How I Survived My Summer Vacation

by Various

  She had votive candles. She had matches. There was just one thing left.

  She found the caretaker, out front, having a smoke break.

  “What do you want now?” he asked, his tone and expression surly.

  Buffy gave him her nicest smile. “Could you show me where I can fill up my water bottle?” she asked.

  “I hate to say this,” Buffy said. “But I need you to understand that —”

  “I know — no promises,” Mrs. Aragon interrupted.

  The two women stood just outside the church, watching the sun go down. The caretaker was long gone. As Buffy had promised earlier in the day, she’d waited until the shopkeeper arrived to put her plan into action. It was almost time now.

  Quickly, Buffy checked her supplies. Candles. Matches. Bottle of water. Check. Check. Check.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess it’s time to get this show on the —”

  “Wait!” Mrs. Aragon blurted out as Buffy moved forward. The Slayer stopped, surprised. “I want to apologize,” Mrs. Aragon went on, her tone halting. “For . . . the . . . things I said last night. I should not have spoken so.”

  “It’s all right. I think I understand,” Buffy said softly. It was how she felt about Angel, in a way. So close, and yet so far. “I just don’t think this is something we have to fight,” Buffy went on.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Mrs. Aragon said.

  You got that right, Buffy thought.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  The shopkeeper nodded.

  “Then let’s do it,” Buffy said. Together, the two women walked toward the graveyard.

  Mrs. Aragon got into position to await Buffy’s signal. The Slayer halted just outside the fence, at the grave of the elder Josefina Maria Alonzo. As she had the night before, she set a votive candle atop the gravestone. Then she tucked her refilled bottle of water under her arm and pulled out the book of matches.

  “Are you ready?” she called.

  “I am ready,” Mrs. Aragon called back.

  Well, here goes nothing, the Slayer thought.

  She struck a match and lit the votive candle.

  Almost at once, she felt the blast of icy air. Josefina Alonzo exploded into being before her, her mouth open in a mournful wail.

  “Why do you torment me?” she cried out. “Why do you summon me if you will give me no peace?”

  The children around Josefina cried and clung to her skirts, as if infected by her pain.

  Quickly, Buffy took the cap off the bottle of water.

  Was she supposed to say something? she wondered. Perform some sort of ritual?

  “Josefina Maria Alonzo, I confront you with the manner of your death.”

  Buffy raised the bottle and pushed down hard in the very center, sending a spray of water straight at the spirit.

  A wild shriek split the night air. As Buffy watched, Josefina’s form began to bleed and blur around the edges, like a chalk sidewalk painting being slowly washed away by the rain.

  Bingo! she thought.

  “Why have you done this to me?” the spirit wailed. “All I wanted was to find my child, my Josefina. Without this form, I will lose that chance. I will be confined to the realm of the shapeless ones, forever. Even if I find her now, she will never know me. I will fail.”

  “You won’t,” the Slayer said. “I know where she is. But you have to promise to let the others go.”

  “My child! You have seen my child?” the spirit asked.

  “No, but I know where to find her,” Buffy said. “But you have to let the others go. It’s not right for you to hold them.”

  “All I wanted was to find my daughter,” Josefina said. “I never meant to hold so many others. But once I had called them, they were bound to me. I could not bear to release them until I had found my daughter. If you show me my Josefina, I will release the others. I swear it.”

  Good enough for me, Buffy thought.

  “Now!” she shouted.

  In the far corner of the graveyard, a single match flared. For one split second, Buffy saw the face of Mrs. Aragon, outlined in the sudden glare. Then the shopkeeper touched the match to another votive candle. The one resting on top of the young Josefina’s grave. The candle sputtered, then sprang to life.

  And a child materialized above the long-neglected grave.

  Her dark hair tumbled to her shoulders. She was dressed in a plain white nightdress.

  “Mama,” she cried out. “Mama, where are you? I am frightened.”

  “Josefina!” her mother said.

  With a cry, the young girl launched herself forward. The spirit of her mother met her halfway. The mother reached out and enfolded the daughter into her arms.

