by A. J. Aalto
He snort-laughed and tried to shift focus off of himself. “If you run around behind Harry and Jerkface’s back, mucking about in this vampire politics stuff, you’re gonna get hosed.”
I heard the V-word and let it go. “I tried to hang out with my cool new friend, Liv Malashock, but she doesn’t want me around, either.”
“You mean Liv: the Other Vampire Hunter?”
“Slipper-humper, your Telepathy is super annoying,” I grumbled. “Does Harry know about Liv?”
“Harry knows way more than you ever give him credit for, Marnie-Jean.”
“Well, if it’s a choice between helping Liv and listening to you-know-who, I pick helping Bizarro Marnie.”
“Why?”
I zipped through a new roundabout in town and passed familiar vineyards, wineries, and storefronts. “I went through the Pro/Con list. Pro: I’m pretty close to Liv.”
“You’re closer to Jerkface.”
“And she’s a famous hunter.”
“But Jerkface…”
“She’s a total bad-ass.”
“Still Jerkface.”
“Cons: she’s humorless.”
Wes stared over at me in the dim flicker of the passing street lights. “So is Jerkface.”
“She cares more about staking revenants than she cares about my feelings.”
“Also Jerkface.”
“And when she does tolerate me, she acts like she’s doing me a favor. I’m training a whole new friend to put up with my shenanigans. Have I ever been this frustrated and exhausted?”
Wes exploded, waving his hands. “Batten! Batten! Batten!”
“Names, Wes!” I barked.
“The point is,” he argued, “you’ve been through all of this before, and where did it get you?”
“Really, really well-laid, for one thing. But also annoyed and sad and –”
He sighed. “Just stay home and eat tacos. When was the last time you ended up bruised, bloody, and brokenhearted after an evening eating tacos?”
“It’s true, Tuesday nights involve a lot fewer tears,” I agreed, “until I fall off the couch and drop my taco.”
Wes considered this. “You cried more about that taco than you did at Batten’s funeral.”
“It had extra cheese, and that special carne asada I like,” I said defensively. That made me think about the cheese shop. “You are wise beyond your years, Batface. Maybe I should back off and let the men handle this one.”
“Whoa, hey, chill. I said nothing about men,” Wes said warily, giving me side-eye. “Not specifically. They just happen to be dudes.”
“If this is about my perceived incompetence — which I can punch you about later — then why don’t you guys try to work with Malashock instead?”
“A trio of dead guys working with a vampire hunter?” Wes boggled. “That’s your suggestion? Find us a woman who doesn’t want to kill us, maybe we’ll work with her.”
I turned into my mother’s driveway, pulled in behind Carrie’s boxy old Volvo, and shut off the car. “Ready?”
“God, no,” he whispered.
I softened a little. “I’m here, Wes.”
“Can I just wait in the car until you tell her?”
“Fuck, no!” I yelped. “Are you nuts?”
“All right, all right,” he stage-whispered, wrestling the corner off the chocolate cake box. He took a big finger-swipe of icing off the bottom edge and popped it in his mouth to fortify himself. Closing his good eye, he savored, then nodded once decisively. “Okay. I’ve got this.”
“What‘s the worst that could happen?” I said, trying to find the positive.
“She's taken up stake-making in her spare time and nails me as soon as we open the door.”
I snort-laughed. “I think that might be a leeeeeeeetle bit over the top, dude.”
“She could start treating me like she treats you,” he grumbled.
“Okay, that would be bad.” I grimaced and pulled my knit cap down tightly around my ears to disguise my still-minimal hair. One weird surprise for my mother at a time. Undead son, then we can broach bald daughter. He’d changed into a plain black eye patch, but even that was going to upset my mother just as much as the UnDeath. Tightening my gloves on my hands, I swung out of the car. My green Keds crunched cold, wet gravel.
My parents’ house was a long bungalow done in a basic tan brick, with brown shutters and a big bay window facing the street. Behind the house, row upon row of greenhouses were lit up with grow lights, fostering tender poinsettias for the coming Christmas season. The hedges in the front were trimmed to precisely the size my mother preferred — unobtrusive. The front pathway was the same brick as the house, well-sanded to prevent weeds from growing between them. The door was painted a glossy piano black, which was new. Nothing else about the place had changed since the 1970s. For a moment, I felt like I was ten years old, until I glanced over at my brother and his eye patch and scars. The bat-shifting was still helping to repair his scarred left side, little by little, but there was plenty of room for healing.
