Since feeding from Sabrina, I knew I couldn’t go back. My mother’s watery, weak blood had kept me alive, but little else. It was like subsisting on broth. It seemed that, with Sabrina, I could get by with only a few solid feedings a week. I was learning how to adapt, how to work with this body of mine. I continued to keep my bedroom door locked and barricaded and my mother went unmolested by night. She was recovering. I started to feel hopeful that maybe everything would turn out okay.
That weekend Sabrina slept over and, after some drinking (pilfered Zinfandel from her mother’s cupboard), when I felt she’d loosened up a bit, I touched her hair, her sleeve. She was uncomfortable though, not as receptive as she had been. It made me angry. I felt hungry and on edge. It had been four days and I didn’t understand the problem. I sighed, louder than intended, and leaned back on the bed. She crossed her arms. Finally, when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak, I asked what her problem was. I tried to sound understanding, receptive even, but I was sure it came off strained.
“Nothing. We could, I don’t know, watch a movie, or talk. Why do we need to get right to that?”
She chewed her lip and avoided my eyes, striped socks tucked beneath her.
I forced myself to smile, though it probably closer resembled a big cat bearing its teeth. “We can do all those things after, Sabrina. I’m . . . hungry.”
“It’s just . . . the bites, they take time to heal. And they hurt after. I know we’re figuring this stuff out, trying to understand, and I don’t mind. I really don’t. I just don’t want to be your . . . milk cow, or some shit.”
“Milk cow?” I tried to laugh it off, but my hackles were up. Please don’t leave me, that voice inside whispered. “What does that even mean, Sabrina?”
“Like I’m only good to you for my milk, or blood, whatever. I want a friend, or a girlfriend, or whatever. We need to do normal stuff; we need to hang out together.”
I stood and gave her space, “We are hanging out, aren’t we?”
“No, Jane, I want more. We need to . . . I don’t know, drive to the mall, or go to the movies. Eat pizza. You know, regular shit.” She kept her eyes on the corner. “It can’t just be me coming over here or sitting in my car while you drink my blood and then, ‘Wham, bam, thanks, go home, Sabrina, I’ll call you when I’m hungry.’ Y’know? I want a friend. I want to have fun.” She raised her head, hazel eyes red rimmed.
She was embarrassed and relieved at telling me the truth, I could tell. I didn’t know what to say. I could remind her I’d never had friends, or that I didn’t know what I was doing. But she knew that. She wanted me to be normal, but she couldn’t understand that I was biologically an outcast. That her being withholding actually starved me. I tried not to get angry with her. My head was throbbing and a small voice deep inside groaned wretchedly. Tired of waiting, the monster in me stepped to the front.
“Sabrina,” I said, my voice hard. She watched me intently.
“I promise you aren’t a milk cow. And if you want to do all those things, pizza and movies, all that, we can. You say when and we will. But right now I need you, I’m hungry. I really need you.”
I willed her with my mind. Which sounds incredible, but my hunger, my dependence, melted her a bit. It pushed into her armor. I saw the frown soften, the sympathy in her face replacing the anger. A flipped switch. She nodded and extended her arm. I released the breath I was holding and went to her, my mouth instantly to her skin.
XX.
Interestingly, the revelation that I could actually control Sabrina made me want to be more careful with her. I thought of Hugh in the diary. I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to use her and drain her with no regard.
So I made an effort. We went to a movie theater, my first ever. The theater was dark and noisome, filled with chattering teenagers. The air was heady with artificial butter and the acrid smells of over a hundred bodies. It was a slasher movie and told the story of a group of friends out camping that get attacked by a maniac. Each of the group gets dispatched graphically and horrifically for the audience to see, all but the virginal tomboy who manages to outsmart the killer and get away.
Overall, it was interesting. I’d never watched much horror growing up and I found myself scared for the characters, jumping in places, averting my eyes. I was filled with relief as the credits scrolled and the house lights went up.