  “My child. My daughter. I have found you at last.” Buffy heard her say.

  She put her hands on the chain-link fence and vaulted over, moving quickly to Cecelia Aragon’s grave. Mrs. Aragon was already there. As soon as she’d lit the candle for the young Josefina, she’d made her way to the grave of her own daughter, as she and Buffy had planned.

  “Remember your promise,” Buffy called out to the spirit.

  Josefina lifted her head. “My little ones, I release you,” she said. “Go to your rest. Wait for the day when your true mothers will call you home.”

  The spirits of the children rose up into the air. For just a moment, they clung together. Then they burst apart, flying in every direction. Their glad cries filled the night air. Then, one by one, they vanished. There would be lots of happy reunions during the next festival, Buffy thought.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “I am ready,” Mrs. Aragon answered. Carefully, Buffy struck one final match, and lit the candle she and Mrs. Aragon had placed earlier on Cecelia’s grave. The candle that would finally guide the young girl’s spirit to her mother.

  “It’s time to come home, Cecelia,” Buffy murmured.

  Time for your second chance.

  “Hi, honey,” Buffy’s father said.

  It was late when Buffy let herself into her dad’s apartment. The living room lights were blazing, the TV on low. A tantalizing smell filled the air, one that made Buffy’s mouth water.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said. “Do I smell popcorn?”

  Her father poked his head in from the kitchen. “Got it in one,” he said. He hesitated, as if uncertain how to handle the next moment. “How was your evening?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Buffy answered. Before heading out to the graveyard, she’d left a message for her father on the Cathy notepad, saying she was going out with old friends. And she’d given Cathy a handlebar mustache.

  “I was thinking I’d watch a late movie. Care to join me?” her father asked.

  “Can we watch a Bugs Bunny tape first?” Buffy asked.

  Her father’s face lit up in a surprised and delighted grin. Watching Bugs together on Saturday morning had once been one of their most cherished family rituals.

  “You know it,” Hank Summers said. “Pick one that has a couple Wile E. Coyotes on it, will you?”

  “Sure thing,” Buffy said. “I’m just gonna go dump my stuff.”

  “I’ll finish putting way too much butter and salt on the popcorn,” her father said.

  Buffy went into her bedroom, shed her shoulder bag and jacket. Then she took off her boots and put her bunny slippers on. Finally, she stopped in the bathroom to splash some water on her face. She looked at her face in the mirror.

  Not a bad evening, all in all, she told her reflection. Even if it wasn’t her usual Slayer-type event. Buffy had reunited two sets of mothers and daughters. And she hadn’t had to kill anything. Not even something that was already dead.

  Buffy had given Father Hernandez’s confession to Mrs. Aragon on the ride home. The shopkeeper had promised to see to it that the older Josefina’s grave was moved, inside the cemetery this time. And close to her daughter, so they would never be parted again. It had taken almost a hundred years, but the evil caused by Rafael
Alonzo would finally be undone.

  Josefina and her daughter, too, would have a second chance.

  Buffy toweled her face, headed for the living room. Her father was crouched in front of the VCR, pawing through his movie collection. A huge bowl of popcorn sat in the center of the coffee table.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be home, so I didn’t rent anything,” Hank Summers said. “I don’t think I have any — what do they call them — chick flicks.”

  “Good use of the lingo,” Buffy praised. “Have you been studying again?”

  Her father laughed.

  Suddenly happier than she’d been in weeks, Buffy knelt beside him to study the movie collection. “What about this one?” she asked.

  It, too, had been a tradition when she’d been growing up, though she didn’t think they’d ever watched it in the summertime.

  “You want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life?” her father asked, his tone surprised.

  “Yeah,” the Slayer said.

  Her father reached out and ruffled her hair, just like he’d done when Buffy was a little girl.

  “Okay, hero,” he said. “You’re on.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Jenny Calendar tapped a fingernail on the colorful flyer she’d just slid across the library counter in front of Rupert Giles. “Come on, Rupert. It’ll be fun.”

