The Society of S

“She didn’t know what she wanted,” he said. “I thought that her hormones might be unbalanced. To be honest, I didn’t know what else to think. But for whatever reason, she chose to leave.” He looked at the floor. “Humans are always leaving, Ari. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Life is all about people leaving.”

For a few seconds we didn’t speak. The grandfather clock struck four.

“I telephoned her sister, Sophie, who lives in Savannah. She promised to call me if Sara turned up. About a month later, she did call. Sara had told her not to let me know where she was. Ari, she said she didn’t want to come back.”

I felt empty inside, but the emptiness had weight and sharp edges. It hurt.

“If I hadn’t been born, she’d still be here,” I said.

“Ari, no. If you hadn’t been born, she would have been even more miserable. She so much wanted you, remember?”

“And you didn’t?” I looked at him, and I knew I was right.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea,” he said. He stretched his hands toward me, palms up, as if asking for mercy. “For all of the reasons I’ve told you, vampires aren’t meant to breed.”

The emptiness in me turned to numbness. I’d gotten the answers to my questions, all right. My head was filled with them. But instead of bringing me any satisfaction, they made me feel sick.

Chapter Nine

When animals and humans are babies, they tend to imprint — they instinctively note the characteristics of their parents, and they mimic them. Newborn foals, for instance, imprint and follow whatever large being looms above them at the time of birth. After I was born, my father was the only parent to loom above me, and so I learned to mimic him.

But in the womb, I must have listened hard to my mother. Otherwise, much of my later behavior couldn’t be explained — except, perhaps, genetically. And that’s a complicated matter that we’ll consider at another time, yes?

Every January my father left the house for a week to attend a professional conference. Normally Dennis took over my lessons while my father was away.

The night before my father left, Dennis joined us at dinner. Root had prepared an eggplant casserole (surprisingly much tastier than anything ever made by poor Mrs. McG), but after a forkful I had no appetite for more.

Ari is depressed, I thought. Looking across at my father and Dennis, I knew they thought so, too. The worry on their faces made me feel a little guilty. They were pretending to talk about physics — in particular, electrodynamics, on which my next lessons would focus — but they really were talking about me.

“You’ll begin with the review of atomic structure,” my father said to Dennis, his eyes on me.

“Of course,” Dennis said. He hadn’t been around much since Kathleen’s death, but whenever he came by, he put his hands on my shoulders as if to strengthen me.

Root came up from the basement with a large brown bottle in her hand. She set it on the table before my father, and he moved it to the side of my plate. Then she looked at me, and I looked back, and for a moment I saw a shred of sympathy in her black eyes. It disappeared almost at once, and she hurried back to the basement.

“All right, then.” My father pushed back his chair. “Ari, I’ll be back next Friday, and I expect by then you’ll be ready to discuss quantum theory and relativity theory.”

He stood there for a minute — my handsome father in his impeccable suit, his dark hair gleaming in the light from the chandelier over the table. I met his eyes for a second, then looked down at the tablecloth. You didn’t want me, I thought, and I hoped he heard.

The new tonic tasted stronger than the previous one, and after I took the first spoonful I felt a surge of unfamiliar energy. But an hour later, I felt listless again.

We didn’t have a scale upstairs; there was one in the basement, I suppose, but I didn’t want to go into Root’s domain. I knew I’d lost weight only because of the way my clothes fit. My jeans were baggy, and my t-shirts seemed a size larger. It was around this time that my periods stopped. Some months later, I realized I’d been anorexic.

Dennis and I slogged our way through quantum theory. I listened to him without asking questions. At one point he stopped lecturing. “What’s wrong, Ari?” he said.

I noticed that his reddish hair had a few strands of silver in it now. “Do you ever think about dying?” I asked.

He rubbed his chin. “Every day of my life,” he said.

“You’re my father’s best friend.” I listened to my words, wondering where they were heading. “But you’re not —”

“I’m not like him.” He finished my sentence. “I know. Too bad, huh?”

“You mean you wish you were?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want the chance to be around forever? But I don’t know if he’d like me talking that way around you. You’re still kind of —”

He hesitated. I finished his sentence: “— up for grabs.”

“Whatever that means.” He grinned.

“It means I get to choose,” I said. “That’s what he told me. But I don’t know how yet.”

“I don’t know, either,” Dennis said. “Sorry. But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“That’s what he says.” I wished I had a mother to give me advice. I folded my arms across my chest. “So where is he, anyway? Some big blood conference? Why didn’t you go, too?”

