Even with the pizza and tea filling my belly, I just couldn’t shut off my mind. Hours passed as questions and connections occurred to me. I wanted to go back to Sundown and ask Wash another twenty or thirty things.
Finally, as the light of dawn peeked into my windows, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was dark again. I glanced at the clock, and was startled to learn that it was already five o’clock at night. My stomach did a small flip, alerting me to the fact that, yes, I hadn’t eaten anything as I slept the day away. So I collected my dishes and headed down to the kitchen.
I was more than a little surprised to find my mother, sitting alone at the table, a cup of what I assumed was coffee sitting on the table in front of her. She looked over at me and smiled. “I was about to come and ask you if you were planning on getting up.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply, so I went with a version of the truth. “I had some trouble getting to sleep last night. Sorry.”
“I heard. Nothing to be sorry about. You’re on vacation. No reason not to sleep in.”
I noticed there was something sitting on the table and it took me a moment to process what it was since I hadn’t seen it in months. “Is that my cell phone?”
My mother nodded, picking it up off the table and handing it to me. “I talked to your father yesterday and we both thought that, what with it getting dark out early and you not having a car; it’s been months since the accident…” She stopped for a moment, then tossed off a whistling breath of frustration. “I kind of had a speech prepared and I just blew it. Long story short, we think you should have your cell with you. You’re not grounded anymore. If you were still grounded. Were you still grounded?”
I thought about it for a second. “I really don’t remember. I think so. I think I was grounded until you decided to give me back my phone. Which I guess you just did.”
“I did. I charged it and everything so it’s ready to go if you plan on going out tonight.”
“Tonight I plan on eating something and probably going back to bed.”
My mom sat for a second, considering her next words. “Do you want to hear the rest of the speech?”
I sat down at the table next her. “Sure.”
“Well, the rest of it goes your dad and I are going to get you another car, although you won’t be able to drive it for a while. I suppose we’ll have time to find a deal on a good used one. We figure you’ll probably need it for college.”
I nodded my assent, though I really had no idea. College was not at the front of my mind right now. “Is that it?”
My mom considered. She seemed to want to say something, while at the same time not wanting to say it. Finally, she said, “How do waffles sound to you? Because I really want waffles.”
That sounded good to me so we got out the Bisquick and I rapidly learned my mom had no idea how to make waffles. Or bacon, which we found in the freezer and had to thaw.
She was, however, adept enough with the microwave to make us some hot chocolate, and thirty-odd minutes later we were having the breakfast I’d missed that morning.
We munched quietly, each lost in our own thoughts, when something occurred to me. “Where’s Chuck? He working?”
My mom stopped chewing, and set down her fork. “He’s at a family function.”
“Oh.” I allowed the room to lapse back into silence as I grabbed another strip of bacon and started crunching it.
A minute passed, followed by a second minute, and I started thinking about the creepy old house again, and how to ask my mom if she’d ever heard about a place where a whole bunch of folks were killed, and if I could borrow her credit card to get some back-dated news, when my mom spoke again.
“I’m pretty sure Chuck and I are done,” she said.
I dropped my fork and considered my next words carefully. I went with, “Okay,” which I figured was functional, but also didn’t reveal any actual thoughts on the matter.
“I’m glad you’re all right with it,” she said.
“I don’t really know if it’s any of my business,” I said.
“Fair enough.”
“What do you mean by pretty sure?”
I could tell my mom didn’t really want to answer the question but she did anyway. “Well, he told me last night he had a family function today. I asked him when and he said it was in the afternoon. I said I wish he’d told me earlier, he was lucky my schedule was open today. He said my schedule didn’t matter because I wasn’t coming, and I told him I thought we were in a relationship. He said we weren’t in that kind of relationship. I asked him to leave.”
I could see my mom was upset by this but saying it out loud had, in a way, released some of the poison in her damaged ego. “Sorry,” I said.
My mom rubbed her eyes and the wetness there was replaced by a look I couldn’t read. “You shouldn’t have to be. You shouldn’t be. I’m the one who needs to be sorry.”
Now it was my turn to look confused. “What for?”
“For being a horrible mom.”
“You’re not a horrible mom.”
“I’m not much of any kind of mom. That’s the problem.”
“Mom…” What do you say to that?
“It’s true. It just is. My dad died and I looked my mortality in the face for the second time in my life. I just decided it was time to make myself feel awesome about myself, and it didn’t matter who I hurt in the process. You. Your dad. You were just in the way. I convinced myself your dad and I had grown apart years ago and I was just now seeing it. I convinced myself you were an adult and you didn’t want me in your hair anyway. I…I just stopped doing anything that wasn’t about making me happy. I got a boy toy and let myself start to really like him. I got hurt, which was a good thing. I’m finally realizing that instead of being awesome, I’m awful.”
I tried to formulate an argument against what my mom was saying and couldn’t come up with anything. Which was unfortunate because when I did say something, it was, “You’re right.”
