Sunshine (7 page)

I sat down. I heard myself saying, “Can I do anything?”

“You are doing it. You are talking to me.”

“I …” I said. “I'm not much of a talker. Our wait staff are the ones who know how to talk, and listen. I'm out back, most of the time, getting on with the baking.” Although several of our regulars hung around out back, if they felt like it. There was also a tiny patio area behind the coffeehouse that Charlie always meant to get done up so we could use it for more seating, but he never did, maybe partly because it had become a kind of private clubhouse for some of the regulars. When the fan wasn't going but the bakery doors were open I listened to the conversations, and people came and leaned on the threshold so I could listen more easily. Pat and Jesse's more interesting stories got told out back.

“The worst time is the hours around noon,” he said. “My mind is full of …” He paused. “My mind feels as if it is disintegrating, as if the rays of your sun are prizing me apart.”

Silence fell again, and the sun rose higher.

“I don't suppose you'd be interested in recipes,” I said, a little wildly. “My bran and corn and oatmeal muffins are second only to cinnamon rolls in the numbers we sell. And then there's all the other stuff, lots more muffins—I can make spartan muffins out of
anything
—and tea bread and yeast bread and cookies and brownies and cakes and stuff. On Friday and Saturday I make pies. Even Charlie doesn't know the secret of my apple pie. I suppose the secret would be safe with you.” Charlie didn't know the secret of my Bitter Chocolate Death, either, but I didn't feel like mentioning death in the present circumstances, even chocolate ones.

The vampire's eyes were half open, watching me.

“I haven't got much more life to tell you about. I'm not a deep thinker. I only just made it through high school. I was a rotten student. I hated learning stuff for tests only because someone told me I had to. The only thing I was ever any good at was literature and writing with Miss Yanovsky.” June Yanovsky had tangled with the school board because she chose to teach a section of classic vampire literature to her junior elective. She said that denying kids the opportunity to discuss
Dracula
and
Carmilla
and
Immortal Death
was in the same category of muddleheaded misguided protectiveness that left them to believe that they couldn't get pregnant if they did it standing up with their shoes on. She won her case. “I'd've dropped out if it wasn't for her, and also Charlie really laid into me about how much my mom would hate it if I did. He was right, he usually is, especially about my mom. I'd been working at the coffeehouse since I was twelve, and I went straight from part time to full time after I graduated. I've never
done
anything. The farthest I've been from New Arcadia is the ocean a few times on vacation when the boys were little and the coffeehouse smaller and Charlie could still be dragged away occasionally. I like to read. My best girlfriend is a librarian. But I don't have time to do much except work and sleep. Sometimes I feel like there ought to be something.…” An image of my gran formed in my memory: an image from the last time I had seen her. I had never decided whether or not it was only hindsight that made me feel she had known I would not see her again, that she was going away. Superficially she had seemed as she always had. She had said good-bye as she always had. There was nothing different about that meeting except that it had been the last. “Sometimes I feel like there should be something else, but I don't know what it is.” Slowly I added, “That's why I drove out to the lake last night.”

I couldn't let the silence after that linger. “You could tell me about your life,” I said. “Er.” Life? What did you call it? “Your … whatever. You must have done lots of stuff besides … er.”

“No,” he said.

That was clear enough. I looked over my shoulder. The sun was getting up there. I looked at him again. The old-mushroom color was very bad again, and there was definitely sweat on his skin. He looked like he was dying, or he would have if he was human. He only didn't look like he was dying because he didn't look human.

“You could tell me a story,” he said. The words were almost gasps. Did vampires breathe?

“A—what?” I said stupidly.

“A story,” he said. Pause. “You have … little brothers. You told them … stories?”

