Midnight Brunch

by Marta Acosta

  “I should have trusted him,” I said. My guilt about treating Gabriel badly was like the chopped cilantro in the salsa of my bad feelings: not the main component, but an essential ingredient.

  “He needed us not to trust him.”

  “We should have trusted him anyway,” I said. “What brought you back from the errand? Silas told me they’d rigged your car.”

  “Yep, and when my phone also went out, it was too coincidental. I thought no one would pick me up on the road at night, but some friendly hippie chick stopped and gave me a lift.”

  “Was her name Trevini?”

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “She works at the spa. She’s wonderful.”

  I sat up in bed. I was wearing the long nightgown that Oswald had bought me. “Oswald, this nightgown always twists around me, and I can’t help but think it’s a metaphor for something—maybe that things that seem appealing are often impractical in real life.”

  “You’ve been through a lot, Milagro. We’ll have breakfast and then we’ll go back home.”

  “I can’t go back with you, Oz.”

  He smiled, but now it was a nervous smile. “You’re tired. You need time to rest and recuperate. We can take care of you best at the ranch. Grandmama will help you pack.”

  I plucked the glove on his hand. “Is this how you want to live? Do you think that we could have a meaningful relationship while I’m like this?”

  “You won’t always be like this.”

  I looked into his clear, gray, honest eyes. “We don’t know that.”

  “I love you, Milagro De Los Santos. I want to be with you always.”

  “I want to be with you, too, Oswald.” I shook my head. “But not now.”

  “I thought you loved me.”

  “I do, Oswald, more than anything.”

  “Then give me one good reason you can’t come back—and don’t say it’s because we can’t have sex now, because I can wait.”

  I knew what I had felt, but now I was ashamed to tell Oswald. “Because I’m afraid I’ll kill someone. I’m afraid I’ll hurt the baby.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense. Okay, you got out of control with Silas and he deserved…Who wouldn’t want to hurt him, but…”

  “Oswald, it wasn’t just that I wanted to hurt him. I was so excited by the idea of killing him.” I watched his face then, to make sure he really understood what I was saying. “It wasn’t anger that I was feeling. It was pleasure. It was erotic. It felt amazing.”

  “That’s not you.”

  “It’s not who I was. It’s who I am now. You let Silas and Willem on the ranch out of deference to others. Are you willing to risk having me there? Because I’m not willing to take the chance of hurting the ones I love.”

  Oswald stood and looked down angrily at me. “You’re going to stay with Thomas, aren’t you? Or is it Ian?”

  “I’m going to stay with myself. I’m either going to overcome this or I’ll have to learn to live with it somehow on my own.”

  When Oswald couldn’t make me change my mind, Edna came into the room and made him leave. “Young Lady, my grandson tells me you have gotten a ridiculous notion in your silly little head that you are a menace to society and, as such, should not return to the ranch with us.”

  “Your grandson related the essential points, Edna.”

  She sighed dramatically and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Young Lady, you are not fit to set loose upon the world, particularly with your unnatural propensity to attract the attention of extremists and incite mayhem. I will not even speak of your unfortunate wardrobe choices.”

  Oh, la, for those not-so-long-ago days when I could gaily exchange insults with Edna. But that time was gone, and now I looked seriously at my friend and said sincerely, “I now know one of the side effects of my contamination with Ian’s blood, Edna. I get a thrill out of hurting someone when I have physical contact with them.”

  She thought for a moment and said, “You don’t want to hurt any of us.”

  “No, I don’t want to hurt anybody. Especially the baby.”

  “Young Lady, are you sure of your decision?”

  When I nodded, she said, “Where will you live? What will you do?”

  “I have some money from my screenwriting job and the deposit Silas made to my account. I’ll be fine.”

  “When you’re well, you’ll come home.”

  Mercedes was the only one who thought it was a good idea for me to be by myself. “Don’t think of it as being alone. Think of it as having time to yourself.”

