“No,” Patricia said. “We can’t fool ourselves anymore. He’s unnatural and we have to kill him the right way or he’s just going to keep on coming back. He’s underestimated us. We can’t underestimate him.”
Her words sounded bizarre in the sterile hospital room with its plastic cups and sippy straws, its television hanging from the ceiling, its Hallmark cards on the windowsill. They looked at each other in their practical flats with their roomy purses by their feet, with their reading glasses, and their notepads, and their ballpoint pens, and realized they had crossed a line.
“We have to drive a stake through his heart?” Kitty asked. “I don’t think I’m up for that.”
“No stakes,” Patricia said.
“Oh, thank God,” Kitty said. “Sorry, Slick.”
“I don’t think that would kill him,” Patricia said. “The books say vampires sleep during the day, but he’s awake in daylight. The sun hurts his eyes and makes him uncomfortable, but he doesn’t have to sleep in a coffin when it’s out. We can’t take the stories literally.”
“So what do we do?” Kitty asked.
“Miss Mary gave me an idea how we kill him,” Patricia said. “But the hard part’s going to be getting to the point where we can do it.”
“I don’t mean to sound difficult,” Maryellen said. “But if he’s everything Patricia says he is—suspicious, sharp senses, fast, strong—how do we even get close enough to do anything?”
Fear made Patricia’s voice strong and clear, “I have to give him what he wants,” she said. “I have to give him me.”
CHAPTER 37
Patricia told Carter that Korey was on drugs. Korey was so sick and confused from James Harris that Carter believed her immediately. It helped that this was one of his biggest nightmares.
“This is from your side,” he said as they threw Korey’s clothes into an overnight bag. “No one on my side of the family has ever had this kind of problem.”
No, Patricia thought. They just murdered a man and buried his body in the backyard.
She prayed for forgiveness. She prayed hard. Then they took Korey to Southern Pines, the local psychiatric and substance abuse treatment center.
“You’ll make sure she’s monitored twenty-four hours a day?” Patricia asked the intake administrator.
Her nightmare was that Korey would do what the other children had done. She thought of Destiny Taylor and the dental floss, Orville Reed stepping in front of the car, Latasha Burns and the knife. They had the money to weigh the odds in their favor, but she didn’t want odds when it came to her daughter. She wanted a guarantee.
She tried to talk to Korey, she tried to say she was sorry, she tried to explain things, she tried hard, but whether it was because of James Harris or because of what they were doing to her, Korey didn’t even acknowledge she was in the room.
“Some of them do this,” the intake administrator said. “I saw one kid break his mother’s nose during intake. Others just shut down.”
When they got home the quiet in the house ate at Patricia, reminding her of the damage she had done to her family. She felt a sense of urgency. She had to finish this. She had to get her family back and glue the pieces together before it got any worse. It was only a matter of time before they hit a point beyond which nothing could be fixed.
That night, Carter left to bury himself in work at his office. Half an hour later, the phone rang. She answered.
“Where’s Korey?” James Harris asked.
“She’s sick,” Patricia said.
“She wouldn’t be sick if she were still with me,” he said. “I can make her better.”
“I need time,” she said. “I need time to figure things out.”
“What am I supposed to do while you dither?” he asked.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “This is hard for me. It’s my entire life. My family. It’s everything I know.”
“Think fast,” he said.
“Until the end of the month,” she said, trying to buy time.
“I’ll give you ten days,” he said, and hung up.
She tried to be around Blue as much as possible. She and Carter asked if he had any questions, they told him it wasn’t his fault, they said that he could see Korey in a week or two, whenever her doctors said it was all right, but Blue barely spoke. She sat next to him while he played games on the computer in the little study. He clattered away on the keyboard, moving colored shapes and lines onscreen.
“What does this one do?” she asked about a button, and then pointed to a number at the top of the monitor. “Does that mean you’re winning? Look at your score, it’s so high.”
“That’s the amount of damage I’ve taken,” he said.
She wanted to tell him she was sorry she hadn’t protected him and his sister better. But whenever she began, it sounded like a farewell speech and she stopped. Let him have one more untroubled week.
Before she was ready, Saturday arrived and Patricia woke up scared. She cleaned Korey’s room to keep herself busy, stripped her bed, collected all her clothes off the floor and washed them, folded them, put them back into drawers in neat stacks, ironed her dresses and hung them up, stacked her magazines, found the cases for all her CDs. She recovered $8.63 in change from the carpet and put it in a jar for when Korey came home.
Around four, Carter stood in the door and watched her work.
“We have to go soon if we want to see the pregame,” he said.
They had made plans to watch the Clemson-Carolina game downtown near the hospital with Leland and Slick’s children.
“You go on,” Patricia said. “I have things to do.”
“You sure you don’t want to come?” he asked. “It’ll be good to do something normal. It’s morbid to sit around the house alone.”
“I need to be morbid,” she said, and gave him her “brave soldier” smile. “Have a nice time.”
“I love you,” he said.
