by B. N. Toler
I shrug, having no idea what it means.
“It means she is dangerous.” He smiles at her, but she still has no reaction. “No, black means something else—”
“And what is your favorite color?” My annoyance obvious in my tone.
Rhett eyes me as he sits back, his wide grin fading. “Guess,” he dares me again.
“I don’t like games.”
“Oh no?” he questions.
“No,” I confirm.
“Well, well. She wants to get down to business, Sarah.” Rhett looks to Sarah again, who rolls her eyes.
“You’d better eat up. You’ve got a long day ahead of you.” Rhett walks towards the hallway. “Sarah will assist me in training you. You will follow her instructions no matter how silly they may seem to you. She is your best friend now, and you are her shadow. You will follow her every order. Do you understand?”
I nod, even though I don’t understand what he means by training.
“I’ll see you at dinner.” His footsteps recede down the hall. I start shoveling food in my mouth as fast as I can and wonder if this will be my last meal. After about five minutes of silence, I place my fork on my plate and wipe my mouth. I sit back and meet Sarah’s gaze, then look away, afraid of setting her off.
“Red.” Her lips curve slightly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Red,” she repeats.
“What about it?”
“His favorite color is red.” She exposes a full-fledged smile for the first time all morning and stands.
I stare at her blankly. Red is Rhett’s favorite color? What is she telling me? Red? Then it occurs to me.
Blood.
Blood is red.
That’s why Rhett likes red. I feel my breakfast start to rise up.
“Come,” she orders, like I’m a dog.
I swallow down the urge to lose my breakfast and follow her out onto the large plantation porch. The day is warm and a wide field extends out to a wood line.
Sarah unbuttons her black suit jacket, revealing the white tank top she’s wearing underneath and tosses it to the side, then slips on a pair of boots. “Get those over there.” She nods towards a bench opposite her where an older pair of boots sits.
I’m relieved to find the boots fit perfectly. I follow Sarah off of the porch toward a huge wooden barn made of aged wood. My fear seems to subside momentarily, and I can’t help but enjoy the beauty of the day. The house overlooks land that goes on forever. Fields of tall wheat surround the property and to the left there is a huge fenced field that sits beside the barn. As I gaze upon the property, I can’t help feeling like I know this place, like maybe I’ve seen it before. As we near the barn, those thoughts vanish as fear rises within me once again. What waits inside? Will I be tortured?
Inside, stalls line both sides, several with beautiful horses poking out their massive heads. Thank God! Relief washes over me.
Sarah approaches up to the first stall on the left and brings the horse’s head to hers; speaking in a hushed voice as if telling it a secret I’m not allowed to hear. She then continues to the end of the barn, grabs a shovel, and holds it out to me.
I eye her as I take it. “What is this for?”
“It’s for shoveling shit,” she replies coldly. I stare at the wooden handle in my hand. They brought me here to clean out horse stalls?
“I’ll take the horses out, and you’ll start cleaning. Get that wheelbarrow over there.”
I follow her instructions and clean the stalls. The rich stench of manure makes me gag, but I push through it. It takes me almost two hours to clean all six stalls, and by the time I’m done, I’m soaked with sweat and stray strands of my hair cling to my wet skin. I sit down and lean against the last stall door, thumbing the blisters on my hands.
Sarah hands me a bottle of water, but I have no idea where she got it from. I quickly open it and chug, enjoying the cool water.
“Come.” She walks out to the fence surrounding the field, where she released the horses and leans against it. “To become a blood healer, we must prepare you.”
“How does shoveling horse shit prepare me?”
“It doesn’t. I just hate doing it.” She snorts a quiet laugh, as if she just heard a funny joke. “When you are transitioned, you will never change. You will always look just as you are. That’s why it’s important to be in your best shape.”
“I’m in pretty good shape.” I shrug. Shut up, Aldo! I’m arguing my way into being turned. “I mean I guess I need some toning up.”
“Listen!” Ice blue eyes cut to me. “I am stuck training you. So you make this easy on me, and I’ll make it easy on you. Got it?”
“Got it,” I agree, too afraid to argue even if I wanted to.
“No matter what, you will do what I say. Do you understand?” She pushes a strand of loose hair behind her ear.
“Yes.” I pause. “So what happened to you?” I ask a little frightened of what reaction she might give me.
“I don’t like to talk about it.” She stares out into the field.
“Was it Rhett?” Was she taken just like me?
“No.” She laughs condescendingly, rolling her eyes. “I wish someone like Rhett would have been the one to change me. You couldn’t handle what I went through.”
I didn’t bother asking what she meant as she obviously wanted to be vague. “Was it painful?”
She pauses and smiles. “Yes, but it was also freeing.”
“Freeing?” Not exactly the answer I was expecting.
“From all the pain I felt.” She shrugs.
“Yeah, but you’re a vampire. Your soul—”
“Forget everything they have told you about it. We’re not all bad. They make us out to be some sort of soulless creatures with no will, but it’s not true.”
“What is true?”
“It’s my job to show you.” She walks along the fence, and I follow, trying to understand what she means.
“You see, Aldo, Rhett wants you to choose this life. He doesn’t change anyone against their will.”
