Chapter 26 The Trimming the Tree Trope
I slumped onto the living room couch, exhausted and starving.
After tonight, one thing was clear: Vampires drink blood.
The despair inside me was building to a dizzying level.
The coconut water might be the highest vibrational food according to several websites, but it wasn’t taking the edge off.
I had almost sunk my fangs into Santa at the Christmas fair.
Heaven had nearly drained the city inspector.
The coconut water experiment was a failure.
With grim determination, I headed to the kitchen and twisted the lid off a box of coconut water.
It went down the drain with a glug glug glug.
After the first two boxes, the rightness of my decision became clearer and clearer.
Why was I drinking a beverage that smelled like sunshine, beach parties, and Jimmy Buffet?
But how could I live happily ever after as a vampire? Draining a virgin and then riding into the sunset—that’s not how it worked. Vampires didn’t marry Prince Charming. Vampires drained Prince Charming.
The more I turned over the predicament in my mind, the worse I felt.
My vision blurred at the edges so I collapsed on a chair in the living room.
I blinked hard and focused on a nutcracker on the mantel to stabilize myself.
His grimace didn’t comfort me, but at least it was familiar.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Grit your teeth and bite down on the hard nut of reality. Soldier on.
I didn’t even need to breathe. It was a vestigial behavior, three hundred years into undeath, and here I was practically hyperventilating. With no other ideas, I texted Dr. Rosetti. She had told me to contact her in case of an emergency.
Me: i think i need help.
Eleanor: Are you suicidal? If so, go straight to the emergency room.
Me: i’m already dead, so no. lol.
Me: i don’t want to drink blood anymore so i’ve been on a juice cleanse. but it’s not working
Eleanor: How long since you had something other than juice?
Me: since halloween
Eleanor: Tiffany, that is concerning. Can you find something to eat right now?
I glanced at the kitchen where Vlad stored his bottles.
Eleanor: Are you available for an appointment tomorrow?
Me: yes
If I wanted to be a Hallmark heroine who didn’t drain her boyfriend, I needed blood. But Hallmark heroines didn’t drink blood. It was a catch-22. A Google search for coconut water alternative yielded an idea: sports drinks. Vlad caught me red-handed googling Gatorade.
“You were right. Coconut water isn’t for us.” Vlad didn’t rub in that he was right, so I must have looked very bad indeed.
“How was the date?” he asked, almost politely.
Too tired to pretend, I confessed. “Ugh. I accidentally swallowed coconut flesh and I vomited in Santa’s bag.”
He started belly laughing.
“The elf said it happens all the time.” Why had I told Vlad about this embarrassing moment? He would literally remember it for eternity.
“Remember that time we went to that fair and got stuck on the roller coaster for hours?” he reminisced. “We could have just climbed down, but we waited forever like we couldn’t rescue ourselves.”
I smiled at the memory. “You could have climbed down, but I was wearing a short skirt, plus you know climbing isn’t in my skill set.”
“Tiffenie, so much is in your skill set that you don’t know about.”
I waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, I said, “Go on.”
While I waited for him to list my skills like a high-school career counselor, I retrieved the Christmas tree. Tyrone had told me to let it dry out on the porch overnight, but if I didn’t decorate it to within an inch of its life in front of Vlad, it would be a wasted opportunity.
“Do you mind?” I asked with an innocent smile. “You can help if you want,” I added, knowing the only thing he wanted to do with this tree was light it on fire and launch it into outer space like a flaming javelin.
“Go ahead. I was going to watch TV,” he said as if he wasn’t annoyed by my Christmas tree flaunting.
He clenched the remote and stared too deliberately in the direction of the television, pretending to watch a documentary about Shakespeare.
For her part, Cat jumped into the window and stared out at the field of snow.
She licked a paw and cleaned her face, bored by both of us.
I jammed the tree into the stand Tyrone had given me and turned the stabilizing screws against the base of the trunk. When it came out crooked, I did it again.
Even without standing back and taking in the view, I suspected the tree was still lopsided.
No matter, though. It smelled amazing. Fresh-cut pine.
I had a tabletop plug-in one in my LA apartment.
I left it up year-round for a couple of years because I didn’t want to have to walk to the storage closet and put it away.
Like a bad wig, it had never lost the shape of the box it came in, and there were never any presents beneath its boughs.
Eventually, I jammed it into the dumpster outside.
