Chapter 3
“I HAVE A GUY,” UNCLE BILL SAYS WHEN I CALL HIM from the road, asking if he can help me change my battery.
Uncle Bill always has a guy. It’s better not to ask too many questions.
“That’s fine. I’ll help you put it in when you get here.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re family.” An acerbic undertone of can’t believe I have to do this creeps into that last statement.
I ignore it, like usual. “Thanks, man.”
My stomach growls. The curse in my heart needs only blood, but the body around it needs more.
My mom and I used to laugh at the TV monsters with their cartoonish capes, the way they recoiled in the sun, the way they slept in dirt and never died.
Maybe it was like that for some people, once, but not for us.
We heal fast, sure, but we’re not indestructible.
And we only avoid garlic because the smell’s off-putting, same as any other pungent food.
Sometimes our eyes come out funny in photos if we’re not quick enough to duck out of the way of the flash, but our bodies are mostly just like everyone else’s, and they can only take so much living.
Uncle Bill clears his throat. “How’ve you been?”
I answer the question he really meant to ask. “She’s okay. About the same.”
“Still with it enough to be a royal pain in the ass.”
“She doesn’t mean to be. She can’t help it.”
There’s another pause, and I think he’s waiting for me to say something more, but I’m too tired to have anything much to say.
Uncle Bill was a teenager when my mom was in kindergarten, and she hadn’t seen him in almost three decades when she showed up in his driveway with nowhere to go and me in the back seat.
“Be nice to your uncle,” she reminded me constantly in the sixteen years since.
Especially when he covered my nursing school tuition, and when one of his work buddies helped get me a job at the hospital.
Given all that, you’d think we’d have a better relationship, but he’s also prone to taking off for days without telling us, and then there are the constant sidelong comments that make it clear he’s never too happy about what he does to help us out, just that he feels he has to.
And maybe he has a point. It’s not like my mom or I have ever volunteered to arrange our own supply of blood.
“See you soon,” I mutter into the phone, then turn back to the road.
The desert sun is hard at work by the time I pull into Uncle Bill’s cul-de-sac, the exposure-scorched sidewalks and cracked asphalt driveways radiating such relentless heat that the air almost shimmers with it.
His white stucco one-story is layered with world-weary grime that can only be achieved through years of dedication to subminimal maintenance.
Instead of a row of palms or an Astroturf lawn out front, it’s just a patch of dirt that the neighbor’s dogs consistently shit in.
Even though they clean up after, it still smells foul to me.
Probably does to Uncle Bill too. I don’t know how he stands it.
I find him out back, folded into a faded lawn chair in the shadow of the house. The back isn’t any nicer than the front, more parched concrete and an empty pool collecting layers of dead tree bits and dirt.
His knees crack like a pair of snapped branches as he hauls himself to his feet. “You got here fast.”
There’s a certain youthfulness to Uncle Bill, even though he walks slower these days and his hair’s thinning and mostly gray.
He has the same nose as my mom, narrow and high bridged with a bump in the middle, and he reeks of drugstore cologne turned rancid by sweat and too many cups of instant coffee.
Beneath that lurks the vinegary chemical stink of detergent and Windex that’s so sunk into his hands that it’ll never leave, no matter how many times he washes them.
Uncle Bill is a custodian at the UNLV phlebotomy lab.
That’s the reason we came here. My mom was tired of drifting and scheming, of digging through hazardous waste bins for trashed Vacutainers and raiding med-spa dumpsters for the discard of their vampire facials.
Doesn’t matter that it’s been processed, or that it might have pathogens.
If it’s blood, it can’t hurt us, only feed us.
Medical samples are best, she taught me, because a standard three-milliliter vial is about what we need for a day.
And we don’t drink it, ever—drinking blood is wasteful and inconsistent, since a mouthful doesn’t always damp our hunger for the same amount of time, depending on what food’s in our stomach. Injection’s clean, easy. Safe.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Uncle Bill says. “Go pop the hood, will you?”
A dried-out branch snaps. Dirt slides deeper into the pool’s concrete embrace.
I shuffle out front and open up my car. It takes me two tries to get the prop rod stable under the hood.
Down the street, someone’s watering their lemon tree.
The smell of it suffuses the dust in the air, delicate, not too sweet, and out of nowhere I imagine my mouth filling with the lemony slick of Zawadski’s—Veer’s—hair gel.
My hands in her hair, my mouth on her neck, the aftertaste of citrus, sweat, and eager fascination.
“What the fuck,” I whisper to the sun. Maybe if I stare at it long enough, it’ll burn the image right out of my brain. When that doesn’t work, I get busy pulling the dead battery out of the car.
Uncle Bill joins me after a minute. He scrubs coffee residue from his front teeth before wiping his hands on his jeans. “You know your mom’s full of shit, don’t you, Ellie?”
I never liked being called Ellie, but my mom made me swear I’d never correct him. “Nice way to talk about your sister.”
“You know I’m right.” He hoists the new battery over the edge of the bumper. “Want some advice?”
“No.”
“Quit letting her ruin your life.” The battery clicks into place. “Don’t tell me she’s not. She runs you around in circles, always has. What is it, you think you have something to prove to her?”
