Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (34 page)

But when I come in, she is asleep on the couch in that position, her knees pulled up and her shoulders hunched and her hands loosely covering her eyes. In my encyclopedia, there are pictures of the ancient Romans who died in Pompeii, cowering in such a position, turned to statues as the ashes covered them.

I go into the kitchen and make myself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. Peanut butter on one piece of bread. Margarine on the other piece of bread. Slices of apple in the middle. I am making this sandwich and pretending that I am building something.

But I can still hear her in the next room. Breathing, breathing.

W
hen Karen and her family died, when their house burned and they died, my mother said,
Oh, honey, please don’t be sad, please please don’t be sad.
I was lying there facedown on the bed with the pillow against my eyes and she put her hand on my back and rubbed along my spine.

Do you know what I think?
she said at last, very softly.
I think that they moved away. That’s what I think. I think they moved away to someplace far away like—I don’t know—Washington or Oregon or California.

I felt her long fingernail trace its way up between my shoulder blades, up the back of my neck to the place where my spine connected to my skull. I didn’t move.

And even though they are gone,
my mother said,
even though they are gone and we will miss them, we know that they are having a good time in—Oregon. And we can write them a letter, if we want.

“That’s stupid,” I said. I whispered under my breath.

I have the address right here,
she murmured.
Karen’s mom left it for me. Here, I’ll write it on your back.

And I felt her tracing out the numbers and letters with her fingernail.

W
hen the house where Karen and her family lived caught on fire, my mother was in one of her manic states. She was up all night for several days, drawing pictures, trying out horrible recipes for things like aspic or haggis, making artworks from twigs and leaves and nature items that she found outside. She woke me up in the middle of the night and the light of the fire was flickering in my window. The wind had carried the bits of ash up the hill and it drifted through the air like the fluff from cottonwood trees.

“Todd,” my mother said, and she shook me awake; it must have been three thirty in the morning. “Todd—Todd—Todd—” she whispered.

I sat up in bed and she was already outside again, standing in the yard in her T-shirt with no pants on. She was doing a kind of dance, like she was a cheerleader, shaking her hands as if she had pom-poms in her fists. “Hi!” she called—up toward the sky, and skipped forward, then back. “Hi! Hi!” Like maybe she was saying hello to God, or the stars, or a UFO. Ash was coming down. “Hi!” she said rhythmically. “Hi! Hi!”

Mrs. Hotchkiss comes over in her Hotchkiss Farms station wagon and we all sit very still watching through the sheers as she looks around and calls hello.

Hello hello!

And it looks as if her eyes are right on us, but Mom says she can’t see a thing through the sheers during the day because they trap the shadows. Mrs. Hotchkiss reaches her hand in the driver’s window and taps the horn. Why doesn’t she just come to the door and knock?

Why doesn’t anyone come to the door? They just stand there until you come out. Except Todd.
He
knocks at the door. He knocks even though Mom has said he doesn’t need to. He is always welcome. But he likes to knock. He likes her opening the door for him.

Hello?

Old Lady Hotchkiss is about ready to leave, she is getting back in the station wagon, when Mom jumps up and opens the door and invites her in.

T
he coffeepot is heaving, they are at the table smoking, Mrs. Hotchkiss brought by her extra seed potatoes and tomato starts in case we could use them, and she wants us to know she could use berry pickers in about a week and she preferred girls—Dee sent her girl, Dee, the name of the lady, Dee, the former mom of this house, she assumes we’ve heard the story, and Mrs. Hotchkiss says history does repeat itself because here she is smoking in Dee’s kitchen again, and isn’t life a mystery? They know it wasn’t arson for a provable fact, but people still say that something feels not all the way right. Well, time marches on, and it’s good to have people here again and are you keeping rabbits just for enjoyment? Well, that’s a luxury! And then Todd knocking.

I’m going to answer the door and Mom does it instead.

“Why, Todd! Come in! Bernard’s around here somewhere. Cecilia, help Todd find Bernard.”

Todd looks disappointed as he follows me through the kitchen and out the back door.

