Diary of an Alligator Queen

by Winter Reid

  I smiled a little. “I’m listening.”

  “A doctor has five patients. All are gonna die unless they get a transplant. Say, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, penis.”

  “Penis?”

  “Just an example.”

  “Okay.”

  “So a young man comes to town. He’s hiking across country. Healthy kid but he twisted his ankle, so he goes to see the doctor. The doctor finds out this kid is totally alone. No family. No tight friends. No schedule, even. He’s just wandering around looking for direction. Does the doctor have the moral authority to kill this kid, harvest his organs, and save five other lives?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. Everybody says no. It’s the difference between passive participation in death and active participation in death.”

  “What if the kid is a serial killer?”

  “You’re starting down a road loaded with landmines, kid.”

  “What if he offers to do it?”

  Renfield watched me for a few minutes before answering. “Still active participation, sweetheart.”

  My fingers went to my neck, tangling in the scarf I wore, not because of the weather, but because it stopped me from touching my scar whenever I was uncomfortable. I’d told Jackson habits were hard to break but that didn’t make them good for us. I didn’t want to draw comfort from the physical evidence of what Meidias had done to me. I didn’t want the way he’d hurt me to be what I reached for when I thought of him.

  “So if the kid is a serial killer who wants to die,” I posited, “it’s still not okay?”

  “It’s a thought experiment, Nadine. The answers aren’t cut-and-dried. The perceived morality of the situation changes with the experiment’s variables.”

  “Is there a variant where the doctor’s judgement is clouded because he’s friends with the kid?”

  He smiled. “Maybe because she’s like the daughter he never had.”

  “You just like me for my prions.”

  “I love you because you’re a miracle. And you’re funny as shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The vines along the scrapyard fence had gone dormant with the cooler weather, their foliage shifting color from green to ochre and red, bare but for the tips. I didn’t have a leather coat, but I had a rolled-up section of carpet. Draping it over the razor wire, I jumped the fence, doing a better job than I had the first time.

  The train cars were still at the back of the yard, covered with fallen oak leaves. I opened hers, but it was empty. No candlelight. No blankets or pillows.

  Meidias had been there to clean it out. Recently, at that. As my vision adjusted to the darkness, I caught sight of a small piece of paper in the corner. The photograph. I held it up in the scanty light coming from the open door and flipped it over.

  Jack Bates, 1861 was written across the top in pencil and underneath in pen:

  To my Beloved Evelyn,

  That we should never forget where we came from.

  Jack

  Christmas, 1974

  I sank to the floor and wept.

  On October thirty-first, I walked through St. Catherine Street hoping Meidias’s ghost fingers would reach out to me. Downtown was a madhouse, with greasepaint zombies everywhere, soaked in synthetic blood. Scary clowns terrorized screeching women dressed as sexy anythings and dead hookers. Holy rollers preached and passed out pamphlets on the street corners, and some asshole in blackface was getting the verbal shit kicked out of him by a couple of black women outside the west entrance of the Piccadilly Theatre. With the exception of the travesty that was my state’s combined celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Robert E. Lee Day, there was no holiday on the calendar that better illustrated the split personality of the South than Halloween.

  My heart had started aching after I left Jack and Evelyn’s. Ached with no hint it would stop anytime soon. I slipped into a club to numb the feeling with a couple shots of tequila and tried to remember the last time I’d eaten. It was getting harder and harder to keep track of those things. Funny how Meidias said new vampires never drank enough. I’d been drinking plenty since he left.

  “Nadine, right?” a voice asked from the stool next to mine. A pair of dimples smiled at me. “We met a couple months ago over by the library.”

  The kid in the Nikes. Dressed as a zombie. Typical.

  “Right. I remember.” I tried to smile, the pain in my chest getting worse. Zombie or not, he was awful pretty. I remembered the way I’d been too good to kiss him before, too loyal. “Where’s your princess?” I asked.

  “Halley. We broke up. Nice fangs.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I left on the sly three shots later after a Hello Kitty from Dimples’ sister sorority swooped in and dragged him over to the dance floor. Drinking hadn’t stopped the ache in my chest but it confused the shit out of my legs and I stumbled a couple times on the street when bodies crashed into me. Seeing the boy again got me wondering what exactly it was I was waiting for. I wasn’t hunting anymore. That was over. Done. I couldn’t have killed a vampire if I’d wanted to. And Meidias was gone.

  I had this idea of how I wanted to go out. How I wanted to exit stage left. It was poetic and beautiful and sunny, but it required me to be as close to fully vampire as possible. When I’d first hatched the idea, it made a lot of sense. In light of recent developments, it seemed kind of pointless to stick around. Plus, the closer I came to being a fully-developed vampire, the more likely it would be that I wouldn’t be able to control myself. Meidias’s plan to off himself all those months ago had been equally poetic and look where it had gotten me.

