She knows for sure that it had been a comfort to be able to listen to songs on her mp3 player and know that the voice in her ears was a kindred spirit, that Michelle wasn’t the only fucked-up brown girl all full of sadness and despair and music in the world.
Lily’s not really brown anymore. She was always a few shades lighter than Michelle; light enough to pass for Caucasian. Now she’s sickly-pale like all vampires, with only a little more color shading her than Will or Ash.
Of all the things Lily’s lost, that’s the one which makes Michelle ache most.
“I always used these corporate calendar things to keep track of show dates and birthdays and shit,” Lily tells her. “Those ones with the days divided up. Will used ordinary lined notebooks for his journals about vampire hunting, because some night he’d had pages and pages to write, and some nights he had nothing. We thought that those were the bad nights, you know. The ones where we didn’t see any vampires.”
Lily lifts her head for a brief moment, long enough to give Michelle a crooked grin, before returning her attention to her shoe. “God, you don’t even realise how fucking young you are before it’s too late, and then you’re already old. Or cold.
“I used the kind of diary that shows a week to each double page. Scribbled crap all over them. But after I tried to kill myself, I couldn’t anymore. Having to face an entire week of obligations and responsibilities and the sheer fucking grind of functioning in the world was almost enough to send me off to try ending it again. Just the prospect of getting out of bed that many times in a row made me start to panic. I couldn’t even think about a whole month on a single page of a calendar— staying alive for thirty days in a row? They might as well ask me to lift up a car with my bare hands.
“Will bought me a new diary, one where each double-page was one day. Morning on the left, afternoon on the right, with each hour chopped up into 15-minute increments on the faint blue lines. A quarter of an hour at a time, that was okay. I could do that. I could commit myself to staying alive for fifteen minutes and probably manage to reach the goal.
“The diary was fucking heavy, of course. A year takes up a lot more pages if you divide it down so small. But I got used to it. You carry the weight that you have to, I guess. That was mine. But now…” Lily gives a hollow laugh. “Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes. It doesn’t matter how tiny I chop it down because they’re going to go on and on and on forever. Forever. What’s the point in promising him the next fifteen minutes when we both know I really have to hang on the next fifteen years, decades, centuries? It’s never going to get easier, I’m never going to outgrow it or find a better medication or a smarter shrink. It’s stay like this, die, or give in.
“I’d only have to die or give in once, and then it would be over. But I have to choose to stay like this over and over. Every fifteen minutes.”
~
Along with all the other vaguely stalkerish random shit Michelle knows about Remember the Stars, she knows that Lily and Will have matching tattoos on their wrists, of lyrics from All You Need Is Love. She’s seen Lily’s in-person, one time when Tommy asked if he could look at it, and there was a picture of Will’s in a music magazine to go with an article about the different ink on different bands.
But it’s weird that they’ve got those tattoos, because it doesn’t seem like they believe at all that all you need is love.
That’s what Michelle thinks, anyway. She says so to Tommy, later in the night when she’s said goodbye to Lily and gone back to Tommy’s place, curling up beside him on his kind of gross and smelly bedclothes.
For a few seconds, Tommy is quiet, obviously thinking over what she’s said. Then he shakes his head. “Doesn’t sound like that to me. To me, it sounds like they totally still believe in love, but in the same way that you believe in kettles or weather or paint. Belief in something existing isn’t the same as belief that it… well, that it can save you. It’s just a thing that’s there. Just because they love each other doesn’t mean anything else is easier or better.”
“Yeah, but I’m not saying that they don’t believe in love,” Michelle explains patiently. “I’m saying that I don’t think they believe that love is enough. That it’s all you need. You see?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I guess,” Tommy agrees. “I guess you’re right.”
“Bet they regret their tattoos, then.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they like being reminded that they used to think that way. An indelible reminder of their youthful optimism might be nice.”
“You sound like one of Jay’s friends,” Michelle teases.
“I am one of Jay’s friends,” Tommy answers.
“I mean Jay’s other friends, loser. His vampires.”
ALEXANDER
Dear Tim
I missed the beginning of the argument, though I imagine that it was a variation on the storm clouds which have been gathering around Nell and Oscar’s conversations for days now.
They like each other well enough; Oscar seems to have taken his cue from Blake in treating Nell with more deference than either of them otherwise might have had for the young girl she appears to be. But even if they like each other, they cannot stop the half-serious trading of sharp barbs.
“Here’s another thing you have in common with Blake,” Nell was saying as I arrived, her words icy and precise. “I’ve wished to the heavens more often than I can count that he someday knows what it is to love. I stole that from him, and it’s one of my few regrets. Now I wish that fate on you as well. Or perhaps I curse you, since you call me ‘witch’ so often. A witch can make things true with her words, and this is what I say: I hope someday you fall in love, Oscar. I hope you fall in love with someone as bright and sweet as Florrie, as beautiful and clever as Constance. I hope that you fall in love with all the things you’ve ever wanted, all in one lovely young soul. And I hope he breaks your heart.”
