Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  Nal got a second job housesitting for his high school science teacher, Mr. McGowen, who was going to Lake Marion to teach an advanced chemistry course. Now Nal spent his nights in the shell of Mr. McGowen’s house. Each week Mr. McGowen sent him a check for fifty-six dollars, and his mom lived on this income plus the occasional contribution from Samson, wads of cash that Sam had almost certainly borrowed from someone else. “It helps,” she said, “it’s such a help,” and whenever she said this Nal felt his guts twist. Mr. McGowen’s two-room rental house was making slow progress down the cliffs; another hurricane would finish it. The move there hadn’t mattered in any of the ways that Nal had hoped it would. Samson had buffaloed him into giving him a spare key, and now Nal would wake up to find his brother standing in the umbilical hallway between the two rooms at odd hours:

  SUNDAY: “How you living, Nal? Living easy? Easy living? You get paid yet this week? I need you to do me a solid, brotherman …” He was already peeling the bills out of Nal’s wallet.

  MONDAY: “Cable’s out. I want to watch the game tonight, so I’ll probably just crash here …”

  TUESDAY: “You’re out of toilet paper again. I fucking swear, I’m going to get a rash from coming over here! Some deadly fucking disease …”

  WEDNESDAY: “Shit, kid, you need to get to the store. Your fridge is just desolate. What have you been eating?”

  For three days, Nal hadn’t ingested anything besides black coffee and a pint of freezer-burned ice cream. Weight was tumbling from his body. Nal was living on liquid hatred now.

  “Hey, Nal,” said Samson, barging through the door. “Listen, Vanessa and I were sort of hoping we could spend the night here? She lied and told Mrs. Griga-looney that she’s crashing at a friend’s spot. Cool? Although you should really pick up before she gets here, this place is gross.”

  “Cool,” Nal said, his blue hair igniting in the flashing light of the TV. “I just did laundry. Fresh sheets for you guys.” Nal left Samson to root around the empty fridge and fished clean sheets out of Mr. McGowen’s dryer. He made the twin bed with hospital corners, pushed his sneakers and sweaty V-necks under the frame, filled two glasses at the sink faucet and set them on the nightstand. He lit Mr. McGowen’s orange emergency candles to provide a romantic accent. Nal knew this was not the most excellent strategy to woo Vanessa—making the bed so that she could sleep with his brother—but he was getting a sick pleasure from this seduction by proxy. The bedroom was freezing, Nal realized, and he reached over to shut the window—then screamed and leapt a full foot back.

  A giant seagull was strutting along Nal’s sill, a bouquet of eelgrass dangling from its beak. Its crown feathers waggled at Nal like tiny fingers. He felt a drip of fear. “What are you doing here?” He had to flick at the webbing of its slate feet before it moved and he could shut the window. The gull cocked its head and bored into Nal with its bright eyes; it was still looking at him as he backed out of the room.

  “Hey,” Vanessa greeted him shyly in the kitchen. “So this is McGowen’s place.” She was wearing thin silver bracelets up her arm and had blown out her hair. She had circled her eyes in lime and magenta powder; to Nal it looked as if she’d allowed a bag of candy to melt on her face. He thought she looked much prettier in school.

  “Do you guys want chips or anything?” he asked stupidly, looking from Samson to Vanessa. “Soda? I have chips.”

  Vanessa kept her eyes on the nubby carpet. “Soda sounds good.”

  “He’s just leaving,” Samson said. He squeezed Nal’s shoulder as he spun him toward the door. “Thank you,” he said, leaning in so close that Nal could smell the spearmint and vodka mix on his breath, “thank you so much”—which somehow made everything worse.

  “NAL DRIVES THE LANE! Nal brings the ball upcourt with seconds to play!” Nal whispered, dribbling his ball well past midnight. He dribbled up and down the main street that led to Strong Beach, and kept spooking himself with his own image in the dark storefront windows. “Nal has the ball …” He continued down to the public courts. “Jesus! Not you again!” A giant seagull had perched on the backboard and was staring opaquely forward. “Get out of here!” Nal threw the ball until the backboard juddered, but the bird remained. Maybe it’s sick, Nal thought. Maybe it has some kind of neurological damage. He tucked the ball under his arm and walked farther down Strong Beach. The seagull flew over his head and disappeared into a dark thicket of pines, the beginnings of the National Reserve forest that lined Strong Beach. Nal was surprised to find himself jogging after it, following the bird into those shadows.

