Unlike with Prudence and Chivalry, Madeline had decided that I would be raised among humans. Why she’d changed her parenting approach after two successful runs already remained a mystery that she’d flatly refused to explain to me, despite the many times I’d asked. My foster parents were named Jill and Brian Mason. Jill was a dental hygienist, and Brian was a cop. They were nice, normal people. Not much money, but a lot of love, and despite years of trying, no baby. They’d tried looking into adoption, but a misspent youth with a militant wing of the Sierra Club and a stack of arrests from chaining herself to redwood trees in the Pacific Northwest had left Jill with a record that Brian’s decorated public service just couldn’t offset. No one cared that Jill had never hurt a single person—forty-three arrests were enough to make sure that no adoption agency, public or private, was going to touch them. Then one day Brian and Jill got a call from a lawyer asking if they’d be interested in a special kind of foster care.
I don’t think they listened to anything past the part where they’d be given a healthy infant. I was three months old, and the family that was giving me up wanted to retain a connection with me that required one dinner a month, unsupervised. But this was their only chance to be parents, and they thought that anything was worth getting me.
It was a long time before they learned how wrong they were.
But they took me into their little house in Cranston, and I had the kind of childhood everyone should have. Cub Scouts, Little League, dog in the backyard, and cookies in the oven—we were a Norman Rockwell painting. And when a black Mercedes pulled up in front of the house once a month and I was taken away from them, I was always back four hours later, no worse for wear.
Maybe if Brian hadn’t been a cop, everything would’ve been okay. Maybe it would’ve ended in blood no matter what. But as I got older, I started whining about going to my relatives’ house for dinner. For a while they were able to dismiss it, but when I was nine, my whining was getting worse, and one day I made a mistake. I told Brian that I didn’t like the way my blood mother touched me. That it made me uncomfortable. He asked for details, which at first I was smart enough not to give. But he reassured me, told me that he could protect me, and I was dumb enough to believe him, so I told him what I had to do at those monthly dinners.
Brian was on the phone with my mother’s lawyer within half an hour. The lawyer was expensive, and the first thing he started doing was threatening to take me away from them. Brian and Jill didn’t have much money—that’s why they’d been chosen to take care of me, just in case this happened. They didn’t have enough money to fight for me, and maybe another couple would’ve backed down, would’ve believed what the lawyer was saying—that nine was a difficult age, I was an imaginative child, and that everything was just fine. Don’t rock the boat.
Brian went to work and started looking into my mysterious relatives. He hadn’t done that before—maybe he knew on some level that he wouldn’t like what he’d find. He’d made a total of three phone calls before he got one of his own, from the chief of police. The message was simple—if you want to keep your job, stop looking into Madeline Scott.
At home, Jill got a call as well, from Prudence. She wanted to come over, to talk to them, to clear up any confusion that might’ve arisen because of my “story.”
Maybe if she hadn’t said it that way, it would’ve been fine and she could’ve smoothed things over. Maybe if Madeline had told Chivalry to handle it, everyone would’ve been okay. But maybe Madeline already knew what direction this was heading, because she gave it to Prudence.
Jill called Brian. He pulled all the money they had out of the bank, and Jill started packing.
I didn’t really understand what we were back then. Maybe if Madeline and Chivalry hadn’t shielded me so much, I would’ve known enough to try to talk Jill and Brian out of it, to calm them down, to lie. To save their lives.
Prudence arrived before Brian came home. I knew she was at the door and I begged Jill not to open it. She loved me enough to believe me, and she didn’t open it, but it didn’t matter. It’s only in stories that vampires need an invitation.
Jill was dead when Brian came home. He saw her body before Prudence killed him.
Prudence made sure that I watched it all.
Then she brought me back to Madeline.
The bus jerked to a stop, and I realized that I’d missed my stop. I got off and walked an extra four blocks, trying to push the past away.
