28. Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
S he couldn’t sit in her car all day. After all, Dad and Mom knew by scent and sound that she and Ryker were out here, parked in the driveway. Yet Leslie couldn’t seem to move beyond sorting and re-sorting her handwritten notes. Yes, the notes were mostly unnecessary. Ryker had everything printed, highlighted, and organized in a file folder. But Leslie had needed to see the same facts in her own handwriting.
She looked up from the pages in her hands and stared at the house she’d grown up in, the house she returned to for Sunday dinners—now usually with Ryker. The modest Cape Cod sported pale-gray siding and blue shutters on the gable windows. When she was little, those shutters had been green, but Dad and Mom had decided on a change about five years ago. In her earliest memory, she was taking a tumble down the hill in the backyard, and then Dad was scooping her up and holding her while Mom kissed her skinned knee. She had been safe here.
Always safe. Sometimes confused.
“We don’t have to do this.”
Ryker’s voice punctured her paralysis. He’d said the words half a dozen times between the minute Leslie had picked him up at the airport and…now. Right now. Sitting in her car, endlessly re-sorting her needless notes.
“I tried asking,” she said. “I tried ignoring. Now it’s time to try rocking the boat.”
“Okay. If it helps, I’m with you all the way.”
“Oh, it does. Thanks for doing this with me.”
He nodded, but she knew no thanks was needed for this. When she’d asked him to be present at the confrontation, his relief had been obvious. He wanted to be here for her…because he loved her. That fact still tasted new and sweet.
Unlike the facts on the papers in her hands, which tasted new and bitter.
“I’m ready,” Leslie said and opened her car door.
Ryker got out too, and they walked up to the front door together. Her mom opened the door as they reached it, typical vampire hearing and timing. She wished this thought didn’t also taste bitter. Maybe after today, it wouldn’t have to.
“Hi, Les! Ryker, nice to see you again.”
“Thanks, Debra. It’s good to see you too.”
Mom motioned them in ahead of her. “Paul’s in the den working one of his jigsaw puzzles. I told him you two had something to discuss with us.”
Ryker’s hand found Leslie’s, and he gave it a gentle squeeze. She squeezed back with barely checked strength, and he tugged her closer to him, pressing their hands snugly against his thigh as they walked side-by-side. No matter how her parents reacted, she would be okay, and Ryker would be with her.
“Hey, you two. Come check this out.”
They crossed the room and stood over Dad’s puzzle table, where a two-thousand-piece puzzle lay half-completed. When finished, it would depict a scene that could have come straight from Harmony Ridge’s downtown fifty years ago, complete with a single traffic light and old brick shopfronts. The single car parked on the street, a red pickup truck with rounded fenders and giant round headlights, was the biggest giveaway of the historical setting. The wardrobes of the few pedestrians crossing the street was another clue.
Hey, maybe she should create a diorama series—same place, different decades.
Was she so dreading the coming conversation, her brain tried to distract her with art? Well, art would have to wait.
“Not that we have anything dire going on at three in the morning,” Dad said, “but we might as well get to your very important conversation. Your mom’s been trying all night to guess what it is.”
Mom settled into one of the stuffed chairs and tugged a throw blanket around her shoulders. “Should I tell you my top three guesses?”
“No,” Leslie said. “I mean, I’d rather just tell you, if that’s okay.”
Mom’s smile faded. “Of course, honey.” She glanced from Leslie to Ryker and back again. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. I need to ask you…a few questions.”
“Come and sit.”
Leslie kept hold of Ryker’s hand as she sat on the love seat, and he sank down beside her. He offered his neat folder to her, and she took it but set it on her lap without opening it. She didn’t need his notes. She didn’t need hers either. She had every piece of their investigation memorized.
“Leslie?” Dad said. He stood up from his puzzle table and moved to the other stuffed chair.
Now they all faced one another, Dad and Mom from one side of the den and Leslie and Ryker from the other side. It was the last thing she wanted, to face down her parents like the opposing army in a battle for family secrets. But she didn’t know how else to do this, and she shouldn’t have to do this, because they should have told her the truth years ago.
“I’ve been wondering about our family,” she said. “Our history, my history. Where I came from and how we got here—as vampires, I mean. Why we’re living apart from other vampires.”
Mom went statue-still. Dad gave a slow blink, and his pale-blue eyes shifted to charcoal gray. Beside her, Ryker stiffened. Leslie wanted to run out of the room, to take the words back altogether, to restore to this house the harmony that had greeted her and Ryker only minutes ago. Ryker wrapped one arm around her, and his defense fortified her enough to keep going.
To her dad she said, “Do you know I asked Mom about this, and she wouldn’t tell me?”
Dad nodded but said nothing.
“Okay, so I looked into it myself. That is, Ryker and I looked into it. I wouldn’t have been able to find much on my own.”
Dad began shaking his head before she finished, and his eyes remained flat and gray. “Our past is a family matter, Leslie. If we’re going to discuss it, then it needs to stay with the three of us.”
A few months ago, she would have surrendered then and there, asked Ryker to honor her dad’s wishes, squashed the frustration and hurt and never brought it up again. But she knew so much now that she hadn’t known a few months ago—about vampires, about herself, about the man she loved and about her parents.
“No,” she said, and her parents’ faces tightened in surprise and displeasure. “Ryker is going to be part of this family, Dad. He’s my boyfriend, and soon he’s going to be not only my spouse but also…my eternal.”
“Oh…” Mom’s voice was resonant, her full self unmuted by her surprise. “Congratulations, both of you.”
“This isn’t how I wanted to tell you.” Leslie glanced to Ryker. “Sorry to ruin the big reveal.”
