Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things

by Margie Fuston

  But that wasn’t entirely fair.

  Hanging onto hope is so, so hard when every turn gives you a reason to let go. I’m shredded with the effort. It’s wrong to expect others to put themselves through what I have.

  And crying last night into Henry’s chest felt needed, like getting out that small grief helped me keep everything else contained.

  But everyone can’t hold things back as well as me.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  “You promise?”

  I cringe. “Yes.”

  “Good,” she says.

  I’m about to end the call when she says my name.

  “Yeah?”

  “Draw me something, will you?”

  “I’ll try.” I hang up. Her last question rings in my ears. It didn’t sound like her trying to be Dad. It sounded like something she’s wanted to say for a long time.

  Maybe I’ll have it in me to draw again when this is over.

  I speed up, skirting around the handful of bright-eyed tourists who turned in to bed early and stepping over the handful of people still passed out in the street who never went to bed at all. Early morning in the French Quarter is probably the one time the two crowds meet—if you can call stepping over someone’s legs meeting.

  The bell dings as I open the bookstore door. Cool air wraps around me—already ten degrees cooler than the outside. I expect to be the only one here at this hour, but two men in their twenties stand in the back, debating the merits of some author.

  Ruth catches my eye and winks as I slip around the corner into the poetry nook.

  Nicholas didn’t tell me to come here again. Replaying our conversations last night, I realize he didn’t reveal much of anything.

  But something must be here waiting for me. If not—

  I’ll hunt him down like I’m the great-granddaughter of Van Helsing himself.

  The thought brings a vicious smile to my face.

  I tug my little book off the shelf and flip through it. There. A snag in the pages, and a new note next to a new poem.

  We Wear The Mask

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,

  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

  This debt we pay to human guile;

  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

  And mouth with myriad subtleties,

  Why should the world be over-wise,

  In counting all our tears and sighs?

  Nay, let them only see us, while

  We wear the mask.

  We smile, but O great Christ, our cries

  To thee from tortured souls arise.

  We sing, but oh the clay is vile

  Beneath our feet, and long the mile,

  But let the world dream otherwise,

  We wear the mask!

  —Paul Laurence Dunbar

  This one hits home and feels like a warning. I am the one wearing a mask and smiling with my bleeding heart in my chest, and Nicholas knows it. I need to do better. I open my note, fingers shaking slightly as I do.

  Gold suits you, which bodes well for you.

  We love wearing gold, after all. But our lives

  aren’t all glitz and glamour. Time to test your

  fangs. Your next challenge: pet an alligator.

  “Hell no,” I mutter.

  “Good book?” One of the young men stands at the entrance of the nook. He takes in the cover of my book through his overtly trendy black-rimmed glasses and shakes his head, reaching and plucking it from my hands without asking, sighing as he flips it back and forth. “This one’s just a tourist trap—spooky poetry for a spooky place. I can recommend something better.”

  As he moves past me, I grab the book back from him. “I’m good, thanks.”

  He shrugs, pushing a Walt Whitman collection back on the shelf, like recommending Leaves of Grass, the one poetry collection everyone’s heard of, would have been impressive. “Your loss.”

  “Right.” He heads back out toward his buddy. “Wait.”

  He turns back around, eyebrows raised in that anticipating way, like he’s about to be right about something.

  “Do you know where I can pet an alligator around here?”

  He snorts.

  His buddy snickers behind him.

  I smile sweetly even though I’m imagining what I’d do to him if I really were a vampire.

  “No idea.” He turns and leaves with his friend, laughing together about tourists.

  “Assholes.” I turn and find Ruth behind me. “Sorry about my language.”

  She smiles. “No problem, dear. Undergraduate English majors tend to be a bag of pricks.”

  I freeze and then laugh until my stomach hurts.

  She’s back to straightening her shelves when I catch my breath.

  “You might try a swamp tour,” she says. “I don’t think they encourage you to pet the beasts, but they’ll get you close enough.”

  * * *

  Eighty dollars and one long bus ride later, Henry and I board a rickety metal boat with ten other people and a guide who tells us not to worry—none of their tour boats have sunk in at least a month.

  Henry cracks up with half the other people.

  The other half and I share a few frightened glances.

  “That’s not funny,” I whisper.

  “Sure it is.” Henry’s grinning like a kid going to Disneyland for the first time. He seems to have forgotten what I did to him yesterday.

  “I can’t swim, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” He laughs even louder, like my drowning takes the comedy level up a notch.

  I scowl. He’s too bright—too happy—there’s an air of falseness to it, like he’s the one putting on a mask to hide any lingering hurts from me. I should never have cried in front of him. He’s trying to make me feel good when I don’t deserve it.

  He was always the first one to apologize.

  “Lighten up. I can swim well enough for both of us.”

  “I’m not sure that’s how that works. You’ll be on dry land fast, and I’ll still be drowning.”

  “I would never let you drown.” There’s a note of seriousness in his voice that lightens my chest so that I no longer feel like a sack of sinkable rocks. He reaches out and squeezes my hand briefly. “Remember?”