I head down to the hutch to get Ivan.

Behind me is Dee’s Place. Mrs. Hotchkiss said we shouldn’t take it wrong if people called it Dee’s Place even now. I am thinking of the fire and holding Ivan and getting the shivers—a fire that killed the people but left the house standing, a fire at Dee’s Place.

And then Todd is there beside me saying, “What did Old Lady Hotchkiss tell you?”

Me: Nothing.

Todd: She tell you my mom set the fire?

Me: No.

Todd: What’d she tell you?

Me: That history repeats itself.

Todd: Better let that rabbit go, then. Better let all your rabbits go.

Bernard, Cecilia, and I walk along the banks of the creek, and Ivan the Rabbit lopes along beside us. I ask them what if he runs away and Cecilia says don’t worry, he won’t. It’s late morning on a Saturday and there are patches of clover that the rabbit stops to nibble in his quick, scared rabbity way, but he seems to keep an eye on us. When we begin to walk forward he quits eating the clover and follows us. He’s wearing a little blue sweater from one of Cecilia’s dolls.

W
e are looking for the cat I saw that night when I stayed over, the pale cat that must have come in through the open window while we slept. I was in the bedroom with Bernard and I woke up and everyone was asleep, and a cat was sitting on my chest, purring.

“We don’t have a cat,” Mrs. Popkin told me the next morning. “I can’t abide them.” The other kids were still asleep, and we sat at the kitchen table in silence.

“Don’t tell your mother you saw me taking down my curlers in my kitchen,” Mrs. Popkin said. “It’s unsanitary. But I like looking out this window.

“Why don’t you go play on that old tire swing,” Mrs. Popkin said. “It’ll give me something to watch while I’m doing my hair.”

We both looked out at it, turning in the breeze.

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll watch.”

I
t must have been a stray cat
, Cecilia says now.

I do not tell them that it has occurred to me that the cat was a kind of
ghostly manifestation
.

I do not say that maybe it is a spirit connected in some way to Karen, who died in the fire, my friend Karen who suffocated, the oxygen sucked out of her so she couldn’t even make a sound.

Maybe it has kittens somewhere around here
, Cecilia says.

I think about what it felt like to wake up with the weight of the cat on my chest. The cat had been sitting there looking down at me; its eyes were hooked onto my face as if it was waiting for a mouse to come out of my mouth.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty
, Bernard calls.
Unless Todd’s psyching us
.

Here, kitty,
Cecilia says also, and then she glances over at me.

But personally, I am quiet. Up at the house, the older brothers have come home in the pickup, and I watch as they start unloading heavy rocks from the back, thick and trudging as mules. I don’t think I have ever seen them without a frown; I don’t think I’ve even heard them talk except to grunt at one another moodily. But Mrs. Popkin exclaims at them in her jolly way:
It’s about time you boys got back! I was about to send out the search party!

F
or a while as we are walking along, we talk about the fire.

What did Old Lady Hotchkiss tell you?
I ask. I can hear my own voice as if I am listening in another room.
She tell you my mom set that fire?

I can feel my face getting red and my voice like something that a ventriloquist put inside of me.
It’s just because my mom is a little eccentric
, I tell them,
people suspected her.

“What’s
excentric
?” Bernard says, and they both look at me.
Bernard scrunches his round, freckled face, and Cecilia eyes me skeptically, fingering the plastic barrette in her short-cropped hair, and Ivan puts his ears back and I am reflected in his magenta eye.

“It means . . . ,” I say. “It just means different. Very, very different from other people.

“She had to go down to the police station and take a lie-detector test,” I tell them, which actually isn’t true. They never took her down to the police station, though I wished they had.

“She passed the lie detector,” I tell them. “So that should have been the end of it but some people still gossip,” I say. “Certain people hate my mother.”