Scheherazade had it
easy
, I thought. All she was risking was a nice clean beheading from some human with a cleaver. And while her husband was off his rocker at least he was
human
. “Oh—um—yes—I guess. But, you know, Puss in Boots. Paul Bunyan. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The Knight in the Oak Tree. And they were always wanting stories about spacemen and laser guns. I read all of Burroughs's
Mars
books and all of Quatermain's
Alpha Centauri
books to give me ideas, except the women in my stories weren't so hopeless. Nothing very—er—riveting.”

“Puss in Boots,” he said.

“Yeah. You know, fairy tales. That's the one when the cat does all this clever stuff to help his master out, so his master winds up really important and wealthy and marries the princess, even though he was only the miller's son.”

“Fairy tales,” he said.

“Yes.” I wanted to ask him if he hadn't been a child once, that surely he remembered fairy tales. Surely every child got told fairy tales. Or if it had been that long ago that he couldn't remember. Or maybe you forgot everything about being human once you were a vampire. Maybe you had to. In that case how did he know I would've told my brothers stories? “There are lots of them. Snow White. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The Frog Prince. The Brave Little Tailor. Jack the Giant Killer. Tom Thumb. My brothers liked the ones best that had the least kissing in them. So they liked Puss in Boots and Jack the Giant Killer rather than Cinderella and Snow White, who they thought were all glang. I agreed with them actually.”

“What is your favorite fairy tale?”

I made a noise that under other circumstances might have been a laugh. “Beauty and the Beast,” I said.

“Tell me that one,” he said.

“What?”

“Tell me the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast,” he said.

“Oh. Yes. Um.” I'd learned to tell this one myself almost first of all, because the pictures of the Beast in the storybooks always annoyed me, and I didn't want any kids under my influence to get the wrong idea about him. I wondered if any even-more-than-usually-misguided illustrator had ever tried to make him look like a vampire. “Well, there was this merchant,” I began obediently. “He was very wealthy, and he had three daughters.…”

How to tell a story—how to make it go on and on to fill the time—how to get interested in it yourself so it would be interesting to your listeners, or listener—all that came back to me, I think. It was impossible to know, and presumably vampires have different tastes in stories than little boys. I thought of a few car journeys we'd had on those holidays to the ocean, when I would tell stories till I was hoarse. There was a lot you could do with the story of Beauty and the Beast, and I had done most of it, and I did it again now. I watched the arc of the sun over my left shoulder. The light crept across the floor, and the vampire had to move to stay out of it. First he had to move in one direction, sliding along the floor as if all his joints pained him (how could he both look as if every movement were agony, and still retain that curious fluid agility?), and then he had to slide back again—back again and farther still, nearer to me. I moved to stay in the sun as he moved to stay out of it. I went on telling the story. There was no spot on the floor that he could have stayed in all day, and stayed out of the light. Vampires, according both to myth and SOF, did something like sleep during the day, just as humans sleep at night. Do vampires need their sleep as we do? So it wasn't only food and freedom Bo was depriving this one of?

He'd said it wasn't hunger that would break him. It was daylight.

I wondered dispassionately if I might be getting a sunburn, but I rarely burned anyway, and the idea in the present state of affairs, like worrying about a hangnail while you are being chased by an axe murderer, seemed so ludicrous I couldn't be bothered.

The sun was sinking toward the end of day, and my voice was giving out. I had drunk several more mouthfuls of water in the course of the story. (If you haven't seen a vampire's lips touch the mouth of your bottle, do you have to wipe it off first?) I concluded in a vivid—not to say lurid—scene of all-inclusive rejoicing, and fell silent.

“Thank you,” he said.

My tiredness was back, tenfold, a hundredfold. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I
had
to keep my eyes open—this was a
vampire
. Was this one of the ways to—persuade a victim? Had he been killing two birds with one stone—so to speak? Make the day pass, make the victim amenable to handling? But didn't they
like
them
un
amenable? I couldn't help it. My eyes kept falling shut, my head would drop forward, and I would wake myself up when my neck cracked as my chin fell to my breastbone.

