by Casey Lane
I pressed my lips to her throat and hovered there. That vulnerable pulse knocked against my lips. My need begged and pleaded with that portion of my mind called control. Take her, it said. Take her, take her, take her…
Lettie battled her own desires. I felt her pulse quicken against my lips and the heat growing between her legs. She wanted me to take her here behind the shed, on her hands and knees in the dirt with me behind her.
“What an imagination you have, Lettie,” I said softly and laughed, the sound of it vibrating against the hollow of her throat. “It must be all those novels you read.”
She swallowed and went completely rigid in my arms.
“You haven’t decided,” I said and released her so suddenly that she fell back with surprise.
“No,” she admitted to herself as much as to me.
“What is so hard about it, Lettie? I can take the old woman in her bed. She has one foot in the grave as it is. It’ll be quick. It’ll end her suffering and free you of the responsibilities of cooking and cleaning and waiting hand and foot on an ungrateful bitch who has never thanked anyone for anything in her whole life.”
Lettie sucked in a sharp breath. Those last words had been said in a pitch perfect imitation of her father’s own voice and on purpose.
“Ah, yes,” I replied as if she’d spoken. “Of course, you wouldn’t truly have been free then, would you? There would be your brother to think of. As long as he is alive, he would seek you out, depend on you, take from you, leech from you. Is it his throat then, that you’d offer? I would have a time with him. Even the poison in his veins wouldn’t be enough to put me off the task.”
She wanted to say yes. I felt the temptation in her as clearly as I felt my own. She wanted me to take every minute of heartache and misery that bastard had wrought upon her, too, but she hesitated. Mouth open. No words came out. What was the story from bible school, she thought. Those days were long behind her, but she remembered enough to know that when Cain had betrayed Abel, his own blood had been damned for it. And giving permission, in opening some hidden door to her family, to the creature that stood before her, she would, in turn, be damning herself.
I flashed my brilliant, white fangs. I couldn’t help myself in the face of such superstitious nonsense.
“Well, be sure then, Ms. Cole,” I said. “But know this: I will only come to you once more, and when I do, it will be to collect what’s due to me.”
“Why?” she asked.
Because I don’t have it in me to delay any longer, I thought. Because every passing moment when my fangs aren’t in your throat, your breasts under my hand, drives me mad.
I would come tomorrow, and no matter what, I would end this. I had to.
I said none of this. Instead I stepped into the shadows and disappeared.
She stood in the dark for a long time, trying to see me, but was unable to. A snapped branch somewhere farther inside the trees broke her daze. She had no choice but to return to the house, cold and unsatisfied, her hunger a stone in her belly.
That made two of us.
Chapter Fourteen
Lettie felt the man in the room before she opened her eyes. She’d been dreaming about her father. They were in his garage, him wearing his blue overalls and reeking of oil and grease. Then the sounds of reality pressed in on her and her father’s lined face wavered. A door opened and closed somewhere. Something overturned onto the dresser, clattering against the glass top.
The vampire is back, she thought. Fear uncoiled inside her, sending all her panic to her tightening guts. I’m going to open my eyes, and there he’ll be, ready to tear my throat out.
But it wasn’t me.
A rough hand threw back her covers and shook her hatefully. “Where did you hide it, you stupid bitch?”
Her eyes flew open and met Merek’s. He had one hand under her mattress, sliding it deeper between the box spring and the lumpy pillow top.
As usual he reeked of piss and tobacco, his sour breath and gum rot hitting her square in the face. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he slammed his fist into the mattress and howled.
“Where is it, you bitch!”
She started to reel back, get out of his reach, but her legs were trapped in the twisted blanket and she couldn’t so much as sit up. She was easy prey. His hand twisted up into her hair and pulled.
It was enough to bring tears to her eyes as she was hauled from the warm bed to her feet. I drank down her pain, tasting it, enjoying it.
“Where’s the goddamn money?”
