Vimbai’s eyes turned to the grandma—the old lady gave Felix a disapproving look of her white eyes and coughed, delicately covering her wrinkled mouth with one white-gloved hand. She coughed for a while, as if clearing her throat from dust and grime accumulated over the years (and Vimbai suspected that was the case); grandma hacked and caught her breath and hacked again, with great inhales and sharp coughs reminiscent of the tearing of butcher’s paper. When she was finally able to stop, she extracted a small white handkerchief demurely tucked away into her sleeve, and mopped the corners of her eyes and her mouth. “Good Lord,” she said. “Maya, are you wearing cutoffs made from man’s jeans? Have you lost your mind?”
Maya let go of Vimbai’s hand then, and she rushed across the kitchen floor elbowing Felix out of the way, and she gave her grandmother a great hug, crying and laughing at the same time.
And what was Vimbai going to say about that? Nothing, that’s what—she kept her lips sealed, because she too had her grandmother who had no reason or way of being here, because sometimes hows and whys did not matter as much as the greatest gift in the world, the biggest privilege imaginable—the ability to look at someone whom one had lost, and to tell them all the things you always wanted to say but did not have a chance. The second chance, the greatest gift—and who was Vimbai to deny it to anyone, least of all Maya?
Chapter 20
Vimbai watched the sun rising over the ocean—still a thin silvery stripe, with the clouds just barely turning pink and golden.
Maya came out onto the porch and stood next to her. “Nice sunrise. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen one—properly, I mean. Driving home after the night shift doesn’t quite count.”
“Sunrise is a sunrise,” Vimbai said. “You okay?”
Maya nodded. “Yeah. Just trying to get used to the idea that my grandmother is, you know, a zombie.”
“Mine is a ghost,” Vimbai pointed out.
Maya heaved a sigh. “Do you think ghosts are cooler than zombies?”
“No way.” Vimbai smiled. “Zombies are way cool. Although the ghosts are too.”
“And undead horseshoe crabs?”
“They are in their own category,” Vimbai said. She pointed at the dark stripe on the horizon, something she had been trying to discern the shape of since it was light enough to see anything. “What does this look like to you?”
Maya looked, her hand shielding her squinting eyes, and grinned, wider than Vimbai had ever seen her smile. “This is land, Vimbai. This is land! We’ll get us some milk soon.”
“And afterwards?”
“I still vote for staying in the house and being queens of all we see,” Maya said. “I don’t think we’d get to keep our grandmothers in the outside world.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine in the house,” Vimbai said. “But we . . . you and I, we need to go outside now and again. I want to see my parents, and I would like you to meet them, and I hope they are not too mad at me—I mean, they would be mad, but they’ll forgive me, I hope. And I want to go back to school, and I hope to get away with academic probation for such a long absence, and I worry that I won’t be able to.”
Maya smiled. “I know. Still, it’s tempting to imagine what it would be like, to leave everything behind like that, and just explore and name things, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Vimbai said. “Maybe we’ll be able to—maybe the house will keep growing on the inside, and we can take weekend trips to its distant reaches.”
“And we can go and visit the man-fish.”
“Oh, damn it!” Vimbai clasped her hands to her chest. “I completely forgot that I promised him a spell—I better take care of it before he gets pissed off and starts walking around swallowing souls.”
“I’ll come with you,” Maya said. “Do I need to bring the dogs with me?”
Vimbai shook her head. “Nah, let them be. I will need a knife, though.”
Maya followed her in the kitchen and stayed close, as Vimbai rummaged through every drawer looking for the sharpest knife. “You think you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” Vimbai lied, and shot a reassuring smile in the direction of both grandmothers. She headed for the door before the grandmothers got suspicious and started asking what they wanted with sharp knives. Maya followed, her expression alternating between giddy and doubtful.
Vimbai and Maya hurried to the man-fish’s lake. The way was so familiar now, so ordinary that Vimbai barely paid any attention to the usual overnight terrain alterations—there was a small hill built of rolled up, twisted laundry, and on the other side of the path a freshly sprung puddle of Jell-O and rich mud. Weak and pale stems of rye fringed the path and brushed against Vimbai’s bare calves, like stiff cat whiskers.