The front door opened, and square in the middle, backlit by the hall light, was my mother. Again, I felt like a ten-year-old, one that was sure to be in trouble for staying out past curfew. She was a tiny powerhouse, wiry with a farmer’s strength, her blue eyes hard, her platinum hair tied back in a severe knot.
I wasn’t sure what I should say first, but I needn’t have worried. Wes solved that by blurting, “So, I’m a vampire now. Let’s hear it.”
I wilted. Fuckanut. “Nothing like easing into it, kid.”
At first, she didn’t seem to hear him. Her blue eyes shifted from my forehead, where she seemed to sense the baldness hidden under my hat, to Wes’s puckered upper lip. “Come in out of the wind, you’ll catch your death.”
I pinched back what surely would have come out as a coarse blurt of laughter.
“You,” Wes whispered, “uh, you have to invite me in, mom. I’m not kidding.”
Mom’s eyes cut back to me and narrowed sharply. “You,” she barely whispered. It was more like a hiss, even without any consonants. Mom had a lot of practice using that tone with me.
“Nope!” I denied, holding my gloved hands up in surrender. “This is not on me.”
“This is your fault,” she insisted tightly.
“It’s not!”
Wesley stepped between us and set his shoulders. “Mother, shut up,” he clipped angrily. “For once in your life, just shut up and listen to me.”
I felt my jaw drop. Wesley had never spoken to Mom like that, not in front of me, anyhow, and I was sure if I peeked around his shoulder, I’d see the same shock on her face that was currently riding through my chest.
“I did this,” Wesley said. “Me. I did it on purpose. It was no accident. Marnie had nothing to do with it, neither did Harry. No — ” He cut her off when a retort half-formed in her throat. “I was not in any way inspired to do this by her lifestyle, so don’t try going down that road, either. There’s only one person to blame for this, and it’s me. If you can’t accept that, then Marnie and I will just go spend Thanksgiving dinner with Harry. But I swear, if you turn us away tonight, you can bet your ass I am never coming back home.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Carrie bellowed playfully from the hallway behind Mom, causing her to grimace. “Can we all just drop the horseshit and focus on what’s most important, here? I don’t care who’s dead. I don’t care who’s undead. I don’t care who’s had a bad haircut and is trying to hide it under an ugly hat.” She slapped her hand in her palm to accent each word. “Carrie. Wants. Turkey!”
“Yeah, I can’t afford to miss another excuse to be a glutton,” I agreed, smiling at my sister with relief. “I already missed Labor Day, the Balls Falls Craft Show, and Sporkfest.”
Carrie moved to stand beside Mom now, barefoot and wearing a familiar, faded yellow leisure suit with a brown stripe down the leg, a terrycloth monstrosity that had been in Dad’s closet since before any
of the Baranuik children had been born, and yet somehow had not precluded our conception. It had been ugly in the seventies, and it was ugly now, but somehow my sister pulled it off. “You mean Spookfest?”
“No,” I said. “They misprinted the brochures on the first year, so it stuck. Sporkfest is the biggest paranormal convention in the States.”
“But you did make it to Dorkfest, right?” she asked.
“There is no Dorkfest.”
“Marnie is Dorkfest,” Wes said to her through the side of his mouth.
I elbowed him and Carrie grinned.
“Hey, is that German chocolate cake?” Carrie asked, shoving past Mom to reach for it. Wes relinquished the box, an offering; my baby brother’s one good eye was brightly fixed on Carrie with hopeful adoration.
“Look, Mom, what’s done is done,” I suggested quietly. “It can’t be undone. Wesley made a foolish choice. I get it, it’s an ugly shock. Freaking out is normal. I freaked out when I saw him.” I half-smiled at the memory of him and his wilted violet eyes. “I don’t agree with his choices, either, but I wasn’t there to counsel him when he made that call. None of us were. All we can do now is support him and move forward.”
