— Maybe I could do with four, she said. Four might be sufficient.
I realized then what a danger she was to me, and I bolted for the fallen oak, vaulted over it, landing among the hyacinths at the edge of the water.
— Louie!
— Four? You been drilling it into me ever since we met how you needed five.
— You don’t understand!
— Of course I don’t. I’m such a stupid girl. I must be really fucking stupid to trust you. Maybe it’s only three people you need. Two plus me.
We were slightly more than an arm’s length apart, but it might have been in different countries.
— Don’t leave, Sandrine said. Without you I’ll die.
I slogged a few paces through the water, the leathery hyacinth roots snagging my ankles.
— I can explain!
I kept going.
— I’ll show you things, she said. Incredible things. I’ll tell you my secrets. I should have been open from the start, but I thought I’d lose you. I’ll never keep anything from you again.
I clambered onto shore.
— You’re taking my heart!
I slipped on something slick and sat down hard.
— Whore! she screamed. You filthy, disgusting whore! Go ahead! All you are is flabby tits and stinking blood! Touching you makes me sick! You hear? I feel like puking when I’m near you! Do you know what you smell like?
She told me. In detail. I could hear her screaming corrosive insults long after I entered the brush, and perhaps I heard them even after I had gone beyond the range of her voice.
I tracked down Johnny Jacks in the parking lot at Cracker Paradise. He took me into the shadows alongside his car, and there he choked me a little and slapped me. I told him he didn’t have to use force, he could have everything he wanted. We drove to a spot not far from Sandrine’s, and we walked down to the river. Big chunks of anger, boulder sized, were in my head, damming up everything except a leakage of bitterness. I ignored thoughts of what he might do to me — I wanted something to happen, and I didn’t care what so long as it was violent. He hardly spoke, and I couldn’t tell what was on his mind. He might have been no different from the rest of us, mostly urge and raw need, and simply was less capable of expressing it.
We reached Sandrine’s, and he climbed eagerly over the toppled oak. I waited in the river, mud oozing between my toes. The moon was so bright the blue sky was almost a day color. I felt it shining inside me, generating hatred, a cooler emotion directed at her, at all things. Hyacinths with foot-high purplish blooms bobbled against my knees. Johnny Jacks glanced at me, his face expressionless as ever. I thought he would say something, but Sandrine melted up from the rotting boards of the shack, a female pattern emerging from the wood grain, and appeared to coil around him. She didn’t draw him inside the shack, into the place where she slept; she bore him to the ground and sank her fangs into his neck and drank. He moaned once, a frail sound. Every now and then his hand twitched or an arm jerked. As he grew paler, she grew more real. It wasn’t what I had expected, or maybe it was. Part of me was disappointed he wasn’t what I’d hoped. Another part would have preferred to be horrified. Mainly I had a sense of. I don’t know. Closure, maybe. Not the feeling you get when you’re over a crush or have gone past some pain, but like the feeling you have the morning after your first time with a boy. Anxious and a little shaky, worried that you’ve screwed up, but with a bigger anxiety removed, and you’re ready to become this new person you see in the mirror.
Johnny Jacks was still alive when Sandrine lifted her head. Blood flowed from the puncture wounds on his neck, anyway. She flipped hair back from her eyes — blood filmed over her chin and lips, dark and thick as gravy.
— The Djadadjii are cool to the touch, she said. But you knew he wasn’t Djadadj, didn’t you? At the least you suspected.
I had nothing to say.
— Not this month, she said. But next month, the month after. soon we’ll be together.
She lowered her head and drank again, just a sip, and then said, I’m not angry with you. You needed a push, so I pushed you. If he had turned out be Djadadj, well. life is risk. It was only a tiny risk, though.
She closed her eyes and arched her neck, sated and languorous. On her hip a speckle of mud like a beauty mark. She stroked Johnny Jacks’s blond hair.
— He’s beautiful, though. Beautiful enough to be Djadadj.
She rested her cheek against his, her lips parted, baring the tips of her crimson fangs — a scene from one of my mind movies brought to life.
— Go home now, she said. Come again tomorrow night. or wait a month. It’s no matter. Go home and think about what you must do.
When I turned from the tableau of the shack and the two figures lying in the grass and mud, it was as if I’d never seen the river and the sky before — they were so vast and unfamiliar, they almost flattened me.
— Good night, Elle, said Sandrine.
My father’s a battered gray suitcase. He left me with no photographs, no scars, no good-byes, no promises, no postcards, no phone calls on my birthday, no memories whatsoever; but he did leave me that suitcase. To my mind he might as well be a battered old thing whose last name is Samsonite. I lay the suitcase open on the bed and begin stuffing everything I own into it. As I cross back and forth between the closet and the bed, I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror. I see Louie, small-time and ordinary, a bright, slutty girl, still hopeful, soul somewhat in hock to a regulation Sunday school dream, with a nice enough face and body to make it happen. And I see Elle, spooky and hot to trot, with her hungry mouth and Xed-out eyes and reckless ways. She strikes me as a fraud, though I can’t say why. I avoid staring at the reflection, not wanting to see which one will become dominant, disliking both equally.
I latch the suitcase and picture myself working with Everett in the parts store — it seems I already know how that story ends, and it’s the same with every other story I imagine. I realize there are better stories out there, ones with happier endings, but I have no idea how to go about achieving those fantasies of wealth and fame. Chandler Mason could tell me, probably, but look where she wound up.
Momma’s entertaining tonight. The bed frame creaks, the springs shriek, the headboard hammers out a factory rhythm, a relentless machine fury, blam-blam-blamming against the wall. Her flutelike outcries provide a breathy counterpoint.
When I was little, I’d scrunch down outside her door and try to interpret the noises, worried about what was happening. After I discovered sex, I envisioned demons atop her. Monsters. Wild animals. Men with beards and hairy thighs and cloven hooves. Now I close my ears to it. For a murderous instant I see myself appearing naked in her doorway, displaying my fangs.
Lugging the suitcase down the hall is a chore and toting it along the riverbank would be a real pain. Maybe, I think, its weight will determine my destination. I crank open the blinds and the vivid indigo of predawn invades the room. The thrift store furniture looks opulent in the half-light. I perch on the recliner, thinking that if I were Sandrine, I’d have handled my seduction more efficiently and the matter would not be in doubt. Sandrine’s stronger than me, she knows more, she’s more experienced, but how smart can she be? She got herself caught by someone as dumb as a chicken. and she intends to let Elle into her life. Elle’s quick on her feet and rat crafty. A fast learner. She’s capable of using a user like Sandrine.
Who am I kidding?
I’ll fuck up wherever I’m going.
At first light I’ll step outside and hitch a ride to Jacksonville. I can always change my mind. It comes as a revelation, the recognition that Elle is driving this indecisive decision and that it’s Louie who is reluctant to go. I thought it would be the other way around. They’re all scrambled in my head, these roles I understudy, these half-formed characters I inhabit, but I understand now that Elle is frightened of life’s sudden dips and swerves. She endangers herself only when she thinks — sometimes mistakenly — that she’s in control. Louie’s the scary one, the one who Sandrine wants, the one who wants Sandrine. She’s the dreamer, the believer. She’d tattoo a heart on her heart and be true for no reason. She could live on a dime’s worth of hope and make love with a shadow. She’s the kind of girl who’d sacrifice for love.