He coughed. “Don’t pretend. I know you’ve done it. Malcolm told us about what you’ve done. Not just the ones you killed, but the kid in Asheville.”
So Malcolm had been around when I was with Joshua, too. “I didn’t make him a vampire,” I said. “He was a donor. A most willing donor.”
“Let me be your donor.” He moved closer to me, lifted his hand as if he were going to touch my hair, then changed his mind. “Even if you haven’t done it before, I can tell you how.”
Of all the oddities of my life so far, this one took the cake (an expression Mrs. McG had used on more than one occasion). I stared at his affable middle-aged face, at the muscles in his neck. For a second, I considered biting him. Then a wave of revulsion hit me, so strong that I had to hold on to the balcony railing with both hands.
“You okay?” His voice sounded oddly distant.
I pushed back my hair and looked up — at the man who had once carried me on his shoulders, who’d taught me physics and the facts of life. “You know all about it, don’t you?” My voice sounded hoarse. “You watched my father and Malcolm. So why don’t you have Malcolm do it?”
Dennis didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were easy to read. He’d asked Malcolm, more than once, and Malcolm refused.
“How could you have helped him take my mother away?”
“He made a good case for her leaving. She wasn’t happy, Ari.” But his thoughts went further. Malcolm had made a deal with him.
“So he led you on.” I felt stronger now. “He made you a promise, and then he reneged.”
Malcolm had used Dennis to get to my mother — then he’d refused to keep his part of the bargain. But he’d kept telling Dennis that he might change his mind if Dennis proved himself worthy. Dennis had kept on hoping. Now he was growing older and impatient.
At the time I didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for him. (Since then, I’ve reconsidered. Who wouldn’t beg for eternal life? He was tired of being left out, just as my mother had been.)
“Why don’t you ask Root?”
He shuddered. “I couldn’t stand to have her touch me.”
His eyes were dull, yet pleading. “You’ve had a lot to drink,” I said, trying to find an excuse for his behavior.
“Ari,” he said. “Please?”
“You.” I couldn’t think of a name bad enough to call him. Traitor came close. “I thought you were my friend,” I said, and I left him and the balcony behind me.
When I awoke the next morning, I could sense tension before I left the bedroom. Root passed me in the hallway, headed in the opposite direction. She nodded. I couldn’t get used to her acknowledging me. My reputation as a murderous vampire must have made quite a positive impression.
The others were in the living room, watching a long television screen built into a wall. My parents sat far apart on the sofa. Dennis stood to their left. He didn’t look in my direction.
On the television screen, a map showed a swirling red and orange mass moving in the Gulf of Mexico. “A tropical storm?” I asked.
Mãe looked at me. “No, a hurricane. It’s projected to make land-fall a little too close to home.”
The storm’s ceaseless rotation was almost hypnotic.
“A hurricane is a beautiful thing, until you’ve been in one,” she said.
She’d been on the phone with Dashay. Dashay and Bennett were closing up the house and getting ready to move the horses to a friend’s farm, south of Orlando, out of the storm’s projected path. “I need to get back, to help,” she said.
This wasn’t an acceptable part of my family reunion fantasy. Don’t go, I thought, and she thought back, I have to go.
“I’ll come with you,” I said, but she shook her head.
“You’re safer here. Sarasota will get some rain, but nothing like the winds headed for Homosassa and Cedar Key. You don’t know how bad this can be, Ariella. The storm is already a Category Four.”
The television image showed dotted lines emanating from the storm, projecting onto land. The announcer called the highlighted area “Hurricane Barry’s cone of uncertainty.” Homosassa lay close to its center. Mandatory evacuations had been ordered.
“There will be tornadoes.” My father’s voice made the prophecy sound poetic. “The North Atlantic Oscillation is in a strongly positive phase. Sara’s right, Ari. You’re safer here.”
I shot a look of contempt at Dennis, but his eyes were on the television screen. My mother caught the look and sent me a question: What’s that?
But she had enough on her mind. “Will you come back?” I asked.
She hugged me. “Of course I’ll come back. I’m going to rent a second horse trailer, load it up, tow it down to Kissimmee. Then I’ll drive here. The storm won’t hit land for three days or so. I’ll be back day after tomorrow. Meantime, start thinking about what you want for your birthday. Do you realize it’s only a week away?”
“How about a tattoo?” I said.
The shock on my parents’ faces pleased me. I said, “That was a joke. What I’d really like is to see a fireworks show.” I thought of the night of my first kiss.
Clearly relieved, Mãe kissed me. “I think we can manage fireworks.” She exchanged a veiled look with my father, then left.
One moment, my family was in the room. Then it was gone.
Dennis went off with Root toward the lab down the hall.
My father and I sat across from each other, and I let him know what Dennis had asked the night before.
My father’s face changed — his eyes narrowed, his jaw tensed, and his body went rigid, as it had been on the night Michael picked me up to go to the dance. “You should have come and told me at once.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you and Mãe.”
He shook his head. “To think how I’ve trusted him,” he said slowly. “He’ll have to leave.”
