by A. D. Koboah
Luna was here with me and I had all I waited in the wilderness for, and so much more. So I returned Luna’s journal to her old home and left it outside on the porch for Lina to find. For it had been written for her, a way for Luna to perhaps explain her actions in seemingly abandoning Lina.
We experienced a kind of paradise during those first few months. Our days were spent sleeping in large, bed-sized chests, our nights spent reading, walking, talking, and sometimes travelling through North America. The world was ours.
One night I sat and watched her read for over an hour, marvelling at her extraordinary beauty. Her skin was like beautiful dark wood that had been buffed to perfection, her hair an ebony halo around her face. And her eyes, there was an ancient magic in her eyes, a dark light that shone from them, keeping me captivated. Such beauty was simply—
“Hush, Avery. I’s trying to read.” She looked up, a small crease lining her brow in such an adorable sign of irritation.
“But I’m not doing anything.”
“How you expect me to read with all that chatter?”
“My thoughts? Of course. I will think quietly,” I said with a smile.
She scowled and battered her eyelashes at me.
She was simply adorable when she became irritated. And her voice. Ah, it was like rich, smoky, warm honey. I could listen to her talk for hours, the—
“Avery!” She brought a finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”
“Of course, whatever you want, Luna.”
But I continued to sit there, marvelling at the way she sometimes bit her bottom lip, her brow creased in concentration when a book had completely absorbed her attention. And her hands, with those long, slender fingers. I loved that her nails were long now instead—
She slammed the book shut. “Avery! Would you—”
“All right, all right. I will go for a walk and leave you in peace.”
I kissed her on the cheek, letting my lips linger for much longer than was needed, and then left.
Outside in the cool crisp night air, I sighed, already bored. I had no interest in travelling to some town nearby and drinking my time away in an anonymous tavern. It was too late now anyhow, so I decided to spend a few hours by the lake.
I made my way to the lake, already disgruntled at being forced away from the object of my affections. I would stay there for a maximum of twenty minutes and then return to tell her it was simply objectionable to have her out of my sight for such a long period of time.
I almost reached the lake when I heard something out by the water. I spurred myself onwards breaking out of the trees and onto the grass by the lake. A smile lit up my face. Who should I see sitting before me on a blanket with her head bent over her book?
Luna.
She looked up as I came to sit before her, a smile dancing around her eyes. She held an index finger briefly to her lips before her gaze returned to the book. It wasn’t long before more complaints were voiced regarding my noisy thoughts.
We were so in love, our bond unique and enduring. But Luna returned to me at the point in time when slavery still thrived and a union between a white man and Negro woman was against the law. So we hid ourselves away at the mansion and on the rare occasions we were burdened with the presence of others, she pretended to be my slave. But it was a thorn in our union that stung both of us, the fact that we could not legally call ourselves man and wife.
I didn’t give Mama’s warning any thought at all, but I soon had reason to recall it. One evening, I awoke before Luna and left the mansion to search for flowers for her. I returned shortly after to see her pacing the bedroom in a state of wild panic. When I materialised in the bedroom, she simply stared at me, her eyes hooded with some unnameable anxiety, and then she burst into tears. Shocked, I went to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away, and as she still had not learned to adjust to her superior strength, the force of the push sent me flying backwards and I hit the wall.
“Where was you?” she cried, decades of repressed anger springing to the surface in all its ferocious intensity.
“I...I...”
In the end, I merely held out the flowers I had picked for her. She ignored them. She moved to the window and placed her hands against her head.
“I only wanted you to wake up to the scent of flowers, Luna.”
“I thought you’s never coming back.”
“Luna, you know why I let you go all those years ago. I love you so much. You know—”
She turned from the window and disappeared, reappearing a few feet from me, anger a dark shadow, like a third person, peering at me from behind her eyes, even as tears coursed down her cheeks.
“Yes! But I never even knowed where you was, Avery. I thought I’d die never seeing you again.”
“I am sorry, Luna. I am sorry,” was all I could say, simply overwhelmed by the anguish I saw beneath the anger.
She continued to cry, recounting the times she came out to the porch at dusk, hoping for a glimpse of me. And of those nights she was frightened out of sleep convinced I was in mortal danger. It was only hours later I managed to calm her down enough for her to let me hold her as she wept in my arms.
She could also be extremely changeable and sometimes volatile. We did not venture into town often during that first year, and while she was extremely antagonistic toward whites—which I understood—she was even more so toward Negroes, which I could not understand. As always, her emotions were conflicting and difficult to decipher. She was angry when we came into contact with Negroes, especially when she looked into their minds and saw the hardship and degradation they endured on a daily basis. But undermining that anger was a fine sheen of contempt. Perhaps she could not reconcile what she now was, a powerful superhuman being, to what they were and what she used to be: A helpless slave.
