“Stay here,” I told Harris. He’d been allowed to remain with us for the summer, as a gift to me. And in truth, he seemed to like Florida more now. Joey had been sent to the rehab center a few weeks ago, and early reports from Panama claimed his personality had blossomed.
I went down the driveway to the gate, not resentful at all about being disturbed, waving at the horses grazing in the paddock as I passed. Grace emerged from beneath a sweet olive shrub and followed me after a fashion, pausing frequently to sniff the ground or wash herself.
But my heart sank when I saw the man at the gate. Agent Burton stood in the road, talking into his cell phone. His suit was too dark for a Florida summer, and his forehead glistened with perspiration. A white Ford Escort idled behind him.
In the space of ten yards, I formed a strategy.
He put the phone in his pocket. “Miss Montero!” His voice boomed. “Long time, no see.”
I kept walking toward him. I opened the gate.
“Do you want to come up to the house?” I said. I made my voice young and perky. “My mother’s not here, but she’ll be back later. We’re staying here with friends. We lost our house in the hurricane.”
I should mention that I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, because he noticed it. Kid is growing up, he thought.
He smiled. “I was visiting the area, you know, and I heard you were here —”
“Where’d you hear that?” But his thoughts told me: he’d traced one of my calls to Michael.
“Somebody told me. And, uh, we thought you might have some further insights into the death of your friend Kathleen. You left the Saratoga area very suddenly.”
“I needed to visit my mom.” I held the gate half open.
He was thinking it might be strategic if he came to the house, but it also might be risky. Better to do it with an adult present.
“Sure you don’t want to come up? The house is cooler.”
He wanted to. He didn’t move. “No, this is okay. By the way, I was sorry to hear about your father’s passing.”
He wasn’t sorry at all. “Thank you,” I said. “But, you know, he isn’t dead.”
His thoughts began to swirl then, because all along he’d found my father’s death hard to believe. A man in his prime, dying so suddenly. But no indication of foul play. “He isn’t dead,” he repeated. “You mean he’s still alive?”
“He lives, he wakes — ’tis Death is dead, not he,” I quoted.
Is she nuts? he thought.
No, I wanted to tell him. I’m fourteen.
I recited a few more lines, making my eyes wide, using the full range of my voice:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep —
He hath awakened from the dream of life —
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
Clearly Agent Burton didn’t know Shelley’s poem Adonais.
Poor kid, he thought. She’s gone over the edge. And no wonder, with all she’s been through.
I could have gone further. I could have recited the entire poem. Or, I could have told him, By the way, my father is a vampire. So is my mother. So am I. I could have told him who killed Kathleen.
I could have told him about the fire. The investigators weren’t sure if Malcolm had set it, or if it was Dennis’s form of revenge. Maybe Agent Burton could solve that one. Or maybe he could find out who left the roses on my father’s grave.
I could have told him how things look, at fourteen, under an aspect of eternity.
Instead, I repeated, “Peace, peace! he is not dead.”
I gave him a sad smile. In practicing the art of confusion, there is no better weapon than poetry.
“Yeah,” he said. “Peace.” He made the V-sign with his right hand, turned, walked back toward his white rental car. I heard him think, This case will never close.
And I turned, walked up the path back to the house, Grace following me. I’d go back to the hammock for a while, dream away the afternoon. For now, it was enough.
Epilogue
Long ago, when my father told me, “It’s a pity that more vampires don’t write the facts,” I’d thought, Well, I’m doing my part.
But I decided to stop writing. I’d put down all the facts I had, and it was time for me to figure out what to do with them — to take two steps back and consider the puzzle as a whole picture, with light and dark and shadows. Later, I copied all the useful parts into this new notebook.
I’d like to think that someone will read my notes and find them useful — that you will read them. I dedicate this book to you — the child that I hope to have one day. Maybe you’ll have an easier time growing up than I did. Maybe this book will help.
Maybe, someday, humans will read it, too. Once they take the first leap — believing that we exist — perhaps they’ll begin to understand and tolerate us, even value us. I’m not naïve enough to imagine us living with them in complete harmony. And I know now that my life will never be normal.
But imagine what could happen if we all felt that we were citizens of the world, committed to a common good? Imagine forgetting ourselves, and forgetting that we’re mortals and others, and instead focusing on bridging the schisms that keep us apart. I think I could do that, serving as a kind of translator between the two cultures.
In the last chapter of Walden, Thoreau wrote, Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
That’s my plan, one way or another: to carry on the work.
Grace still is with me, but Harris is gone, off to the sanctuary in Panama to learn how to be wild again. Will there someday be a sanctuary for us?