The Season of Risks

Chapter Ten

 

  Dashay drove up on Thanksgiving weekend. Seeing her step out of the familiar battered truck, wearing a pumpkin-colored jacket and a cranberry-colored scarf, made my heart ache-with happiness that she was here and with sadness that she soon would be leaving again.

  I flung myself into her arms.

  "You want to knock me over?" she said, but her hands stroked my face gently. She shook her head. "My, my. Don't you ever have any fun? What happened to the Ari I saw last summer?"

  "Too much happened to her," I said. "Or maybe not enough. "

  Her eyes were full of concern. She sent me the thought: I want to hear it all. But first we eat.

  Dashay had brought two large wicker hampers filled with food, plates, and glasses. We set up a feast in the lounge. Jacey came, and Sloan.

  We ate roasted oysters, stuffed squash, mashed potatoes with vegan gravy, green beans, pureed cranberries, and biscuits. Dashay had brought Scotch bonnet sauce made from her secret recipe. I knew it included peppers and vinegar, but I could never quite figure out the other ingredients. The sauce wasn't as fiery as the hot sauce I'd first tasted in Georgia, when I'd been introduced to oysters. No, Dashay's Scotch Bonnet made a first impression of being mellow, fruity. Then it spread across your tongue, waking up each taste bud. It began to warm and sustain you-your mouth, your throat, your stomach. Its heat made every part of you feel alive.

  "What's in this stuff ?" After one taste, Sloan poured it on everything, including the cranberries. He ate as if he'd been starved.

  "Secrets," Dashay said, watching him drain the bottle. "I have more, if you want it. "

  "Would a duck swim?" Sloan said.

  Finally came pecan and pumpkin and sweet potato pies, whose tops featured whimsical crust forms: pumpkins and nuts and squirrels. I wondered if Bennett had helped make the crusts.

  Between mouthfuls, Dashay made light conversation with everyone, but she sent me a look that meant the real talking with me would take place later on.

  After we'd finished the meal and cleared the table, the others said they'd wash the dishes. Sloan said, "Thanks for the lovely grub. "

  Dashay smiled at him, as if those were exactly the right words.

  The air outside felt cool and crisp. Dashay and I had decided to hike through the woods that bordered the campus's western boundary. As we walked, she said, "I like that boy Sloan. What a nice young man. And nice that you're not the only other at Hillhouse. "

  I buttoned my sweater. "I like him, too. "

  She glanced at me. "So he's not the one, then. "

  I didn't have to ask what she meant. "No, he's not the one. " I tried to keep my thoughts on the pine trees around us, on the differences between manmade forests and natural ones. Think trees, I told myself.

  "It has to be that one, then. The politician man, yes?" Her words spun out, green and pink in the afternoon air.

  I gave up. "How did you know?"

  Dashay smiled. "How could I not know? Every time his name came up in conversation or he was on the television, your face was such a sight. " She made her eyes huge and moony, her mouth pursed as if to kiss.

  "I never looked like that. "

  "You did!" She made the moony face again, and I laughed.

  She laughed, too. "Welcome back," she said. "So now. What did that man do to you?"

  We came out of the forest, into a clearing bordered by two river birch trees. Some of their leaves had turned yellow, but most remained stubbornly green. We sat on a stone wall, our sweaters a buffer, and I told Dashay the story of the relationship that ended before it had barely begun. As I talked, I basked in the sympathy of her eyes. They made me think of liquid amber.

  "Most of our problems came about because of my age," I said. My fingers trailed across the edges of the stones, feeling their cold irregularities. "What if I were older?"

  Her eyes turned wary. "What are you talking about?"

  "Sloan told me about a drug called Septimal. Do you know about it?"

  She pulled her scarf tight to her neck and looked away, as if she, too, had suddenly realized that the trees were fascinating.