His voice was so cold that it scared me. “What about your research?”
At dinner the night before, he’d talked about their work in progress: developing polymer microcapsules to carry hemoglobin, a project he called “truly promising.”
“I can’t work with someone I don’t trust,” he said. “First that business with your mother, now you. He can go back to Saratoga, to his job at the college. He should feel right at home in that environment. Academics are more venomous than vampires ever could be.”
I wondered if I’d ever go to college.
“I’ll have to change my will,” my father said. “Dennis is the executor, you know.”
“How can you have a will if you’re already dead?”
“Raphael Montero died,” he said. “Arthur Gordon Pym lives.”
While my father met Dennis in the lab, I tried not to listen. But the condominium walls were thin. I heard Dennis’s voice from time to time, belligerent at first, then apologetic. Then it fell silent. I couldn’t hear my father at all. Sometimes the softest sounds are the most powerful ones.
To pass the time, I opened the closet doors in my bedroom. One closet was empty. The other was packed with framed pictures and tall vases of artificial plants. I shut its door quickly.
When my father rejoined me, he looked as usual: face composed, eyes faraway, suit pressed, shirt crisp. Only the speed with which he moved suggested anything unusual. Root trailed behind him, a look of amazement on her face.
“We’ll need to make our own preparations for the storm,” he said. “Mary Ellis, will you ensure that we have adequate supplies of food and drink? Not to mention the supplements.”
“I made a fresh batch this morning,” she said. “And I can make more. Green Cross delivered serum this morning. Again. Some kind of mistake.”
I could have explained, but I kept quiet.
“I’ll get things ready before I go,” Root was saying. “I’m spending the night with a friend in Bradenton.”
Root has a friend? I thought.
“Ari, do you have all of the things you need?”
What things? I wondered. I
ate and drank what he did, except for meat. Then I realized he must mean tampons. They were the only special need I had.
“I could use more,” I said.
“You’ll find a pharmacy in the shopping plaza around the corner,” he said. “Better to go today than to wait.” He handed me money and a key. “By the time you return, Dennis will be gone.”
Good riddance, I thought. But a small part of me wondered if, in time, I’d come to miss him.
At the pharmacy I dawdled, browsing the magazine and makeup aisles. I didn’t want to run into Dennis when I returned.
The line at the prescription counter was long; people were stocking up on drugs and bottled water. The pharmacist had a radio on, and the announcer said that Hurricane Barry was now “Category Five.” That meant “winds greater than 155 mph, or a storm surge more than eighteen feet above normal.” I didn’t have enough experience of storms to know what normal was, but the worry in the customers’ faces was daunting.
As I paid for my purchases, it struck me as funny, but not surprising, that my father, who knew so much about blood, couldn’t bring himself to use the word tampons.
I headed home, up the side street. Xanadu looked different now. White metal hurricane shutters masked most of its windows. Our unit was one of the few whose eyes were still open.
I waited at the intersection for the “Walk” signal. As I crossed Midnight Pass Road, a man with a cane left the opposite curb. He was more obese than fat, and he wore a dark suit, dark glasses, and hat. As he came closer, his cane tapped ahead of his path, delineating his cone of uncertainty. Then he smiled at me, and I knew he wasn’t blind at all.
Apprehension of evil begins at the base of your skull and travels quickly up and down the spine. I swayed with repulsion, but somehow kept moving. When I reached the other side, I broke into a run.
I caught my breath again in the elevator at Xanadu. Then I let myself in and put the drugstore bag in my room. Voices came from the living room; I listened hard to see if one belonged to Dennis. Instead, I heard Malcolm’s voice.
I like to think that vampires behave more rationally and ethically than humans, but, like all generalizations, this one is arguable. Yes, I eavesdropped. As I said before, the walls of the condominium were thin.
“I could have killed her,” he was saying. “I could have killed both of them.”
Then my father’s voice, low, yet harsher than I’d ever heard it. “You’re telling me that you spared them for altruistic reasons? I doubt that.”
“I’ve never claimed to be an altruist.”
I could imagine his grin.
“I spared them so that you’d see them for what they are, and come to your senses.”
“And what are they?”
“An embarrassment. A constant reminder of your own weakness.”
My face burned. I had to struggle not to burst into the room and —
And what? What could I do to someone like him?
“All the lies you told.” My father’s voice was even lower now. I had to strain to hear it. “How many times you said you were trying to help my family. Instead you tried to ruin it.”
Malcolm laughed — an ugly sound with no amusement in it. “Listen to you. What do you know about family? You’re like me, and you know it. Women have never been more than encumbrances to you. They’ve kept you from the important things — from your work.”
“To the contrary.” My father’s words were clipped. “Ariella and her mother have given me more insights than you could possibly know about.”
“But taking care of her, teaching her. All those hours, wasted. You know, it’s thought in Cambridge that you’ve never fulfilled your early promise. But I’ve found the delivery system you need. We can make a substitute better than human blood. Think what that will mean for us. Think of the lives that will be saved.”