Thankfully, we did not need to be around the inhabitants of that town often and we deliberately kept them confused about our identities and gave different names, often altering what they saw so we appeared to be different people. We did this, created an extended family in their minds, along with children, so we could continue to live at the mansion as long as we could, and assume the identity of a fictitious child, or relative, years later to hide the fact that we were unnatural beings who would never die.
On one occasion, we came across one of the slaves owned by the town mayor. She was a woman in her late thirties who had borne many children for the man and worked long hours for him. The work had crippled her, leaving her with a limp. She had a nervous air around her and was childlike around others in some ways, so great was her fear of whites and the power they held over Negroes. When she came across us on the very rare occasions we ventured into town, her face lit up with awe and admiration when she saw Luna, a Negro woman who was well-dressed and clearly had the respect of the white man who was known to be her master. Luna was immediately drawn to her by the intensity of her thoughts and the clear admiration she held for her. The woman smiled timidly when Luna turned to stare at her. The smile disappeared when she saw the clear contempt in Luna’s eyes. I could see it was more than contempt, it was rage at what she saw of the life the woman led, and the brutality she endured that left her cowering around others. But she seemed to be especially angry at the woman herself for being weak and letting them break her spirit, as she saw it.
That anger followed us when we left town and Luna remained silent and moody. At times like that, I let her be. She went out on her own that night, something she rarely did at that stage, and I did not try to follow, understanding that she needed to be on her own. At dawn, I returned to the mansion to see her waiting in the field of flowers as she used to do when she was human, her expression troubled.
I sat down beside her and we watched the sun make its way over the horizon.
“Where did you take them?” I asked after a few moments.
“New York. I didn’t think, I just got her and her children and took them to New York. I...I just couldn’t let her go back there and...and...�
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I pulled her close to me and she laid her head against my shoulder.
After a few moments she pulled away to gaze at me, tears shimmering in her eyes.
“Did I do the right thing, Avery? She...she’s so scared of everyone and everything. I left money for them, but I don’t know if she can look after herself and her children.”
“She’ll find a way, Luna.”
“Will she? There are some things, some experiences that people never come back from. There...there is so much wrong with me, Avery, so much that Master John and his father destroyed. I don’t understand why you even fell in love with me, and why you continue to love me, when I’m just a slave.”
It felt as if my heart was tearing into two as I stared at her. Her face was lit by the light of the coming sun, her skin turned to dark gold, her eyes jet-coloured glass shinning with tears.
“I love you because you’re my everything. There will never be another like you, Luna.”
I pulled her to me and found she was shivering. I held her tighter, remembering the evening I came across her praying in the chapel.
“They can’t hurt you now, Luna. No one will ever harm you again.”
She looked up at me, a soft smile on her lips even as tears slid down her cheeks. She kissed me gently as the sun broke over the horizon, bathing us in gold. Then we entered the mansion to seek refuge from its glare.
But this contempt she sometimes showed toward other blacks was puzzling, and perhaps is why she strove to change the way she spoke. The colourful, comforting speech and idioms I loved slowly vanished. It was so gradual I barely noticed it was disappearing. Every once in a while it crept back into her speech in a word, or a turn of phrase, and I realised it had been absent and I missed it. But whenever this happened and she became aware of it, she reprimanded herself mentally and crushed the stray word so it never resurfaced again.
And it was not only Negro slaves that had her animosity. Once, during our travels, Luna came to a stop in the middle of a busy street and gasped out loud.
I faced her, puzzled, and we turned in unison to the person whose thoughts had elicited such a reaction from her. It was a smartly dressed Negro male in his mid-forties. He was a wealthy free man of colour, but what drew Luna’s attention to him was the way in which he had accumulated his wealth.
He owns slaves! Luna hissed in my mind.
I had never seen her like this before. She was distraught and also angry. So very angry.
“Let us leave here, Luna,” I said out loud.
She continued to glare at him, wounded and angered beyond all understanding.
“Luna, please,” I whispered.
She managed to tear her gaze away from him and followed me off the busy street.
I was relieved. Luna’s anger always unnerved me, whether it was directed at me or not, and I was thankful we were leaving that town within the hour and would not see the Negro slaveholder again.
Our love was unique and precious, like a beautiful rose. But the thorns from this rose were particularly sharp, especially since our thoughts were open to the other.
For decades Luna harboured anger toward me at what she saw as my betrayal when I abandoned her. Over the course of our union, it began to manifest itself frequently in emotional outbursts that sometimes lasted for hours. In the beginning, I appeased her and kept telling her I was sorry and she would eventually calm down. But after a few years, resentment began to creep in and I often remained silent during her tirades. But, as unfortunately happens with mind-readers, every so often one is slower to conceal what the other might overhear.
We were in the drawing room one night and she had been shouting at me for the past two hours.
“I spent the rest of my life aching for you but you were gone. I nearly died without ever getting to see you again.”
I remained silent, seething inwardly, having long lost patience with her tirades, especially since I had an eternity of more to look forward to. But what really aggravated me during these moments were the latent thoughts behind the words. She saw my selfless actions as a betrayal. And the latent thought behind it? White people always betrayed you.