  “I know what it is to live alone, Mercedes.”

  “No, you don’t. You know what it is to live by yourself while you hope you meet someone who will live with you. Living alone is different. Living alone can be very peaceful.”

  “You mean, it’s peaceful as long as your friends don’t come crashing in with problems and craziness.”

  She fiddled with one of her locks. “If I have peace the rest of the time, I can deal with a loca on my doorstep every now and then.”

  My friends kept finding reasons to delay their departure and made a dozen phone calls. Gabriel called Oswald and told him that Ian had been released from detention and that Silas was being delivered to them.

  Oswald handed the phone to me and said, “Gabriel wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello, Miss Thing,” he said cheerfully.

  “Gabriel! I’m so glad you’re you again.”

  He laughed. “You don’t know what a burden it is to be straight. I’m sorry about that huge mess, but I kept trying to get you to leave. How are you doing?”

  “Well…”

  I heard announcements and chatter in the background. “Gotta go, Young Lady,” Gabriel said. “That’s our plane. See you back at home!”

  I handed the phone to Oswald. “He doesn’t know I’m not going home?” I asked.

  “He knows. He’s just hoping you’ll change your mind. We’re all hoping.”

  In the end, I made them all leave. It broke my heart to watch Oswald walk away. I crawled into bed and cried and cried. I went through boxes of Barton tissues.

  Oswald, Mercedes, and my other friends called. It was painful for me to talk to them so I stopped answering the phone. Then the new concierge at the Paragon informed me that Skip’s production company had only paid for one more night.

  I was slumping around the casita, packing my belongings, when I found the white vampire dress in the back of the closet. I was going to throw it away, but I wondered what the maids would think of a girl so spoiled that she threw away beautiful clothes. I folded it and left it on a chair.

  The doorbell rang, then someone knocked. When I didn’t answer, Bernie yelled, “Milagro, I know you’re in there!”

  I opened the door and he shambled inside. “You look like hell,” he said.

  “Thank you for your frank assessment. I’m leaving here tomorrow. I’ve reached the end of the line.”

  “You going back home? Or to L.A.?”

  “I don’t know where I’m going. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Faulkner said, ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’”

  “Everyone keeps quoting things to me,” I said listlessly.

  “‘When one door closes, another opens.’ Do you know who said that?”

  “Bob Marley?”

  “Good guess. Alexander Graham Bell.”

  “Your friend Mercedes got hold of all the video of the other night, but I had an extra camera there for myself.”

  “Oh.” I remembered Thomas’s request. “Thomas wants you to send any good pictures to him for the columns.”

  “Milagro, I won’t release the other pictures. I covered Hollywood for half a decade, and I’ve seen worse things.”

  “Thanks,” I said listlessly.

  Bernie sighed. “You want my place? I’m moving into Gigi’s suite for a while, and then she wants me to hang out with her this summer. I’ve got the lease through the end
of the year.”

  La Basura was as good a place as any for me now. I said yes.

  I had just checked out of the Paragon when I ran into Thomas in the lobby.

  “I’ll come visit when you go back to Edna’s,” he said.

  “I don’t know that I’m going back.”

  “Sure you’ll go back. I’ve seen sad endings and I’ve seen happy endings, and you’re a happy ending type.”

  “You’re talking about movies, not real life.”

  “Same difference,” he said. He gave me a big hug, and I said good-bye to the only person I could touch without pain.

  I moved into Bernie’s place, and the enormity of my situation and the possible end of my relationship with Oswald made me feel incapable of doing anything. I called the ranch when I knew Oswald would not be there and told Edna where I was staying. I hung up quickly before she could ask any questions, but the next day a special-delivery package came. Inside were two pouches of calf’s blood.

  There was one thing, however, that kept crashing at the door of my pity party: every time I looked out the kitchen window, I saw the barren yard. Finally, I decided to add a few grim and gray-leaved plants that would not distract me from my gloomy mood. Well, that was the plan, and the best-laid plants of girls and vampires do sometimes get replaced.