My apartment was the third floor of an old Victorian that had probably been stately and grand when it was built. It was still pretty nice on the ground floor, which was a women’s lingerie boutique, but the upper two floors were showing the wear and tear of about two decades of renters. I paid more than I could really afford for the apartment, but I liked the old woodwork, the big windows, and the hardwood floors. I had an only moderately overpriced parking space in the back where I kept my aging Ford Fiesta, which I’d bought at a police auction. I’d later learned that its suspiciously reasonable price was not because it was the older (and far homelier) model of Fiesta, but because at one point it had been Exhibit A for the state of Massachusetts. During my ownership it had shown no further murderous tendencies, however, and now seemed content to simply rust and drip oil. Because the bus lines were within walking distance, I even had the hope that I could baby the Fiesta into lasting another few years for me. I was close to Brown University, where I’d gone to college, and my expired ID card got me access to all sorts of college facilities.
The apartment had two bedrooms with a kitchen that had been updated in the ’seventies, and a bathroom whose peppermint pink amenities were authentic to the ’sixties. The wallpaper said visually impaired old lady, but my daring decorating mix of IKEA and roadkill furniture, plus the piles of DVDs, said cheap student.
I stepped inside, wishing that the memories would stay away. They waited in the back of my mind, and I knew that tonight I’d dream of blood.
There was nothing I could do about that, so I focused on the now. Specifically, my roommate, Larry, whose clothing was scattered all over the living room. If I could’ve afforded to live alone, I would’ve, but living here meant sharing space. And Larry was a philosophy grad student at Brown who had liked the apartment for all the same reasons I did, and who even seemed like he’d be an okay guy to live with. I’d gone through five roommates in four years, but I always thought that the next one would be different.
Larry had been different—he’d been the worst one yet. Since signing the lease he’d shown a noticeable tendency to avoid cleaning any of the common spaces, clog the toilet (and leave it for me to fix), have obnoxiously noisy sex with a series of women (culminating recently with my girlfriend, Beth, after which they both found it useful to quote Sartre at me to explain how unreasonable it was of me to object), and lately a propensity of not paying his half of the rent. As of last count, he was four months behind, a weight that I was now having to pull double shifts down at Busy Beans to offset.
But worst of all was the meat.
I’d gone vegetarian when I started dating Beth, who was militantly vegan. At first it had just been a pacifying measure to sustain my likelihood of having sex, but after two weeks I noticed that it helped me keep that vampire part of me pushed down, and I stuck with it. I wasn’t a particularly great vegetarian—I don’t think I could give up cheese or eggs if I tried—and periodically I’d backslide and eat chicken. But I avoided red meat.
And tonight, just as on many other occasions, Larry had left his leftovers in the fridge.
Not paying his part of the rent seemed to give Larry a lot more spare change, and he ate out a lot. For an unapologetic carnivore, that meant a lot of steak, ribs, rack of lamb, and burgers came home in doggie bags. Whenever his date didn’t finish her meal, Larry brought the rest of it home so that he could still get his money’s worth. That would’ve been hard enough, except Larry would take the food out of the nice foam containers, stick it on a plate, and put that i
n the fridge without a cover. He said it made it easier to eat at two in the morning when he got hungry.
I looked in the fridge. It was steak this time, still with a few leaves of parsley clinging to it. And even old and half-eaten, it was rich and red. Rare. There was some juice on the plate, making little red droplets.
Jill’s blood had made pools. Brian’s blood had made patterns on the walls.
I realized that I was licking my fingers, and that I’d dipped them in the steak juice. A minute ago I’d felt the warmth of a stuffy and un-air-conditioned apartment on a June evening, but now everything felt cool and comfortable.
I’m mostly human. But that leaves me a little vampire.
I pushed it down, all the way down, washing my hand off at the sink and wishing that it wasn’t so hard to watch the last of the juice run down the drain.
Tonight I’d eat my vegetarian wrap and try to convince myself that it was everything that a nice human guy could want for dinner. I’d watch Bogey movies until I fell asleep. I’d nag Larry again about the rent, even if he had a girl with him when he came home. Even if it was Beth again.