  But the truth is, life is a hard thing to give up. It’s precious. Tenuous. Brief on a cosmic scale, even for immortals. The odds of us being alive at all—in terms of the planet, the species… I mean, Earth and her inhabitants won roll after roll of the dice, from the time we were all soup. I’d been firmly attached to my body for thirty years. How could I just let it go? I loved it. I loved it chunky and skinny. I loved it broken and whole. I loved what it was capable of, and how it allowed the incorporeal consciousness in my brain to interact with the physical world around me.

  The easiest answer was that I needed to find someone who wouldn’t mind taking me out. Who hadn’t managed to complicate things by falling in love with me or making me fall in love with them.

  I staggered my way over to the Historic District, quiet and peaceful as it always was at night. Stopping in the bakery doorway, I bit my wrist hard, letting two thick rivulets of blood drip down my fingers before I started walking again, circling blocks. Marking the whole area with my scent before ducking into an alleyway to wait.

  I sat with my back against the bricks, remembering. A Little Match Girl who painted scenes with blood instead of fire. I didn’t reminisce about the time I got caught jumping the turnstile at fourteen. Or the first time I had sex with Jackson in my own apartment. I was too shit-faced to remember anything except that I’d dumped a bottle of champagne in a box of my art history textbooks. What I remembered was the time I spent with Meidias, tucked in a womb of dirt under a broken tree. I flipped back through our minutes, letting each one catch and develop like Polaroid photographs. I closed my eyes and went to him, dancing through the space between consciousness and sleep.

  I didn’t want to fucking wake up again. I was tired of waking up in hospital beds. I was tired of being hurt. Tired of thinking and feeling. I wanted the absence of thought. Not dreams, but nothingness.

  I didn’t want to wake up, but I did. In a strange bed with Meidias’s taste in my mouth, the feel of his touch on my skin.

  “Welcome back, sweetheart,” Renfield said. “How’s your head?”

  Struggling to sit up, I looked around at the room, white and clean with blonde hardwood floors. Floor to ceiling windows lined the west wall, blinds open. The last hints of a recent sunset lined sparse clouds in a fading pink. We were at least five stories up. High enough to have a view of much of
the city. It was beautiful, all twinkle lights and traffic snarls.

  The bed was huge, probably a California king, and I was tucked right in its center, a down comforter heavy on my legs.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  Remy smiled. “My place.”

  “Your place,” I echoed softly. My wrist was bandaged and strapped down to something hard. An IV dripping blood hung from the headboard. “What happened?”

  “You got wasted and tried to check out early, doll.” He stood up, checking my eyes with a penlight. “Tapetum lucidum. Interesting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Eyeshine. It’s faint, but it’s there.”

  “Remy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Tapetum lucidum. It’s a membrane behind the retina that reflects the available light. It’s why critters see better at night than humans do. That wasn’t there six months ago, darlin’.”

  “I was looking for a vampire,” I said. “That’s what I was doing last night.”

  “A week ago. And you found one.”

  “Meidias promised he wouldn’t stop me.” Tears stung my eyes. “Why do I taste him?”

  Renfield considered his answer for a minute, cocking his head to the side to study me. “You taste him because he’d bleed out to save you,” he said, pointing to the IV. “And did he promise you he wouldn’t stop someone else? Because from what I understand, he got there just in time to stop some lunatic wooly mammoth from tearing you to pieces.”

  “He should have let him. This would all be over by now.”

  Renfield grunted. Reaching over to his dresser, he grabbed a framed photograph, pressing it into my free hand. A much younger Remy looked out from the glass, his arm flung around another man. They were both standing beside professional bicycles and wearing racing numbers, white teeth shining in blindingly beautiful smiles.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  Renfield put his elbows on the bed, leaning in so our heads were close. His breath smelled like cinnamon and coffee. “That’s Patrick. My freshman year of med school, I walked into my first dissection lab for anatomy and this beautiful man was standing at my assigned table over our cadaver. Bluest eyes I’d ever seen. Sharp jaw. Black-brown hair… the man, not the cadaver. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the way he looked, I might have noticed he didn’t look so good… a little green around the gills. The whole place stank of formaldehyde. A little eau de death underneath. Anyway, he held out his hand, told me he was my lab partner in the heaviest Texas accent I’d ever heard in my life, and passed out cold.”

  I laughed. Renfield did, too, but his lip trembled at the end, and his eyes held that kind of sad-happy that only comes with loss.

  “This story doesn’t end well, does it?” I asked.

  “Patrick was the love of my life.” Remy smiled, running his fingers over the glass. “He was brilliant. A genius. But most importantly, he was kind. Brave. Out in a time when out meant ostracization at best.”

  “Was,” I whispered.

  Remy nodded. “ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. This was fifteen years ago so we had no legal marital status and his mother didn’t approve of our relationship. We’d been partners for two decades, but she tried to keep me from him at the end, even though I had Power of Attorney.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a privilege to love him as long as I did.” He picked up my hand, shaking his head. “Nadine, I would have done anything to keep him. Anything. So you need to understand that whatever Meidias told you, he told you because it was what you needed to hear in that moment. There’s a difference, though, between what he said and what he can bear. Just like there’s a difference between what you intend to do and what you’re capable of.”

  I said nothing.

