Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (33 page)

A new family moved in across the road and their name is Popkin. A mom, two big teenage boys, and a boy and girl about my age. I like to walk down the hill to their house because I enjoy the company of other children.

But my mother has somehow gotten the idea that the real reason I go is because of Mrs. Popkin. Whenever I go over to their house, my mother teases me about it.
Mrs. Popkin, s
he says in an exaggerated sexy voice.
Oh! Mrs. Pop! Kin!
I don’t know when she decided this, but she thinks it’s hilarious.

“Todd’s on his way to see his girlfriend tonight,” she tells Old Lady Hotchkiss over the phone. I am sitting at the kitchen table reading
Watership Down
and she regards me for a moment. I act like I’m not even listening.

“The family that moved in across the road,” she says. “The woman and her seven dwarves.”

“Four,” I say under my breath.

“Ha!” my mother says to the phone. “It’s so cute; you should see how he looks at her.”

I am thirteen years old and small for my age and the word
cute
is not a word that I particularly like, but I don’t say anything. I just turn the page of my book.

My mother is currently in the process of trying to be happy. This is her new thing. She had been very low for a while, for a year or two, I think—so low that she didn’t think she wanted to live anymore. But we are going to put that behind us, she says.

Live life to the fullest! That is her new motto. She has ideas about JOY! SPONTANEITY! To somersault in the grass, for example. To take a moment to TRULY EXPERIENCE the world of nature around us, looking at birds, for example, and spreading some birdseed out in the yard where our late dog used to be tied up. RECONNECT TO YOUR CREATIVE SELF, which might include, for example, a tea cozy crocheted in the shape of a ball gown, with a plastic doll head at the top of it. The two of us made it together one afternoon.

This tea cozy is sitting on the counter by the sink and staring at us as my mother talks on the phone to Old Lady Hotchkiss and I read
Watership Down
.

We live outside of town off of Highway 30. On our side of the road, houses are about a mile apart, sometimes more. On the other side of the road are fields of wheat, alfalfa, and pastures where white-faced Hereford cattle wander around, grazing.

I never understood why people want to live out of town. There is no cable television, no one to play with, nothing to do. I remember reading a book about some children who lived in a city and they went down to the corner store to get a Popsicle. I loved that idea.
The corner store.

When my mother tried to kill herself, there was nowhere to go for help. She had told me never, ever to call the cops. Under any circumstances. I didn’t know whether I should call Old Lady Hotchkiss or not.

I went outside, and the circle of the porch light extended only part of the way down the gravel driveway. Beyond that was pitch darkness, no streetlights, not even stars. There was nowhere to go.

T
hen the Popkins moved into the old farmhouse down by the creek. That house had been empty ever since a fire had killed a family there the year before, but it wasn’t uninhabitable. Most of it was still intact. Must have been cheap to buy it, my mother said.

Mrs. Popkin put the teenage boys to work immediately once they arrived, and soon they had planted flower beds and grass in front of the house, and they had painted the rooms where the smoke damage was, and patched up the hole in the roof where the fire had broken through and licked up toward the sky. The younger two—a boy named Bernard and a girl named Cecilia—built a rabbit hutch, and one day it was filled with rabbits, rabbits of all colors, and one white rabbit with red eyes. Magenta, like the color of the crayon.

When the farmhouse had burned, so had one of the trees, but the skeleton of the tree still stood, just along the bank of the creek. The Popkins put a rope on the tree and swung themselves into the water. I watched from the window of my house as the older boys dove off the swing, still wearing their work clothes and boots, and splashed like boulders into the creek. Cecilia and Bernard stood on the bank, observing.

His name is Todd. The kid of the house up the hill. The standing-there kid. The staring kid. Staying on his side of the gravel road that runs between our two houses. Watching us watching him. We didn’t even know there
was
a kid in that house. The whole time we were moving in, there was no evidence of him. No bike, no swings, no toys lying in the yard. The only one I thought lived there was the
lady who came out in her nightgown to water her hanging begonias. She had bad veins on her legs. Mom pointed that out.

