Chapter 9
“WHERE ARE YOU?” MY MOM DEMANDS. HER VOICE IS tinny and scared.
I glance at Veer and mouth Sorry again. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m with friends.”
“Friends?” Her voice soars, distressed. “What friends? Where did you go?”
“I’m wide awake.” She sharpens the words into an accusation. “I was so worried about you. I won’t be able to sleep for hours.”
Veer brushes my arm. “I’ll go.” Before I can stop her, she’s swung herself down the ladder and I’m alone on the roof.
“I’ll be home soon,” I tell my mom. What was I thinking, drinking and dancing and leaving her alone? What kind of a daughter does that? “Put on an episode of TV. I’ll be back before it’s done, I promise.”
“Okay, baby.” A raspy breath. I imagine her curled on the couch, knees pulled tight to her chest. “You know I love you.”
“I know, Mom. I love you too.”
Climbing down, the ladder creaks every time I take a new rung.
My mom’s the one who banished me. I shouldn’t feel bad for doing something other than waiting for her mood to turn.
No, that’s not fair. She needs me. I scoot my way across the top of the shed, itchy with desperation to get home, to already be home, to have this taken care of and behind me.
As I slip my legs over the side, an impulse drives me to glance back at the roof. All my thoughts catch in my throat.
The house is weeping blood.
Dark stains coalesce in the seams where stucco meets tile. I watch them grow wet and heavy, watch them drip down the walls in swampy blurs. My senses ring with the scent of decay, of sun-scorched earth and maggots so fattened on corpses their bodies burst like tiny, ghastly water balloons.
My marrow quivers with a single phrase, not my own thought but an alien incursion: I can smell you.
I slide off the shed and hit the ground hard.
My feet are under me and then they aren’t, and gravel bites my palms and I’m breathing like I’ve just run a mile, my sinuses slick with the smell of dead things.
I glance back at the house, afraid I’ll find it collapsing under the weight of all that gore.
The wall is normal. White stucco, gray shadows. I sniff the air and find only the lingering smells of diet soda and cherry lip balm.
Maybe I’m seeing things as punishment. Maybe I’m losing my mind.
No. Don’t. It’s just that I’m a little drunk and I haven’t been to a party in a long time. Haven’t kissed anyone in a long time either.
There’s no sign of Veer in the backyard.
I don’t spot her inside either, and the glamour of the party is gone now.
It’s all stains on the carpet and the claustrophobia of too many people packed in together.
The night is already slipping away, folding me back into the insular world where only my mom and I exist, where I’m never enough and I’ve lived all this before. It’s time to go home.
I order a rideshare, and the driver blasts talk radio all the way back to our apartment.
My mom’s asleep in front of the TV. When she opens her eyes, they’re bleary and docile, and she doesn’t protest as I herd her back into her bedroom and tuck her in. She’s so small, I can almost lift her into bed myself.
“Good night, Mom,” I whisper. “I love you.”
“I knew you’d come back, baby,” she mumbles. “You always come back.”
I tug her rose-patterned comforter up to her neck and pat her shoulder through it. For a second, I’m tempted to lean down and kiss her forehead, like Uncle Bill did to me, like he used to do to her. But that would be the wrong way around.
“That’s right,” I tell her. “I’ll always come back for you.”
Back in the kitchen, I run my tongue across my molars, hoping there might still be something left of Veer there. Need stirs, clawing against my shoulder blades. I’m hungry.
We have five vials left. One vial each per day, so that makes two days till we’re out.
A little less, if my mom’s appetite keeps growing.
In the kitchen, I shoot Uncle Bill a text—Mom told me you called, hope everything’s ok.
I’ll drop by again before work tomorrow—and focus on the sharp bite of my hunger.
I unseal a wipe, drop a fresh needle onto the counter.
Which arm was it, last time? Left, probably.
I always go left if I’m not thinking. I swab my right forearm, unseal the needle, fill the barrel. Make a fist, hold my breath.
God, it feels good.
There’s the usual uncomfortable pinch of metal, the strain of keeping the arm still and getting the angle right, but once the blood’s loose inside me it’s like sitting down to ice cream after weeks of water and wafers, like jolting awake after an impossibly good night’s sleep, no grit in your eyes or sand in your mouth, just euphoria and energy and life, life, life.
It feels like being me down to the bones, no beast tugging me along like a dog on a chain.
