Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,39

than anything, as it does in a small Southern congregation where anything new or different is gossip-worthy. She was an orphan, or a runaway. She drank, or dealt drugs. She’d had a baby, or an abortion. Everyone had a theory, all of which painted a ghastly portrait of sin and depravity. Everyone was so focused on their imagined backstories that they missed (or ignored) the obvious: her piety.

I watched her during services. Her devotion wasn’t ostentatious in the least—hell, she didn’t even sing during worship as far as I could tell—but something in the way she held her hands in her lap, head slightly bowed, her whole body relaxed and utterly at peace, utterly at home, convinced me she knew more of divinity than any of us could ever hope to claim. I’d been too afraid to ever greet her. And it was fear I felt, not intimidation or embarrassment, but a yearning sort of fright. I suppose that’s a contradiction in terms. How can you be attracted and repelled at the same time?

“We talked about this, Grace,” she says now, her disappointment palpable as she steps up beside me. “You shouldn’t have come again.”

My de facto gravesite had looked dispassionately somber on the news the other night. Dozens of people from town had gathered beneath the magnolia where, one week earlier, I had lain in two feet of snow in my blue flannel nightgown, dead to the world. They’d brought lilies and carnations and violets and teddy bears—so many teddy bears, some still with price tags punched in their ears. Gifts for the dead girl. A few of the attendees had carried signs with handwritten messages framing grainy photos of my face: REST IN PEACE or DANCING WITH THE ANGELS or HER FATHER CALLED HER HOME. Our neighbor, a foully sweet woman who insisted on calling me Gracie, had carried that last one. It was my favorite of the signs, as if God Himself had rung a dinner bell and I had dutifully zipped on up to Heaven. As if my earthly father hadn’t pumped a shit ton of morphine into my feeding tube instead of my dinner.

At the end of the memorial everyone had been given a cheap white candle, the disposable kind with a paper guard to stop wax dripping on your hand. The vigil had translated beautifully on film: warm pinpricks of light illuminating dark silhouettes against a bruise-blue sky. I’d watched the coverage in Seanan’s small living room on mute, shapes moving without sound, a choreography of mourning. One last pan of the crowd had shown a line of people waiting to hug my father, his eyes rimmed red from all the crying.

There is no light now. Seanan says I’ll be able to withstand the sun in fifty years or so, once I acclimate. Not so very long, she’d said. Shadowed by the new moon, the teddy bears look like alive, watchful things. And the flowers, half a wilt from rotted already, smell gray somehow. I imagine, not for the first time, how quickly they’d catch fire with help from a stray spark. The whole forest might burn before anyone noticed.

Seanan turns away from the display and faces me. “We should go, Grace.” It’s only been a few weeks, but already I’m learning to read her expressions. Her arms are crossed, head cocked, like she’s going for stern, but her eyes give her away: She’s worried.

“Have you seen him?” I ask.

“What?”

“Have you seen him?” I repeat slowly, as if to a child. It’s churlish, but I do nothing to modulate my tone. “At church? At work? Anywhere.”

She sighs, an artificial sound that only draws attention to the prior stillness of her chest. “Why?” she asks.

“This isn’t a trick question, Seanan. Have you seen him or not?”

She’s dressed for the graveyard shift as we speak: black pants pressed to pleated perfection, a crisp white dress shirt, a black velvet blazer, and her signature ruby suspenders. The occasional flashes of red contrast handsomely with the green felt that lines her card table. She’s been running games since the Irish pubs of her youth, seedy backrooms filled with loud men, warm beer, and blue-tinged smoke drifting like fog. Not much different, to hear her tell it, from the casino where she now spends nights dealing blackjack and Texas Hold’em.

“There’s nothing for you here,” Seanan says gently, reaching for my hand. Her Irish lilt grows heavier as her voice gets quieter. She sounds like a lullaby on the wind.