Chapter 12
Ifind the portrait at ten, entirely by accident, because I’m looking for a bathroom.
The side gallery off the east hall is where this museum puts the things it hasn’t decided about. It’s drafty and badly lit and contains four ship portraits, a case of buttons, and a display about the ropewalk that has been in that exact spot since the Ford administration.
There’s an oil on the end wall, three feet high, in a frame someone has cleaned too hard.
A man stands at a table in a dark coat and high collar, with one hand on a chart and the light off the water coming through the window behind him.
He has dark hair pushed back off a high forehead and eyes so dark the painter appears to have given up and used the same color he used for the coat.
He isn’t smiling, but there’s something at the corner of that mouth that says he might, later, once everyone has gone home.
I look at it for about nine seconds. Then I laugh out loud, alone in a gallery.
The card says Gentleman with a Chart, c. 1816. Artist unknown. Gift of the Pratt family, 1958.
“Julian,” I call.
He comes, unhurried, across thirty feet of two-hundred-year-old floorboard without making one single sound, which is something about him I stopped remarking on in October.
“Look at this.”
He looks at it.
For half a second something goes over his face that is not embarrassment and is not amusement. It’s the expression of a man watching a wave come in from a long way off and calculating, without any particular alarm, exactly where it is going to reach.
Then it’s gone.
“It is a portrait of a man in a coat,” he says.
“It’s your portrait of a man in a coat. That is your face. That’s the thing you do with your mouth when Theo talks about the Bruins.”
“His chin is different.”
“It’s your chin, Julian.”
“Every man in 1816 had that chin,” he says. “There were four faces and they shared them. It was a smaller country.”
I’m laughing. I put my hand through his arm because I want to, because the gallery is cold and he is right there and I am allowed to now. I lean into his chest the way you lean on a doorpost.
There’s nothing under it.
No lift. No fall. No beat. None of the small ordinary machinery of a person standing beside you in a cold room.
I’ve had my hand flat on that chest. I’ve been kissed against my own counter by the man wearing it, and I’ve felt exactly this same nothing every single time, and I’ve never once acknowledged it.
“You’re cold,” says Julian.
“I’m fine.”
“You have goose bumps.”
“That’s the gallery.” My voice comes out completely level, which is the most impressive thing I’ve ever done with my voice. “They heat this place with hope and one fifty-year-old radiator.”
And then everything rushes in at once.
Weeks of untouched plates. A full wine glass at the grange and a full wine glass at my own table, always set down full.
A mug of cocoa held in two hands for an hour by a man who never lifted it.
Forty heads of garlic on my prep counter and Julian Volkov walking to the far end of my kitchen with the air of a man evaluating his options.
His skin is cool. Cool under my hands, cool at my throat, cool between my legs, and warm only where I make him warm. A chair coming off my floor so fast I nearly went over backward. Lag bolts driven into wet planking faster than Theo Goodwin, who has been doing it since 1994.
He knows what the yellow house looked like when it was blue. He knows why two men were drying nets over a brazier in February, and he is annoyed about it. Tonight he looked at a bell in a case and told a curator what was written in a place no one has seen since the Truman administration.
Forty years. It doesn’t seem very long.
Red beneath the brown by candlelight in my grandmother’s front room. Twice. And I said the candles to myself, like a woman putting a lid on something.
“Penny.”
“Mm.”
“Would you like my coat?”
“No,” I say. “Thank you. Tell me about the man in the picture.”
“There is nothing to tell. He is a man in a coat.”
“Someone painted him.”
“Someone painted a great many people,” he says. “It was that or conversation.”
I laugh again. God help me, I laugh, standing six inches from him with my hand on his sleeve, and here is the part I would rather skip, because I do not come out of it well.
I have known vampires and other supernatural creatures exist since I was about six.
Everyone has. They live in the same drawer as sharks and the deep-sea things with the lights on their heads.
They’re real, documented, occasionally on television, and nothing whatever to do with a Sunday in Black Harbor, Maine.
Deirdre Fanning has been telling this town for nine years that there is something not right about the mailman.
Gil Amory’s brother is certain his landlord in Providence is a demon and cannot produce a single fact about the man beyond the parking.
I have never met one. Not once in thirty-two years.
I had every piece. That’s the part that is going to keep me up tonight.
I had every single piece for weeks and carried them around in my apron pocket like change because at a dinner in October I sat beside a man with a plate in front of him he was never going to touch and thought, very clearly, I don’t need to solve it tonight.
Every time something failed to add up, I put it in the drawer with the others and shut the drawer and called it kindness.
And once I got all the way there. He leaned away from my grandmother’s garlic bread like it had said something about his mother, and my own brain put the word up in front of me in letters a foot high.