  He tapped his fingers on the bed. “What if we make a deal, kid?”

  I gave him the hairy eyeball. “What kind of deal?”

  “I’ll be your failsafe.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “I don’t want to spend every day from now until the solstice—you New Age freak—worried about you offing yourself in some gruesome or outlandish way. One, you’re too pretty. Two, I think it’ll put Meidias over the edge if he finds you the way he did again, and you may not think he’s good or honorable, but—”

  “I do,” I broke in. “I do think he’s good.”

  Remy’s mouth tipped up at the corner. “You promise not to do anything crazy again. Every day, you send me a text or email detailing something you love about being alive. It can be short. It can be long. But it has to be honest, in fact and in intent. If you still think dying is the answer by the end of December, and you can’t seem to pull the trigger, I’ll help.”

  “Help?”

  “I’ll pump you so full of morphine you won’t feel a thing.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Wonderful.” He slapped my thigh through the blankets. “Can I interest you in breakfast?”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Renfield: It’s been a week. You better start squealing or the deal is off.

  Me: I love watching the sunrise over the Atlantic. Running at noon on Saturday. Eating real food. My parents.

  Renfield: Did someone say you couldn’t mourn those things? Try again.

  I sighed, dropping my phone back into my purse and looking up at the sign for Le Bonne Nuit. It was the last place I wanted to be, preferring lonely misery to social interactions. I could barely stand to be around myself since I’d left Remy’s apartment. The idea of spending time with other people, in public, was torturous. A slight tingle registered at the back of my neck and I cast a quick glance behind me at the street as I opened the door.

  He was there. Meidias. Standing on the sidewalk across the way, watching me. I froze for a split second before my feet started moving, crossing the street, dodging traffic in heels. I was terrified I wouldn’t get there fast enough, like he might disappear in the time it took me to reach him. He reached for my hand when I was a foot or so away and started moving, pulling me along behind him, until we came to a little city park, dark and quiet. Tugging me through the open gate, he guided me deep into a tight copse, his breath loud in the darkness. He turned around, cupping my cheeks in his hands.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  I nodded and then shook my head, covering his hands with mine, holding his wrists. He kissed my forehead first. Then my temples and cheeks. The bridge of my nose.

  “Don’t do that again,” he ordered.

  When I didn’t respond, he squeezed my cheeks harder, his mouth finding my own.

  “Stay with me,” he whispered between rough kisses. “Stay.”

  I wanted to. “I can’t.”

  His hands fell away and he pulled back when I reached for him, shaking his head and slipping away into the darkness.

  I should have gone back to the restaurant but I couldn’t. Walking home instead, I stopped under a yellow streetlight and pulled out my phone, bringing up my conversation with Remy.

  Me: I love his hands. The bones of his wrists.

  He didn’t respond until I got back to my apartment, a soft ping breaking the silence.

  Renfield: Better.

  I answered Bell’s call the next morning even though I didn’t want to.

  “Levitt, you sure know how to make a pregnant woman cry.”

  I sat back down on the couch to finish painting my toenails, wedging the phone between my neck and shoulder. My goddamn apartment was spotless, and I was bored out of my skull.

  “Something came up, Billy.”

  “She saw you. She saw you walk up to the door and walk away. She thinks she did something wrong.”

  I winced. “She does?”

  “You can’t just kick her out of your life with no explanation, Nadine.”

  Actually, he was wrong. I could and I had to. I had a five hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy that didn’t pay out for suicide. My parents were
listed as my beneficiaries. Without a body, they’d have to wait a few years and have me declared dead to collect it but it would give them an extra cushion at the end of their lives. The only drawback was that I couldn’t send any last heartfelt letters. I couldn’t act any differently than I had been acting for the last six months because I had a feeling my situation would get the hairy eyeball from my insurance company as it was. Bell didn’t even know anything solid about what I was becoming. He just had suspicions I neither confirmed nor denied.

  “Nadine.”

  I must have been quiet too long. “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “Nobody fucks with my baby, Nadine. Not even you.”

  Lacey squealed and jumped out of her seat, throwing her arms around my neck.

  The back deck of The Cantina was a lot colder than it had been after the First Ladies opening, but Lacey didn’t feel the chill.

  “I’m so hot all the time,” she whispered, sipping on a virgin margarita. “Like, hot, hot. And hot.”

  “Baby hormones?” I grinned.

  “I guess, but good lord, girl, I’m gonna miss them when they go away. My glory’s acting like a fourteen-year-old’s cock.”

  “Your glory?”

  “My girlie bits. You don’t look so good, honey.”

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  “There a reason for that?”

  “There is.”

  Her face changed a little, a tiny frown forming on her forehead. “Does it have dark hair, wear a leather coat, and smell like the woods?”

  I hesitated. “It does.”

  She let out a shaky breath and closed her eyes. “I thought I dreamed him.”

  “Lacey… do you remember more about that night than you let on?”

  Taking another drink, she shook her head. “No. I don’t remember much at all, but I remember him carrying me. I think because I had been so scared and then… when he was holding me, I felt safe. Protected.”