“Let me out!”
“We’re almost there. You’re doing great!” I called. There was nothing for it. I stepped on the gas.
“Tiff, is that you? I’m going to kill you!”
“You’re going to love Vermont,” I answered. “The leaves, the hills, the…” Not murdering her girlfriend was the real highlight, but that was better left unsaid for the moment. The headlights were twin beams of soft yellow light illuminating gently falling snow. I was heading home.
According to a DJ on Valentine’s 103.5 “The Heart,” it was past peak fall colors—not that it mattered much to me. Leaf-peeping was a daytime hobby.
There wasn’t more than an inch or two of early snow, but it had been preceded by bouts of rain, making for poor driving conditions, especially for an LA driver. I followed each curve in the road with bated breath and a white-knuckle grip until I saw it: a quaint wooden sign that announced,Welcome to Valentine!
“We’re here!” I called.
No response from Heaven, except for some rustling around. It seemed like she’d drifted off again. For the undead, a coffin is quite comfortable, except that the pillows are too small.
Valentine, population 4,356, was quaint. I stopped the car in the middle of the empty street beneath a banner advertising the SugarBoo Ball. A week ago, I’d watchedA Country Christmaswith Heaven on my couch in LA, my dumb slipcover riding up between the cushions, and drank my fill by accident. Somehow, I’d basically Jumanji-ed myself into the TV. Me, Tiffenie Ruba, immortal vampire and servant of the devil, livingA Country Christmas.
Wide-eyed, I took it in. Everything about the town was charming and quaint. A small gazebo decorated with snow-dusted pumpkins and heaps of about-to-be-frozen mums marked the center of the town square. The gazebo and gardens were bordered by a bakery, a bookstore, and a tavern. Of course, here, a bar wasn’t just a bar. It was atavern.
I wanted to touch all the books in the bookstore, admire the goodies in the pastry case of the bakery, walk into the general store looking for breath mints only to meet the love of my life when we reached for the last tin. Or something. Not tonight, though. It was late and every store had aClosedsign. No Patagonia-clad Vermonters trudged down the street carrying too many shopping bags and steaming hot chocolates. There wasn’t a sled or a ski track to be found. In my old neighborhood there would be people everywhere at this hour, making a late-night run to the store, heading to or from work, and always a guy peeing in an alley because there weren’t public restrooms.
Here, the snow was a pristine blanket, not a track in it, a world created just for me. Heaven was banging on the inside of the coffin. I called, “Just a few more minutes.”
An impulse hit—to put my tracks in the snow, to make this town mine. I would be the Neil Armstrong of Valentine, Vermont, leaving prints from my Payless heeled boots. Were Neil’s footprints still on the moon? Really, NASA should be sending vampires into space. Then they wouldn’t have to invest so much in life-support technology.
With a Christmas morning feeling I hadn’t felt for centuries, I stepped into the snow-covered square still wearing yoga pants and my Parliament of the Undead T-shirt (the Bloodthirsty Banjo tour, not the vampire council). The snowflakes fell like kisses on my alabaster cheeks. An eddy of flakes twirled around me like magical Disney sparkles, the kind that turn Cinderella from a pauper to a princess.
I was becoming who I was always meant to be, a small-town girl. Maybe the big city had been my problem all this time. Back when I was human, I lived in a small village. Valentine was a return to my roots.
In the back of the hearse, I found my best fur coat, the one I wore to the club during the flapper era. It had been the only thing that looked good on me in the 1920s. Flapper dresses aren’t for curvy girls. The coat smelled a little of mothballs, but it’d air out soon in the fresh Vermont air.
I knocked on the coffin. “Heaven, you’re going to love Vermont! It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.” And I’ve been to Switzerland.
Heaven murmured something, but she didn’t sound distressed.
Before I shut the back door of the hearse, Heaven’s phone pinged again. My official announcement that her followers should chill out had done no good. To satisfy these followers, whoever they were, I snapped a photo of the snowy landscape. All it needed was a caption. I tried a few pithy pieces of advice before landing on:
Get out of your own way and become who you are meant to be. If you don’t know who that is, that’s okay, at least try something. I’ve heard great things about pottery and Korean skincare seems to be a good idea. If you haven’t seen that Martha Stewart documentary, you should watch it. You do you.
Back in the car, I retyped the address of my new home into the map app, my whole being vibrating with excitement.
“Here we go.” I took Main Street out of town and turned right at an old-fashioned mill. I sat up straight, peering at every tree and rock with a wide-eyed excitement I hadn’t felt since that time I drank from some people at Woodstock. That LSD hit hard, even secondhand.
Maple Lane, my new street, was narrow and curved gently along the path of the Valentine River. My heart and mind floated on a plane they’d never reached. Yoga, meditation, affirmations—nothing had lifted me like Vermont on a snowy day. When a graceful doe leapt in front of the car, I gasped. She was so lithe and tawny, a happy little deer dotted into my world by Bob Ross. But then she stopped and stared, a literal deer in the headlights.
“Ah, fuck! Move it, deer!” I yelled, but she was frozen, forcing me to slam on the brakes. Instead of slowing, the wheels locked and the Happily Ever After hearse skated sideways down the road, taking up both lanes.I screamed. Heaven, now fully awake apparently, screamed with me. I gripped the wheel harder to no effect. The guardrail-less drop into the Valentine River beckoned, an abrupt fall into an icy river that could kill us if we weren’t already dead.
Just when I thought it was hopeless, a crash inevitable, the car skidded to a stop peacefully on the side of the road. No accident, nothing. It was nothing but a reminder that you needed snow tires in Vermont. In the silence, I started laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing, at the dumb hearse, Heaven in her coffin, a falling-down bed-and-breakfast. And then a few tears welled up—relief, probably. I don’t know. The doe who had started it all watched from the hillside, serene, graceful, completely unbothered.
“Heaven!” I called. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” But when I glanced in the rearview mirror, the back of the car was open and her coffin was skidding to a stop. Apparently, she had been ejected in the chaos. I jumped out and slipped on the icy road, almost not catching myself. Why was I wearing heels?
“Heaven!” I yelled, scrambling to my feet. “I’m coming! It’s okay!”
All I had to do was collect Heaven and get her back in the car. We were okay. I had this.
Just then, a cherry-red pickup came barreling down the lane. The lights blinded me, and I shielded my eyes. Hopefully, he would just keep driving. I didn’t need anyone to get all up in my business before I even got to the house.Please keep going. Please keep going.
No luck. The truck pulled to a stop right beside me.
