The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  “No.” Of course I was hungry, but not for fast food, or even shrimp and grits. “You can let me out anywhere.”

  She pulled over near an intersection. I thanked her, but she waved her hand. “The Lounge Wizards will miss you,” she said. “And God, Joshua will probably kill himself.”

  “I hope not.” I knew she was joking. I also knew Joshua might want to do such a thing. But I didn’t think he was capable of carrying it out.

  We both said “See you,” without conviction.

  I watched the gray sedan drive away, much too fast, and I wished her well. We hadn’t been friends, really, but she’d offered me what companionship she could. For that I was grateful.

  Chapter Eleven

  In Savannah I learned how to be invisible.

  That first day I spent hours walking through the city, savoring the cool green squares, the fountains, the statues, the church bells. I memorized the names of streets and squares so that I wouldn’t get lost, and I imagined the city’s original architect trying to calculate how much street should lie between squares in order to offer respite from the humid heat. I commended him for an excellent design.

  It was late May, and people passed through the city wearing cotton dresses or short-sleeved shirts, and carrying their jackets. My black trouser suit looked out of place among them. I sat on a bench in a square sheltered by live oak trees, and I watched the people as they walked past. Perhaps one of them was my aunt. I had no way of recognizing her. I could tell the tourists from the locals by the way they walked and by what they looked at; the locals moved with an easy familiarity, a languorous stroll.

  In Savannah I began to wonder: How does one vampire recognize another? Is there a secret gesture, a nod or wink or hand movement by which she proclaims herself “one of us”? Or does some instinct allow for instant identification? If I met another vampire, would he or she welcome or shun me?

  As the afternoon waned, I sat on my bench and watched for shadows. Everyone who walked by cast a shadow. I did not. Either Savannah held few vampires besides me, or all of them were inside, waiting for nightfall.

  I made a pilgrimage to Colonial Cemetery, but I didn’t go inside the gates. Instead I looked for the house where my mother had lived. And I think I found it: a three-story red brick house with green shutters and black-iron-framed balconies. I stared up at the balcony facing the cemetery, and I imagined my father sitting there with a woman — a faceless woman. My mother.

  As I walked away, I looked down at the brick sidewalk, at the patterns etched in the bricks. They weren’t spirals — they were concentric circles, like little target signs. My father’s memory wasn’t perfect after all, or else his pattern dyslexia was to blame.

  A few blocks later I saw an old hotel with wrought-iron balconies overhanging the street, and for a moment I fantasized about checking in, having a bath, spending a night sleeping on crisp clean sheets. But I had fewer than a hundred dollars left, and I didn’t know how or when I’d have more.

  I looked into the hotel’s first-floor windows: a lobby, then a bar and restaurant. At the bar sat a tall man in a dark suit, his back toward me, and he lifted a glass that caught the candlelight and gleamed a familiar dark red.

  Picardo. Suddenly, I missed my father terribly. Was he sitting now in his leather chair, raising a similar cocktail glass? Did he miss me? He must be worried, more worried than ever before. Or, did he know what I’d been doing? Could he read my thoughts from that distance? The notion alarmed me. If he knew what I’d done, he would despise me.

  The mirror behind the bar reflected the cocktail glass — but not the man who held it. As if he sensed my stare, he turned around. Quickly I walked on.

  The sky had darkened by the time I found the river. My feet ached, and my hunger turned to dizziness. I walked among the tourists on River Street, past gaudy shops and restaurants that promised raw oysters and beer. When I saw an Irish imports shop, I stopped walking. In my mind, I saw my father go inside and come out with a shawl, which he wrapped around the faceless woman.

  My neck tingled — a sensation I hadn’t had in so long that at first I didn’t recognize it. Then I knew. Someone was watching me. I looked in all directions, but saw only couples and families, intent upon themselves. I took a deep breath and looked around again, more slowly. This time my senses focused on a stone staircase, then on the first step, where mist from the river seemed to have gathered.

  So you’re invisible, I thought. Are you the same other who watched me at home?