  Giles squinted down at the red, white and blue piece of paper. Curved across the top, in screamingly bright red, three-dimensional block letters, were the words JOIN OUR UNCLE SAM CELEBRATION!!! “ ‘It’ll be fun,’ ” he repeated. “Why do I always cringe when I hear that phrase?”

  Jenny tilted her head. “It will,” she insisted. She folded her arms and gave him a stern look. “Plus it will get you out of this musty old library. It’s summer, remember? The birds are singing, the sun is shining —”

  “Yes,” he interrupted. “And there are biting mosquitoes and sunburns to be had by one and all. Must we share in the experience?”

  “We must,” she said. “Besides, it’s about time you learned to appreciate this holiday. It’s all about tradition.”

  “I’m quite well informed in my history,” he said huffily.

  “I’m sure you know the British version very well,” Jenny shot back. “But you live here now. You need to be imbued with the American spirit.”

  He gave her a dark look. “Thank you, but such as things are around Sunnydale, I’d prefer to avoid being imbued with anything. Spiritual or otherwise.”

  A corner of Jenny’s mouth lifted in a pretty smile, and despite himself, Giles felt his resolve weakening. “Point taken, but really, Rupert — lighten up. I just can’t let you spend the best months of the year tucked away in the library and hiding behind the excuse of a handful of summer-school students.” She pointed again at the flyer. “Besides, it’s on a Saturday.”

  Blast it. “The Fourth of July is . . . Saturday?” He felt his last excuse slip away.

  She nodded. “Yes, Rupert. And that would be tomorrow. Amazing how the calendar sometimes arranges that. Tuesday comes after Monday, Saturday comes after Friday —”

  “Yes,” he cut in. “I believe I get it.” He shivered as the air conditioning suddenly kicked on and a cool draft skittered across the back of his neck, too much skin exposed by the casual summer shirt. He much preferred the formal shirt, vest, and tweed jacket that was his usual attire the rest of the year, but Jenny had pointed out that he was standing out among the summer faculty and students like a green cabbage in a petunia bed. He was sure that somewhere behind that observation was a gentle bit of mockery, but he couldn’t pinpoint it enough to defend himself.

  “So I’ll pick you up at three?”

  Giles blinked and mentally searched his schedule, desperately trying to find something — anything — that would rescue him. “Well, I —”

  “Great,” Jenny said brightly. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.” She turned and strode briskly away.

  “Wait,” Giles said. “What about, er, tonight . . .?”

  Jenny paused and looked at him inquisitively. “Tonight? Oh, no. Last night was a new moon. I have an on-line chat with my Wiccan group that starts at dusk. We probably won’t be finished until after midnight.”

  Giles nodded. “An on-line chat. Of course. I’ll call you, then?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” she reminded him. “The phone will be tied up tonight.” She gave him a cheerful good-bye smile. “Have a great evening.”

  “Right.”

  “And Giles?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “Please try to get out of this stuffy old library. There’s a big, beautiful country out there, just waiting for you to encounter it.”

  Giles only nodded as another wave of damp air inexplicably caressed the back of his neck.

  It had taken Patrick Beverly a long time to come home.

  Of course, the home he’d thought he was headed for had things like air conditioning, overstuffed furniture in the living room, a waterbed in his room, his pipe-smoking Dad watching Sunday basketball while his Mom baked — cookies, dark fudge brownies or sometimes a cherry pie — for her Monday evening Bridge Club. It had a cranky old cat named, courtesy of his own less than creative mind at eight years old, Hisser. It had heat in the winter, electric lights at night, and sunlight streaming through his Mom’s handmade lace curtains.

  Yeah, most of all, it had sunlight.

  Scowling, Patrick looked around his new, and hopefully, temporary abode. It had a window, true, and someone had thoughtfully put a pattern of dark stained glass in it, some patron saint or another instead of a cross, thank you very much. It also had mildewed concrete walls, a cold floor, and six tombs in it. One of them was his, and oh, joy — there was his bed now: nice oak wood, the equivalent of satin sheets and a pillow. Too bad it was a coffin instead of a four-poster.

