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“You’re a vampire.”
And I heard the word above the roar because I had already realized that was what this was all about.
I spun around to see if Hugh and the girl had heard, but they were gone. I stood looking at acres of perfect green grass, wishing with all my might they would reappear so I could say something, anything, to them to explain. But there was no explanation. There was only that black word and it was the truth. Vampires take the one thing that keeps a person alive. Sometimes it is blood, sometimes hope, love, ambition, or faith. I took them all.
Behind my back the noise stopped. Not even the sound of the wind. When I turned, only the boy was still there. The stands were completely empty. He stood in the same spot, his hands at his sides.
I took a step toward him but this time hepulled back, afraid I would touch him.
I tried to speak but my throat was thick and dry. “What’s your name?”
“Declan.” He said it beautifully, melodiously, as if it were the easiest word in the world to say. “It’s the name of a saint.”
I smiled, remembering Hugh and his saints.
“I’m going to go now, Declan. I understand why they wanted me to come here, but I don’t need to see any more. I understand everything. Is that all right? Can I leave?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
I walked back across the field, through the gate, up the steps past the empty seats. At the top I almost turned around for a last look, but I knew that might kill me and there were things I had to do before I died.
11. THE HISTORY OF SHADOWS
And I heard the word above the roar because I had already realized that was what this was all about.
I spun around to see if Hugh and the girl had heard, but they were gone. I stood looking at acres of perfect green grass, wishing with all my might they would reappear so I could say something, anything, to them to explain. But there was no explanation. There was only that black word and it was the truth. Vampires take the one thing that keeps a person alive. Sometimes it is blood, sometimes hope, love, ambition, or faith. I took them all.
Behind my back the noise stopped. Not even the sound of the wind. When I turned, only the boy was still there. The stands were completely empty. He stood in the same spot, his hands at his sides.
I took a step toward him but this time hepulled back, afraid I would touch him.
I tried to speak but my throat was thick and dry. “What’s your name?”
“Declan.” He said it beautifully, melodiously, as if it were the easiest word in the world to say. “It’s the name of a saint.”
I smiled, remembering Hugh and his saints.
“I’m going to go now, Declan. I understand why they wanted me to come here, but I don’t need to see any more. I understand everything. Is that all right? Can I leave?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
I walked back across the field, through the gate, up the steps past the empty seats. At the top I almost turned around for a last look, but I knew that might kill me and there were things I had to do before I died.
11. THE HISTORY OF SHADOWS
OUR HOUSE WAS not on fire when I reached the top of the cellar stairs. No surprise. But what did startle me was how I perceived the house and the objects inside as I walked through it on the way to the front door.
Before Hugh and I ever became intimate and I was wrestling with whether or not I should let myself fall for him, I said, “I don’t want to fall in love with you. It would be too big a memory.”
Now as I walked through our home, everythingwas too big a memory. From the antique brass letter opener on the side table to the four paintings of young Lolly Adcock on the living room wall, it felt like I was walking through a museum of myself. Almost everything held brilliant, crushing memories of the time when I didn’t know the truth about myself, when I was only a woman in love with a man and a vision of life with him I thought sound and possible.
I stopped and picked up things because the impulse was irresistible. A pair of scissors we’d used to open boxes, a postcard from the electric company saying we were now registered customers. Artifacts in my museum, objects and ephemera from a stone age when I guilelessly believed in a just God, believed that people had only one life to live, and evil was a word most suited to the Bible, history books, or silly movies. Charming and quaint as a hand-carved cradle, our house and what it contained was the beautiful dream you had last night that, on waking, you ache not to forget, but inevitably do within minutes.
As I was passing the living room, something nudged my mind and I went in to find a book Hugh had once shown me. Favorite Irish Names for Children. I looked up the boy’s name.
Heaven gave Saint Declan a small black bell, which he used to find a ship for himself and his followers. Later, that bell overtook the ship and showed Declan where to establish his monastery off the Waterford coast. Declan Oakley. The kind of beautiful name a child hates when they’re young because it’s strange and foreign-sounding, especially in America. But he would love it when he grew older. Declan. I said it aloud.
“Actually, the formal name is Deaglan. Emphasis on the second syllable.” Shumda stood outside on the porch. The window was closed but I heard him perfectly. I hadn’t paid close attention to what he looked like the first time I saw him in the cellar. He appeared to be about thirty-five and similar to the portrait on the old poster Hugh had found for Frances. But if he was thirty-five in the 1920s, he would be well over a hundred today. The man on the porch did not look a century old.
“Come outside. It’s a nice night.”
“Why are youhere? Where’s James?”
“You set him free, Miranda. Remember? Now he’s just a puff of smoke. Good closure! Besides, he’s not one of us. Not one of the chosen few. He’s only dead. Dead people are not high on our food chain.”
“But why did you come?”
“Because they told me to escort you through the next stage of your… pilgrimage. It’s more involved, but that’s enough of an explanation for now. You know those stories about after-death experiences? How dead loved ones come to greet you and take you toward the Light? Beautiful, and not a word of it is true. But in your case it is, sort of. Although you’re not dead. And neither am I.” He threw up both hands in quick denial. “That’s the beauty part. Oh, I think you’re going to like this. It just takes getting used to. Are you going to come outside? Should I come in? Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” He ballooned his cheeks and closed his eyes.
“Go away.”
He stretched both arms out to the sides hands closed. He opened them slowly and in each was a small black bell. Saint Declan’s bell. Fingers extended, he gave each a shake. Their tinkle was light and crystalline. “I can go. But what if you have questions?”
“I don’t want you to answer my questions.”
Pouting, he jingled the bells again. “Brave girl. Dumb girl.” He put the bells on the windowsill, crossed the porch, and went down the stairs to the street. I hurried to the window to make sure he was gone.
Then I picked up the telephone and made two calls. I needed a taxi and I needed to make sure Frances Hatch was still at the Fieberglas Sanitorium.
“I GOTTA TELL you, lady, this ride’s gonna cost you money. It’s about a half hour, forty-five minutes from here.”
“I understand that. Could we go now?”
“You betcha.”
We had been under way a few minutes before the cab driver spoke again. “You ever heard about bed mites?”
“Excuse me?”
“Bed mites. Ever heard of them?” We traded looks in the rear-view mirror. “Neither did I till the other day. Was watchin’ this documentary on TV about allergies. Ever notice how people think they’re intellectual because they watch the Discovery Channel? Not me; I just like finding out about the weird way the world works.
“Anyhow, there was this show on about human allergies. They got a new theory that things called bed mites cause a lot of them. They’re these microscopic bugs that live in our beds and pillows, the sheets.… They’re not dangerous or anything, but they leave droppings, if you know what I mean. And it’s the droppings human beings are allergic to. Strange, huh?”
Taken aback, I couldn’t stop myself from rudely blurting, “Did you make that up?”
“Nah, really, I saw it on this show! They suggested all these ways of protecting yourself if you’re allergic. Wrap your mattress and pillows in plastic, get an air cleaner to catch any droppings that might be floating in the air… No, it’s really true.”
Again we looked at each other in the mirror, and he nodded enthusiastically.
“That’s horrible!”
“Not for the bed mites.”
I laughed. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about them, despite all the chaos surrounding my life at that moment. I envisioned a beautiful woman getting into a freshly made bed and falling asleep. And then, like a scene in a David Lynch film, the camera goes in close on her pillow. Closer and closer until we see thousands and thousands of tiny white insects scurrying around, living their lives despite a huge human head in their midst.
I knew from high school biology class the world is infested with horrid microscopic creatures living happily off and in and on human beings but, thank God, we never know the difference. Yet sooner or later some of their droppings or their germs or their simple existences dotouch us. If we’re lucky all we do is sneeze. If we’re not, they kill us. The metaphor, especially at that moment in my life, was clear and forbidding.
All the conscious lies and forgotten promises we breed, the cruel gestures, small and large. The lack of gratitude and unwillingness to share, the kindness not repaid, the slight returned. The selfishness, the chosen ignorance, the pointless theft, the fuck-you-I-come-first attitude that taints so much of life. All of them are bed mites wecreate. Growing up, we’re taught to accept them as a given. Age-old. Been around forever. They’re part of life. But they aren’tbecause in most cases when we stop and think, we’re instantly aware of how to avoid producing more of these revolting bugs and their shit.
As far as other people’s behavior is concerned, we learn how to “wrap our mattresses in plastic”—we learn how to protect ourselves. But more important is filtering our own words and conduct so that our “droppings” don’t enter others and make them sick.
