Chapter 14 – Lily
LILY
My teenage bedroom is the same as it was when I was sixteen. It is an IKEA-dominated, modest double, with a blue patterned bedspread and a few limp scatter cushions.
I stand in the doorway for a moment, taking it in.
The room feels smaller than I remember. There’s only one poster up: a framed Lady Gaga Born This Way album pullout that has Gaga’s red lips stretched and roaring from the frame.
Her eyes are heavily lined in thick black eyeliner drawn to an exaggerated dark point, and her chaotic platinum-blonde hair fills the frame.
Aside from a mirror and a string of lights, it’s the only thing hanging up.
Despite Pat’s insistence that I try to settle in, I never did much more to the walls.
I think on some level I was afraid we’d have to move again at some point, so I didn’t ever allow myself to get comfortable.
Not properly. The glossy white flat-pack bookshelves Pat so kindly built for me remained bare save for a book here, a bit of costume jewelry there, and a purple iPod nano with the color chipped and the edges dented.
I flop onto the bed and pull out my phone, checking for messages. Nothing from Cassini. My thumb hovers over the single text thread between us. Just one message from me, sent a few hours ago:
Lily: “Leaving now, will let you know when I get there. x”
Time for another. I tap the phone screen rapidly, adding, then deleting an “x” on the end. One is friendly, right? Two kisses are more serious; it’s practically a declaration.
Lily: “Made it to my stepdad’s. I’m safe. Hope you’re good, wherever you are.”
I hit send, then immediately wonder if it’s pointless. Where do vampires go during the day? Do they sleep, or do they just…exist somewhere in a kind of limbo? The thought of him lying motionless somewhere, hiding from the sun, makes me strangely worried.
The whole drive here, I have been thinking about him and about last night.
About how I felt when I saw those sharp fangs in his mouth or when I put the puzzle pieces together and realized what he was.
I thought learning that I was able to talk to the dead was a mindfuck, but next to an infatuation with a vampire, that’s nothing.
When he asked me if he’d ever see me again, I told him I didn’t know, but that was a lie. I need to see him again. He’s key to finding the truth of what really happened to Mom, but he’s also in my head and under my skin like an itch I’m desperate to scratch.
I toss my phone across the mattress. It’s ridiculous; he’s undead, he’s probably fine. For all I know, he could be lying in a plush, silk-lined coffin with a flatscreen TV stuck to the lid, watching Vanderpump Rules while he waits for the sun to go down.
“Lil, food’s nearly ready!” comes Pat’s voice from the bottom of the stairs, and I drag myself off the bedspread and pad to the kitchen.
The table is already laid when I get downstairs.
Pat’s got an oven glove on one hand and a dish towel over his shoulder, dancing through the space to rock classics like a well-coordinated ballerina twirling through a crowd.
He busies himself between the oven and the countertop, and when he sees me lurking in the doorway, he motions for me to sit at the head of the table.
“Come, come! Sit!” he sings, bumping the fridge closed with his hip.
“This is too much,” I say, sliding into my old seat at the kitchen table.
It’s the same spot where I used to do homework while he tuned his guitar, the place I sat and cried after my first teenage breakup, where Pat consoled me and jokingly promised to break Josh Waterson’s legs for hurting me.
It’s where I grew up, and where I felt normal.
We’ve done everything at this table, even eating the occasional meal.
I laugh. “I’d be totally happy eating it off a tray in front of the TV.”
He drops a hot dish of buttered green beans next to the ketchup beside me and snorts. “Don’t be daft, Lils! You’re never home, and you know I like to make a fuss of you. Will you have bread?”
“Sure,” I say.
There’s truly no place like home. Perhaps it’s the Irish in him, but since I was young, Pat has insisted on serving a plate of brown buttered bread with almost every meal.
Soup, gravy, pasta—you name it, and Pat’s probably spread it on a piece of bread, folded it in half, and declared it a meal in itself.
“What are we having, then?” I ask, picking up a piece of bread and nibbling the crusts.
The air smells of thick gravy and onions, so I already know what’s coming. Mom’s favorite. My favorite. The meal he’d make for us after every bad day or celebration. Sometimes he’d make it just because it was a Wednesday.
“Cottage pie,” he announces proudly, with his hands on his hips. “I thought since it’s a special occasion and all.”
