All Hallows' Eve (15 page)

Despite cruising down that street four times, I couldn't make out any more numbers, nor did the numbers go up in any reasonable way—like by twos, fives or tens—to let me count off.

Isn't there some sort of law that house numbers have to be visible from the street?

But across the street from this house was one that had the words
fifteen ninety-six,
in script, over their garage door. (Try reading
that
while driving a car—the first time you've driven alone or for longer than fifteen minutes—down a dark, unfamiliar street when you're pissed off at just about everything the day has thrown at you already.) The house I was looking for had to be this one or the one next door. This one still had lots of lights on, which made it look more inviting. Lights, despite the late hour. And despite the fact that all the trick-or-treaters must either be asleep by now or bouncing off the walls of their own bedrooms due to sugar highs.

My heart was beating so hard I wondered if I had found my real mother just in time to die in her arms of a ruptured aorta. Writer Charlie Kaufman goes in for that kind of irony in his films.

I got out of the car, and finally saw the number, 1593, written vertically on the post next to the front door. It
was
the right house.

Nice neighborhood, in spite of the lack of numbers. Nice house. Big house.

I took several deep breaths, but nothing was getting my heart rate settled into anything near normal. I rested the trick-or-treat pumpkin into the crook of my elbow à la Dorothy with her basket on the road to the Emerald City. Then, restraining myself from glancing down to check how the bodice of my dress had dried, I walked up to the front door.

The bell chimed a snatch of a classical tune that sounded familiar, from the sound track of some movie or another, but I couldn't place it.

The door opened.

I'd been afraid that my real mother—not immediately recognizing that it was me—might be irritated to have someone show up so late on her doorstep on Halloween night.

But standing there in the doorway were two people who were obviously very into Halloween. It was a woman and a man, and they were dressed like rag dolls, like Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. It made me think, just for a moment, of the Mr. and Mrs. Scarecrow figures on the porch of the house that used to be mine. The house I would never go back to. Though there was no reason for it to, not now, my arm under the bandage began to ache anew.

Far from sounding put out by my late arrival, Raggedy Andy chanted: "Trick or treat, smell my feet, gimme something good to eat."

"No, Andy," Raggedy Ann told him. Bonnie. Bonnie Ryan. My real mother. I immediately liked her voice. Kind of smoky like Lauren Bacall's, but friendly, too, like Julia Roberts. Obviously part of a spiel they'd worked out, she said, "
We
give
them
something good to eat."

Clearly Raggedy Andy—Marty Ryan—knew that, because he was holding a big black bowl full of candy. But he asked, in the simple way you'd expect from a person with rags in his head, "And do we smell
their
feet?"

"No, Andy," my mother told him firmly. "Nobody smells anybody's feet."

He bowed, holding out the candy bowl, which was probably more necessary for the average-sized trick-or-treater than for someone of my age and height.

Despite that extra two and a half hours in the car, I hadn't come up with just the right entrance line. "Um...," I said.

Marty cocked his head, like androids always seem to in sci-fi films, to show he was concentrating so as not to miss anything.

My mother smiled graciously. With all of their theatrical makeup, it was hard to tell what they
really
looked like. But they had kind eyes. And I knew she was beautiful, and he was handsome.

"Are you all right?" my mother asked, and suddenly the playfulness was gone from her voice. She sounded concerned, not impatient to get me off her front stoop.

"Yes," I managed to squeak.

"Your heart's beating so fast," she said.

"You can
hear
it?" Maybe it
was
about to explode.

Gently, she rested a fingertip at my throat, and I realized she could see the blood pulsing through my veins. My mother was as observant as she was kind. I wondered if she was a doctor or a nurse.

Marty was still in his Raggedy Andy persona. "Maybe we should invite her in?" he suggested, acting as though he was having trouble holding his head up straight. "I sometimes get wobbly when I stand too long."

"Marty," my mother chided him, letting him know this was not playing, and she took my arm and led me into the living room.

