I fold it up and slip it into my purse. For a second I think Travis can tell me for sure whether it’s a forgery, but then I remember he’s dead.
Outside the bank, I open my brand - new phone and dial my mom. Not the real one, but the one who feels real.
Like on Thanksgiving, it takes a while for the guards to fetch her. I’m unlocking my car by the time I hear her voice.
“Two calls in five weeks,” she says brightly. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“Mom?” I resist the urge to call her Marjorie. “If I told you I needed a kidney transplant, and it could only come from a blood relative, could you give it to me?”
She starts to cry, and this time I don’t doubt the sincerity of her tears.
I sit down hard in the driver’s seat and pull the door shut. “How? How could you not tell me who my real mother was?”
“She didn’t deserve you,” she hisses. “She was always drinking. Never gave you baths. Your own grandmother said Luann would leave you alone in the house while she went to the liquor store. When she went to jail for her third check -kiting conviction, your dad sued for custody. The judge said it was the easiest case he’d seen in years.” She pauses. “She didn’t fight it. I’m sorry, Ciara, but she didn’t want you. We did. We loved you so much, we would’ve kidnapped you, if that’s what it took.”
I squeeze the steering wheel so hard that the leather creaks in my grip. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“You were only eleven months old.”
Too young to remember. But it seems impossible not to. How can someone not know, deep down in the core of her heart? How could I look at Luann and not feel the tug of instinct? “My whole life, I thought you were my mother.”
“I am.”
“You’re not even my stepmother, since Dad never married you.”
Her silence sends a chill across the back of my neck. Oops.
“How do you know that?”
I structure my response to be as technically truthful as possible. “I spoke to Dad yesterday. He’s in prison.”
“Why hasn’t he been in touch with me?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
She draws in a quick breath. “You’ll still call me that?”
“You’re the only mother I’ve ever known.” I run my thumb over my apartment key. “The only one I’ll ever want.”
She lets out a long sigh, then sniffles. “I suppose I wasn’t a total failure in raising you.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
A knock comes on my windshield. I jump. Outside my car, a white - haired lady huddles in a pink quilt coat.
“Are you leaving?” she yells through the window.
I glance back to see a car idling behind me. All the other spots are full in this tiny, built - for - a - past - era bank parking lot. I nod and mouth the word “sorry.”
“They’re telling me I have to go now,” my mom says. “You’ll call again soon?”
“I will,” I tell her, and mean it. “Mom . . . when you get out of jail, you should move to Maryland. I’ll find you a job.”
“Really?” she whispers. “I could live with you?”
“No. But nearby.” At least an hour away. Maybe two hours. “Think about it.”
“I will. Merry Day - After - Christmas.” Her end of the call cuts off.
“Not yet it isn’t.” I pull out of the parking space, keeping my eyes dry long enough to avoid hitting the adjacent cars. I wave at the patient lady, who toots her horn in response.
I drive under a banner that hangs across Sherwood’s narrow Main Street, advertising the town’s First Night New Year’s Eve celebration. It makes me reflect on the last two months, how three major holidays have turned my life—which was not terribly stable to begin with—into utter chaos.
Halloween: station gets attacked by FAN, and Dexter enters the picture.
Thanksgiving: I realize how dangerous even the “good” vampires can be, and somehow still invite Shane to live with me.
Christmas: almost get killed (again), then find out my mom isn’t my mom.
Maybe for New Year’s, I’ll just stay in bed.
32
Heart - Shaped Box
In the business world, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is notoriously slow. Everyone’s on vacation and out of the office, or goofing off in the boss’s absence. Phone calls aren’t placed or expected to be returned. Deals don’t get made this week, especially not the sort that change lives.
But WVMP is the exception to every rule.
Right now I’m standing in the freshly rebuilt Smoking Pig, at WVMP’s private party, tapping my feet to some rousing Chicago blues and admiring the life - size cardboard poster of Rolling Stone’s first cover of the New Year. Regina and Jeremy pose next to it as Lori snaps photos. The DJ successfully re - creates her cover stance—snarling face and middle finger extended toward the camera. In real life, the gesture doesn’t have a black box over it.
Below her defiant pose, the cover reads WVMP TAKES BACK THE NIGHT. Jeremy and I decided to go with the feminism angle, how a band of twentieth - century “vampires” overcame a seventeenth - century worldview. We added just enough subtle allusions to the “real vampire” subculture to titillate the public.