“He’s in Baltimore. Every year he goes there. But it’s not about blood. It’s something to do with the Edgar Allan Poe fan club, or society, or whatever they call themselves.” Dennis shook his head and reopened the physics book.

We’d finished lessons, and I was doing yoga alone (Dennis had laughed when I suggested that he join me), when I heard the sound of the front door knocker. It was an old brass one with the face of Neptune on it, and I’d rarely heard it used before — mostly on Halloween nights, by trick-or-treaters whose expectations must have quickly deflated.

When I opened the door, Agent Burton stood on the porch. “Morning, Miss Montero,” he said.

“It’s actually afternoon,” I said.

“So it is. How are you this afternoon?”

“I’m okay.” If my father had been there, I’d have said very well, not okay.

“Great, great.” He wore a camel’s hair coat over a dark suit, and his eyes were bloodshot, yet energetic. “Is your father at home?”

“No,” I said.

“When do you expect him?” He smiled as if he were a friend of the family.

“Friday,” I said. “He’s at a conference.”

“A conference.” Burton nodded, three times. “Tell him I stopped by, won’t you do that? Ask him to give me a call when he gets back. Please.”

I said I would, and I was about to shut the door when he said, “Say, you wouldn’t know anything about kirigami, would you?”

“Kirigami? You mean paper-cutting?” My father had taught me kirigami years ago. After folding paper, you made tiny cuts, then unfolded it to produce a picture. It was one form of design that he could tolerate, he said, because it was symmetrical, and it could be useful, too.

“Very skillful cutting.” Agent Burton kept nodding. “Who taught you how to do it?”

“I read about it,” I said. “In a book.”

He smiled and said goodbye. He was thinking, Bet her old man knows something about cutting.

That night Dennis cooked dinner — vegetarian tacos with fake meat filling — and although I wanted to like them, I couldn’t. I tried to smile after I said I wasn’t hungry. He made me take two teaspoonfuls of tonic, and he gave me some homemade “protein bars” wrapped in plastic.

His face turned darker and redder when he was worried. “You’re depressed,” he said. “And it’s no wonder. But it will pass, Ari. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” The cheese melted into the glutinous fake meat on my plate, making me feel nauseous. “I miss my mother.” Another sentence I hadn’t planned. Yes, it’s possible to miss someone you’ve never met.

I wondered why he looked guilty.

“Whatever happened to that boy you were seeing? Mitchell, was that his name?”

“Michael.” I’d never mentioned him, I felt sure. “He’s Kathleen’s brother.”

I could tell he hadn’t known. “That’s rough,” he said. He took a large bite of his taco, which dripped tomato sauce onto his shirt. Normally I might have found that funny.

“Why don’t you ask him over sometime?” Dennis said, still chewing his taco.

I said that maybe I would do that.

When I called the McGarritts’ house that night, no one answered. The next morning I tried again, and Michael answered the phone.

He sounded neither pleased nor sad to hear my voice. “Things are okay,” he said. “The reporters are pretty much leaving us alone now. Mom still isn’t well.”

“Do you want to come over?”

I heard him breathing. Finally he said, “I’d better not.” Another pause. “But I’d like to see you. Could you come over here?”

After another stultifying physics lesson (Dennis preferred to work with me in the morning, so that he could go to the college in the afternoons), I went upstairs and looked at myself in the mirror. My wavering reflection wasn’t impressive. My clothes were so loose that I looked like a waif.

Luckily, I’d received new clothes for Christmas (which we’d noted with even less fanfare than usual). An enormous box marked Gieves & Hawkes had been set next to my chair in the living room; in it were tailored black trousers and a jacket, four beautiful shirts, socks, underwear, even hand-made shoes and a backpack. I’d been too dispirited to try them on until now. They all fitted perfectly. In them, my body appeared lithe, not too skinny.

Feeling presentable, I trudged over to the McGarritts’ house. The air wasn’t too cold — the temperature must have been above freezing, because the snow on the ground oozed, and icicles on the houses dripped slowly. The sky was the same dead gray color it always was, and I realized how tired I was of winter. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine why people choose to live in the places they live, and why anyone at all would choose Saratoga Springs. I found nothing quaint or picturesque about it that day, only row after row of increasingly shabby houses with peeling paint, framed by dirty snow and dreary sky.

I rang the McGarritts’ doorbell — three ascending notes (C, E, G) that sounded inappropriately cheerful. Michael let me in. If I’d lost weight, he’d lost more.