Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things

by Margie Fuston

  Dad’s gaze flicks to me, and he leans forward. “Still a werewolf. Not going to switch sides just because I’m drugged.” He drops his head back on the pillow and closes his eyes. “Nice try, though.”

  “But vampires are immortal.” My consistent argument. Dad always countered that nobody wanted to live forever, but that was before. When was the last time we watched a movie where a vampire died from cancer?

  Never.

  He doesn’t even open his eyes. I need him to switch sides. I need him to say he’d choose vampires now because he doesn’t want to leave me behind. I need him to erase the relief I saw earlier. To keep fighting.

  “Dad,” I whisper. His eyes stay closed, and I should let him sleep, but sitting here, analyzing how much his round cheeks have sunken in the last two weeks, creates an overwhelming ache in my chest. What if he closes his eyes and never opens them again? The thought makes my heart pulse too hard and too fast, and I can’t breathe or think about anything else besides making sure his eyes open. I reach out and touch his hand. “Dad,” I say a little louder.

  His eyes crack open. “What, honey?”

  “You still have hope, right? You’re not giving up. I know you believe in miracles.” My voice breaks, and I bite my tongue to give myself a tangible pain to focus on. I put all my strength into making my voice strong and steady. “You taught me to believe in them.”

  “Of course I do, honey. And I always have hope, but sometimes what we hope for changes, and sometimes we can’t hope for the thing we really want.” He holds his hand out for me, but I don’t reach for it. The gesture feels like acceptance, like he wants me to give up and hope for something else, but what? Maybe I had other hopes before, but right now I can’t think of a single one that doesn’t include my dad being there. “Do you understand?” he asks.

  I nod but refuse to meet his eyes. When I look back, they’re closed again.

  “Dad?” I say.

  The front door slams, and I flinch. My sister’s voice rises and falls from the front of the house until it rises and doesn’t come back down. Relief unwinds the knot in my stomach. She’s angry, too. Mom told her they’re giving up, and Jessica will talk some sense into them. Mom listens to her.

  When Jessica left for college two years ago, it was almost a relief. We’d grown so far apart after the vampire reveal that we barely spoke. I mostly avoided her because I couldn’t stand the condescending glances she shared with Mom whenever I spoke about anything vampire-related—even if was just a new movie.

  But when Dad got sick, I needed her. I wanted the big sister from before vampires were real, the one I held hands with to fall asleep on those rare occasions Dad let us watch something too scary. Well, she was scared. I pretended so she wouldn’t feel alone. I’d squeeze her hand and she’d repeat vampires don’t exist over and over again until she fell asleep while I lay there and secretly dreamed they did.

  I needed someone to be strong for again, but I also wanted her to squeeze my hand and tell me cancer wasn’t scary. It might exist, but it was an easily defeated monster.

  And she did.

  Jessica showed up with color-coded binders full of research and options and clinical trials. She had statistics for Mom. She had hope for Dad. She even knew the best diet—the one Mom’s been diligently following ever since. I’ve been eating cruciferous vegetables with every meal for months, and I haven’t complained once. I know Jessica will have another plan for us now. A new routine will be nothing I can’t handle.

  But then she bursts through the door, cheeks wet with tears. “Daddy.” She sniffles, pausing steps from the bed. Dad opens his eyes, and she falls into his arms, weeping.

  The hardness in my stomach expands to my throat. This isn’t the version of her I want.

  The one ally I thought I could count on has fallen prey to my greatest enemy: statistics.

  I stare at the blank television and listen to her sniffle. I wish I could walk in here and weep and then go back to my dorm and not worry about how Dad would feel after I left. But I’m here all the time. I don’t get to escape—not that I want to.

  Dad rubs her back as she wipes at her eyes.

  He doesn’t need this. It’s not fair to him.

  My throat aches like it might burst open if I don’t release a few tears. I want to curl up against Dad’s chest and let him comfort me too, but I place my hand around the front of my neck and squeeze. I’m in control even if I can’t control Jessica. You can’t take care of others when you can’t keep a grip on yourself. Why can’t she realize that? If she would get it together, we could figure out a different plan. Scientists come up with new cures every day—we just need to research more.

  But all she does is cry.

  My face gets hot and stuffy, and I need to leave the room.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Jessica mumbles into his chest.

  “It’s okay,” he says. But it’s not. Everyone knows it’s not.

  I back toward the door.

  “Victoria.” Dad says my name softly, stopping me. He’s still holding Jessica, but he looks at me over her shoulder. “Draw me a picture?” he asks.

  I try not to cringe, nodding instead. He’s made that request a hundred times before—sometimes when he senses I need a distraction, sometimes when he needs a distraction, and sometimes just for fun.

  But he doesn’t know that it’s been months since I’ve drawn anything.

  I head to my bedroom and pull out the tub full of art supplies from under my bed, smudging the thin layer of dust on top. Pulling out my sketchbook, I flip to the first picture—a landscape of the forest behind our house done in stark charcoal with none of the vibrant chalks or watercolors I usually favor. The shading’s so intense I can barely make out the silhouettes of the trees. It looks like I drew it at midnight, not noon when it really happened. But I did it right after Dad got sick, and I couldn’t stop shading. Shadows usually shape the picture, make it come alive, but too many drown it in darkness. I flip to the next one and the next, but they’re all the same—a mess of shadows and hurt. Until they just stop. I couldn’t try anymore. My sketches wouldn’t let me lie about how I was feeling.