Tomorrow I’d accept my mother’s invitation.
Chapter 2
Trying to outrun dreams and outflank Larry, I’d watched the movie marathon on the futon until my body finally gave out at the end of The Maltese Falcon. I failed on both counts—my subconscious subjected me to a walk down my worst memory lane, and Larry managed to come in and leave again without waking me up. My own alarm clock was muffled enough by the dividing wall that I didn’t even get up on time, and ended up at work late, groggy, and with a really frightening case of bed head. Even by the standards of a job that at its best always carried the strong whiff of despair, failure, and burned coffee beans, the day was horrible. Jeanine was fuming over Chivalry’s failure to make the expected bootie call, and the few morning customers who were old enough to still buy a coffee and a newspaper were irate over the delay in their schedule, since I’m the one who always sets out the papers and Jeanine hadn’t bothered. After several lectures from octogenarians about the lack of work ethic inherent in my generation of whippersnappers, Tamara showed up even later than me and took increasingly longer cigarette breaks that finally culminated in her just never coming back, and the combination of insufficient sleep and dread over the evening’s plans caused me to screw up almost every order I took, plus spill coffee on myself a grand total of three times. By the time my shift was finally grinding to a halt, Jeanine subjected me to a screaming fit that several loyal customers captured on their iPhones, and was being uploaded to YouTube before I even managed to head out the door.
I missed my usual bus, which left me with the unappealing choice of waiting twenty-eight minutes for the next one or spending roughly the same amount of time walking home. I’m normally a huge fan of sitting still for long periods of time. My degree, after all, is really just a glorified justification of my love of spending all day watching TV. But today I walked, and was subjected to the dubious distinction of seeing my bus beat me to my stop by about thirty seconds.
Larry was home when I entered the apartment, as evidenced by the sounds of thumping bass and squeaking mattress coils emanating through his bedroom door. After spending the last few days trying to corner him long enough to make my latest plea for rent money, it was frustrating, but also nothing less than I expected. I’m not much for believing in a higher power, but sometimes it’s tempting to believe that a strange and mysterious force likes to fuck around with my life. Besides my family, that is.
Dinners at my mother’s are typically formal dress events. When I was younger this meant a full three-piece suit, as if I were a prepubescent ring bearer at a wedding, but as I got older I started pushing against that line a bit, and had slowly worn my way down to business casual. I was fairly sure that it burned Chivalry’s retinas every time he saw me show up dressed in the Gap’s end-of-season sale stuff, but it was the small things that made my visits there livable. Besides, it wasn’t as if I actually could afford anything fancier.
After a quick shower and enough hair gel that I looked like I was on my way to a high school prom in New Jersey, I hauled on a pair of relatively clean khakis and a collared green dress shirt. I was still buttoning up my shirt as I put the key in the ignition of my car.
“Good car, nice car, pretty car,” I said to it, patting the dashboard with my left hand while I turned the key with my right. The engine gave a sulky little grumble as it tried and failed to turn over. I turned the key a second time, and this time the engine caught. This had been my car since high school, bought with the money I’d saved up by busing tables at a neighborhood Greek restaurant, and while its engine was getting progressively crankier, and its body was now so eaten away by rust that the best I could do was periodically slap on some extra body putty and hope for the best, it had yet to let me down. Of course, every time I said that to someone who had seen the car, their inevitable response was “Yet.”
