Family Ties: A 'Vampires in the Family' Look Back

When I was little, Mother wouldn’t let me into the basement, mostly because the screams gave me nightmares. ...Well, the screams and the whites of the men’s eyes as their veins bled, slowly, into the upturned pots and rubber tubing connected to thick, hollow needles. Mother didn’t want me to have bad dreams – I slept during the day like she did, or at least I tried, but then Mother was never awake to comfort me when I woke up early, sweat dripping, heart pounding. She had a sickness, after all. She couldn’t help me, even though she swore she wanted to. I always believed her. Back when I was a little girl, Mother was always in the next room, even during the worst of times, and all I had to do was wait for darkness to see her. 1

These days, though, it wasn’t so great. I tried to keep in contact with her, tried to let her know that I’m okay, but I couldn’t be on a landline phone more than a minute without her tracking device catching my location. With prepaid cell phones, we could talk a little bit more. Our longest conversation happened a week ago, lasting almost half an hour. Mother begged me to stay on the phone with her longer, but I could hear her car door slam in the background, the key turning, the ignition. I had to cut the conversation shorter than I’d liked – she’d get to where I was, otherwise. Still, the risk of the phone call had been worth it; Mother needed to know at least some of the details. Her only daughter was pregnant, after all. I told her I’d name the baby after her. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d already chosen a middle name as well. 2

I’d had to leave immediately after I hung up, paying for the cheap hotel room out of my rapidly-dwindling cash reserves. The clerk, some pimple-faced teenager with greasy red hair and an odor like old catfish, politely asked me if I’d enjoyed my night. I’d said, yes, it was wonderful, conveniently leaving out the three cockroaches I’d killed while turning back the covers on the bed and the dead marijuana plant hidden behind the toilet. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the hotel was so crappy. I’d taken a job, briefly, as a hotel maid a few years back, back when I’d been living with Mother and had wanted to express my independence in the most fiscally responsible way possible. I’d learned. If a hotel was gross-looking, it was usually the management’s fault. The job had been a valuable life lesson. 3

“Come back soon, ya hear?” the clerk – Jackson - called to my back as I fled to my car. I’d waved at him without looking, throwing open my sedan’s door and then speeding the hell out of there. 4

I saw Jackson’s face again a few days later, displayed next to four other photographic portraits on the front page of the newspaper display. “Hotel 6 Massacre!” the headline declared. “Victims mutilated almost beyond recognition. Serial Killer suspected.” 5

Mother again, I knew it. The hotel had been halfway across the country from the family home, and since it was summer, she could only drive about nine hours a night before having to find some place to hide from the daylight. By the time she’d reached the Hotel 6, she’d probably been starving. Desperate. Needy. And Jackson and the other four people had been right there, all convenient and blood-filled and available. 6

I purchased the newspaper, even though I couldn’t afford to. Carefully, using my only pair of scissors, I cut out the pictures from the thin, crinkly paper and gently pasted them in my scrapbook later that evening. Jackson had looked much better in his photograph than he did in real life – his hair was cleaner, and his zits were under better control. At least it had been quick for him, I thought to myself. At least he hadn’t been like the men in the basement, chained up alone, being drained in the dark with needles and incisions and the endless dripping of blood from unhealing sores. 7

At least his death hadn’t been as bad as Micah’s. 8

Unconsciously, I gripped the necklace that hung between my breasts, squeezing the crystal shard pendant so tightly that my hand hurt. My breasts didn’t look any bigger – weren’t they supposed to swell with milk or something? - and my stomach was as flat as always. I knew I was pregnant, though. Two months ago I’d taken a pregnancy test. Well, two tests, then four, then six, all purchased from the local Walmarts and dollar stores and Rite Aids. I hadn’t realized it could happen so suddenly. Micah and I had only had sex one time, exactly one time, before Mother had... Before she...9

I slammed the scrapbook closed, mostly to shut the unblinking eyes of the five hotel victims, but also to keep myself from flipping a few pages back to where the photographs of Micah were posted. Micah and me at the high school prom. Micah wearing his worn Knicks jersey. Even Micah in his favorite shirt, the night he’d suggested that we run away together, that we escape our families, escape the suffocating town of Adrienne’s Falls. 10

