Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things

by Margie Fuston

  I am lusting red tinged with purple fear and streaked with yellow happiness—real happiness, not something fake. I only told myself it was fake earlier to make it okay. I’ve lost control of my well. Nicholas is pulling up buckets of color.

  Water splashes us as a car drives through one of the constant puddles on the street, and suddenly I’m back in my own skin, aware of what I’ve done—I let myself live in the moment. I let myself feel things that have no purpose in my life right now.

  His fingers close around my beads again, like he senses me pulling away and wants to hang on, but I’m already stepping away, and the beads stretch between us. He gently lays them back against my chest.

  I thought it would be easy to pretend for him, to show him happiness on the outside without any of it existing inside. But I’m not just fooling him. I’m fooling myself. He draws out something real inside me—the thrill of adventure and danger, the erratic pulse of longing. And when my heart started pounding, it drowned out everything else—my bond with Henry. Even Dad. I sketch Dad in my mind, all in smudged charcoal that’s fading with age. I hang onto the image, letting it drag me back out of my momentary happiness.

  Nicholas was right all along—I am capable of feeling true joy through my pain. But I don’t want to.

  “Can we be done for the night?” I ask.

  “Of course,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you…”

  He doesn’t finish the sentence, probably because he has no idea what’s wrong with me. He doesn’t know about my father.

  I brush past him and walk into the night. He doesn’t speak to me again, but I sense him behind me as I walk. The streets are rowdy, and I dodge more than one group of drunk men, so I appreciate the gesture. When I reach the doorway to the building, I pivot and catch his silhouette turning the corner, walking in the other direction.

  Part of me longs to call after him. I tell myself it’s only to ask if that was enough—if one minute of betraying my grief will satisfy him—but the traitor within me just wants him close enough to feel those things again.

  I turn and take the stairs to the apartment two at a time, moving so fast my muscles burn by the time I reach the door.

  Good. I deserve the pain.

  “You were out late,” Henry grumbles from the couch when I get through the front door.

  I almost make a “sorry, Dad” joke, but it wouldn’t work, given everything.

  I go with silence instead.

  Henry sits up, and I get the sense he’s inspecting every inch of me. “You look like you had fun,” he says, and my stomach clenches. He’s not wrong. I did. I felt light and free and alive in a way I haven’t felt in months. I let out all the vibrant colors, and now I can’t stop the rest from coming with them.

  Happiness demands an equal dose of sorrow.

  I let myself be bright and pink and golden, standing in the shadows, and now I spiral into a sea of blues I can’t separate.

  I walk to my room and shut the door.

  Sad songs hit the spot, don’t they?

  —A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

  Sixteen

  In the morning, I slink out of bed and to the bookstore, giving Ruth a cheery hello on my way back to the poetry section. She watches me over her glasses, probably sensing something’s off, but she’s shrewd enough not to ask. I take a picture of the poem and grab the note and don’t bother looking at either one until I get back under my hot-pink bedspread.

  I’m honestly not sure I can do this anymore, but I’ve already come so close and sacrificed too much. It’s Saturday. Three days left—how much more can he ask of me?

  I unfold the note.

  I’ve never seen anyone so determined. Joanie’s got nothing on you. Your story will have a different ending. I want the world to see that determination. Your task for tonight: Sing with a jazz band.

  I get terrible stage fright. I wanted so badly to be a performer as a kid, but every time I tried, I froze. But this doesn’t even faze me. Fear I can conquer.

  A place and time are listed below at the bottom of the note.

  I have nothing to do until tonight, and that feels like such a waste. I’d rather have another silly challenge to occupy my mind—something to give me at least the illusion of progress instead of lounging around on vacation while my family needs me.

  I open the pictures on my phone so I can distract myself with the poem.

  The World

  By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:

  But all night as the moon so changeth she;

  Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy

  And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.

  By day she wooes me to the outer air,

  Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:

  But through the night, a beast she grins at me,

  A very monster void of love and prayer.

  By day she stands a lie: by night she stands

  In all the naked horror of the truth

  With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.

  Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell

  My soul to her, give her my life and youth,

  Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?

  —Christina Rossetti

  This poem scares me. Is Nicholas the beast, or am I? What if I’m the one playing with him?

  I lay back and close my eyes, but the darkness behind my lids magnifies every thought. They snap open, and I count my heartbeats instead, but that only makes me think of what it would be like to not have one at all—to be undead or just dead. I wonder if God has a heartbeat or if he’s like a vampire, feeding off the energy of everyone on earth. I wish I could ask Dad his thoughts about that interpretation, but I don’t think he’d like my God-might-be-a-vampire theory.

  I move on to counting planks of wood in the ceiling, but eventually I need to face the fact that I let my well open last night, and now emotions trickle under my skin like a leaky faucet I don’t know how to fix.

  I need to regain control. The only way to win this is to hide my sadness, and to do that, I need to hide everything.