It was almost seven in the evening, and most of the commuting traffic had cleared out when I hit the road. The humidity of the day was dropping, and with the windows rolled down I was getting a nice breeze to clear the remaining day’s heat out of the Fiesta’s interior. The highway took me quickly out of Providence, and as I turned onto Route 4 southbound, the thick suburb of ticky-tacky small houses melted away into quiet little New England towns separated by dense maple trees. The drive from my apartment to my mother’s house takes just around fifty minutes, and takes me across almost the entire length of the great state of Rhode Island. The sun was just dropping in the sky, with the shadows lengthening, when I went from Route 4, which is a smallish highway, onto 138 East, which is a simple two-lane road and is always the place where my fifty-minute estimate is either made or broken. There are almost no places at all to pass on that road, so if I get stuck behind Grandma on a Sunday outing, I’ll have no other option than to creep behind her and add twenty to thirty minutes to my arrival time as we weave in and out of little towns and past the kinds of stores that exist primarily to sell overpriced antique furniture to summer tourists.
Madeline’s house is in the town of Newport, which even for New England is excessively picturesque. It’s on an island on the southern tip of the state, accessible by two very long and beautiful suspension bridges, the Jamestown and the Claiborne Pell. Driving over the bridges is probably the best part of a visit to my mother—on a clear day all you see is the beautiful expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, dotted with little yachts and skiffs, with seagulls drifting on the wind overhead. When I was little, being driven by a silent chauffeur in the black Mercedes, I would press my face against the window when we passed over the bridges—now I have to restrain myself to quick glances as I do my best to stay in my lane. The Claiborne Pell is the longer of the two bridges, with small white lights built into it, so that when you see it at night it looks like someone wrapped it in Christmas twinkle-lights. On very dark nights, when the moon isn’t out, with just the right amount of fog to cover the stars and mist, the top of the water, it is eerily beautiful.
The town itself was one of America’s most thriving port cities before the British blockade during the Revolution broke the economy, and it didn’t quite recover until the wealthy industrial families of the Gilded Age realized that a gorgeous little island with soft breezes and sandy beaches would be the perfect place to build a summer home. That passed Newport into its current incarnation as a historic town with a reliance on summer tourism and wealthy recluses, all within reasonable driving distance of Boston and New York. The main streets are still paved in cobblestones, the Historical Society rules with an iron fist over anyone who happens to buy any of the older houses, and most of the houses that crowd together with year-round views of the harbor were built before the transcontinental railroad was completed. The docks where whaling ships used to unload their cargo are still there, but are now lined with seafood restaurants and signs for sportfishing tours. There’s a small Catholic college
that set up shop in many of the old mansions when scions of the old industrial families realized that a tax-deductible gift made more sense than maintaining a forty-room house with only two flush toilets and no modern heating. There’s a coast guard academy as well, along with a strong naval presence, and a few jazz and folk festivals to keep the bar scene hopping. Little boutique stores line the cobblestone streets to entice roaming pedestrians in the summer, and make it through the winter by renting out their upper floors as apartments. Chain stores have made very slow inroads, and you have to drive out of Newport and to the other side of the island to find a McDonald’s.
As I drove in I could smell buttered lobster from the many restaurants that had opened all their doors and windows. Families walked in and out of the fudge shop that still made all of its product on huge marble slabs that you could look at through the windows, while a few shops over, girls in short skirts flirted with men in navy whites at the sidewalk tables of a bar. I loved this town, but the farther I drove into it, the more I could feel my hands sweat and a metallic taste enter my mouth. Worse among all my Pavlovian symptoms, though, was the hunger in my stomach that had nothing to do with a need for a vegetarian pizza down at the firehouse pizza restaurant.
Well, almost nothing. I’d skipped lunch, and pizza sounded really good. If I hadn’t been running late, I would’ve stopped and committed the cardinal dinner party sin of prearrival snacking.
I drove past the tennis hall of fame and the Belleview Supermarket, then turned onto Thames Street, where claustrophobically cluttered Victorians interspersed with boutique shops suddenly gave way to the huge and manicured lawns, Grecian statuary, and Gilded Age splendor of the mansions. It was late enough that most people were done for the day, but some tourists were still strolling along the wide sidewalks and taking photos. I drove past The Breakers, the two-hundred-room summer cottage that the Rockefellers used to rough it in, and hung a left onto the long white gravel driveway that led to my mother’s house.
Generation V Page 2