  "Sloan took Septimal, and it made him seven years older. " I rubbed my hands against my jeans, to warm them. "He says it's no big deal. "

  She turned toward me, her jaw clenched. "So now you want to be twenty?"

  I shook my head. "Twenty-two. Same age as Cameron was when he crossed over. Same age as Sloan. I'm fed up with being younger. Can't you understand?"

  "Yes, yes. I can understand that. " Her mouth turned into a wry grin. "Once upon a time, I did that same thing myself. "

  Dashay had come to the United States from Jamaica after her parents and fiance died in a car accident. She'd been made a vampire in Miami, hours after she got off the plane from Montego Bay. I'd already heard that part of the story.

  But the next part took my breath away.

  "I was eighteen, only eighteen," she said. "Brought up the way I was, more like twelve in American years. I didn't know much. And once I was vamped, I didn't know how to get by, from day to day. You understand? I scared myself. I had a plan to stay with cousins in Florida, but I would not let them see me that way-the mood swings, the always hungry, the hunting for blood. You know how it is at first. "

  I knew.

  "So, I found me a vampire doctor. There are many, many doctors in Miami; it wasn't hard. I asked him how was I going to live. Was there some medicine I could take to stop me, stop the hunting and biting?

  "He told me about the blood substitutes. And about a drug that would make me older. Wiser, too. So, I said yes. I wanted the tonic and the Septimal injection. I had savings to pay for them. "

  "Then how old are you?" I'd never known her age.

  She tilted her head, as if to say it wasn't important. "The Septimal, it did make changes in the way I think, in the way I decide about things. The way we think at twenty-five years is very different, you know, from the way we think at eighteen.

  "Ari, you know the treatment is not reversible? I mean to say, I had good reasons to skip ahead seven years. But you, you have your vamp act pretty much together. What would you gain by this? Only that man?"

  "It's not only about him. " I'd spent considerable time and thought on these questions. "I don't want to go through life always being thirteen. Thirteen is naive. Thirteen is passive, doing what you're told. Think about it. Would you want to be a juvenile again?"

  Dashay shook her head.

  "Say you'll help me find a doctor. "

  The sun, a wan yellow ball, sank behind the tops of the birch trees, and our stone seat seemed to instantly grow colder. Dashay stood up and stretched.

  "No, that I will not do," she said. "I don't know any doctors in Miami these days, and besides, I don't want any part in this business. Why don't you ask Dr. Cho?"

  I'd considered that already. "I don't want her to know. She'd contact my parents, I'm sure of it. And I think they like keeping me a child. " I thought, I could call Malcolm. Then I shuddered. There had to be some other way.

  She wrapped her sweater around her. "I don't know what to say to you. " Her voice sounded forlorn.

  I had no more to say, either. I felt she'd failed me somehow.

  As we walked past the river birch trees, a sudden wind hit them. Yellow leaves swirled in the air and fell to the ground. If I climbed a tree, might I be able to decipher their pattern, read them like tea leaves?

  We walked back to the dormitory, chilled.

  Jacey lay on the beat-up futon in our dorm room, reading the Sunday paper.

  I'd said good-bye to Dashay, feeling guilty and disrespectful. She made all that good food and brought it to us, and now, instead of feeling appreciated, she would make the long drive home with my questions her only company. I had stood in the road watching the truck drive away, wanting to shout after her to stop, come back, let me find words that would bring us
close again. But I did nothing. The truck disappeared, and I shivered in the cold. I realized that I'd never even told her about the ghosts.

  "Check it out. " Jacey handed me the magazine section of the newspaper. On its cover, so handsome that it hurt to see him, was Neil Cameron, under a caption: OUR N EXT P RESIDENT?

  I didn't say anything, but Jacey wasn't stupid. "Oh, Ari," she said. "You love him?"

  I tried to think of the best lie, but what was the point? I said nothing.

  "Those times when the phone rings, and you walk away-is that him?"

  I stared at the wall.

