Chapter 16 #3
She takes the jar back and works the lid off herself.
“I suppose you’ve come to the end, then.
When he died, I thought about destroying all his work.
But I realized if you ever decided to read the journals and couldn’t have them, your father’s legacy would grow even larger in your mind.
I kept them in the hopes that you would see his wretchedness.
You would see the only possible conclusion to meddling in forces beyond our comprehension is utter destruction. ”
“But whatever he found is still out there!”
“It was out there before he found it, and it will be out there long after we both die. And it is not our problem.”
“But—”
She slams the jar down on the table. It cracks, sweet orange liquid seeping outward. “Anneke! It’s over. It’s time to give up.”
I’m as angry as I’ve ever been in my life.
She sabotaged me from the beginning. She interfered with our investigations, and she stole the information I need most. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her.
Demand answers. But this is a woman who decided twenty-three years ago she’d never set foot outside the home again, and has never budged on it.
A terrible possibility occurs to me. Twenty-three years ago, my mother was bitten by a vampire. Pieter died twenty-three years ago. “Mama,” I say. “What really happened to Pieter?”
He died when I was so little, I don’t really remember him.
I’ve always been afraid that I created any memories myself, after the fact.
Flashes of reddish hair and blue eyes, much like my own.
Spinning in circles, laughing, until we both fell down.
Crying outside his door and demanding to see him.
My father grabbing me by the wrist and yanking me into my own room, screaming that it was all my fault.
Mama stares at the table as the carrot juice spreads.
She sags, becoming older and smaller before my eyes, and at last turns toward me.
“Both of you got sick. You got better, and he died. There was nothing sinister or supernatural about it. It was the most human of tragedies: We lost him, and there was never anything anyone could have done to stop it.”
“But the bite on your neck.”
Her fingers drift up and rest against the puckered, purple flesh.
“I spent three nights weeping in the cemetery, refusing to leave his grave. I didn’t want him to be alone.
I was worried he’d be scared. He hated the dark.
He—” She cuts herself off, blinking rapidly, and her voice becomes firmer.
“I was attacked there. Almost dying that night helped me realize how desperately I needed to stay alive. Leaving you would be far worse than losing Pieter. After that, I did my best to be the mother you deserve, flawed though I am.”
“How did you survive?” I ask, going cold thinking of the creature in München. I almost lost Mama. As angry as I am with her, I can’t imagine my life without her. If I’d only had Father, without Mama to provide affection and support and constancy. If she’d died that night, I might as well have, too.
“It was nearly dawn. I managed to get away and run back here, bloodied and terrified as I told Abraham what had happened.” Her face goes hard and angry.
“He told me he would take care of it. For days, I was in agony, sensing the vampire out there, knowing it was waiting to finish what it had started when it bit me. I trusted your father, though. I knew what he was capable of when he set his mind to something. Every night he left, not returning until morning. I was so afraid for him, so worried he might get hurt, so desperate for the creature on the other end of my senses to be killed so I would be freed from its torment. During the days, Abraham took tender care of me for the first time since I’d given birth to you.
He asked about my symptoms, took my pulse, sat at my bedside, monitoring.
And then, one night when he was gone and I couldn’t sleep, knowing the vampire would torment my dreams, I found Abraham’s journal. ”
“Which one?” I’ve read all of them. He didn’t talk about this anywhere.
“The first one. In it, he detailed my symptoms at length with clinical detachment. Not so much as a tender fear for my safety and health. He referred to me only as ‘the woman,’ like I was a study to be presented at a conference rather than his wife, the mother of his children, his partner. And I also discovered in those pages that he had the vampire. He’d caught the creature the very next night.
All that time, watching me suffer, he’d had the means to end it.
I knew then what I was to him. The next morning when he came home to sleep for a few hours, I walked to your father’s lab at the university where he was holding the vampire in a cage.
I lit it on fire and threw your father’s first journal in to burn, too.
That was the last time I left this house.
Abraham never forgave me, and he never stopped chasing death. ”
It’s all so horrible and devastating. I understand why she never told me.
She’s a strange and complicated person, but aren’t we all?
At least she was here. At least she tried to be a good mother.
She’s always tried to protect me, to keep my world full of light and love despite knowing full well the darkness around us.
And my father. I hold back a shudder, hating who he was, hating what he did to her.
Hating that part of me understands exactly what could have driven him to let her suffer so he could get the information he needed.
So he could pursue his obsessive quest to understand the divide between life and death in hopes of overcoming it.
I take Mama’s hand in mine. Her skin feels thinner than it used to, with fine lines and blue veins marking the passage of time.
I understand why she did what she did. But it doesn’t mean I can give up. “What did Diavola lead Papa to? What did those last pages say? Please, I have to know. Dávid is dead because of this. Our Dávid. I loved him. You loved him.”
Mama lets go of my hand and presses her palms to my cheeks. Unlike my eyes, which I’ve been told are as clear and blue as compacted ice, hers are the exhausted gray blue of deep winter. Something about them always makes me want to sink into bed and wrap myself in a quilt.
“I did love Dávid,” she says, “and I’m sorry for what happened. But he’s dead. You’re not. Unlike your father, I know to prioritize the living.” She drops her hands. “I’ll never help you chase her.”
She doesn’t bother comforting me as I sink to the floor and weep.