What I had learned in one hideous moment at the stadium was that life is not usually ruined by any one crowning blow, KO punch, or single act of savagery. It isruined by the thousands of “bed mites” our cruelty, indifference, and insensitivity breed in the beds of those we love or know.
“Do you have any music?”
He looked down at the seat next to him. “I do, but I don’t think you’d go for it. I got Voodoo Glow Skulls and Rocket from the Crypt.”
“Could you turn on the radio?”
“Sure.”
Thoughtfully, he searched through the channels till he came to classical music. Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” was on, and for a while it calmed my heart. The night landscape did too as it slipped by outside in intermittent patches of glitter and dark. Towns at rest, people going home. A man leaving a liquor store. A boy on a bicycle rode furiously in front us on the road, turning again and again to see where we were, trying to keep ahead, red reflectors on the pedals. The lights in one house came on like an eye opening. A van pulled into a driveway, its exhaust smoke gray over night black.
“That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“The drive-in movie over there. They usually stop running it at the end of summer. Who wants to go to the drive-in this time of year? It’s too cold.”
I looked where he was pointing and what I saw meant nothing for a moment. On the giant screen, people bustled around inside a busy store. Then Hugh Oakley entered the picture. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, he tried on a baseball cap. It was the day we almost slept together for the first time, when we went to the Gap store in New York instead and made out in the dressing room. I come up behind him with a pair of trousers in my hand and say something. He nods and follows me to the back of the store.
At a drive-in theater in Somewhere, New York, a scene from a day in my life was showing on a screen forty feet high.
“Look at that, willya? No cars in there! Who are they showing the movie to?”
The parking lot was empty.
“Could you turn the music up, please?”
THE PARKING LOT of Fieberglas Sanatorium was not empty. We arrived around nine at night, but there were still many cars parked. We pulled up to the brightly lit front door. I looked at the building and was surprised at the stillness in my heart.
“Are you visiting someone in there?”
“Yes. An old friend.”
The driver ducked his head so he could see the building better through the windshield. “Must have money to be staying in a place like this.”
I looked at the back of his head. The hair had recently been cut—it was all precise angles against perfectly white skin. From behind, he looked like a soldier or a little boy. “What’s your name?”
“My name? Erik. Erik Peterson. Why?”
“Could you wait here while I go in, Erik? I’ll pay you for your time.”
“You know, I was planning on waiting for you anyway. Didn’t think you’d want to stay around herevery long, especially this time of night. You’ll be going back to Crane’s View?”
He turned and smiled at me. A neighborly smile, nothing behind it but a kind and considerate man.
“Yes. Thank you. But I might be a while.”
“No problem.” He held up a Watchman miniature television. “The last episode of Neverwhereis on in ten minutes. Gotta see that.”
I got out of the taxi and started toward the door. Behind me he called out, “What’s yourname?”
“Miranda.”
“I’ll be right here, Miranda. You take your time.” I took a few steps and he said, “When we drive back home, I’ll tell you about hyacinth macaws.”
“Are they related to bed mites?”
“No, they’re birds. Another documentary I saw afterthe bed mites.” He looked down. The dancing gray-blue flicker of the television screen reflected off his face. I was so glad he was there.
Opening the heavy front door this time, I was immediately struck by how quiet and empty the place was. My leather heels on the stone floors were a riot of noise. A middle-aged nurse sat at the reception desk reading. No one else was around. I walked over and waited for her attention but she didn’t look up. Reading a page of her book upside down, I saw it was poetry. The first line of one poem read: “Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.”
She continued to ignore me.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“I would like to see Frances Hatch.”
“What room is she in?”
“I don’t remember.”
The woman sighed mightily and consulted her computer. She said the room number and immediately went back to her book.
“That’s a nice line.”
She looked up. “What?”
“’Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.’ It’s a nice line. It pretty much says it all.”
She looked at me, her book, me. She snapped it shut and grew a suspicious look. I walked away.
The elevator arrived with a pingand the doors opened on Frances’s doctor. “You’re back.”
“Yes. I have to talk to Frances. But first I have a question: Could you tell me, what exactly is this place? Who is it for?”
“It’s a hospice. Of sorts.”
“People come here to die? Frances is going to die?”
“Yes. She’s very weak.”
“But why here? She loves her apartment so much. Why would she come here?”
“Do you mind if I go up with you? Just up to her floor? Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“All right.” I stepped into the elevator. She pressed the button.
When the door closed, she turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Do you know about your lives?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me how you learned?”
I briefly described returning to the house in Crane’s View, the fire, the stadium, and the word Declan had used there that explained everything. I said nothing about Hugh’s and my baby. While I spoke, she crossed her arms and lowered her head almost to her chest. When I finished we were standing near Frances’s door.
The doctor slowly shook her head. “Extraordinary. It’s always different.”
“This is common?”
“Miranda, everyone here has experienced the same thing as you. It simply manifests itself differently every time. All of your lives have led you here. Now you must make a great decision. You can stay here as long as you like and you’ll be safe. That’s one of our purposes—to protect you while you decide. The other function is to care for those who have made the decision and choose to end their lives here.
“Hospices for people like you have existed for as long as recorded history. A hotel in the Pyrenees, a youth hostel in Mali, a hospital in Montevideo. There is an inscription over one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt—”
“What decision are you talking about?”
“Frances will tell you, but I think you already know. All of those people in the stadium hated you because you took something essential from the life of every one of them. People use the word vampirebecause it is something so foreign, so impossible to imagine really existing that we shiver at the thought and then laugh it off as idiotic fantasy. Dracula? Sucking blood and sleeping in a coffin? Silly. But if you look up the definition it says ‘one who preys on others.’ Everyone does that, but we have nice rational explanations for it. Until you look more closely.
“I think you must talk to Frances now. She’ll answer the questions you have.” She turned to leave. I touched her arm.
“Wait! But who are you?”
“Someone like you. I was in the same situation as you are but made my decision a long time ago.” She touched my hand. “At least you’ll have clarity now. I learned how important that is, no matter where it leaves you in the end.” She walked soundlessly down the hall and out the door at the other end. The same door Hugh’s son had used earlier. Today. All this had happened in one day.
I knocked softly on Frances’s door and pushed it open. The first thing that hit me was the perfume. An aroma like the most wonderful flower shop. I hesitated in pushing the door further. The flood of colors and shapes drowned the eyes. For a second I couldn’t even find the bed. When I did I had to smile because Frances was sitting up straight reading a magazine, looking totally oblivious to the paradise surrounding her.
Then I heard music. It was classical, lilting and summery, something I had never heard before. It reminded me of Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.” Before speaking, I let my eyes and ears calm down.
Still flicking through her magazine and without lifting her eyes, Frances said, “Close the door, girl. I don’t want people seeing me in this nightgown.”
“The room is so beautiful, Frances. You always know how to do up a place.”
“Thank you. Come in and sit down. There’s a chair in here somewhere. Just shift some flowers.”
“Who sent them to you?”
“The Shits. But we have other things to talk about. I assume that’s why you’re here in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. But could you turn off the music while we talk?”
She stared at me blankly, as if I had said something complicated in a foreign language. “The music! No, I can’t do that. It’s piped in. There’s no control.”
“What if you don’t want to hear it?”
She started to say something but stopped. “You grow used to it. Forget the music, Miranda. Tell me what happened to you. And give the details—they’re very important.”
I told her everything, including seeing Hugh and our child. It didn’t take long. It was disturbing to finish as quickly as I did. In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it.
The only time Frances showed real emotion was when I told her about Shumda. She grilled me on what he looked like, what he said, how he acted. Normally very pale, her face grew redder as I talked. Eventually she put a hand over her mouth and kept it there until I finished describing the last thing he said to me before walking off the porch. She stared at the window and seemed to be putting both her thoughts and her emotions together.
“Your name in Vienna was Elisabeth Lanz. Your death was the most celebrated scandal of the day because so many people were in the theater when you fell. Shumda was a great star then. People came from all over Europe to see him. The chief of police was in the audience that night and personally arrested him.
“The Landesgericht. Shumda used to like to say that word to me when I visited him in his cell. He spoke perfect Hochdeutsch, of course. He was a superb ventriloquist because he loved languages. He spoke four. He could be happy just saying words in different languages because they were so delicious to him. Some people love the taste of chocolate; Shumda loved the taste of words. Landesgericht, crйpuscule, piombo, zvinka. I can still see him: lying in bed after we’d made love, rolling difficult words off his tongue and smiling. He liked to talk as much as he liked to screw.
“He had led a charmed life, so he never truly believed they would punish him for your death. But it was a political year in Vienna and politicians love a scapegoat. Here was this showman, a ventriloquist from Romania, who had killed one of the city’s young flowers in front of hundreds of people. The case against him was clear. There was no question they would have executed him if I hadn’t saved him.”