From outside, it had looked like a nice house in a nice neighborhood, but inside was very impressive. It looked like the kind of house that ends up as a six- or eight-page spread in a magazine about elegant homes. Marty and Bonnie had done quite well for themselves in the years since they'd had to give me up because they couldn't afford a good home in which to raise me.

Bonnie had me sit down on the couch, and she sat next to me.

I was sitting next to my real mother.

"Marty, why don't you get the poor child a glass of water?" she said. "And turn off the front light. I don't think there are going to be any more trick-or-treaters tonight."

Child?
I was disappointed. "Oh, dear," I said. "I hoped to look like an adult princess." My first sentence to my real mother.

"Well," Bonnie said, trying hard to please, "a
young
adult princess."

I appreciated the effort.

Marty sat down on the other side of me and handed me a frosty glass of water, complete with ice cubes. Very thoughtful.

I sipped at the water.

"So...," Marty said, friendly but inquisitive, the Raggedy Andy muddleheadedness gone entirely. "May we ask who, exactly, you are?"

"Evelyn Parkhurst."

No reaction at all.

Which made sense. The adoption agency wouldn't have given them the name of the woman who adopted me.

"Evelyn," I repeated. The papers just said "baby girl," but I thought it could have been that my mother had suggested the name to the social worker or the person in charge; she could have said, "That's what I've been calling my dear baby that I have to give up for her own good, and maybe you could ask her new, rich mother to call her that."

But apparently not.

"You drove here," Marty said, which meant they'd heard the car—either that or he'd seen it in the driveway when he'd gone to the kitchen to get the water. He continued, "Most of our trick-or-treaters don't come by car."

"I imagine not," I said. I was about to say it—
I'm your daughter
—when he kept on talking, asking, "So where are you from?"

"Corning."

His eyebrows—both the yarn-colored painted-on ones and the real ones—went up, and he glanced at his wife. They both moved in a bit closer to me as though they could tell I needed comforting, and she put her arm around my shoulders—a very friendly gesture.

Again I was about to tell them, when he asked, "Lost?"

"No," I admitted. "Looking for you specifically."

Neither of them appeared as surprised as I would have thought.

"I think," I said—I was sure, but needed a running start before I could get it out—"I think I'm your daughter."

"Really?" my mother asked.

I was a bit disconcerted how evenly she said that: not surprised; neither pleased nor distressed. "And how did you find us?" Marty asked. "Internet." Somehow, though he had moved no closer, my perception of his closeness veered abruptly from making me feel comfortable to making me feel uneasy. I was aware of my stepbrother Bradley's plastic pumpkin, which was still looped over my arm, pressing into my side. I shifted myself away from my father, closer to my mother.

"Did you tell anyone you were coming here?" my mother asked.

"No," I said, a moment before I realized her arm had me pretty much blocked in.

"One way to be sure...," Marty murmured, leaning toward me.

The next thing I knew, he had put his hands on my thighs, pressing me down into the couch so that I could not get up. And my mother—my real mother—grabbed my shoulders, then sank her teeth into my neck.

My mother was drinking my blood.

There must have been something in my mother's saliva, some anti-panic enzyme, to keep me from struggling—either that or she exerted some sort of mind control. I knew she was a vampire. I mean, come on!—she was sucking blood out of my neck. But the horror was more on an intellectual level than the stomach-churning, frantic, I'm-about-to-die terror that it should have been. At the same time, it wasn't that my mind had shut down, because I was aware of the ticking of the clock on the mantel. I had dropped—all unaware—the glass of water Marty had brought for me, but now I could feel that cold wet spot on my hip. I could also feel the fabric of the couch scratching the backs of my thighs, and I could see the strands of yarn that formed the curls of my mother's Raggedy Ann wig. I could smell the thick stage makeup she wore, and I could smell my own blood.

Was I about to die, or were my parents going to make me into one of the undead to join them forever? I wasn't sure what to hope for.

My mother shoved me away from her and spat my blood out onto that expensive hardwood floor. She made a disgusted, boy-have-I-bitten-into-something-bad sound to go along with her boy-have-I-bitten-into-something-bad expression.