Tipped off to the article, the two major satellite radio providers entered a bidding war for weekly broadcasts by each of our vampire DJs. We sold the rights as a six - piece package, for more than the sum of its parts.
The contract was lucrative enough to let the DJs jointly purchase the station. Spencer’s T - Day - hosting donor, Marcia, is a corporate lawyer specializing in transfer of property. She’ll make it all look copacetic, then arrange for Elizabeth to disappear with minimal attention from the authorities.
The man who will benefit most from the overdue demise of the station’s owner is currently passing out a box of cheesy plastic sunglasses shaped like the numerals of the New Year.
When David reaches me, I catch a whiff of a distinctive smell on his breath. I wrinkle my nose. “Stuart got absinthe for the party?”
“Jeremy’s idea. It’s an experience you really should . . .” David seems to fumble for the correct word. “. . . experience.” He picks out a pink pair of sunglasses and tries to fit them on my face. Instead he pokes me in the eye with the plastic frame. “Sorry.”
“I don’t care how trendy and vampiric absinthe is, I hate licorice.” I put on the sunglasses, wanting to ask him if the rumors are true, that the liquor makes you see green fairies.
“Besides,” I add, “tonight I’m sticking to the drink of the man of the hour.” I raise my bottle of National Bohemian beer and take a wistful pause to think of Travis.
David’s face sobers, if not his brain. “How’s Lori?”
“Better now that she’s back in Sherwood. When I called her at her parents’ house to tell her, she couldn’t even grieve in front of them. She can’t tell them her boyfriend died—they’d want to know his name and look up his obituary and learn all about the man who loved their little girl.” I watch Lori immortalize Regina with Travis’s camera and realize that for the first time, she doesn’t seem afraid of the leather - drenched vampire.
David frowns. “Public mourning is a luxury for people like us.”
I try to see his eyes behind the plastic zeros of his sunglasses, to no avail. Behind him, the front door opens to reveal Shane.
My boy saunters over and kisses me. “Happy New Year.” He says it like he means it.
“How’d it go with your family and the Control?”
“Good news and bad news.” He takes off his jacket and lays it over a chair. “Bad news: we can’t tell my nephews about my true nature. The Control thinks they’d tell all their friends at school, what with the current popularity of vampires.”
“And the good news?”
He shrugs. “The Control will give Mom and Eileen an incentive not to tell anyone that they were snatched out of their home and almost burned at the st
ake.”
“How big an incentive?”
He gives me a cryptic smile. “More than a TV network would pay them for their story.”
When it rains manna from heaven, it really pours.
“How’s your mom taking all this?” David asks him. “Does she want to send you to an exorcist?”
“Not after I told her what holy water will do to her baby boy’s face.” He rubs his cheek, but his smile falls flat. “She cries a lot when we talk, and blames herself.”
I take his hand. “Does she think you’re going to hell?”
“That’s the promising part. She figures if vampires are hated by truly evil people like the Fortress, then we can’t be all that bad.”
“Keep her away from Regina and Jim so she holds that thought.” I lift my Natty Boh. “Want a beer?”
“I’ll wait for the champagne.” As the song changes to a slow, sensuous blues tune, he gives my hand a gentle tug. “Dance with me while I ask you something.”
David salutes us with an orange pair of sunglasses. “Sounds like my exit cue.”
I let Shane pull me into the open space between the bar and the stage. As we start to sway together, he says, “I was thinking—”
“Uh - oh.”
“—now that Elizabeth will be dead for good, we’ll have to move out of her apartment.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But at least we’ll have a shorter commute. You’ll be at the station and I’ll be . . . I don’t know where.”
He slows, almost missing a beat. “I saw an ad for a basement apartment in downtown Sherwood. Three bedrooms, fully furnished, washer/dryer, and they take pets.”
“I probably can’t afford it. I’d never pass the credit check on something that nice.”
“No.” He squeezes my hand. “Not by yourself.”
My feet freeze. This is much bigger than holing up together in another person’s place. This is sign - our - names - on - a - piece -of - paper - together big. I try to remember how to breathe.
Shane tilts my chin up. “Since it’s in Sherwood, I could come home every morning after my show, except in summer when it gets light real early. We wouldn’t be living together part - time anymore.”