“How did you do that?”
“I traded my life for his.”
“How did you… What do you mean?”
“Look at your hand, Miranda.”
I looked but saw nothing.
“No, turn it over. Look at your palm.”
It had no lines. Every one had vanished. My palm was smooth as paper. Smooth as skin anywhere else on your body, but not the hand. Not where your past and future are supposed to be mapped out by fate and will.
Disbelieving, I could not raise my eyes when Frances spoke again.
“Miranda!”
“What is this? Why—”
“Listen to me: There werelines on your hand when you entered that stadium. They disappeared when you realized what you are.”
“A vampire? When I realized I had lived all these lives? That’s when the lines disappeared?” I needed to repeat what she had said so I could fix it somewhere in my reeling mind. Despite the effort to remain sane, my voice teetered on the brink of something very bad. I could barely control myself.
It felt like the big bang theory was being played out all over again—in my brain. Everything I knew was speeding outward toward the farthest reaches of space. Maybe in a few billion years the fragments would have slowed and cooled enough again to allow some life again, but right now they were only flying out.
Frances held up her own right hand, palm out. Covering it were lines and ridges, highways crossing and separating, a lifetime of lines on skin, a detailed albeit chaotic map of the many days of Frances Hatch.
“What are you saying, Frances?”
She slowly raised her left palm. It was blank. I looked quickly at my left but it was as blank as my right.
She brought the hands together and folded them in her lap. “Palmists disagree about what the individual lines on a hand mean, but most concede those on the left indicate what you’re born with and the ones on the right are what you’ve done with them. Left hand,” she raised her blank one. “Right hand.”
“Why are both of mine blank?”
“Because now that you have discovered who you really are, you haveno fate anymore. Everything from this point on is up to you.” She licked her lips. “You’re different now.”
“From what I learned today, I’ve been different all my life. All my lives!” I said the last word like a hissing snake.
“But now you know the truth about who you are. That changes everything. Now you can do something about it, Miranda. Everything is up to you from this point.”
I looked at my smooth palms again, not sure of what to say or ask. “Tell me about you and Shumda.”
“I haven’t seen him for seventy years. Not since the day I saved him. That’s part of how this works—if you sacrifice yourself for another person, you will never see them again. In most cases, because they never want to see youagain. They don’t like to be reminded of what you did for them. But if they’re young, they never know it happened, because they don’t understand.
“In other respects it’s tolerable. Yousimply become a normal human being and live a normal life. You get flu, pay taxes, have kids if you want.… And sooner or later you die. For good. Welcome to the ‘mortal coil.’ No more VIP lounge for you. Watch out for cholesterol.
“I was extraordinarily lucky, Miranda. I gave my immortality to Shumda, but then went on to live a gorgeous life. Now it’s over. I have no complaints.” Her eyes betrayed her. As soon as she finished speaking, they shifted to the flowers as if the beautiful clusters knew a secret she didn’t want told.
“But Frances, I died! I fell in the theater. I fell off the scaffold in the church—”
“And you came back. Again and again. Normal people don’t. They live once and die. Welive and die and come back. No one else does that, only us. But that’s why people believe in reincarnation—because some of us doreturn, just not the ones they think. Unsterblich.”
“What?”
“Immortal. The German word for it. Shumda loved that word. He said you had to wrap your tongue around it like a kiss.”
“That word was on the cradle. It was carved on our baby’s cradle.”
“I’m not surprised. Everything we experience links up sooner or later. Our separate lives, the smallest details… nothing is left out. You met Hugh because of a discussion about your James and Lolly Adcock’s paintings. You met me because of her work too. Remember those connect-the-dots coloring books you had as a child? That’s us. Everything connects.”
“Why now, Frances? Why am I learning this now?”
“Because of love, dear; because you’re finally in love and have the opportunity to be selfless. It happens only once in a lifetime, any lifetime. There are big loves and small ones, but only one selfless love. In your case, I assume it’s for your child. I would have thought it was for Hugh, but it wasn’t, because you had this revelation afterhe died.”
Without any warning I felt violently ill. I was going to throw up. I slapped a hand over my mouth to try and stop it. I did, but only just.
So much had occurred since I’d learned I was pregnant that there had been no time to reflect on what it meant. But I knew what Frances said was true. The child inside me meant everything. The daughter from the man I had planned to spend the rest of my life with. The baby I had wanted all my life but avoided thinking about because the possibility of long love and children had faded as I grew older. It was a joy I tried not to think about. Getting older means you have fewer beginnings. Children are the beginning of everything again, no matter how old you are or how fixed in your ways.
The day I learned I was pregnant I had another, altogether different revelation. Riding home on the train to Crane’s View, I considered the best way to tell Hugh. Somewhere in the middle of that planning, I was embraced by the thought: I will never be alone again. With this child in my life, I wouldnever be alone again. It was the most warming, intimate, reassuring sensation I have ever known.
While Frances spoke, I unconsciously put both hands on my stomach, but whether for reassurance or protection I didn’t know. In a whisper I said, “What’s so bad about being normal?”
“Nothing. But it is entirely different from what you’ve known.”
“Different how?”
She thought it over. Once her right hand flew up off the bed as if reaching for something in the air. Only after it had floated back to her lap and she thought some more did she speak. “Being human is a deeper, richer, much sadderexperience than you know. Somewhere inside all of their souls, their genes, inside their cells, human beings understand this is all there is. But most of the time they can’t figure out what thisis. Your spirit is comfortable because it knows that when this dance is finished there’ll be another for you. And another.”
“What exactly would I be giving up?”
“Your immortality. You would give it to your child. You give it to the person you love as much as yourself. I gave mine to Shumda. They were going to kill him. I couldn’t let that happen because I realized I loved him more than my own life.”
“How do you give it up—is there some special way?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s always different, but instinctively you’ll know what to do when the time comes. It’s not anything you have to think about.”
“What did you do, Frances?”
She closed her eyes. “I set a dog on fire.”
“ Why?”
“I can’t tell you. But it was necessary. When I realized that was what I had to do, I also understood it would cause the change. And it worked. As soon as I had done it, a lawyer appeared and said he could save Shumda. Herr Doktor Pongratz. I’ll never forget that name. He said he had read about the case in the Viennese newspapers and had found a little-known law in the Austrian judicial system that would exonerate Shumda. And it did.”
“But couldn’t someone else have found that law too?”
Frances straightened up and smoothed the sheets around her. “No, because no such law existed until Pongratz found it.”
“Can you give your immortality away to anyone, or does it have to be the one you love?”
“To anyone. Once you realize who you are and what you have, it’s your decision what to do with it. You can give it to whoever you choose.”
We sat silently amid her flowers and the piped in music. I had so many questions to ask.
“Can I have the baby even being who I am? Without giving up the immortality?”
“Yes! Of course you can, Miranda. But you’ll destroy it. You’ll love it and care for it and do everything in your power to give it a wonderful life. But eventually you’ll destroy it because you are what you are. Your ego takes precedence over everything else. And as you’ve already discovered, it’s not always obvious. You can’t fight the instinct, no matter how hard you try. It’s like pushing against the ocean.
“Whatever you give your daughter you’ll end up taking back, times two. Often you won’t even know you’re doing it, but shewill. As with everyone else in your life, you’ll ruin things that are fundamental to her well-being. You’ll ruin her dreams, sabotage her feelings of self-importance. You’ll suck her dry. When she’s your age, she’ll tell cynical, embittered stories about her mother the bitch. She’ll finish by saying she loves you of course, but the less she sees you, the better.
“As an adult, she’ll believe the articles in women’s magazines and think she’s missing everything. She’ll wear too much jewelry and her voice will get louder over the years as she realizes fewer and fewer people listen to what she says.
“Look around you. Watch how people function and interact with one another. You’ll see this is going on everywhere all the time. People devour each other in the name of love, or family or country. But that’s an excuse; they’re just hungry and want to be fed. Read their faces, the newspapers, read what it says on their T-shirts! ‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.’ ‘My parents went to London but all they brought me back was this lousy T-shirt.’ ‘So many women, so little time.’ ‘Whoever dies with the most toys, wins.’ They’re supposed to be funny, witty, and postmodern, Miranda. But the truth is they’re only stating a fact: Me. I come first. Get out of my way.”
“So vampires are everywhere?”
“Everywhere. They just don’t have fangs or sleep in coffins.”
“What will happen if I give the baby my immortality? Will she live a happy life?”