As we left the theater, Sabrina kept looking at me and chuckling. When we got to the car she cracked up.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You. You were totally scared in there!”
“So? It’s a horror movie. It’s supposed to scare people, right?”
“But you’re a vampire.”
I flinched at the word, hating it. It evoked images of capes, coffins, crosses. Undead. I was none of those things. I was alive. My heart beat. I ate food. I slept. I could walk in the sun. I was a regular person. Sabrina noticed that I wasn’t amused. Her laughter dried up.
“Sorry, it’s just funny, is all.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I thought you’d think all the blood everywhere was sexy or funny or something.”
I opened the car door, and paused before getting in to respond. “That’s gross, Sabrina. I don’t want to see anyone get hurt. I don’t like what I have to do.”
A group of rowdy friends spilled out of the theater. They were boisterous, laughing and roughhousing, and watching them reminded me that I would always be on the outside. I couldn’t even watch movies like a regular person. I thought Sabrina understood, that she got me, but I was wrong. No one could understand.
She tried to change the subject to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t bring myself to play along. She swore and we drove home in silence.
XXI.
A few weeks passed and Sabrina and I fell into a routine. Once a week, we did something that she wanted to do: a movie, a meal, whatever. And bi-weekly, I got to feed off of her.
During this time, my mother showed marked improvement. Her face filled out, and she kept some weight on her bones. She’d even started to become more independent, bathing and dressing, fixing some of her own meals. We’d reached an odd impasse, her and I. Living in the home together, filled with mutual resentment and frustration but unable to go anywhere else. She made herself scarce when Sabrina came around, her disapproval plain. But she couldn’t do anything about it, unless she wanted to put herself in danger or take up serial killing again.
It was a cold December night, a week before holiday break, and Sabrina was over. And I’d just finished, rising from between her thighs. We were both surprised and relieved by her period that month. The past few days had been mutually pleasurable for both of us and that made me feel good. I wanted her to be happy with me, to feel we were equals as much as we could be in our situation.
So on this night, she lay sated and smiling. I cleaned myself up and crawled into the bed with her, pulling the heavy covers with me and nestling up to her throat, enjoying the heat and steady thrum of her pulse. If I could purr, I would have.
We lay together, limbs intertwined. I was dozing when Sabrina blurted, “I want to talk about your father.”
I sat up, instantly tense. “My father?”
I hadn’t really thought of him outside of a character in my mother’s diary. A person, a monster, who contributed in making me. I’d never imagined him as someone I would know, or have a relationship with. Sabrina plowed on in a rush.
“Hear me out. Right after you gave me the journal, like that same weekend, I started googling him. Just to—” she licked her lips excitedly, trying to find the words “—to corroborate your crazy story. And I found him! I just never told you. But I’ve been keeping track of his gallery, and of him ever since. I even found pictures online of him. He looks just like you.” I could see she was both proud of herself and a little guilty at keeping something so major from me. I squeezed my hands together, even the idea of meeting my father filled me with dread.
Sabrina rus
hed on: “Anyways, after the movies the other night, I started thinking. You need to talk to someone like you. I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from—I’m trying. You know I am. But I’m not like you. You need someone like you, to help you.” She was thrumming with eagerness now. “His old gallery—the one that had your mom’s show—isn’t around anymore, but Hugh’s got another one in Brooklyn now.”
“I don’t even know how to respond to any of that.” My father was real. And Sabrina knew where he was. I got out of bed, suddenly ice cold and needing to be doing something. I pulled a sweater on, keeping my back to Sabrina.
“Well, he’s like you, we know that, and he’s your father. Aren’t you even a bit curious?” She beamed up at me, entirely too proud of herself.
“I don’t know. This is all too much, too fast. Last month I thought I was dying of cancer or something. And now I’m . . . whatever I am, and I have a father someplace? And you knew and didn’t tell me until now.” I paced the room. I was scared. How could Sabrina do this without talking with me? And how could she read the diary and want to find this guy?