“No, just take them against their will,” I reply under my breath.
“You know nothing!” She whips around, and I stumble backwards. She recoils and takes a deep breath.
I freeze, too afraid to move.
“He wants you to decide to become a blood healer,” she states calmly as she continues her walk.
I hesitate but follow after a moment. Choose to be a blood healer? “I would never choose that,” I state plainly.
“I think you can be persuaded.” Her voice hangs with the sound of a smile I can’t see.
“How so?” I follow closely behind, my shirt clinging to my skin, still damp from my workout of shoveling horse manure.
“Once you see what we do, you may feel otherwise.” She shrugs.
“Doubt it,” I mutter under my breath.
She turns quickly and faces me. “We’ll see.”
She leans against the fence, letting her arms rest on the top beam, staring out into the field.
I lean my back against the fence, facing opposite of her. The afternoon sun hangs high and covers the property, gorgeous raw land, like something out of a magazine. From where I stand the house is about five hundred feet away. Tall massive trees are scattered sporadically throughout the field that blanket the earth around them with their shade. I find myself day dreaming about Thomas and I sitting under the shade of one of those big trees as we watch our little one chasing butterflies. My heart aches at the thought.
“So, you have a child?” Sarah questions as she stares out into the field.
I freeze, trying not to react. How did she know? Is she reading my mind, or has she known all along?
“A child?” I try to fake my best confused expression, which is pointless because she doesn’t look my way to see it.
“So, here is something you might want to know about me.” She smiles and turns leaning her back against the fence. “I know everything.”
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I stare at her blankly. What world have I entered where no thought or dream is safe? How can I play this off? Maybe I could say I was day dreaming about the child I wished I could have.
“Calm down. We are not in the business of kidnapping children. Your brothers would be of no use to us either. There are no guarantees they could establish their abilities after they were changed.”
“So his threats are all a bluff?” I ask confused.
“The one you love. I’m not sure what the dynamic is, but Rhett didn’t want him here even though he had certain gifts.”
“Why does he want me?”
“He will tell you in time.”
“How much time?”
“However long it takes.”
“For what?” Desperate for answers, fear rises inside of me. Would he hurt Thomas?
She shrugs and ignores my question, then walks again towards the house.
Her nonchalant dismissal of my fears is infuriating. Just because she has embraced this way of life does not mean I will. Has she forgotten what a beautiful thing life is? As healers, it is the one thing we are taught to treasure above all else. We see how easily life can come and go. Here she walks among the living, possessing no life herself and suspends the energy of life like it is nothing. It has lost its magic to her.
“How do you know so much? Are you psychic?”
“I can see what was or has been. I cannot predict the future.”
“Is it by transfer of energy, or do you just meet someone and see things?” I ask, genuinely fascinated.
“I have to touch them.”
“That’s amazing.”
“I can’t see everything. The information can be random.”
“I can’t pick the information I get either.” I shrug.
“Have you ever tried?” she questions.
“Tried what?”
“To absorb something specific?”
“I guess not. I’ve never really needed to.” I try to remember if it ever occurred to me that I might be able to do that.
“Hmm,” she says to herself as she still stares out into the field.
“Don’t you miss your family?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” She cuts her eyes at me. “Rhett is all I need.”
Does she mean Rhett is her lover or something?
“Do you miss the family you abandoned?” she asks harshly.
Her words sting, and tears form in my eyes.
“But that was to find—”
“Thomas?” she mocks. “Was he the reason or the excuse?” She turns on her heel and continues her walk.
I watch her go, choking on her words. Excuse? “What do you mean excuse?” I manage to yell after her.
“You figure it out. You must be famished,” she calls back to me. “I think it’s time for lunch.” Her voice is casual, as if she hadn’t just whipped me in the face with her words.
“Come,” she orders.
I can honestly say I’m not at all hungry, but it would be nice to get a shower and get away from her. We go back into the house and Sarah permits me to wash up and orders me to put on something nice and make myself look presentable.
I head back to my room and take a long hot shower, and then put on a white sun dress and flip-flops from the bag that still sits on the bathroom floor. My brown satchel with underwear and makeup that I packed the night before sits on the sink. Rhett must have sent someone back to the club for it. I brush my hair and apply some makeup, while my inner self paces nervously. As I stare into the mirror, I notice how much I have aged in the last few days.
Without warning, I vomit in the sink and cry as I rinse my mouth and face. My world has been destroyed, and I have no one to blame but myself. If I had just stayed with my brothers, none of this would have happened. I sit down on the toilet and lay my head on the sink trying to let my stomach settle.
Even in this pain, I know I was in the same kind of pain wishing and wanting Thomas to return. The loss of Lucy and Thomas at once was unbearable. I think back to the day Beau was born. My brothers picked the name Beau (pronounced Bo) which I actually liked. The three of us sat huddled together as I held the tiny little mutant looking creature we had been waiting for. It was magical, and my heart seemed to forget the pain I harbored for so long, but the moment was fleeting. My pain would not subside. Even the memory—distant and far away as it is—ignites anguish within me.
