The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  My mother looked at me, questions in her eyes.

  “So you were up early with the bees, huh,” Dashay said. “Guess I’ll do some gardening this afternoon, then take some honey down to the store.”

  Mãe was still watching me. “Two cartons of orange blossom are ready to go,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to give Ariella a riding lesson.”

  In short order I learned how to tighten a saddle, adjust the stirrups, mount and dismount, and hold the reins. I’d asked to ride Johnny Cypress. Mãe agreed.

  “He’s the gentlest of the bunch,” she said. “I think it’s because he’s so grateful. His previous owner abused him. You should have seen him when we adopted him, poor baby.”

  We headed down a trail toward the river, the horses stepping briskly, enjoying the outing. I quickly got used to the rhythm and let myself relax in the saddle.

  “You ride well,” my mother said. It was the first time she’d praised me, and I grinned. “It’s not always so gentle,” she said. “Later we’ll pick up the pace.”

  The dirt path led through mangroves, past small ponds and marsh grass, and then to the river, broad and blue, smelling of salt. Here we dismounted and sat on a large flat rock, shaded by mangroves. “We have picnics here,” Mãe said.

  For a while neither of us spoke. The wind played with our hair, and we watched the horses as they grazed. Osceola was a true beauty: tall and muscular and handsome in all respects. Johnny Cypress was small and jaunty, perfect for me.

  “I want to ride him every day,” I said, not realizing I’d spoken aloud until Mãe said, “Of course you will.”

  “Mãe, I need to tell you some things.” Again, I hadn’t planned to speak. Then the words all came in a rush. “I killed someone, I didn’t mean to, you don’t know who I am, it all happened so suddenly —” Clumsy words, but such a relief to say them.

  She put up her hand, and the gesture made me stop talking and think of my father.

  Her blue eyes were clear, untroubled. “Slow down and tell me.”

  I told her the story of Robert Reedy’s untimely death in the woods outside Asheville. She interrupted only twice, to ask, “Did anyone see you get in his car?” (I didn’t know) and “Did you leave behind any evidence?” (I hadn’t, and I’d been wearing gloves.)

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, when I’d finished.

  “But it’s murder.”

  “More like self-defense,” she said. “He would have raped you.”

  “Then why do I feel so bad?” I crossed my arms and gripped my shoulders. “Why do I think about it all the time?”

  “Because you have a conscience,” she said. “Something he probably lacked. Ariella, from all you’ve said I doubt that you were the first girl he took out there. Be glad you’re the last.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not even shocked that I’m — that I’m —”

  She laughed. “You’re so like your father,” she said. “All this concern for things that really can’t be helped. No, I’m not shocked. How could I be? I knew you were a vampire — although I didn’t like to use the word — right from the beginning.”

  To be precise, she said, she knew from the first trimester that her pregnancy wasn’t “normal.”

  “I felt terribly sick.” She rubbed her forehead, then pulled her hand through her hair. “I threw up all the time, and I was mean to your father. I blamed him for everything. But in fact, getting pregnant was all my doing.”

  “It usually takes two.” My voice came out sounding so prissy that she laughed again, and finally I smiled.

  “In our case, I was the driving force,” she said, her voice dry. “Hasn’t he told you any of this?”

  “Some,” I said. “He said it was a difficult pregnancy. And he did say that you were the one who wanted me.” I looked toward the river.

  “That’s not entirely true, either. Look at me. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  I wasn’t sure, anymore. But I said, “I have to know. It feels as if everything depends on me knowing.”

  She nodded. She told me her story.

  Imagine finding the love of your life, then losing him. Yes, people lose their loved ones all the time to war and disease, accidents and murder. But imagine watching your lover change before your eyes, devolve into some other being, and you’re powerless to bring him back.

  My mother told me about meeting Raphael, about their early months together, about packing for her trip to England as if it were a honeymoon. She described their reunion — the horror of seeing a man who wasn’t Raphael inhabit his body, the futile desire to recover what he had been.

  “He was brilliant,” she said. “And funny. He could dance, and tell jokes, and of course he was beautiful —”

  “He’s still beautiful,” I said.

  “But he lacks something,” my mother said. “Something that made him my Raphael.”

  She said that she’d hoped that with time and love, he would come back to himself. “The odd thing is, he imposed this new personality on himself,” she said. “It didn’t happen as a result of his so-called affliction. He felt guilty. He made himself into a sort of monk, so obsessed with doing the right thing that everything he did seemed stiff, programmed.

  “You’ve known me exactly one day,” she said to me. “But you’ve seen enough to know that I’m impulsive, and kind of silly at times.”

  “I like that,” I said.

  “So did your father, once,” she said. “In any case, getting married was my idea. He didn’t think it was ethical, a vampire marrying a human. I said, love isn’t a matter of ethics!”

  We didn’t speak for a moment. The water nearby began to ripple, and as I watched, a gray-white mass rose to the surface and took shape. I put my hand on my mother’s shoulder, mouthed the word manatee?

  She nodded. The manatee turned its wrinkled face away and slowly sank again.