  “Gull?” he called after it, his sneakers sinking into the dark leaves.

  He found it settled on a low pine branch. The giant seagull had a sheriff’s build—distended barrel chest, spindly legs splayed into star-shaped feet. Nal had a sudden presentiment: “Are you my conscience?” he asked, reaching out to stroke the vane of one feather. The gull blatted at Nal and began digging around the underside of one wing with its beak like a tiny man sniffing his armpits. Okay, not my conscience, then, Nal decided. But maybe some kind of omen? Something was dangling from its lower beak—another cigarette, Nal thought at first, then realized it was a square of glossy paper. As he watched, the gull lifted off the branch and soared directly into one of the trees. In the moonlight, Nal saw a hollow there about the size of his basketball: gulls kept disappearing into this hole. Dozens of them were flying around the moon-bright leaves—they moved with the organized frenzy of bees or bats. How deep was the hollow? he wondered. Was this normal nocturnal activity for this kind of gull? The birds flew in absolute silence. Their wingtips sailed as softly as paintbrushes across the night sky; every so often single birds descended from this cloud. Each gull flapped into the hollow and didn’t reemerge for whole minutes.

  Nal chucked his basketball at the hollow to see if it would disappear, go winking into another dimension, like objects did in that terrible TV movie he secretly loved, Magellan Maps the Black Hole. The basketball bounced back and caught Nal hard against his jaw. He winced and shot a look up and down Strong Beach to make sure that nobody had seen. The hollow was almost a foot above Nal’s head, and when he pushed up to peek inside it he saw nothing: just the pulpy reddish guts of the tree. No seagulls, and no passage through that he could divine. There was a nest in the tree hollow, though, a dark wet cup of vegetation. The bottom of the nest was lined with paper scraps—a few were tickets, Nal saw, not stubs or fragments but whole squares, some legible: Mary Gloster’s train tickets to Florence, a hologram stamp for a Thai Lotus Blossom day cruise, a roll of carnival-red ADMIT ONES. Nal riffled through the top layer. Mary Gloster’s tickets, he noticed, were dated two years in the future. He saw a square edge with the letters WIL beneath a wreath of blackened moss and tugged at it. My ticket, Nal thought wonderingly. WILSON. How did the gulls get this? It was his pass for the rising sophomore class’s summer trip to Whitsunday Island, a glowing ember of volcanic rock that was just visible from the Athertown marina. He was shocked to find it here; his mother hadn’t been able to pay the fee back in April, and Nal’s name had been removed from the list of participants. The trip was tomorrow.

  Nal was at the marina by 8:00 a.m. He was sitting on a barrel when his teacher arrived, and he watched as she tore open a sealed envelope and distributed the tickets one by one to each of his classmates. He waited until all the other students had disappeared onto the ferry to approach her.

  “Nal Wilson? Oh dear. I wasn’t aware that you were coming …” She gave him a tight smile and shook out the empty manila envelope, as if trying to convince him that his presence here was a slightly embarrassing mistake.

  “ ’S okay, I have my ticket here.” Nal waved the orange ticket, which was shot through with tiny perforations from where the gull’s beak had stabbed it. He lined up on the waffled copper of the ferry ramp. The boat captain stamped his ticket redeemed, and Nal felt that he had won a small but significant battle. On the hydrofoil, Nal sat next to Vanessa. “Tha
t’s my seat,” grumbled a stout Fijian man in a bolo tie behind him, but Nal shrugged and gestured around the hold. “Looks like there are plenty of seats to go around, sir,” he said, and was surprised when the big man floated on like some bad weather he’d dispelled with native magic. He could feel Vanessa radiating warmth beside him and was afraid to turn.

  “Hey, you,” Vanessa said. “Thanks for letting me crash in your bed last night.”

  “Don’t mention it. Always fun to be the maid service for my brother.”

  Vanessa regarded him quietly for a moment. “I like your hair.”

  “Oh,” Nal said miserably, rolling his eyes upward. “This blue isn’t really me—” and then he felt immediately stupid, because just who did he think he was, anyway? Cousin Steve refused to shave it off, saying that to do so would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath of Beauty Professionals. “Unfortunately you have an extremely lumpy head,” Cousin Steve had informed him, stern as a physician. “You need that blue to hide the contours. It’s like you’ve got golf balls buried up there.” But Vanessa, he saw with a rush of gratitude, was nodding at him.