  I fortify it by thinking of Dad—not him sick, but all the times he was strong for me, like when I slipped and broke my arm climbing up a slide after my mother told me not to, and while I bawled and my mom screamed, he calmly scooped me up like nothing was wrong and packed me into the car like it was any other day. I actually stopped crying in the face of his calmness, and I can do the same now.

  The harder part is containing the emotions that have already seeped through my skin and left watercolor stains. I chase down happiness first, a sharp, translucent yellow—those few moments last night watching my necklaces soar through the air. I picture my dad’s once round and jovial face sunken in with pain, and the happiness slinks back without a fight.

  Sorrow’s harder to draw out. It shifts and changes like the blue of the sea and hides in all the curves of my veins. I’m tempted to let it stay, but letting it stay would be giving up. I squeeze it out by imagining Dad, healthy for all eternity, so grateful that I believed and took this risk for him, and the sorrow scurries back from my determination.

  The guilt’s the hardest to scrub out—gray and as untouchable as a storm cloud, it refuses to be contained with other colors. It eats at me until my insides become a field of suffocating fog. And because I have no colors to fend it off with, I let it stay. After all, Nicholas said I was too sad to live forever. He didn’t mention guilt.

  I wallow in it until an hour before I have to go.

  I choose a white cotton dress with soft blue vertical stripes, accented in the middle with a large dove-gray bow. My hair embraces the waves the humidity gives it, and I keep my makeup light. I smile at my reflection. I’m the embodiment of air and lightness, and nobody will ever suspect the hole in the center of my chest when I look like this.

  When I come out of my room, Henry’s gone. I try not to care. I let the fog cover that feeling too.

  * * *
<
br />   The jazz club is nothing like the loud, decadent place where I first met Nicholas. The vibe is cool in a simple, effortless way—a classic wooden bar, faded green walls covered in an eclectic array of art I could look at all day, a tiny stage set up in front of the window facing the street, and a couple of small tables and chairs.

  I’m surprised to see Nicholas leaning back in one of those wooden chairs in light jeans and a gray T-shirt, a beer in front of him, his normally slick curls soft and natural. When he smiles at me, a little flush of lust, hot and red, flares through my haze. He pulls a single pink rose wrapped in gold tissue paper off the table and hands it to me.

  “My favorite color.” I wrap a hand around the smooth, thornless stem.

  “I thought it might be.” His smile is shyer than I’ve ever seen it. Something holds his normal cockiness at bay.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  His smile fades. “What do you mean?”

  I dangle my flower in front of his face.

  “I’m wooing you, of course. Haven’t you been wooed before?” His voice is serious.

  I think of Henry.

  “I guess not. But why?” He could just bite my neck, give me his blood, and be done with it, or tell me to leave and never think of me again.

  “Do I need a reason?”

  “Everyone has a reason.”

  “True.” He hesitates, eyes narrowing, searching me for something I probably can’t give him. “If I turn you, we’ll be connected for a very long time. It’d be delightful if we got along.”

  “Oh. So you kind of like me, then?”

  He grins, and it draws out the tiniest bit of joy, which my guilt immediately swallows without mercy.

  I attempt to draw on a smile to hide it. But the muscles in my face protest. They are so, so tired.

  “Victoria?” He pauses as he’s pulling out a chair for me to examine the downturned corners of my uncooperative mouth. His own lips mirror mine.

  Shit. Why can’t I pretend anymore?

  Nicholas starts to say something as someone clears their throat behind me.

  I glance back, and there Henry stands, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking like he regrets his decision to come.

  His eyes flicker between me and Nicholas.

  Nicholas waits with one hand on my chair, face smooth, saying nothing.

  “How’d you find me?” I ask him.

  Henry’s cheek twitches. He glances at his toes and then the band setting up next to us. Whatever reaction he wanted from me, this was not it. “Ruth told me.”

  Nicholas finally breaks his stony silence behind me and grumbles something about never trusting Ruth again.

  I shoot him a glare, and he stops. “Should I pull up another chair?” he asks a little too sweetly.

  I turn back to Henry.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Me too,” I answer.

  We don’t get into what we’re sorry for. It reminds me of how easy it was when we were kids, pissing each other off one minute and forgiving the next with no drawn-out apologies.

  He runs a finger inside the collar of his white shirt, smiling softly in a way that makes me want to close the gap between us and let his long arms close around me for a second. Then Nicholas clears his throat behind me—or growls—I’m not sure which.

  “Add the chair,” I tell him.

  He grabs one and scrapes it across the concrete floor, putting it a little farther away than the other two chairs. I resist the urge to roll my eyes as I take the center seat and Nicholas takes the chair closest to me while Henry takes the farthest one and proceeds to scoot closer.

  Henry picks up the rose on the table and lets it drop again. “What’s this?”

  “Some of us know how to treat a lady,” Nicholas says as he drapes an arm over the back of my chair.

  Henry snorts. “By giving her gifts she doesn’t want instead of the one she does?” He leans forward, putting himself almost in Nicholas’s face. “Or maybe you can’t give her that.”

  Nicholas’s arm tenses against my back.

  I can’t let Henry scare him off.

