The Succubus and the Healing Doctor

Chapter 1

Benjamin Fickler was the first boy I ever killed.

No one called him Benjamin. I’m being formal, out of respect. It was Benny. We were fourteen and I kissed him first. He wasn’t sure he was ready. I could tell. I liked that about him.

My two best friends at the time—their names don’t matter—preferred boys who were the tallest, the loudest, the usual. Benny was on the short side, often smiling like he was open to the possibility that everything might turn out to be a joke.

It was early summer. I asked him to go for a walk with me.

My plan was that we would kiss on the blue bridge over the lightly polluted stream in the preserve two blocks down from my house.

When we got to the bridge, I stopped, and he had to stop, too, and then I said something subtle like, “Do you want to kiss me?” and he looked slightly terrified, which was more appropriate than I realized at the time.

“I guess,” he said, looking down. “Sure.”

I remember the toothpaste-white of his sneakers. He wasn’t wearing a cool first-kiss outfit, but I didn’t mind.

“Do you want to go first?” I said chivalrously.

When he didn’t move, I leaned forward, too nervous to wait, and pressed my tight, uncertain lips to his soft, looser ones.

It was shocking to be against his skin, his nose.

His breath was on my mouth, the smell of his mom’s favorite laundry detergent rising from his shirt, a pink, overextended scent.

Why am I reliving this?

Because it’s the least I can do.

I’m not in therapy. I tried that at nineteen, when my suspicions were horrifyingly confirmed. I spoke in code of course, because the truth wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of believable. Thank God I have Grub now. And Dee, even though she doesn’t believe me, either.

It wasn’t the kiss on the bridge that killed Benny.

That was just the first drop of poison. The next time, we kept going, pecking wetly, perched like virgin birds on his musty basement couch.

Then Benny got sick—his dad couldn’t wake him up one morning.

That’s what I heard. They rushed him to the hospital, but it was as though his lungs had simply given up.

They said it was maybe a virus. We did a memorial service: the whole school, candles lit, kids crying with our arms around each other; we couldn’t believe Benny was gone.

No one had known until then that death—as distant as war, as outer space—could swoop down at any random moment and grab someone our age and carry them off, never to be seen again.

I had no idea that it was my fault. It’s funny—I was worried that maybe I’d gotten the virus from him. Maybe my lungs would quit, too.

Not funny, obviously. Nothing about it is funny.

I didn’t know until college. Until Sam.

By then, I’d also killed a boy named Arlo Wu, who was the captain of the debate team junior year of high school.

He was long-haired, sarcastic, and sensitive.

A little goofy, like Benny. We got mozzarella sticks at the diner.

I invited him over when my mom was at work late, and Dee, my little sister, was at twirling practice.

We made out on my bed and put our hands down each other’s pants, and that was the first time I touched a penis.

His heart gave out two days later. A Thursday.

Maybe he’d had an undiagnosed heart defect, they said.

I went to his funeral, and I’ll never forget his little sister’s face as she watched her parents holding each other and crying in heaving gasps as though Arlo had taken the air with him into that casket.

My hair, always frustratingly thin and limp, seemed thicker in the weeks afterward.

It was easier to wake up in the morning, even if I hadn’t gotten much sleep.

I felt lit up, buoyant through my sadness.

As though every microscopic thing inside me was suddenly going right, even as everything outside me went wrong.

You could say I was full of life. As though I’d eaten an extra helping of it.

I am so unlucky, I wrote in my diary.

“You are so unlucky,” Carly (okay, that was the name of one of the best friends) told me. “It’s like every boy you like dies.”

“Don’t say that!” I yelped.

But I didn’t date anyone else in high school. I felt like maybe I’d been in love with Arlo. I learned guitar and wrote some songs about him. Then I went to college, became more of a hippie, and killed Sam (the first boy I had sex with), and I began to wonder.

When I turned nineteen and killed Omar, I knew.

I fell apart and dropped out and moved to Sedona where I waited tables at a gimmicky restaurant called The Vortex and tried to find myself in all the ways you’d think, minus sex.

I probably took all the same hallucinogenics as my mother, and look where it got her. Years slipped through my fingers.

And then Dee got married and pregnant right away, and he cheated on her, and they got divorced, and he vanished just like her father and also my father.

She had Ella (a C-section performed by a brusque, irritated OB), and I came back to visit and slept on the couch in her crappy upper upper Upper East Side apartment.

Dee got her tech job and worked her butt off, and Ella hated preschool, and Mom moved in full time to do childcare, which she was unsurprisingly bad at.

So when Dee and Mom moved to New Jersey to a creaky house in an upscale town with a fancy university and Ella started kindergarten, I moved in with them.