Whit and Hudson were like two doting fathers and I, his actual mother, couldn’t even hold him. I resented him. I don’t know why. He was a beautiful little baby, but I was sick with sadness, and his birth only enhanced that feeling. He was eight weeks old when I left. Leaving was a relief. I’ve hated myself for feeling that way, but it’s true. I left that amazing little creature to find Thomas, telling myself if I could bring him back that it would make everything all right. We would be happy. We would raise our son together and never leave each other’s side.
My brothers were angry with me for leaving. I guess having me there, even if I was an empty shell of a human being, was better than not having me at all.
“He’s only two months old!” Whit roared at me.
“I gave birth to him. I know how old he is!” I shouted back.
“Aldo, you have no idea where Thomas is. It would be like searching for a needle in a hay stack.” Hudson sat between us, calm, the voice of reason.
“I have to go.” I stood, but Whit grabbed me and dragged me over to Beau’s bassinet positioned by the sofa.
“Look at him, damn it!” he growled through clenched teeth. “You are abandoning your son.”
“No, I’m not!” I jerked free. “I’m going to search for his father. He deserves a father.”
“He deserves a mother, too.” Whit stared down at me, disappointment heavy in his eyes, a look that made me want to crawl into a deep dark hole and hide. Whit and I had never fought like this before.
“Aldo, how long will you be gone?” Hudson tried to break the intense moment.
“I don’t know. However long it takes.”
Whit turned away from me, his body tense, arms crossed.
I stared down at Beau, swaddled tightly, and sleeping sound despite our argument. I turned back to Hudson and picked up the notebook that sat next to the pile of his car magazines on the table. “I have opened two accounts. I will put money in them to provide for you guys so you don’t have to work.”
Hudson took the notebook and opened it.
“I made a point list of new locations with numbers. I’ll make deposits, but you will have to withdraw the money and leave the amount of money in the checking account to represent your location.”
“There’s over four hundred points in here.” Hudson stared up at me from his seat on the brown sofa. “How will you remember all of them?”
“I’ve memorized them all.”
“How long have you been planning this?” Hudson asked.
That was not a question I wanted to answer, so I ignored it and said, “There are also codes for the savings accounts. Certain amounts mean certain things. Like nine hundred and eleven dollars would mean there’s an emergency and you need me.”
“Just fucking go.” Whit shook his head, picked Beau up and left the room. My heart catapulted into my throat. I knew Whit would be upset with my leaving, but I didn’t want to leave him seething angry at me.
“Whit—” Hudson called.
“Let him go.” I stopped Hudson as he went to follow Whit down the hall. I was leaving no matter what. There was nothing I could say to make Whit feel better about it.
“Don’t you want to say goodbye to Beau?” Hudson looked at me, brow furrowed.
I’m a horrible person for answering, “No.” But saying goodbye to Beau had the potential to derail my plans to leave. I was too scared my guilt for leaving Beau would override my goal to find Thomas. I lifted my backpack off the coffee table and slid it on.
“Aldo,” Hudson gasped, shame in his voice. The weight of Hudson’s
big brown eyes fell heavy on my shoulders and it felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I’d put it on the top five list of the worst I have ever felt in my life. Just above leaving Whit fuming mad at me and right under the day that Lucy died.
“I have to go.” I quickly kissed him on the cheek, grabbed my bag at the front door and left.
They may never be able to forgive me for leaving them, just like Lucy and Thomas, but I thought Thomas would fix that, too. If I brought Thomas back, it would all be okay. They would forgive me.
I sit up, willing myself to stand, Sarah’s words sit in my throat, burning through the lies I have told myself, like acid on flesh. I stare at myself in the mirror. What is true? I ask myself this, over and over. I love Thomas, but the years apart have changed us. Could he really love who I am now? The woman who abandoned our child, pitting all hope of happiness on finding him? The woman who resented not only a baby, but his baby? I have always prided myself on being a good person, but the truth is, I’m not. Yes, I left to find Thomas. There is no untruth in that, but I also left because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be a mother. Not then. I was barely a woman. I couldn’t be Lucy.
Thomas tried to send me on my way by putting me on that bus, and I told myself that it was time to go home and raise my child, but instead I made an excuse to come back. An excuse that didn’t even involve Thomas. Ella. Why? Why did you go back, Aldo? I ask myself. You had been found, so why go back? “Because you wanted this.” I hear a small voice whisper in the back of my mind. I dry heave as these truths wash over me. Why would I want this? Because I failed? Because Thomas wouldn’t go with me? Sobs escape me as I lean over the sink and cover my mouth trying to muffle the sounds of my despair.
I look back into the mirror and find it is cracked. My crying is momentarily suspended as I eye it. How did that happen? I trace my finger over the crack that extends across the mirror. I make a mental note to tell Sarah about it, but my mind resumes reflecting on the sins of my past. No matter what, I know I love my son. He will never know me, but I know my brothers will tell him his mother loved him, even if they are angry with me. Beau would grow up thinking I left searching for his father and died before I could get back to him. Maybe he would think I was a hero. I cringe at the thought, realizing how undeserving I am, but my son thinking his mother abandoned him is unbearable.