Ryker shrugged. A smile tugged his mouth, but it didn’t last while Dad continued to frown at him.
“Stop glaring at him,” Leslie said, and her parents flinched again with surprise. “And stop acting like I’m a mouse who just came out of her hole for the first time in her life. Didn’t y’all just a month ago encourage me to take on my boss, to go after the things I want? Well, I want this. I want to know the truth.”
“You found enough on your own,” Mom said. “Whatever you found, why can’t that be enough?”
“Because stories matter, Mom. Our story matters.”
After a moment that tightened and stretched itself out, Dad sat back in his chair and nodded. “All right, Les. Show us.”
It was time. She knew all the way to her bones, though the conflict in the room threatened to squeeze her heart dry. She slid her notes from Ryker’s organized folder into her lap. She looked from Dad to Mom, back and forth, as she told them everything…and hoped they would understand.
“Okay, um… Dad was pretty straightforward. He was born in Knoxville, which I knew. I’m assuming how he got to Missouri is a true story—that he went to visit a cousin, met Mom, and stayed.”
Both her parents nodded. Mom’s fingers were laced in her lap, so tight they had turned white. Her jaw was clenched tight, and she seemed to be grinding her teeth.
Keep going. No quitting now. Ryker’s arm tightened around her. She glanced down at the notes she didn’t need, then back up, focusing on Mom, who would not look at her.
“Ryker found Mom’s birth certificate in the county records of Meredith, Missouri. So I know both of you have the birthdays you’ve always claimed to have. You’re not relics.”
“Of course we’re not,” Mom blurted.
Leslie shrugged. “I wanted confirmation.”
“Because we’re not the type of parents to spill all our early life experiences to our child, you assumed we must be relics?”
“That one was me,” Ryker said. “My speculation based on what I know of older vampires. They tend to hold a lot of secrets, which you’ve been doing with Leslie all her life.”
Why did he have to be so direct all the time? Leslie held Mom’s gaze with every ounce of effort she had. While she did, Mom’s eyes turned charcoal.
“I’m sorry,” Leslie said. “But I needed to know, Mom.”
“You should have asked me.”
“Would you have told me the truth?”
Mom flinched. “I wouldn’t have lied to you.”
“But you wouldn’t have told me. You would have hung up the phone or…or told me not to ask careless questions.”
It was a solid memory now. Leslie had been no older than seven when she asked about Mom’s parents, why she’d never met them. After all, she’d met Dad’s parents, Meemaw and Papaw. She’d even met Papaw’s papaw.
“Some stories aren’t safe to tell,” Mom had said. “Don’t ask careless questions, Leslie.”
Leslie had walked away in confusion, held onto a sort of murky guilt. She never wanted to be careless. Disturbing to find out she could be careless by accident.
As Mom held Leslie’s gaze, the memory seemed to flash between them. Quietly she said, “I might not have explained very well back then.”
“You can fix that. You can explain now. There’s a lot of detail I couldn’t find.”
“Tell us the rest, what you did find.”
“I know you were nineteen and Dad was twenty-two when y’all got married. I know you lived in Meredith for the next ten years, and then your residence transferred to Harmony Ridge. So you were pregnant when you got here. I was born eight-and-a-half months later.”
“Anything else?” Dad said.
She was suddenly pinned down by the weight of the story. She couldn’t say the rest of it. She couldn’t see them shut down in front of her, couldn’t bear to hear them stonewall her or blame Ryker for investigating. She wrapped her arm around his and leaned into him. Please do the talking for a minute.
He squeezed her hand. Message received. “I found some old news articles from the Meredith Chronicle that included the name Wilkins, including the deaths of two vampires named Derek Wilkins and Edmund Wilkins. The articles claimed they’d been attacked by a bear.”
Mom closed her eyes and began to wring her hands in her lap. Dad got up and went to her, and Leslie fought tears as he sat on the arm of her chair and pulled her into a protective embrace. He was glaring at Ryker with flat eyes and bared teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Ryker said.
“If you’re sorry,” Dad said, “then let this go. Let it go, Leslie.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was wrong to ask. These things had happened before she was born. She couldn’t possibly carry the weight of them.
Except…she did. She carried the uncertainty, the loss, the disorientation every time she collided with an experience she’d never had, a factoid she’d never learned, a story she’d never been told. She carried the hurt of only partly knowing who her family was, who she was.
She held Dad’s gaze. Mom wouldn’t look at her at all now. Leslie reached out blindly with her free hand and found Ryker’s knee. She held onto it while he squeezed her other hand in his. He understood, and he was here.
“I can’t let it go,” she said. “I can’t. I need to know where I came from, why I’m here, why y’all can’t even walk past a wolf in the grocery store without going on high alert.”
Now Dad looked away from her too, and the severing was a knife twisting inside her. She held her tears inside, but her throat tightened around them.
“Please,” she said, but the word came with a sob. “Dad, please.”
Dad met her eyes again and seemed to see her for the first time since she’d ventured the topic. Slowly he began nodding. His final nod was firm and short. He had decided.
“Debra,” he said to Mom. “It’s time.”
“We weren’t going to do this,” Mom said. “Not ever.”
“When we didn’t know what it was doing to her. Now we know. Now it’s time to break the silence, Deb. For Leslie.”
Mom hid her face in her hands, then lowered them and finally, finally met Leslie’s eyes. Her frostiness had melted, and she looked smaller somehow. She leaned against Dad as though her whole body was trying to bear up under the weight of the story, many tons heavier for her than it ever could be for Leslie.
Mom said, “Derek was my cousin. Edmund was my uncle, my father’s brother. They were murdered by a wolf pack.”