I was staying in my car tonight. Hotels were too easy to locate, too expensive, and I didn’t want something to happen again. Jackson’s friendly smile flashed at me from my memory. I just didn’t want to risk it. 11

I slid the scrapbook underneath the seat and adjusted my position in the back. I had a pillow back there, several blankets, and although my legs were too long to properly stretch out on the back seat, at least I could sleep lying horizontally. The car was parked in an empty lot behind a closed warehouse, so the cops would never notice me. The doors were locked, the windows were sealed. I was going to be okay. I closed my eyes, adjusting my knees so that way they bent with less pressure, and prepared to fall into sleep. 12

From somewhere in the car, a telephone rang. 13

“Jesus!” I shot up from my lying position, searching around the car for the source of the noise. My neck wrenched, a little, and the twinge of soreness barely even registered with me as I searched for the phone. I knew what it was, where the noise was coming from. The cell phone. The goddamn prepaid cell phone I’d used to call Mother the last time. I’d forgotten to throw it away. She’d traced it and she was coming and she’d take me back and...and...14

And what? Mother wouldn’t kill me. She wouldn’t hurt me, either, at least not physically and, if she did it emotionally, she rarely meant it. She loved me. I was her daughter. I mean, admittedly, I was adopted, but still, there were family ties. 15

My legs cramped up as I knelt on the floor between the seats and dug around underneath the front seat for something hard and plastic and cell phone-shaped. I really hated sleeping in a car. The family house, where Mother and I had lived when I’d been growing up, had been the size of a mansion and filled with comfortable furniture, soft beds, good food. I dug out several fast food wrappers and tossed them into the back. All I’d been eating for the past two months were dollar menu items from drive-throughs. I missed my ratatouille and bouillabaisse dishes, the fresh fois gras served on china plates. I wasn’t used to this. I was alone, pregnant and malnourished, poor as hell, with a limited job experience of exactly three months, and I couldn’t even find a friggin cell phone in a car the size of a bathtub! 16

Finally, after what seemed like the eighteenth ring, my fingers closed around the cell phone, wedged between the passenger seat and the door. I brought it to my ear. 17

“Hello?” I said. 18

“Sylvia, sweetheart.” It was my mother’s voice. I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised. She sounded so relieved to hear me. Inside, a part of me ached. I missed her so much, even after what she’d done. 19

No. 20

With my free hand, I yanked the scrapbook out from under the seat and opened it to Micah’s first page. His brown face and warm eyes gazed out at me from the photograph, his thick, kissable lips curved into a soft smile. I felt my heart harden, at least a little. I remembered what Mother had done to those lips. 21

“Why did you call me?” 22

“Sylvia, please, you need to come back home.”23

I really didn’t want to talk to her now. Not after looking at Micah. Normally I could handle phone conversations with Mother, but only on my terms. The calls had to be short, to the point, and, most importantly, avoid any and all mention of the stuff that had caused me to leave in the first place. All the murders. Micah. 24

“Just...leave me alone, okay?” I said. 25

“No.” I heard her sigh over the phone, the sound magnified into a wind storm. “I will never leave you alone. You’re my daughter. I won’t abandon you.” 26

I listened carefully to the background noise, trying to figure out where she was. 27

“Are you in your car?” I asked. There were no car noises, but maybe she was on a smooth, empty road or something.28

“No, sweetheart. I’m not.” 29

“Then where are you?” 30

There was a knock on my car window and I flinched, like I’d been slapped with a burning wire. A dark shape stood outside. The silhouette was terribly familiar. 31

“I’m standing,” Mother said, “outside of a neglected car parked in a bad part of town where all sorts of awful things can happen to the occupant.” 32

“Are you threatening me?” I spat, not taking my eyes off of the shape. The outside door handle clicked as Mother tested it. The locks held. 33

There was a sharp intake of breathe. She sounded shocked. “Of course not! But I’m not the danger here – everyone else is! You’re putting yourself in constant risk by going to these dangerous places.” 34

“I think the odds are better doing things my way, Mother,” I said. “Just...stop following me. Please.” 35

