The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  “He prefers his loneliness,” she said. “All in all, Malcolm was right. It was better this way.”

  I crossed my arms. “Let me tell you about Malcolm.”

  And so I told my mother about my father’s “change of state” and all that followed. I told her everything he’d told me. After I’d finished talking, she didn’t say a word.

  We rode the horses back to the stable — walking first, then breaking into a trot, then a gallop. I hung on to the saddle, afraid I’d be thrown off, but I managed to hold my seat. My mother and Osceola flew ahead of me.

  Back at the stables, we groomed and fed the horses. When Mãe wasn’t looking, I gave Johnny a good-night kiss on his neck.

  Finally she spoke. “I’m going out. Want to come?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The parking lot was full, and my mother had to park the pickup on the street. We walked toward a long white building with a neon sign in a window reading FLO’S PLACE.

  Inside, the tables all were occupied, and the bar had standing room only. The bartender called out, “Hey, Sara!” Mãe stopped here and there to say hello as we made our way toward a corner booth.

  Dashay sat with a muscular man wearing a black cowboy hat. They were drinking something red. My mother slid into the booth, and I sat on the end.

  Dashay said, “Ariella, this is Bennett. He’s my boyfriend.”

  I shook his hand. He had a strong grip and a beautiful smile. “I like your hat,” I said.

  “Hear that? She likes the hat,” he said. “Dashay’s always telling me to take off the hat. Lose the hat, she says.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Dashay asked me.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s quiet,” I said. “He has long hair.” I wondered if my mother had a boyfriend.

  She looked at me and said, “No.”

  A server brought us two glasses of Picardo, and my mother raised her glass in a toast. “To justice,” she said. Dashay and Bennett looked puzzled, but they drank.

  I took a sip. Picardo was an acquired taste; this time I liked its smoky tang. When I looked around, I noticed that most of the others seemed to be drinking Picardo, too. Here and there I saw a beer or a glass of white wine, but the glasses of red liquid were twice as prevalent. “Why is almost everyone drinking the same thing?”

  “Creatures of habit,” Mãe said.

  “What makes it so red?” I asked.

  “Supposed to be a secret recipe,” Bennett said.

  “I read somewhere that the color comes from crushed insects.” Dashay held her glass up, and rays from the setting sun outside gave the liquid a garnet glow.

  “Very appetizing.” My mother hadn’t smiled once since our talk, and it made me realize how often she had, before. “Ariella, I need to talk to these friends. You’re welcome to listen, but it will be the same things we’ve been talking about for hours. Or, you can play the jukebox.” She dug into her pockets and pulled out a handful of change.

  I didn’t want to hear the stories again. In any case, I had my own thinking to do. I took the money and my drink, and headed for the jukebox: a glowing red, purple, and yellow monster of a machine. The only one I’d seen before was at the soda shop in Saratoga Springs, and this one was three times its size.

  None of the songs’ titles was familiar, so I chose them randomly: “Late Night, Maudlin Street” by Morrissey; “Marooned on Piano Island” by the Blood Brothers; “Lake of Fire” by the Meat Puppets; “Spook City USA” by the Misfits. I fed the machine quarters. When the music began, it wasn’t any one of the songs I’d picked, but a country song about a ring of fire. Everyone in the bar seemed to know it; they all came in on the chorus, except for my mother and her friends, deep in conversation in the corner booth.

  I sat on a stool next to the jukebox, and looked at the others, who glanced at me from time to time. Were they all vampires? Or did this little corner of Florida simply have an unusual craving for red beverages?

  They looked like “normal people,” I thought — they varied in age and height and skin color, they wore mostly casual clothes. Two men wore mechanics overalls, and one couple wore suits. It could have been any small-town bar, except for the preponderance of red drinks, and the songs on the jukebox — and, it now occurred to me, the fact that no one in the place was overweight.