“There’s no guarantee. She willbe a vampire. But you’ll be giving her an enormous chance because, if nothing else, she would have all those lives. In a way, that’s happiness. Very few of our kind have been willing to make that sacrifice. Even when we find the love of our life, we refuse to give them our immortality.”
I told her about the cab ride from Crane’s View and seeing my life on screen at the drive-in theater.
“You’re doing that to yourself. It’s the immortal part of you with the unbelievable powers. The part that was able to free James Stillman. The part that was outside this building staring in the last time you were here. It knows you must decide now and it’s afraid you’ll make the wrong choice.”
“But why show me thatscene? Hugh’s dead. I can’t do anything about that.”
“I don’t know. But those kinds of bizarre things will continue until you choose. Your magical side can be very persuasive, believe me.”
“Frances, that music is driving me crazy. Can you call down to the front desk and ask them to turn it off?”
She held up a finger for me to be quiet. The pastel-colored, ethereal music filled the room. Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Delius—it could have been composed by any of them. It perfectly complemented the brilliant mass and whirl of the flowers.
I watched her face. It remained expressionless most of the time, but now and then she flinched slightly or gave a faint smile.
“It reminds me of things I’ve forgotten and what I’m going to lose when I die. ‘Only in hell is memory exact.’ I suppose this is how my trip to hell begins. We forget so much over a lifetime. So many brilliant moments and stories. How could we forget, Miranda? Why do we let them go without a struggle? They make us, deepen us; they define who we are. But we live these moments and forget them. We mislay them like a set of keys. How is it possible to be so sloppy with our own life?
“Before you came in, for the first time in fifty years I remembered an October afternoon I spent in Vienna with Shumda. It was right after we’d arrived there, and he hadn’t started performing yet. We took a tram to the last stop in Grinzing, then walked up through the vineyards to the Wienerwald and Cobenzl. There’s a magnificent view from there down over the whole city.
“On the way home, we stopped at a Heurigenand had a lunch of fried chicken and new white wine. Shumda loved to talk. Almost nothing could stop him once he got going. But in the middle of our meal, right in the middle of taking a bite of chicken, he saw something behind me and absolutely froze. I’d never seen anything like it. I spun around to see what it was, but there was nothing there but two nondescript men sitting at a table drinking wine. Shumda wiped his hands carefully on a handkerchief, then reached into his backpack and took out the book he had been reading the whole summer. It was Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had just been published.
“He asked how he looked. I said ‘Fine, what’s the matter with you?’ He bit his lip and it was plain he was extremely nervous about something. Shumda was never nervous. He was the most self-confident person I’ve ever known. He took the book, stood up, and walked across the courtyard to the two men. As he approached, a chow chow came out from under the table and stared at him. Obviously it was protecting the men, and for a moment I thought it was going to bite him. But it was on a leash, and one of them reined it in close.
Shumda looked at the dog and then the men. He held up the book, but instead of speaking, he made the dog talk for him. Itsaid, ‘Dr. Freud, you have written a masterpiece. I’m in your debt.’ Freud, who wasn’t famous for his sense of humor, was bewildered. He kind of harrumphed a bit, said thank you, looked suspiciously at his dog, and finally asked Shumda if he was a performer. Shumda said yes very meekly and invited him to his show when it opened at the Ronacher Theater. Freud tried to smile and be gracious but he really didn’t know what to do.
“We left the Heurigenbefore they did. As we were walking out, Freud and I made eye contact. Passing their table I leaned over the great doktor, whom I didn’t know from the man in the moon, and said, ‘You really should come to his show. He’s a genius.’ I often wondered if he was there the night you fell.”
“You said you forgot things, Frances. Sounds like you remember very well.”
“I’m remembering everything now. The music has been doing that to me. It brings back Freud’s smell when I bent over to talk to him. The yellowness of the chestnuts on the ground in the courtyard of that Heurigen. They fell from the trees in spiky shells. You peeled, them open and inside was a shiny brown chestnut. People collected them and fed them to the animals at the Schonbrunn zoo.”
“Do you like remembering these things? You sound so sad.”
“Well, it is sad watching your house burn down. When there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to stand and watch. You remember the things inside you’re losing. It’s hard, but it reminds me of how rich my life was. God, I had a good one.”
“But I’m looking at your face, Frances. You’re not remembering only good things, are you?”
She wouldn’t answer.
Is it better to remember all we’ve lost? Especially when we know it’s gone forever? And what about the bad memories? The bad times, bad people, bad choices, bad plans—should we be reminded of them?
I didn’t think so, especially not in Frances’s case. In her retelling, even her good memories, the Freud stories and their like, trailed an aroma of melancholy and loss that stank. Even in a room filled with the most exotic flowers.
“I’ll go now. I’m going back to Crane’s View.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She knew I had no other choice. “If you leave here tonight, you can’t come back until after you’ve decided. You won’t be protected.”
“I don’t want to be protected.” I bent over and kissed the old woman high on her forehead. She smelled of talcum powder. “Thank you for everything, Frances. Even after all that’s happened, I still love you very much.”
“And I love you. The one thing I always regretted was not having a child. A daughter. Now, having known you, I know what it would have been like and I regret it even more.”
I touched her cheek and left. I walked into the hall and closed the door behind me.
After two steps I started shaking so much I couldn’t move. I wasn’t ready yet. I had thought I was but I was wrong. Five more minutes with Frances. A few more questions. I just needed five more minutes with my friend. Then I would be all right and able to go on to whatever was next. She would understand that. She would know how to stop my shakes and push the demons back.
I returned to her door and opened it. The music was playing. Frances sat with her face in her hands weeping so hard her whole body shook violently.
“Oh Jesus, Frances!”
She looked up. Her face was crimson. Her cheeks were shiny from tears. She waved a hand at me to leave. I did not know how to help, how to save my friend from a fate so hopeless and decided. But I could fetch the doctor. Maybe the doctor had something that could calm her down and at least let her rest.
Dr. Zabalino was downstairs in the lobby talking to the receptionist. The sight of me racing toward her must have said everything. I started explaining what happened but she was hurrying for the elevator before I was three sentences in. I started after her but she stopped and slammed a hand against my chest.
“No! If you want to stay here and be protected, don’t move till I get back. But you cannot come with me! Think of Frances. Something you said obviously upset her. She’s very weak and this is bad for her. I don’t want her seeing you again now.” She took her hand away but kept both hands wide open at her sides, as if ready to shove me again if I tried accompanying her. She walked to the elevator, entered, turned around and faced me. As the doors slid closed, she said, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay here and you’ll be safe.”
The light above the door illuminated the floor numbers. When it stopped at Frances’s, I turned and walked to the receptionist. She wasn’t ignoring me or reading poetry this time. Her eyes were bright and alert, like those of a small animal that’s just realized a much bigger one is very close.
“What happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
I slapped my hands down on the desk loud enough to make her cringe. “Don’t give me shit! What happens now?”
“Usually the doctors can fix things. Dr. Zabalino is very good. She’ll know how to help your friend. But it’ll be harder to help you because you haven’t chosen yet. That’s the worst. Making up your mind, because there are so many reasons for and against it. That’s why you should stay here until you’ve decided. Fieberglas is the safest place for you. Outside it’s very, very dangerous. There are things out there—”
“Tell the doctor I left.”
“You can’t!”
“I don’t want to be here. I’ve got to—Just tell her I left.”
“But—”
The clatter of my heels against the stone floor rang out again in that quiet place as I walked to the door. Through a window, I saw Erik Peterson in his taxicab, the light from the portable TV flickering on his face. I pushed open the heavy front door. The air outside was cold and smelled of pine and stone. I felt no desire to return to the “safety” of the building.
“Erik? Let’s go home.”
He looked up. “You finished?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I sit next to you?”
“Not at all. Hop in.” He reached across the passenger’s seat and threw open the door. The overhead light came on a weak yellow. I walked around the front of the car and got in but didn’t close the door. I needed a moment just sitting before my life could continue.
“How’d it go in there, Miranda? How’s your friend?”
“Sick. Is this your family?” On the dashboard was a small metal frame with three oval photographs inside. A boy, a girl, a wife. The girl wore a cheerleader’s sweater and flirted with the camera. The pretty woman looked straight at it, expressionless. The boy—
“Yes. That’s my wife Nina, our daughter Nelly, and Isaac.”
“He looks like you.”
“Isaac died of meningitis two years ago. One night he didn’t feel well and went to bed. The next morning he was gone.” He gestured for me to close the door. I hesitated so as to have another, closer look at Isaac in the dim light. Erik started the car. The strong smell of exhaust fumes filled the air.
“I’m so sorry. What was he like?”
