The Society of S

by Susan Hubbard

Page 42

  Her blue eyes looked joyous and exhausted. “Don’t try to speak now, darling,” she said. “Just breathe. ”

  What happened? I sent the thought to her. Where’s my father?

  There was a fire, she began.

  I know that much! If she saw the words, they must be purple.

  No need for sarcasm, she shot back. I guess you must be feeling better.

  I opened my mouth, but she said, “Hush. Your father is alive. ”

  In what we call “The Movie,” Dr. Van Helsing makes a pronouncement found nowhere in Bram Stoker’s novel: “The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him. ”

  For many vampires, that statement is more than a favorite aphorism — it’s a central tenet of the philosophy of the undead. Despite all evidence to the contrary, humans are more comfortable with the most convoluted theories that contradict our existence than with the simple fact that we share the planet with them. We’re here, and we’re not going away.

  My father, recovering from third-degree burns, was given a tracheotomy and skin grafts he didn’t need. The doctors couldn’t accept what their eyes told them: despite being found unconscious and badly burned in a raging chemical fire, he’d suffered minimal damage to his lungs and skin, and he was healing rapidly. Yet they kept him under observation in the intensive care unit, and they didn’t allow visitors.

  I celebrated my birthday in the hospital. A candlelit Twinkie was delivered on a tray.

  My gift was seeing my father for the first time since the fire. My mother wheeled me into his room, littered with monitoring devices connected to his body. The outline of his body beneath the sheets was slight for such a tall man. He was sleeping. I’d never before seen him asleep. His eyelashes, long and dark, lay against his cheek — like butterfly wings, I thought.

  He opened his eyes. “Butterfly wings?” he said, his voice incredulous.

  Mãe and I laughed, and he smiled — his real smile, not the scholarly one. “Happy birthday,” he said to me. His voice sounded soft. “Your fireworks arrived a few days early. ”

  I tried not to ask questions, but my brain generated them anyway.

  “I don’t know,” he said, when I asked, Who started the fire?

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, when I asked, Who rescued us?

  “Well, I can answer that one,” Mãe said. “I did. Along with the help of Siesta Key’s finest fire squad. ”

  Mãe had been driving down I-4 in what she called “hideous rain,” when she picked up my first “distress signal. ”

  “You couldn’t breathe,” she said. “It came through to me as clearly as if you hadn’t been born yet. ” She turned to my father. “Remember that time when her heartbeat increased, and you thought she was in fetal distress? And I told you no, I’d know it if that happened. ”

  “Isn’t the idea of knowing such a thing a bit of a cliché?” My voice was as innocent as I could manage.

  She rubbed her eyes. “You must be feeling better. ”

  My father put his hand in the air — then looked at the intravenous needle taped to it. He thought about ripping it out, and my mother and I both said, “No!”

  “All right,” he said. “The needle stays. But only so long as Sara tells the story in a linear fashion, without a thousand digressions. Is that possible?”

  She tried.

  She’d arrived in Sarasota to find the traffic lights out, and only a few streetlights working. Her truck was the only vehicle on the road, and she blazed through intersections, feeling like an anarchist.

  She apologized for the digressive simile. But she’d always wondered what it would feel like to be an anarchist.

  When she arrived at Xanadu (my father shook his head at the name), flames coming from unit 1235 were visible from the street. The elevators weren’t working, and in any case she knew the door to the condominium would be locked. She didn’t have a key, or a cell phone, but she remembered seeing a fire station at the intersection of Midnight Pass and Beach Road. So she drove there.

  “They were sitting in the station watching the Weather Channel,” she said. “They’d put out a fire about an hour previously —” She looked at my father. “All right, I won’t tell you about that. ”

  When the fire trucks arrived at Xanadu, she said, a ladder truck drove to the back of the building, and another crew went up the stairs, carrying extinguishers, a hose, and other equipment. They told her to stay behind, but she trailed after them.

  “Ever the obedient one,” my father said.

  Then a nurse walked into the room, wearing a brightly patterned smock. My father shuddered at its design and closed his eyes.

  “Time for visitors to leave. ” The nurse smiled at us, most insincerely.

  My mother sighed, and abruptly hypnotized her.

  “Only for a few minutes,” she said. “Let me finish telling this. So, they were trying to get in through the metal shutters at the back, and the others used axes to break down the front door. I am very impressed with the Siesta Key firefighters, in particular the ones from Station 13. They pried off the shutters somehow and found Ari in the study, and carried her down in the basket thing. Or is it a bucket? What do you call it? Never mind.

  “And you were the first one we found. ” She looked at my father as if she might cry. “You were in bad shape. Much worse than you-know-who, and much worse than Ari. You were black with soot, and oh, the burns on your back —”

  “Who’s you-know-who?” His shoulders moved off the pillows, as if he were trying to sit up.

