by Lily Levi
But Maman said no more and the night passed.
When the first touch of morning pressed against the parlor windows, she stood. Her bones cracked beneath her. She stepped forward and placed a dry hand on his shoulder. “Boy.” Her dark eyes flickered at him. “Why do you do this? Don’t you remember?”
“Tell me,” he whispered.
She stared down at him for a long while until he was forced to look away from her.
“The monsters are made,” she said. “Make no more.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Francoise sat alone at her old vanity.
Time and heat had warped the mirror. The porcelain jars were chipped and thick with dust. The room was nothing and everything like it had been when she’d shared it with Laurie’s father.
She hadn’t moved in two, perhaps three days.
Time was a difficult thing. In the warped mirror, she might’ve seen her husband lumber from the bed, but he’d been gone for a long time and their house was in shambles. This was not how she’d imagined the future of the world without her in it. It was supposed to have been something different, but it felt so much the same.
What happened?
She thought she’d left the question behind. What did it matter what happened?
She touched the shriveled mole on her chin. It felt loose and she flicked it from her skin.
It landed at her feet and she kicked it away with her toe.
Her husband had understood what the boy was capable of, though his maddened notes were scattered and difficult to read.
Frozen hearts, he’d written. Drank the blood, do we drink the blood? Shared blood. Swallowed blood? Vampires, all of us vampires. The boy was dead. Is he dead? What happens now?
Of course, Francoise could not accept the staying of time and the rising of dead things.
But then she’d died.
There could never be language to describe what happened after her body was interned in the tomb that had waited for her since the moment she took her wedding vows.
There were the rising swells of fire and light, like a horrific ocean, and far above she could hear the dark spasms of dying stars.
She’d joined a mass of dead things, a rolling black meadow across the ether. One turn of the eye brought about a new terror to eclipse the last.
But there were no words for it.
The boy’s tutor, her sweet Martel, had been there. They’d stood together for a time, but she couldn’t say how long. She’d been ripped away and the pain of leaving that place and the pain of the place itself, those were enough to deaden her dry heart to the question that had plagued her while she lived.
What happened?
Francoise had known death. It was not a person, or a god, or a figure in a dark hood. It was not an event and had no description. It was a place and not a place. It was a permanent state that could not be changed.
She had not wanted to leave the landscape of the dead behind, and now, she was the walking dead, though even this terrible thought failed to strike up the fear she knew it should.
She was not afraid, not anymore.
And so, Francoise saw herself in the midst of a horrific puzzle. If she was not alive, then she could not die. If death could not reclaim the soul she no longer had, then Martel was lost to her forever.
What other conclusion could she draw?
Her withered hands worked themselves open and closed. Yes, Martel was gone, unless they’d preserved his body just the same as they’d preserved hers, but what a nightmarish fantasy to have. She mustn’t think it.
She stared into the mirror and into the black globes of her own sunken eyes. They were not the eyes she remembered having. She was not Francoise, not really. She was a middling creature who’d been spit up from hell, back into a gray world where she did not belong.
None of them belonged.
The door opened soundlessly behind her.
She eyed the man in the mirror. His dark hair sat disheveled and dark circles had formed beneath his eyes. Specks of dark blood colored his white shirt. This man had been her son and perhaps he still was. But was she still his Maman, his mother, even now?
She stared at her own face in the mirror. “She will want to know what I am and soon enough, she will demand to know what she is.”
Laurie’s shoulders lifted with a heavy breath. “She needn’t know you were real.” He stood quietly and it seemed they both heard the echo of his words. The ether would have made the whole affair seem like nothing more than a terrible dream.
Francoise thought of the return to death, if it were even still possible, and of once more taking her place in black sea of souls. Would there still be a space for her beside Martel?
No. She would not fool herself into thinking such a thing.
Laurie stepped forward into the room. “It will take you time to remember how you felt about me and about this world.” He opened his mouth, began to say something more, but stopped himself.
Francoise laughed, though she didn’t mean to. “And we have all the time in the world, too, is that it?” She wondered if he believed his life was a gift and not a curse. “Perhaps our time is short, my boy. Ask your question, I see it in your eyes, dead as I am, I still have some small memory of once being your mother, as little as that’s worth.”
“You remember,” he said.
She said nothing. She would’ve liked to forget.
“Maman,” he said. He stepped further into the room. “I must ask you. I have tortured myself with the question.”
“And so you torture others to find the answer.” She knew the question that danced inside of his mouth, eager to escape his lips.
She would ask it for him.
“What happened?” she said, mockingly. She watched how he swallowed back fear, or words, or both. “Is it why you brought me back here, to ask me this?” She laughed and the cruelty of her own laughter grated upon her ears. “Selfish boy, selfish, selfish. You know what happened.”