It took her by surprise and she faltered for a moment, thinking of everything James Harris had told her about Carter’s out-of-town trips and wondering how much of it was true.
“I love you, too,” she made herself say back.
He left and she waited until she heard his car back out of the driveway, and then she got ready to die.
Patricia’s stomach felt empty. Her whole body felt drained. She felt sick, light-headed, fluttery. Everything felt hollow, like it was all about to float away.
In her bathroom, she put on her new black velvet dress. It felt tight and awful and hugged her in all the wrong places and made her self-conscious of her new curves, and then she adjusted it and pulled it down and cinched and strapped and smoothed. It clung to her like a black cat’s skin. She felt more naked with it on than off.
The phone rang. She answered it.
“Finally,” he said.
“I want to see you,” she said. “I made my decision.”
There was a long pause.
“And,” he prompted.
“I decided that I want someone who values me,” she said. “I’ll be at your place by 6:30.”
Eyeliner, a bit of eyebrow pencil, mascara, some blush. She blotted her lipstick with Kleenex and dropped red balls of tissue into the trash. She brushed her hair, curled it just a touch to give it body, then sprayed it with Miss Brecks. She opened her eyes and they stung from the falling mist of hairspray droplets. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a woman she didn’t know. She didn’t wear earrings or jewelry. She took off her wedding ring. She fed Ragtag, left a note for Carter saying she’d had to run downtown to see Slick in the hospital and she might spend the night, and left home.
Outside, a cold wind thrashed the trees. Cars lined the block, all of them there to watch the Clemson-Carolina game at Grace’s. Bennett was a hardcore Clemson alum, and he hosted the big get-toge
ther for the game every year. Patricia wondered how he would deal with everyone drinking. She wondered if he’d start again.
The wind came black and bleak off the harbor, tossing the waves into whitecaps. She passed Alhambra Hall and looked at the far end of the parking lot, close to the water, and saw the minivan parked there. She could just see a few huddled shapes inside. They looked pathetically small.
Friends, Patricia thought. Be with me now.
James Harris’s house was dark. His porch lights were off and only a single lamp shone from his living room window. She realized he’d done it so no one would see her come to his front door. Cars filled every single driveway, and as she walked, a swelling of cheers erupted from all the houses. Kickoff. The game had begun.
She knocked on the front door, and James Harris opened it, lit from behind by the dim glow of the living room lamp, the only light in the house. The radio purred classical music, a piano riding gentle orchestral surges. Her heart danced inside her rib cage as he locked the door behind her.
Neither moved, they just stood in the hall, facing each other in the soft spill of light from the living room.
“You’ve hurt me,” she said. “You’ve scared me. You’ve hurt my daughter. You’ve made my son a liar. You’ve hurt the people I know. But the three years you’ve been here feel more real than the entire twenty-five years of my marriage.”
He raised his hand and traced the side of her jaw with his fingers. She didn’t flinch. She tried not to remember him screaming in her face, spattering it with her daughter’s blood, her daughter who would hurt forever because of his hunger.
“You said you made up your mind,” he said. “So. What do you want, Patricia?”
She walked past him into the living room. She left a trace of perfume in the air. It was a bottle of Opium she’d found while cleaning Korey’s room. She almost never wore perfume. She stopped in front of the mantel and turned to face him.
“I’m tired of my world being so small,” she said. “Laundry, cooking, cleaning, silly women talking about trashy books. It’s not enough for me anymore.”
He sat in the armchair across from her, legs spread, hands on its arms, watching her.
“I want you to make me the way you are,” she said. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I want you to do to me what you did to my daughter.”
He looked at her, his eyes crawling across her body, seeing all of her, and she felt exposed, and frightened, and just a little bit aroused. And then James Harris stood up and walked over to her and laughed in her face.
The force of his laughter slapped her, and sent her stumbling a half step back. The room echoed with his laughter, and it bounced crazily off the walls, trapped, doubling and redoubling, battering at her ears. He laughed so hard he flopped back down in his chair, looked at her with a crazy grin on his face, and burst out laughing, again.
She didn’t know what to do. She felt small and humiliated. Finally, his laughter rolled to a stop, leaving him short of breath.
“You must think,” he said, gasping for air, “that I’m the stupidest person you’ve ever met. You come here, all dolled up like a hooker, and give me this breathless story about how you want me to make you one of the bad people? How did you get to be so arrogant? Patricia the genius, and the rest of us are just a bunch of fools?”
“That’s not true,” she said. “I want to be here. I want to be with you.”
This brought another wave of ugly laughter.
“You’re embarrassing yourself and you’re insulting me,” James Harris said. “Did you think I’d believe any of this?”
“It’s not an act!” she shouted.
He grinned.
“I wondered when you’d get to righteous indignation.” He smiled. “Look at you: Patricia Campbell, wife of Dr. Carter Campbell, mother of Korey and Blue, debasing herself because she thinks she’s smarter than someone who’s lived four times as long as her. See, Patricia, I never underestimated you. If you told Slick you planned to come into my house, I knew you came into my house. And if you got into my house, I knew you’d gotten into my attic and found everything there was to find. Was her license supposed to be bait? Leave it in my car and go to the police and tell them you found it and they’d pull me over and find it and get a search warrant? In what sad housewife’s dream does something like that work? Those books you girls read have really rotted your brains.”