“Do you think that land we saw was . . . is really New Jersey?” Maya said. “I mean, could it be some never-never land or something?”
Vimbai shrugged. “I doubt it. The crabs know where they are going, and they know New Jersey. They would tell us if they were lost . . . wouldn’t they?”
“Of course,” Maya said. “Just wondering, you know? These past few weeks have been a bit—”
“Weird?” Vimbai interrupted.
Maya smiled and nodded. “Yeah. If you’re aiming for the understatement of the century.”
“You’ve been coping well.” Vimbai sucked on her lower lip, considering her words. “I was getting an impression that you were rather . . . reveling in it.”
“I never thought it would make sense to freak out or whine about shit,” Maya said. “Roll with the punches, dontcha know. But this stuff, this . . . this house and the ghosts and my dogs—all this has been great. I like it, and sometimes you just have to stop worrying about what’s possible and what isn’t, and how it’s all going to play out, and what will happen to you and if you’re losing your mind.”
“You thought that you might?” Vimbai said.
“And you didn’t?”
Vimbai shook her head. “I would’ve, if it was just me. But with you around, being so cool about all this . . . I never really doubted.”
The cattails and reeds fringing the man-fish’s lake greeted them with sage nodding to the nudgings of a light gentle wind, and the sun reflected in a thousand facets on the lake’s surface.
There was a movement, a splash by the small island of wild rice not too far off the bank. The man-fish waited for them, his wide mouth twisted in a grimace of acute displeasure that eerily reminded Vimbai of her mother. “Finally,” he said. “Took you long enough to show up.”
“Sorry,” Vimbai said. “We’ve been battling blood-draining monsters.”
“Successfully, I assume.” The man-fish gave Vimbai a long measuring look. “Of course. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“And you would.” Maya shook her head. “You really know how to hedge your bets—you would be here no matter what.”
“You don’t seem to understand the man-fish,” the man-fish said.
Vimbai nodded. It seemed impossible to understand such a creature, like it was not possible to understand the vampires. There was that solitary drive, the terrible single-minded obsession that Vimbai lacked and yet did not envy. “I suppose we don’t,” she said. “Then again, what are you going to do?”
“You don’t understand the survival.” The man-fish crawled closer to the bank, his wet browned skin glistening in the sun as his humped back and the stiff dorsal fin breached the water surface. “You don’t know what it is like, constantly thinking of not dying, and finding enough to eat so you can live another day.”
“Maybe not,” Maya said. “But you need Vimbai now, so you better be nice to her.”
The man-fish grumbled and crawled closer still. “All right, all right. So what say you, witch-girl?”
“I’m definitely not a witch,” Vimbai said, even as she doubted her own words. Her thoughts ran in so many directions at once now—was she really a witch, or was her magic born merely of love and desperation? Would her mother be mad at her if she knew? Of course not, Vimbai thought. She would be mad at Vimbai’s long disappearance first of all, and if she was ever kicked out of school or even put on academic probation, she would be even madder. Magic was quite far down on the list of things Vimbai’s mother would get mad about. “But I can cut you good. It’s a pity I didn’t bring a fish knife.”
Maya snickered, and the man-fish rolled his beady eyes. “Very funny,” he said. “Go ahead—less talking and more cutting, and I only pray that you’re more proficient in the latter than in the former.”
Vimbai eyed the wide expanse of the man-fish’s flank and back, brown and green like silt, like river mud. He swelled immense, and his eye still glimmered with malice he never bothered to conceal. And what sort of magic could she pour into such a creature? She could only rely on her vague understanding of how these things worked, and she reasoned that if her love, her unrequited desire fueled the protective spell she had somehow carved into her forearms, then to quench the insatiable thirst for souls she had to offer something the opposite of it—satisfaction, satiety, contentment. Vimbai smiled, since this was something she knew quite a bit about.