by Casey Lane
“Coming, Momma!” she called out and put the book down.
You feel asleep reading and dreamed it all, she told herself. Going out on to the porch to smoke, rolling cigarettes, the visitor—it was all a dream. The book’s suggestive lines and the empty cigarette case were proof enough.
She was both disappointed and relieved by this. No vampire in a clearing. No ultimatum to provide him with a victim or be the victim herself. And yet, she wanted it to be real. She wanted my cold lips on her throat and my hard hands pinning her against my body. A sudden swell of loneliness rose up like a wave and crashed down against her. I felt it in my own throat as I lay in the cool dark.
She was lonely. She hadn’t realized she was so desperately, crushingly lonely.
“Coming, Momma,” she called.
All the blood rushed to her head when she stood. For a moment, she swayed on her feet. She took two steps, and her hip connected with the white dresser. The mirror sitting on top of it wobbled. Something toppled over and skittered across the top of the dresser, but I didn’t see what because Lettie’s eyes—my eyes—were pinched closed.
She stood there, listening to the panicked drumming of her own heart until the red sparks in her eyes disappeared.
“Lettie, what in the world!”
“Just a migraine, Momma. Give me a minute, please!” Or I’ll strangle you to death in your own damn bed, woman.
I laughed at that. Lettie always could make me laugh.
Her mother’s reply was lost in the creak of her bedroom door as Lettie pulled it open and stepped into the blaring light. I hissed, out of shock and surprise, and found Lettie mimicking my response. Her body hunched, pulling itself back. When she dared open her eyes, I smelled no burning flesh. No sizzling hair. The light bothered her, but it was not burning her alive.
It is just the migraine, I whispered to her, even as I cringed in my bed of soil. Just your migraine hurting your eyes.
Somehow, with a groping outstretched hand she found her mother’s door handle and turned.
The dark opened its arms and embraced her first. Then the stench. She was certain her mother had shit herself again. No wonder the woman was howling like a child.
“I’m here, Momma,” she said. “Right here.”
She pinned back the curtain to let in the fresh air.
“After all I’ve done for you,” her mother said, her wiry hair matted to the side of her head with sweat on a gray pillow.
“I know, Momma I’m not feeling well. I couldn’t get up.”
“Couldn’t get up!” her mother hissed. “No. I couldn’t get up. Last I checked, you still had the two legs God gave you and a mother who keeps a roof over your head.”
Lettie didn’t argue. She only pulled back the covers to inspect the damage.
One look and her stomach turned. Mine did as well. I considered severing this connection, taking refuge in my bed which smelled only of fresh, damp earth.
“Yes, take a good, hard look,” her mother said. “Take a good look at what’s coming for you in twenty years.”
Maybe not for me, she thought as she pushed the wheelchair over to the side of the bed and angled it so that her mother could be hauled into it. Not for me if I choose right.
It was a dream, I said again, testing my power over her. No vampire came to the house to kill you.
She pulled her mother out of her soiled clothes while she prattled on, howling and hissing her indignation. Once she was wiped down enough to put her in a robe, Lettie hefted the woman up out of the bed and into the chair. The doorways with their chipped trim were wide enough to push a chair through. Getting her mother into the tub was laborious, more laborious than Lettie expected, and I knew why.
I’ve taken a great deal from you, I thought.
I need to smoke less, she thought, as her chest compressed.
“You’re a damn clumsy fool!” her mother called as Lettie set her into the tub and gave her the soap and wash cloth.
“You’re welcome,” Lettie replied, grunting, deciding that all the heat and blood in her body must be in her face.
“It’s cold!”
“Give it one second,” Lettie said, patiently, refraining from her desire to stick her own shit slick hand into the woman’s face and cry look at this! Look at what I put up with, and yet I don’t say a damn thing!
She had such patience, my Lettie. I would have snapped the crone’s neck ages ago.
The water warmed. Lettie finally soaped and rinsed her own hands.
