Fledgling(33)

I walked past her into the house. There was, near the front door, a broad staircase on one side and a living room almost as large as Iosif’s on the other. The walls were a very pale green, and the woodwork was white. All the furniture was, somehow, exactly where it should be and exactly what it should be. Iosif’s living room was more lived-in, more imperfect, more comfortable to be in. I began to feel even more uneasy about asking Theodora to come with me.

She came up behind me, and when I turned to face her, she stopped, staring at me with a kind of horror.

“Is it my skin color or my apparent age that’s upsetting you so?” I asked.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“To talk with you,” I said. “To have you see me.”

“I didn’t want to see you!”

I nodded. “It will make a difference,” I said, “but not as great a difference as you think.” I went to her, took her arm, tried to lead her into the perfect living room.

She pulled back and said, “Not here.” She took my hand and led me up the stairs into a room whose walls were covered with books. There was a sofa and two chairs also piled high with books and papers. In the middle of the room was a large, messy desk covered with open books, papers, a computer and monitor, a radio, a telephone, a box of pencils and pens, a stack of notebooks and crossword puzzle magazines, a long decorative wooden box of compact discs, bottles of aspirin, hand lotion, antacid, correction fluid, and who knew what else.

I stared at it and burst out laughing. It was the most disorderly mass of stuff I had run across, and yet it all looked—felt—familiar. Had I once had an equally messy desk? Had one of my mothers or sisters? I would ask Iosif. Anyway, it was the opposite of the living room downstairs, and that was a relief.

Theodora had been clearing books off a chair so that I could sit down. She stopped when I laughed, followed my gaze, and said, “Oh. I forget how awful that must look to strangers. No one ever sees it but me.”

I laughed again. “No, this is who you are. This is what I wanted to see.” I drew a deep breath, assuring myself that she was still free of me, still unaddicted. She was, and that was a good thing, although it felt like a flaw I should fix at once.

“I write poetry,” she said. She almost seemed embarrassed about it. “I’ve published three books. Poetry doesn’t really pay, but I enjoy writing it.”

I took some of the books off the sofa and piled them on the chair she had been clearing for me, then took her hand and drew her to the sofa. She sat with me even though she didn’t want to—or she didn’t want to want to. I felt that she was teaching me about herself every moment. I turned her to face me and just enjoyed looking at her. She had waist-length, dark-brown hair with many strands of gray. Her eyes were the same dark brown as her hair, and the flesh at the corners of them was indented with arrays of fine lines—the only lines on her face. She was a little heavier than was good for her. Plump might have been the best word to describe her. It made her face full and round. She wore no makeup at all—not even lipstick. She had been at home, relaxing without her family around her.

After a moment, I leaned against her, put my head on her shoulder, and she put her arm around me, then took it away, then put it back. She smelled remarkably enticing.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t either,” I said. “But the things I don’t understand are probably not the same ones giving you trouble. How long do we have before your family comes home?”

“They’re visiting my son-in-law’s family in Portland. They won’t be home until tomorrow.” The moment she said this, she began to look nervous, as though she was afraid of what I might make of her solitude, her vulnerability.

“Good,” I said. “I need to talk to you, tell you my story, hear yours. Then I have something to ask of you.”

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What’s your name? What … What …?”

“What am I?”

“… yes.” She looked away, embarrassed.

I pulled her down to a comfortable level and bit her gently, then hard enough to start blood flowing on its own so that I could be lazy and just take it as it came. After a while, I said, “You told me I was a vampire.”

She had not objected to anything I’d done even when I climbed onto her lap, straddled her, and rested against her, lapping occasionally at the blood. She put her arms around me and held me against her as though I might try to escape.

“You are a vampire,” she said. “Although according to what I’ve read, you’re supposed to be a tall, handsome, fully grown white man. Just my luck. But you must be a vampire. How could you do this if you weren’t? How could I let you do it? How could it feel so good when it should be disgusting and painful? And how could the wound heal so quickly and without scars?”

“You don’t believe in vampires.”

“I didn’t use to. And I never thought they would be so small and … like you.”

“I’ve been called an elfin little girl.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“In a way, it is. I’m a child according to the standards of my people, but my people age more slowly than yours, and I have an extra problem. I may be older than you are in years. As far as my memory is concerned, though, I was born just a few weeks ago.”