  I dig out an older sketchbook, but all the pages have already been torn out and handed to Dad so I could pretend to be okay. Show him I could still draw with the same joy I had before.

  Some lies are okay—especially the ones that keep a smile on his face—but I’m out of old drawings, and I desperately don’t want to know what will happen if I let myself try again right now.

  I shove everything back under my bed and head down the hall to the office my parents share. On one side is Mom’s stark white desk with a single chrome lamp on it and a calendar taking up the wall above it. On the other side is Dad’s mahogany beast he found at a yard sale because he likes the history of used things. So do I—they tell stories like paintings. Tacked to the wall above his desk, spread out in the spaces around his movie posters, are twenty or so of my drawings—from one of our family that I must have done in preschool, where we look more like trees than people, to one of Lestat I gave him on his birthday last year. I know he has more tucked away in his desk drawer, and I consider pulling one out and regifting it, but I don’t want to risk him remembering it and catching me.

  I turn to Mom’s desk instead. It’s not like I’ve never given her any—she just doesn’t like clutter. I pull out her bottom drawer and fish through the bland documents until my fingers hit the texture of real paper—the kind meant to hold everything. I pull out a watercolor of a lavender rose I gave her a couple of years back. It’s a bit plain, but I thought she might actually hang it up if it was more her style. The funny thing is, Dad’s always talking about how Mom used to be this fabulous artist, but she gave it up when she went to law school. I asked her once if I could see some of her work, but she got quiet and said she didn’t keep it. She doesn’t have time for it because she has a real job.

  She’s less than thrilled I’m going to art school in the
fall—that is, I am if I can draw again by then. Maybe she’ll get her wish after all, and I’ll study accounting like Jessica.

  I stare down at the vibrant petals, melding subtle shades of purple. I want to create like that again. I need to, but I need Dad to be okay to do that, and I’m running out of old pictures to give to him. At least this one won’t go to waste.

  When I get back downstairs, Jessica hasn’t come out yet, so I head into the kitchen instead.

  Mom’s cutting onions into unrecognizable slivers when I pull myself up onto the stool on the other side of the island. Her eyes are dry. My dad and I always joke that she’s so composed even onions can’t make her shed a tear, but it’s really because she wears contacts.

  “Jessica’s going full sprinklers in there,” I say, placing my stolen picture on the counter in front of me.

  She stops mid-cut to look up, her gaze pausing on the drawing. I wasn’t sure she’d even recognize it, and I wait for her to mention it.

  “Your sister’s taking this hard. Go easy on her,” she says.

  Her words constrict around my throat, and I take a deep breath to shake them off. He’s my dad too.

  She glances at my picture again as she goes back to slicing. “Are you back to drawing?”

  My chest tightens. She doesn’t recognize the picture, and that stings, but I didn’t expect her to notice I wasn’t drawing anymore. I don’t want to explain why I can’t—she’s too practical to understand.

  “Are you?” Mom doesn’t accept silence as an answer.

  “No.” I stare at the vibrant petals and hope she doesn’t ask why.

  “You’d better get over that if you want to go to art school.”

  I wince. I hate that she says if you want to go, like nothing’s been decided even though I already accepted. But she’s not wrong. She just doesn’t understand that I can’t get over this.

  I need to change the topic.

  “What are we gonna do?” I ask.

  She doesn’t look up. “About what?”

  “Dad. Jessica had other options in those binders. Maybe a new diet?” We already tried the diet with the highest success rate, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t worth trying as well.

  The knife clanks against the quartz countertop as she sighs. “Victoria.” She pauses as if searching for the words. “It’s over. We knew the odds. Only twenty percent make it past the first year.”

  Each short sentence is a stake in the chest.

  Why does everything have to be odds and statistics with her? Why can’t she ever hope for the best without analyzing whether or not it makes sense?

  “You don’t know that. We can’t give up.”

  Mom’s agnostic. Dad’s religious. I waver between them both, but lately I’ve taken up praying again. It helps me voice everything I keep hidden from everyone else. I’m not sure anymore though—this is not the outcome I prayed for.

  “Your dad is ready. He doesn’t want to fight anymore.” I’m staring at her pile of mutilated onions, and I think her voice breaks a little. I look up to try to catch a moment of vulnerability, but she’s picked up her knife again and gone back to work.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “He told me, Victoria.”

  She punctuates the last sentence with my name—it’s usually my cue that our conversation is over and she doesn’t want to deal with me anymore.

  “He wouldn’t say that.” Dad doesn’t give up. I’m the same way.

  “Victoria,” she says, but her voice cracks again, and for a second we stare at each other. I lean toward her, praying she’s going to tell me she still has hope too, or at least show me that we’re both burying the same unfathomable pain.

  But she turns away, her blade beating once again on the cutting board.