  “Oh,” I said. “To think such things really exist.”

  Mãe reached for me and hugged me hard.

  Listening to my mother that day was something like hearing a horror story read aloud at a toddlers’ picnic. Nothing in the place or the company was in keeping with the tale.

  “I trapped him,” she said. Nearby, butterflies perched on a flowering shrub. “He didn’t want to have a child. I told him I was using two forms of birth control, so that he didn’t need any. I lied to him.”

  For the first time, I felt I was hearing more than I wanted to know.

  She seemed to sense my discomfort. “So when I learned I was pregnant, I felt triumphant — briefly,” she said. “Then I was sick as a dog.”

  She learned she was pregnant in November — peak season for the Saratoga Springs doldrums. “The weather was dreadful, and I stayed inside,” she said. “He hated himself for giving in to me, and his way of dealing with it was reverting to complete correctness. That is, he played the model husband — no, more like a nurse — looking after me, doing research about pregnancy and home deliveries, watching my diet, taking blood samples. He and Dennis were like two hens, clucking over me. They made me want to scream.”

  Two jays — males, their wings and tails a vivid royal blue — alit on the rocks near the river and looked at us. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt sympathy for my father. He’d tried to do what he thought was right, given the circumstances. My mother had been the greedy one.

  She was watching me, and now she nodded. “He tried to do what was right. And he thought having a child was wrong. Well, Ariella, at least I won that one.”

  I took a deep breath. “Mother — Mãe, I want to know why you left us.”

  “That’s simple,” she said. “I wanted to be like you two. I was tired of being left out.”

  As her pregnancy proceeded, my mother had more indications that the child inside her — that I — was not a normal human. Extreme nausea and anemia of the kind she experienced were considered unusual, but not abnormal — that was the consensus of my father and Dennis a
nd Root, who had recently joined them. (“I loathed that woman on first sight,” Mãe said. “And she clearly resented me.”)

  Bad dreams weren’t abnormal, either. “But my dreams were more than bad,” she said. “I couldn’t remember them, and that in itself was terrible, for someone who’s always placed great store in dreams. I’d awaken with my mouth still open from screaming, the sheets wet, my sense of smell so extreme that I could taste the bleach in the pillowcases. I heard voices — not any I recognized, and certainly not yours or your father’s — telling me I was damned. I wanted to answer back: ‘Who damns me?’ But my voice would dry up in my throat. I ran high fevers. I heard them say I was delirious.”

  A breeze swelled, running a line of wind shadows across the water. The air ran right through me. I wondered if I should have been born.

  “Ariella, I’m telling you this because I want you to understand why I left.” She leaned toward me, only a small space remaining between us on the warm stone, and yet I didn’t bend toward her.

  “Tell me the rest,” I said, my voice stiff.

  “I asked him to make me an other. Like him. Like you,” she said. “And he refused.”

  And she told me of their arguments, which I don’t like to think about, much less write down here. Listening to parents fight — is there anything worse for a child, except hearing about it years later, knowing that you were the cause?

  My father wasn’t about to make anyone a vampire. My mother, sensing that I (in utero) already was one, wasn’t about to be the only aging human in the family.

  “Think of it,” she said to me. “Growing old, getting ill. Losing strength and intelligence in the company of others who maintain theirs. The ultimate indignity.”

  I took a deep breath. “You both had too much pride.”

  In the end, or in the beginning, I was born. And my mother left.

  My father examined me in the basement laboratory. What did he do besides count my toes? I wondered. Blood tests must have been run, but what else?

  Upstairs, my mother slept. She remembered them covering her with a yellow cashmere blanket.

  When she awoke, she was being lifted, still wrapped in the blanket, into an automobile. She heard the engine running, and she smelled its exhaust. She caught a glimpse of Dennis’s face as he shut the car door.

  “Who was driving?” I couldn’t be patient. “Was it my father?”

  Mãe had been hunched forward, tracing patterns on the rock as she spoke. Now she straightened and looked at me. “Your father? Of course not. It was his best friend. A man called Malcolm.”

  My mother had known Malcolm for years, since she’d met my father in Savannah, and when he told her Raphael had asked him to take her for emergency medical treatment, she didn’t question him. She felt weak and exhausted. She slept in the car.

  When she awoke, she was in bed — not in a hospital, but in a house. “A rather grand house, somewhere in the Catskills,” she said. “The room had long leaded casement windows. That’s what I remember best: looking out the diamond-paned windows and seeing nothing but empty green fields and hills.”

  Malcolm brought her food, then sat by her bedside. “He told me that you’d been born with deformities,” she said, her voice low. “He told me you weren’t expected to live. He said Raphael was devastated, but that deep down, he blamed me. He hated me. Malcolm explained things calmly and rationally. He said I had some choices to make, the first of which was the obvious one: whether to go back and face the horror — face the music, is what he said — or whether to go on with my life and let Raphael go on with his. Your father, he said, much preferred the latter.”

  I stood up, shaking. “That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what my father told me.”

