Chapter 2
THE KID WITH THE brOKEN TEETH IS STILL THERE, bloody face to the ceiling and one thumb working furiously over his phone screen, when I head for the dawn outside the ED’s sliding glass doors.
The TV screens blast true crime reruns on mute.
Close-up photo of a woman’s smiling face.
Wide shot of the house she was killed in.
Five in the morning smells like boredom, like bad breath and disinfectant and the sweet rancid odor of packed-in, half-asleep bodies still waiting, always waiting, as the sky shifts with agonizing slowness from black to gray to blue.
Busy night. It’s always a busy night, somehow.
My car is littered with hair ties and drive-through napkins and a scrunched-up sweater, periwinkle except for a slash of brownish gray down the front where I spilled coffee and chased it with bleach.
Dust sticking to the air vents and an empty to-go cup on its side in the passenger seat.
My mom didn’t raise me to be this messy.
Then again, I’ve disappointed her in much bigger ways.
Twist the key, and the engine sputters. I try it again. Faster, then slower, then fast again, like maybe I can trick it into starting if I move quick enough. It doesn’t work, of course. It’s just an engine.
I press my forehead into the cracked leather of the steering wheel and picture the jumper cables shoved in the back of the pantry.
All I want is to run my errands and go home, to wash the night out of my hair and sleep before the Las Vegas sun gets so bright it blinds me awake for hours.
A sudden urge to cry grips me by the throat.
I should text her. Maybe I shouldn’t, maybe she’s sleeping. It’ll only worry her. Unless she’s awake, unless she’s alone and confused and her only lifeline is the Post-it I left on the door that said, I’ll be back by six. Love, Ellis.
Why is this so hard?
Hey Mom, it’s Ellis. No, she doesn’t like that.
She knows who I am. I delete it, start again.
Hi Mom. I’ll be home a little late, my car didn’t start but it’s nothing to worry about.
I’ll call Uncle Bill for a new battery. Joanne’s number is on the fridge if you need anything. Don’t worry please. Love you.
She calls almost the same moment as I send it. Like she’s been staring at her phone, waiting.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Where are you?” She sounds worried.
“I’m at work.”
“Don’t lie. It’s five in the morning.”
“I work nights. Remember?”
She sighs, and even over the phone I can read her tone well enough to understand each breath’s secret meaning. “Yeah, baby, I know. I’m not a two-year-old, you don’t have to talk down to me.”
“Sorry.”
She pauses, and I hear her slippers shuffling over the kitchen linoleum. “When are you coming home?”
“Did you read my text? I have to stop by Uncle Bill’s on the way home for a battery and, you know.” Blood, for both of us.
More shuffling. Maybe she’s rereading the Post-it on the door.
Or maybe the one on the fridge—Ask Ellis before you take something out of the freezer!
—or the stove—Turn off the burner when you’re done!
—or the kitchen table—Grocery list is next to the sink!
The fridge door clicks open and shut disconsolately.
“Are you at the fridge?” Could be hunger’s making her fussy. A vial of blood, injected intravenously, is usually enough for a full twenty-four hours, but she’s needed to feed more often lately. Like as she fades, hunger is filling in the gaps.
“Yeah.”
“Get a snack and turn on the TV, okay? The remote’s on the table, you can watch something you like. Night Court?”
A long silence punctuated by the click of the fridge door. Open, shut. Open, shut. “You’ll really be home soon?”
“Yeah, Mom. Of course.”
She sighs again. “Are you sure? You know what happens when you lie, baby.”
The baby jabs like a sharp fingernail. Where other kids have Bloody Mary, people like us have flayed men.
They call them by different names, tell different variations of the story, but the gist of it is the same: a creature like us who turned on his family.
Devoured their hearts, and in return was cursed with eternal life.
Or blessed, I guess. Depends on the telling.
My mom’s flayed man story, passed down from her mom, was of a monster who stalks firefly-lit swamps, fangs machete-sharp, unable to return to his human form.
I don’t know whether he can read minds in the original version, or if my mom added that part herself.
When I was in elementary school, if she thought I was keeping a secret, she’d stand in the bathroom with all the lights off and pretend to talk to him until I begged her to come out, swearing I’d never do anything wrong again.
He was her way of warning me: if you lie to your mom, if you choose anyone over your family, there are consequences.
“I’m sure.” I can’t deal with this right now. “I promise, everything’s fine.”
Another long silence. The smack of a door, more shuffling. Then, finally, slightly muffled, “Ellis?”
“Yeah?”
“Where are you? It’s five in the morning. Are you in trouble?”
I peel my fingers off the wheel one by one and count the things I know to be true. It’s my job to take care of her. It’s not her fault that she gets confused. She’s only worried because she loves me. “I’m fine, Mom. I’ll see you soon.”