And that, at least, is true. I don’t really know if people like Old Lady Hotchkiss think that she started the fire at Karen’s house, but whenever we are in town I can see the way their eyes rest on us. They are suspicious of her, uncomfortable, and why shouldn’t they be? Even when she is trying to be normal, you can sense a force coming out of her in ripples, like radiation. Sometimes we are standing in line at the supermarket or the post office and I will feel it.
Repellent.

We are repellent
, and I feel my face getting hot just thinking of it. I put my hand on my chest because I can almost feel that cat sitting there, that weird kind of pressure.

W
e come at last to the place on the edge of the creek where Karen and I used to like to play. There is the crab-apple tree where we nailed wooden slats to the trunk so it was easier to climb up into the branches. There is the soft, loamy ground where we buried pieces of our old toys—a plastic tea set, Matchbox cars, GI Joe legs, a bent Slinky—because we liked to pretend that we were archaeologists and we were going to find a forgotten civilization. There is the place where Karen and I saw the poisonous mushrooms, the Destroying Angel,
Amanita virosa
is the Latin name of the mushroom. Once Karen and I had talked about putting some of those mushrooms into
my mom’s food, and standing here now, I wonder what would have happened.

Eating a rabbit. Todd has done it. My mom has done it. My brothers and even me. I am told when I was little I did not mind it. When Mawmaw fixed it, I ate it.

And I don’t remember it or the taste of it, but the thought of it is in my mouth and in my teeth and when Mom tells the story of how I loved Mawmaw’s stew before I knew what was in it and how I screamed bloody murder when I realized it—she always tells it in the same way and she does not skip a word when she tells Mrs. Hotchkiss—as I try to sneak off the back porch steps she says

Cecilia.

And how she says it in the accent of a doctor asking for a scalpel.

“Cecilia. Mrs. Hotchkiss needs a fresh ashtray,” she says.

“Oh no, no, I really do have to get going, I just wanted to ask about your girl for the berry pick—”

“Oh, she was screaming bloody murder. Have you seen that movie
The Miracle Worker
?”

“Well, I really have no time for watching movies this time of year! It was good talking with—”

“She screamed bloody murder and tore the room up worse than Helen Keller. I told her, you’d make a good Helen Keller, you know that? We learned all kinds of things on that day, didn’t we, Ceci? Even Mawmaw learned something.”

“Well! Good-bye then, let me know about the—if she—if your girl wants to pick with us. Thanks again for the—”

Screamed bloody murder because it was bloody murder.

I have made certain vows to Ivan. Certain swears upon my honor to live as his guard and be willing to die saving him. I play movies of it
in my head, how I give my life. And movies of what I do to anyone who hurts him.
Miracle Worker
, only very bloody. And if I should die before I get my revenge, I will come back, come back from the dead, and I will be violent. I have written these things in pencil on the wood of Ivan’s pen but you can only see it if you tilt your head just right. It is not obvious, but to certain kinds of people it will be visible.

And Todd asks Bernard about Mawmaw, why we say it, why not Grandma?

Bernard says we had a grandma and a mawmaw. “Before she passed,” says Bernard.

Todd: Died. Dead.

Bernard: We have to say
passed
. Unless you want a slap. Do you want a slap?

Todd: No.

Bernard: Mawmaw would go, You want a slap? You want a slap?

And I see Bernard remembering, about to say it, and I step toward him.

Bernard: Todd! Wanna see Ceci go crazy? Put your hands like claws and say—

SAY IT, BERNARD! Say how I just kicked you so hard between your legs, perfectly and very on purpose. SAY! SAY! Tell Todd the magic words that will make me kick his nuts too, because you know I will do it. I will do it if you say my name and just three other words.

C
ecilia. Mawmaw wants Ivan.

I
t is the worst place to kick a person and I must get the belt for it, but Mom says the belt isn’t working for me anymore. So what will work for me? There were slaps and Bernard snot-faced crying, “Kill Ivan, Mom! She doesn’t deserve him!” and my other brothers come in, see there will be no dinner, and slam out.

Mom sits at the table and lights a cigarette. She points to the chair across from her.

Scalpel.

I sit.

“So,” Mother says to me. “What was all that screaming about?”