These thoughts were subconscious, and she was probably not even aware of them. But they were there. And they evoked severe resentment in me, especially since I had suffered so much when I gave her up to be loved and cared for by another man.
The display also sickened me because I saw Luna as superior in so many ways—apart from one—when she cried and screamed over nothing and behaved like the hysterical, whimpering women I had left behind me along with my mortal life. And as the cauldron of my resentment burned a thought slipped through my mental net to the surface.
Oh for God’s sake, are we back to this. Again. Now I’ll have to spend the entire night listening to her nonsensical rant.
Silence came crashing down on the room as she spun to face me. Her eyes were still shining with tears, but her face was hard and cold. Realising she heard me, I could only stare in consternation, trying to think of something to say that would explain my comments or at least mitigate them.
“Luna...I...I—”
She didn’t let me finish. In an instant she was across the room. She dragged me from the chair with one hand by the lapels of my jacket and the room disappeared in a whirl of gold and reds. I only saw flashes of green as we dipped in and out of the ether at a blinding speed before we arrived at the lake. Shocked at how fast she had brought us here, I was about to speak when she picked me up and threw me into the air. I was sent hurtling over the water and smashed into the lake, quickly sinking to the bottom.
Furious, I materialised out of the water to the bank. She was gone.
When I returned to the mansion, she was sitting in the chair by the fire, the skirts of her canary yellow dress spread around her in rolling folds of yellow silk. She was holding an open book in her lap, her neck inclined demurely as she read in the soft light cast by the fire.
She didn’t look up when I appeared in the room or when I walked across it to her, dripping and squelching over the expensive rugs we had spent so long choosing together. Once I was before her, I stared down at her for a few moments before I reached for the book and carefully pulled it out of her grasp. I threw it into the fire. It was only then that she looked up at me. She didn’t flinch when I slammed my hands down on the armrest of the chair and loomed over her. When I spoke, my voice was soft and controlled.
“Luna. The reason why men do not hit women is because they are weaker physically, a category you do not fall into. So I am warning you. If you ever do that again, I will not hesitate to strike you in turn.”
She regarded me in silence for a few moments, calm and poised on the surface, a raging inferno on the inside. Then her eyes narrowed to thin slits.
This time she threw me clear across the lake into the trees on the other side. I smashed through one, cleaving it in half, and would have hit another had I not shimmered out of the air, materialising on my feet below as the tree I had slammed into came hurtling to the ground a few feet away.
She was standing on the other side of the lake, her yellow dress like a candle flame against the soft darkness around her. When I materialised before her, she had her hands on her hips, her chin jutted forward in defiance, her lips in a triumphant smirk as she stared me down, daring me to make good on my threat.
Of course, the last thing I wanted to do was hit her but I was not only wet, my ego was bruised and I was furious with her. I no doubt looked a fool standing there and she clearly thought I had no intention of hitting her. She had to know that this behaviour was unacceptable. Luna was already much stronger than me, the vampire blood I had given her along with the blood of her ancestors had combined to make an exceptionally powerful being. But despite the fact that the fight that ensued would see me the worse off, to make my point, I reached out and lightly, reluctantly, tapped her on the cheek.
I swear, my fingers barely touched her cheek, so timid and feeble was
the ‘blow’ I directed at her.
But her reaction was horrific. At first she gasped and put her hand to her mouth in shock, her eyes widening like that of a frightened, defenceless kitten. And then she did the worst possible thing she could have done under those circumstances.
She burst into tears.
Bawled—no, wailed—would probably be a better description. At first I merely stood awkwardly before her whilst she wailed, shocked and deeply ashamed of myself.
“Luna, I am so sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.”
I tried to gather her into my arms, but she pushed me away and then proceeded to deliver a flurry of feeble, open handed slaps across my face and chest. Then she ran away into the trees with her hands against her face as she continued to bawl, a glimmer of saffron cutting through the gloom.
I spent the rest of the night in my wet clothes apologising and apologising whilst she wept and wept. I even shed a few tears of my own, I was so exasperated and tormented by her distress. She was still crying when the sun came up that morning and we retired to our chest. She finally relented to let me hold her, and so I brought her close to me, the sad mantra of her sobs making it impossible for me to sleep.
The following night saw her sullen with dark, fragile eyes. She had only to look at me and a fresh wave of tears engulfed her.
She never threw me into the lake again, but it was at least ten years before she fully forgave me. It took many more years before mere mention of the incident did not bring a thin film of water to her eyes.
But as is always the case with Luna, when I look back at those years, I missed so many signs that trouble was brewing. I had been so caught up with her distress that I failed to see the crucial element, the speed with which she raced through the woods to the lake. It was a journey that was normally made in a couple of minutes but she had made it in seconds. We both knew she was stronger than me, but I now saw she was a great deal faster and she had hidden that from me. If she loved and trusted me, why would she feel the need to hide all that she was? The other thing was that her rants ceased completely and she never brought up my “betrayal” again.