“Interesting you ask. Most people when they hear about it just say they’re sorry. They’re embarrassed to ask questions. Or they feel uncomfortable.
“What was he like? He was a pistol. You couldn’t keep the kid down. He woke up at five every morning and went full tilt till you threw him into bed at night and shut his eyes for him. I guess he was hyperactive, but my wife said he was just too interested to sit down. We miss him.”
I pulled the door closed and we drove away from Fieberglas. The gravel crunching beneath the car tires sounded very loud. As we drove onto the street I looked down at my hands in my lap and saw they were both clenched into fists. I was fearful something might stop or hold us back, but that was egotism or paranoia. Nothing stopped us; nothing met us but the night in front of the headlights.
“Once when Isaac was a little boy, I mean really little, I walked into the bathroom and saw him standing next to the toilet barefoot. The seat was up and he was dangling a foot over the bowl. I asked what he was doing, because with that kid, it coulda been anything. He said he’d bet himself he couldn’t put his foot in the toilet. For some crazy reason he was frightened of doing that. So there he was standing, daring himself to do the thing that scared him most.”
“Why was he afraid to do that? Had it been flushed?”
“Oh, sure.” Peterson took a hand off the steering wheel and gave an airy wave. “But you know how it is when you’re a kid: you got different monsters than the ones you got as an adult.”
Before Hugh and I ever became intimate and I was wrestling with whether or not I should let myself fall for him, I said, “I don’t want to fall in love with you. It would be too big a memory.”
Now as I walked through our home, everythingwas too big a memory. From the antique brass letter opener on the side table to the four paintings of young Lolly Adcock on the living room wall, it felt like I was walking through a museum of myself. Almost everything held brilliant, crushing memories of the time when I didn’t know the truth about myself, when I was only a woman in love with a man and a vision of life with him I thought sound and possible.
I stopped and picked up things because the impulse was irresistible. A pair of scissors we’d used to open boxes, a postcard from the electric company saying we were now registered customers. Artifacts in my museum, objects and ephemera from a stone age when I guilelessly believed in a just God, believed that people had only one life to live, and evil was a word most suited to the Bible, history books, or silly movies. Charming and quaint as a hand-carved cradle, our house and what it contained was the beautiful dream you had last night that, on waking, you ache not to forget, but inevitably do within minutes.
As I was passing the living room, something nudged my mind and I went in to find a book Hugh had once shown me. Favorite Irish Names for Children. I looked up the boy’s name.
Heaven gave Saint Declan a small black bell, which he used to find a ship for himself and his followers. Later, that bell overtook the ship and showed Declan where to establish his monastery off the Waterford coast. Declan Oakley. The kind of beautiful name a child hates when they’re young because it’s strange and foreign-sounding, especially in America. But he would love it when he grew older. Declan. I said it aloud.
“Actually, the formal name is Deaglan. Emphasis on the second syllable.” Shumda stood outside on the porch. The window was closed but I heard him perfectly. I hadn’t paid close attention to what he looked like the first time I saw him in the cellar. He appeared to be about thirty-five and similar to the portrait on the old poster Hugh had found for Frances. But if he was thirty-five in the 1920s, he would be well over a hundred today. The man on the porch did not look a century old.
“Come outside. It’s a nice night.”
“Why are youhere? Where’s James?”
“You set him free, Miranda. Remember? Now he’s just a puff of smoke. Good closure! Besides, he’s not one of us. Not one of the chosen few. He’s only dead. Dead people are not high on our food chain.”
“But why did you come?”
“Because they told me to escort you through the next stage of your… pilgrimage. It’s more involved, but that’s enough of an explanation for now. You know those stories about after-death experiences? How dead loved ones come to greet you and take you toward the Light? Beautiful, and not a word of it is true. But in your case it is, sort of. Although you’re not dead. And neither am I.” He threw up both hands in quick denial. “That’s the beauty part. Oh, I think you’re going to like this. It just takes getting used to. Are you going to come outside? Should I come in? Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” He ballooned his cheeks and closed his eyes.
“Go away.”
He stretched both arms out to the sides hands closed. He opened them slowly and in each was a small black bell. Saint Declan’s bell. Fingers extended, he gave each a shake. Their tinkle was light and crystalline. “I can go. But what if you have questions?”
“I don’t want you to answer my questions.”
Pouting, he jingled the bells again. “Brave girl. Dumb girl.” He put the bells on the windowsill, crossed the porch, and went down the stairs to the street. I hurried to the window to make sure he was gone.
Then I picked up the telephone and made two calls. I needed a taxi and I needed to make sure Frances Hatch was still at the Fieberglas Sanitorium.
“I GOTTA TELL you, lady, this ride’s gonna cost you money. It’s about a half hour, forty-five minutes from here.”
“I understand that. Could we go now?”
“You betcha.”
We had been under way a few minutes before the cab driver spoke again. “You ever heard about bed mites?”
“Excuse me?”
“Bed mites. Ever heard of them?” We traded looks in the rear-view mirror. “Neither did I till the other day. Was watchin’ this documentary on TV about allergies. Ever notice how people think they’re intellectual because they watch the Discovery Channel? Not me; I just like finding out about the weird way the world works.
“Anyhow, there was this show on about human allergies. They got a new theory that things called bed mites cause a lot of them. They’re these microscopic bugs that live in our beds and pillows, the sheets.… They’re not dangerous or anything, but they leave droppings, if you know what I mean. And it’s the droppings human beings are allergic to. Strange, huh?”
Taken aback, I couldn’t stop myself from rudely blurting, “Did you make that up?”
“Nah, really, I saw it on this show! They suggested all these ways of protecting yourself if you’re allergic. Wrap your mattress and pillows in plastic, get an air cleaner to catch any droppings that might be floating in the air… No, it’s really true.”
Again we looked at each other in the mirror, and he nodded enthusiastically.
“That’s horrible!”
“Not for the bed mites.”
I laughed. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about them, despite all the chaos surrounding my life at that moment. I envisioned a beautiful woman getting into a freshly made bed and falling asleep. And then, like a scene in a David Lynch film, the camera goes in close on her pillow. Closer and closer until we see thousands and thousands of tiny white insects scurrying around, living their lives despite a huge human head in their midst.
I knew from high school biology class the world is infested with horrid microscopic creatures living happily off and in and on human beings but, thank God, we never know the difference. Yet sooner or later some of their droppings or their germs or their simple existences dotouch us. If we’re lucky all we do is sneeze. If we’re not, they kill us. The metaphor, especially at that moment in my life, was clear and forbidding.
All the conscious lies and forgotten promises we breed, the cruel gestures, small and large. The lack of gratitude and unwillingness to share, the kindness not repaid, the slight returned. The selfishness, the chosen ignorance, the pointless theft, the fuck-you-I-come-first attitude that taints so much of life. All of them are bed mites wecreate. Growing up, we’re taught to accept them as a given. Age-old. Been around forever. They’re part of life. But they aren’tbecause in most cases when we stop and think, we’re instantly aware of how to avoid producing more of these revolting bugs and their shit.
As far as other people’s behavior is concerned, we learn how to “wrap our mattresses in plastic”—we learn how to protect ourselves. But more important is filtering our own words and conduct so that our “droppings” don’t enter others and make them sick.
What I had learned in one hideous moment at the stadium was that life is not usually ruined by any one crowning blow, KO punch, or single act of savagery. It isruined by the thousands of “bed mites” our cruelty, indifference, and insensitivity breed in the beds of those we love or know.
“Do you have any music?”
He looked down at the seat next to him. “I do, but I don’t think you’d go for it. I got Voodoo Glow Skulls and Rocket from the Crypt.”
“Could you turn on the radio?”
“Sure.”
Thoughtfully, he searched through the channels till he came to classical music. Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” was on, and for a while it calmed my heart. The night landscape did too as it slipped by outside in intermittent patches of glitter and dark. Towns at rest, people going home. A man leaving a liquor store. A boy on a bicycle rode furiously in front us on the road, turning again and again to see where we were, trying to keep ahead, red reflectors on the pedals. The lights in one house came on like an eye opening. A van pulled into a driveway, its exhaust smoke gray over night black.
“That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“The drive-in movie over there. They usually stop running it at the end of summer. Who wants to go to the drive-in this time of year? It’s too cold.”
I looked where he was pointing and what I saw meant nothing for a moment. On the giant screen, people bustled around inside a busy store. Then Hugh Oakley entered the picture. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, he tried on a baseball cap. It was the day we almost slept together for the first time, when we went to the Gap store in New York instead and made out in the dressing room. I come up behind him with a pair of trousers in my hand and say something. He nods and follows me to the back of the store.