“All we can do now is eat our fucking feelings like Baranuiks do,” Carrie hollered, leaving us to run off with her cake box. “Come on, people, snap out of it. The potatoes are finished boiling. They’re going to get waterlogged.”
“Invite him in, Mom,” I said, “or I guess we’ll go.”
“You can’t go,” Mom said tightly. “Your sister wants you here.”
“At least someone does.” I glanced at Wes. He smiled wanly. This was going about as well as I'd expected, but his high hopes for a loving reunion had been dashed, and it showed in his face.
My mother’s cool gaze wanted to turn into an eye-roll but she controlled it. “Tell me how to invite him. I have potatoes to mash and gravy to whisk.”
“Who’s on the mortgage? You, or Dad, or both?”
Her lizard-like glare said “both” loudly enough that Carrie could probably read it through the back of Mom's head.
“Okay, so you can say, ‘Wesley Wasp Alexander Baranuik Strickland, you are welcome in my home,’ and then we’ll come in.” I gave Wes the stink-eye to make sure he didn’t blurt out anything else. Mom didn’t need to hear about smugglers or boggles or phantasms or Kill-Notch or dude-witchery. Next time we had something big to tell her, we’d role-play the reveal ahead of time. Or he could send an email like a reasonable person.
Mom followed my instructions without my having to repeat myself, which was good, because my tongue was already twisted. She urged me to take off my hat and I declined, telling her it was a fashion statement, giving her the opportunity to sigh one of her overburdened mom-sighs.
“You didn’t bring him, did you?” she asked, meaning Harry.
“I thought one immortal at the table would be more than enough,” I said. She didn’t hear the humor and nodded to agree with the sentiment. I sighed. “Where's Dad, anyway? He’s not having dinner with us?”
Carrie cleared her throat while taking Wes’s jacket and gave me the not-safe-small-talk rapid head shake, so I immediately said, “Early snow this year, eh? Saw ice on a puddle down at the lake. Frost warnings on the radio. Might be good for this year’s ice wine, right?”
My mother’s face softened gratefully — weather and farm reports, she could handle. Her undead son and her husband were off-limits for now, and she moved efficiently into a lecture I didn’t need regarding climate change and shifting seasons and how dreadful the storms were going to be this winter. Carrie and I spoke silently with our eyes behind her back, throwing pointed looks at Dad’s den, where his hospital bed had once been set up. It had been replaced with the old furniture from the rec room. Had he moved back up to the bedroom? Was he doing that much better? Had he moved out? Had mom kicked him out? That seemed unlikely.
Tight small talk continued as gravy whisking and the clatter of potato mashing filled my mother’s small kitchen. The wallpaper was older than I was, a faded harvest wheat and grapes pattern in taupe, yellow, and orange. A long shelf in front of the big kitchen window held clay flower pots painted by me and my siblings, plaster and clay doodads made in pottery classes at school throughout the years. One of them was a frog. I didn’t remember it being there, and couldn’t guess which of my siblings had made it.
“Mom, is there anything I can do to make you okay with this?” Wes asked.
“Family harmony is important to me.” Mom moved about the table laying out covered dishes on potholders and trivets. “I don’t prefer to lose yet another child to the darkness.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your insults are getting less subtle as you age, Mother.”
“In the spirit of reconciliation,” Mom continued, “I suppose if your sisters recommend that I forgive you, Wesley Alexander, then I will forgive you.”
I perked up. Was she leaving a door open? If not for me, then at least for him? “Great! Ask them. Carrie, you’re fine with all this, right?” I nodded vigorously at her to encourage her, and she grinned teasingly and shook her head.
“Nope,” Carrie said, fetching the plates.
I suggested, “Wes can do you a favor.”
“Wes can do me a lot of favors,” she agreed.
“Hey, hold on,” Wes said. “Maybe Wes doesn’t wanna do a lot of favors.”
My mother slid her half-glasses back on her nose. Annoyingly, she looked over them like Harry often did when he was waiting for an answer to some incomprehensibly worded question.
“He will,” I promised on my baby brother’s behalf. “He’ll get all of the Baranuik sisters on board. And Grandpa Matts, and Dad, too. That’s fine.”
