fist opened out slightly to accommodate it.
He felt himself breathe faster.
He turned to look at Chrissie. Tried to make out her face in the dim light. Her eyes were still closed. He thought she was asleep. And then—and then maybe the clouds parted a bit, because the Paris moon stretched across the bed and in the light of it her eyes opened at last, and they looked straight into him and straight through him. The rest of the face was still an impassive mask, utterly cold, utterly without expression, and looking so adult once more. But the eyes, was there a challenge in them? He thought there was.
He held his breath. He licked his lips. He didn’t say anything.
Nor did she.
And then her eyes closed again.
The grip of her hand didn’t relax, not even now. The blood drained out of his penis. It started to wilt.
He waited ten minutes, maybe more, not daring to breathe properly, not daring to stir her again. Until he was sure she must be asleep, and then he edged away from her, very gently, and as he pulled his body into the cold outer fringes of the bed, he pulled his penis away with him. By now it was just a stump, there was nothing left for the hand to grip on to. He felt the hand clasp and unclasp uselessly for it, then slow, then stop.
A little later, he carefully got out of bed. He wanted to go back to the bathroom. To brush his teeth, wash his face, finish the note, whatever.
He felt his way slowly through the darkness, and he was making good progress—and then his foot collided hard with something firm and round, and it hurt, and he couldn’t stop himself, he cried out in surprise if not in pain, and the grapefruit he’d kicked rolled across the carpet and bounced against the wall. Pamplemousse, he thought to himself involuntarily.
“What are you doing?” Chrissie asked, drowsy, irritated.
“Nothing.”
“Come back to bed.”
“I’ll come back to bed.”
He got back under the sheets, and didn’t dare move again, and at some point he must have fallen asleep.
When they woke the next morning, she gave him a kiss, and it seemed perfectly well intentioned and well executed.
At breakfast, he decided not to spread confiture or beurre upon his croissants. “Look,” he told her, “I’m having them plain, just as you suggested! Are you proud of me?” She smiled, and congratulated him, and told him he was being a proper Frenchman. Even the waitress looked pleased, she hardly glared at him at all.
In the morning, they went to look at some church or another, and in the afternoon, they went to some museum or another. They found a fountain. Donald said he’d read that if you tossed a coin into a fountain it meant you’d come back to Paris, but he wasn’t sure it was this fountain—and Chrissie laughed, and said he’d got it wrong, that was Rome—and Donald said, why would tossing a coin into a fountain in Paris mean you’d come back to Rome—and Chrissie said he was a silly darling man, and hugged him. And it was all very nearly normal. It was all very nearly loving. And they both tossed coins into the fountain anyway, and Donald knew it meant they were leaving Paris after all, they were going home, it was decided.
They ate at little bistros, and Chrissie ate only vegetarian food, and Donald ate meat, but the meat seemed to him so dull and so flavorless.
They spent three more nights in Paris.
The cab to the airport took a particularly circuitous route, but Chrissie didn’t seem to mind, she stared out of the window and pointed out all the parts of Paris they hadn’t done yet, Paris had more to offer after all. And Donald sat, and held her hand, and mused, and realized what he really wanted to say to her in that still-unfinished letter.
The airport was very busy. Everyone was trying to escape Paris. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the woman at check-in, “the flight is very full, I don’t think you and your daughter can sit together.” Donald got very forceful, and said that his daughter was a very bad flyer, and if she wasn’t able to sit with him, she’d scream the plane down. They got their double seats, and Donald was quite proud of himself.
As the plane took off, Donald listlessly leafed through the in-flight magazine, and Chrissie looked at some revision notes for her GCSE exams.
At around ten thousand feet, and somewhere over the English Channel, Donald proposed to her.
“What?” said Chrissie.
“You said I wasn’t a bad man. I’m not a bad man, am I?”
“You’re fine,” said Chrissie.
“Marry me,” said Donald. “I’ll make you very happy. I’ll give you whatever you like.”
“Can we live in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“Or somewhere else?”
“Whatever you like.”
/> Chrissie thought about it. “All right,” she said.
“We can’t get married now,” said Donald. “We’ll have to wait until you’re older. But it’s a commitment, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Chrissie. “For when we’re both older.”
“I love you,” said Donald, and Chrissie said she loved him too, and Donald felt relieved, she hadn’t said it in ages.