At a drive-in theater in Somewhere, New York, a scene from a day in my life was showing on a screen forty feet high.
“Look at that, willya? No cars in there! Who are they showing the movie to?”
The parking lot was empty.
“Could you turn the music up, please?”
THE PARKING LOT of Fieberglas Sanatorium was not empty. We arrived around nine at night, but there were still many cars parked. We pulled up to the brightly lit front door. I looked at the building and was surprised at the stillness in my heart.
“Are you visiting someone in there?”
“Yes. An old friend.”
The driver ducked his head so he could see the building better through the windshield. “Must have money to be staying in a place like this.”
I looked at the back of his head. The hair had recently been cut—it was all precise angles against perfectly white skin. From behind, he looked like a soldier or a little boy. “What’s your name?”
“My name? Erik. Erik Peterson. Why?”
“Could you wait here while I go in, Erik? I’ll pay you for your time.”
“You know, I was planning on waiting for you anyway. Didn’t think you’d want to stay around herevery long, especially this time of night. You’ll be going back to Crane’s View?”
He turned and smiled at me. A neighborly smile, nothing behind it but a kind and considerate man.
“Yes. Thank you. But I might be a while.”
“No problem.” He held up a Watchman miniature television. “The last episode of Neverwhereis on in ten minutes. Gotta see that.”
I got out of the taxi and started toward the door. Behind me he called out, “What’s yourname?”
“Miranda.”
“I’ll be right here, Miranda. You take your time.” I took a few steps and he said, “When we drive back home, I’ll tell you about hyacinth macaws.”
“Are they related to bed mites?”
“No, they’re birds. Another documentary I saw afterthe bed mites.” He looked down. The dancing gray-blue flicker of the television screen reflected off his face. I was so glad he was there.
Opening the heavy front door this time, I was immediately struck by how quiet and empty the place was. My leather heels on the stone floors were a riot of noise. A middle-aged nurse sat at the reception desk reading. No one else was around. I walked over and waited for her attention but she didn’t look up. Reading a page of her book upside down, I saw it was poetry. The first line of one poem read: “Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.”
She continued to ignore me.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“I would like to see Frances Hatch.”
“What room is she in?”
“I don’t remember.”
The woman sighed mightily and consulted her computer. She said the room number and immediately went back to her book.
“That’s a nice line.”
She looked up. “What?”
“’Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.’ It’s a nice line. It pretty much says it all.”
She looked at me, her book, me. She snapped it shut and grew a suspicious look. I walked away.
The elevator arrived with a pingand the doors opened on Frances’s doctor. “You’re back.”
“Yes. I have to talk to Frances. But first I have a question: Could you tell me, what exactly is this place? Who is it for?”
“It’s a hospice. Of sorts.”
“People come here to die? Frances is going to die?”
“Yes. She’s very weak.”
“But why here? She loves her apartment so much. Why would she come here?”
“Do you mind if I go up with you? Just up to her floor? Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“All right.” I stepped into the elevator. She pressed the button.
When the door closed, she turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Do you know about your lives?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me how you learned?”
I briefly described returning to the house in Crane’s View, the fire, the stadium, and the word Declan had used there that explained everything. I said nothing about Hugh’s and my baby. While I spoke, she crossed her arms and lowered her head almost to her chest. When I finished we were standing near Frances’s door.
The doctor slowly shook her head. “Extraordinary. It’s always different.”
“This is common?”
“Miranda, everyone here has experienced the same thing as you. It simply manifests itself differently every time. All of your lives have led you here. Now you must make a great decision. You can stay here as long as you like and you’ll be safe. That’s one of our purposes—to protect you while you decide. The other function is to care for those who have made the decision and choose to end their lives here.
“Hospices for people like you have existed for as long as recorded history. A hotel in the Pyrenees, a youth hostel in Mali, a hospital in Montevideo. There is an inscription over one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt—”
“What decision are you talking about?”
“Frances will tell you, but I think you already know. All of those people in the stadium hated you because you took something essential from the life of every one of them. People use the word vampirebecause it is something so foreign, so impossible to imagine really existing that we shiver at the thought and then laugh it off as idiotic fantasy. Dracula? Sucking blood and sleeping in a coffin? Silly. But if you look up the definition it says ‘one who preys on others.’ Everyone does that, but we have nice rational explanations for it. Until you look more closely.
“I think you must talk to Frances now. She’ll answer the questions you have.” She turned to leave. I touched her arm.
“Wait! But who are you?”
“Someone like you. I was in the same situation as you are but made my decision a long time ago.” She touched my hand. “At least you’ll have clarity now. I learned how important that is, no matter where it leaves you in the end.” She walked soundlessly down the hall and out the door at the other end. The same door Hugh’s son had used earlier. Today. All this had happened in one day.
I knocked softly on Frances’s door and pushed it open. The first thing that hit me was the perfume. An aroma like the most wonderful flower shop. I hesitated in pushing the door further. The flood of colors and shapes drowned the eyes. For a second I couldn’t even find the bed. When I did I had to smile because Frances was sitting up straight reading a magazine, looking totally oblivious to the paradise surrounding her.
Then I heard music. It was classical, lilting and summery, something I had never heard before. It reminded me of Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.” Before speaking, I let my eyes and ears calm down.
Still flicking through her magazine and without lifting her eyes, Frances said, “Close the door, girl. I don’t want people seeing me in this nightgown.”
“The room is so beautiful, Frances. You always know how to do up a place.”
“Thank you. Come in and sit down. There’s a chair in here somewhere. Just shift some flowers.”
“Who sent them to you?”
“The Shits. But we have other things to talk about. I assume that’s why you’re here in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. But could you turn off the music while we talk?”
She stared at me blankly, as if I had said something complicated in a foreign language. “The music! No, I can’t do that. It’s piped in. There’s no control.”
“What if you don’t want to hear it?”
She started to say something but stopped. “You grow used to it. Forget the music, Miranda. Tell me what happened to you. And give the details—they’re very important.”
I told her everything, including seeing Hugh and our child. It didn’t take long. It was disturbing to finish as quickly as I did. In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it.
The only time Frances showed real emotion was when I told her about Shumda. She grilled me on what he looked like, what he said, how he acted. Normally very pale, her face grew redder as I talked. Eventually she put a hand over her mouth and kept it there until I finished describing the last thing he said to me before walking off the porch. She stared at the window and seemed to be putting both her thoughts and her emotions together.
“Your name in Vienna was Elisabeth Lanz. Your death was the most celebrated scandal of the day because so many people were in the theater when you fell. Shumda was a great star then. People came from all over Europe to see him. The chief of police was in the audience that night and personally arrested him.
“The Landesgericht. Shumda used to like to say that word to me when I visited him in his cell. He spoke perfect Hochdeutsch, of course. He was a superb ventriloquist because he loved languages. He spoke four. He could be happy just saying words in different languages because they were so delicious to him. Some people love the taste of chocolate; Shumda loved the taste of words. Landesgericht, crйpuscule, piombo, zvinka. I can still see him: lying in bed after we’d made love, rolling difficult words off his tongue and smiling. He liked to talk as much as he liked to screw.
“He had led a charmed life, so he never truly believed they would punish him for your death. But it was a political year in Vienna and politicians love a scapegoat. Here was this showman, a ventriloquist from Romania, who had killed one of the city’s young flowers in front of hundreds of people. The case against him was clear. There was no question they would have executed him if I hadn’t saved him.”
“How did you do that?”
“I traded my life for his.”
“How did you… What do you mean?”
“Look at your hand, Miranda.”
I looked but saw nothing.
“No, turn it over. Look at your palm.”
It had no lines. Every one had vanished. My palm was smooth as paper. Smooth as skin anywhere else on your body, but not the hand. Not where your past and future are supposed to be mapped out by fate and will.
Disbelieving, I could not raise my eyes when Frances spoke again.
“Miranda!”
“What is this? Why—”
“Listen to me: There werelines on your hand when you entered that stadium. They disappeared when you realized what you are.”
“A vampire? When I realized I had lived all these lives? That’s when the lines disappeared?” I needed to repeat what she had said so I could fix it somewhere in my reeling mind. Despite the effort to remain sane, my voice teetered on the brink of something very bad. I could barely control myself.
It felt like the big bang theory was being played out all over again—in my brain. Everything I knew was speeding outward toward the farthest reaches of space. Maybe in a few billion years the fragments would have slowed and cooled enough again to allow some life again, but right now they were only flying out.
Frances held up her own right hand, palm out. Covering it were lines and ridges, highways crossing and separating, a lifetime of lines on skin, a detailed albeit chaotic map of the many days of Frances Hatch.