Within twenty minutes they were back to being firm friends again, of course—one of the things which Nell has in common with Blake and Oscar both is capriciousness. None of them can sustain a dark mood for long without finding something new to snap them out of it. But the venom in her words stuck with me. I think Nell would be a terrifying enemy indeed, if she really hated someone.
~
Dear Tim
It seems fitting that even though it’s years now since I was last here, and so many things have changed, some things are just as I expected. Right now I believe completely that cities have souls, because being back in London feels just like catching up with a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Some details are different, but London is London always. Do cities feel like that to you? You have a much broader perspective on this than I will be able to manage for some time yet. I wonder if London will seem the same if I visit it a hundred years from now.
Nell’s dire prophecy for Oscar has come true, at least in part—he appears to have met a soul who is everything he ever wanted in a companion. Sadly for Nell’s dramatics, the boy is a witty, friendly, scathingly funny and bracingly forthright young man. Blake would probably steal him on the spot if he was anybody but Oscar’s. Perhaps the most interesting thing about young Robert (he prefers Robbie, but Blake’s pedantry about full names has left me in the habit of calling him Robert, to his annoyance) is that he and Connie are close and loyal friends who quite love one another. It seems like Nell’s decrees on the subject of multiple spouses trump her spells of misfortune.
~
My Dear Tim
I miss you. Tonight especially, because I’ve been talking to Nell about her brothers, Owen specifically.
Owen is old. That much, I think I’ve mentioned before, in earlier letters. But what I didn’t know until tonight is that when vampires become old, they often grow weary. We begin as living men and women, after all, and living men and women have hearts and souls built for only a handful of decades. Becoming a vampire toughens our hearts, but—contrary to what our detractors might say—our souls remain unchanged.
When vampires grow weary, some of them force an ending on themselves, since death is unlikely to come to them naturally. Beheading, prolonged exposure to sunlight, the poison which nearly killed Nell... we are not so indestructible, if we have enough resolve about it.
Owen has no such plans. But if the brain is sufficiently damaged, or the heart is removed and has to grow back, a vampire will lose all that they’ve been and thought since the first time they died. They’ll awake, but the last thing they’ll remember is the last breath they drew as a living man or woman. This is what Owen plans for himself.
Not yet, mind—Nell says that Owen has declared that he’s not quite tired enough, not yet—but some day. I asked her what she plans to do when the day comes. If she’ll keep the new, unremembering Owen at her side after it’s done.
“Yes,” she answered, clearly having given the question thought long before my asking. “Of course. He won’t be my Owen, but... it would be like the death of a mortal friend, with an orphan left behind. You’d keep the orphan safe, for the sake of your remembered friend, wouldn’t you? No matter how it hurt you to see the features of their lost parent in the new and childish face.”
The discussion had clearly made her sad, in anticipation of the loss that’s still to come, so we changed our subject to the latest round of bickering in her argument with Oscar. He’s written a new play, an ostensibly Biblical drama about Salome, but the caricature of Nell in the lead character is even less veiled than Blake’s appearance in that novel Oscar wrote. First a dandy lord who seduces away the soul of a beautiful young boy with pretty talk of amorality and immortality, and now a bloodthirsty seductress who kisses the lips of the dead. Blake is flattered, Nell is offended, and I think that it’s all hilarious.
~
Even alive, Alexander’s ability to sense tension in the air had been sharply honed, and now it is trigger-fine. He wakes shortly after nightfall and, before he has opened his eyes, he can already tell that it’s going to be the kind of evening in which everything that can go wrong, does.
Blake and Jay have clearly decided to get the trouble started as early as possible, and Alex groans in despair against his pillow at the filtered sounds of the fight several rooms away.
“You… all this time we’ve been together, you’ve been afraid that we’ll fall apart as you grow older. And you’ve been right. We will. But not for the reasons you’re so certain of. You think that as you age, I’ll lose interest in you. But I am a creature of centuries, Jay. No amount of exposure to vampires, at our worst or at our best, can be enough to make a living human understand what that’s like. I am as static as a fly in amber, a butterfly behind glass. When I come to be interested by someone, I don’t have the luxury of fickle dalliances. It was change enough for me to love you, do you think I have the heart to change again so soon?”
“Oh god, not this again,” Timothy mutters, rolling over and giving Alexander a smile. “Hello.”
Blake’s voice through the walls is smooth and bitter as he speaks to Jay. “Did it never occur to you that someday you will be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty? Did you truly think about that, beyond fretting that I may not want the man you will become? Didn’t it ever cross your mind that the things you want at sixty will be wildly different to those you want at sixteen?”
“Hello. Should we tear out our own eardrums or Blake’s voice box, do you think?” Alexander asks.
Jay’s voice is defiant. “No. You’re wrong. A lot—okay, maybe not a lot, not anymore, because now almost everyone gets divorced and stuff—but some people stay with the same person even if they start really young. All that vomity bullshit about high school sweethearts growing old together, that’s gotta be based on something.”
“Both, for good measure,” Tim tells Alex.
“You’ve found the crux of the problem. We’ll never grow old together, Jason. We can’t. You’ll grow old, and I’ll…” There are footsteps as Blake moves across the room, and Alexander has only heard him this vulnerable, this bare, a few times in all the years they’ve known each other.