After the stewardess announced they were coming in to land, Donald once more interrupted Chrissie’s schoolwork.
“This is a big mistake,” he said. “We shouldn’t leave France.”
Chrissie laughed. “Silly! We’re on the plane!”
He said, “Then we can get straight onto another plane, can’t we, and fly back? We can get our suitcases, and then we’ll buy some tickets for the very next flight to Paris. We don’t even need our suitcases, I can buy you a new suitcase, brand-new. Please,” he said, and he squeezed her arm, “Please.” He squeezed hard until at last she put down her work and gave him her full attention. “If we go back to England, I’ll lose you.”
She looked at him with such innocent eyes. “But we have to go back to England,” she said. “I’ve a friend meeting us at the airport.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to disappoint my friend.”
Donald had thought there might be policemen waiting for him as soon as he put foot on British soil. There weren’t. Instead, a man holding up a placard for M AND MME MACALLISTER. Chrissie squealed when she saw it, and ran straight into the waiting man’s arms, and for a moment that wasn’t what made Donald jealous at all, what made him jealous was that the assumed names they had thought up together, that had been theirs, had been stolen. He wondered how the man had found out what they were.
“Well, well!” said the man. “And did you have a good holiday?”
“I did!” said Chrissie. “Paris is as beautiful as ever. Oh, and this is Donald, he’s my friend.”
“Is he coming with us?”
“We can give him a lift, can’t we?”
The man nodded. “As far as he wants to go, as far as he wants to go!” The man was probably older than Donald but still looked better—he was tall and slim, he was confident, he had the sort of pencil mustache that only pure Englishmen of a certain background can get away with.
Donald said, “I’m not just her friend. I’m her fiancé.”
“Indeed?” said the man. “Indeed! Well, I’m sure some sort of congratulations must be in order. The car’s waiting, so come along, Monsieur MacAllister!”
They set off for the car, Chrissie and the man linking arms, Donald wheeling the little pink suitcase behind.
When they reached the car, Donald got into the backseat. He assumed Chrissie would join him there. She didn’t.
“On y va! Now, where oh where shall I take you both?” And the man laughed, as if he’d made the funniest joke in the world, and Chrissie laughed too. The engine roared, the car started, and Chrissie was full of stories of her adventures in Paris, how tall was the Eiffel Tower, how small was the Mona Lisa, how wet the Seine—and it was odd, but none of the stories ever seemed to include Donald, but Donald couldn’t be sure—to hear her he had to lean forward uncomfortably, and to join in the conversation he had to shout. But no one was listening to him, and his head was hurting, so he soon just sat back and was silent. If he stared ahead he could see how animated Chrissie was, and he didn’t want to see that—and he could also see how her friend had stretched out his hand and was brushing the hair off her shoulders and was stroking the nape of her neck. He didn’t want to see that either, not any of that—and so instead he looked out of the windows at the English countryside, and he didn’t recognize any of it, not a bit of it, and he wondered where they were taking him.
THE YELLOW DEATH
LUCY A. SNYDER
“Lady . . . ,” I whispered.
My sister stood there in the doorway of the Freebirds’ clubhouse, the fall wind blowing dead leaves in a dervish around her sandaled feet, ruffling the hem of her dandelion-bright sundress, and suddenly the laughing and roughhousing stopped. All the bikers and their sunburned old ladies just stared at the girl.
The silence probably only lasted twenty seconds, but in my mind it stretched out to an agonizing hour. I didn’t know whether to trust my own eyes. She didn’t look like the sister I remembered, but she’d only been twelve when I ran away from home. And that was eight years ago. A lot can happen to a girl in nearly a decade. Adolescence, for instance. And also the apocalypse.
The young woman in the doorway was tall, nearly as tall as me, but slender and elegant as any of the ballet dancers we used to admire as they walked home from the theater. Her dark hair looked impossibly clean and cascaded down past her shoulders. The bikers called me Beauty to mock my scars, but they’d call her that because they hadn’t the words for anything better. Any old French poet would spend sleepless nights trying to capture this strange girl’s pulchritude in serifed letters. But she had the same cornflower eyes and she gave me that dreamy smile I remembered so well. I didn’t wonder how she’d tracked me down. She’d always been the one to locate the missing book behind the couch, our mother’s lost earring in the drain, forgotten song lyrics in a notebook in her bag.
