Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (36 page)

“Oh, that bread! It was so wonderful!” my mother says now to Cecilia. “So dense . . . and seedy!”

Actually, she threw it in the garbage. After we unwrapped it and she cut it open, we saw that it was full of tiny white shells and nuts and my mother made a face.

Ugh
, she’d said, and handed it to me.
Why don’t you scatter it out in the backyard. Birds might eat it
.

Now she says to Cecilia: “Your mother likes starches, doesn’t she?” She gives Cecilia that smile she sometimes makes. “It’s so thoughtful of your mother. She must think all we eat is peanut butter and jelly. Mrs. Popkin is thoughtful, isn’t that right, Todd?”

“I guess,” I say.

But Cecilia still won’t look at me. She leaves as my mother takes the casserole, or whatever it is, and my mother puts it in the oven.

I am about halfway down the hill when Todd catches up with me. The moon is up; his lips look blue-gray. They say,
Hey
. White eyelashes flick, his pale lids lower and raise, his nose is wider than Bernard’s.

I say, “Hey,” and keep walking. “Bye,” I say. “See ya.” But he’s following me, crossing the gravel road behind me, saying, “Wait a sec, Cecilia.”

The way he says my name like I’m a person. Sometimes in the beginning, they do that. They think I’m a person like Karen was a person. A person they can talk to. Or if they had a sister, maybe they will think that. And they start to feel very friendly. And Mom does not understand why I don’t use this to my advantage. It’s a natural talent. It’s a gift. And I waste it.

Todd touches my arm and we stop. He’s looking past me to our dark front porch. There are no lights on in the house. Even so, he wants to come over.

I remember Mom standing at the front window when she first saw him, saying,
I feel kind of sorry for that one.

I feel her looking at us, I feel her standing at the window, watching us, but I’m wrong. She’s standing on the porch.

“
Cecilia?”

“Go!” I whisper to Todd. “You gotta go. GO!” And I shove him.

“
Cecilia?
Bernard needs your attention.” And then, “Todd? Is that you?”

Me: GO!

Action: shoving him back across the road and him shoving back.

Todd: Why are you doing this?

Mom:
Cecilia?

Action: digging my fingers into Todd’s bare arm and scratching him as hard as possible, digging in until he yells and his mother steps out to save him.

After being scratched and yelled at, I am not really in the mood to eat the casserole, but my mother insists, and she even takes a few of the meatballs herself. I don’t want to like them, though they are actually really good.

“Hmmm,” my mother keeps saying as she takes small bites. “Interesting flavor.”

And then after we do the dishes and put them away, I go upstairs to my room. I feel sad that it’s summer, and I don’t have any homework to do. So I read my book about dragonflies, and then I read in the encyclopedia about rabbits. The family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha. Cottontails. Pikas. Hares.

Out my window, I can see Cecilia’s house. There is one light on, and I imagine it is maybe Cecilia’s. Maybe she is sorry, maybe she just lost her temper. I imagine I could send her a signal with a flashlight. If she knew Morse code.
Friend
, I could say.

But then, just as I get out my penlight, I see movement in the frame of the window. The thick, hulking shape of one of the big brothers stares out, stares up toward me. For a minute, it feels as if he senses me, but then the other brother comes in, the one who wears the baseball cap backward, and I can see the two of them begin to dance. I can see their silhouettes, their hands in the air and their hips grooving.

“What are you doing?” my mother says.

And when I turn from the window, she is standing there in the doorway.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just reading.”

“Memorizing the encyclopedia again,” she says when I show her the book. “R for
railroad
. R for
Rembrandt
. R for
running away
.”

“Why do you even say that?” I say, and I watch as she sits down
on my bed with her glass of wine. “I never try to run away anymore,” I say.

“That’s true,” my mother says. “You don’t.”

F
or a second, I have a little flash of memory—how long ago, how many years? It’s actually more like a dream: I am running through dark high grass. I don’t believe that she’s my mother. I am calling: Mom! Dad! Help me!

And then, in my dream, she catches me by the back of my hair and pulls me to the ground and pushes my face deep into the wet mud.