I close my eyes and savor it. The rush fades after a few minutes, dulls back to the same old manageable throb in hours.
There was a time, Uncle Bill used to say, chin tucked and eyes watery after a few beers, that creatures like us didn’t survive on the bare minimum it took to keep us in human form.
People lined up at our feet and offered their arteries, so plentiful no one needed needles.
They’d just open their mouths and let their digestive systems waste as much as they wanted.
Stupid stuff. I never liked those stories.
Injection’s impersonal, safe. After a lifetime of it, it would feel wrong to drink someone’s blood.
The messiness, the intimacy, hot skin against your lips, the scent of sweat and dirt in your nose, dark hair and lemons and arms looped lazily around your neck, teeth and tongue and iron and—
I sit bolt upright, breathing hard, and get busy getting rid of the needle.
Uncle Bill doesn’t text back. Which is fine. He prefers phone calls.
I call him when I’m headed over. He doesn’t pick up. My head’s a little woolly, and my back is stiff from sleeping like shit. I’d hoped that the morning would shear away some of last night’s guilt, but it’s still there. I’ll make up for it today, somehow.
When I get to Uncle Bill’s, all the lights are still off. His truck’s still missing. I tell myself the clamminess on the back of my neck is just the hangover, or bad ventilation.
The freezer’s still empty. No one’s cleaned up the smashed vial in the corner.
I desperately don’t want this to be one more thing I have to fix. But there’s no one else to do it, and Uncle Bill’s family, and we need him. What I want is less important than all of that.
I call him again. Still no answer. I think of the garage walls swollen with blood. The eaves last night, sagging under the weight of it. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but this doesn’t feel like Uncle Bill’s usual casual disappearance.
I kick open the rock-shaped hide-a-key buried next to the doormat and let myself in. The usual cigarette reek is muted, and the usual burnt coffee smell is missing entirely.
“Uncle Bill?” I call into the lightless hallway. “It’s Ellis. You home?”
The hall is piled high with moving boxes.
Cardboard flaps clutch at me as I pass. Something wet has spilled or melted in one near the end, turning the stiff brown edge dark and mushy.
My heart squeezes as I turn the corner into the kitchen.
Maybe I’ll find Uncle Bill shuffling to the coffee maker or punching down the toaster button so hard it pops back up rather than sticking.
Instead, all I see on the counter is a lone plate and a piece of untoasted bread, an open tub of margarine sweating beside them.
The kitchen’s painted shades of brown, with fingerprint-stained white cabinets and stacks of paper plates next to the sink.
It smells arid. And something else, something rotten.
I push open the fridge and find a steak left marinating, uncovered, on a plate.
It’s shriveled into a brown mass like a withered organ.
The sick mix of Worcestershire sauce and spoiled meat sticks to the inside of my nose.
It’s not just that, though. A wind-racked rot peeks through the seams of the nasty rotten food stink, a faint smell like a septic wound left weeping.
“Uncle Bill?” I repeat. When the dead quiet stays that way, I dial him again.
A faint buzz that I can delude myself into believing might be coming from my own phone. Then his ringtone trills loud and clear, farther into the house.
I find it in the bathroom, face down and vibrating slowly toward the edge of the counter. The locked screen displays notifications of twelve missed texts, four missed calls, and a bunch of Facebook messages. The battery blinks red: 6 percent.
Uncle Bill’s never without his phone. Half the time I see him, he’s on the phone with someone.
But Uncle Bill’s not here, and his phone is, and something is definitely wrong.
When I catch my own eye in the bathroom mirror, I look wrong too.
Lank and sweaty and spooked. At the angle I’m standing, the corner of the mirror catches a sliver of Uncle Bill’s bedroom through the open door.
He keeps a safe under his bed. I only know because he told me, once, with an unusual urgency, that the combination was my birthday.
Like it was proof that he cared about me.
When I asked why he was telling me, he grumbled something like “Someone should know, in case something happens to me,” and refused to elaborate.
Then nothing happened to him, and I mostly forgot about it.
But the safe’s not under his bed now. It’s lying on its side in the middle of the shitty beige carpet, still locked. Did he leave in a hurry, no time to shove it back into its hiding place?
The house is starting to smell like sand and rot, like chaparral baked brittle by heat, like miles of tiny, dazzling grains hiding the ground beneath, cracked open by thirst.