Vlad might have been pretending to ignore me while learning secrets about Shakespeare’s identity, as if he didn’t already know them, but he was watching my every move. When I hung an ornament on a branch, he said, “I can’t take it anymore. Let me straighten this.”
“Okay,” I said, secretly delighting in making Vlad decorate a tree.
“You hold it and I’ll adjust.”
“I didn’t think you supported my celebration.”
“I would like it if you just moved into the coven and followed the rules. That would be so easy. But if you’re going to put up a tree, it might as well be straight.” With a mortified look, he said, “And you have to put the lights on before the ornaments. Were you raised in a barn?”
“You know I was.”
“Don’t exaggerate. You lived in a house next to a barn. It was very comfortable for the 1700s. It always smelled like fresh-baked bread. The noise, though! So many children in one small space.”
I smiled at the memory.
“Could you help me haul up some boxes from the basement?” I asked. In a normal household, Christmas hides in the basement for eleven months of the year. Even I knew that. Those are the rules. A grand celebration trapped in a dark corner in a musty old box. Relatable.
“After this show is over,” he said.
I put my hands on my hips. “Vlad, come on. Help me finish the tree. You and I both know that documentary has it all wrong.”
“I know,” he scoffed. “Shakespeare was not twelve different people.”
“Shakespeare was a woman,” I said. “Most successful pen name in history.”
“I met him. If he was a woman, he had me fooled.”
“You idiot. That was just some guy she convinced to stand in for her. He grandstanded his way into history, the undeserving bastard.”
“That’s absurd. How many women even knew how to read and write in those days?”
I walked away to avoid strangling him. When I heard footsteps behind me, I turned on him and said, “Stop following me!”
“You asked for my help!”
I laughed. “Is this a new argument at least?”
“I don’t think so. Pretty sure we’ve gone at it over Shakespeare before.”
“But not while decorating a Christmas tree,” I pointed out. “That’s new.”
Downstairs, it was a basement-by-spiders situation, a place where people kept pictures and trinkets, where memories went to die.
I pushed the cobwebs away from my face and scanned the area.
It didn’t take me long to find an entire corner devoted to Christmas.
Old boxes that looked like they’d been holding ornaments since the 1970s.
One box, undoubtedly the manger scene, was hot to the touch.
I might not be able to feel a rush jumping out of a plane, but celebrating a religious holiday… This was skydiving for vampires.
“Take these upstairs,” I told Vlad.
Back in the living room, I shut off the TV and put on Christmas music. If we were going to do this, we were going to do this right.
“Tiffenie, that music hurts.”
“Just the religious ones,” I said. Mariah was all cool.
He shook his head but sat down to help.
The Christmas boxes were mostly a bust, plastic trays filled with colorful glass balls, many of them broken or missing their wire hangers.
One tiny frame held a blurry picture of a toddler labeled Tiffany 1998.
No one would realize it wasn’t me. I spotted a few ornaments obviously made by a child: stacked Styrofoam balls with googly eyes, a pine cone with antlers made of pipe cleaners. Memories of someone else’s childhood.
A feeling of melancholy washed over me. For all the time I’d been on earth, I didn’t have a collection of memories in a basement.
“Do you wish you had a box of childhood ornaments?” I asked Vlad as I walked into the living room with the box of ornaments in tow.
He gave me a funny look. “Tiffenie, do you not remember what I told you about my so-called childhood in the Middle Ages? I’ll take someone else’s box of trinkets from 1995 any day.”
I laughed at the truth of the statement and carefully hung Tiffany’s ornaments.
I’d also purchased some clearance ornaments at Tyrone’s farm and began to rummage through them to find anything that might reflect me.
I found a moose with one antler, a scuffed Santa, and an empty Christmas 2024! frame. I added them to the tree.
It wasn’t a Christmas tree so much as a tree of two broken Tiffanys.
“So ugly it’s cute,” Vlad announced. “Like a pug.”
Sitting in front of a tree in a room lit by Christmas lights, going through a memory box—it was downright cozy. Vlad’s hair was bronze in the firelight and called out to me to run my hands through it. I resisted.
“I think Vermont is what I’ve always needed: the clean air, the wholesomeness, the small-town charm.”
Vlad shook his head. “I still don’t think Valentine is a good idea. In small towns you get to know people. What happens when they realize what you are?”
I turned Tiffany Amanda Blair’s toddler photo frame over in my hand.