  Mãe looked up at me. She was crying. But her voice stayed clear and steady. “You can’t know how I felt: sick inside, weak and stupid. He talked to me for hours about the ethics involved. How I hate that word! Ethics are nothing but excuses for behavior.”

  I disagreed, but this wasn’t the time for that debate. “Why didn’t you call my father?”

  “He didn’t want to talk to me. Malcolm told me the best thing for everyone would be for me to go away, start a new life, forget what he called this misery that I’d created.”

  Tears were streaking her face, and I wanted to comfort her, but something in me resisted.

  “And he made me an offer. In exchange for leaving Raphael alone, he’d give me what I wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “To live forever. To be like you.”

  “So you left us, you abandoned us, for that?”

  She looked so pathetic, and I wanted to console her as much as I wanted to strike her, or break something. I picked up a rock and threw it into the river, and then I remembered the manatee. I rushed to the edge of the water and peered down.

  “It’s all right.” She’d come up behind me. “Look.” She pointed downstream, at eddies that grew deeper, then parted as the manatee surfaced. We watched it for a while.

  “I don’t know how to feel,” I said, my voice raspy.

  She nodded. We went back to the rock and sat. The sun was hot, and I moved into the shade cast by the tree. Somewhere a mockingbird sang a complicated song, then repeated it six times. High overhead, a bird with a vast wingspan soared and circled.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A short-tailed hawk,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to fly?” Her voice was wistful.

  “My father wished he could fly, too.” I thought back to the evening in the living room when I’d listened to his story. “Knowing the truth doesn’t set you free, does it?”

  “I think that it does, in time.” Her tears had stopped.

  The sun had begun to move westward, and I noticed that she cast no shadow. “So you’re one of us?”

  “If you mean what I think you mean, yes.”

  She told me Malcolm had kept his part of the bargain. Afterward, he’d taken care of her for a month, until she was stable enough to fend for herself. “It was the worst month of my life.” She said it without emotion. “Sometimes I thought I heard you crying, and my breasts ached. I wanted to die.”

  “But you didn’t come for me.”

  “I didn’t come for you. Malcolm told me I mustn’t — you needed special care. And Raphael would hate the idea of me being a vampire. Malcolm said I’d done enough damage, that I’d ruin Raphael if I interfered any further. He convinced me that he was right: Raphael and his research were what mattered, in the end. It might have been different, if we’d been happier together. Malcolm said that if you survived, which he doubted, he’d keep an eye on you, he’d act as your invisible guardian. He wanted your father to focus on work, and he didn’t trust Dennis to look after you. He thought Dennis would bungle things, somehow.

  “So I agreed. But I never forgot about you. I had friends look in on you, from time to time, and they told me that you were all right, that you were growing stronger.”

  “We had very few visitors,” I said. I was watching a bird with an impossibly two-dimensional head, an amber beak, and long legs that bent backward before angling forward as it waded nearby. It looked like a cartoon bird.

  “These visitors were invisible.” She said it matter-of-factly.

  “Why didn’t you come yourself?”

  “It would have hurt too much.” She stretched her hands toward me. I didn’t move. “I tried to send you messages,” she said. “I sent you dreams.”

  I remembered the crosswords, and the song. “‘The Blue Beyond,’” I said.

  “So it worked!” Her face lit up.

  “The song came through,” I said. “The crosswords were pretty garbled.”

  “But they brought you to me.”

  They hadn’t, really. But to my mother, they were the invisible thread that had led me home. “Actually, it was the letter S that helped me find Homosassa Springs,” I said. “My father and Sophie said you thought S was luck
y.”

  “It is.” She picked a leaf from a shrub and put it into her mouth. “The form of S symbolizes the waxing and waning of the moon. But I liked it long before I knew that. From the time I learned to write the alphabet, the shape and sound of S seemed special.”

  A snake swam by, and I stiffened.

  “It’s a bird,” Mãe said. “Look.”

  Visible beneath the water’s surface was the body of a bird — its long neck created the illusion of a snake. “It’s called an anhinga. You weren’t taught about birds?”

  “Some. We focused more on insects, actually.” I was thinking, hard, about all she’d said. “I think Malcolm is the éminence grise of this story.”

  “He treated me kindly, all in all.”

  “He stole you. He told you lies.” More and more, I was convinced of it. “Didn’t my father tell you how Malcolm treated him?”

  “Malcolm was his friend,” she said.

  “He didn’t tell you who made him a vampire?”

  Her eyes were wary, now. “He never said. I assumed it was one of his professors.”

  Why would my father tell me, and not her? I wondered.

  “How like him, to be so discreet.” Her voice was bitter.

  “You hear my thoughts?”

  She nodded. “I don’t listen all the time, I promise.”

  “Why can’t I hear yours?”

  “I’m in the habit of blocking them.” Then she let her guard down, and I heard her think, I love you. I’ve always loved you.

  I thought, He loves you still. He never stopped.

  She shook her head. He stopped the day I lied, the day I seduced him. When he looked at me after that, I saw shame in his eyes.

  “I’ve seen his eyes when he talks about you,” I said. “He misses you. He’s lonely.”