  As I watched the crowd at the bar — the server massaged the shoulders of one of the regulars, the bartender sang and sipped from his own dark red glass — I thought of my father, sitting in his green leather chair, drinking his evening cocktail, alone. I wondered what color shirt he was wearing. And, although I was tired of thinking about his past, it began to replay in my mind again.

  When I was very young, even before I could talk much, my father gave me a picture book called Can You Spot the Six Differences? Of course I couldn’t read the title, but I grasped the concept instantly: two nearly identical drawings (featuring animals and space aliens, usually) sat side by side, only small differences between them: the shape of an eye might be subtly altered; a cat’s tail or a shadow might be missing. Although I couldn’t say what the differences were, I could point to them, and my father nodded approval.

  As I thought of my father’s story, and my mother’s, the differences between them stood out in sharp relief. Of all the discrepancies, the detail that bothered me most concerned Dennis — that he had closed the door of Malcolm’s car. I knew how much my father trusted Dennis, depended on his loyalty.

  I made a decision: it was time for me to call home.

  In the phone booth at the rear of Flo’s, near the rest rooms, I dialed Saratoga Springs and dropped in the requisite coins. I had no idea what I’d say when he answered.

  But the number never even rang. A recorded voice told me the number I’d dialed was no longer in service, and urged me to check the listing and try again. I didn’t need to check the listing, but I dialed the number again, dropped in the coins, and heard the same recording.

  Baffled, I replaced the receiver.

  When I rejoined my mother and her friends, Dashay was in the middle of a long sentence, which ended with “— must be the Sanguinist influence.”

  I knew they’d been talking about my father; my mother let me hear her thoughts. “What’s a Sanguinist?” I asked.

  They looked at me.

  “Well,” Dashay said. “We need to talk about sects.”

  Bennett began to laugh.

  “Hush!” she told him. “S-E-C-T-S is what I said.” She turned her back on him. “I guess you weren’t told about them? Some vampires are Colonists — they think humans should be penned up and bred for blood, like animals. Others are Reformers, and they’re all about teaching humans how superior vampires are. There are some weird ones called Nebulists — extremists who want to wipe out the human race. Nice folks. Then there is what they call the Society of S. S stands for Sanguinists. They’re environmentalists, conservationists — well, we are, too. After all, most of us think we’re going to be around forever, so we have a real stake — stop laughing, Bennett. I mean it. We have a stake in preserving the earth.

  “But the Sanguinists take it a step further. They practice abstinence, and they don’t mingle much with mortals, although they think mortals should have, you know, democratic rights. The Sanguinists think biting people is immoral, and vamping humans is, too.”

  “Vamping?”

  “Making mortals into vampires,” Bennett translated. “That’s Dashay’s own word that she made up herself.”

  Dashay ignored us. “The Sanguinists, they’re obsessed with doing the right thing. They take life very, very seriously.”

  “We don’t belong to any sect,” Mãe said. She gave me an odd look. I was blocking my thoughts.

  “We’re crunchies,” Bennett said. “You know, granola and organic gardening and all that. We don’t mess with big ideas or obsess about ethics.”

  “We do what comes naturally,” Dashay
said. “Live and let live.”

  “Some sects assume that they need human blood every day to survive.” My mother held up her glass. “But we get along nicely using supplements, so long as we pay attention to balancing our diet. Your father was a typical scientist — never much interested in food,” she added. “He doesn’t recognize the value of vegetables.”

  “We don’t need blood?”

  Dashay said, “We take the supplements. We don’t need to bite people. Sure, we like it, but you can get the same rush from raw oysters or soybeans — they’re full of zinc — or red wine or Picardo.”

  “Almost the same.” Bennett sounded regretful. I wondered how he and Dashay had come to be vampires. Flo’s Place must be full of strange stories.

  “What about eating meat?” Asking questions gave me time to come to terms with the disconnected phone.

  “Meat isn’t necessary,” my mother said. “We’re pescetarians.”