She hadn’t meant to taunt him, but the words came natural enough that she believed they were her own. It didn’t matter if she answered his question or not. He knew the answer.
She watched the concerted effort in his eyes, perhaps as he tried to think of something else he might say.
“I don’t,” he said at last. “I don’t know what happened. And I have given you new life, is that selfish?” He folded his arms across the blood-stained shirt. “What happened to him?”
Francoise looked to the empty bed. “Your father died,” she said. “It was as I told you when it happened. Did I not bury him with my own hands?”
“Maman.” He caught her eye and held it. “When I moved you from the tomb, he was not there beside you. There was no one else there with you. You were alone.”
She looked down at her shriveled hands. She’d spent the last half of her life protecting him from the truth, but that was when her own heart was full of warm, pulsing blood.
Now, all she had was the faded memory of how she might’ve once loved him very much as most mothers are wont to feel towards their own children. He seemed to think she had. Still, she didn’t feel moved to ease whatever suffering he felt. He had sinned against nature. He’d brought back the dead and refused to die himself. He was the incarnation of arrogance and defiance, to think he could rise above and escape the fate that waited for them all. No, she felt nothing for him, only for Martel. They’d been dead together and she belonged with him. Even now he swayed in the black mass of so many infinite, dead souls. Theirs was a bond formed in life, cemented in death and now, because of narrowed aims, it was broken.
“I can see that you know,” he said. “Why won’t you tell me? I will help you get anything you want. I will take care of you, I promise you that. Do you want to be let free? We can arrange it.”
“Martel,” she said, looking up from her hands.
Martel, the name was a most deadly sin upon her lips, but she could not help herself. “I want Martel to be brought here
,” she said.
“He’s dead,” said Laurie.
“What of it?” she asked, but she could see that he already knew what she wanted.
He stared at her.
She lowered her chin. If she truly was sin incarnate, a second defilement could make it no worse than it already was.
“Bring him back,” she said slowly, measuring her words. “Bring him back the way that you’ve brought me back and I will tell you what you want to know, and then, I will be nothing to you. You can forget I lived.”
Lived. The word curdled in the dry socket of her mouth.
Laurie said nothing.
She stood. “Together, Martel and I, we will stray no further than this room or whatever place you have for us. Bring him back and I will answer your questions, all of them.”
What happened?
Chapter Twenty-Five
“If this isn’t déjà vu,” said Jolene, “then I don’t know what is.” She held the match against the end of a long cigarette, but the flame fizzled out before it could light the end of the twisted paper.
She held back the unexpected tears and shook her head.
“Let me.” Laurie reached over from the side of the bed and took a second match to the cigarette.
“Thanks.” She leaned back against the headboard. “How many fortnights was I out this time?” She tried to smile at her own poor joke, but it was no use.
“Three days,” he said.
It was hard to believe. Somehow, it felt both longer and shorter than three days. It had only been an hour and it had been a month. When she wasn’t looking, time could work in whatever way it wanted to, wild and unsupervised.
She flicked the ash into the porcelain ashtray at the bedside. “It’s just so frustrating,” she started to say, but he had to know what she was going to say after that. To have yet another black hole in her memory was exhausting.
“I’m very sorry,” he said with an apologetic smile. “But you didn’t miss much.”
Riley stretched out her short legs and yawned at the end of the bed.
“We missed you, of course.”
Jolene shook her head. “I remember sitting on the dock. I remember the Peter Pan riddle, I felt sick, and then I felt nothing.” She looked at him. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“What if this always happens to me?” She struggled to hold back the frustrated tears. “What if my whole life has just been a series of these episodes?”
The lines on his face smoothed out and he sat back. The chair creaked beneath his weight. “It hasn’t been,” he said.
She frowned at him. He sounded so sure, but how could he know?
“But I don’t know,” he continued. “What if?”
She propped herself up against the headboard. “I mean, what’s the point if I just forget everything after it’s happened? Why should I do anything at all or know anyone?”
“To do things,” he said. “To know people and to let them know you.” He took her hand in his. “Even if you forget them.”
She dropped her eyes from his. “I don’t want to forget you. I don’t want to forget anything else.”
He moved the hair from her face. “You won’t forget me,” he said, lifting her chin. “Because I’ll be here to remind you.”
She lowered the cigarette into the ashtray and struggled to find the words. She wanted to say so many things to him.
“I have to tell you,” she said. She wanted to say thank you, but that wasn’t right. She didn’t know what she wanted to say. That she cared for him? But that wasn’t enough. It went beyond that, but was it too much to say?
“Yes?” he asked.
“Laurie.” She leaned forward to tell him whatever words would come out of her mouth. They didn’t need to be the right ones. He would know what she meant.
A quick series of knocks ran down through the walls.
She looked away from him and up at the gilded ceiling. “What was that?”