“I gave you what I had!” she cried, trying to hold onto his wrist, lift herself up enough to ease the pressure setting fire to her scalp.
“You’re lying!” He snarled, and the smell of sour breath hit her full in the face again. She couldn’t decide if it was the stench of his breath or the hair pulling that brought tears to her eyes.
He dropped her in a heap and went for her bed. Sticking his bruised and thinning arms under the mattress, he flipped it. The pillows popped up as if thrown on a trampoline. The bedding, thin and scratchy hit the wall. The end table wobbled and crashed. This seemed to inspire him, because he pushed the other end table over even though all that sat on top of it was a picture of Kai in a dented brass frame.
I saw all of this through Lettie’s eyes and felt her mounting anger.
“Stop destroying my room!” she wailed. “I don’t go into your room and break your shit!”
He said nothing. He moved on to the dresser.
I recognized this battle. Hunger was hunger no matter who had it. It was a battle raging with himself, and anyone who dared intervene would be a casualty.
Go to the bathroom, I said, planting the thought in her mind. Go on, you’ll be safe in there until he is finished.
Yes, she thought. If she didn’t leave now, it would only get worse. Before the third paperback flew across the room, she pulled herself onto her shaking legs and hurried to the bathroom.
Lock the door, I thought.
She turned the bolt.
Shall we reinforce this somehow?
She opened the closet door, which stood just behind the bathroom door itself, and hooked one handle over the other, the two silver knobs. So even if he managed to break the lock on the bathroom door and tried to force himself inside, he wouldn’t get in. The second door would prevent it.
Very good, I thought. That should be enough.
She collapsed onto the toilet with a relieved sigh.
Touching her scalp gingerly, she listened to her brother destroy her room. Drawers rattled open and closed, wood slapping against wood as they were yanked out and forcibly returned again. The closet door banged open and metal hangers shrieked on the bar. Shoeboxes slid across the wooden top shelf and then fell with a plastic thwap. She imagined all her baby pictures of Kai hitting the old carpet and spreading in a photograph waterfall, some images up, others with their paper backings shining in the overturned lamplight.
She made a silent prayer that none of them were torn under a black boot heel or bent up too badly. I didn’t think I could answer that prayer, so I said nothing.
“I knew you fucking had it!” He cried out and rapped loudly on the inside of her bedroom closet. The bathroom mirror bounced in its gilded frame beside her head.
As he stomped past the bathroom a hard fist slammed into the wood twice. Lettie jumped on the toilet, her heart going up into her throat. The seat creaked under her, threatening to buck her off onto the unforgiving floor tiles, yellow with age.
She listened to the loud stomping feet echo away from her and continued sitting on the toilet even after the whole house rattled with the sound of the door slamming shut.
She sat until her heart stopped racing in her chest. She sat and let the silence press in on her from all sides.
“Lettie?” her mother called.
At first, she almost didn’t recognize the voice. It was small and frightened.
Louder, “Lettie?”
Lettie took a ragged breath and pulled herself to standing.
Her hand shook as she shut the bathroom closet and eased open the bathroom door. She waited, as if the sound of footsteps had somehow been a trick, a ventriloquist’s thrown voice just to get her to come out of the bathroom.
But Merek’s pockmarked face and black eyes didn’t appear. The hallway remained dark. She exhaled.
“Lettie,” her mother croaked. “Answer me, goddamnit!”
She stepped into the hallway, sucking in a breath as she eased her shoulders down from her ears. “I’m here, Momma. You okay?”
“I’m hungry and tired of lying in my own piss!” the old woman hissed, but the words came out in a rush of relief. I needed no vampire tricks to know the mother was relieved Lettie had not been killed. Lettie heard the relief, too, but thought less of it.
Was it a self-serving concern? Wondering who would wash her shitty sheets or pay the electric bill that powered her soap opera obsession if she were dead? You’re too hard on her, Lettie’s mind said. And already she was digging deep for that well of compassion that she so often found dry and filled with the gnawed bones of her anger and resentment.