  "Wow," she said. "Okay. You don't have to answer me. Your face always gets the same look when he calls. "

  Stupid thirteen-year-old face, I thought. And then an image came to me: a moat, so deep that no one dared cross it. I would have to dig and fill that moat and keep it around me, for protection, so long as I was thirteen masquerading as nineteen.

  "Does he love you, too?"

  I had to make her stop. "Jacey, whatever there might have been between us is over. And it wasn't much. A kind of flirtation, I guess. " I hated these words. "Please promise you won't tell anyone. "

  "Don't worry," she said, her voice solemn. "You can trust me, Ari. I won't tell a soul. "

  I sat down on my bed.

  "But you're so lucky. " She leaned forward, her face pink with excitement. "Cool men keep falling for you. First Sloan, and now our next president? Ari, that's pretty amazing. "

  I rubbed my forehead, wishing I were somewhere else. "Sloan hasn't fallen for me," I said. "We're just friends. "

  "Yeah, sure. " Jacey wasn't going to stop talking, I realized. "He gets the same kind of dreamy look when you're around. You haven't noticed that?"

  I said I hadn't. Then I said I really needed to study.

  Later, while she was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, I began to read the magazine article. Its subheading was THE C AMERON N OBODY K NOWS.

  "Watch him run," the article began. "Every morning, rain or shine, Neil Cameron hits the trail. He does five miles, whether in his posh neighborhood on St. Simons Island, Georgia, or in any city on his campaign route. Even on the hottest day, he never seems to break a sweat. "

  Big deal, I thought. Vampires don't sweat.

  "Neil Cameron is in the public eye every day of his life," the article continued, "but the thirty-one-year-old senator from Georgia has a private life that he intends to keep very private indeed. "

  Jacey came in, saw me reading the article, and shook her head. I kept reading. I skimmed through the summary of his political views-very green, very global-in search of the personal stuff. Besides running, his hobbies were sailing and collecting antique maritime equipment. I thought of the brass lamp on Dulcibella.

  Then the phrase eligible bachelor caught my eye.

  "Although he's never married, Cameron says he's recently been in love, but wouldn't comment on the person in question. 'Campaigning for president and having a personal life don't seem compatible for me,' he said. "

  "Stop reading," Jacey said. "You're going to make yourself depressed. And you should be happy. At least you've had boyfriends. "

  "Haven't you?"

  "Only one. "

  "Somebody I know?"

  Her face turned red. "I don't want to talk about it. "

  "You sound exactly like him. " I couldn't say the name Cameron. Nonetheless, I returned to reading the article.

  "'Of course, someday I want a wife and a family, when the time is right,' Cameron said. " When the time is right. That's when I made the final decision: no matter what else happened that year, I was going to grow older.

  The article ended with a list of questions and Cameron's responses. One was "Who are your favorite real-life heroes?" Cameron answered, "Women and men of genius leading ordinary lives. "

  But the one that stood out for me was the banal question: "What's your favorite color?" Cameron said, "Grey, with an E. Not g-r-a-y, which, as a dear friend once taught me, is a different color entirely. "

  I handed the magazine back to Jacey, who set it on her desk. "Okay," she said. "If you must know, it was Richard. "

  "Richard!" I couldn't imagine them as a couple. As long as I'd known him, Richard's girlfriend had been a tiny blond girl called Bunny. She never said much but followed him around, laughing at even his lamest jokes.

  "He wasn't so bad, his first semester here. " Jacey carefully spread her hair over her pillow and switched off her bedside lamp. "He liked to take me to movies. " Her voice sounded sad.

  "What happened?"

  "Oh, he met Bunny. She's cuter than I am, and richer, too. Her dad's some kind of judge. And that was when Richard began to get all political. She went right along with it. I got left behind. "

  I switched off my lamp and remembered something Dashay once said: love is misery. I wanted to say something to comfort her, but comfort was in short supply that night. "I'm sorry," was all I could manage.