She couldn’t make her legs stop shaking. She sat down on the raised brick hearth. The velvet dress rode up and bunched around her stomach and hips. She felt ridiculous.
“Then again, I moved here because you people are all so stupid,” he said. “You’ll take anyone at face value as long as he’s white and has money. With computers coming and all these new IDs I needed to put down roots and you made it so easy. All I had to do was make you think I needed help and here comes that famous Southern hospitality. Y’all don’t like talking about money, do you? That’s low class. But I waved some around and you all were so eager to grab it you never asked where it came from. Now your children like me more than they like you. Your husband is a weakling and a fool. And here you are, dressed up like a clown, with no cards left to play. I’ve been doing this for so long I’m always prepared for the moment when someone tries to run me out of town, but you’ve truly surprised me. I didn’t expect the attempt to be so sad.”
A rhythmic, wet huffing sound filled the room as Patricia bent double and tried to breathe. She attempted to start a sentence a few times, but kept running out of breath. Finally she said, “Make it stop.”
From far away, she heard a chorus of faint voices shouting with disappointment.
“I tried once,” he said. “But an artist is only as good as his materials. I thought for sure the humiliation I inflicted on you three years ago would make you kill yourself, but you couldn’t even do that right.”
“Make it stop,” Patricia said. “Just make it all stop. I can’t do this anymore. My son hates me. For the rest of his life I’ll be the crazy woman who tried to kill herself, the one he found convulsing on the kitchen floor. I put my daughter in a mental hospital. I have ruined my family. I couldn’t protect them from you.”
She sat, hunched over, spitting her words at the floor, her hands were claws digging into her knees, her voice scouring her ears like acid.
“I thought you were filth. I thought you were an animal,” she said. “But I’m worse. I’m nothing. I was a good nurse, I really was, and I walked away from the one thing I loved because I wanted to be a bride. I wanted to get married because I was terrified of being alone. I wanted to be a good wife and a good mother, and I gave everything I had, and it wasn’t enough. I’m not enough!”
She shouted the last words, then looked up at James Harris, her face a grotesque mask of streaked makeup.
“My husband has no more consideration for me than a dog,” she said. “He goes off and screws little girls with the other men and we sit home like good little women and wash their shirts and pack their bags for their sex trips. We keep their houses warm and clean for when they’re ready to come home and shower off some other woman’s perfume before tucking their children into bed. For years I’ve pretended I don’t know where he goes, or who those girls are on the phone, but every time he comes home, I lie there in bed beside my husband, who doesn’t touch me, who doesn’t talk to me, who doesn’t love me, and I pretend I can’t smell some twenty-year-old’s body on him. Our children hate us. Look at mine. It would have been better if a dog raised them.”
She hooked her fingers into claws and pulled them through her hair, harrowing it into a crazed haystack, jutting out in every direction.
“So here I am,” she said. “Giving you the last thing I have of value and begging you to spare my daughter. Take me. Take my body. Use me until you throw me away, but leave Korey alone. Please. Please.”
“You think you can ba
rgain with me?” he asked. “This is some kind of sad seduction, trading your body for your daughter’s?”
She nodded, meek and small.
“Yes.”
She sat, a long runnel of snot dangling from her nose, dripping onto her dress. And finally, James Harris said:
“Come.”
She pushed herself up, and walked to him on shaky legs.
“Kneel,” he said, pointing to the floor.
Patricia lowered herself onto the floor at his feet. He leaned forward and took her jaw in one big hand.
“Three years ago you tried to make a fool of me,” he said. “You don’t get any more dignity. We’re going to finally be honest with each other. First, I’m going to replace Carter in your life. Is that what you want?”
She nodded, then realized he needed more. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Your son loves me already,” he said. “And your daughter belongs to me. I’ll take you now, but she’s next. Will you do that? Will you give me your body to buy her another year?”
“Yes,” Patricia said.
“One day it will be Blue’s turn,” he said. “But for now, I’m the family friend who helps put your life back together after your husband dies. Everyone will think that we just naturally felt a powerful attraction, but you’ll know the truth: you gave up your pathetic, miserable, broken failure of a life to accept your place at my feet. I’m not some doctor, or lawyer, or rich mommy’s boy trying to impress you. I am singular in this world. I am what you people make legends from. And now I’ve turned my attention on you. When I’m done, I’ll adopt your children and make them mine. But you’ve bought them one more year of freedom. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said.
James Harris stood and walked up the stairs without looking back.
“Come,” he said over his shoulder.
After a moment, Patricia followed, only pausing on the way to unlock the deadbolt on his front door.
In the darkness of the upstairs hall, she saw white solid walls all around her, each one a closed door, and then she saw a black hole like the entrance to a tomb. She walked into the master bedroom. James Harris stood in the moonlight. He had taken off his shirt.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Page 33