“The house is old,” he said. “A bird flew into the window, perhaps. They’re always doing such things.” He stood from her side. “Stay here and I’ll see what the fuss is about.”
He opened the bedroom door. “Will you be all right?”
She nodded and he shut the door gently behind him without another word.
She put out the last of the cigarette in the ashtray and rested her head against the pillow. She hadn’t told him about the nightmare or how real it had felt. It didn’t matter, of course. It had only been a dream, something she’d conjured in the dark of her own heart.
She closed her eyes. Although she’d been out for two days, she was more exhausted than ever before.
She waited for sleep to come and let her mind wander and dance around the almost perfect image of Laurie. He was almost too kind to her and she wondered if she deserved it. She’d been left for dead beneath the trees, but neither one of them could say how she’d gotten there or what had happened.
An accident, he’d said, and maybe there wasn’t anything more to it.
She turned over onto her side and listened to the creaking beams in the house. She wondered if she’d had her own house somewhere, possibly nearby, and a family that waited for her even now. She thought she should be able to remember them, but there was nothing.
She knew that she would have to look eventually. Even if she couldn’t remember them, there had to be someone out there who was looking for her, and if she saw them, maybe, just maybe, she’d remember who they were.
But what if that someone was a man who loved her and who she’d once loved? What could she do then?
She turned restlessly over onto her other side and traced the heat-warped wallpaper across the room. She knew she was being selfish.
She closed her eyes and pushed the thoughts away. The house and Laurie in it were like a magnificent dream and she didn’t want to wake up, not yet.
She would, she promised herself that, but not yet.
When the sun set and Laurie didn’t return, Jolene fell into a reluctant sleep.
The sun was a hot orange oval. It zipped through a gray sky. Below, the hazy shadows of dark trees wavered beneath its wild flight.
Jolene watched from the ground. She raised her arms upward to catch it as it flew by, again and again. She desperately wanted it and she didn’t know why. It would burn her. It would kill her. Still, she reached out for it.
When it finally dipped low enough between the trees, she wasted no time. She sprung up from the ground and lunged after the orange sun. Reaching out with both hands, she grazed the oval-shaped sun with her fingertips.
It was warm, but not hot. Where she’d expected fire, there was only fabric.
It lingered just above her.
She jumped up and took the thing to the ground with her.
What’s that, Jo-Jo?
From the ground, she scanned the dark trees for the voice.
The shadowy frame of a man moved between them and she followed his slow walk towards her.
What do you got, Jo-Jo?
With one hand, she felt beneath her belly for the captured sun, but it was gone. She struggled to her feet and scanned the gray sky between the branches.
Jo-Jo.
The shadowed man stopped between the trees and reached out his arm to her.
They faced each other for what felt like a very long time. Neither of them moved.
I miss you, he said. Come back.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Laurie stepped out from the car and shaded his eyes against the sun.
She was already waiting for him.
Darla waved and set the loose skin under her large arm flapping. “Good morning, sunshine!” She moved out from the cool shadows at the back of the Neverpine Butchery.
He bent down and let himself be wrapped in her arms.
Riley barked from the front seat of the car.
“Hey-o, Riley girl!” she called out in the smoker’s rasp that he’d come
to love. “And how are you doing, honey?”
“Just fine,” he said. “You’re looking radiant, if I might say.”
“You might,” she said. “Come on then, you lying devil. How’s the garden?”
He followed her into the tin building’s cool shade. “Wilted,” he said. He’d let the garden rot and the maze grow in on itself a long time ago.
“And the ladies?” She stooped over to hoist up a sealed can of pig’s blood and gave it to him to hold.
“One lady,” he said. If there was anyone he could tell, or even knew to tell, it was Darla. He’d known her since she was a girl and he trusted her the same way that she inexplicably trusted him. She was unquestioning. She accepted whatever she thought he was and he never asked what that was. A devil? A vampire? A god? A cursed fool? She didn’t care and he would miss her dearly when she was gone.
“One lady, huh?” She reached up to pat his chest. “Bless your heart. You treat her right. If I hear anyone come screaming from that place, I’ll come over there myself and show you what’s good and right.”
He laughed and he could feel how the fresh pig’s blood splashed up against the sides of the sealed can.
“Have you changed your mind?” It was a question he always asked and she always had the same answer. She did not want to be like him.
“No thank you, honey. I’ll die when I die and that’s all right by me. You want the sausage this time, too?”
“Not this time.” He grit his teeth as he said it, remembering that he would still need to tell Jolene what she was and that she needed the blood of others to survive. It wasn’t going to a pleasant conversation and he didn’t think she would believe him.
Why should he?
Perhaps he would wait. There would be time.
He kissed Darla gently on the cheek and she waved him off.
“Laurence!” she yelled out after his car. “You be good to that little lady of yours!”
Riley barked happily back at her from the passenger seat.