  Then I said, "Good night. " Sweet dreams would have been too much of a stretch.

  I spent the next afternoon in the library, researching how the human body ages.

  The books I consulted agreed: mortals may mature at different paces, but there are distinctive phases.

  A human stops growing and is physically mature by age eighteen, and after that, the human brain may lose more than a thousand cells each day. Since the brain has more than a hundred billion cells, the loss isn't considered significant. Cognitive abilities continue to grow.

  Beginning at twenty, skin begins to thin. Wrinkles and gray hairs may appear, and hands and neck lose firmness.

  By age thirty, the body's major organs begin to decline.

  This was the point where I wanted to stop reading, but I pressed on. Muscle strength, vision, hearing, and bone density may diminish beginning at age forty. After sixty-five, chronic conditions such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and osteoporosis often set in.

  The life expectancy of the average human is seventy-seven and six-tenths years. Such a short time.

  I closed the books. Would any of those awful things happen to the human elements in me? Malcolm's research might hold the answers, I thought. But did I really want to know?

  Maybe as Septimal worked to advance age, it also maintained it, fixed it in time? None of the library books could answer that question.

  But if I could fix my age, twenty-two sounded about right.

  The last week of our Japanese Culture class focused on folktales. Professor Itou read one aloud to us. Its title was "The Woman of the Snow. "

  We sat, slumped in our chairs, drained as if we'd been dancing Butoh. We wanted nothing more than for the semester to end so that we could go home and revive, recharge ourselves.

  But as the professor read, I became uncomfortably alert. The tale concerned two woodcutters, one old, one young, lost in a snowstorm on their way home from work. They take refuge in a hut and fall asleep. When the young man awakens, he sees a beautiful woman dressed in white bent over his companion, breathing on him. Her breath is like white smoke, and it turns the old man to ice.

  Then she turns to the young man, bends toward him. He is overwhelmed by her beauty and terrified of her powers. After staring into his eyes, she smiles. She says, "I had planned to treat you as I did the other man. For you I feel pity, because you are so young. "

  But she warns him that if he reveals her existence to anyone, she'll come back to kill him.

  I steeled myself for the story's resolution. Yes, the young man did go on to meet and marry a beautiful woman, but this time they had ten children, not two. Yes, one night he remembered the woman of the snow, and he told his wife the story. And yes, she immediately manifested herself as the snow woman, in all her terrible beauty.

  But unlike Cameron's vampire tale, in this one she did not kill him. Instead, she spared his life, this time on condition that he be a good father. I
f ever he wasn't, she said, she'd come back and he would die. Then the woman, O-Yuki was her name, disappeared in a cloud of snow and ice, never to return.

  Once again, the professor had managed to cast a spell over the class. We sat in our seats as if frozen there. Later, when we'd thawed, I began to wonder why Cameron's story had such a different ending.

  Every culture has its monsters, and every ocean and lake of any size in the world is supposedly inhabited by at least one.

  That doesn't surprise me. Gazing at a body of moving water, our eyes can play tricks on us, and our imaginations are ready to do the rest. This is not meant to discredit cryptozoology, the study of unseen or hidden animals, in any way; for all I know, lake monsters may be real. Their existence simply hasn't been proven.

  But other recurring monsters are harder to explain. Some consider Eve in the Bible a femme fatale, like O-Yuki. Egypt's Cleopatra and Greece's Aphrodite and Helen of Troy are other women who drive men to the point of making irrational, even fatal, decisions. What causes so many different cultures to demonize charming women?

  Karl Jung believed that in creating monsters, we're simply projecting shadows, our own inhuman qualities. Do femmes fatales simply personify our own shadows? Do ghosts?

  I wrote about these questions in my final Japanese Culture paper, and my head was still spinning with ideas after I finished it. I wanted to write about shadows in my final Creative Writing portfolio, too, but ghosts and monsters were taboo topics in Professor Warner's class. Instead I wrote about a girl who was homeschooled until she ran away, then found out she didn't know how to survive in the world.