I met Adam at an outdoor concert in town, where I was sitting on a bench only half listening, trying to study for my first exam in the doula training program I’d signed up for. I had sworn off men long before then, of course. I’m not a monster.

I am a monster.

But I have never wanted to be one.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t continue the conversation after he sat down next to me.

But something about him felt different, felt inexplicably unbreakable.

And it had been so long. So long that maybe it wasn’t true anymore— this terrible thing that had never been possible to begin with.

Maybe it had never been true. Just an incredibly strange run of the worst luck.

After I went home with him, terrified and shaking, to his nearly empty faculty apartment, Adam didn’t get sick.

I held my breath all week, frantic with guilt, tripping on hope.

It was finals; he was grading and the new text-to-speech software he was trying out kept glitching.

He didn’t get sick when we reunited, and I was flattered that he—obvious genius that he was—wanted to be with me.

Once, I’d been academically promising, had been called smart, but that felt like a different lifetime.

Maybe it was because he was blind, I thought. Maybe there was something in the curse that required me to be seen. Or I’d aged out. Somewhere around thirty the curse might have run its course. Or I’d broken it with my impressive willpower. I hadn’t done more than flirt with a man in ten years.

That’s a whole decade, by the way. I had atoned.

Oh, Adam.

Adam Tav.

He was out of my league. He was my last chance at salvation.

“Titi,” says Ella from the back seat. “Can we hear the one where Aladdin is running away from the guards again?”

I hit Back on the touchscreen so we can hear the song for the fortieth time. “Almost there. Look, sumac! Very red, right? Do you remember if it’s a native or nonnative species?” It’s mid-September and we’ve been trying to observe which plants and trees are changing color.

“No,” says Ella. “Do you think they’ll have those gluten-free cinnamon muffins again?”

“I love those,” I say. “But your mom said we need to do less sugar.”

“How about only a little bit less?” she suggests optimistically. We crack up.

Ella is seven and a half. She is not, in fact, an optimist. Typically, she assumes things will turn out to be scary.

Her official diagnosis is childhood anxiety disorder.

Dee thinks she probably has ADHD, too. And there are some sensory issues.

The kid will not wear socks. Ever. That was one of the reasons school didn’t work for her.

Not even the expensive private one Dee put her in after a year of torture at the cute public school down the street.

Now it’s mostly just Ella and me during the day, plus some playdates with kids from Blossom and Twig, our homeschool group. When I’m filling out the “Parent or Guardian” section of all the kid-related forms, there isn’t a checkable box for me. No pediatrician’s office has ever suggested:

a. homeschool aunt

b. minorly employed expert in breathing techniques during labor

c. spontaneous editor of children’s chapter books, specializing in real-time removal of any hint of “meanness”

d. murderer (but who would ever believe it?)

e. demon, maybe

f. succubus (that’s probably the best term for it, though it’s not, in fact, a term for anything real—except me)

Speaking of which, at thirty-three years old I’m responsibly celibate again.

And I read a lot of romance. Mostly contemporary happily-ever-afters, but also, let’s be real, jacked blue aliens and the tiny human women who love them.

A steely-jawed fae warlord with the biggest sword in the Kingdom of Shadow, the literal God of Death (also jacked) kidnapping some twenty-year-old with a spunky attitude and a talent for multiple orgasms. The kind of stuff I can’t leave lying around, in case the kid whose education I’m responsible for decides at some point to actually start reading.

I keep meaning to get back into meditation, but then I keep not getting around to it. I’m no longer in immediate danger of being swallowed by the hungry dark of my despair, but I’ll never be completely free of it, either. How could I be?

My shoulder and back ache as I pull into the Trader Joe’s parking lot.

The longer I go without having sex/committing involuntary manslaughter, the worse I feel: my body aging ahead of itself, a weakness like anemia slackening my muscles.

I park, facing the cluttered highway with its infinite, interchangeable gas stations and gray strip malls.

Personal injury lawyers smile smarmily from their billboards, promising NO WIN, NO FEE.

I’ve lived in prettier places, but my soul was roadkill then.

I was flattened by the grotesque power lurking inside me, and for a long time I couldn’t even masturbate without hating myself.

Everything is better now.

My phone is ringing. It’s always on when I have a client near her due date.

“Crap,” I say. “Sweetie, that’s Izzy.” (My high-risk client— two days before her scheduled induction, but she never calls.) “I don’t think we have time for the muffins today after all. I’m sorry.”

“Does that mean you were going to get them?” Ella says sadly.

* * *

Eight hours later, I am at the hospital watching Izzy—Isobel Lopez—have a seizure. Her blood pressure spiked almost immediately after she delivered the placenta, and the baby has been whisked away to the NICU. This is now an emergency.

And that is when I see him.