“Hey, Louise.” The years had turned her voice seductive, husky. Pure aural sex. I could practically smell the men’s sudden desire, a musky pheromone note cutting through the stink of beer, motor oil, and tobacco. And I could feel their old ladies’ anxiety and jealousy build alongside it, like the charge in the air before a lightning strike.
“Found you,” she said, and made a languid motion as if she were tweaking my nose.
My brain teetered between joy and terror. Because if that wasn’t Lady? We were probably all fucked five ways to Sunday. I craned my neck to try to see past her, see if the prospects on guard duty were still up on the wall or if their guts were scattered across the concertina wire. I saw nothing but the glaring floodlights and darkness beyond.
The problem with vampires is that before they get inside your veins, they crawl inside your mind. You think that you’ve opened the door to your neighbor or your aunt Heather, but in reality you’ve just let in a pallid, toothy monstrosity that’s about to rip your jugular out and drain you like a juice box. If you’re lucky. If you’re not so lucky, the local hive needs more hunters and it’s just there to nip you, grab a quick drink, and flap away, leaving you to your slow, torturous metamorphosis.
I knew what that looked like better than most living people. My fiancé, Joe, got bitten in the first wave, right before anyone outside the CDC had any inkling there was a problem. He’d carried the trash out to the alley in the dark. Something hiding in the ivy covering the low cinder-block wall attacked him. He never got a good look at it, or even a sense of its size, so we figured it was a rat. We washed the bite with peroxide and got him to the doctor the next day. Antibiotics and rabies shots cleared out what was left in our bank account, but we imagined he’d be fine after that.
He ran a low-grade fever—the doctor’s office said the rabies vaccine could cause that—and his mood went straight to hell. Joe was normally pretty hakuna matata about money, even when we were flat broke, but suddenly he wanted to count every miserable cent coming in or going out. It was almost enough to make me call home and beg forgiveness just so we’d have access to the trust fund I’d given up years before. Almost. I accidentally spilled some Tylenol down the drain one day and he made me wait while he counted and re-counted the rest in the bottle so he’d know exactly how many we had to replace. It didn’t matter to him that we still had plenty. He was losing his mind right in front of me and at the time I figured he was just cranky.
When his eyes turned yellow from jaundice, it seemed like a side effect of the antibiotics. He refused to go to urgent care, because that would be fifty bucks we couldn’t afford. It was only four more days until his next doctor’s appointment for another rabies shot anyhow
. I was worried, but I let it ride.
That night, he woke me up around four a.m. when he started going berserk in the living room. Joe was yanking books and movies off the shelves and throwing them around. He’d smashed the big blue sunfish lamp he made in ceramics class and the floor was covered in jagged shards. The bottoms of his feet were in tatters, but somehow he wasn’t bleeding. He picked up my special-edition Blu-ray of Sorcerer and made a motion as if he was going to snap it in two.
I tried to grab it away from him. He slugged me in the mouth and I dropped like a sack of potatoes; I didn’t know how to take a punch back then. The sight—or maybe the smell—of the blood from the gash on my lip then sent him into a whole new orbit of madness. He grabbed me by my hair, dragged me screaming to the radiator, gagged me with a dirty handkerchief, and lashed my hands to the pipe with the cord from the busted lamp.
Joe stared down at me for a long time, not saying anything, his expression shifting between rage and confusion. He paced back and forth, asking me who I was and if I’d seen the sign. I was on my back, my head and neck pressed against the radiator and my hands tied high to the top pipe. Stuck. There was no way to pull myself up to reach the rag in my mouth to try to yank it out to talk to him, so I just lay there, waiting. A dog started yapping a few houses down. So then I thought, well, we’d both made a whole lot of noise after he hit me. Surely someone had heard him and called the cops.
I felt a surge of hope when I heard a police siren, but it passed us by. And then I realized that what I’d thought was a dog was really a woman barking, “Fuck you!” over and over.
Joe abruptly stopped interrogating me and flopped down on the couch. He turned on the TV—the one thing in the room he hadn’t tried to wreck—and just started flipping through channels as if nothing had happened. The local station was showing a live feed of a female reporter standing near a police car in some other neighborhood. I started trying to work the stiff cords off my wrists, as quietly as I could.
Seize the Night Page 40