I laugh a little, partly because she has a point and partly because I don’t know how to explain what I mean. At the hospital, I’m only a bit player in someone’s worst day. I’m not the cause of it, and I don’t have to be the solution. The people who whine and argue with me over the paperwork or the wait time won’t even remember my face by the time they leave.
Zawadski reaches to scratch the middle of her back, and her tank top rides up to reveal a big white bandage stuck over her hip, the same side as the massive bruise on her arm. Then she sticks out her hand with decisive ferocity and says, “I’m Veer. By the way.”
Her hand is warm and a bit clammy. My knuckles come away with a light coating of dirt and engine oil from her fingers. “Ellis.”
“Cool.” She nods to herself. Then, again, her focus is on me, as intense as high beams on a night road. “You’re probably fine to get home now. Let me give you my number.”
My stomach twists, and I try to remember what’s real, and what isn’t.
“Just in case you need another jump,” she finishes.
We exchange numbers. She gathers the jumper cables and slings her jacket over one shoulder. I slide into my still-running car and watch her in the rearview mirror, a sliver of hair slipped free to curl over her temple, tongue tracing her upper lip as she drives away. My curse growls softly, a curious tremor in my chest, and for a second, I don’t mind being an animal. I might even like it.
3
“I HAVE A GUY,”UNCLE BILL SAYS WHEN I CALL HIMfrom the road, asking if he can help me change my battery.
Uncle Bill always has a guy. It’s better not to ask too many questions.
“Corolla, right?” I can hear him writing it down. “2014?”
“2012.”
“That’s fine. I’ll help you put it in when you get here.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re family.” An acerbic undertone ofcan’t believe I have to do thiscreeps into that last statement.
I ignore it, like usual. “Thanks, man.”
My stomach growls. The curse in my heart needs only blood, but the body around it needs more. My mom and I used to laugh at the TV monsters with their cartoonish capes, the way they recoiled in the sun, the way they slept in dirt and never died. Maybe it was like that for some people, once, but not for us. We heal fast, sure, but we’re not indestructible. And we only avoid garlic because the smell’s off-putting, same as any other pungent food. Sometimes our eyes come out funny in photos if we’re not quick enough to duck out of the way of the flash, but our bodies are mostly just like everyone else’s, and they can only take so much living.
Uncle Bill clears his throat. “How’ve you been?”
I answer the question he really meant to ask. “She’s okay. About the same.”
“Still with it enough to be a royal pain in the ass.”
“She doesn’t mean to be. She can’t help it.”
There’s another pause, and I think he’s waiting for me to say something more, but I’m too tired to have anything much to say. Uncle Bill was a teenager when my mom was in kindergarten, and she hadn’t seen him in almost three decades when she showed up in his driveway with nowhere to go and me in the back seat. “Be nice to your uncle,” she reminded me constantly in the sixteen years since. Especially when he covered my nursing school tuition, and when one of his work buddies helped get me a job at the hospital. Given all that, you’d think we’d have a better relationship, but he’s also prone to taking off for days without telling us, and then there are the constant sidelong comments that make it clear he’s never too happy about what he does to help us out, just that he feels he has to. And maybe he has a point. It’s not like my mom or I have ever volunteered to arrange our own supply of blood.
“See you soon,” I mutter into the phone, then turn back to the road.
The desert sun is hard at work by the time I pull into Uncle Bill’s cul-de-sac, the exposure-scorched sidewalks and cracked asphalt driveways radiating such relentless heat that the air almost shimmers with it. His white stucco one-story is layered with world-weary grime that can only be achieved through years of dedication to subminimal maintenance. Instead of a row of palms or an Astroturf lawn out front, it’s just a patch of dirt that the neighbor’s dogs consistently shit in. Even though they clean up after, it still smells foul to me. Probably does to Uncle Bill too. I don’t know how he stands it.
I find him out back, folded into a faded lawn chair in the shadow of the house. The back isn’t any nicer than the front, more parched concrete and an empty pool collecting layers of dead tree bits and dirt.
His knees crack like a pair of snapped branches as he hauls himself to his feet. “You got here fast.”
There’s a certain youthfulness to Uncle Bill, even though he walks slower these days and his hair’s thinning and mostly gray. He has the same nose as my mom, narrow and high bridged with a bump in the middle, and he reeks of drugstore cologne turned rancid by sweat and too many cups of instant coffee. Beneath that lurks the vinegary chemical stink of detergent and Windex that’s so sunk into his hands that it’ll never leave, no matter how many times he washes them.
Uncle Bill is a custodian at the UNLV phlebotomy lab. That’s the reason we came here. My mom was tired of drifting and scheming, of digging through hazardous waste bins for trashed Vacutainers and raiding med-spa dumpsters for the discard of their vampire facials. Doesn’t matter that it’s been processed, or that it might have pathogens. If it’s blood, it can’t hurt us, only feed us. Medical samples are best, she taught me, because a standard three-milliliter vial is about what we need for a day. And we don’t drink it, ever—drinking blood is wasteful and inconsistent, since a mouthful doesn’t always damp our hunger for the same amount of time, depending on what food’s in our stomach. Injection’s clean, easy. Safe.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Uncle Bill says. “Go pop the hood, will you?”
A dried-out branch snaps. Dirt slides deeper into the pool’s concrete embrace.