“H
mmm,” she says, and she sips her wine, settling back against my pillow.
Hmmm
: this is what she likes to say when she’s lost in thought, or when there’s nothing else.

It was a sound that she made a lot right before the fire.

And so I am silent, and I glance at the yellow light down the hill, and I say, “Are you okay?”

“Hmmm,” she says.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” I say.

And she lowers her head. “Oh, Todd,” she says. She sips her wine, grimaces.

“Don’t be sad,” I say. “Mom.” And she gazes at me for a long time with her big eyes.

Then she moves her fingers softly:
come. Come
. Her fingers waving like sea plants. Anemones.

I lie down in her lap the way she likes, and she puts her arms around me, cradling, like I am a baby, and she rocks a little as she lowers her mouth to my neck.

I feel her sharp tongue poke me, and then I get sleepy, of course. I close my eyes. I can hear the soft sounds that she makes as she’s nursing.
Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm
. Almost as if she’s crying.

We don’t sell our rabbits because we need them for things. You learn things when you dress them, like how when they are skinned they all look the same, and then you eat what can be eaten and you keep the feet for luck and you use the head for thinking.

Tonight, my mom needs to think.

I’m holding the bundle. She’s in her robe and curlers holding the birdcage containing Ivan. Did I follow the instructions? Keep it with me, keep it warm, make sure there is enough air, the bundle needs the same tender care that Ivan does, Mom says. She sets Ivan on the floor and reaches for the bundle. How is our project coming along?

She puts the bundle on the table and begins to unwrap it. “Have you seen my cigarettes?” And yes, they are on the kitchen counter next to the sink, and I put them on a plate and carry them to her and she says, “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

It was my job to dress it, to wash and comb its hair, slice off its eyelids, remove its nose and lips. Those were, Mom said, the best parts. The ones she wanted most. But she became impatient with how I was detaching the nose and took over. “You’re scaring him!” She said I’d ruined the freckled skin of his cheeks with my antics as she cut the little lips away.

And now the face peers out at us. The mouth opens and the tongue comes out and licks the bare teeth. We hear it draw air through its nose hole. The gelatin eyes rake back and forth. I can tell how bad Mom wants to be alone with it, to take it on a TV tray up to her room and close the door.

She begins the prayer and I repeat it. This time of year comes with the buzzing of certain insects with rasps on their legs that make a sound that rolls along underneath our chanting. Mom hands me a cigarette, strikes a match. “Have you been practicing?” I have, I say. And it’s true. I can smoke like her. Just like her when I want to.

The bundle opens and closes its mouth, its tongue wiggling, its eyes shocked. Mom takes a long, long sip of her cigarette and then she lowers her mouth to the nose hole and exhales. I watch as the smoke curls out of its mouth, out of the ragged hole of its throat where the neck is severed. Then she tells me it’s my turn. She tells me it’s a different kind of smoking.

When I lift my face away, I watch the eyes grow dim and the freckles on the cheeks fade out.

Bernard.

In reality, Bernard is not a name. In reality it’s a place, a hutch, which a boy needs to occupy for a certain amount of time.

We chant and we clap as the pink candles glint, Mom gathers the bundle and heads up the stairs, and I take Ivan out of his cage. We open the door for the new Bernard. And we do not mention what I did to the last one’s face.

Mrs. Popkin laughs when she sees me. “You don’t have to knock, Todd,” she says. “You’re family.” I am standing at the screen door holding the dish, my mom said that I should throw it away but why would you do that, it belongs to Mrs. Popkin. And so while she was sleeping, I washed it along with the other dishes and I dried it and then I mopped the kitchen and dusted and then I thought,
All right. I’m going to go up there. I don’t care what Cecilia says
.

And now I can see Mrs. Popkin through the screen door, coming toward me, barefoot, wearing a very thin nightgown. Smoking her cigarette. You can see her nipples blurrily through the sheer of her garment. The dark of her pubic hair. She comes close to the door but doesn’t open it.