The bathing part was easy. Lettie was outside the tub reaching in. Her mother holding onto the silver bar the case worker came and installed for them after her mother’s first round of treatment, before the nerves in her legs went out and she stopped feeling them and stopped being able to control them. Lettie washed and lathered and soaped until all that was left was that saccharin scent of chemical perfume.
She left her mother to enjoy the rest of the heat and steam and returned to the room to finish the task. She wiped down the wheelchair with lemon-scented disinfectant sprayed on a towel and stripped the bed. Pillowcases, sheets and her mother’s filthy pajamas. She balled it all up for the washing machine.
Why? I thought. What bond holds you to this woman? She never sides with you. Never protects you. You’ve been infinitely more valuable to her than either of her other children, and yet she would choose either of their lives over your own. So why do you love her so? It couldn’t simply be because the woman was her mother, could it?
I searched her mind, flipped through old memories, but I found nothing. I was convinced Lettie herself did not understand her loyalty to this woman.
“Feel better?” Lettie asked as she peered down at the skeletal woman reclining in the white basin, her gray hair matted to a red face.
“I’m hungry,” her mother said, with all the expectation in the world. “It’s got to be nearly ten, and you ain’t fed me a thing. Trying to speed this along, are you?”
“Momma, I told you, I had a headache.” Lettie reached into the tub and slipped her dry arms under the saggy wet ones.
“Likely story. You look like hell. You’ve been out drinking again, and probably with some man. And where’s my damn cigarettes!”
We both laughed at that. My high amusement trilling along her tongue. It made the old woman look at her daughter twice. Could she see me? Could she see the demon behind her daughter’s eyes? I tried to turn Lettie’s neck and see for myself, but I couldn’t. My power waned as the sun climbed higher.
“I know you’re lying! Look at your damn neck!” her mother went on.
Lettie wrapped her mother in the oversized towel with a discernible bleach stain in its brown cotton and eased her into the open chair. “Come on, Momma, get into the chair.”
She’s so thin, Lettie thought, as the towel-wrapped crone placed one shaky foot on the bathmat, putting all her weight on her daughter. I can see every bone in her back, and her wrists are thin enough to break. Lettie bore her weight until she pulled the other foot from the tub and collapsed into the chair.
“Look at yourself in the mirror, and tell me you weren’t with no man last night,” her mother said, relentless. She breathed heavily as she adjusted herself in the chair.
“What are you—” Lettie began, but as soon as she turned and saw herself in the bright vanity, her words died on her lips.
I shrank back from the reflection. I was afraid she might see me there within, lurking in her skin. But her eyes were her own, no feral gleam.
In the three remaining bulbs that illuminated the vanity, she saw herself and what her mother was talking about. The whole right side of her throat was bruised, a near purple-black.
She lifted her blond hair, now dark at the roots, off her neck and leaned forward. Puncture hole after puncture hole overlapped on the side of her throat. She counted at least ten interspersed in a field of raised red welts.
What can I say? I'd been excited.
I kept stopping and resuming, afraid I would
take too much if I remained latched too long. And let me tell you, it’s nearly impossible to simply slip one’s fangs into the same holes again and again.
“You went out and got a load of damn hickeys! Like you’re in high school,” her mother said. “Lord help me, I raised you better than that.”
“This isn’t a hickey, Momma,” Lettie said, but she was unable to look at anything but her throat. “This is a bruise.”
“And I can pass for a young Goldie Hawn!”
She met her own hazel eyes again in the mirror, and I shrank once more. But no recognition.
She pushed past her mother’s chair, clipping her hip on the door knob as she stepped into the living room. Her mother yelled after her, but she paused only to throw a cursory glance at the battered white recliner. She was glad to see it empty. Merek was up and out of the house early on another hunt, and she preferred it that way.
She threw open the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The heat and light almost knock her off her feet. A sudden and desperate urge to vomit swelled inside her and she turned, latching onto the wrought iron.