“Sounds perfect.”
We eat in comfortable silence for a while, the way we often did. It feels like a warm hug. Pat never felt the need to fill every moment with chatter, one of the things that made living with him so peaceful after years of Mom’s chaotic energy.
“How’s life then, Lil’? Any new lads I need to worry about? You send them to me if they’re giving you trouble.”
I push a forkful of potatoes into my mouth, buying time. I’ve never liked lying, especially to Pat, so I’m not sure how I do this.
Oh yeah, sure, there’s just one, Pat. He’s a nice guy, very attractive, big dick from what I can tell from grinding on it.
He’s Italian but doesn’t like to talk about it for some reason.
He’s got incredible green eyes that only occasionally glow in the dark.
He’s oddly kind, and we had a chance encounter at a tattoo shop where he helped me discover my deep-rooted psychic abilities, which in turn stopped me from wanting to kill myself because the pain of suppressing them was becoming unbearable, so I quite literally owe him my life.
Oh, and by the way, he’s undead. A vampire.
That’s right. He drinks blood to sustain himself.
Whose blood? No idea. It didn’t seem polite to ask.
Will he drink mine? I hope not, but also, I kinda hope he does.
Yeah, I don’t think that’ll fly, so I settle for a half-truth instead and hope he doesn’t pry for details.
“I met someone. We’re just friends right now, but I think maybe it could grow into something more.
” Pat’s head is tilted, listening intently, and my cheeks flush.
“Anyway, we’ll have to see. He’s nice. He’s a tattoo artist. He did my tattoo, the one I got for Mom. ”
Pat studies me over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses. “A tattoo?”
A tingle of fear creeps up my chest. I’m almost thirty for fuck’s sake, but Pat has that disapproving look on his face, and suddenly I’m sixteen years old and getting scolded for staying out past curfew, coming home late, and smelling of weed because I was too busy making out with skater boys to get a ride home.
I drag the confession out slowly, watching his reaction. “Yeah. It was an impulse thing, but it’s very discreet, honest. I got laurel leaves, one for each year I knew her. Nowhere visible, just for me.” I show him a picture of the design on my phone.
His narrow eyes focus and then soften as he lets out a deep exhale of relief. “She’d love that, you know that? She really would.”
“I know.” I seize the opportunity to play detective, picking at the edges of a piece of bread while I avoid his eyes. “Mom had tattoos, didn’t she?”
“She did. She had a great big lily done for you when you were little. It was so lovely. Said it was worth the pain.”
“Yeah,” I say, dipping the bread in some gravy. “I remember, but there was another one, wasn’t there? On her shoulder. A number six or something?”
Pat’s fork freezes in midair, and he swallows. “There was,” he says slowly. “What’s on your mind, Lilypad?”
“Just the anniversary,” I say. “It’s bringing up a lot of stuff for me. You don’t happen to know what it meant, do you? The six? She never told me.”
He avoids my gaze. “It was her lucky number, I think,” he says as he fidgets in his chair. “Always loved the number six. She did.”
After that, we eat in silence. He clears the plates, and neither of us speaks for a while.
Talking about Mom is easy—she’s in everything we do, everything we are—but talking about Mom is hard.
I mean really talking about Mom, about the reality of her and not just the safe, sweet version we feel comfortable with. That shit is damn near impossible.
I dry the dishes as he washes, both of us with our hands busy, standing side by side, avoiding our reflections in the darkness of the kitchen window.
From the small speaker in the kitchen comes “Whiskey in the Jar” by Thin Lizzy, filling the air.
I look up and see Pat’s eyes glassy with unspilled tears.
“I miss her so much sometimes,” he says quietly, handing me a saucepan.
“I do, too,” I admit, “but I think it’s different for me. I remember the bad stuff mostly. Sometimes I think I remember the good, but I’m never really sure if it’s a memory or a fantasy.”
Pat slows his pace, rotating a wet plate around in his hands mechanically.
I glance up at his reflection, and his head is bowed.
I know he doesn’t want to talk about this.
Getting Pat to admit that Laurel wasn’t a saint, that she was a malignant presence who destroyed herself and nearly destroyed us in the process—that will be tough.
I used to think he was protecting her legacy for me, but now I think it’s for him.
He needs her to be canonized in death so that he can better live with his own choices.
I’m tired of it.