"She's right," my mother told her husband, "she has our blood in her veins. But with the human gene, not the vampire."

"Drat!" Marty said. "One of our worthless offspring coming back like a bad penny. I was hoping she was wrong entirely and we could have her."

One of?

Worthless?

"Well, the night's still young," my mother consoled him. "We'll find
someone.
" My real parents were disappointed that they had to go out rather than have home delivery.

She hauled me up off the couch and started dragging me toward the front door. "So nice of you to come to visit," she said. "Now scram."

"But...," I said. "But ... but..."

"We didn't want you—which one are you?—fifteen years ago. We don't want you now. We can't raise you as a vampire; we can't feed on you. You're totally useless. Go back to where you came from."

"But...," I said again.

She closed the door in my face.

"But..."

I stood on their front step like an idiot, thinking I couldn't go back to Corning. My arm throbbed. Considering the mess I'd left, there was
no way
I could go back.

But my choices had gotten dramatically fewer.

In the end, I suppose I was lucky. They could have killed me, even if my blood was no good to them—just to make sure I didn't turn them in. Maybe they knew nobody would believe me. Maybe they changed their identities periodically. They must, at least once every twenty years or so, being creatures that never aged or died. Even if I
did
get someone to believe me and go there with me, my vampire parents would have moved on.

Hard to say, because I couldn't see how telling about them would help me.

It took me even longer to drive back to Corning because I still couldn't understand the map directions,
plus
I was so upset with all that had happened that I kept losing track of what I was doing.

So it was four o'clock in the morning when I pulled into the driveway of my adoptive parents' house. Another hour before the easternmost edge of the sky would be turning pink.

I didn't even try to put the car back in the garage.

The pumpkin was smashed on the front walk, the TV tray was upside down in the bushes, and the plastic bowl—empty, of course—had been tossed onto the garage roof.

So much for hoping for civilized trick-or-treaters.

I sat down between Mr. and Mrs. Scarecrow, leaning against the front door so that I felt the coolness of it through the fabric of my adoptive mother's party dress. I didn't want to go in, face that mess in the living room, all that blood, including a bit of my own.

I touched the bandage on my arm, where I'd used the knife on myself to get blood to leave a handprint, as though, wounded, I'd tried to get to the phone. So I'd look—even though I was missing—like another victim, an abductee.

"Well," I said to Mr. and Mrs. Scarecrow's burlap-covered faces, "you were wrong about life not being like the movies. This evening has been very much à la Alfred Hitchcock."

Luckily, no one had messed with them. Or not badly, anyway.

I'm guessing, by their slightly altered positions, by the way they were doubled over, that someone had given them a kick or two. Whoever had done that hadn't carried on, for whatever reason. Perhaps from a slightly skittish feeling that
something
was amiss, a feeling too vague—or too real—to investigate.

Or maybe Mr. and Mrs. Scarecrow's positions had shifted when the rigor mortis set in.

I readjusted the hat on my adoptive mother's head.

It had seemed such a good plan this afternoon.

Harlan is playing with the cat when the cat suddenly focuses its attention on a spot somewhere behind Harlan's left shoulder. Harlan feels a sudden chill, as though he had been sitting cross-legged in front of a refrigerator whose door someone opened.

Harlan tries to tell himself that the steady gaze at something no human can see is in the nature of cats. He has just articulated this explanation to himself when the cat bristles its fur, arches its back, and hisses.

At the same moment, Harlan catches the whiff of smoke.

It must be Halloween again,
Harlan thinks.

He stands and turns.

He can see through the boy, a boy whom Harlan estimates to be about fifteen or sixteen. Harlan has been seeing the boy for what must be eight years now, and in that passing of years, they are finally the same age.

Harlan wonders if this is significant in the interaction of ghosts with the living.

As has happened before, but only on Halloween nights, Harlan can make out not only the boy, but some of his surroundings—as though, on this one night of the year, the fabric that separates the living from the dead grows thin enough to see through.