I made a slow turn to the left, then to the right, seeing nothing but bushes and trees. Finally I spun around. The road behind me was empty. I told myself the sun was making my skin sensitive. But I knew better.
I walked on, slowly, measuring the intensity of my reaction with every step. Gradually my skin calmed again. Whatever had been watching me had moved on.
After the gate, the dirt path to the house curved to the right, and Grace bounded down to meet me. We came around the final curve and there stood the house, only its front limestone wall intact. A savory smell came from the kitchen, one of my mother’s astonishing soups—garlic, cucumbers, basil, and tomatoes, as well as red wine vinegar and lashings of Sangfroid crystals and the tonic that kept us from drinking human blood.
Yes, we still had the urge to drink blood. I couldn’t tell you which appetite was stronger, which one propelled me home.
At lunch I handed my mother the pages I’d printed. Only the two of us sat at the table. Her friend Dashay, who co-owned the property, and Dashay’s boyfriend, Bennett, were in Jamaica to attend a funeral. They’d be back in a week.
“So much speculation,” she said, after she’d read them. She said she’d called the state agricultural office a few minutes before I’d come home, and left a message on their voice mail.
I told Mãe about the girls I’d met at the post office.
“What are their last names?” she asked.
I didn’t remember.
“What do their parents do?”
“That never came up,” I said. Did she think I cared about such things?
I was going to tell her about the man in the van when she pushed her chair back from the table. Her shirt was stained (with tomato juice or tonic?), her auburn hair had fallen down completely, and her eyes had the worried cast that made them seem darker. But her skin glowed as if it were made of pearl dust. She was as beautiful as ever.
She smiled, as if she appreciated the compliment. “I’m glad you found some friends,” she said. “It’s lonely without Dashay and the horses.” And the bees. And Raphael, she thought.
Yes, I missed Dashay. And I missed the bees, and the horses, too. They’d stay at a friend’s farm in Kissimmee until our own stables were rebuilt.
And yes, I missed Raphael. I missed my father most of all.
Some voices have undernotes of rusty hinges. Others hint of water gurgling down slow drains. But most vampires’ speech is melodic, measured, sometimes as lyrical as a song. I guess it’s because our sense of hearing is so acute. We can hear our own voices, and most mortals don’t pay attention to their own.
After lunch I’d taken a nap. I must have been asleep for hours, because when I opened my eyes, the light in the room had turned blue-gray. The wrinkled ceiling overhead reminded me of the underbelly of an ocean floor. From outside, voices drifted in, fluid and fluent as music. My mother’s voice counterpointed that of her best friend, Dashay.
I pushed my hair away from my face and sat up. Their voices floated through my open window.
They sat outside in what remained of the moon garden. Once, pale night-blooming flowers had filled the circular borders behind the benches. But the hurricane left bare roots, broken stems, and piles of leaves and debris. The benches, upended against the house during the storm, now were set face to face. The sun must have just slipped beneath the horizon, because the sky had turned indigo—not blue, not quite violet, but a color in between. The color of secrets, I thought.
My mother, facing me, sat slumped in her chair, listening.
Is it wrong to eavesdrop? Of course. But if you’d seen the unhappiness on my mother’s face, you wouldn’t have been able to resist. I did resist listening to their thoughts.
Dashay’s words poured out in clusters so fast that they ran into each other, and she spoke with an accent and lilt I’d heard only hints of before.
“Then I told them, I told them no, how can you be so quick to judge, but they do not listen, they are all against me, they tell me to go, and then I look for Bennett, I go after him, I look all through the trees, but he’s not there, he’s not there.” Her shoulders were shaking.
I didn’t want to hear any more. Bennett had been Dashay’s true love, or so I’d thought. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and a beautiful smile. I’d watched them dance one moonlit night in our garden, turning and dipping, their hands clasped, and I’d thought, Someday, I want to have what they have.
I didn’t want to hear any more, but I couldn’t stay away. From the house’s west side, still unfinished and open, I could see Dashay’s face.
She was crying. I’d read the expression that tears “well,” but I’d never seen it happen before; tears continually reached the lower brims of her eyes and overflowed, streamed down her face. Her white skirt was streaked gray with tears. And she said words I didn’t understand: “Duppy get the blame, but man feel the pain.”
My mother left her bench and bent over Dashay, wrapped her arms around her, pulled her out of the chair. They stood, holding each other in the ruined garden. The sky turned from indigo to midnight blue to black.
I turned away, surprised (but not for the first time) that I felt jealous of their friendship.
The next morning, I awoke with the sense that everything was normal. The blue plastic ceiling seemed to breathe with the wind, the air smelled of sawdust, and the tapping of hammers broke the rhythm of “Iron Man,” a song the radio played at least once every day.
But when I looked outside, I noticed something new. In the moon garden, all around the chair where Dashay had sat, bloomed tiny white flowers. Her tears had been their seeds.
Chapter Two
After breakfast my mother led me outside, handed me a hammer, and introduced me to Leon, a member of the framing crew, who showed me where to put the nails.
We were nailing plywood to two-by-fours, don’t ask me why. I’m sure Leon would have told me if I’d asked. My mind wasn’t on what we were building. I wanted to be inside. Dashay would be getting up soon, and she and Mãe would be talking. I wanted to hear the details.
But no, I had to help rebuild the house. It felt like being outside a movie theater or a playhouse; all the drama was on the inside, and I was left to imagine the plot.