“I’m glad you like it.”
After dinner James found a place to park near the rocky coast where they could see the water winding past the granite cliffs and cobblestone beaches. He turned the car off, slid his arm around his wife, pulled her close, and kissed the top of her hair. Sarah relaxed into him, resting her head against his chest. They sat silently, watching the moonlight reflect off the glacier-formed peaks and valleys, the water flowing around the waving evergreen trees, the balsams, the spruce and the pine.
“Maybe it’s not a bad thing this happened,” Sarah said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve learned not to be so attached to things. It’s like you said…our house in Salem is just a house. I love it, I’ll always love it, but if I never see it again I’ll be all right. You and Grace are the only things I need in this world.” She looked out the window, smiling at the moon, her decision made. “Besides, we won’t need to hide forever. This craziness will die down. People will get bored of it. They’ll start to accept that you nocturnal types are just a part of life.”
“Sarah…”
“Craziness does end. The witch trials did end.”
“Yes, they did. But fear, paranoia, madness, they never go away—they just look different from one generation to the next. And some prejudices are harder to get over than others. People may have a harder time dealing with the paranormal because it seems so physically, biologically, religiously, inherently wrong. It goes against everything people have been taught to believe about the world.” He looked into Sarah’s eyes. “You want me to be honest with you, so I’m being honest with you. I don’t think this problem is going away any time soon, and I think we need to be prepared to run at a moment’s notice. I’m not saying anything is going to happen. I think we’re safe here—for now. But we also need to be ready, just in case.”
Sarah nodded. “I’ve been keeping our bags packed and ready to go.” She yawned, then looked at the time on the car’s dashboard. “It’s midnight,” she said. “We should head back.”
After the accident James wondered if it was a planned attack. As if someone knew where they were. As if someone knew what he was. As if someone followed them. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know who, and he certainly didn’t know why. In the whole world he couldn’t think of one person who might want to attack him. Even if someone knew what he was, why would they want to kill him or his innocent wife?
As they drove toward Brooklin in the dark night, back around the Swiss cheese-like slices of water, James heard the car before he saw it. His extrasensory perception wouldn’t allow him to miss it, the sound of a buzzing jigsaw, closer and closer, faster and faster. Suddenly, there it was, the black Hummer swerving around the trees. James guessed the driver was going at least one hundred miles an hour, and he swerved to avoid colliding with the tank-like car. Sarah had fallen asleep, but she was jolted awake as the tiny Bug jerked around branches and through bushes. When she realized they were being chased, she grabbed the handlebar above the passenger’s door and held her breath.
“James?”
“Just hold on, honey. Hold on.”
Suddenly, the black SUV disappeared. James was still on edge, driving faster than he should have been but he had to get his very human wife away. He checked the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, out the back window. They passed many miles since he last saw the Hummer, but he couldn’t relax, not yet, not until he knew Sarah was safe.
“Probably a drunk driver,” he said. Sarah nodded, but she didn’t look convinced.
He didn’t see it again until it was too late. Even with his extrasensory instincts it happened too quickly. The SUV shot out from the distance, hitting Francine’s Bug head-on. The car was thrown from the road, rolling over and over and over, and James watched in horror as Sarah whipped around from side to side. When the car finally stopped, she was unconscious and covered in blood. James pushed the metal of the crumpled car aside like his arms were jaws of death. He ran to the passenger’s side, pushed aside the airbags, unhooked Sarah’s seatbelt, and pulled her from the wreckage through the shattered window. He wasn’t thinking about broken bones or internal injuries. He had to get her out of the car.
“Sarah, honey? Sarah?”
She didn’t respond. He pressed his ear to her blood-covered chest and listened. Normally, he could hear her metronome-like heartbeat from far away, and normally that sound brought him such comfort. Now, with his ear against her chest it was barely audible. But it was there. She was alive.
With shaking hands, he pulled the cell phone from his pocket, the one with the unlisted number, and he called 911 begging for an ambulance for his wife.
