The Society of S (36 page)

Later that night, I sat on the edge of the dock. Harris came out to join me, sitting about a foot to my right. The sun had set, but the sky remained pink. Nacreous clouds along the horizon glowed as if lit from within. They gradually faded, turned as blue as distant mountains; they made me think of Asheville, and I suppressed that thought, along with any thought of Saratoga Springs.

Harris and I dangled our feet in the cool water. An anhinga swam past me, still looking like a snake, and a mockingbird called from a tree nearby. I thought of a line from Thoreau’s
Walden: The life in us is like the water in the river
.

All was calm — until I saw an ominous fin no more than two hundred yards away, skimming the river’s surface. I grabbed Harris and pulled both of us backward. He leapt to his feet and disappeared into the trees.

I ran barefoot all the way back to the house and into the living room. “I saw a shark!”

My mother, Dashay, and Bennett, playing cards at the kitchen table, looked up. Mãe handed me a piece of paper and a pen. “Draw the dorsal fin.”

I sketched it quickly.

“Looks like a dolphin to me,” Dashay said. She took the pen and sketched in another fin, this one without the crescent-shaped backward curve. “That’s what a shark looks like.”

Wrong again
, I thought.
Always wrong, and I used to always be right
. “I scared Harris,” I said, my voice sounding as ashamed as I felt.

“I’ll find him and explain,” Dashay said. She went out.

Then Mãe pushed back her chair and left the room. She came back with two books: a field guide to Florida and a gardening handbook. “You’ll learn, the same way I did,” she said.

I took the books and sat in a chintz-covered chair in the corner. Grace the cat strolled past me as if I weren’t worth noticing.

When Dashay returned, she said that Harris had settled down in the guest house for the night. “I explained to him what happened,” she said. “He won’t hold a grudge.”

The card game resumed, but I could tell from their rush of idle talk that I’d interrupted a more important conversation. So I told them good-night and went to my room, carrying the books.

Later, as I lay in bed, Grace came in and sat at my feet. We watched an ochre moon climb the sky. Mãe knocked and opened the door. “Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?”

I kept my thoughts blocked, not sure what to say. “Tomorrow,” I said.

When I awoke, sunlight glared in at me. I heard voices, and from the window I saw Mãe and Dashay outside the stables, talking to someone I didn’t recognize. A Green Cross courier van was parked in the driveway.

I went downstairs as quietly as if they’d been in the living room. I took the cordless telephone from the kitchen and made my way back to my room again.

Michael answered on the third ring.

“Michael, it’s me,” I said.

After a pause, he said, “Thanks for calling. I’ll let you know.” And he hung up on me.

I held the dead phone. He’d sounded odd, formal and nervous. The click lingered in my ear, the sound of one more disconnection.

I was about to take the phone back to the kitchen when it rang. I answered at once.

“It’s me, Ari.” Michael still sounded nervous. “I couldn’t talk.”

“What’s going on?”

“Agent Burton is here. He comes by every couple of months, checking in. I’m out in the garage now, on my cell phone. I took your number off Caller ID.”

So the McGarritts had finally updated their telephones. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, fine. Where are you?”

“I’m with my mom,” I said. “It’s really nice here.”

“Good, good. Don’t tell me where you are. Burton keeps asking about you, and it’s better if I don’t know.”

“He’s asking about me?”

“Yeah. You know, since what happened to your dad and all —”

“What happened to my dad?”

The silence on the phone had its own tension.

“Michael?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I haven’t talked to him since I left. What’s happened?”

Another silence, this one even more charged. Then a sentence, so rushed and garbled that it made no sense.

“I can’t hear you,” I said. “Say it again.”

“He’s dead.” The words swam at me, mere patterns of sound. “Ari, your father is dead.”

At some point my mother came in and took the phone from my hand. I was holding it without hearing, sitting on the floor. From a distance I heard her voice, talking to Michael, but the words didn’t register. In my ears was white noise — the sound of all sound and no sound — and in my head was nothing.

The smell of incense woke me. I couldn’t identify the scent — a blend of herbs, a few of which I recognized. Lavender was one, and rosemary another.

When I opened my eyes, I saw smoke; it wasn’t from incense after all, but from a bundle of plants set on an iron brazier. Candles burned on nearly every surface of the room — maybe a hundred of them, white pillars with flickering flames. Yet the room was cool, the ceiling fan swirling lazily. I swore I heard the sound of women’s voices chanting, but the room was empty.

I must have closed my eyes, because then Dashay was in the room. She wore a white dress and her hair was wrapped in a white scarf. She sat beside me and fed me clear soup with a mother-of-pearl spoon. I ate without tasting, not speaking between mouthfuls.

She smiled and went away. Grace climbed onto the bed, gave herself a bath, and licked my hand.

Sometime later I awoke again. The candles still burned. My mother sat at my bedside, reading. Her face in the candlelight reminded me of a picture that hung in the McGarritts’ living room titled
Our Lady of Sorrows
: a woman in profile, face serene yet dolorous, wearing a blue robe and hood. I slept again, and next time I wakened, sun dappled the periwinkle walls. In this manner I reentered the land of the living. Afterward they told me that I’d been “comatose” for nearly a week.

During that time, my mother and Dashay had been busy. Gradually, as I grew stronger, they told me what they’d been doing.