  “Tastes gross.” Bennett extended his fingers and wriggled them like worms. “But the Sangunists eat it. They think meat is necessary, that it kind of substitutes for blood.”

  “We have the supplements, and spring water.” Dashay seemed eager to steer the conversation away from blood. “The river is fed by springs, did you know that, Ariella? And the water has the same minerals as salt water. Freshwater and saltwater fish both live in the river, and we eat them, too. The springs are one reason so many vampires settled here.”

  Mãe leaned close to my ear. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  The server brought us platters of raw oysters and a bottle of deep-red hot sauce. Despite the oysters’ succulence, I ate little, without much appetite.

  Later that night, I sat on the edge of the dock. Harris came out to join me, sitting about a foot to my right. The sun had set, but the sky remained pink. Nacreous clouds along the horizon glowed as if lit from within. They gradually faded, turned as blue as distant mountains; they made me think of Asheville, and I suppressed that thought, along with any thought of Saratoga Springs.

  Harris and I dangled our feet in the cool water. An anhinga swam past me, still looking like a snake, and a mockingbird called from a tree nearby. I thought of a line from Thoreau’s Walden: The life in us is like the water in the river.

  All was calm — until I saw an ominous fin no more than two hundred yards away, skimming the river’s surface. I grabbed Harris and pulled both of us backward. He leapt to his feet and disappeared into the trees.

  I ran barefoot all the way back to the house and into the living room. “I saw a shark!”

  My mother, Dashay, and Bennett, playing cards at the kitchen table, looked up. Mãe handed me a piece of paper and a pen. “Draw the dorsal fin.”

  I sketched it quickly.

  “Looks like a dolphin to me,” Dashay said. She took the pen and sketched in another fin, this one without the crescent-shaped backward curve. “That’s what a shark looks like.”

  Wrong again, I thought. Always wrong, and I used to always be right. “I scared Harris,” I said, my voice sounding as ashamed as I felt.

  “I’ll find him and explain,” Dashay said. She went out.

  Then Mãe pushed back her chair and left the room. She came back with two books: a field guide to Florida and a gardening handbook. “You’ll learn, the same way I did,” she said.

  I took the books and sat in a chintz-covered chair in the corner. Grace the cat strolled past me as if I weren’t worth noticing.

  When Dashay returned, she said that Harris had settled down in the guest house for the night. “I explained to him what happened,” she said. “He won’t hold a grudge.”

  The card game resumed, but I could tell from their rush of idle talk that I’d interrupted a more important conversation. So I told them good-night and went to my room, carrying the books.

  Later, as I lay in bed, Grace came in and sat at my feet. We watched an ochre moon climb the sky. Mãe knocked and opened the door. “Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?”

  I kept my thoughts blocked, not sure what to say. “Tomorrow,” I said.

  When I awoke, sunlight glared in at me. I heard voices, and from the window I saw Mãe and Dashay outside the stables, talking to someone I didn’t recognize. A Green Cross courier van was parked in the driveway.

  I went downstairs as quietly as if they’d been in the living room. I took the cordless telephone from the kitchen and made my way back to my room again.

  Michael answered on the third ring.

  “Michael, it’s me,” I said.

  After a pause, he said, “Thanks for calling. I’ll let you know.” And he hung up on me.

  I held the dead phone. He’d sounded odd, formal and nervous. The click lingered in my ear, the sound of one more disconnection.

  I was about to take the phone back to the kitchen when it rang. I answered at once.

  “It’s me, Ari.” Michael still sounded nervous. “I couldn’t talk.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Agent Burton is here. He comes by every couple of months, checking in. I’m out in the garage now, on my cell phone. I took your number off Caller ID.”

  So the McGarritts had finally updated their telephones. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. Where are you?”

  “I’m with my mom,” I said. “It’s really nice here.”

  “Good, good. Don’t tell me where you are. Burton keeps asking about you, and it’s better if I don’t know.”

  “He’s asking about me?”