  “I know it’s not you,” she said. “But it’s a good disguise.”

  Nal nodded, wondering what she might be referring to. He was thrilled by the idea that Vanessa saw past this camouflage to something hidden in him, so secret that even he didn’t know what she was seeing there.

  On the long ride to Whitsunday, they talked about their families. Vanessa was the youngest of five girls, and, from what she was telling Nal, it sounded as if her adolescence had been both accelerated and prolonged. She was still playing with dolls when she watched her eldest sister, Rue Ann, guide her boyfriend to their bedroom. “We have to leave the lights on, or Vanessa will be scared. It’s fine, she’s still tiny. She doesn’t understand.” The boyfriend grinning into her playpen, twaddling his fingers. Vanessa watched with eyes round as moon pies as her sister disrobed, draping her black T-shirt over the lampshade to dim it. But she had also been babied by her four sisters, and her questions about their activities got smothered beneath a blanket of care. Her parents began treating her like the baby of the family again once the other girls were gone. Her father was a Qantas mechanic and her mother worked a series of housekeeping jobs even though she didn’t strictly need to, greeting Vanessa with a nervous “Hello!” at the end of each day.

  “Which is funny, because our own house is always a mess now …”

  Nal watched the way her mouth twitched; his heart and his stomach were staging some weird circus inside him.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty funny.” Nal frowned. “Except that, I mean, it sounds really awful, too …”

  He tried to get one arm around Vanessa’s left shoulder but felt too cowardly to lower it all the way; he stared in horror at where his arm had stopped, about an inch above Vanessa’s skin, like a malfunctioning bar in a theme park ride. When he lifted his arm again he noticed a gauzy stripe peeking out of Vanessa’s shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” Nal interrupted, “Vanessa? Uh, your shirt is falling down …”

  “Yeah.” She tugged at it, unconcerned. “This was Brianne’s, and she was never what you’d call petite. She’s an air hostess now and my dad always jokes that he doesn’t know how she maneuvers the aisles.” Vanessa hooked a clear nail under her neckline. “My dad can be pretty mean. He’s mad at her for leaving.”

  Nal couldn’t take his eyes off the white binding. “Is that … is that a bandage?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It’s my disguise.”

  Vanessa said she still held on to some childlike habits because they seemed to calm her parents. “I had to pretend I believed in Santa Claus until I was twelve,” she said. “Did Sam tell you that I was accepted to LMASS, too?”

  “Oh, wow. Congratulations. When do you leave?”

  “I’m not going. I mentioned that the dorms at Lake Marion were coed and my father didn’t speak to me for days.” Why her development of breasts should terrify her parents Vanessa didn’t understand, but she began wearing bulky, loose shirts and wrapping Ace bandages over her bras all the same. “I got the idea from English class,” she said. “Shakespeare’s Rosalind.” Her voice changed when she talked about this—she let out a hot, embarrassed laugh and then dove into a whisper, as if she’d been trying to make a joke and suddenly switched gears.

  “Isn’t that a little weird?” Nal said.

  Vanessa shrugged. “Less friction with my parents. The tape doesn’t work as good as it did last year but it’s sort of become this habit?”

  Nal couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to look; he was having a hard time staying focused in the midst of all this overt discussion of Vanessa’s breasts.

  “So you’re stuck there now?”

  “I don’t see how I could leave my folks. I’m their last.”

  Vanessa wanted out but said she felt as though the exits had vanished with her sisters. They’d each schemed or blundered their way out of Athertown—early pregnancy, nursing school, marriage, the Service Corps. Now Vanessa rumbled around the house like its last working part. Nal got an image of Mr. and Mrs. Grigalunas sitting in their kitchen with their backs to the whirlwind void opened by their daughters’ absence: reading the paper; sipping orange juice; collecting these old clothes like the shed skins of their former daughters and dressing Vanessa in them. He thought about her gloopy makeup and the urgency with which she’d kissed his brother, her thin legs knifing over the dune. Maybe she doesn’t actually like my brother at all, Nal thought, encouraged by a new theory. Maybe she treats sex like oxidizing air. Aging rapidly wherever she can manage it, like a cut apple left on a counter.