But I could hear what Lettie could not and knew the woman’s concern was true.
Lettie pushed the door open and the smell of piss hit her. Sharp and acrid in her nostrils, filling them like cotton. “Let’s clean you up.”
Her mother didn’t resist as she sometimes did, as Lettie eased her arms under hers and lifted her. Once the clothes were over her mother’s head, Lettie grabbed the metal case of cigarettes beside the bed and flipped it open. She’d always liked the feel of the cool case flipping open against her hot palm.
She fished out one of the rolled cigarettes and offered it to her mother.
The woman arched an eyebrow but then inclined her head ever so slightly in gratitude. She pinned the white twisted paper between her thin and wrinkled lips while Lettie searched for a lighter. She found one, red and plastic with a black tongue. She flicked her thumb, but the breeze came through the open window, and the flame flickered and failed. She cupped it with her left hand, instantly darkening her mother’s face against the light streaming through the flittering curtains, and struck again.
Lettie lit her mother’s cigarette. Her mother’s face burned orange in turn as the paper caught.
Thin gray smoke rose to the ceiling, and Lettie waited for that first luxurious exhale to come. It did, and her mother’s whole body seemed to shake with it.
“Better?” Lettie asked, shoving down her own rising need for a good draw. It could wait.
“Much,” her mother said. Puffy pink flesh stood at attention under her dark eyes. The wrinkles in her face seemed deeper than just the day before, as if she were drying up from the inside out. Her crooked, arthritic fingers shook a little more than they had yesterday. A bad day, Lettie thought. And those conflicting feelings of resentment and pity began to war inside her, snapping at each other like starving dogs, white foam at their mouth as they tugged at a bone between them.
Lettie made a motion with her fingers that her mother understood perfectly. The woman took one more drag off the smoking cigarette and then raised her arms up into the air the way Kai had done on countless mornings as a child.
Lettie waited for her to lay back onto her pillows and lift her hips so could ease the wet bottoms off. She tossed them toward the hamper, which she would empty and wash after stripping the bed again. She opened the plastic container of baby wipes, blue with white ducks dancing across its lid.
“It’s going to be cold,” she warned, and her mother only harrumphed and swore when she pressed the wipe to her body. “Sorry.”
Lettie made quick work of the mess, tossed the used baby wipes in to a plastic bin wedged between the bed and the dresser. All the while, I couldn’t help but appreciate my transformation, the body I used and its impervious nature. I would never grow sick and age. I could die, yes. But not age, and watching this old woman waste away made me suddenly very grateful for that.
Lettie found fresh clothes in the drawer. A cheerful white t-shirt with cherries printed in diagonal rows. She matched this with a nice pair of satin bottoms that reminded her of the women in the yoga videos she used to watch on television not long after Kai was born. Back then, everyone in the world seemed to be telling her that if she didn’t get her body back into shape that her husband would find a better, younger body to plunge his cock into. Well, he’d done that anyway, hadn’t he?
Once the woman was dressed, Lettie offered her the glass ashtray on the bedside so the paper could be smashed to black cinders. Still smoking, Lettie put the ashtray back on the table and then laced her arms under her mother’s. She lifted, pulling and tugging and grunting until the woman somehow made it from the mattress into the unsteady black seat wedged between two giant silver wheels.
Then their routine began anew. She made biscuits, eggs, and pan-fried some bologna. She served it all with a large iced diet coke in a plastic tumbler. After she moved her mother to the television, she made sure her mother had the diet coke and her cigarettes at hand. She liked to have both while watching her shows. Women with six potential baby daddies and soap operas where someone always had a twin or was coming back from the dead featured often.
While her mother watched television, she stripped the room, opened all the windows wider, and sprayed the Lysol. She changed the trashcan too, and got the laundry into the wash.
It wasn’t until then that she returned to her room.