She puked into the overgrown shrubs, her stomach trying again and again to empty itself.
Go inside, I told her, unsure if I had the strength to communicate directly. Stay out of the light.
She didn’t seem to hear me. Instead she stood there on the slanted porch for a long time before righting herself and prying her eyes open.
There. On the porch, she found them. Her rolling papers and a scattering of tobacco spread across the concrete steps. Even to me, it looked like she dropped them out of surprise.
Or maybe before she was pulled up into the sky.
Chapter Seven
I fell into darkness. I slept.
When I woke, the sun was on the other side of the trees. I couldn’t crawl out from under the house yet, but I knew the sun’s hold on this world had waned, and soon rising would be possible.
I cast my mind out for Lettie. She was at the kitchen table with her mother. They both had steaming bowls of food in front of them. Some sort of biscuit, chicken, and green vegetable from what I could see.
Lettie rolled her cigarettes. It was easier with the machine and with no Merek to torment her while she worked. She enjoyed the repetitive action of rolling cigarettes with the machine. It reminded her of working in the factory back when Kai was still a child. It was a steady job, and the money wasn’t so bad. And even though it was difficult, and it sent her home every night with blisters, that mind-numbing repetition had its appeal. She didn’t have to think when she pulled the swaths of bundled newspapers from the machine and stacked them on the conveyer. And not thinking was a blessed relief to her.
I rather missed the printing press myself. I’d always been fond of the scent of hot ink and paper, even when that scent came from monks and inkwells rather than gargantuan machines.
My power grew as she placed her rolling paper in its holding chamber and then added the tobacco. Turn, turn and perfect cigarettes. Except this machine was a little old and sometimes it caught on the corner and tore the paper. Then tobacco spilled into the slot. When this happened, she had to blow it out, toss the ripped sheet and start over.
She rolled thirty cigarettes, in the time it took her mother to eat one biscuit and half of her piece of chicken.
“You’re quiet,” her mother remarked. “Usually you talk my damn ear off, and I pray to Jesus every minute that I’ll go deaf. But today, I ain’t seen your lips move but once or twice. That boyfriend of yours must’ve really worn you out. How about it, Lettie? You find husband number three?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend, Momma. I have a migraine.”
Her mother laughed “I suppose there ain’t much difference—men and migraines. But don’t you try to convince me that you fell and the vacuum hose attacked you.”
Lettie turned to the clock. There was her instinct again. She grew more anxious as the sun waned in the sky, and she wasn’t sure why. “Where’s Merek?” she asked, setting another rolled cigarette on the tabletop in the long row she’d already created. “He’ll probably be home soon.”
“How would I know? Boy does as he pleases.”
I slipped inside her again. Felt the delicate scrape of the white tobacco paper as if it were between my own fingers. Lettie seemed oblivious to my intrusion. She kept looking at the recliner as if she expected Merek to appear at any moment. As if the patched seat with its scuffs and loose stuffing would morph and reveal a brother hidden in the beams of fading sunlight and blackened cigarette burns.
Is he just out hunting? Or did something happen? Maybe the vampire had wanted more than a rabbit and her own blood. What if he took Merek?
I laughed in my grave. As if I had any use for that scarecrow.
“Are you done?” Lettie asked, suddenly aware that her mother’s hawkish face was fixed on hers.
“You haven’t eaten your dinner.”
Lettie looked down at the lump of browned chicken, glazed vegetables and hunk of buttered brown bread. A gleaming knife sat diagonal across its corner. Two water spots sparkled near the tip of the blade.
“I’m not hungry,” Lettie said, and it surprised her to find it was true.
Not me, of course. This was due course for my plans for her.
She pushed her dinner toward her mother. The woman should eat it anyway. If anyone here was a bag of bones it was her. They poked through her paper-thin flesh enough to make me uncomfortable.
“You’re squinting,” her mother said and began to spread jam across Lettie’s biscuit.
