From Hell to Breakfast

by Meghan Tifft

  She can’t tell for sure, but right now she thinks that maybe as Rory speaks of his other plays his voice is smothering down a bright, boyish pride, something that perhaps he’s learned he should cover over but doesn’t really want to. He seems almost ready for her to make fun of him. Lucinda is once again wondering about Rory. What his life has been like. Who he is. Why he has these two distinct and dangling parts of his personality—this pained shard of optimism and that swift kick of brute belligerence. He is perfect for this character in the play. He does dumpy doldrums and proud perseverance as one and the same. Is perseverance just another stage of despair? Yes, says Rory. His brand of perseverance is embarrassing and full of the terrible sewage of self, the kind the world sometimes has to smear off its shoe with a shudder. He plays this tragedy with such secret optimism for his piteous plight that it gums up the message, Lucinda thinks. She feels like Rory’s optimism is probably something he’s been punished for all his life, and maybe that’s why the belligerence is so quick to rear up. Of course she doesn’t really know. She can’t make assumptions.

  They pull into the lot of the apartments and Lucinda shakes out her keys. She looks unseeingly at Rory. After tonight, she feels like she knows Rory much less than she did before, but also she knows more about him. It’s odd. It’s odd how knowing people works.

  “What’s this?” Lucinda says. It’s a note, or something, stuck to his rearview mirror. Beat that weakling! and above it is a number: 315!! Lucinda peers at it.

  “Oh,” says Rory, “I used to be friends with this guy. I keep that there for inspiration. One day I’m going to beat it and then beat his ass.” He doesn’t seem to realize she’s confused. “Actually he’s your neighbor.” He says this like it’s not a revelation.

  “You mean—” her neighbor the Russian?

  He darts a smile. “Dmitri? He dated my sister. The other one. The one you don’t know.”

  Lucinda finds it amazing that he can say this with a big bland voice when he’s also leaving so much out. That he took care of that sister’s baby. That now it’s Rory’s job because he can’t or won’t. That they are both Daddy. That Daddy, whichever one or both, has been going in and out of her apartment with a key he stole to look for letters.

  “Have you met him? I can’t stand him,” he says. He seems to be picking up her mood now like a rag in dirty dishwater. He makes a face.

  Lucinda looks at him and through him. “Why not?”

  “Eh.” He cringes, as if he does and doesn’t want to tell her. “Just stuff.” She thinks he’s thinking about his sister. “Weird things.” Weird things. What kind of weird things? That’s what Lucinda wants to know.

  “I used to know this girl—she was roommates with my sister.”

  Lucinda thinks she detects an aluminum bend in his voice, some kind of warp of uncertainty. He rubs his hands on his pants. “She had this whole mirror thing with him where they’d tape each other singing in the bathroom. Like they actually tampered with the glass and had all this equipment—it was like karaoke hour—She was—” he swallows that as Lucinda skids an inward breath. He’s talking about Vanessa. Isn’t he?

  “And then.” Rory clears his throat. “He’s also friends with Lauren’s new boyfriend. They’re always doing art together.”

  That is literally the last thing she expected him to say. “Art?”

  “That guy—where you were tonight?”

  Lucinda is still gunfiring heartbeats and trying to decide if she should say something.

  “He was showing me this—pictures they do.” He stubs a finger down between them. “Mirrors.” He looks at her. “My sister actually gave them her placenta. Now they keep asking people for their placentas. That seems weird to me. Don’t you think that seems weird?”

  “Yes,” she says. That is nothing if not weird. It also seems like something she’s seen. Very much so. In those photographs in Warren’s apartment. Where he was squeezing blood into buckets.

  “It’s part of some—I think they’re into this lame Dracula thing.” Rory looks at her, realizing his slip. “Oh,” he says. “No offense.” He almost seems to sneer.

  Lucinda sighs. Okay. She gets it. Rory doesn’t like Dracula. She’s so sick of it—the way he always refers to him with mulish grunts and bursts of breath, calling him Bugs and Chopsticks. This is her boyfriend he’s talking about.

  Lucinda gets out of the truck. She grabs for the mirror. “Okay. Let’s stick to the routine,” she says, and without a look back she slams the door.

  Lucinda remembers when she found the flyer for the community theater group. How Rory was the first one she saw when she walked in, slipping his hand through his hair like it was a fine silk. That’s not exactly how he turned out to be. It was just one unreliable snapshot. Now she has many unreliable snapshots, of every one of the people who has recently arrived to meddle in her life. It seems like all of them are connected somehow.

  But she doesn’t have anything close to an answer for this. And she was the one who got herself into it. She remembers finding the flyer for the group in the book she got from her mother and took to the library. Somebody had been using it as a bookmark, or had folded it there for future reference.