The vampire network, I learned, functions something like an underground railroad. When a vampire is in trouble, others offer transportation, food, and shelter. My mother’s contacts also smuggle abused animals away from harm, and they barter goods and services. But most of all, they trade information.

Mãe’s friends in Saratoga Springs told her that my father’s obituary had run in the local paper; they emailed her a copy. He’d died of heart failure. His body had been cremated, and the ashes buried in Green Ridge Cemetery. Her friends emailed a photograph of the grave. They took another of our house, a “for sale” sign prominent on the front lawn. Someone had chopped down the wisteria vine that traced one side of the house, making it look exposed, naked.

My mother didn’t show me the photos all at once, to keep me from reacting too emotionally. But it was hard to keep my feelings in check, especially the first time I looked at the pictures. The image of the abandoned house shocked me as much as the one of the black marble gravestone.
RAPHAEL MONTERO
had been inscribed on it, along with a quotation:
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR / IUVENES DUM SUMUS
. There were no dates.

“What’s the inscription mean?” Dashay asked.

“So let us rejoice / While we are young,” Mãe said.

I hadn’t known she read Latin. She turned to me. “He sometimes used that phrase as a toast.”

The photograph had been taken close up, and visible in the foreground stood some sort of bottle.

“What’s that?” I asked Mãe.

“Looks like the top of a liquor bottle,” she said.

“Funny thing to put on a grave,” Dashay said. “Maybe vandals left it.”

I was lying in bed, propped up on pillows. Harris sat at the bed’s other end, coloring in a coloring book. My mother had delayed the monkeys’ transfer to the primate sanctuary, in hope of humoring me. That week, if I’d said I wanted an elephant, I believe she would have brought one in.

“Mãe,” I said. “Could you email your friends and ask them to take some more photos? And ask them who signed his death certificate?”

My mother thought me stubborn, even delusional, but I sent a thought back to her, loud and clear:
I don’t believe he is dead
.

You don’t want to believe it
, she thought.

If he were dead, I would have sensed it
. I folded my arms.

That’s a bit of a cliché
, she thought. Then she blocked her thoughts and said, “Sorry.”

“He was with me nearly every day for thirteen years,” I said. “
You
weren’t around.”

She flinched. Then she turned and left the room.

While she was gone, Dashay told me her theory of my father’s death: Malcolm had killed him. My mother had told her about him, and she considered him Evil Incarnate.

“The obit says heart failure,” she said. “That could mean anything. I never heard of one of us having a heart failure, unless it was you know what.” She made a fist with her left hand, thumb on top, and simulated a hammer with her right.

“Do people really use stakes in the heart?” My father hadn’t been entirely clear on that point.

“It’s been known to happen.” Dashay didn’t sound sure she should discuss this topic. “Sometimes, you know, people don’t know any better. Ignorant folks get the idea in their heads that somebody’s a vampire, and then they decide to get rid of the somebody.” She frowned. “I don’t like people much. If I hadn’t been one once myself, I wouldn’t have any use for them at all.”

She turned away from me, toward Harris. “Hey, that’s pretty good,” she told him.

Harris was coloring a seahorse purple, mostly inside the lines. The coloring book featured an array of sea creatures; he’d already finished the octopus and the starfish. I moved to look over his shoulder, inhaled his peppermint breath (he brushed his teeth twice a day). I didn’t want him to leave, ever.

“Where’s Joey?” I asked.

“Napping on the porch. As usual.” Dashay didn’t think much of Joey. “So, Ariella, you look more like yourself today. You must be feeling a lot better.”

“I guess.” I stared down at the photos again. “What do you suppose happened to our books and furniture and our other stuff?”

“Good question.” She stood up, stretched her arms. “Don’t know, but I’ll ask.”

It took a few days to get answers, during which time I grew bored with being ill. I began to walk around the house, then the yard. On the southern side of the house, my mother had planted deep blue hydrangeas and plumbago; they’d been green hedges and shrubs last I looked, but during my week away from the world they’d burst into bloom. I recognized them from photos in the book my mother had given me. The air smelled hypnotically sweet from night-blooming jasmine and the blossoms of orange and lemon trees. It was hard to stay depressed in Florida, I thought.

But later I ventured down a path I hadn’t explored before, and I found a different sort of garden. Roses climbed a trellis edged by hollyhocks and snapdragons. Water trickled down the sides of a fountain shaped like an obelisk. Tall grasses bordered the patch. Everything in the garden was black — the flowers, the grasses, the fountain, the vines that climbed the fountain, even the fountain’s water.

“Welcome to my garden of gloom.” Dashay had come up behind me.

We sat on a black iron bench and listened to the fountain. I was reminded of a story I’d read by Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” most of it set in a macabre garden of jewel-like, poisonous plants.

Yet I found this garden’s darkness curiously comforting. “Why did you plant it?” I asked.

“I’d read about gothic gardens. Two or three hundred years ago, if you lost someone you loved, you planted a funeral garden, and when you sat in it, you did your mourning. You have to let yourself mourn, Ariella.”

“Did someone you loved die?”

“I lost my parents and my first love, all in the same bad year.” Her eyes were like amber, translucent yet clouded. “That happened back in Jamaica, a long time ago.”