  I put a palo verde in the back corner and filled a small plot with succulents. I covered a planter in blue mosaic tiles for a sago palm. I hung a basket of burro’s-tail sedum by the door and placed an apricot angel’s trumpet so that it was the first thing I spied out the window. I couldn’t decide between red or purple bougainvillea, so I planted one of each so that they would intertwine, deep and rich as blood.

  Oswald called daily. Even though I didn’t answer, I listened to his messages over and over. “I miss you, Milagro. Maybe you don’t miss me anymore, but I miss you. Daisy misses you. We all miss you. Libby misses you. I’m teaching her to say ‘Young Lady.’ Petunia is pining. Her feathers have lost their sheen.”

  Gabriel left a message saying that Silas had been banned from this continent and had joined the Dervishes on a tour of Asia. Sam submitted a petition to the council demanding that I have full rights as a family member. Ian had sponsored the petition. The baby was happy, and Winnie was in contact with the family research scientists and wanted a sample of my blood so they could investigate treatment possibilities.

  I didn’t want to find out that there was no treatment, though.

  Bernie came by one day with a bag of papers to grade. As we worked together, he said, “We’ve got a teacher out on disability, and I need you to substitute.”

  “I don’t know anything about teaching teenagers.”

  “If you can subdue a man with a knife, you can handle teenagers.”

  My face went hot with shame. “I might hurt someone.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said calmly. “Do this for a few days or the tape of your friends goes out.”

  “You’re blackmailing me?”

  “I’m persuading you.”

  My fear of reacting to physical contact overcame my fear of the students. They were reading Huck Finn and complained annoyingly about the dialect and story. From the back of the classroom, one boy slumped in his chair and said, “You’re one hella boring bitch.”

  I froze and the class went silent with anticipation. But when I didn’t feel the desire to plunge my hands into the boy’s stomach and pull out his steaming, dripping guts, I knew that I might actually be able to teach. “Shut up,” I said happily, staring him down until he looked away and slumped further.

  I made them close their books and told them why I loved Twain. Twain had lost his beloved brother, his daughter, eventually his wife, but he had always retained his tender and fierce understanding of the human condition. We spoke then about loss and hope and freedom and humanity.

  It wasn’t one of those after-school-special moments with dust motes floating on beams of sunlight through the window and students’ faces open with wonder and the worst student having an epiphany and going on to Harvard. But they did stop hitting one another and making body-function sounds for about five minutes.

  On the way home, I went into the grocery store and picked up cartons of yogurt and cereal, things I could eat without effort.

  “How’s that cooking coming along?” the woman at checkout asked, looking disdainfully at my groceries.

  “Cooking?”

  “You said you were doing all the Julia Child recipes.”

  “Oh, that. It’s too much trouble to cook just for one.”

  A voice behind me said, “You could invite me to dinner.”

  I turned to see my former masseuse in a long hippie skirt, her hair loose and wavy. “Trevini, how are you?”

  “Good, now that I’m not at the Paragon anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  She raised her arms with a minor crashing of colored glass bracelets. “They had a big shake-up and anyone who wanted to leave got a deal. I set up a massage room at my place.”

  “So it worked out.”

  “Absolutely. What’s doing with you?”

  Instead of answering, I said, “You’re welcome to come to dinner. I have strawberry yogurt.”

  “Puhleeze.”

  We made pasta with fresh tomatoes and herbs. I found a bottle of Lefty’s wine in the back of the refrigerator and we sat in the backyard.

  “It’s wicked serene here,” she said. “I feel the spirit of the garden. Maybe it will help your heart chakra.”

  “To be honest, Trevini, I don’t really buy into all this New Age stuff.”

  “New Age? This stuff’s been around forever,” she said. “I used to want to be a cop, you know. But I always had a sense of the mind-body connection, and besides, I didn’t like the idea of ever having to bust my friends.”