  “Boys,” I say, because they’re definitely not behaving like men. And if not for my need to complete my next task, I might let them sit here by themselves with all their angst, because it’s sure not doing anything for me. “When does the music start?” I ask. The band’s set up, poised, ready to go.

  “Whenever you’re ready.” Nicholas grins.

  “You’re going to sing?” Henry pulls a face halfway between shock and terror. I can relate.

  “I sing really well.”

  “I remember. But when you got the solo in our second-grade concert, they had to restart the song three times before you would actually go through with it.”

  “Gee, thanks for the reminder.”

  He bites his lower lip and then laughs. “Sorry. What I meant to say was, I totally one hundred percent believe in you.”

  “A little over the top, don’t you think?”

  He wraps his hand around mine and gives it a quick squeeze as Nicholas grabs my other hand to lead me over to the musicians and introduce me to Jaeda on the drums, Patrick on the saxophone, and Denzel on the bass.

  “What songs do you know?” I ask.

  “You name it and we can play it,” Denzel says, smiling widely and strumming a few notes on his bass.

  Jaeda shakes her head behind him, and I like her immediately.

  I turn to consult Nicholas, but he’s already back sitting at the table with Henry, my empty chair between them. This is all me.

  I chew my lip for a moment. “ ‘She’s Not There’ by the Zombies?”

  Naturally, Dad and I both love and listen to the Zombies. After all, zombies are only a quick slide down from vampires, so we’ve been known to watch a zombie movie or five as well.

  “Nice,” Jaeda says, nodding.

  I beam, telling the guilt inside me to back off—I’m doing this for Dad, not for myself. The guilt whispers back, telling me I’m lying. I’ve been having fun all along. This was never about Dad—it was a thinly veiled attempt to escape watching him die.

  I shake, and not from stage fright.

  But when the deep hum of the bass picks up, I manage to turn around, grasping the cold mic in both my hands. The saxophone jumps in and echoes the tune while the drum beats in rhythm behind me. And when the saxophone drops out, I know it’s my time to come in, and I do. My singing voice’s always been an octave lower than my speaking voice, and it always bothered me, but I embrace it now. I have enough things to fear, and being onstage can’t be one of them right now.

  The first line trembles out. Some people at the bar turn to watch, but I’m too caught between staring at Nicholas and Henry. They both smile, but tension tightens their jaws, straining the edges. My stomach flips.

  I close my eyes and sink into the song until I get to the line about the girl not being there even though she looks fine on the outside.

  Because I’m not here. The real me exists six months ago, before Dad got sick. All that’s inside me right now is the guilt, and I’m afraid to let go of it and risk letting anything else in.

  I stop singing, and the saxophone slides back in and covers the melody like this was always part of the plan.

  Cold fingers wrap around my hands, still clenching the microphone. I open my eyes and stare into Nicholas’s worried ones.

  “Dance with me?” His voice is low and soft. I nod, and he puts a hand on my waist as I step down. He doesn’t give me time to think; we just move together, faster and sweeter than when we danced at the club—an easy rhythm of movement and forgetting. I don’t know how Nicholas always makes me forget, but I end up letting out a strangled giggle. And drops of happiness and sorrow threaten to burst out again. But the guilt cackles and swallows them, and I stumble from the force of it, and I try so hard to smile, but my lips refuse to do anything but grimace. The guilt won’t even let me pretend. And I’m so close to falling
to my knees that I need to do something, anything to regain control.

  I need something rooted in the physical, something to pull me out of the violent thunderstorm growing inside.

  His kiss made me weightless last night. Before I let it get too far, too real, it was blissful nothingness. I need that and nothing else.

  The next time Nicholas spins me, I slam into his chest at the end, lace my fingers against the back of his neck, and pull his lips down to mine, releasing a red, wicked heat that burns through the fog and leaves me feeling okay for a single moment.

  But his lips against mine tease out more than the burning red of desire. Whatever draws us together flickers with traces of yellow and blue like a true flame—complicated and indescribable.

  He pulls back, surprised, breathing heavily. For a second his expression is chaotic and vulnerable, as if he also has emotions that have broken free of the coffin he stores them in.

  And then he shuts the lid, face smoothing.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he says. “The other night, you—I didn’t want you to think you had to kiss me to get what you wanted.”

  “No—I wanted to kiss you. I just got scared.”

  He grins down at me, his dark curls dangling over his eyes, not bothering to hide the relief in them. He looks younger now, and I wonder if he’s younger than I originally thought.

  The heavy wooden door of the club slams, and I jerk.

  Henry.

  I unwind myself from Nicholas and run after Henry without looking back.

  “Henry, wait!” I call as I race outside.

  The back of his white shirt glows in the dark as he moves farther and farther away from me.

  “Damn it, Henry. Wait,” I yell, chasing him. Even with him walking, I’m slower in my white kitten heels.

  But he spins and strides back toward me.

  His face is contorted and angry. “I’m trying here.”

  His words catch me off guard. What’s he trying? I don’t like that he’s placing the blame on me like we didn’t both hurt each other in the past.