She hovered outside the door, listening to the jeering crowd on the television blare behind her, a hateful sound punctuated only by her mother’s own derisive laugh.
She took a breath and pressed hard against the door. It eased open, slowly, the way doors open in horror movies to reveal the whole family murdered and entrails hanging from the ceiling.
But there was no body.
Her mattress was upturned and now stood against the wall, the underside facing her. Several drawers had been left hanging open. Some had been left on the floor, stacked on top of one another. Several of her paperbacks had flown about the place. Some landed faced down. At least one had its pages ripped out. She’d finished that one at least. Small scraps of paper with unreadable black letters had landed like confetti across the bed, clothes, and the dresser. One of the curtain rods, a cheap white metal bar, had swung off its hook and hung across the window, the curtain having slid off into a heap on the floor.
She stepped over all of this carefully and went to the closet.
On the floor was a heap of her photographs. Glossy prints from an age when film was still allergic to light and the slightest exposure could destroy all the collected happiness from a life.
She knelt onto the carpet and picked up the first photo she saw.
Kai was four. I knew because she was holding up her pudgy baby hand with her four fingers erect, the thumb folded across the palm, letting the viewer know exactly how old she was. And if that still left doubt, there was the single 4 candle on top of a white cake with blue trimmed frosting. And the pink and green hat that said happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday in big block letters over and over again—as if it had something to prove. As if it insisted that this little girl have one moment of happiness.
Her blond curls were pulled up in a ponytail, her grin bright and one of her OshKosh B’gosh overall straps hung down, unsnapped.
Lettie smoothed the photograph flat across her bent thigh and reached forward for one of the large overturned shoeboxes. She put this photograph in the bottom of the cardboard box and picked up another, smoothing this one as well before putting it face up in the box.
She heard a small sound behind her and turned. Her mother sat in her wheelchair, burning cigarette poised between her two bony fingers, glaring down at her. Her face was dark, unamused.
“I don’t know why you do this to yourself,” her mother said, raising the cigarette to her lips and sucking at the white pa
per with shriveled lips.
“Please don’t start,” Lettie said, turning away, and I had the sense I was watching my own version of a soap opera. The infamous mother-daughter chat.
Lettie had most of the photographs in the box now. For the most part, it seemed as if they had moved backward in time. From the teenage Kai in a softball uniform to a middle school Kai in front of a cheap keyboard one Christmas morning, and at last, all those photos of Kai as a baby, chubby cheeked and smiling.
“If you just gave him what he asked for, Merek wouldn’t torment you like he does,” she said, ignoring Lettie’s plea. “He—” she began, but whatever she meant to say was choked out by a fit of coughing. White-gray smoke billowed out of those bruise-colored lips, obscuring her face for a moment.
“Yes, he would, and you know it,” Lettie said, wondering why her mother had bothered to wheel herself back here. To taunt her? Scold her? Torment her?
Besides, her mother was wrong. Lettie knew if she invited him, he would keep coming back for more. As pathetic as it might seem, her refusals, her resistance, did slow him down. She knew it did. It was easy prey he preferred. And sometimes, she was easy, and she supposed that was the part of the problem.
“He can’t be blamed any more than your daddy could’ve been blamed for all his drinking and whoring,” her mother said. “What’s in the blood will out, and you just can’t be hating people for that.”
Lettie snorted. If this was her mother’s version of a pep talk, she’d rather not.
“Don’t take sass with me, Lettie Cole.”
Lettie scooped up the last of the glossy photographs and smoothed them against her thigh. One she placed in the rippled pile with a few others which had been torn. She’d have to find the scotch tape and put them back together again. After that, she might try to call Kai. Seeing her face had incited this urge to hear her sweet voice. So many versions of that face, a baby so joyful sometimes, she wasn’t sure she was hers, if not for the long ugly scar from her navel to the patch of light hair between her legs. A scar she got because Kai had been breach, feet first, either because she was unwilling to enter the world she knew was waiting, or because she was ready to hit it running.