He wept with his limp Sarah in his arms, unconcerned about the blood streaking him in his misery. He patted her cheek gently at first, then more firmly, trying to sting her awake, anything to get her to open her eyes.
“Oh my God, Sarah, you have to wake up. You have you wake up. You can’t leave me again. Sarah? Oh my God.”
When Sarah opened her eyes, she moaned in such pain. James could hardly stand it, as if it was his own pain she voiced. He promised he would protect her, it was his job to protect her, and now this. It didn’t make any sense. Suddenly, Sarah was coughing blood and clutching at her stomach. James soothed her the best he could, stroking her matted curls from her eyes, holding her sweater over the wound gushing blood from her abdomen.
“It’s all right, Sarah. Help is coming. You’ll be all right.”
“James?”
“I’m here honey. It’s okay.”
He looked at his wife bleeding and barely conscious on the side of the road. The idea that she might die was too real to him, and he knew if someone didn’t help her soon she would leave him again. He couldn’t let that happen.
“I can fix this, Sarah,” he said. “I know what to do. I’ve done it before.” He didn’t want to say the words, but looking at his wife, weaker by the moment and straining to breathe, he thought he had no choice. “I can turn you,” he said.
Sarah shook her head. She was so weak she could barely say the words. “I can’t…I’m so sorry.”
“Sarah, please…”
“I’m so sorry, James. I love you so much.”
James clutched Sarah close and wept bloody tears into her hair. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “This is all because I’m cursed. I wish I were human again so I could go with you.”
“Grace needs you,” Sarah said. She tried to say more, but she fell unconscious in his arms.
When the ambulance arrived, too long, James moaned, it took too long, the medics raced to Sarah. Blood drooled from everywhere, her mouth, her nose, the gashes in her abdomen and arms, and the EMTs rushed to stop her bleeding. They strapped her to the gurney, pushed her into the ambulance, and when they were all inside and speeding away one of the medics noticed James, the blood staining his cheeks. The medic shined a flashlight into his face.
“No,” James said, turning away, “you need to take care of my wife. Please, my wife.”
“Sir, you need to let me check you. You’re bleeding.”
“It’s my wife’s blood,” James said. “Please,” he begged, “you have to take care of my wife.”
“Your wife has massive internal bleeding, sir,” the medic said. “We’ll do everything we can.”
James kneeled by Sarah’s side, her hand in his, his head on her shoulder. “Don’t leave me, Sarah,” he said.
The back ambulance doors opened and a team of doctors and nurses in scrubs were waiting. As soon as the gurney hit the ground, they rushed Sarah through the emergency doors and disappeared. James tried to follow them, but a young woman wearing a surgical mask blocked his way.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you need to wait here.”
“But my wife…”
“Sir, has someone examined you? You're bleeding.”
“It’s my wife’s blood. Where is my wife?”
“We’re checking her now, sir. We’ll let you kn
ow as soon as we know something.”
She disappeared behind the door. James heard the doctors and nurses shouting medical terms he didn’t understand, she’s lost a lot of blood, he heard, then something about blood transfusions and emergency surgery. The doors swung open and they wheeled Sarah past on her way to the surgical ward. James rushed alongside them.
“Sir, you need to wait here,” a nurse said. And then Sarah was gone.
James would have dropped to his knees but he didn’t have the strength to fall. Dear God, he begged silently, you can’t take her from me. Not now. Not like this. I can’t live another three hundred years without her.
He stood there, for how long he didn’t know, waiting for something, someone, half-expecting Sarah to walk out on her own two feet. “Hi, honey,” she’d say. “Sorry, it was all a mistake. Let’s go home.”
James drifted into a dream-like stream-of-consciousness as the events of the past few months drifted through him. His greatest fear had been realized in the midst of his greatest joy. He had his wife and daughter. He had the life he had always wanted and missed. And now it was all going away, and in his heart of hearts he knew all along it would happen. He was right—he was cursed. He put Sarah in danger simply by being there. She wouldn’t be involved in any of this, she wouldn’t be fighting for her life at that very moment if she wasn’t with him. James thought he should go away, disappear, leave Sarah and Grace to themselves without the taint of the curse of the vampire to haunt their every step. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He loved them too much.