She just presses her palms against the mesh of the screen and bends down. She wets her lip with her tongue and then she closes
her lips around her cigarette and her chest expands as she draws on it and I see the lit tip grow brighter.

“Have you ever played this game?” Mrs. Popkin says. She tells me to press my face up against the screen, and I do.

Back at the house, my mom is asleep on the couch with her arms folded over her chest and the TV on low volume and I can picture her flinching, I can picture the way she softly grimaces when she is dreaming.

“Push your lips up to the screen,” Mrs. Popkin says, and I do. There is a dusty, chalky taste to the meshed wires, but I do what she says. I feel my lips making a damp print.

“Close your eyes,” she says, and I do that too. I know that it is the stupidest thing that a boy like me can do. When you are a nerd, kids at school are always telling you to close your eyes.
Open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a big surprise
, they say.

“Are you brave?” Mrs. Popkin whispers, and I think

Why are you doing this you shouldn’t be doing this

And then I taste the hot smoke as she breathes it into my mouth and I gasp and it goes into me.

I
n the dream, there is a girl sitting beside my bed when I open my eyes. She is holding a rabbit in her arms, and staring hard at me, and I think she is going to tell me something.

I think that she is trying to tell me with her face that I should get up. She is trying to tell me that I should run away.

The rabbit’s nose moves rhythmically, as if it’s smelling something over and over.

“Mom!” the girl calls out. “He’s awake!”

“B
ernard, sweetheart,” the mother says. She leans over me, and I can smell her breath, the scent of old smoke and sweet beer and bread. The mother leans down and kisses me on the lips, gently, and draws a little air out of my lungs and into hers.

Then she places a washcloth on my forehead.

“Oh, I’ve been so worried about you, baby,” she says. “I think you’ve been delirious.”

And when I open my mouth to speak, she says
sshhhhhhhh.
She presses a cup to my mouth. I can see the liquid, which is like thin gruel, a grayish brick-red color like hamburger when it is spoiled.

“Drink,” she says. “Drink.”

While Mom feeds him, I take Ivan out back to the rabbit hutch, and then I go to the garden and pull some carrots. They are small enough and thin enough that I can push them through the chicken-wire mesh, and Ivan lopes over to nibble at orange whisker roots at the end of the carrot.

The other rabbits watch warily. They know that I won’t be giving them any treats, and they let out nervous little turds, round as marbles, which fall through the wire floor of the pen and onto the ground. Those are the ones whose names I try not to remember. It’s better if you don’t think of them as anything.

All that carrying on for nothing
, Mom said.
See? It wasn’t so hard, was it?

Well. It would have been harder not to keep my promise. Another carrot to Ivan.

I
n the earliest days, back when we were living with Mawmaw and Romey, I remember when Ivan was my real brother. We were twins, and he had short hair and I had long hair, but otherwise we were identical. We were six years old.

And one day Mawmaw was asleep in the bedroom and Romey was sitting on the couch watching TV, his midget legs splayed out,
and they didn’t even reach the edge and he was wearing nothing but jockey shorts and he said, “Your mom is looking for you.”

I remember I met her in the backyard, and she showed me what it meant.
Think of it this way,
she said, and I saw two pictures in my mind. On the one hand here was Ivan, skinless, no hands or feet or head, no guts inside his stomach, hanging by his feet from a rope. On the other hand was a little white rabbit in a hutch.

I thought I was making the saving choice, but actually it was the trapping choice. My pledge. My vow.

“W
e’ve got a new Bernard, Brother Rabbit,” I tell Ivan now. “You’re going to like him. He won’t throw rocks at you or yank you up by the ears or any of that. He’s nicer.” And Ivan keeps nibbling thoughtfully, and the other ones make their bodies tight and huddled and glare at me and shiver.

None of them had been
just right
, as Mom says. None of them just right enough to be Bernard. None of them strong enough to be one of the big boys. None of them loved enough to be protected, like Ivan. They know that one late night the hutch door will open, and a fist will clutch their ears. They know about the hammer and the skinning knife.

They are not one of the Seven: the big boys. Bernard. Mom. Me. Ivan.