“What are you saying, Frances?”
She slowly raised her left palm. It was blank. I looked quickly at my left but it was as blank as my right.
She brought the hands together and folded them in her lap. “Palmists disagree about what the individual lines on a hand mean, but most concede those on the left indicate what you’re born with and the ones on the right are what you’ve done with them. Left hand,” she raised her blank one. “Right hand.”
“Why are both of mine blank?”
“Because now that you have discovered who you really are, you haveno fate anymore. Everything from this point on is up to you.” She licked her lips. “You’re different now.”
“From what I learned today, I’ve been different all my life. All my lives!” I said the last word like a hissing snake.
“But now you know the truth about who you are. That changes everything. Now you can do something about it, Miranda. Everything is up to you from this point.”
I looked at my smooth palms again, not sure of what to say or ask. “Tell me about you and Shumda.”
“I haven’t seen him for seventy years. Not since the day I saved him. That’s part of how this works—if you sacrifice yourself for another person, you will never see them again. In most cases, because they never want to see youagain. They don’t like to be reminded of what you did for them. But if they’re young, they never know it happened, because they don’t understand.
“In other respects it’s tolerable. Yousimply become a normal human being and live a normal life. You get flu, pay taxes, have kids if you want.… And sooner or later you die. For good. Welcome to the ‘mortal coil.’ No more VIP lounge for you. Watch out for cholesterol.
“I was extraordinarily lucky, Miranda. I gave my immortality to Shumda, but then went on to live a gorgeous life. Now it’s over. I have no complaints.” Her eyes betrayed her. As soon as she finished speaking, they shifted to the flowers as if the beautiful clusters knew a secret she didn’t want told.
“But Frances, I died! I fell in the theater. I fell off the scaffold in the church—”
“And you came back. Again and again. Normal people don’t. They live once and die. Welive and die and come back. No one else does that, only us. But that’s why people believe in reincarnation—because some of us doreturn, just not the ones they think. Unsterblich.”
“What?”
“Immortal. The German word for it. Shumda loved that word. He said you had to wrap your tongue around it like a kiss.”
“That word was on the cradle. It was carved on our baby’s cradle.”
“I’m not surprised. Everything we experience links up sooner or later. Our separate lives, the smallest details… nothing is left out. You met Hugh because of a discussion about your James and Lolly Adcock’s paintings. You met me because of her work too. Remember those connect-the-dots coloring books you had as a child? That’s us. Everything connects.”
“Why now, Frances? Why am I learning this now?”
“Because of love, dear; because you’re finally in love and have the opportunity to be selfless. It happens only once in a lifetime, any lifetime. There are big loves and small ones, but only one selfless love. In your case, I assume it’s for your child. I would have thought it was for Hugh, but it wasn’t, because you had this revelation afterhe died.”
Without any warning I felt violently ill. I was going to throw up. I slapped a hand over my mouth to try and stop it. I did, but only just.
So much had occurred since I’d learned I was pregnant that there had been no time to reflect on what it meant. But I knew what Frances said was true. The child inside me meant everything. The daughter from the man I had planned to spend the rest of my life with. The baby I had wanted all my life but avoided thinking about because the possibility of long love and children had faded as I grew older. It was a joy I tried not to think about. Getting older means you have fewer beginnings. Children are the beginning of everything again, no matter how old you are or how fixed in your ways.
The day I learned I was pregnant I had another, altogether different revelation. Riding home on the train to Crane’s View, I considered the best way to tell Hugh. Somewhere in the middle of that planning, I was embraced by the thought: I will never be alone again. With this child in my life, I wouldnever be alone again. It was the most warming, intimate, reassuring sensation I have ever known.
While Frances spoke, I unconsciously put both hands on my stomach, but whether for reassurance or protection I didn’t know. In a whisper I said, “What’s so bad about being normal?”
“Nothing. But it is entirely different from what you’ve known.”
“Different how?”
She thought it over. Once her right hand flew up off the bed as if reaching for something in the air. Only after it had floated back to her lap and she thought some more did she speak. “Being human is a deeper, richer, much sadderexperience than you know. Somewhere inside all of their souls, their genes, inside their cells, human beings understand this is all there is. But most of the time they can’t figure out what thisis. Your spirit is comfortable because it knows that when this dance is finished there’ll be another for you. And another.”
“What exactly would I be giving up?”
“Your immortality. You would give it to your child. You give it to the person you love as much as yourself. I gave mine to Shumda. They were going to kill him. I couldn’t let that happen because I realized I loved him more than my own life.”
“How do you give it up—is there some special way?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s always different, but instinctively you’ll know what to do when the time comes. It’s not anything you have to think about.”
“What did you do, Frances?”
She closed her eyes. “I set a dog on fire.”
“ Why?”
“I can’t tell you. But it was necessary. When I realized that was what I had to do, I also understood it would cause the change. And it worked. As soon as I had done it, a lawyer appeared and said he could save Shumda. Herr Doktor Pongratz. I’ll never forget that name. He said he had read about the case in the Viennese newspapers and had found a little-known law in the Austrian judicial system that would exonerate Shumda. And it did.”
“But couldn’t someone else have found that law too?”
Frances straightened up and smoothed the sheets around her. “No, because no such law existed until Pongratz found it.”
“Can you give your immortality away to anyone, or does it have to be the one you love?”
“To anyone. Once you realize who you are and what you have, it’s your decision what to do with it. You can give it to whoever you choose.”
We sat silently amid her flowers and the piped in music. I had so many questions to ask.
“Can I have the baby even being who I am? Without giving up the immortality?”
“Yes! Of course you can, Miranda. But you’ll destroy it. You’ll love it and care for it and do everything in your power to give it a wonderful life. But eventually you’ll destroy it because you are what you are. Your ego takes precedence over everything else. And as you’ve already discovered, it’s not always obvious. You can’t fight the instinct, no matter how hard you try. It’s like pushing against the ocean.
“Whatever you give your daughter you’ll end up taking back, times two. Often you won’t even know you’re doing it, but shewill. As with everyone else in your life, you’ll ruin things that are fundamental to her well-being. You’ll ruin her dreams, sabotage her feelings of self-importance. You’ll suck her dry. When she’s your age, she’ll tell cynical, embittered stories about her mother the bitch. She’ll finish by saying she loves you of course, but the less she sees you, the better.
“As an adult, she’ll believe the articles in women’s magazines and think she’s missing everything. She’ll wear too much jewelry and her voice will get louder over the years as she realizes fewer and fewer people listen to what she says.
“Look around you. Watch how people function and interact with one another. You’ll see this is going on everywhere all the time. People devour each other in the name of love, or family or country. But that’s an excuse; they’re just hungry and want to be fed. Read their faces, the newspapers, read what it says on their T-shirts! ‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.’ ‘My parents went to London but all they brought me back was this lousy T-shirt.’ ‘So many women, so little time.’ ‘Whoever dies with the most toys, wins.’ They’re supposed to be funny, witty, and postmodern, Miranda. But the truth is they’re only stating a fact: Me. I come first. Get out of my way.”
“So vampires are everywhere?”
“Everywhere. They just don’t have fangs or sleep in coffins.”
“What will happen if I give the baby my immortality? Will she live a happy life?”
“There’s no guarantee. She willbe a vampire. But you’ll be giving her an enormous chance because, if nothing else, she would have all those lives. In a way, that’s happiness. Very few of our kind have been willing to make that sacrifice. Even when we find the love of our life, we refuse to give them our immortality.”
I told her about the cab ride from Crane’s View and seeing my life on screen at the drive-in theater.
“You’re doing that to yourself. It’s the immortal part of you with the unbelievable powers. The part that was able to free James Stillman. The part that was outside this building staring in the last time you were here. It knows you must decide now and it’s afraid you’ll make the wrong choice.”
“But why show me thatscene? Hugh’s dead. I can’t do anything about that.”
“I don’t know. But those kinds of bizarre things will continue until you choose. Your magical side can be very persuasive, believe me.”
“Frances, that music is driving me crazy. Can you call down to the front desk and ask them to turn it off?”
She held up a finger for me to be quiet. The pastel-colored, ethereal music filled the room. Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Delius—it could have been composed by any of them. It perfectly complemented the brilliant mass and whirl of the flowers.
I watched her face. It remained expressionless most of the time, but now and then she flinched slightly or gave a faint smile.
“It reminds me of things I’ve forgotten and what I’m going to lose when I die. ‘Only in hell is memory exact.’ I suppose this is how my trip to hell begins. We forget so much over a lifetime. So many brilliant moments and stories. How could we forget, Miranda? Why do we let them go without a struggle? They make us, deepen us; they define who we are. But we live these moments and forget them. We mislay them like a set of keys. How is it possible to be so sloppy with our own life?