“Go to sleep,” said his voice. “The worst is over … for me … today. There are five hours till sunset. I am … harmless till then. No vampire can … kill in daylight. Sleep. You will want to be awake … tonight.”

I remembered there had been a blanket in the sack. I crawled over to it, pulled it out, put my head on the sack and the remaining loaf of bread, and was asleep before I had time to argue with myself about whether he was telling the truth or not.

I
DREAMED.
I dreamed as if the dream was
waiting
for me, waiting for the moment I fell asleep. I dreamed of my grandmother. I dreamed of walking by the lake with her. At first the dream was more like a memory. I was little again, and she was holding my hand, and I had to skip occasionally to keep up with her. I had been proud of having her for a grandmother, and was sorry that I only ever saw her alone, at the lake. I would have liked my school friends to meet her. Their grandmothers were all so ordinary. Some of them were nice and some of them were not so nice, but they were all sort of … soft-edged. I didn't know how to put it even to myself. My grandmother wasn't hard or sharp, but there wasn't anything
uncertain
about her. She was unambiguously herself. I admired her hugely. She had long hair and when the wind was blowing off the lake it would get into a tremendous tangle, and sometimes she would let me brush it afterward, at the cottage. She usually wore long full skirts, and soft shoes that made no sound, whatever she was walking on.

My parents split up when I was six. I didn't see my grandmother for the first year after. It turned out that my mother had gone so far as to hire some wardcrafters—smiths, scribes, spooks, the usual range—and on what money I don't know—to prevent anyone in my dad's family from finding us. My father hadn't wanted to let us go, and while his family are supposed to be some of the good guys, it's very hard not to do something you can do when you're angry and it will get you what you want. After the first year and a day he had probably cooled off, and my mom let the fancy wards lapse. My grandmother located us almost at once, and my mother, who can drive herself nuts sometimes by her own sense of fairness, agreed to let me see her. At first I didn't want to see her, because it had been a whole year
and
I'd been sick for a lot of it, and my mother had to tell me—that sense of fairness again—what she'd done, and a little bit, scaled down to my age, of why. I was only seven, but it had been a bad year. That conversation with my mother was one of those moments when my world really changed. I realized that I was going to be a grown-up myself some day and have to make horrible decisions like this too. So I agreed to see my gran again. And then I was glad I did. I was so happy to have her back.

She and I had been meeting at the lake every few weeks for a little over a year when one afternoon she said, “I don't like what I am about to do, but I can't think of anything better. My dear, I have to ask if you will keep a secret from your mother for me.”

I looked at her in astonishment. This wasn't the sort of thing grown-ups did. They went around having secrets behind your back all the time about things that were horribly important to you (like my mom not telling me she'd hired the wardcrafters), and then pretended they didn't. There'd been a lot of that that nobody explained to me before my parents broke up, and I hadn't forgotten. Even at six or seven I knew that my mom's wardcrafters were the tip of an iceberg, but I still didn't know much about the iceberg. I didn't know, for example, that my father might have been a sorcerer, till years later. And sometimes grown-ups said things like “Oh, maybe you'd better not tell your parents about this,” which either meant get out of there
fast, now
, or that they knew you would tell anyway because you were only a kid, but then they could get mad at you when you did. (That this had happened several times with some of my dad's business associates is one of the reasons my mom left.) But I knew my gran loved me and I knew she was
safe
. I knew she'd never ask me anything bad. And I knew that she really, really meant it, that I had to keep this secret from my mother.

“Okay,” I said.

My gran sighed. “I know that your mother means the best for you and in many ways she's right. I'm very glad she got custody of you, and not your dad, although he was very bitter about it at the time.”

I scowled. I never saw my dad. Once my gran had found me he started writing me a lot of postcards but I never saw him. And the postmarks on the cards were always blurry so you couldn't see where they'd been sent from.
All
the postmarks were blurry. Two or three a week sometimes.