  He scuffed his shoes along the floor — nice, dirty concrete there, too — and sulked. Some rest of his life this had turned out to be. Join the Army and serve your country and look what had happened — they’d shipped him over to Bosnia and he hadn’t even had the honor of getting shot down by an enemy sniper, or blown up by a rocket. Oh no, Private Patrick Beverly had sucked in one too many lungfuls of sooty, frigid air (after being repeatedly reminded by his C.O. to wear his filter mask) and had come down with pneumonia.

  A grueling, fever-filled airplane ride had gotten him home and then into the V.A. Medical Center in Washington, D.C. To make matters worse, his weakened lungs invited in a new visitor — imagine, him, a guy barely nineteen, with TB! He’d thought it was an old person’s disease, not something for the twenty-first century. For crying out loud, his grandmother had endured it in the 1920s and won. Why was he having such a hard time with it now?

  The crud in his lungs, that’s why — smoke from the barrel fires he and his buddies had built to warm their hands over, drifting ash and soot from bombed-out buildings, all settling deeply into tissue he’d never considered could be so fragile. Months had passed, too many to count, while he lay in a blood-tinged fog, isolated from all but masked doctors, nurses and aides who washed his wasting body like he was an infant. But he was getting better, his body slowly fighting off the TB while his lungs struggled to clear themselves of the black sludge embedded in the tissues. He’d been too ill — nearly comatose — to know how much time had passed, but his parents had finally gotten the go-ahead to transfer him back home to Sunnydale. Another month or two as they waited for a bed to open up, then voilá — he was as close to home as he’d seen since the break between boot camp and his assignment to Fort Stewart in Georgia. A nice, sun-filled room at the back corner of the V.A. medical facility right here in his hometown, another couple of months and hey, he could actually walk again instead of being trundled around in a wheelchair. Rehab then, and he’d been . . . what? A week, maybe two, away from finally, finally going home, when he’d met the girl.

  The hell of it was, he couldn’t even remember her name, or w
hat she’d been doing there, or . . . anything beyond the fact that two nights after she’d introduced herself, she had slipped into his room and made herself a nice dinner out of the side of his neck. Who knew why she’d turned him — amusement perhaps, maybe even a misplaced sense of guilt out of chowing down on a good ol’ American service boy pulled back from the brink of death and about to finally go home.

  Well, she’d sent him “home” all right.

  Patrick didn’t like this being a vampire business. In fact, it sucked. He couldn’t go out in the daylight, he was dirty, this place smelled like dust, old rat droppings, and mummified flesh, he was hungry all the time, and all he wanted to do was bite people. What was the deal with this sudden craving for blood, when a few days ago all he could think about was that he was only hours away from being able to sit down to his mom’s homemade corned beef and cabbage?

  He felt like a runaway kid: lonely, dirty, and stuck in a hiding place instead of being able to go out and play. And even the hiding place had its tiers of importance. His was at the bottom in the back, the last slot. It had taken him a while to get it, but then he realized his parents had put his body in a long, unused family spot in Sunnydale Cemetery, one originally intended for his war hero grandfather. Grandpa, however, had come back from World War II and met himself a grand old matron from Seattle. He’d moved there and married her when Patrick was little, and the now-deceased couple were moldering happily away in a dual plot in the rain-soaked ground of the Northwest.

  So here was Patrick Beverly, turned nineteen right before he left the Washington V.A. center, buried with a bunch of dead World War II fogies. Ugh.

  Bored, restless, Patrick poked around the inside of the small mausoleum, reading the inscriptions on the other tombs. There wasn’t a single inscription for anyone younger than seventy except for him — it figured he would be the only young person in here. And what was with this uniform his parents had buried him in, anyway? Dull, dull, dull, and besides, he’d had more than enough of the military when he’d been alive, and look at what it had gotten him.

  Say . . . maybe one of these old farts had something a little brighter.