“What do you care for saving lives? You’ve killed people for no reason. You even killed the neighbor’s cat.”
He killed Marmalade. I felt guilty for ever suspecting that my father did it.
“The cat got in my way. As for the people, each one died for a good reason. Do you know how many women Reedy raped? And that fellow in Savannah — he’d murdered three teenagers and buried them in his basement.”
“What about the girl?” My father’s voice was almost inaudible now. “What about Kathleen?”
“She was an annoyance.”
I didn’t think — I simply walked into the living room. “You killed her,” I said.
Malcolm stood before the window, hands in his pockets, his linen suit outlined by gray sky. “She asked for it.” He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He’d probably known I was listening all along. “She asked me to bite her.”
“You didn’t have to! And you didn’t have to kill her.”
He took his left hand from his pocket and examined his fingernails. “She begged me to make her a vampire. You and your father are to blame for that. She wanted to be like you.” Then he turned to my father. “And she wanted to marry you. Imagine, her a vampire! The very idea of it nauseates me. She was a stupid girl.”
Kathleen wanted to marry my father? I shook my head, ready to defend her.
My father put up his hand, warning me not to respond. “We’re wasting time here,” he said to me. Then, to Malcolm: “You rant like any psychopath. Get out.”
Malcolm’s eyes were bloodshot, I saw now. His voice stayed deliberate, calm. “You’re willing to sacrifice millions of lives because of a girl and a cat? What sort of ethics are those?”
“They’re my ethics,” my father said, “based on the virtues I hold dear.”
I went to stand next to him. “That we hold dear,” I said.
Malcolm’s looked away from us, his mouth half open. As he left the room he looked up once more, at my father, and I couldn’t believe what I saw in Malcolm’s eyes. It was love.
Chapter Eighteen
One night in Saratoga Springs, when I was about to ride my bike home from the McGarritts’ house, I overheard their next-door neighbors arguing. The father of the family bellowed, his wife pleaded, and their teenaged son shouted back.
“You never wanted me!” he said. “I wish I’d never been born.”
I’ve felt that way, sometimes. Have you? All things considered, my birth set in motion events that might better have never happened. For every choice I’ve made, there are infinite other choices that might have been better ones. Sometimes I’ve envisioned those other choices as shadows of my actions, shadows that define me as much as what I did.
Bertrand Russell wrote, “All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration.” Failure of unity, he said, keeps a person from happiness. But once that person feels part of “the stream of life,” feels herself integrated with a culture and its values, she becomes “a citizen of the world.”
The day that my father had his confrontation with Malcolm was the first day I felt I might have a claim to such citizenship. My father and I were united, and we had Malcolm to thank.
My father and I dined on gazpacho and smoked salmon and salad in the living room, watching Hurricane Barry’s approach on TV. The giant orange and red spiral tunneled up a cone of uncertainty again and again as the weather station replayed its hurricane maps. The storm was forecast to reach Sarasota’s latitude later that night and make landfall north of Homosassa early the next day.
We didn’t talk about Malcolm, although I tried. As we finished dinner, I said, “How could he do such things?”
My father said, “Malcolm never acquired the habit of virtue.” His eyes let me know that the conversation was closed.
Mãe telephoned while my father was clearing our plates. She and the horses were safe in Kissimmee, along with Dashay, Bennett, Harris, Joey, and Grace the cat. My mother was watching the weather on television, too.
My father called from the kitchen, “Advise her not to travel until tomorrow.”
I relayed the message.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Ask him how he feels about living with monkeys.”
After I’d hung up, I watched the weather forecast again. A Category Five was the highest on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and the litany of damage associated with it went far beyond wind and storm surges. The forecaster began to recite the list with inappropriate gusto. It began with “Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. All shrubs, trees, and signs blown down.”
My father came back and switched off the television. “Enough melodrama for one day,” he said.
I’d been about to tell him about the “blind” man at the intersection. I’d planned to say, I may have met the devil today. But he was right: we didn’t need more melodrama that night.
For a few minutes we went onto the balcony, but it was too humid and windy to stay long. The bay water below raced toward the shoreline in whitecaps, and rain began to fall in tiny, stinging lines.
When we were inside again, my father locked the door. Then he pushed a wall button, and a metal hurricane shutter descended, inch by inch cutting off our view of the world. He’d already shuttered the other windows.
“I’ll go to bed in a minute,” I said. “But I want to know why Raphael Montero needed to die.”
He frowned. “It’s simple, really. I had no good reason to keep on as we had been. You and your mother had left. What did I want with a house in Saratoga Springs? And that fellow Burton kept coming around, asking questions. His pestering bored me.”
“So how did you do it?”
He sat back on the sofa. “The entire business was easily managed. Dr. Wilson — you remember him, the fellow who treated your sunburn — is one of us, and he signed the death certificate. And old man Sullivan (another one of us) cremated an empty coffin and interred the ashes. Dennis” — he spoke the name with an expression of distaste — “arranged for the sale of the house, and the relocation of the laboratory here. All of your things, by the way, are in storage.”
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