For whatever pain his presence caused her, he knew she loved him, that unconditional love that saw him exactly as he was and loved him anyway. So he stood and he waited. And he sat and he waited. And he walked the length of the curving hospital corridor, past the emergency room, past the cafeteria, past the elevators, around the gift shop with Get Well Soon balloons and pink and yellow flowers, and waited. He sat outside in the garden with the toad fountains spitting water in the air, the rocks set out like a Japanese garden, the benches scattered under the trees, and waited. Suddenly, he saw the light of the dawn peeking tentatively from under the covers of the night. At first, James was so dazed he didn’t realize he needed to get away. He forgot what he was, and in that moment he was an ordinary man whose wife had been injured in an accident. They had a daughter waiting for them. But then the sky brightened and he remembered that day, the year before, when he stood in the Salem sun and slipped into an unconsciousness he nearly never recovered from.
What to do? James panicked. He had no car since he had come with Sarah in the ambulance, and Francine’s Bug was wrecked anyway. He could run away quickly, but where? They were in Bar Harbor and he didn’t know the area. Besides, he needed to stay close to Sarah. He needed her to know he was there the way he needed her to know he was there when she languished in jail in 1692. Then, he sat outside the jail all hours of the day and night. Until he was turned. And then she died. Oh my God, James groaned. He realized there must be rooms in the hospital with no windows. That was the answer: he needed to get inside one of those rooms.
He walked to the woman behind the nearest desk. There were a handful of people waiting in the emergency room in pain or sick or both.
“I have a migraine and the lights are painful,” James said. “The sunlight is especially hard when I have a headache like this. Is there somewhere I can lie down where there’s no sunlight?”
The gray-haired woman looked at him over the top of her eyeglasses. “Let me put you in an exam room where a doctor can see you.”
“The paramedics checked me at the scene. They said I was banged up but I’m fine.”
“But if you have a headache, sir, you might have hit your head. That could be dangerous if you don’t get it checked.”
“I didn’t bang my head. I get migraines when I’m stressed, and having my wife in surgery is stressful. I just need to lie down for a while.”
The woman looked around as if she were looking for someone to tell her what to do, but no one was there. She gestured for James to follow her down the hall. They took the elevator to the second floor where she showed him a windowless room with two hospital beds.
“You can rest here,” she said.
James shut the door as she walked away. He sighed, pressing the air from his lungs as if he were still being watched by human eyes, and he waited until the woman's footsteps grew fainter. When he felt safe, and alone, he fell asleep.
As soon as he opened his eyes he knew something was wrong. A young nurse in pink scrubs pressed herself against the wall as if the Devil himself requested her presence in Hell. A doctor with salt and pepper hair in a white lab coat sat in the chair next to James, staring at him.
“How is my wife?” James asked. “Is she all right?”
“You weren't breathing,” the nurse said.
Though James cringed inside, outwardly he laughed. “That can't be true if I’m sitting here talking to you.” He laughed again. When the nurse’s eyes narrowed, he shrugged. “Sometimes I get sleep apnea and stop breathing for a while.”
Two men in scrubs appeared in the doorway carrying a gurney between them. When they saw James sitting upright, they stepped back.
“Were you sending me to the morgue?” James asked. He tried to sound light but sounded sickly instead.
“You had no heartbeat,” the woman said. She stepped to the door. “I'm calling the authorities.”
“There's no reason for that,” the doctor said. “Obviously, you were wrong, Nurse Tosh. As you can see, he’s fine.”
The nurse glared at the doctor. “I came in here to tell him his wife was out of surgery, and I called you when he didn't wake up. You're the one who said his heart wasn't beating, Doctor Masters. You're the one who said he had no pulse.”
Doctor Masters’s face became a caricature of silliness. “I was just joking,” he said. “You came running to me saying he had died in his sleep, so I was playing along with you.”