  The dining hall called our last meal on campus a pre-holiday feast, featuring all manner of faux meats and real vegetables. Sloan piled his plate high. Jacey called it the last good meal she'd have until January. She would return home to her parents' house in Tennessee for the holidays, then head for her internship in Pittsburgh.

  "This is our last supper together until March," she said. "Poor Sloan will be here without his sophomore buddies.

  "How are you spending the break, Sloan?" she asked him.

  He pretended he hadn't heard the question. After she'd repeated it, I realized that he didn't know the answer.

  "Probably going to Savannah at first," he said. "To a hostel there that I think I can afford. "

  It sounded too bleak to be real, spending Christmas alone in a hostel. Jacey and I looked at each other. She was thinking, My parents would hate him, and he'd hate them.

  I said, "That's a terrible idea. Why don't you come home with me?"

  His face looked so uncertain-his dark eyes startled, then hopeful, then afraid. He was blocking his thoughts.

  "Come on," I said. "You met Dashay. She'll be cool with it. "

  Dashay was more than cool with it. I phoned her after dinner, and she insisted on inviting him herself. When he handed the phone back to me, he said, "That's grand, then. " I think it was a version of thank you.

  Jacey and I promised to e-mail, and try to visit each other, once we'd settled in our new cities. She would rent a room in Pittsburgh, in a house owned by the day care center's director, while I'd sublet an apartment in New York. She said she'd miss me, and I realized how much I'd miss her, too. It seemed I was always saying good-bye that year.

  In the car, driving to Florida, I kept quiet for the first half hour or so, wondering what the next year might hold. Sloan wrote in a battered journal, pausing to stare out the window from time to time. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

  For some reason, being around him wasn't as comfortable as it had been only a few months ago. I kept noticing him: his breathing, his posture, his hands.

  When he finally shut the notebook, I said, "Is that your diary?"

  "It's a dream journal," he said. "Every night my dreams are full of images. I write them down, and sometimes I try to sketch them. Last night I dreamed about Jacey. But in the dream, her hair was bleeding. "

  I glanced at him. He didn't seem disturbed.

  "That's a horrible image," I said.

  "Is it? I don't think dreams are prophetic, if that's what's bothering you. "

  "I don't want anything to happen to Jacey. Two of my friends already died. " I hadn't planned to say it, but there it was.

  He didn't act surprised. "Death is part of life. "

  "They were murdered. I'd hate it if anything happened to Jacey. "

  "I don't think bleeding hair has anything to do with death," he said. "To me it symbolizes a kind of rebirth. "

  "Dream interpretation isn't one of my strong suits," I said.

  I repeated what my father had told me: dreams inevitably center on birth, death, and/or anxiety. And when I asked him about love dreams, he'd said, "Birth, death, anxiety. Love can be any combination of the three. "

  Sloan said, "That about covers it. I'd like to meet your father. Will he be with us for Christmas?"

  I explained that my parents were in Ireland, and I began to tell him about them but stopped when I sensed his unease. He didn't want to think about Ireland. For him it meant family, and Delia, the girl he'd loved.

  So I changed the subject. I told him about Blue Heaven, about the horses and the gardens. He listened politely.

  Finally I said what was really on my mind. "I want to be older. Can you help me figure out how to do it?"

  "Maybe. " I felt his eyes on me. "Why don't you tell me why it matters so much?"

  Keeping my eyes on the road, I told him about a few of the disappointments and humiliations I'd known since I met Neil Cameron. I hadn't mentioned him before.

  Sloan didn't say a word until I'd finished. "Is this bloke really worth that much to you?" His voice carried no emotion. "This politician? Never mind. I can see that he is. "

  "He's more than this politician," I said. "Besides, I'm not doing it for him. I'm doing it for me. "

  Sloan gazed out the window. Finally he said he'd e-mail his doctor in Dublin and ask for names of American doctors familiar with Septimal.