  Jessica’s high heels click into the room behind me. “Dad’s going to sleep.” Her cheeks are redder than usual, but she got Dad’s olive complexion and black hair, and she always looks stunning, even when she cries—maybe that’s why she feels free to do it so often. I got Mom’s copper-blond hair and pink skin. If I cry, I look like someone scalded my face with boiling water.

  “We’re going to watch a movie together.”

  “You should let him sleep,” she says, sparing me a glance before turning to Mom. “We need to start planning.”

  My stomach bottoms out. The chasm that used to be between us opens again in an instant. She’s too scared to hope just like she was too scared to believe in vampires. She’s not talking about a new diet. The determined quiver in her lips tells me she’s thinking about his memorial, and I can’t allow it. If we all think like Dad’s dying, then it’s over. We need to plan for him to live, and I need to show them how.

  Dad’s birthday’s in a week and a half, and every year we invite all our extended family along with some friends for a barbecue and way too many rounds of charades. Dad looks forward to it.

  I give my hands one quick clap, taking charge like I always do for special events. “Okay, I know Dad’s still on a diet, and maybe we need to make his diet more hardcore given the negative news today, but I’m thinking he can cheat for his birthday and we get that German chocolate cake from the bakery downtown that uses way too much frosting.”

  For a second, the normalcy of planning a party makes me forget about anything else. I’m picking the cake, like I do every year. Dad will say it’s the best cake he’s ever had, like he does every year.

  But their faces, strained and sad, won’t let me pretend. They share one of those condescending looks I hate—the ones that make me feel ridiculous.

  “Victoria,” Mom whispers, her voice gentler than I’ve ever heard it.

  Jessica reaches out and places her clammy hand over mine. “Dad’s not up for a party.”

  I pull away. I know that, but I don’t want to admit it. I can’t. “Then what did you mean?”

  Vaguely, I’m aware how cruel it is to make her say it, to keep pretending I don’t know, but I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to let go of this one last thing that says everything’s going to be okay.

  “We need to plan a memorial.” She says the words slowly and carefully, as if I need the extra time to let them register.

  I tell myself to let it go. Instead, I jump up fast enough to knock over my stool, and it crashes against the wood floor so hard I probably scratched it. “You realize he’s still breathing, right?”

  Jessica gapes at me.

  “Victoria.” Mom’s voice is a warning, her brief softness gone.

  I’d needed Jessica to come in here and make plans, but not these.

  Jessica’s face goes soft with sympathy, as if she understands something I don’t, and I hate that look more than any other.

  “Don’t you have exams or something? Why are you here?” Jessica barely visited after she moved out two years ago, but she’s been here once a week since Dad got sick, usually sitting in the kitchen with Mom, drinking wine and going through her binders.

  “Victoria,” Mom says. “Why don’t you go watch that movie with Dad?”

  I glance between them. Jessica’s crying again, and I feel bad, but then I remember she’s given up, and I hate her enough to not care.

  Snatching my painting off the counter, I leave the room without looking at either of them.

  Dad’s asleep, but I go in anyway, pull Underworld out of the DVD player, stick in The Lost Boys, and watch Kiefer Sutherland trick Michael into drinking blood and becoming a vampire. But Michael doesn’t want to be a vampire and live forever. He spends the whole movie trying not to live forever.

  He doesn’t understand—staying human means inevitable death. What fool fights so hard just to die one day? Someone who hasn’t seen what death looks like, I guess.

  There is no escape.

  No hope. Only hunger and pain.

  —30 Days of Night

  Two

  The loneliness of sitting in a church pew by
yourself can be brutal. Church seems like a place where nobody should feel alone, but here I am, the only one in my row, trying to sing the hymns without choking on the words. I loved coming with Dad. His faith was contagious. Lately I come here mostly because when I get home, Dad will ask me how church was, and he’ll smile as I recite the few key points I remember from the sermon. Dad hasn’t come in two months.

  Today I’m here for myself. I need some kind of sign it’ll be okay. I can go home and hold Dad’s hand and know a miracle is coming because that’s what I asked for. I need a reason to believe. The doctor says science has nothing left to offer us, but God’s still in the picture.

  The preacher gets up and starts droning on about how God meets us in our grief and some nonsense about trials making us stronger, but I’m already strong. I don’t need grief. I tune her out and pull my phone from my purse to check the Google alert I have set for vampires. I need some little tidbit to distract Dad with later. A new Dracula movie is coming out. Cool—can’t have too many of those. A man murdered a woman and left bite marks on her neck. Not cool, but I click on it anyway. I still keep tabs on the news, looking for signs of vampires showing themselves once more. But most of the time their existence feels like something we dreamed.

  This guy wore fake fangs and black contacts. Definitely human, then. Too bad.

  I click my phone off and make one more effort during the final prayer. I only ask for one thing over and over again—not to lose him. Maybe that’s why God hasn’t listened to me. I’m selfish. I’m worried about what I’ll be without Dad—a girl who looks at weird vampire articles alone in her room with no one to share them with.

  The thought turns my stomach. If I were a better person, God might listen.

  Tears burn my cheeks, but I wipe them away as quickly as they come. Even without Dad here to see them, they’re a betrayal. They mean I’ve given up.