  “That would be a bummer,” I agreed.

  “Totally,” she said. “You should talk to your grandmother more.”

  “My grandmother is dead.”

  “You are the most limited person ever.”

  I thought she was nuts, but then I realized that I hadn’t visited my abuelita’s grave since her funeral. I drove hundreds of miles to the cemetery where she was buried. When I found her grave, I was surprised to see a bouquet of bright, clean plastic flowers by the headstone. I wondered who had left them.

  I placed my own flowers beside them and sat there for a long time, remembering her love and kindness.

  One sweltering evening I went to Trevini’s with a bag of ice for frozen lemonades. I said, “It’s too hot for anything but ice. I’m so sweaty I’m going to slide off the chair with a big sucking sound.”

  She started laughing and put her hand on my bare arm—I felt a delightful frisson. It was a rosy, warm, joyous sensation.

  Because I’d mistakenly believed that I was cured before, I was afraid that my visions would return. They didn’t. On the last day of school, I was able to hug my students good-bye. I felt prouder than I had when I’d received my F.U. diploma and practically skipped down the sidewalk on the way home.

  A gray Porsche was parked in front of my house and a man was leaning against the front door.

  Coming up the sidewalk, I said, “Hello, Ian.”

  “My dear girl,” he answered. He kissed me on the cheeks and I felt a flare of delight. “You’re looking very well.”

  “And you, as always. Won’t you come in?”

  “I’ve brought a picnic for us.” He picked up a basket beside him and we went inside.

  I turned on the small air conditioner and he opened a bottle of wine. We looked at each other.

  “I was unavoidably detained,” he finally said.

  “I heard the council kept you in custody.”

  “So they did, but there’ve been changes recently, which I have long wanted. No more reminiscing about our glorious vampire heritage. Sam waged a gallant fight on your behalf, arguing for your rights. I believe they will be granted soon.”

/>   “Sam is a good egg,” I said. “I hear you also lobbied for me.”

  “I had my own selfish reasons. I like to talk to you.” He said gently, “Edna told me you’ve had a hard time, my love.”

  “There were times when I thought you should have let me die, Ian. But I got over it.”

  Ian said wryly, “Dying is for other people, not for you.”

  “I almost killed Silas, you know, and I was really enjoying it. That scared me.”

  “Power can be frightening.”

  “Silas told me you cut him one hundred times.”

  “Did he?” Ian said, neither confirming nor denying the story.

  “I’m better now and when I touch people…” I walked to him, put my hand on his neck, and enjoyed the sensation. “Now when I touch people, it’s as if I can feel the life inside them and it’s fantastic.”

  Ian looked genuinely happy. “I’m so relieved. That’s what I feel, too. But Edna’s family, the majority of vampires, don’t have it. It’s just a rare few.”

  “Why are you different?”

  “A genetic mutation passed down directly in the original line, but not in the branches. I’m a little more resilient than others.”

  “What am I, Ian?” I asked. “Am I vampire or am I human? Am I like the Grants, or am I like you?”

  “You are yourself, Milagro De Los Santos, unique and indefinable. Decide what it is you want to be, although I do hope you won’t continue being so serious.”

  “I have big things on my mind, Ian,” I said. “Do you think I’ll ever be able to have children?”

  “I don’t see why not. Would you like to try now?” he asked, taking my wrist and tugging me close. “I’ve studied the technique at great length.”

  I laughed. “I’m being serious, Ian. Evelyn Grant says I have no future with Oswald because we can’t have babies together. But Silas seemed to think that I may be a baby factory.”

  Ian looked deep into my eyes and suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore. “Milagro, you are enough for any man just as you are.”

  Nervously I pulled away and said, “Let’s have that picnic now.”

  Afterward I took him to Lefty’s, and even Lefty was friendly to him. When we walked back to the house, he said, “I was hoping to get you intoxicated and take advantage of you.”