  I felt relieved. I wouldn't have to turn to Malcolm, after all.

  Sloan said, as he had before, that the procedure wasn't painful or all that complicated. And that afterward, the biggest change he'd noticed was that his brain seemed to process experiences differently.

  "You don't have the giddy energy that a teenager has," he said. "Which frankly I found distracting. You're a bit more calm, not so ready to fight. "

  Well, that's how it might be for boys. I'd never felt much urge to fight anyone.

  "And you seem to make better decisions, to look at the long-range effects of things instead of going after immediate gratification. " As he spoke the last words, he gazed out the window. We were crossing the border into Florida. A sign welcomed us to the Sunshine State. "Is all of Florida like this?"

  He waved his hand at the souvenir shop we were passing. An aluminum hut had been painted flamingo pink, and giant signs outside it read FRESH OJ. LIVE GATORS. GATOR JERKY! BOILED P-NUTS HERE! MOON PIES!!

  I grinned. I looked forward to introducing him to the more subtle pleasures of Homosassa Springs.

  Last December Dashay had volunteered to find us a Yule tree. She came home with something called a cryptomeria, a live cedar with foliage like feathers growing in spirals, nothing like a traditional Christmas tree. The cryptomeria now loomed over her garden of gloom.

  This year's tree looked about as strange: six feet tall with sparse, twisted branches, scaly triangular spikes, and a few brown seedpods the size and shape of cucumbers. Does she deliberately choose the ugliest trees?

  Dashay heard that thought. "This, my friends, is a monkey puzzle tree," she said. "A fine specimen of an evergreen. Yule trees are traditionally evergreen. " She flung out her hands, as if to say, Case closed. Then she said, "It is not ugly. "

  Sloan loved the monkey puzzle. It looked like something he might have drawn, a perversion of an actual tree.

/>   He and Bennett-a sturdier-looking Bennett, though still not as muscular as he'd once been-sprawled in armchairs in the living room, glasses of Picardo in their hands, clearly enjoying watching Dashay and me face off.

  "Yule trees are supposed to be decorated. " I wasn't giving up yet. "How can you decorate a thing like this?" I touched one of its branches gingerly. "It hurts!"

  Dashay handed me a box holding strings of lights and ornaments. "Wear gloves," she said.

  Sloan slid off his chair and began to untangle the lights. I unwrapped the newspapers protecting ornaments shaped like pinecones and nuts. Bennett went to the kitchen and came back with a box of rubber gloves. I put them on, but Sloan didn't.

  And Dashay went to the phonograph and put on a raspy record featuring sleigh bells-something by Prokofiev, she said.

  No carols or sentimental Christmas stuff for us. But I liked our traditions better, monkey puzzle and all.

  Twice, as Sloan and I trimmed the tree, our fingers accidentally touched. I felt glad I was wearing gloves. My feelings were as tangled as the lights had been.

  And they stayed that way throughout a week of horseback riding and boating and pitching in on the farm. Around the middle of the week, I logged in to the Hillhouse web page and read my professors' evaluative reports. They all sounded positive, except for my mixed evaluation for Creative Writing.

  "She is a capable writer whose work needs to go deeper," Professor Warner wrote. "Clearly she has some growing to do. "

  Sloan checked his next-again, all positive except for the one from Professor Warner. "His work is strangely facile," she'd written.

  He fell onto the carpet, laughing.

  Sloan seemed enchanted by Blue Heaven. As usual, he didn't say much, but his attitude, his face, and even his posture grew more relaxed, less wary. He'd never ridden a horse before, but he took to it so naturally that both Dashay and Bennett seemed impressed.

  Dashay and Bennett-they weren't back together as a romantic couple, as far as I could tell. Instead they'd formed a partnership based on hard work and good food, and maybe, I thought, those things were as good as love. Maybe.