“Winter break’s coming up. And I have a crazy idea. I think we should drive down there and just check it out. It’s only eight hours, maybe even six if we make good time. My cousin goes to college at Drew University. It’s like an hour outside the city. She said we could stay with her. And—worst case—if we get too scared, we just go to the Statue of Liberty and come home. Don’t you want to understand what you are, where you come from?”
I turned on her. Angry that she’d planned all this behind my back. “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
She recoiled a little, hurt, but bounced back fast. “Because I care about you. If there are others like you . . . you wouldn’t feel so alone.”
“That . . . man . . . didn’t want to be a father. He didn’t want me. And he doesn’t even know I exist. Why would he want anything to do with me now?”
Sabrina reached out of bed and took my hand. Her touch was incredibly soothing. I would never take for granted the simple act of touching, having been deprived my whole life. I felt greedy enough to take my other hand and place it on top, trapping her in between like a clamshell or a Venus flytrap.
“Just think about it. I know it’s scary, so just think about it.”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll think about it.” But I felt extremely ambivalent about the whole situation.
I spent the next few days thinking about it, hard. On one hand, Hugh—my father—could be a monster. He could even hurt me, or worse. On the other, Sabrina could be right and this could be my only opportunity to talk to someone else like me. What if there was a community of people like me out there? A nest of vampires? Way too True Blood, too fictional. But still. I couldn’t waste this chance. I needed answers, and Hugh was the only one who could give them.
I called Sabrina midweek and agreed to the trip.
XXII.
Remarkably, Sabrina’s mother allowed her to take the car for our trip during winter break. Sabrina assured me her mother had a very trusting and hands-off approach to child-rearing, and once Sabrina spun my dramatic story of my dying mother and discovering a long-lost father, her mother was tearily handing over the keys and a wad of gas money.
What that poor woman must have thought of me. Sabrina had made a joke about me reminding her of Norman Bates and it hit a little too close to home. It took all my strength to explain that he was a killer of women, a human killer, and that I was something else. But I remembered the movie from late-night TV, the tall spooky house with a spookier-still old mother, the obedient only son. I could sympathize with him. The isolation, the resentment and the fear of making a change. For some, horrible and familiar was better than the unknown. I didn’t want to be like that anymore.
On the Saturday morning we were leaving, I found myself sitting in the bathtub, the water raining on my head, terrified at what I was about to do.
It’s not too late to say no, a little voice reminded me over and over. But this is what you prayed for, another chided. A change. Answers.
And finding Hugh would do that. Hugh. I careened through every emotion from numbing fear, to childish excitement sitting in that tub.
Later, when Sabrina’s car horn tooted, I was as ready as I’d ever be. Duffel bag over my shoulder, I turned back to the den where my mother was propped up in her familiar chair, the radio playing a piano sonata. She stared at me, more lucid and alive than ever. All week I’d been pumping her full of protein and iron. She had some color in her cheeks and was holding onto some weight. She could even fill the stove with the wood I’d piled, plenty more than we normally went through in a week. The fridge was full of supplies to make sandwiches and soup in cans were stacked high on the counter. I left out huge bowls of water and food for Tommy the Cat and extra litter boxes. Clothes and blankets at easy reach for her. I still feared I’d return to find a body, decomposing in this exact spot. It was impossible not to, she’d been helpless for so long.
“I need to do this. I need to at least try to find him. I need to find out how I’m supposed to live like . . . this. It can’t be the way we’ve been doing it all these years.”
She nodded, blinking back tears, her hands squeezed into knobby fists. I closed the door and left it unlocked behind me. It had started snowing that morning, and already a few powdery inches coated the drive and yard. The air was crisp and filled with wood smoke.
The dark sedan idled, the headlights illuminating the falling snowflakes. Sabrina waved, beaming as I approached. I had to remind myself that this was, to her, a road trip adventure. A soap opera of monsters and mystery parents. A departure from her ordinary, normal, perfect family. I’d warned her all week that if we found my father, it was unlikely he’d be excited to see us. Would we even survive meeting Hugh McGarrett? Sabrina’s smile evaporated when she saw me.