My mom gave a nervous giggle. “Well, don’t try to spare my feelings or anything.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be,” she said. “Don’t be, at all. I haven’t been a great mom, ever, really. It was your dad who took you to all your dance recitals, and whatever else. He did all the cooking. I can’t even make waffles, for crying out loud. He wasn’t perfect, and I wasn’t perfect, and we weren’t perfect, but the fact that I could put him through what I put him through, and even then he still thought to call me yesterday…”
“Why did he call you?”
My mom looked at me, her eyes widening in surprise. “You don’t remember? No, I guess that makes sense. You were really young.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “I was?”
“Yeah. When Grandma died. It was the day after Thanksgiving. She went shopping, was out late, it was before cell phones. My dad got worried and started calling stores. They only had the one car at the time and had to ask a friend to drive him around. Found Mom dead behind the wheel of the car in a parking lot. Just gone, out of the blue, no rhyme or reason to it. The autopsy didn’t show anything unusual. She just died. Bam. Out like a light. She was too young, you know?”
I didn’t know. It’s hard to know that kind of thing when you’re eighteen. When you’re not even halfway to forty, not even a third of the way to sixty, your idea of dying young is something like Becca’s boyfriend, gone before marriage, fatherhood, and your first grey hairs.
My mom started talking again. She was staring out the window, conversing not just with me, but with the world. “Every time I think about it, every year that passes, it never gets any easier. I miss my mom. I just plain miss her. I think about the age she reached and how I’m getting closer to it all the time. I find myself wondering, what if I’m not in the last thirty years of my life? What if I’m in the last ten? What if I’m in the last five?”
We lapsed back into silence. My mom didn’t realize it bu
t she had just laid down the track for a train of thought already gliding through my head, engine throbbing and lights aglow.
CHAPTER 25
Mom and I cleaned up in silence, her with her thoughts, and me with mine.
My synapses were firing, putting together rough timelines, tying them to motivations.
And in this case, two plus two equaled my grandfather had joined a vampire hunting party because John Smith had killed my grandma.
It made a nearly shocking amount of sense. My grandma had died when I was two years old. That would have been around sixteen years ago. Plugging in a few details Wash had provided, it was very plausible that in addition to killing homeless folks, Smith had decided to kill a few random shoppers on one of the busiest days of the year.
Assuming Smitty was still on the lookout for vampires at the time, he could have noticed a couple of interesting marks on my grandmother’s neck. So he took his collection of evidence to my Grandpa D, and signed him up for a little revenge, wooden-stake style.
Only my grandfather realized they were in over their heads, or maybe he just caught a lucky break and he got out with the only camera ever to record the great vampire hunting party.
There were huge gaps in the story as if I had assembled all the edges of a puzzle without filling in any of the middle, but it gave me a starting point when it came time to begin my research.
Except life got in the way, in the form of a text message from Becca.
CHAPTER 26
Sometimes the most profound moments of your life are the least interesting when they happen. My phone buzzed, and I jumped. I wasn’t used to the sound any more.
I picked it up, and there was Becca’s name and a text message. “Psychology quiz chapters?”
Why did she text me, after telling me that we were over and done? I didn’t ask her. There isn’t a good way to ask a question like that, and the answer wouldn’t matter anyway. At that moment, all that mattered was that I had my friend back, if only for a few typed characters.
I texted the answer back to her.
And she texted me back. “Thanks.”
I texted back. “No problem.”
Then our electronic conversation ended.
The next day, she thanked me personally for saving her sorry behind and knowing the chapters because otherwise she totally would have blown the quiz, which might have knocked her grade from an A- to a B+. With college admissions coming up, you don’t want to hork up your GPA in your last year.
I told her again it was no problem.
As the weeks passed, every two or three days, we’d talk about something stupid, like what grade she got on her quiz (she missed one question) or whether I’d gotten any letters back from the colleges I had applied to (one) or which teacher was being kind of a jerk because Christmas was coming and people weren’t keeping the laser-like focus he preferred to see in his classroom.
Those few words passed, and then came the big conversation where I said again what happened had been a horrible mistake and I would never trust mystery punch again. She said after she talked to a bunch of people who had been at the party, she realized I really was telling the truth, and my plan had not been to drive drunk. We both felt stupid, and we both were sorry, and although our give-and-take had taken some damage, we started to be friends again.
So we made plans for New Year’s Eve.
My mom and dad also started talking again and started going to counseling, which at first they claimed was just about trying to parent me together even though they were living apart. But then there was a shift, and my parents had to have a long, embarrassing talk with me about how they might eventually get back together. First they had to deal with a lot of trust and other issues, but they wanted me to know what was happening because I was an adult, kind of, and wanted to treat me like an adult.
It was sort of great, and sort of freaky all at the same time.