  At the end of the week, we celebrated the winter solstice with a special dinner, and afterward we burned a Yule log in the fireplace, even though we weren't a bit cold.

  Dashay stared into the flames, her eyes opaque. She shook her head, as if clearing her thoughts, and returned my gaze. "I think it's time to open presents," she said.

  Dashay had suggested that we exchange only handmade gifts this year. I'd thought that idea stemmed from Bennett, and Sloan's lack of money, but later I realized that Dashay and Blue Heaven also were operating under tighter fiscal constraints. The economy in general was suffering, and few had the kind of wealth that my father enjoyed and I'd taken for granted. Mae had refused to let him put money into Blue Heaven, wanting the farm and horse business to be self-sufficient, and so far it was, but rebuilding after the hurricane had been expensive.

  Ironically, I was the one who had money from my allowance to spend on holiday presents but no talent to make anything worth giving.

  Dashay gave everyone a jar of honey, and candles made from honeycomb harvested from Blue Heaven hives. Bennett had whittled whimsical small animals out of dead branches from the basswood trees in our yard; mine was a tiny kingfisher. "My favorite bird," I said.

  "I knew that. " He grinned.

  I'd worried that Sloan wouldn't be able to give presents, but he surprised me. Working late at night, he'd been making sketches of each of us, and the simple drawings managed to capture our essential natures: Dashay's communicated pride, Bennett's hope, and mine . . .

  "I look wistful," I said. "Is that how you see me?"

  "This week, yes. "

  "You have a good eye," Bennett said.

  "You've got real talent. " Dashay couldn't take her eyes off the sketches.

  Sloan looked at the floor, trying to hide his pleasure at their praise.

  My parents had sent a box to all of us, filled with Irish books and foods-soda bread, chocolates, oatmeal-but what I liked best was a thick envelope addressed to me in my mother's handwriting. I set it aside to read later.

  I set down the sketch to pass around my gifts: small loaves of honey cake, made from one of my mother's recipes, wrapped in napkins made of vintage cotton whose hems I'd stitched clumsily by hand. A small stalk of edible lavender flowers was embedded in the top crust of each loaf.

  "It's not much," I said.

  Bennett and Sloan were already eating theirs.

  Dashay lifted the cake and sniffed it as if it were a worthy wine. "You used the lavender honey," she said. "Very nice. "

  Alone in my room I opened Mae's letter.

  Mae's handwriting raced across the page, each letter slanted right as if ready to take off. She said she'd been busy gardening and tending the beehives on the new property in Kerry. She listed all the plants in the garden and described their temperaments as if they were people. She'd also supervised painting and redecorating the house, while my father worked in his new lab.

  "Raphael has buried himself in work, as usual," she wrote. "He's part of the Vampire Genome Project-have you heard about that? They're trying to identify all the vampire genes. He says the results may help prevent or cure some human diseases, and might even help make vampires more resistant to fire. "

  It sounded similar to, but on a larger scale than, the project Malcolm had described. I wondered if they knew how similar. I was sure they'd never collaborate-my father wouldn't even consider it.

  The letter finished: "We can't wait to show you our corner of Ireland. We'll have our own solstice celebration once you're here. "

  We can't wait. But they would wait. I would wait.

  I folded the letter, kissed it, and put it on my dresser next to my kingfisher amulet and the charcoal sketch of a sad-eyed, vulnerable me.

  Late that night Sloan sent me another present. When I checked e-mail on my laptop, I found a message he'd forwarded from his Irish doctor. "U. S. Septimal specialist: Dr. Godfried Roche, Miami, Florida. " I whispered the name to myself over and over as I went to sleep.

  Maybe an hour later, I awoke. Someone was tapping on my bedroom door.

  I opened it grudgingly. Sloan said, "Quick, come on. You've got to see this!"

  "See what?" His hair needed combing, I thought.

  "Ari," he said, "you've got ghosts!"