CHAPTER 1. UNHAPPY FAMILIES
Happy families are all alike, Leesa Nyland had read somewhere, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When she was younger, Leesa loved to imagine herself and her big brother Bradley at a convention of unhappy families, somewhere suitably gloomy and wet, like Seattle in January or Maine in March, where melancholy children would gather to share their stories. “My family is unhappy,” she would say matter-of-factly to the other kids, her striking blue eyes betraying no sign of guile, “because my mom was bitten by a one-fanged vampire. What about yours?”
Her declaration would be met by silence at first, of course, because who would be able to top that statement? But then the other girls and boys would gather around her, curious to hear more.
“A one-fanged vampire?” someone would ask.
“Tell us about it,” another would say.
A few doubters might be rude enough to say, “There’s no such thing as vampires,” but they would be drowned out by the others, clamoring to hear her story.
Leesa would smile shyly and twirl her fingers nervously in her long blond hair, a bit uncomfortable with the attention, but glad that everyone would be too caught up in her tale to notice her limp.
“It happened a few months before I was born,” she would begin. Her family lived in New Jersey then, and her mom had driven up to Connecticut to visit her sister. Late one afternoon, they’d gone hiking to enjoy the colorful fall foliage. Somehow, her mom had wandered away for a few minutes, only to stagger out of the woods with blood on her hand and a single puncture wound in her neck. She mumbled something about being bitten by a one-fanged vampire, but her sister said she had probably just stumbled into a sharp branch.
“I was three when my mom began acting strangely,” Leesa would continue. It started with a craving for tomato juice, of all things. A big glass at dinner was soon joined by one at lunch, and then tomato juice replaced orange juice at breakfast. Finally, her mom drank nothing but tomato juice, even on her cereal. She began avoiding direct sunlight, claiming the sun hurt her skin. For a while, Leesa enjoyed the game they made of it, pretending they were furry little moles and darting from shadow to shadow, but by the time Leesa was six her mom had stopped going outside except on the cloudiest days, doing what errands she could at night and leaving the rest to Leesa’s dad.
The eccentric behavior was bad enough, but her mom’s increasingly anxious and depressed ramblings eventually drove her dad away. “Why couldn’t I have been bitten by a normal, two-fanged vampire?” her mom would complain endlessly. She was convinced the one-fanged version was a crippled, sterile creature, unable to impart true vampire powers. One day, her dad simply did not come home from work, and Leesa had not seen him since. She wondered if she was part of the reason for his leaving. Maybe he didn’t want a gimpy daughter any more than he wanted a deranged wife. A year after her father left, her mom uprooted the family. She looked at a map and chose the farthest place she could find from New Jersey and Connecticut—San Diego.
“And that’s how a one-fanged vampire made my family unhappy,” Leesa would finish to her spellbound audience.
She smiled wistfully before brushing the familiar fantasy from her mind. She wasn’t surprised it had returned now, while she sat on a hard black vinyl chair in the noisy baggage claim area of Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport—how like Bradley to get an airport named after him, she thought laughingly—waiting for her Aunt Janet to pick her up. This was her first time in Connecticut, the place where her mom had been “bitten” by the one-fanged vampire. No wonder the story had come flooding back to her here, triggering her old fantasy. Her light-hearted musing about Bradley and the airport quickly turned into a pang of loss, and her hand moved reflexively toward her purse and the carefully folded piece of white paper she carried with her everywhere. Catching herself, she stayed her hand—she didn’t need to take the paper out to know every word printed on it.
Suddenly unable to sit still, she pushed herself to her feet and limped toward the exit. The glass doors slid open, and she stepped out onto the sidewalk, squinting in the bright sunlight. She shaded her brow with her palm while her eyes adjusted to the light. The air was hot and damp, especially compared to the air-conditioned terminal, and in just a few minutes her dark green cotton shirt began clinging to her skin. She was glad she’d decided to wear shorts.
So this is Connecticut, she thought. This was so not what she’d been picturing. Where were the brooding gray New England skies she’d been imagining? There was nothing remotely mysterious, gloomy or dangerous here. No way could she picture this as a place where someone could be attacked by a vampire, one fang or not. Nor did it seem the kind of place where a beloved older brother could suddenly disappear. But that was exactly what had happened.
Her eyes moistened as she thought of Bradley. Until he left for college, he had been her best friend. She knew how lucky she was. Plenty of her classmates had brothers who wanted nothing to do with their little sisters; or worse, who teased them incessantly. But not Bradley. He was especially protective whenever anyone made fun of her limp, getting into several fights over it, until everyone knew the penalty for teasing the young Nyland girl was a busted lip or bloody nose.
The heat was beginning to bother her, so she turned and limped back into the comfortable coolness of the terminal, settling into the same seat she’d vacated a few minutes before. She had been born missing a small piece of bone in her lower right leg, making the leg an inch shorter than the other and causing her foot to twist slightly inward. When she was four, Bradley began walking with her every day, until she was able to make it to a neighborhood park more than a mile away. At the park, Bradley would push her on the swings or spin her on the merry-go-round as a reward for her efforts. Walking with her brother and playing in the park were among her best childhood memories.
After their father left, Bradley became even more important in her life. With her mom growing more withdrawn, Bradley became her real parent, her source of love, strength and wisdom.
She remembered the day he left for college. She had hugged him on the sidewalk while the cab driver loaded his luggage into the trunk. Phone calls, texts and email would keep them in close touch, he promised. Leesa told him she understood, that above everything she wanted him to be happy, that it was time for him to make his own life, though she secretly wondered why he had chosen to go all the way to Weston College, in Connecticut of all places.
Bradley had been true to his word, calling or writing every day without fail. In the middle of his sophomore year, he told her about a girl he’d met, someone very special. Leesa was so happy for him—her big brother deserved someone extra special. But not long after, something changed. His calls and emails became shorter, and he began skipping a day now and then. She let it slide. That was part of growing up. Things changed. She was fine with it—until the day she received that fateful email. No longer able to stop herself, she reached into her purse and pulled out the printed copy of his final message, unfolding it with exquisite care and laying it open on her lap. She gently smoothed the paper with long, slow strokes of her fingers. As her eyes moved down the paper, she didn’t know if she was reading or simply reciting the words from memory.
Dear Sis, This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write. There’s something I need to do. I have to go away, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be coming back. Her eyes began to mist. Why couldn’t he have been more specific? Why the secrecy? She could have handled his going away, if she thought he was going somewhere to make a new life with his girlfriend, far from the turmoil of his youth. But the message hadn’t ended there. Not by a long shot. Please don’t try to find me. Get on with your life in California. Forget about me. As if! She still couldn’t believe he’d said that. Forget about him? No way. She had to find him. She just had to.
Sitting there alone in the airport, she read his final words. Always remember, pumpkin, your big brother loves you. A single tear wobbled down her che
ek.
The sound of her name rescued her from the painful memory.
“Leesa, honey,” her Aunt Janet called warmly, her heels clicking on the hard floor as she hurried toward her niece. “It’s so good to see you.”
Leesa carefully folded the paper and placed it back in her bag. She wiped the tear from her cheek and pasted a smile onto her face as she stood up to greet her aunt. “Hi, Aunt Janet,” she said, moving into her aunt’s waiting arms.
For a moment, as Aunt Janet tightened the hug, Leesa felt three years old again, wrapped in the safety of her mother’s embrace, before everything began to change. As she returned her aunt’s hug and soaked up her loving warmth, Leesa’s pasted-on smile slowly became real.