Now there he is, staring at our house, dressed in school clothes like he’s going somewhere, but it turns out, no, he’s dressed in school clothes because those are the only kind of clothes he can stand to wear.

Mom tells me to get her cigarettes and when I come back, she is standing in my spot at the front room window, pointing through the drapes at him. “I feel kind of sorry for that one.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I recognize the type.”

“What type?”

Then Bernard starts walking across the yard toward him fast with a rock in his hand.

Mom steps to the screen door and hollers his name.

“Bernard!”

“What?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“I wasn’t!”

“Go find out his name,” she says to me.

“Make Bernard.”

“Cecilia,” she says.

“Why do I have to do it?”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you why.”

W
hen I come back to tell her his name is Todd, Mom repeats it. “
Todd
,” she laughs. “Todd, Todd, Todd. What was your mother
thinking
?”

Then she’s at the screen door calling his name, and the kid turns. “Hello! Todd! Come in and join us for some lemonade! Todd.”

I say, “We don’t have lemonade.”

Mom says, “Oh, he won’t care.”

I
t’s late in the afternoon and I’m walking with Todd and Bernard along the gravel road to a cutoff Todd wants us to see. It’s hot and Bernard keeps kicking gravel at my legs to show off. He runs way ahead and kicks up a huge dust cloud and dives in and out of it. “Gas attack! Poison gas! Gas mask! Ahhh! I don’t have a mask!” and I’m embarrassed by his babyishness. Todd isn’t babyish. He moves back from the dust. He’s the type that doesn’t like to get dirty.

The cutoff leads to a part of the creek that is deeper and when we get there, Todd says, “There is something you need to know,” and he starts telling us that the people who lived in our house before us died in a most terrible way.

“It was most terrible!” says Bernard, making fun. “I say, old boy! Most terrible!”

“You think I’m joking, but I’m not,” says Todd.

“No one died in our house,” says Bernard. “Psych.”

We follow Todd through some brush. “Five people died in your house,” says Todd. “One father, one mother, three kids.”

Cause of death: fire. “But it wasn’t the burning that did it,” says Todd. “In fact, they were hardly burned at all.”

“From what, then?” says Bernard.

“From the fire sucking their lungs out.”

“
Super
psych!” says Bernard. “Sure, Todd.”

“It’s the nature of fire,” Todd says. And he’s very calm as he describes the instantness of the vacuum caused by the fire sucking away all the oxygen. How you can’t escape—the fire will suck it out of you. It will suck it right out of your own mouth.

“You’re supposed to crawl on the floor!” says Bernard. “The stupids. Anybody knows that.”

“Wouldn’t matter where you crawled,” says Todd. “Not in this case.”

“Okay,” says Bernard, “so how come the house didn’t burn down?”

“It was a very special case,” says Todd.

And I remember the first day of moving in, the smell of burned wood that was so strong that Mom said not to bring it up. That we would get used to it faster if we didn’t mention it. Now I can hardly smell it at all, even if I try.

Mrs. Popkin!
says my mother that morning. Something is wrong with her eyes, and her hair is not quite combed right. People stare after her as she walks through the supermarket, stepping slightly too fast for normal.

Ooooh, Mrs. Poppy-kins!
she says, and tries to pinch my cheek.

Which is almost too embarrassing to even think of it.

“There’s something wrong with you,” I say to my mother.

I don’t actually. But I think it.

L
ater, Mrs. Popkin and I are sitting at her kitchen table and I watch as she lights a row of pink candles that smell of rose perfume. On the biggest candle, in gold lettering, it says:

LORD, bless our door, that opens wide

To welcome those who come inside!

And bless our house, dear LORD above

That we may share YOUR peace and love!

Mrs. Popkin loves blessings, she says. Also angels, miracles, the works of God.

“I don’t believe in forcing my religion on people,” she says. “I’m not a holy roller like some of them.”

She puts the ham of her foot up on the edge of the table and flexes out her toes.

“Don’t tell your mother you saw me putting my foot up on the table like this,” she says. Smiles. Unscrews the cap of her nail polish.