  I heard a laugh, but no one around me was laughing.

  My face felt hot. It’s not funny.

  And for the first time, I tried to make myself invisible.

  It’s not difficult. Like deep meditation, it’s a matter of concentration; you breathe deeply and focus your awareness on the immediate moment, the experience of here and now, then you let it all go. Your body’s electrons begin to slow down as you absorb their heat. Deflecting light feels as if you’re drawing all energy into your deepest core. A sense of freedom and lightness spread through me; later I learned that it’s called qi or chi, a Chinese word for “air” or “life force.”

  As a means of proof, I held my hands before my face. I saw nothing. I looked down at my legs, and saw right through them. The tailor-made trousers had disappeared. So had my backpack. My father’s claims about metamaterials had not been exaggerated.

  After that, I had no sense of the other. I moved on, down River Street, as if I were floating. I walked into a restaurant, toward the kitchen, where plates of food waited to be collected and served. No one even looked in my direction. I took a plateful of rare filet mignon, went out the back door with it, and sat on a stone wall to devour it, using my hands as utensils. A few minutes later, two servers from the restaurant came out to smoke cigarettes, and one of them noticed the empty plate on the wall, right next to me. He sauntered over to pick it up, standing so close that I saw flakes of dandruff in his hair.

  “Somebody must have dined al fresco, huh?” he said.

  The other server laughed. “Al Fresco? Who’s that? You mean the wino who sleeps by the Dumpster?”

  I tucked a ten-dollar bill into his back pocket as I left, to pay for my dinner.

  I drifted on, through the alley to River Street again, giddily dodging tourists. Being invisible must be almost as good as flying. Once I brushed by a plump man in a suit; he recoiled and furtively glanced around to see who had touched him. He gasped. It took me a second to figure out why: he’d been bumped by my invisible backpack.

  For the first time in a long while, I was having fun, and I wondered what else I might do. But the physical strain of maintaining invisibility is as exhausting as running or biking for miles. It was time to find a place to stay the night.

  I walked up the steep cobblestone street toward the city again, headed toward the hotel I’d seen earlier.

  Checking into the Marshall House was easier than you might imagine; I pulled myself up a wrought-iron brace to the balcony, passed a row of empty rocking chairs, and climbed through an unlocked bathroom window. After making sure that the room was empty, I locked its door, shed my clothes, and ran a bath. They even provided a fluffy robe. On the counter I found a small vial of lavender-scented bath oil, but its top was so tightly screwed on that I couldn’t remove it — until I used my teeth. I poured the oil into the running water.

  Into the tub I sank, and slowly let the light escape me, let myself become visible — as if anyone could see. I scrubbed my legs and my hair — which, I noticed, had grown past my waist.

  I nearly fell asleep in the bath. Exhausted, I toweled off, wrapped myself in the robe, braided my hair, and climbed into a king-sized bed. The sheets smelled improbably of roses. I dreamed of flowers, and birds, and crosswords.

  In the Aeneid, Virgil calls sleep “Death’s brother.” To us, sleep is as close to death as we’re likely to come — barring catastrophe, of course. Always barring that.

  Sunlight woke me, stream
ing in golden bands through the window over the balcony. I sat up in bed, my mind fresh and alert for the first time in months. I felt as if I’d been asleep since I left home. In a second I realized how much I’d missed my orderly mind. Perhaps my earlier education had some use after all, not so much in terms of what I’d learned as in teaching me how to think.

  Finding my aunt now seemed a perfectly straightforward process. First I consulted the telephone directory on the bureau; more than twenty Stephensons were listed, but no Sophie or even S.

  But she might have married and taken another name, or have an unlisted number. I thought back on the little my father had told me about my mother’s background: she’d been raised in the Savannah area, but I didn’t know where she’d attended school. I knew, or thought I knew, her former address, and I knew she’d had a job keeping bees.