“The light hurts my eyes.”
Her mother pursed her lips and watched her. Lettie pretended not to notice. I, however, was looking straight into the woman’s mind.
Her mother was ready to tear into her again. A bath, cooked meals, and cigarettes—none of it mattered. She was still furious about being left in her room, covered in her own filth, without a cigarette for hours.
“You got something to say?” her mother asked, as if plucking the resentment straight from her mind. Only, I wasn’t sure if it was my resentment or Lettie’s which had registered on her radar.
She should leave you here to rot, I thought, looking into those flat black eyes, tracing the wrinkles that radiate out from their corners. Lettie said, “Where is your cigarette case, Momma?”
“My bedside table, I think.”
She found the cigarette case on the bedroom floor by the window. When she inspected the window, she found a small chip of wood gouged out of a lower frame. So, this was what she’d thrown last night, when she was angry and desperate. She’d hurled the case at the window before her meds kicked in and carried her to sleep.
Lettie picked up the case, flipped it open, and found it empty. Only stray pieces of brown tobacco rested inside the metal cradle. She turned the case over and tapped these remnants out the open window.
Lettie returned to the kitchen and counted the rolled cigarettes lined up in front of the machine. 36. They were laid out in tight little rolls like neat paper sausages.
Paper sausage will be exactly what we start eating if Merek figures out how to trade food stamps for drugs, she thought.
She slid two cigarettes over to her mother, as well as her own plastic Bic lighter with its red tongue. She knew she shouldn’t give her one. How many times had the doctor warned her that these were simply nails in her mother’s coffin?
She is a month from the grave at best, I cooed into her ear. Don’t fear for her.
It was easier to give her mother what she wanted, she thought. Than to spend all day listening to her complaints. She couldn’t bear it on most days, let alone on a day when her head buzzed, her throat burned with every swallow, and it felt like the sunbeams in her eyes were icicles sliding into her brain. And I supposed I was to blame for all that.
Her mother lit the cigarette she was given and sighed, falling back against the chair with relish.
Lettie filled her own case—eighte
en cigarettes in two rows of nine, and put the remaining sixteen in her mother’s.
She watched her mother tilt her head back and exhale. Gray smoke rolled toward the ceiling in a thin, languid stream. I didn’t have the heart to tell Lettie she would have no taste for the sticks herself, soon enough.
She watched her mother smoke, tracing the lines in her mother’s face. Her mother had been beautiful once. She’d kept her body cleaner than any of the Coles, and yet she’d been the one to fall ill.
God’s punishing me, she’d said countless times, for as long as Lettie could remember. Every time the woman had to deal with one hardship it was the same. God’s given it to me good, she’d say with a snide tone. All of y’all are my cross to bear, and I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it. Was it feeding you? Keeping you in good clothes? Sending you off to school? I suppose the moment I knew y’all were demons, I should’ve drowned you in the tub like kittens. Then maybe God would be pleased.
And what would you do now if you knew a demon squatted in your daughter? I thought as the first movements returned to my limbs. The sun must have been close to the horizon now.
One day, Lettie realized that this chatter was her mother’s only source of pleasure. She loved to complain. She loved to make sure that whomever was on the receiving end had no one to blame but themselves. Even as children, her mother had sent her into the yard to pick a switch and kneel in the front room to await punishment.
She’d been on her hands and knees in the front parlor, looking at the underside of a glass dining room table beside a potted fern, for nearly an hour. On her knees and waiting with nothing to do but think. The waiting was part of her mother’s punishment. She’d come in. She’d peer down at her offensive children, and then walk out again. If any of them were stupid enough to get up, thinking they’d been given a reprieve, they were whipped twice as hard for it.
Lettie had learned to stay on her knees. On her knees, until she heard the old familiar prayer. You’ve done this to yourself. And I don’t know why I’ve got to be the one to punish you. Or I guess I do. God’s punishing me.