“Before you came in, for the first time in fifty years I remembered an October afternoon I spent in Vienna with Shumda. It was right after we’d arrived there, and he hadn’t started performing yet. We took a tram to the last stop in Grinzing, then walked up through the vineyards to the Wienerwald and Cobenzl. There’s a magnificent view from there down over the whole city.
“On the way home, we stopped at a Heurigenand had a lunch of fried chicken and new white wine. Shumda loved to talk. Almost nothing could stop him once he got going. But in the middle of our meal, right in the middle of taking a bite of chicken, he saw something behind me and absolutely froze. I’d never seen anything like it. I spun around to see what it was, but there was nothing there but two nondescript men sitting at a table drinking wine. Shumda wiped his hands carefully on a handkerchief, then reached into his backpack and took out the book he had been reading the whole summer. It was Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had just been published.
“He asked how he looked. I said ‘Fine, what’s the matter with you?’ He bit his lip and it was plain he was extremely nervous about something. Shumda was never nervous. He was the most self-confident person I’ve ever known. He took the book, stood up, and walked across the courtyard to the two men. As he approached, a chow chow came out from under the table and stared at him. Obviously it was protecting the men, and for a moment I thought it was going to bite him. But it was on a leash, and one of them reined it in close.
Shumda looked at the dog and then the men. He held up the book, but instead of speaking, he made the dog talk for him. Itsaid, ‘Dr. Freud, you have written a masterpiece. I’m in your debt.’ Freud, who wasn’t famous for his sense of humor, was bewildered. He kind of harrumphed a bit, said thank you, looked suspiciously at his dog, and finally asked Shumda if he was a performer. Shumda said yes very meekly and invited him to his show when it opened at the Ronacher Theater. Freud tried to smile and be gracious but he really didn’t know what to do.
“We left the Heurigenbefore they did. As we were walking out, Freud and I made eye contact. Passing their table I leaned over the great doktor, whom I didn’t know from the man in the moon, and said, ‘You really should come to his show. He’s a genius.’ I often wondered if he was there the night you fell.”
“You said you forgot things, Frances. Sounds like you remember very well.”
“I’m remembering everything now. The music has been doing that to me. It brings back Freud’s smell when I bent over to talk to him. The yellowness of the chestnuts on the ground in the courtyard of that Heurigen. They fell from the trees in spiky shells. You peeled, them open and inside was a shiny brown chestnut. People collected them and fed them to the animals at the Schonbrunn zoo.”
“Do you like remembering these things? You sound so sad.”
“Well, it is sad watching your house burn down. When there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to stand and watch. You remember the things inside you’re losing. It’s hard, but it reminds me of how rich my life was. God, I had a good one.”
“But I’m looking at your face, Frances. You’re not remembering only good things, are you?”
She wouldn’t answer.
Is it better to remember all we’ve lost? Especially when we know it’s gone forever? And what about the bad memories? The bad times, bad people, bad choices, bad plans—should we be reminded of them?
I didn’t think so, especially not in Frances’s case. In her retelling, even her good memories, the Freud stories and their like, trailed an aroma of melancholy and loss that stank. Even in a room filled with the most exotic flowers.
“I’ll go now. I’m going back to Crane’s View.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She knew I had no other choice. “If you leave here tonight, you can’t come back until after you’ve decided. You won’t be protected.”
“I don’t want to be protected.” I bent over and kissed the old woman high on her forehead. She smelled of talcum powder. “Thank you for everything, Frances. Even after all that’s happened, I still love you very much.”
“And I love you. The one thing I always regretted was not having a child. A daughter. Now, having known you, I know what it would have been like and I regret it even more.”
I touched her cheek and left. I walked into the hall and closed the door behind me.
After two steps I started shaking so much I couldn’t move. I wasn’t ready yet. I had thought I was but I was wrong. Five more minutes with Frances. A few more questions. I just needed five more minutes with my friend. Then I would be all right and able to go on to whatever was next. She would understand that. She would know how to stop my shakes and push the demons back.
I returned to her door and opened it. The music was playing. Frances sat with her face in her hands weeping so hard her whole body shook violently.
“Oh Jesus, Frances!”
She looked up. Her face was crimson. Her cheeks were shiny from tears. She waved a hand at me to leave. I did not know how to help, how to save my friend from a fate so hopeless and decided. But I could fetch the doctor. Maybe the doctor had something that could calm her down and at least let her rest.
Dr. Zabalino was downstairs in the lobby talking to the receptionist. The sight of me racing toward her must have said everything. I started explaining what happened but she was hurrying for the elevator before I was three sentences in. I started after her but she stopped and slammed a hand against my chest.
“No! If you want to stay here and be protected, don’t move till I get back. But you cannot come with me! Think of Frances. Something you said obviously upset her. She’s very weak and this is bad for her. I don’t want her seeing you again now.” She took her hand away but kept both hands wide open at her sides, as if ready to shove me again if I tried accompanying her. She walked to the elevator, entered, turned around and faced me. As the doors slid closed, she said, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay here and you’ll be safe.”
The light above the door illuminated the floor numbers. When it stopped at Frances’s, I turned and walked to the receptionist. She wasn’t ignoring me or reading poetry this time. Her eyes were bright and alert, like those of a small animal that’s just realized a much bigger one is very close.
“What happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
I slapped my hands down on the desk loud enough to make her cringe. “Don’t give me shit! What happens now?”
“Usually the doctors can fix things. Dr. Zabalino is very good. She’ll know how to help your friend. But it’ll be harder to help you because you haven’t chosen yet. That’s the worst. Making up your mind, because there are so many reasons for and against it. That’s why you should stay here until you’ve decided. Fieberglas is the safest place for you. Outside it’s very, very dangerous. There are things out there—”
“Tell the doctor I left.”
“You can’t!”
“I don’t want to be here. I’ve got to—Just tell her I left.”
“But—”
The clatter of my heels against the stone floor rang out again in that quiet place as I walked to the door. Through a window, I saw Erik Peterson in his taxicab, the light from the portable TV flickering on his face. I pushed open the heavy front door. The air outside was cold and smelled of pine and stone. I felt no desire to return to the “safety” of the building.
“Erik? Let’s go home.”
He looked up. “You finished?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I sit next to you?”
“Not at all. Hop in.” He reached across the passenger’s seat and threw open the door. The overhead light came on a weak yellow. I walked around the front of the car and got in but didn’t close the door. I needed a moment just sitting before my life could continue.
“How’d it go in there, Miranda? How’s your friend?”
“Sick. Is this your family?” On the dashboard was a small metal frame with three oval photographs inside. A boy, a girl, a wife. The girl wore a cheerleader’s sweater and flirted with the camera. The pretty woman looked straight at it, expressionless. The boy—
“Yes. That’s my wife Nina, our daughter Nelly, and Isaac.”
“He looks like you.”
“Isaac died of meningitis two years ago. One night he didn’t feel well and went to bed. The next morning he was gone.” He gestured for me to close the door. I hesitated so as to have another, closer look at Isaac in the dim light. Erik started the car. The strong smell of exhaust fumes filled the air.
“I’m so sorry. What was he like?”
“Interesting you ask. Most people when they hear about it just say they’re sorry. They’re embarrassed to ask questions. Or they feel uncomfortable.
“What was he like? He was a pistol. You couldn’t keep the kid down. He woke up at five every morning and went full tilt till you threw him into bed at night and shut his eyes for him. I guess he was hyperactive, but my wife said he was just too interested to sit down. We miss him.”
I pulled the door closed and we drove away from Fieberglas. The gravel crunching beneath the car tires sounded very loud. As we drove onto the street I looked down at my hands in my lap and saw they were both clenched into fists. I was fearful something might stop or hold us back, but that was egotism or paranoia. Nothing stopped us; nothing met us but the night in front of the headlights.
“Once when Isaac was a little boy, I mean really little, I walked into the bathroom and saw him standing next to the toilet barefoot. The seat was up and he was dangling a foot over the bowl. I asked what he was doing, because with that kid, it coulda been anything. He said he’d bet himself he couldn’t put his foot in the toilet. For some crazy reason he was frightened of doing that. So there he was standing, daring himself to do the thing that scared him most.”
“Why was he afraid to do that? Had it been flushed?”
“Oh, sure.” Peterson took a hand off the steering wheel and gave an airy wave. “But you know how it is when you’re a kid: you got different monsters than the ones you got as an adult.”