  Dracula, when he was trying to catch her, had fumbled it out of the back pages and dropped it. He stuck it in again. Your father’s in there, her mother had said. It was then that she had the thought. But she couldn’t figure it out. It was just the sort of thing her mother might do for a joke.

  “Is this yours? Do you want this?” Dracula asked, trying to give the whole thing back. She ignored him and tried not to take it until finally he forced it on her at the bus depot. They were playing Go Fish. She remembers the whole place smelled like a sulfur puff from a drain in there, like a gas leak.

  It made her listless and grim, sitting in there with Dracula, thinking that her mother had done this, that she had locked her out, that Lucinda had nowhere to go. She could hear the squeak of rubber as people stood and idled and sat and waited to come and go. “Go fish,” said Dracula. Lucinda rubbed her eyes. The light in there was like a heat lamp, roasting her eyeballs into old chicken nuggets. Lucinda went fish. Why did her mother even want her to think about her father? He was in the book somewhere. She never thought to look at the author.

  Now Lucinda is glad the whole thing happened. If it hadn’t, she wouldn’t have written the play. She wouldn’t have met Dracula. She doesn’t know why she wants to be with him. She doesn’t know why he wants to be with her.

  It’s just what happened. She would do it again. She will. She can already tell she has a second act.

  Lucinda remembers the beginning—what she now thinks of as the first act—how she used to walk this path in the early days, when she would visit Dracula at the apartment before she lived here. She would cut across this parking lot with an engine revving in her throat, wondering where the feeling came from and trying to gulp great breaths to battle it back. As she opened the gate to get in, it actually hurt.

  The routine she is doing now is the one she and Rory have gotten used to. She is on her way to go upstairs to check that Dracula is either gone or occupied indefinitely in the bathroom, and then she will come down and fetch Rory from the parking lot for the coffin. She hopes Dracula is not gone. She hopes tonight he’s not occupied.

  She remembers how when she used to see him Dracula never seemed to have the same feeling spluttering off of his face.

  He would come to the door and give her a kiss, even if he was in the middle of brushing his teeth. Cavalier and presuming as the day he met her. It was like the moment they met they were already dating.

  “Knock-knock,” he used to say, as if they had a routine. He might say it whenever, just to remind her this was their thing. She remembers how disarming it used to be.

  “Excuse me?” she would say. She even said it after she knew the routine.

  “Who’s there. Come on. I’ve got one.”

  “Who’s there?”

 
“Needle.”

  “Needle who?”

  “Need-le little loving?” Dracula was holding up his mending that night. She’d been there at least an hour. “I just made that up.” He put the mending down.

  “You just made that up, huh.” She remembers her voice was aimed huffily into the fridge. That night she wasn’t having it.

  “It’s like me. You know. Because.” He pointed at his teeth. “You know.”

  “Ha ha,” said Lucinda drably, because she already got it.

  “You know, you’re going to make yourself sick.” She said this with a stabbing gesture at the fridge. She’d been cleaning it for more than an hour and she was feeling more than a little irked. Dracula didn’t ask her to clean his fridge. He didn’t even want her to. He kept saying that over and over.

  Now he looked at her. He was not going to get sick, his look said. It was just hard to embrace the monstrosity of someone who sat with his mending pinched between his knees. “You don’t have to do that. I already said.”

  Lucinda shook her head. She did have to, because of herself. She had come over for the evening to get out of her house and accidently thrown herself into this grubby task impromptu and pissed herself off. Lucinda often did the same thing in her own home, though her mother never cared either way, and it always seemed the whole house would come right back undone around her while she worked. Even Lucinda herself would get into these diabolical funks and sabotage her own efforts—mats of hair and grime smearing a surface that she’d then bury in the shredded remains of one of her mother’s magazines, torn vindictively and disconsolately, because now she’d have to clean that too—despising herself and hating those distant, dewy dreams of cleanliness. Why did she care? Why did she clean so much? Lucinda didn’t know. She’d been doing it since she was young. But Dracula’s pad—this was fresh, and in a certain manner attainable, because it was empty at least of her mother’s insensible clutter, and since it was a new palette, a blank slate, something in her said it was possible.

  The fridge she specifically attacked because when Dracula opened it she hadn’t been able to stand seeing those dribbles of ground chuck he let fall right on the shelf, all raw and crusting, like nosebleed seepage. Worse, it came from those snack handfuls he would pull out all night long right in front of her, as if that wasn’t a repulsive habit for a new girlfriend to behold. Well, she’d lived with things before. It had occurred to her all at once that Dracula was just and absolutely like her dad. All of them.

  Now he was back to his mending.

  Looking at him, she really didn’t think it was going to work. He was cute but it was too much. Coffins in the closet. Pigeons in the tub. What else would there be? Hamburger breath every night and, for some reason, tremendous amounts of mending. Upon having that thought, Lucinda took closer note of his lap and wondered what atrocity he actually was mending tonight—some furry muff of fetid brown, rolled softly over his arm as he pricked the needle up through it.