I looked straight at it and decided I was not going to diagnose a man with vampirism over carbohydrates.
I was so pleased with that. I have been carrying it around for weeks like it was wisdom.
Some of it really was kindness. The rest was a woman who had figured out, somewhere under the floorboards where I do my actual thinking, that solving him might be the end of something that was making her happy.
So I put food in front of him instead. I let him hold a mug.
I invited this man to a Transylvanian Twilight Feast, with black roses in silver goblets and a soup called a crimson reduction, and invited him to it in writing, and he came and sat at the head of it all night being unbelievably polite.
Julian Volkov is a vampire.
The sentence goes through me from the throat down, and I wait for the fear, because there is supposed to be fear. There is an entire shelf at Harbor Books that says so.
It doesn’t come. I check twice, the way you check a pocket for your keys. What comes instead is my grandmother’s kitchen in the middle of winter with the wood stove blazing. It is the feeling of coming in out of the weather to somewhere safe and warm.
Then the second thing arrives, and the second thing is worse.
Weeks. Weeks of the far end of my kitchen.
Of holding a cocoa he could not drink because it gave his hands something to do.
Of I have encountered roofs, and those are different statements, and enough—one flat, quiet word about every person he has ever lost, given to a woman who was crying about her own parents and never once asked him a question back.
He has been lonely in my kitchen four evenings a week and perfectly gentle about it. The ache that arrives with that is so enormous and so entirely the wrong feeling for this cold gallery that I have to hold on to his arm to stay upright.
“Penny,” he says. “You’ve gone somewhere else.”
“I know.”
“Where?”
“Nineteen fifty-eight,” I say. “The Pratts gave this museum a painting and it ended up in the corridor by the buttons. That’s the saddest thing in this building and I include the whaleboat.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Then he says, “Come and be warm. Mabel is going to auction the roof plans if no one stops her.”
I put my hand back through his arm and walk out of that gallery beside him exactly the way I walked into it, which is the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I’ve catered a hundred and ten covers with a broken oven.
He drives me home at eleven in a car that smells of nothing at all, and I talk the entire way because that is what I do when a room has too much space in it. This car has centuries in it, and I’m the only one in here who has just found that out.
At the turn onto Point Road, I run out.
“You stopped talking,” Julian says.
“I’m tired.”
“You are never tired. You are occasionally horizontal.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“They are different statements,” he says, and I have to look out the window at nothing at all for a while.
When we reach my cottage, Julian walks me up the steps. I have spent the entire drive trying not to think about the fact that the man beside me is a vampire, which turns out to be excellent preparation for standing under my porch light while that vampire puts one cool hand against my waist.
“Thank you for tonight,” he says.
“You bought that ticket from Mabel with the door open.”
“I did.”
“On purpose.”
“On purpose.”
I look at his face. The face from the painting. The mouth from the painting too, more or less, except I know considerably more about what this one can do.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
Then he bends and kisses me.
This has happened enough times that it should be familiar.
It is familiar—that’s the problem. His mouth is cool against mine, the way it has always been cool, and his hand settles at my waist with the same deliberate care he uses every time he touches me.
I know the pressure of his fingers. I know the small tilt of his head when he wants the kiss deeper.
I know that if I put my hand against his chest I will feel no heartbeat under my palm.
Now I know why.
The knowledge should change everything. Instead, I put my hand against his chest anyway.
Julian makes that quiet sound I have become entirely too interested in and draws me closer.
For one dangerous second I forget about portraits and bells and centuries and think only about his mouth, his hand at my back, and the fact that I would very much like to invite him inside and find out whether being a vampire has any implications for the thing he nearly did to me on my prep counter.
Apparently the revelation has not improved my character.
When he finally lifts his head, I’m breathless. He, of course, is not. He rests his forehead briefly against mine.
“Goodnight, Penny.”
“Goodnight.”
He waits until I have my door open before he goes. He has done that every single time since October, and until tonight I thought it was only manners.
I stand in my dark hall with the keys still in my hand and my coat still on. Eventually I say it out loud to an empty house, because if I say it in my head one more time I am going to start arguing with it.
“He’s a vampire.”
The house takes it about as well as I do.
I’m not frightened. I want that on the record. I have spent the evening on the arm of a vampire, kissed him goodnight, and seriously considered inviting him upstairs. What I feel standing here in my grandmother’s hallway is not fear, and I am going to have to think about that eventually.
What I feel is that he has been on the stool at the end of my prep counter for days with a book he wasn’t reading, knowing perfectly well what might happen if I ever put the pieces together.
And he kept coming back.