  His question pulls up the memory of the time we were at another kid’s swim party. I would only get in with the safety of an inner tube, but I was walking along the edge of the pool without it when another boy thought it’d be hilarious to shove me in. My head went underwater, but only for a second before Henry appeared, holding me up at the side of the pool as I coughed and cried from the way my nose burned.

  I shudder as I remember the feeling.

  “You shoved that kid in the deep end afterward,” I say.

  “I’ll still hurt anyone who hurts you.” His voice holds no trace of lightness or humor. I know exactly who he’s thinking of.

  I keep my voice mellow. “Good to know.”

  And then the boat shoots forward with a speed nobody anticipated. My body slides, closing the couple of inches between me and Henry, and I don’t immediately correct myself. If the boat does go down, I should be closer to the guy who promised to save me from drowning. That’s just solid reasoning.

  The thick green grasses lining the murky water become nothing but a blur. I focus on the white spray ripping off the side of the boat. When we stop, we’re in a swamp cul-de-sac, a small, rounded offshoot surrounded by dense green foliage. It feels like a different world than the French Quarter, which is so alive and layered with human history. Out here teems with untouched life—a different kind of vibrancy and beauty.

  “Here they come, folks,” the guide says.

  I don’t know when my hand latched onto Henry’s biceps, but I squeeze a little tighter as a seven-foot alligator drifts up to the side of the boat.

  “I am not touching that thing,” I mutter.

  Henry laughs. “I don’t think that’s an opt
ion.”

  I didn’t tell him about the next challenge. When I shook him awake this morning to tell him to get ready for the swamp tour, he thought I got the tickets for him. A little surprise for my betrayal from the night before. I didn’t correct his assumption.

  And now I feel terrible.

  I let go of him so he can lean forward and get closer to the rails than I want to be.

  “Holy crap.” His voice rises on the a in crap in a way that makes me a little concerned about his level of investment. “They’re glorious. They’re like little miniature dinosaurs.”

  I stare at him like he lost his mind on the ride out here, but he’s not looking at me. I could probably take off all my clothes and start nude sunbathing, and he still wouldn’t look at me because he’s more into the scaly rough look.

  He loved dinosaurs as a kid. When we were ten, we holed up in his room and watched the first Jurassic Park movie even though I wasn’t supposed to watch it yet, and he regaled me with random facts like how long a real T. rex’s teeth would be as it chomped into a dude or how a T. rex wouldn’t actually be fast enough to keep up with a Jeep going full speed, as if that made it any less scary.

  At that point in my life, I much preferred my favorite Disney Channel Original Movie: Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire.

  “ ‘Pretty cool’?” I say, keeping all my fingers and toes well away from the railing on the boat. Even though eventually I’m going to have to stick my hand out there and go for it.

  “Pretty cool.” Henry’s voice still carries that higher prepuberty pitch as he finally breaks his loving trance with the gator to gape at me. “I don’t think you’re appreciating this at the appropriate level. Look at those eyes. They’re ancient and cold and true killers. I bet they’d eat vampires for breakfast.”

  “No doubt.” The slitted golden eye roves over me like I barely register on its radar of important things in life.

  The guide dangles a little ball of something out over the water, and the alligator leaps for it, snagging it in his mouth and then dropping back down.

  Henry cheers.

  I pull the Polaroid from my purse and snap his picture.

  His face falls when I do.

  “What?”

  “Why’d you bring that thing?” He dips his chin toward the camera like it’s some kind of horrible contraption he can’t even name. “Is this another task? Are you doing this for him?”

  I want to argue. Nothing I do is for Nicholas—not really. I thought I made that clear last night.

  “I just wanted to take your picture.”

  “Oh.” The alligator makes another leap behind him, and he misses it. “Look.” He points down the side of the boat behind me, where a smaller one eyes the show hungrily.

  “Will you take my picture?” I ask. I pass the camera to him, trying not to let my fingers tremble, which would be a dead giveaway.

  He hesitates but plucks the camera from me.

  I lean against the rail and take a deep breath. “Don’t take it yet.”

  “It’s going to swim away.”

  “I want to touch it.”

  He lowers the camera from his face, suspicion latching onto his expression, tugging down the corners of his mouth. I probably left fingernail imprints in his arm when they swam up to the boat, and now I want to touch one? He isn’t buying it.

  “My dad will think it’s cool.” The lie burns my tongue so bad I might need to jump in the swamp to make the pain go away.

  “Will he think it’s cool when you come home minus three fingers?”

  “I’m sure he’ll love me anyway. Just take the shot, will you?”

  He pulls the camera back up to his eye.

  The tour guide and the rest of the people on board focus on the giant alligator snatching his snacks from midair. It’s now or never.

  I lean closer to the rail, gripping it with both hands. I count my ten fingers and wonder if I’d actually be good with counting only seven. The little gator floats there, eyes focused on the bigger gator getting all the snacks. He really wants a snack too.

  I lean back in my seat, feeling queasy.