  “Yeah. You know, since what happened to your dad and all —”

  “What happened to my dad?”

  The silence on the phone had its own tension.

  “Michael?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I haven’t talked to him since I left. What’s happened?”

  Another silence, this one even more charged. Then a sentence, so rushed and garbled that it made no sense.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said. “Say it again.”

  “He’s dead.” The words swam at me, mere patterns of sound. “Ari, your father is dead.”

  At some point my mother came in and took the phone from my hand. I was holding it without hearing, sitting on the floor. From a distance I heard her voice, talking to Michael, but the words didn’t register. In my ears was white noise — the sound of all sound and no sound — and in my head was nothing.

  The smell of incense woke me. I couldn’t identify the scent — a blend of herbs, a few of which I recognized. Lavender was one, and rosemary another.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw smoke; it wasn’t from incense after all, but from a bundle of plants set on an iron brazier. Candles burned on nearly every surface of the room — maybe a hundred of them, white pillars with flickering flames. Yet the room was cool, the ceiling fan swirling lazily. I swore I heard the sound of women’s voices chanting, but the room was empty.

  I must have closed my eyes, because then Dashay was in the room. She wore a white dress and her hair was wrapped in a white scarf. She sat beside me and fed me clear soup with a mother-of-pearl spoon. I ate without tasting, not speaking between mouthfuls.

  She smiled and went away. Grace climbed onto the bed, gave herself a bath, and licked my hand.

  Sometime later I awoke again. The candles still burned. My mother sat at my bedside, reading. Her face in the candlelight reminded me of a picture that hung in the McGarritts’ living room titled Our Lady of Sorrows: a woman in profile, face serene yet dolorous, wearing a blue robe and hood. I slept again, and next time I wakened, sun dappled the periwinkle walls. In this manner I reentered the land of the living. Afterward they told me that I’d been “comatose” for nearly a week.

  During that time, my mother and Dashay had been busy. Gradually, as I grew stronger, they told me what they’d been doing.

  The vampire network, I learned, functions something like an underground railroad. When a va
mpire is in trouble, others offer transportation, food, and shelter. My mother’s contacts also smuggle abused animals away from harm, and they barter goods and services. But most of all, they trade information.

  Mãe’s friends in Saratoga Springs told her that my father’s obituary had run in the local paper; they emailed her a copy. He’d died of heart failure. His body had been cremated, and the ashes buried in Green Ridge Cemetery. Her friends emailed a photograph of the grave. They took another of our house, a “for sale” sign prominent on the front lawn. Someone had chopped down the wisteria vine that traced one side of the house, making it look exposed, naked.

  My mother didn’t show me the photos all at once, to keep me from reacting too emotionally. But it was hard to keep my feelings in check, especially the first time I looked at the pictures. The image of the abandoned house shocked me as much as the one of the black marble gravestone. RAPHAEL MONTERO had been inscribed on it, along with a quotation: GAUDEAMUS IGITUR / IUVENES DUM SUMUS. There were no dates.

  “What’s the inscription mean?” Dashay asked.

  “So let us rejoice / While we are young,” Mãe said.

  I hadn’t known she read Latin. She turned to me. “He sometimes used that phrase as a toast.”

  The photograph had been taken close up, and visible in the foreground stood some sort of bottle.

  “What’s that?” I asked Mãe.

  “Looks like the top of a liquor bottle,” she said.

  “Funny thing to put on a grave,” Dashay said. “Maybe vandals left it.”

  I was lying in bed, propped up on pillows. Harris sat at the bed’s other end, coloring in a coloring book. My mother had delayed the monkeys’ transfer to the primate sanctuary, in hope of humoring me. That week, if I’d said I wanted an elephant, I believe she would have brought one in.

  “Mãe,” I said. “Could you email your friends and ask them to take some more photos? And ask them who signed his death certificate?”

  My mother thought me stubborn, even delusional, but I sent a thought back to her, loud and clear: I don’t believe he is dead.