  I left the hotel room exactly as I’d found it, minus one small bottle of lavender bath oil. The old wooden door creaked as it opened. I tiptoed down the corridor and down a flight of stairs. In the lobby I sat at the guests’ computer station. Thanks to the hotel’s Internet access, it took me seconds to search for Savannah and honey and to find what I needed: the address and phone number of the Tybee Bee Company.

  I walked out through the lobby as if indeed I were a paying guest.

  The doorman opened the front door for me. “Mornin’, babe,” he said.

  “Good morning,” I said. I slid on my dark glasses and strutted down Broughton, feeling, in my London-tailored black trouser suit, very much the babe.

  Some days, it seems as if you’re one with the universe. Do you feel that way, too? With every step you take, the ground rises to meet your feet, and the air caresses your skin. My long hair floated in the breeze behind me, smelling of lavender shampoo. Even my backpack felt light.

  The Tybee Bee Company was situated on the outskirts of the city in a warehouse — not a pretty place, and not easy to find. Being invisible helped; I didn’t want to hitchhike, but at a gas station I slipped into the backseat of a car with a Tybee Island sticker on its rear window. A teenaged girl was the driver, and she headed out the Island Expressway. When she neared the President Street exit, I began to whine, sounding as much like an ailing engine as I could. She obediently pulled over, and I (and my backpack) slipped out while she was looking under the car’s hood. I mouthed a silent thank-you.

  No, I didn’t feel guilty about my pranks at the time; I felt the end would justify the means, whatever the end might be. Only much later would I come to a full moral reckoning with myself.

  I made myself visible for the last stretch, and I stopped twice to ask directions before I found the warehouse. Inside, half a dozen young people were working. One was attaching labels to tall bottles of golden honey. Another packed small jars into cartons for shipping, and someone else used a spatula to cut squares of honeycomb. The room had tall windows and a high ceiling, but its air felt thick and sweet.

  They all looked up as I came in. “Hi,” I said. “Are you hiring?”

  A sleek woman in a suit interviewed me in an upstairs office. She said they had no openings at the moment, but that she’d keep my application on file. When I filled out the paperwork, I said I was eighteen, and I left the address section blank. I explained that I was en route to visit a relative. I asked if she’d known my mother, who had worked here about fifteen years ago.

  She said, “I’ve only been here a year. You may want to talk to the owner. He’s out on Oatland Island with the bees.”

  One of the packagers lived on the island and was headed home for lunch, so she drove me to the hives. They stood at the edge of a nature preserve, near an old wooden boat that rested on cement blocks. She pointed them out, then turned to head back to her car.

  “I’m afraid of bees,” she said, over her shoulder. “Walk slowly, and they should leave you alone.”

  Thus warned, I moved across a lawn toward the hives, which looked from a distance like ramshackle wooden filing cabinets. A man in a white suit and hood was pulling what seemed to be a drawer out of one of the files. On the ground next to him was a metal device emitting pine-scented smoke. I came up slowly behind him. A bee buzzed over me, as if checking me out, then flew away. A steady stream of bee traffic came and went from the hives. The sky had clouded over, and the place was utterly still but for the sound of bees.

  The beekeeper turned to look at me. He slid the drawer back into the cabinet, then motioned me back toward the boat. When we’d reached it, he pulled off his hood and veil. “That’s better,” he said. “The girls are a little wild today.”

  He had a shock of pure white hair and eyes the color of aqua-marines.

  Have I mentioned my interest in gemstones? It began with an old encyclopedia at home. I can still see the plates of cabochon-and emerald-cut gems: jade, aquamarine, cat’s-eye, emerald, moon-stone, peridot, ruby, tourmaline, and my favorite: the star sapphire. Diamonds, to me, are boring, unsubtle. But the sapphire’s six-legged ivory star radiated against a Prussian blue background like fireworks or lightning in a night sky. Years later, I saw a real star sapphire, and it proved even more subtle: the star wasn’t visible until you looked at the gem from a particular angle, and then it emerged, like a ghostly sea creature surfacing in deep water, thanks to an optical phenomenon called asterism. I pored over the descriptions of the stones and their mythology, then flipped the page to the next entry: Genealogy, which included a “chart of blood relations,” explaining how a great-grandparent ultimately connected to a first cousin once-removed. I never read that entry, but its accompanying chart — a series of small circles, connected by lines — will always be associated for me with the gleam and fire and mystery of gemstones.