  “That’s why it’s easy to be with your brother,” she said. “It’s a relief to … to get out of there, to be with someone older. But it’s not like we’re serious, you know?” She brightened as she said this last part, as if it were a wonderful idea that had just occurred to her.

  What do I say now? Nal wondered. Should I ask her to explain what she means? Should I tell her Samson doesn’t love her, but I do? The homunculus typed up frantic speeches, discarded them, tore at his green sweater in anguish, gnashed the typewriter ribbon between his buckteeth. Nal could hear himself babbling—they talked about the insufferable stupidity of this year’s ninth-graders, his harem of geezers at Penny’s, Dr. J’s jump hook, Cousin Steve’s bewildering mullet. More than once, Nal watched her tug her sister’s tentlike shirt up. They spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Whitsunday Island together, cracking jokes as they filed past the flowery enclosure full of crocodiles; the dry pool of Komodo dragons with their wispy beards; and finally, just before the park’s exit, the koala who looked like a raddled veteran of war, gumming leaves at twilight. They talked about how maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing that they’d both missed out on Lake Marion, and on the way back up the waffled ramp to the hydrofoil Vanessa let her hand slide inside Nal’s sweating palm.

  That night Nal had a nightmare about the seagulls. Millions of them flew out of a bloodred sunset and began to resettle the town, snapping telephone wires and sinking small boats beneath their collective weight. Gulls covered the fence posts and rooftops of Athertown, drew a white caul over the marina, muffled every window with the static of their bodies—and each gull had a burgled object twinkling in its split beak. Warping people’s futures into some new and terrible shapes, just by stealing these smallest linchpins from the present.

  THE NEXT DAY, Nal went to the Athertown library to research omen birds. He was the only patron in the reading room. Beneath the painting of the full orange moon and the plastic bamboo, he read a book called Avian Auspices by Dr. Carlos Ramirez. Things looked pretty grim:

  CROW: an omen of death, disease

  RAVEN: an omen of death, disease

  ALBATROSS: an omen of death at sea

  Screech owls, Old World vultures, even the innocuous-sounding cuckoo, all harbingers of doom. Terrific, Nal thought, and if an enormous seagull f
ollowed you around and appeared to be making a blithe feast of your life, pecking at squares of paper and erasing whole futures, what did that mean? Coleridge and Audubon were no help here, either. Seagulls were scavengers, kleptoparasites. And, according to the books he found, they didn’t portend a thing.

  Nal began going to the nest every day. He woke at dawn and walked barefoot on the chilly sand down to the hollow. By the second week he’d collected an impressive array of objects: a tuxedo button, a scrap of paper with a phone number (out of service—Nal tried it), a penny with a mint date one year in the future. On Friday, he found what appeared to be the disgorged, shimmering innards of a hundred cassette tapes, disguised at first against the slick weeds. The seagulls had many victims, then—they weren’t just stealing from Nal. He wondered if the gulls had different caches, in caves or distant forests. Whenever he swept his hand over the damp nest he found new stuff:

  An eviction notice, neatly halved by the gull’s beak

  Half a dozen keys of various sizes—car keys, big skeleton keys and tiny ones for safes and mailboxes, a John Deere tractor key, one jangling janitor’s ring

  A cheap fountain pen

  A stamp from a country Nal didn’t recognize

  An empty vial of pills, the label soaking and illegible

  Most disturbingly, on the soggy bottom of the nest, beneath a web of green eider, he found the disconnected wires of a child’s gleaming retainer

  Nal lined these objects up and pushed them around on the sand. He felt like the paleontologist of some poor sod’s stolen fate—somewhere a man or a woman’s life continued without these tiny vertebrae, curving like a spine knocked out of alignment. Suddenly the ordinary shine of the plastic and aluminum bits began to really frighten him. He drew the tiny fangs of the tractor key through the sand and tried to imagine the objects’ owners: A shy child without his retainer, with a smile that would now go unchaperoned. A redhead with pale eyelashes succumbing to fever. A farmer on his belly in a field of corn, hunting for this key. What new directions would their lives take? In Nal’s imagination, dark stalks swayed and knit together, obliterating the stranger from view. Somewhere the huge tractor wheels began to groan and squeal backward, trampling his extant rows of corn. A new crop was pushing into the spaces that the tractor had abandoned—husks hissing out of the earth, bristling and green, like the future sprouting new fur.