Wes yipped like I’d stuck him with a pin. “It is?”
“Of course it is. Everybody loves you. For starters, I’m your sister and I totally forgive you. See, one down! Wait… do I forgive you?” I thought about how much of a pain in the ass he was; he read my mind and growled playfully. “Yeah, I guess I do. If!” I held up one finger in the air.
Wes prodded, “If?”
“If you leave my bunny slippers alone.” I gave him a long, knowing look full of eww and ick.
Wes cried out, “I’ve been trying to! Life ain’t easy as a bat.”
My mother slapped the cutlery down to interrupt. “Your sister Margot can’t be here tonight, but she’s in Stony Creek. You can go see her before dinner. She needs a visitor; she hasn’t been well.”
I frowned. “I thought Margot was still in Paris pursuing her dream of being an artiste?”
Carrie gave me a rapid headshake warning again, setting the dishes down on the table, and I shifted gears quickly. “Is there time? I thought the potatoes were ready for mashing?”
“I’m making twice-baked,” Mom said. “Carrie, add the cheeses. Wesley, you’ve got an hour. On your way, you can stop by Claire’s house. Bring her this bowl of cucumber salad.” She pulled a lidded, yellow Tupperware bowl out of the fridge. “Ask for her forgiveness.”
Carrie gave me a don’t-leave-me face, so I reluctantly slid Wes the keys to the hearse. “You remember how to drive, right?”
Wes sucked his teeth at me in admonishment. “Back soon.”
Seventeen
Wesley took his sweet time, so dinner was just me, Carrie, and Mom eating in the type of tense silence that could break a person. The only sounds were cutlery and chewing. It didn’t take me long to realize that Mom had planned two Thanksgiving dinners — one for me, the Black Sheep of the family, her most wayward child, and a second to follow for the daughters she approved of. Tomorrow, they’d have the warm family dinner that she’d enjoy. Tonight, she would tolerate her company. Barely.
Carrie, bless her, had chosen to come tonight, probably hoping I would assume this was the one-and-only Thanksgiving dinner, that everyone else was just busy. She had always been the peacekeeper, in her own clumsy way. When I grabbed the butter from the fridge,
a second turkey thawing on the bottom shelf confirmed my suspicions. I checked the walk-in pantry under the pretense of fetching more salt for the shaker, and found an apple pie. Cheese plate dessert, my ass. Mom was saving the sugar for the sweet girls, a reward for good behavior. Fuck it. I sat back down and ate extra helpings of everything. When we finished, Mom excused herself. In her absence, the kitchen seemed to warm ten degrees.
Carrie smiled sympathetically, glanced at the hall to make sure Mom wasn’t eavesdropping, and then poured herself another chocolate martini. She sipped and checked her watch. “Should we be worried that Wes ate Margot? Not that Margot is any big loss…”
“He wouldn't eat her, just suck her to death,” I said, not disagreeing with her at all. Mom stomped around upstairs, putting laundry away while the dishes soaked.
I stopped staring at the window when the hearse's headlights slashed the dark. I grabbed my coat and threw it over my arm, and Carrie and I went out to the front yard to meet him. There was a branch sticking out of the grille that I flapped a hand at. Wes didn’t answer my flapping, so I made a guttural noise. My brother, looking harried, raised his palm to stop me from speaking.
“Please,” he said. “I’m recovering. We can deal with the dent in a minute.”
“You’re late,” Carrie said, swirling her martini and looking amused at the dent in the hearse. “We didn’t save you anything.”
“We did so,” I scolded.
“Well, everything is cold,” she said.
“So is he. And he doesn't need to eat, anyway.” I poked at his midsection, which was still softer than it had been when he was alive, due to his clandestine cheeseburger and pizza snarfing.
“Cold turkey is the least of my problems.”
Uh oh. “How did your visit with Margot go?” I asked.
“Margot didn’t need a companion, she is a companion,” Wes said, flopping on the steps with a huff. Carrie and I stood over him, Carrie sipping her martini, me wishing I’d made a coffee. “She babysits this old lady neighbor. But since Margot has the flu, I had to visit Mrs. Rayelle.”