I hang up before she can ask any more questions. The sky outside is the same indifferent gray as the concrete of the parking structure. This time, when the engine coughs and refuses to turn over, I feel like screaming.
The tap on my window makes me flinch.
“Hey.” Zawadski fills the entire window with the thick-padded navy blue of her medic jacket. “Need a jump?”
I do need a jump, and if it were anyone else asking, I’d be drowning in gratitude.
But seeing her resurfaces the prickly strangeness from earlier, and something else too.
A sudden instability, like this is the last step of a complex dance I didn’t know I was doing.
Or the surreal silence before an ambush.
“Sure.” I climb out of the driver’s seat. “Yeah.”
Her car’s almost as old as mine, and with at least ten times as many dents.
She strips off her jacket to dive under the hood with the jumper cables, red in one hand, black in the other.
One bicep is a mess of bruises in various stages of healing.
A circle of rich purple mottled with red dots, fading to brown, then green, then yellow bleeding into her elbow, making oil-slick shimmers where it crawls across round, shiny craters of scarring.
A nicotine patch is plastered across the back of her other arm.
She jerks her chin up. “Back in the car.”
As I pass her, I smell old wounds again, clotted and scabbing, and the soft smooth wetness of regeneration beneath.
Zawadski idles her car for a couple minutes, and when I turn the key, my car starts like there was never any problem.
What if there wasn’t? What if I imagined it or just forgot how to start a car?
What if the thing ravaging my mom’s brain is in me too?
A smack on the driver’s side door pulls me back. Right. This is what’s real. The rumbling car and Zawadski’s expression halfway between embarrassment and sympathy as she mutters, “Give it another minute, okay?”
When we lean against the car together, side by side as the metal shudders under us, I discover her hair isn’t shaved, just slicked flat to her head with gel that makes it look more black than brown and smells like artificial lemon.
She’s shorter than I expected, with lips that tilt up at the corners and shoulders that slope in like she’s using them to form a barrier between herself and the world.
She folds her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry for being a dick to you earlier.”
The car hums expectantly. I’m not sure what she wants me to say.
“It’s just, you know. Kid stuff gets to me sometimes.” She’s staring intently at the concrete seam at the corner of the parking lot. “That girl we brought in, she’s eight. Second grade. She was already having a tough time at home, and now a hospital stay… ”
“It’s okay,” I assure her automatically. “Certain stuff gets me too.”
I picture the teenager’s bright blood spattering my desk. Such a waste.
“I’ve seen you around.” Zawadski turns on me with eyes that seem to want to pin me in place and dissect me. “How long have you been on nights?”
“A while.”
“You like it?”
I work nights because no one stays on the night shift long, no one bothers me much, and because during the day, I need to be there for my mom.
How will she be when I get home? Confused and concerned, or furious at some perceived betrayal?
Or the worst one, the unnatural docility, like something sucked her essence out and left nothing but numb flesh.
My mom loves me more than she loves anything, or anyone.
All she wants in return is that I love her too, that I keep nothing from her, that I let nothing take me away from her. Why is that so hard for me to do?
“Yeah,” I say, because it’s a lot easier to answer Zawadski’s question than my own. “It’s peaceful.”
She scrunches her nose, revealing crooked canines. “Yeah, if your definition of peaceful is getting screamed at while you’re trying to save someone’s life.”
I laugh a little, partly because she has a point and partly because I don’t know how to explain what I mean.
At the hospital, I’m only a bit player in someone’s worst day.
I’m not the cause of it, and I don’t have to be the solution.
The people who whine and argue with me over the paperwork or the wait time won’t even remember my face by the time they leave.
Zawadski reaches to scratch the middle of her back, and her tank top rides up to reveal a big white bandage stuck over her hip, the same side as the massive bruise on her arm. Then she sticks out her hand with decisive ferocity and says, “I’m Veer. By the way.”
Her hand is warm and a bit clammy. My knuckles come away with a light coating of dirt and engine oil from her fingers. “Ellis.”
“Cool.” She nods to herself. Then, again, her focus is on me, as intense as high beams on a night road. “You’re probably fine to get home now. Let me give you my number.”
My stomach twists, and I try to remember what’s real, and what isn’t.
“Just in case you need another jump,” she finishes.
We exchange numbers. She gathers the jumper cables and slings her jacket over one shoulder.
I slide into my still-running car and watch her in the rearview mirror, a sliver of hair slipped free to curl over her temple, tongue tracing her upper lip as she drives away.
My curse growls softly, a curious tremor in my chest, and for a second, I don’t mind being an animal. I might even like it.