Just go, I prayed. Just go so I can hold my tongue and pretend that things can return to how they used to be. When we were happy together. When we were a real family.36

I picked up the scrapbook and ran my finger lightly over the photograph of Micah, following the smooth line of his cheek up to the corner of his eyes. Mother could see it through the window, I was sure. She could see in the dark with relative ease – a byproduct of her sickness. Plus, the modest light in my car from the book light I’d set up also helped matters a little. 37

“I know you miss him,” she said. I felt the icy veneer of my self-control shatter.38

“You know nothing,” I shouted. “You have no idea how much it hurt to lose him, to...to see him after what you put him through. How could you do that to me?” 39

“He wasn’t worthy of you!” Mother cried. I could hear her voice from outside the car, her wail wild and almost daunting. Her voice didn’t sound human when she made that noise. It was almost like a cheetah’s screech, or something worse, something predatory. 40

Had that been the last sound Jackson had heard before she’d torn into him? Had that been the last sound that Micah had heard?41

“Sylvia, darling, just come home with me.” Her voice was back to normal. She gestured towards the car with a shadowy jab of the arm. “You can’t live like this. I can give you your room back, hot meals, medical care. I’ll make amends, I swear to you. I’ll be a good grandmother to little Lavinia.” 42

Automatically, I touched my stomach. The fetus was too underdeveloped for me to be certain what gender it was, but all of my instincts were screaming that it was going to be a girl. Baby Lavinia. I wondered how much she’d look like Micah. 43

“The baby will never want for anything,” Mother said. Her face was pressed close to the glass of my car window. I could see her dark eyes, her curled, Grecian ringlet hair piled on top of her head. “I can give her anything she needs.” 44

“She needs her father,” I said, shutting off the phone and tossing it onto the passenger seat in front. Micah looked at me from his photograph. I kissed the tips of my fingers and brought them down, gently, on his lips. Then I closed the book and slide it back to its resting place. 45

Mother was still standing there, silent, besides the car window. If she wanted to, she could break it, force open the door, force me to go home. But she wasn’t doing that. Not yet, anyway. Maybe she still had hope.46

I crawled into the front seat, put on my safe belt, and started the car engine. Carefully, deliberately, I pulled out of the parking space, but before I pulled away, I opened my car window barely half-an-inch. 47

“Mother?” I called. 48

The shadow of her torso appeared in front of driver’s side window almost instantly. She bent down, moving her eyes close to mine, locking me with her gaze. 49

“Sylvia.” 50

“I can’t come home. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But maybe, one day, after the baby is born, we can visit. Maybe she can grow up knowing her grandmother.” I paused, steeling my courage, and then plunged on. “But she will never know what goes on in the basement, okay? She’ll never know about your sickness.”51

Mother nodded. “Of course. That’s acceptable.” 52

“And one more thing,” I said, my foot resting on the gas pedal, my heart thrumming in my ears. “I decided on a middle name for your granddaughter. Her name will be Lavinia Micah Sanchez. After her father. We’re taking his last name.” 53

“Oh, Sylvia,” Mother said, but I pressed down on the gas and sped away, not willing to wait and listen to what she had to say. I pulled out of the parking lot, onto the highway, and floored it, opening the window a little bit more to thrust the prepaid cell phone outside so it would shatter on the road. I knew, with all my heart, I knew that she could only stay away from me for so long before she’d go searching again. Then more people would die, more people like Jackson...more people like Micah. 54

The images in the scrapbook haunted me. I’d been keeping it since I was eight, since I’d learned to search newspapers for the grainy pictures of the ‘missing’ men that Mother kept in the basement until they were all used up. The scrapbook was almost full. With the fresh page about the hotel victims, there were only about four blank pages left. 55

At least almost all of the images featured happy, smiling faces, though. People like to look cheerful in photographs. It was better this way. Whenever I pictured them now, I could sometimes see them happy instead of when I’d last looked at them, pale and hollow cheeked and bruised, wrists stretched out in iron manacles, feet chained to the floor. 56

At least they were smiling in the photographs. At least they had been happy once. 57

I touched my belly again and sped up, going even faster into the darkness of the highway, speeding away from something that, inevitably, would always catch up again. Always.58