“She needs me,” I say automatically.
“No, what she needs is—”
“She needs us.”
He grips the hood and guides the prop rod back into its slot. “You know, if it was just her, I wouldn’t be bothering. She can make her own way. But there was you too. So maybe try thinking for yourself for once.”
A little black-and-white dog scampers past us, snuffles in the dirt of Uncle Bill’s front yard, and cocks his leg.
“Hey! Rudy!” A woman in neon workout gear sprints up behind the dog and whisks him into her arms just before his bladder gets going.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she says to Uncle Bill. Her blond ponytail has the copper undertones of a home bleach job. “I don’t know why he does that.”
“It’s fine. Have a good one.”
She jogs off, Rudy at her heels, and Uncle Bill gives me a look like And you think you have problems.
“What do you want me to do?” I hiss. “Stick her in a home I can’t afford, where they don’t know how to take care of whatever we are, and wait until she turns inside out and devours everyone in the place?”
“That’s not the only option.”
“You think I should kill her?”
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Fuck no. What’s wrong with you?”
Our wounds heal, because that’s the only way to survive with hunger ready to rip through you if you leave it too long.
Our minds don’t. If one of us goes that way, lucidity and reason fading out before their body does, it’s the role of the next generation to slide a kitchen knife or a camping stake or a rusted machete through their loved one’s chest, to release them from the torture of appetite.
But I still see flashes of my mom, the real her, in between the bouts of confusion and anguish, and I can’t help hoping.
Uncle Bill drops the hood closed with a bang. “Quit acting like you’re the center of the universe. There are other people going through it too.”
“Okay.” Not like this. Not like us.
“No, there—” Instead of finishing, he wipes his hands again on the dirty rag and tosses it toward the garage. He’s been around my mom and me long enough to know when something’s a lost cause, I guess. “Whatever, not like you ever listen anyway. At least try to have some fun when she’s not around.”
Easy for him to say. I chose this. I went to nursing school because it gave me options: I could have picked anywhere in the country and found a decent-paying job with plausible access to blood.
I could have survived away from my family, but there’s a need for them somewhere in me that’s beyond survival.
And there’s a debt. For that need, and that debt, I let my dreams of independence go when my mom stopped just forgetting where she put her keys and started forgetting what day it was, when to turn off the stove. And it’s not forever. When she’s gone…
Don’t. I owe my mom. I’m not sure what, maybe love, maybe obedience, certainly my time and my care and the good fucking attitude I can’t ever seem to scrape together. Giving her anything but my all would be the same as abandoning her.
“I’m only saying it because I love you,” Uncle Bill adds. On the next street over, someone revs a leaf blower.
“Okay, so then why—”
Uncle Bill pats his pockets and produces his phone. I can’t hear it ringing over the leaf blower, but he grimaces. “Gotta take this.”
Of course he does. This is why I’m the one taking care of my mom, not him. He’ll help us, begrudgingly, but he’s never been interested in being responsible for anyone but himself. If I left things up to him, he’d look for the quick way out. He’d reach for the knife.
“Bill here,” he says into the phone, his voice brash and businesslike.
But the bravado doesn’t make it as far as his face.
He looks disappointed, and like there’s something else he’d rather say, but he knows better than to say it.
He tucks the phone into the angle of his chin and whispers, “Grab something out of the garage before you go, okay?”
That’s another thing about Uncle Bill. He never likes to say blood.
He turns back to the phone, and I head for the garage door, but he pulls me back in by the shoulder, not demanding, just a little solemn, and kisses the top of my head.
Like he used to when I was in high school, when I’d roll my eyes, thinking I was too old for it.
Like he used to, apparently, to my mom, when they were kids.
“Thanks,” I mutter. I’m not quite sure what I’m thanking him for.
The temperature of the air drops as I let myself into the garage.
The single light bulb dangling over the door flickers awake.
Uncle Bill’s truck looms over me, a hulking black pickup with tinted windows and a bumper sticker that reads I DON’T HAVE ROAD RAGE, YOU’RE JUST AN IDIOT.
I step carefully around the tangle of power tools and paint buckets discarded in a heap on the floor.
It smells like concrete and cold in here, like spilled beer and spent shells and other things I don’t really want to look at too closely.
Except for the massive stainless steel freezer humming in one corner. That smells like blood.
I pull a plastic bag from atop the freezer, line it with cold packs, and wedge the vials gently in among the crevices.
They’ve still got stickers on them, some of the names smudged where they pressed up against melting ice.
I try to avoid reading them—it feels like an invasion of privacy.
I wonder if any of these people imagined this was where their samples would end up when they sat down with the phlebotomist.
I take enough for a week.
Uncle Bill’s gone when I come back out, probably in the back saying things I don’t want to hear into his phone. It’s another part of our unspoken agreement with him: he feeds us, and we don’t ask him who his friends are or how he managed to buy a house on a custodian’s salary.
The leaf blower is still going, its rumble adding a layer of discomfort to just standing still.
Halfway home, I realize that the song I switched on to drown it out got stuck somehow, and it keeps repeating, over and over, the same swell of triumph, the same downward inflection, the same chorus of disappointment.