“What’s up? You okay?”
I just nodded, trying to summon a smile.
“This is my first time leaving home. I hope my mom will be all right on her own.”
Sabrina’s eyes widened at the reality of that, as I tossed my duffel in the back seat and buckled myself into the passenger seat. She dropped the gear into reverse and accelerated, dirt and snow spraying.
“She’s doing a lot better, Jane. There’s a big bad world out there, and you’re about to go explore it. Your mom will be fine.”
Sabrina turned up the radio, the gnashing angry synth drowning out our voices as we drove onto the main road. I turned back once. The gate had been left open by a foot, and I was tempted to have her turn around so I could close it, before realizing the absurdity of it all. Let the gate be open, let the house exist without me to hold it up, to be its heart and eyes. I faced forward and allowed the miles of trees and houses to blur, letting my vision un-focus, floating above it all, tethered to my body like a balloon on a string.
The hours melted by, rural roads with few cars, all dirty from the slush and street salt. Miles of snow, dusting the trees and piled high and brown on the sides of the road. The roads slowly became highways like streams flowing into larger rivers. After a few hours we stopped for gas at a large rest stop oasis. The station glowed clean white amidst all the asphalt, the murky sky, the dirty snow. We sat in the car, the heat on full blast. We ate our over-processed fast food, the grease coating my mouth long after it was swallowed.
I sipped my coffee and watched Sabrina over the rim. My stomach felt empty still, the burger a greasy lump in my gut. She had a smear of ketchup at the side of her mouth. She chewed loudly and talked with her mouth full. Her hair was braided into pigtails. A streak of dyed pink was mixed into the shiny artificial blue black. Her hooded sweatshirt had the Misfits skull emblazoned across it. Her nails were painted pink to match the streak in her hair. Her right hand, squeezing the steering wheel, had three rings: one a skull, one a glass bauble, another a silver snake.
Sabrina was more like my mother than I was. Her clothes, her art, h
er desire to be someone. They both wanted people to see them as unique. My mother wanted people to see an artist. Sabrina wanted to be seen as an individual. How did I look from the outside? What did I want anyone to see? What would my father think of me?
That I looked like him, probably. A few days earlier my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Sabrina to show me a picture of him. He and I had the same big nose and thick eyebrows. The same dark brown hair and pale olive skin, the same shadowy brown-black eyes. The brown of wet rotting wood on forest floors.
But beyond a girl that looked like him, what else would he see in me? What did anyone see? Sabrina spent so much time cultivating a look and making a statement. But with my long hair and practical, thrift-store clothes, I looked nothing like Sabrina.
What did I look like to people? Poor? Weird? Would Hugh be ashamed of my appearance?
I turned to Sabrina. “What do I look like to you? If you just saw me in a crowd. What would you think of me?”
She stopped eating and regarded me strangely, mouth still full. “What do you mean? What got you thinking of that?”
“I’m going to meet my . . . Hugh for the first time. I was thinking about how much time people spend creating an identity. You make a lot of choices in what you wear. I don’t. I was wondering how that works, how much real thought goes in. Hugh’s a fancy guy. He likes nice things and art. How much of people’s avoidance of me is how I look?”
I thought Sabrina might blow off the question, but instead she glanced at me quickly in between passing a few cars. “I guess, if I just saw you, I’d definitely think you were a little strange. Your clothes aren’t current. But I think it’s less what you wear and more how you carry yourself. You could be wearing anything, really. You seem . . . above that sort of stuff, I guess. Makes us mere mortals feel insecure. You don’t wear makeup or jewelry. You’re all dark and mysterious, and intimidating. I guess what I’m trying to say is, in a world of people who are trying to create an identity, the one who has a genuine one would always be an outcast, y’know?”
Parasite Life Page 15