  “I can’t do it.” I like my fingers. I use them to draw pretty things, or at least I used to. I thought maybe I’d be able to draw pretty things again once I saved my dad, but if I’m missing all my fingers I won’t be able to. Then again, some people learn to paint with their toes—I think I read that somewhere. But if I don’t save my dad, I’ll never draw a pretty thing ever again, just endless black holes.

  My face is wet. Am I crying? No—I wipe away one errant tear. Damn it. They’re too close to the surface after last night.

  “Hey. It’s okay. We can take other cool pictures for your dad,” Henry says.

  “No… I can do this.” Remembering the weakness in Dad’s voice, I let out enough sorrow from my well to drown out my fear. At least I don’t have to smile for this challenge. I only need to be brave—channel my inner child who would do almost anything. Almost. How’d that bastard know I don’t like anything resembling a dinosaur?

  Sucking in a breath, I crouch down by the rails, lean over, and touch the rough, slick back of the alligator. Then it’s gone, and my fingers touch nothing but water. I yank them back and count them.

  Henry’s grinning at me.

  “Did you get it?”

  He nods and passes me the still black Polaroid.

  “Are you shaking?” he asks.

  “Nope. Not at all.” I realize our arms are touching again and start to shift away, but he reaches out and grabs my hand, weaving his fingers between mine and squeezing tight enough to stop my tremors. He rests both our hands on my knee, watching me the whole time to make sure it’s okay.

  It feels nice.

  The guide kicks the engine on, and as we speed through the next section of the swamp, I dry up the little bit of sorrow I let out and relax into our surroundings. I achieved my task, and it’s not like I can jump off the boat and swim back to deposit my picture any sooner.

  The second part of the swamp tour takes us through a narrow passage dense with trees growing straight out of the water, half their roots twisting above the waterline. Everything is green and dark, and you just know something will kill you if you fall overboard. Delightfully creepy.

  And then I spot the pack of wild raccoons, smaller with redder fur than the raccoons in the city.

  “Ohhhh, they are too cute. Maybe I can pet one of them.”

  “Gross,” Henry says. “They probably have rabies. They’re more dangerous than the gators.”

  One stands up on its hind legs, cocking its head at us as we coast by. I wave at it.

  “Did you seriously wave at that rodent?”

  I punch him in the shoulder with my free hand. “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not—it’s cute.”

  I widen my eyes dramatically. “Did you admit I’m cute?”

  “I’m pretty sure I admitted that more than once before.”

  Some of the humor’s left his face, replaced by something else I’m afraid to name. Something way beyond physical chemistry. Something I don’t have room for in my life. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

  The comfort of my fingers between his shifts to something electric—exciting but hard to bear.

  We stare at each other until I break my hand free and turn back to the swamp, whose murky water suddenly seems much safer than this boat.

  “Holy cow. Would you look at the balls on that boar?” The boar roots through the mud in front of us, and it’s impossible to ignore that it’s the male of the species.

  Henry barks out a laugh. “Well, that’s one way to change the subject.”

  I watch him in my peripheral vision to gauge if he’s upset, but he’s already smiling slightly, leaning over the bars on the boat, trying to catch a glimpse of the water snake the guide pointed out moments before.

  I paste an easy smile on my face and withdraw, letting it do the work for me. If Henry notices I’m no
t engaged anymore, he doesn’t mention it. Occasionally he smiles in my direction, but it carries none of the suggestion from our earlier conversation.

  I don’t have room for romance in my life right now. It would only distract me from my tasks. I can’t help but think of how I leaned into the moment last night—Nicholas’s cold fingers tracing the pulse in my neck—but that’s different. I’m playing pretend with Nicholas. Henry’s real.

  When our boat docks again, he offers his hand to help me step up. Even though I certainly don’t need it, I take it like a peace offering. Friends help friends off boats.

  Everything’s fine until we get back on the bus and I register the photograph still gripped in my hand. I lift it and stare at my blurry arm and the dark shadow in the water, which looks nothing like an alligator. You can’t even tell I touched it.

  My stomach bottoms out, and I almost cry again for the second time in one day.

  Thankfully, Henry doesn’t notice. He’s going full nerd beside me, rattling off fun facts from his phone about alligators, which are apparently his new favorite thing.

  When we get back into town, we head to the bookstore under the pretext of getting the next challenge. I shake my head slightly at Ruth when we walk through the door, praying she gets the hint and doesn’t mention me being here already this morning.

  She’s spry as ever in a pink linen dress and a little white shawl, but I catch the crease of worry in her brow as she watches me head back to the poetry section. Henry’s safely chatting with her, so I pull the book off the shelf and place my photo between the pages, hoping the blurry action is enough. I don’t know what I’ll do if I get behind. I don’t have the money to postpone our flight, and I worry Dad doesn’t have that kind of time. Plus, I’ve never missed a single one of Dad’s birthdays. I’m not going to start now, even if I plan on him having an endless amount of them.

  “What are you doing?”

  I snap the book shut, but Henry grabs it from me and flips it open to the picture.

  His usually warm face goes cold as he closes the book and hands it back to me with two fingers as if it’s been doused in poison.

  “You lied,” he says simply, staring above my head instead of directly at me.

  “I really thought you’d enjoy it.”