I fumble for a stalling question. “Does it have a dishwasher?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He holds my gaze. “I have a method for hand - washing dishes, too. I have methods and routines for things you can’t imagine. Over the weeks or months or, God willing, years, you’ll discover them, one by one. There’ll be blood in the fridge, and notes and charts on the fridge, but there’ll also be music in the living room, and the bedroom. I’ll never bring a donor home, and I’ll never forget to walk the dog when it’s my turn. Sometimes I’ll even walk him when it’s your turn. I promise you all of this.”
I break eye contact and look around the room, as if the answer will be written in the freshly cut wood of the walls. Regina is dancing with Jim, who will have only one arm for the foreseeable future.
“Kissing them wasn’t like kissing you,” I tell Shane. “Not warm and real. They kissed me like I wasn’t a person.” I look up at him. “How long before you get that way?”
“I don’t know.” He lets his hands slide down my arms, releasing me until we’re only touching fingertips, but still standing close. “Is that your answer?”
I think of Ned’s broken body lying in a pool of glass, and the blood and who knows what other substances splattering Shane’s shirt on Christmas Eve. My boyfriend is a monster. I can’t deny that anymore. I can’t pretend he’s a normal human or ever will be.
But his ferocity reared its head so he could protect the four women he loved most—his mother, his sister, his maker, and me. If he’s a monster, he’s our monster. He’s mine.
“This is my answer.” I yank him close and kiss him hard. My head spins and pitches, like I’m falling from a cliff. No, not falling—waltzing on a tightrope, with no more looking down.
Shane folds me in his arms, then pulls me away a few inches so he can look me in the eye. “Is that a yes?”
I nod. “We’ll sign a lease together, like real grown - ups.”
He cringes. “Don’t use the G word. DJs don’t like it.”
“Neither do con artists.” I kiss him again, reveling in the warm - enough heat of his mouth. I try not to wonder how much maturity—and which other qualities—I’ll need to be a Control contractor. That’s many months’ worth of worry away.
“Five minutes to midnight!” shouts a loud voice behind us. I turn to see Stuart, proud owner of the new - and - improved Smoking Pig, brandishing a trio of champagne bottles.
We join the others at a side table, where champagne flutes are lined up like dutiful soldiers.
Shane looks around. “Where’s David?”
Jim points his cigarette at the double doors to the bar’s deck. “Out there in the smoking lounge.” Which, I notice, Jim’s not using, and probably won’t until the ban takes effect in one month and four minutes, and maybe not even then.
I pick up an extra glass of champagne and carry it to the door. Before opening it, I peer through to see David standing alone outside, leaning on the railing. His chin is tilted up, as if he’s searching the sky.
I walk over to Lori, who’s standing to the side of the party, examining Travis’s camera.
I put my arm around her, careful not to drip champagne down her back. “How’s it going?”
“I’m thinking of taking up photography. Travis taught me a lot about it when he was alive. I mean, when he was, um, around.” Her shoulders sag for a moment. “Anyway, he said I had talent.”
“That’s great. You’ve got some killer equipment there.”
She tries to smile, and I notice her eyes are rimmed with red. “Maybe it’s time I did something with my life besides chase ghosts and schlep drinks.”
I look at the extra glass in my hand. “Then this is terrible timing, but could you take this champagne out to David? I don’t think he wants to be with the crowd right now.”
“I can understand that.” She takes the champagne flute and picks up her own.
I watch her exit through the glass doors and approach David. He turns and accepts the champagne with a smile. I wait, expecting them to return to the bar but hoping they won’t.
Finally, Lori and David turn away from us to look out over the railing together at the darkness. Though it’s not midnight yet, they clink their glasses and sip.
“Happy New Year, guys,” I whisper, then turn back to Shane, a sudden bubble of hope swelling inside me.
The countdown begins. I gaze around at all the young -looking faces and realize how many New Years some of them have greeted. For Monroe, nearly a hundred. Yet at this moment, none of them look jaded, not even Regina and Shane, who have raised coolness to an art form, a moral imperative.
We hit zero, and Shane kisses me. I hold tight to him as the others sing “Auld Lang Syne,” a few of them horribly off - key.
A squealing harmonic comes from the speaker, joined by a saxophone, and then Roy Orbison implores us to let the good times roll.
We obey, dancing and singing (me and Regina on backup) and, of course, drinking until we can’t stand up.
I’ve always believed in now, and that’s always been good enough. But for the first time, tonight, I believe in what comes after.
Bad to the Bone Page 33