I watch as she dips the brush into the nail polish and lifts it. She presses the hairs of the brush against the mouth of the nail polish bottle until the excess paint has squeezed off. Drip. Drip. Then she brings the applicator slowly toward her pinkie toe. I don’t say anything. In the kitchen doorway stands the girl Cecilia, with her weird small mouth and staring eyes. She is very still on the threshold, observing us, holding a rabbit in her arms like it’s a cat.

“I got my first baby when I was fifteen years old,” Mrs. Popkin tells me. “Only a few years older than you. That must seem so strange. Does it?”

“Not really,” I say.

I watch as Mrs. Popkin fans her toes with a letter, a piece of junk mail I guess, and Cecilia watches too. Very still, holding her rabbit and petting it in long slow strokes.

“It’s just old-fashioned,” Mrs. Popkin says. “That’s the way the people always used to do it. Back in the olden days, fifteen wasn’t even considered young. And I’m actually glad I started early because I love babies. Some women don’t like it, but I do.”

“That’s good,” I say, and Cecilia and I glance at each other. There is a little bit of smoke lifting up from the candle, vanishing before it gets very far. But when I look upward, I can see all the smoke stains running along the surface of the ceiling, gray-black smoke stains from that long-ago fire, I guess. The stains are like figures and shadows and branches. A thicket.

“Um,” Cecilia says, after there has been a little silence. “Todd, Bernard is looking for you.”

“Oh, Cecilia,” Mrs. Popkin says, and she leans toward me and gives a wink. “That girl. Always interrupting,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t want Cecilia to hear us.

The way Mom talks to him:

I am noticing their deal with each other where she talks to him like a person, like she talked at our before-house, when we still had cousins and aunts and uncles coming over, when she would tell people the door was always open, our door was always open.

The way she pours him coffee. When she puts his cup down along with Coffee-mate and the sugar bowl and says, “You don’t have to drink it—it’s just that one cup of coffee looks so by-itself.” I am looking at Todd, the way he drinks it like a person. Not like a kid. If he was a midget, if he was like Romey, then okay. I would say okay. But he is for sure not a midget, although he slightly acts like it.

The way he doesn’t show his personality to her. Where with us he will talk about the people who died in our house and it makes you nervous but you still keep listening. Like how there was no screaming because with your oxygen sucked out, you can’t scream. You can only silent scream.

And that the silent scream is the worst scream of all.

But to Mom, he says he didn’t know the dead people that well when she asks if the house is more attractive inside now. He says he didn’t come inside all that much before because his mother didn’t like the old family, but he knows it was way darker because they kept their drapes shut.

Then later I walk up the hill—I will admit I wanted to spy on his house a little—but I did not expect his mom to instantly come out. I keep walking, but his mom says, “Are you a Popkin? Are you one of the Popkin brood?”

So I stop and she says, “You think your mother would trade me one of her big boys for my son? He seems to be over there enough. Think she could send over a boy to be infatuated with me?”

She laughs in the direction of my house. She says she saw we had rabbits and that she loves rabbit and Todd also loves rabbit and do we sell them cleaned?

We don’t sell them, I say.

She says to ask my mom if she would consider it. The people before us weren’t stingy with
their
rabbits and is Mom my natural mother? Because I don’t look like her at all and do I know there was a girl named Karen about my age who used to live there? And that Todd about died when that family moved away.

“He was so close to that Karen,” says Todd’s mom.

I say I have to go, but she keeps talking. I walk away and she follows. When I run, she laughs. “Oh, I don’t bite, for heaven’s sake!” she calls.

L
ater I’m with Todd and Bernard walking back to the cutoff.

I say to Todd: “Your mom said the people who lived in our house moved.”

He says: “They did. They moved to the cemetery.”

Bernard is laughing very hard at this. He says it’s a good one. “That’s a good one,” he says.

When I walk back home up the hill, I think about how I could confront Mother.
How dare you!
I think about saying.

It is the sort of thing that Bernard makes fun of, like I’m trying to sound like some kind of professor or from England, he says, but I like the dignity of it.
How
dare
you!
I think, and I like the way the words feel, like the Statue of Liberty holding a torch
aloft over the ocean.
How dare
you,
Mother! How dare you tell
lies
to my friends!