I took a deep breath. “Mother — Mãe, I want to know why you left us.”
“That’s simple,” she said. “I wanted to be like you two. I was tired of being left out.”
As her pregnancy proceeded, my mother had more indications that the child inside her — that I — was not a normal human. Extreme nausea and anemia of the kind she experienced were considered unusual, but not abnormal — that was the consensus of my father and Dennis and Root, who had recently joined them. (“I loathed that woman on first sight,” Mãe said. “And she clearly resented me.”)
Bad dreams weren’t abnormal, either. “But my dreams were more than bad,” she said. “I couldn’t remember them, and that in itself was terrible, for someone who’s always placed great store in dreams. I’d awaken with my mouth still open from screaming, the sheets wet, my sense of smell so extreme that I could taste the bleach in the pillowcases. I heard voices — not any I recognized, and certainly not yours or your father’s — telling me I was damned. I wanted to answer back: ‘Who damns me?’ But my voice would dry up in my throat. I ran high fevers. I heard them say I was delirious.”
A breeze swelled, running a line of wind shadows across the water. The air ran right through me. I wondered if I should have been born.
“Ariella, I’m telling you this because I want you to understand why I left.” She leaned toward me, only a small space remaining between us on the warm stone, and yet I didn’t bend toward her.
“Tell me the rest,” I said, my voice stiff.
“I asked him to make me an other. Like him. Like you,” she said. “And he refused.”
And she told me of their arguments, which I don’t like to think about, much less write down here. Listening to parents fight — is there anything worse for a child, except hearing about it years later, knowing that you were the cause?
My father wasn’t about to make anyone a vampire. My mother, sensing that I (in utero) already was one, wasn’t about to be the only aging human in the family.
“Think of it,” she said to me. “Growing old, getting ill. Losing strength and intelligence in the company of others who maintain theirs. The ultimate indignity.”
I took a deep breath. “You both had too much pride.”
In the end, or in the beginning, I was born. And my mother left.
My father examined me in the basement laboratory. What did he do besides count my toes? I wondered. Blood tests must have been run, but what else?
Upstairs, my mother slept. She remembered them covering her with a yellow cashmere blanket.
When she awoke, she was being lifted, still wrapped in the blanket, into an automobile. She heard the engine running, and she smelled its exhaust. She caught a glimpse of Dennis’s face as he shut the car door.
“Who was driving?” I couldn’t be patient. “Was it my father?”
Mãe had been hunched forward, tracing patterns on the rock as she spoke. Now she straightened and looked at me. “Your father? Of course not. It was his best friend. A man called Malcolm.”
My mother had known Malcolm for years, since she’d met my father in Savannah, and when he told her Raphael had asked him to take her for emergency medical treatment, she didn’t question him. She felt weak and exhausted. She slept in the car.
When she awoke, she was in bed — not in a hospital, but in a house. “A rather grand house, somewhere in the Catskills,” she said. “The room had long leaded casement windows. That’s what I remember best: looking out the diamond-paned windows and seeing nothing but empty green fields and hills.”
Malcolm brought her food, then sat by her bedside. “He told me that you’d been born with deformities,” she said, her voice low. “He told me you weren’t expected to live. He said Raphael was devastated, but that deep down, he blamed me. He hated me. Malcolm explained things calmly and rationally. He said I had some choices to make, the first of which was the obvious one: whether to go back and face the horror — face the music, is what he said — or whether to go on with my life and let Raphael go on with his. Your father, he said, much preferred the latter.”
I stood up, shaking. “That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what my father told me.”
Mãe looked up at me. She was crying. But her voice stayed clear and steady. “You can’t know how I felt: sick inside, weak and stupid. He talked to me for hours about the ethics involved. How I hate that word! Ethics are nothing but excuses for behavior.”
I disagreed, but this wasn’t the time for that debate. “Why didn’t you call my father?”
“He didn’t want to talk to me. Malcolm told me the best thing for everyone would be for me to go away, start a new life, forget what he called this misery that I’d created.”
Tears were streaking her face, and I wanted to comfort her, but something in me resisted.
“And he made me an offer. In exchange for leaving Raphael alone, he’d give me what I wanted.”
“Which was?”
“To live forever. To be like you.”
“So you left us, you abandoned us, for that?”
She looked so pathetic, and I wanted to console her as much as I wanted to strike her, or break something. I picked up a rock and threw it into the river, and then I remembered the manatee. I rushed to the edge of the water and peered down.
“It’s all right.” She’d come up behind me. “Look.” She pointed downstream, at eddies that grew deeper, then parted as the manatee surfaced. We watched it for a while.
“I don’t know how to feel,” I said, my voice raspy.
She nodded. We went back to the rock and sat. The sun was hot, and I moved into the shade cast by the tree. Somewhere a mockingbird sang a complicated song, then repeated it six times. High overhead, a bird with a vast wingspan soared and circled.
“What’s that?” I asked.