  “You’re not from around here,” the beekeeper was saying.

  I introduced myself, using my real name for the first time in months. “I think my mother worked for you,” I said. “Sara Stephenson?”

  His face changed from quizzical to sad. “Sara,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her for years. Whatever happened to her?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

  His name was Roger Winters, and when he heard I’d never met my mother, he shook his head. After a few seconds, he said he’d known her fairly well. “She worked part-time for me when she was in high school, and then later she came back, after she got her divorce. You knew she was married before?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “I was glad she left him, and glad to have her back. She was a good worker,” he said. “She got on real well with the bees.”

  His voice was soft and slow, with inflections and muted vowels that I’d never heard before. I thought of the harsh way most people talked in Saratoga Springs (my father a notable exception). I could listen to Mr. Winters talk for hours.

  “I do see the resemblance now,” he said, looking at me. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”

  “Thank you!” He’d given me my first physical link to my mother.

  He shrugged — an odd twist of his right shoulder, only. “She was a great beauty,” he said. “And funny? That woman could always make me laugh.”

  I told Mr. Winters I’d come to Savannah to find my mother, any trace of her, or her relations. “She had a sister, Sophie.”

  “Sophie’s nothing like Sara,” he said.

  “Is she here?” I could hardly believe my luck.

  “Lives a couple miles from here, back toward the city. At least she did. I haven’t heard mention of Sophie for years. Used to see her in the papers with her roses, every time they had a flower show.”

  My disappointment must have shown, because he said, “That don’t mean she ain’t still here, now. You might want to give her a call.”

  I told him I hadn’t found her name in the telephone directory. He shrugged again. “She’s a spinster. Lives alone. Like to have her number unlisted. Yes, that’s the sort of thing Sophie would do.” He bent to pick up his hood and veil, which he’d set next to the smoker device on
the grass. “Tell you what. It’s about time for my lunch break anyway. I’ll run you over there after lunch, and we’ll see if she’s still at that house on Screven Street.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said.

  “Seems like I could do that much for Sara’s daughter. How old are you, anyways? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  “More or less.” I didn’t want to have to explain why a thirteen-year-old was traveling alone.

  Mr. Winters drove an old blue pickup truck with a yellow honeybee logo on both its doors. The windows were rolled down, and I was glad; the sun had emerged from the clouds, and the air swept into the truck, humid and hot.

  He stopped at a restaurant on the way back to town — nothing fancy, a roadside shed — and, sitting at a picnic table outside, overlooking a marsh, I had my first taste of raw oysters.

  Mr. Winters carried out a plateful of them, half-shells of various sizes embedded in shaved ice. He went back for a soup plate holding a bowl of crackers and a bottle of red sauce. He removed them and set them strategically, midway between us.

  “Never had one?” he said, his face as baffled as if I’d said I never breathed. “Yankees,” he muttered.

  He demonstrated the proper oyster-eating technique: he sprinkled two drops of sauce on the round gray oyster, lifted the shell, tipped it toward his mouth, and sucked it down. He set the empty shell in the soup bowl. Then he took a few soda crackers and tossed them back.

  I picked up a shell, already planning ways in which to hide my distaste — subtly coughing it out into a paper-towel napkin, for instance. The little ivory and gray bodies looked inedible, and in any case, these days I had no appetite for anything that wasn’t red. I held the shell as he had, so that it didn’t spill any liquid, and I gamely sucked it into my mouth.

  How to describe that first taste? Better than blood! The texture was firm, yet creamy, and it yielded a mineral essence that seemed to shoot oxygen right through my veins. Later I found out that oysters — the ones that haven’t been polluted, that is — are full of nutritious minerals, including oxygen, calcium, and phosphorus.