“Young lovers who remain lovers throughout their lives,” Blake says softly. “They manage the trick because they change in the same direction as one another. Those who part, part because they follow different tracks. But I’m where I’ll always be. And you’re still moving.”
The cat, sensing that Timothy and Alexander are awake and yet for some incomprehensible reason not yet paying attention to her, leaps up onto the bed and begins roaming the hills and valleys created in the coverlet by their bodies underneath. Timothy laughs quietly, sitting up and catching her on his lap.
The nearby argument continues. “You can’t imagine it now, because the boy you are now loves me, and he can’t imagine that his future selves could ever do otherwise. And I love you dearly for that, for how absolutely you believe in what you feel for me. But…” Blake laughs, a laugh completely unlike the capricious chuckle he usually offers. This laugh is quiet, almost tender, and as sad as sobbing. “Bette once compared her own love affair with Rose to that of Romeo and Juliet, and I told her just how ridiculous I found that comparison to be. But it’s fitting, in its way. Romeo and Juliet’s love can never be anything but exactly what it is: violent and doomed and exquisite. Take away the poison and the dagger, and let the morning light come, and you’re left with two children who will grow older and grow wiser, and forget each other in time. A fond memory will linger, but that’s all. Is that better? Love’s lost either way, by the whimper or the bang…”
“Stop.” Jay’s voice, still flat, is choked and cold. “Fucking stop with your fucking words for three fucking seconds for once. You don’t get to decide what I want and you don’t get to… you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to compare me to some fictional character in a play who acts a certain way because the guy writing him decided that’s how a teenage guy in love acts. Don’t write a script for me. You’re no fucking Shakespeare, Blake. And I’m no Romeo.”
“All right, I’ve had more than I can stand. I’m going to shower,” Alexander declares, getting up and walking to their ensuite. Hot water and clean, well-made clothing are things which he has a healthy appreciation for, and he takes his time over the routine of washing and dressing.
When he comes back into the main bedroom, Tim is standing over by the desk. The cigarette box is open, letters still scattered near it where Alexander left them the night before. He’d been too full of memories and thoughts to remember to close the contents away before going to bed; he’s not in the habit of keeping things secret from Tim, and so forgot to do so now.
Alexander’s preternaturally sharp eyesight can see the words of the topmost letter even from the other side of the room.
He won’t be my Owen, but… it would be like the death of a mortal friend, with an orphan left behind.
“Is that how it feels with me?” Timothy asks, and Alexander can hear the waver that struggles to overwhelm the coolness of the words. He’s always been able to hear even the subtlest hints of feeling in Timothy’s voice, no matter how hard Timothy may be trying to hide them—the laughter at an inopportune moment, the sudden lust during a conversation, sweet love in a goodbye or a hello. And now, he can hear pain.
“Those were Nell’s words, not mine,” Alexander reminds him, trying to stay patient. “And it was a long time ago. Even she might not feel that way anymore.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Alexander sighs. “You know the answer.”
“No,” Tim snaps. “I don’t. That’s why I’m asking. Is it pity? Obligation? I’m a foundling that you feel burdened with responsibility for?”
“There are certainly times when you act like a petulant child!” Alexander fires back. “If you want a life free of the echoes of who you were, you shouldn’t have stayed amongst your old friends. You should have started anew.”
The anger drains from Timothy’s face almost instantly, leaving him looking stricken and pale. “Is that what yo
u want?”
“Isn’t it what you want?” Alexander asks, angry and hurt and afraid, voice venomous and low.
“I’m having a shower. Feel free to leave without me,” Timothy says, pushing past Alexander and slamming the door to the bathroom behind him.
Alexander sighs. One of those nights where everything goes wrong, that’s for sure.
On the couch in the main room of the top-floor apartments, Ashley is chattering to someone on the telephone, typing away at her laptop computer at the same time, while Bette scowls at the screen of her hand-held Nintendo and offers a litany of colorful swear words as the game defeats her. Seeing Alexander, Ash ends her phone call and gives him a sympathetic half-smile.
“Either of you feel like a walk?” Alexander asks. Bette shakes her head.
“I’m waiting for Jay.”
“I’ll come. Gimme a second,” Ash tells him, entering a final burst of typing into the laptop before shutting it down. “Let’s go.”
~
They take their time, wandering without any particular destination, enjoying the light rain and chill air around them. Ashley is rarely talkative, so her quiet manner tonight isn’t especially noteworthy, but there’s an edge of desperation in her silence that reminds him of how she was after she first died, before she’d settled a little into her new skin.
Ash smiles a little at him, like she can tell that he’s worried. Like most things that she does, when Ashley smiles she does so softly, sadly. Only her kills are jagged, and these days she is fighting against herself to refrain from those.
Alexander finds himself thinking how ironic it is that Ash tried hard for so long to retain her living adolescence, with her absurd charade of attending school and inhabiting her parents’ house, when she is already so old and worldy behind her youthful face. All the young ones they’ve met in recent times are, the living and the dead alike: Jay, Bette, Jenny, Sofie, Ash. Even tiny Min, still so much a child, has that particular supple strength that only hard-learned lessons can give a character.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 71
