I knew that, but I wasn’t going to let him know I’d been paying attention.
Me:how’s utah?
Vlad:Haha. Sleep tight.
Our first evening in Vermont Heaven and I sat silently in front of the picture window in the front room. Day one of together forever.
“The view is lovely, isn’t it?” I commented mildly. It was everything I’d hoped it would be, a serene painting of a landscape and an old barn, the kind that might hang in a dentist’s office, soothing and unobjectionable. Except for the hearse. It was lodged in the ditch where Heaven had left it, deep tire tracks leading to its final resting place.
“The view—” Heaven scoffed. “That’s what we’re going to talk about?”
“Would you like to say something?” I asked. “You’ve been very quiet.” Uncomfortably so. I couldn’t help but recall that feeling of new motherhood, holding a brand-new human who is at once a stranger and your child. One does not become a mother, or a maker, overnight.
“For one, it would be nice if we had electricity,” Heaven said, turning in my direction and blinding me completely with a headlamp she had found.
Holding a hand over my eyes, I asked, “Can you dim that?”
“No.”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
This was going to be more work than parenting in the 1700s. Standards were pretty low back then. People these days are always talking about the trials of growing up in the 1980s, but child mortality ratesspoke for themselves. Most kids born in the ’80s survived to adulthood, even if they subsisted on plastic-wrapped American cheese slices and benign neglect.
Heaven was already an adult, a former neighbor, a woman who previously tried to fix me with some volunteer life coaching. This was uncharted territory.
“Well, tonight we have to do two things. Number one, we need to burn all of the vaguely religious decorations and Bibles.” I shuddered at the thought of all the danger around us. The least religious decoration was a Thomas Kinkade painting.
When I plucked the Kinkade from its place on the wall, Heaven exclaimed, “You can’t burn that. I love the light!”
“Which is why it has to go.” There was something sinister about the idyllic cottage. The sunbeams, the saccharine coziness—it was too perfect to trust. On second thought, it was essentially my Hallmark fantasy. I hung it back up.
“Okay, we can keep the painting, but this could kill you.” I picked up a Bible with fireplace tongs.
“Book burning, Tiff, really?”
“Heaven, right now, I know what’s best for you. I’m your m—”
She looked down her nose at me. “What were you about to say? You’re my—”
“Maker. That means a couple of things. First, I need to help you stay undead, instead of regular dead. If you watchedBuffy, you know most of it—no stakes, sunlight, religious stuff like holy water and”—I gestured to the pile of cross-stitchery and portraits—“almost everything Aunt Mildred owned. We would get sunburned just living in this house as is.”
Heaven stared out the window listlessly. “Did you have to get a hearse?” Her voice had a “really, Mom?” edge to it.
“We’re vampires.”
She shut her eyes and started slowly shaking her head. “We’re vampires” wasn’t sitting well with her. In a preachy tone that filled the vestibule,she said, “Tiffenie, I am a Black woman, I’m a life coach, I’m a lesbian. I’m a mediocre gardener. I’m a fan of old cartoons. Vampire”—she spat out the word—“is waaaay down the line of anything I identify as.” Gathering momentum, she said, “Why am I even humoring you? I’m not a vampire and I never will be. You can’t make me.”
Umm…we could talk about that later.
I handed her a coconut water. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”
She took the coconut water and set it down unnoticed. “Before we light all the Bibles on fire, where’s the rest of my stuff? I found a duffel with some clothes, but that’s not all, right?”
“Your earrings are in the center console. I grabbed those dangly ones you always wear and the African ones. I didn’t know which crystals you wanted, so I grabbed a bunch.”
“That’s it? You didn’t even bring hair products.” She pointed to her hair, which I couldn’t see with the headlamp pointed right at me.
In a huff, she gestured to a pile of things. “You packed medieval armor, several laundry baskets full of—” She picked up a bottle of encapsulated retinol and a bunch of beauty products that promised to provide a youthful glow. There was an LED mask. She shook her head in exasperation. “Isn’t eternal youth one of the perks of this?”