  “What is that?” she said.

  “I’m making something. It’s for Vlad.”

  Lucinda looked at him. “You’re making a rotten fur tube for Vlad?” It almost seemed like another language coming out of her that she didn’t understand, on many levels. Who would do that, even including her? She’d never made anything for anyone. Lucinda almost felt something filling her throat. It felt very much like that fur he was smoothing down over there.

  “He’s always so cold and you won’t go anywhere without him so we never go anywhere.”

  They’d been dating, or whatever this was, for a month. He wanted to go somewhere? “Where do you want to go?” she asked around the feeling.

  “I don’t know, anywhere. Just for a walk. We could do that bike ride. Vlad could sit in a basket.”

  She felt a ferocious heat inside her then. She couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. It was just the strangest feeling.

  “Where did you get that fur?” She remembers coughing it out, sounding as if she were berating him just barely, and how she’d twirled her father’s knife with a quiet hysteria on the counter, its tip digging up a little dust of Formica. The mark is still there.

  “Remember that thing in the laundry room that we thought was a dead animal?” Dracula never followed up on that remark because he said, “Oh. I think I left my key down there.”

  “I’ll get it.” Lucinda needed the fresh air anyway. She needed to stop this immolating sensation from getting the better of her. She felt like it was somehow cremating her insides right away from her, leaving her a shell around a hiss of dry steam.

  Dracula gave her a smile. An unassuming one.

  On her way down the steps that night Lucinda couldn’t help having a derisive conversation with herself. He is not that nice, she told herself. Or if he is that nice then he’s a nitwit of some sort. This was definitely a possibility. Either way he is a blackbird pie—different on the inside from what he is on the outside. That is exactly what he was.

  The Russian happened to be going up the stairs as she was going down. This was the first time she’d seen him. “They’re broken,” he said, in a huff.

  “What?”

  He didn’t pause. “The machines.” His tone told her that she was a further nuisance for not knowing what he meant. He kept going up floridly in those green swishy outfits she saw in hospitals, and his was big, voluminous as a parachute, so that what little space he gave her still made her slice her way down the wall at a slant. His elbow even thumped her in the arm. He didn’t say sorry. She’d have to ask Dracula about him. How was it that all these belligerent cohabitants conspired to make Dracula look so much better? Lucinda felt like she had drawn the short straw that nobody wanted and realized it was a bit of good luck.

  Now, being the bad girlfriend she is, it would normally be time for her to go flush her boyfriend out, like some vermin, from his own apartment. It’s what she would be doing to complete the night’s lie. But the lie had already been undone. Like a good dog Rory still waits in the truck. Now she can see from her spot on the path—a goulash of living room light is upstairs behind the curtains. Perhaps he is home. She could have left the TV on. Lucinda feels it, in her chest, like a tender brownout—her boyfriend’s nearness. This feeling is so fickle for her. Sometimes she likes it and sometimes she doesn’t.

  Lucinda shifts her grip on the mirror. As she crosses to the stairs, it feels like some uncertain number of eons have passed.

  Above her in the courtyard, the stars are out jabbing at the night sky with their feisty torchlight, as if stuck on the staffs of so many lost crusaders. She can see it in the mirror too. Emptily, as she goes, Lucinda gazes down into the pane. The face in the pane gazes blandly aloft, sinking up into the deep and constant fistfuls of heaven, and that’s when something in her catches, the feeling of being lifted, to silent prevailing applause, as if she is finally here in the one place she will always, now that she knows her role, be going.

  “Hi.”

  He says it before she even looks. He’s holding something too. His hair is going up in the way it does. And he’s coming from the strangest direction.

  Acknowledgments

  I have a few people to thank deeply for this novel. First I want to thank my editor at Unnamed Press, Olivia Taylor Smith, for seeing me through all the various stages of development and for bestowing upon me the great gift of time, which I couldn’t have survived without. I want to thank Paul T., for answering my plea and reading this whole book when it was a ramshackle experiment, and then giving me advice that stuck the whole way through. Your generosity and insight helped me shore up my vision and kept me on track to the end. I also want to thank Ann A., who has been instrumentally in my corner, listening and advocating.

  I want to thank my mother and father, for supporting me always and for understanding every time I dove back into my bunker for another indefinite bout of phone silence. I also want to thank my daughter and husband, for all the love and sacrifice you do every day to keep me writing and t
o keep our lives prospering. To my daughter, you give me mermaids and mermaids of love, and the truest companionship. To my husband, you give me everything over and over again, and you put the fangs on all my pigeons.

  About the Author

  Meghan Tifft is the author of The Long Fire, a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona and teaches at the University of Colorado. She lives in Colorado Springs.