  I’d never known my father to interrupt anyone. He’d always said that, no matter how dire the situation, rudeness is inexcusable.

  “Lie back. ” My mother stretched her hands as if to push him, and his shoulders fell back. “Malcolm,” she said. “You-know-who is Malcolm. You’re too weak to read my thoughts. ”

  “He was there?” I asked.

  “They found him in the entryway, not far from your father. ” Her eyes were on his face, not mine. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “How did he get in?” my father asked no one in particular.

  “He must have made himself invisible,” I said. “He might have come in when I put out the trash. Then, when the fire got to him, he would have lost the concentration and become visible again. But Father might not have seen him in the smoke. ”

  “I’d thought Raphael must have let him in. ” Mãe pushed her hair back, straightened her shirt.

  “I saw no one. ” He lifted his hand again, looked at the IV with disgust. “I awoke with smoke in my room. I found the fire near the kitchen and tried to put it out, but it moved too quickly. The smoke was overwhelming. ”

  “Ethyl ether,” Mãe said. “That’s how it started. The firemen found a canister in the kitchen. Whoever planned it did a thorough job. He even took the batteries out of the backup switch for the hurricane shutters. ”

  “Malcolm started it,” I said. “It makes sense. ”

  My father said, “It could have been Dennis, I suppose. But I tend to agree with you — Malcolm’s more likely. Why didn’t he leave, after he set the fire?”

  Mãe said, “I suspect he wanted to watch. ” Her voice was bitter.

  “Where is he now?” I hoped that he was dead.

  “Who knows?” Mãe’s face looked far away. “They put him in an emergency van to take him to the hospital, but somehow or another they lost him. When they opened the doors, the van was empty. ”

  “He escaped. ” My father sank into his pillows and closed his eyes.

  “You need to rest. ” My mother woke up the nurse, and we said good-night.

  Back in my room, I told her about the argument the day of the fire — and about the expression on Malcolm’s face as he left.

  She didn’t show surprise. “Yes, he loves Raphael,” she said. “I’ve known that for years. ”

 
And her face, and her voice when she said his name, told me that she loved my father, too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  On a sweltering afternoon about a month later, Harris and I were lounging at either end of a hammock on the front porch of a house owned by Mãe’s friends in Kissimmee. The friends were in Orlando for the day, so we had the place to ourselves. An overhead fan kept the air circulating enough to keep us tolerably cool, and we drank lemonade in tall glasses through long, bendable straws.

  I was writing in my journal. Harris was thumbing though an art book: The World’s Greatest Paintings.

  Hurricane Barry had not been kind to Homosassa Springs. Blue Beyond was no more. A storm surge from the river had destroyed most of the house, Mãe said, and the trees and gardens had been shredded by tornadoes. Luckily all of the animals had been evacuated safely — even the bees, whose hives had been moved off the property to higher ground and secured, before the storm. The statue of Epona also survived intact, and currently guarded the front door of the house where we were staying.

  Mãe and Dashay sat up late, talking about whether the structure could be rebuilt. They’d been back to Homosassa twice, and each time they returned to Kissimmee with rescued items and more stories. Flo’s Place and the Riverside Resort were ruins, missing roofs and walls, their windows smashed despite plywood nailed up to protect them. Monkey Island was nothing but a rock, its trees and rope bridges gone. Its lighthouse had been found floating in the river several miles away.

  Today they’d left an hour before, to make another assessment of the damage and do some cleaning up. They’d invited me to come along. I declined. I didn’t want to see the destruction.

  My father was in Ireland. He’d sent me a postcard of an island in a lake; the message read “Peace comes dropping slow,” a line from a Yeats poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree. ” After his too-lengthy convalescence in the hospital, he decided he’d had enough of Florida. Root went on a summer vacation, and my father flew to Shannon to explore, possibly to find a new home base. He’d invited me to come along. That offer, too, I declined. I needed time to sort things out.

  For the first time in my life I wondered about my future life. Would I go to college? Get a job? It had been months since I’d spent time with teenagers. In becoming other, I’d lost my contemporaries, my friends.

  Human friends, at any rate. At some point Harris nudged me and pointed at a painting in his book — John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. It could have been a portrait of my mother, I thought, and Harris thought so, too. Pleased that we agreed, he settled back into his end of the hammock again, and I returned to my brooding.

  I wondered if I’d have a boyfriend. Michael and I had talked on the phone a few more times, but we found less and less to say. I couldn’t tell him I knew who killed Kathleen, and that knowledge constrained my end of our conversations.

  And I wondered if Malcolm was out there, somewhere. Would I spend my life being stalked by him?

  Or would I spend it trying to reconcile my parents? I didn’t know how things stood between them. My father had left for Ireland without confiding in me. When I asked my mother, her face was enigmatic. “The summer’s not over yet,” she said.

  The front gate’s buzzer rang, and I was glad to stop my thinking.