Because of all this, my parents agreed that Christmas together might be nice. My dad cooked dinner Christmas Eve and we all opened our gifts. I got the laptop I already knew about and a reminder there was a car in my future.
My mom also got me a complete set of the vampire romances I had completely forgotten about. She saw me reading a beat up copy of the first book and thought I might like to see how it ended. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d given up halfway through the first novel when I realized that, yes, there really were vampires, and they were nothing like the folks between those pages.
On top of that, my mom also got me the movie versions of the books, mentioning casually that perhaps we could have a few girly nights watching the flicks together.
I got my dad a couple of cheap paperbacks that told you how to write and sell your fiction. And I gave my mom a coupon for a home-cooked meal. We all had a laugh over that one.
To cap off the night, we went to a midnight mass and sat together as a family. Since we didn’t go to church very often, no one knew my parents’ relationship was complicated and we were, just for a night, the Leary family again.
I spent the week reading the vampire series, laughing at how much it got wrong, and groaning at the frequently awful prose. As I finished the books, mom and I would watch the movies, giggling at the horrible pregnant pauses between each line, sometimes filling the silences with our own asides.
It was so much more fun than it should have been.
So I dragged the movies over to Becca’s and we did a marathon while we waited for the New Year to come. We laughed until our stomachs hurt, and we nearly threw up all our snacks. We soda-toasted the upcoming year, when we’d finally get out of high school and go to college.
Then we fell asleep, our faces aching from the smiles on them.
I felt like I’d slammed the door shut on the worst year of my life, locked it, and melted the key down.
I had no idea the worst was yet to come.
CHAPTER 27
With the new year came the end of the first semester, and all of its finals and papers. Transcripts would be sent to colleges the minute they were entered into the school’s computer system, which meant both Becca and I, as seniors, needed to bring our A game. Literally.
Even though we were mending our fences, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend together. She had her work to do and I had mine.
Thanks to my new laptop and a Wi-Fi connection my mom put in, I could do a lot more work from my room. And when I wasn’t checking sources or typing footnotes, I would zip around on the web looking for more information about Smitty.
My mom got me an account for the archives to the local paper and a basic search revealed that archive was only fifteen years deep, instead of sixteen, which was what I needed. While I could fill in a few details here and there (I learned right away that Smitty was, in his former doctoring life, actually named Greg Bards) they were mostly detail-light rehashes that reminded people to be on the lookout for Smitty, possible murderer.
Ultimately, I eventually might have dropped the whole thing, except for one minor detail. The Great Plague.
Of course, that wasn’t really what the local flu epidemic was called but it was what I opted to tag it when our sociology teacher said she wanted us to do a report on what governments do when there was a disaster.
Most people chose obvious stuff from the not-too-distant past. A recent tsunami. A batch of earthquakes. I almost did the same thing. After all, we were heading into the end of the semester and the Internet had a crazy amount of easy-to-locate information on these topics, which meant you probably could churn out a five or ten-page paper on one of them in a night. Two if you really tried hard to polish it.
Except I am not an idiot.
The fact is, teachers know recent history readily is available to copy and paste. One paper on an earthquake they can handle. If they get ten, they start comparing and contrasting and suddenly one person has an A- and everyone else gets a B-. Teachers know what a one-night paper looks like.
But if you actually go to
a library and crack open a couple of books, or a newspaper, then they can’t toss your phrases into a search engine and check your sources.
It isn’t an easy A, but it’s an easier A. Which is all I was looking for.
Plus, well, as long as I was having the librarians pull the microfiche of long-forgotten newspapers, I may as well have them grab the stuff that came out sixteen years ago.
Should I have let it go? That would have been smart. Could I have let it go? Probably, if I really wanted to.
But in a lot of ways it was like a scab. You’re not supposed to pick at it, but you can feel the edge, and you know if you just give it a little tug, it’ll come off. Once it’s done, that maddening itch will go away.
The maddening itch, in this case, is who was John Smith? And why did he come back? And how does Wash know him?
CHAPTER 28
For me, the problem with going to the library at night had a lot to do with all the dead homeless people.
Wash warned me to stay off the streets as long as homeless folks kept turning up dead on a semi-regular basis. With each passing day, another one or two popped up in the paper. The police couldn’t explain it, as none of the victims were suffering from unusual physical wounds, which would indicate a serial killer. And none of them had any kind of poison in their system. Or bad drugs.
So they chalked it up to a virus.
I was surprised that the so-called virus didn’t penetrate the public consciousness in some way. I kept waiting for someone to quarantine all the homeless folks in the city so they could figure out the nature of the disease they were spreading.
Ultimately, I figured, most people just didn’t care. Which was a depressing thought. Homeless people weren’t really human beings to society. The homeless were someone else’s problem, or perhaps not a problem at all. People just figured if the homeless folks kept on vanishing, well, that was just one more person they didn’t have to give spare change to as they walked down the block.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 8