“I'm calling the authorities. He's one of them.”
The nurse tried to leave but the doctor closed the door in front of her. He leaned close to her and spoke firmly. “There’s nothing to report. Obviously, the man is fine. He was in a deep sleep and you panicked. That's all. You need to consider if this report is worth your job.”
The nurse shook her head, opened the door, and walked away. The doctor closed the door behind her and stepped close to James.
“Your wife is out of surgery,” the doctor said. “She's still in serious condition, but she's stable. Come with me to my office and we can talk there.”
All eyes were on James. The nurse who found him dead asleep was huddled close to two other nurses, whispering until James stepped into the hall. She stopped speaking, and the entire floor was silent. Everyone there, doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors, stared at James like he was hideously disfigured or naked or unclean somehow. They knew. He could tell by their disgusted faces. They saw his pale white skin, his shallow breaths, his dark eyes, his glasses lost somewhere along the way, and they knew. James wouldn’t look at them as he followed the doctor down the hall.
“She won't say anything,” the doctor said as he opened his office door. “She's a single mother and her ex-husband doesn't pay child support. She can't afford to lose this job. Besides, she has a reputation for making mountains out of molehills. No one will listen to her.”
“How is my wife?” James asked.
“There were some complications during surgery. She lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion. There's still some concern about infection.”
“Can I see her?”
“Of course.” The doctor's hands came together under his chin, and he watched James like a boy who stumbled upon Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. “I just have one question. Are you…?” The doctor shook his head. “I always wondered if it were possible. With all the craziness these days, I thought it had to be nonsense, but here you are, and you don't breathe, and your heart does
n't beat, and yet you're as real as I am.”
James said nothing. The doctor gestured to the photos on the bookshelf behind his desk.
“This is my family,” the doctor said. He handed James a picture of a pretty blond lady and two young boys. “My wife Emily and my sons Joshua and Eric.”
James pulled out his wallet, surprised it was still there, and showed the doctor a picture of Grace. “This is my daughter.”
The doctor pulled the picture close to his face and studied it. “She looks just like you. I didn't know…I didn't think…”
James shook his head. “She's adopted.”
“But she looks just like you.”
“It’s a long story.”
The doctor had his stethoscope around his neck, his hand on the knob on the end, stretching out towards James.
“Can I…?”
“Then can I see my wife?”
“Of course.”
The doctor closed his eyes as he listened to the silence inside James's chest. “Unbelievable,” he said. He sat behind his desk, his fingers forming a triangle under his chin. “What are you going to do? Congress is holding a special session to decide what to do about the Vampire Dawn. Now they're fighting between deportation and internment and…" The doctor grimaced, unable to continue.
“And…”
“It doesn’t matter. The ACLU is fighting it, but a lot of angry people are worried about being attacked by bloodsuckers in the night. Look there.”
He pointed through the open blinds into the corridor where a patient, hospital gown open in the back, pink fluffy slippers on her feet, wore a necklace of garlic coves around her neck. Across from the nurse's station was a silver cross banged crookedly into the wall.
James felt a grip like fingers around his throat. This wasn’t a flash of red-boiling anger. This wasn’t rage-filled frustration or blindly thrashing fury. This was primal, paralyzing fear.
“I need to see my wife,” James said.
The doctor walked James to the Intensive Care Unit. The family before them had to be buzzed past the locked door, but Doctor Masters ran his card through the slot on the wall and the doors opened. They walked into a circular ward with the nurses’s station in the center and eight rooms around, the walls of glass exposing the patients and the monitors inside. The doctor led James to a room around the nurses’s station, and he saw her, Sarah, sweet Sarah, beautiful Sarah, everything he ever needed in this world Sarah, her eyes closed, breathing heavily, well bandaged, her beautiful face lacerated and bruised, a dead-pallid tone to her usual peach-like complexion. He walked to her, carefully, as though the sound of his footsteps would wake her. He bit his lip, determined not to cry.
Her Loving Husband's Curse Page 21