Vampires Never Get Old, page 10
Williams led police to his home, where he had initially intended to bury his daughter before the weather turned. When they arrived, the body was missing from his yard. Police believe wolves living on the heavily wooded property carried off her body before Williams and the police arrived around midnight. By that time, any tracks had been buried by the historic blizzard along with the rest of North Georgia.
“Grace’s short life and sudden death is a tragedy for her family and our community, but we can find solace in the fact that she has been saved from a lifetime of suffering,” Sheriff Darryl White said in a press conference Thursday afternoon. “We will remember Grace for her courage and her inspiring presence.”
Citing the extenuating circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, police have decided not to press charges at this time.
* * *
My “death” was a gentle affair. Quiet. Rare snow had fallen all day and through the previous night, collecting on pines, willows, magnolias, southern branches unaccustomed to bearing more weight than violent-bright pollen or summer’s full bore. As day sallowed into dusk, limbs began snapping in a staggered cascade, like firecrackers, or blood vessels bursting. Above me, my father cried. His tears fell on my face and rolled down my own dry cheeks. I clenched my eyes shut. Listened hard to the sharp breaks in the distance. Felt my heart’s jagged beat way up in my ears. My chest refused rising. He cried and cried. He didn’t wipe my face. I couldn’t wipe my face. The backup generator buzzed. Another branch broke, louder this time. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Crack. One Mississippi. Two Missi—crack. One—
The sun rose fast and miraculously hot. At fifty degrees the forest floor had turned to muddy slush. By eighty degrees the ground was straw and red clay once more, the only signs of the unprecedented snowfall being a few zones still left powerless and the half-shouted can you believe? greetings from one driveway to the next. He must have planned to bury me, but the snow threw him. Seanan said there’d been a shovel propped against the trunk when she’d found me, a few aborted attempts at holes clustered in front of the magnolia’s wide base. Did he case our property in advance, searching for the perfect spot? Or did he know instinctively that he would settle my body snug under the centuries-old tree farthest from the house?
This is how I know my father was flustered: He left my body off-center, angled carelessly askew. Maybe he considered waiting until the melt and thaw to finish. But if he waited, he would have had to carry me back to the house, and where would he have stored me? My bed? The unfinished basement that would surely flood with runoff? The garage that, despite poor insulation, would still be too warm to stop me rotting? No. I needed a grave, and he needed help providing one.
He improvised.
This is how I know my father was desperate: He believed his freezing, shaking hands when he couldn’t find a pulse. Probably didn’t even think twice before leaving me there and heading for the station.
Seanan didn’t need to check my wrist for life, of course. She could smell it on me.
My coma broke like a fever as soon as she latched on to the inside of my thigh. The femoral artery, surrounded as it is by meat and fat, provides the best anchor. You can really clamp down, which means you can suck faster, which means there’s less chance the body’ll realize it should be dead before the venom can finish recoating the circulatory system. Wrist for sampling, throat for draining, thigh for turning.
I felt her pull the blood from my body, the sudden lurch and sway how I imagine a headrush must feel when standing too quickly, only amplified by fangs and intention and finality. Seanan couldn’t have known that my heart, like all my muscles, was so much weaker than in most humans. It couldn’t pump fast enough for her venom to flood me back to living. Not without some encouragement.
Everything was lurid and pure. No thought, only bright pain and a sense of falling.
Then heat. A mouth full—so much more than a mouthful—of something thick as molasses. The taste of moonlight and brass. Tongue trying to find purchase on teeth or palette, unmoored. I had no body, only this mouth and this liquid mass filling, rushing. I gagged. My throat opened and the flood drained downward. I had swallowed so little in recent years, using a feeding tube instead, but muscle memory took over. My mouth emptied, my stomach bloated with blood and bile, and I lost consciousness again.
* * *
“You shouldn’t be here,” Seanan says behind me. I don’t startle at her sudden appearance like I might have before, back when she was the strange loner girl at church and I was the awkward high schooler parked at the end of a pew. We’d never spoken, not once in the three years since she’d shown up alone and aloof one Sunday morning. News of her spread quickly those first weeks, more rumor than anything, as it does in a small Southern congregation where anything new or different is gossip-worthy. She was an orphan, or a runaway. She drank, or dealt drugs. She’d had a baby, or an abortion. Everyone had a theory, all of which painted a ghastly portrait of sin and depravity. Everyone was so focused on their imagined backstories that they missed (or ignored) the obvious: her piety.
I watched her during services. Her devotion wasn’t ostentatious in the least—hell, she didn’t even sing during worship as far as I could tell—but something in the way she held her hands in her lap, head slightly bowed, her whole body relaxed and utterly at peace, utterly at home, convinced me she knew more of divinity than any of us could ever hope to claim. I’d been too afraid to ever greet her. And it was fear I felt, not intimidation or embarrassment, but a yearning sort of fright. I suppose that’s a contradiction in terms. How can you be attracted and repelled at the same time?
“We talked about this, Grace,” she says now, her disappointment palpable as she steps up beside me. “You shouldn’t have come again.”
My de facto gravesite had looked dispassionately somber on the news the other night. Dozens of people from town had gathered beneath the magnolia where, one week earlier, I had lain in two feet of snow in my blue flannel nightgown, dead to the world. They’d brought lilies and carnations and violets and teddy bears—so many teddy bears, some still with price tags punched in their ears. Gifts for the dead girl. A few of the attendees had carried signs with handwritten messages framing grainy photos of my face: REST IN PEACE or DANCING WITH THE ANGELS or HER FATHER CALLED HER HOME. Our neighbor, a foully sweet woman who insisted on calling me Gracie, had carried that last one. It was my favorite of the signs, as if God Himself had rung a dinner bell and I had dutifully zipped on up to Heaven. As if my earthly father hadn’t pumped a shit ton of morphine into my feeding tube instead of my dinner.
At the end of the memorial everyone had been given a cheap white candle, the disposable kind with a paper guard to stop wax dripping on your hand. The vigil had translated beautifully on film: warm pinpricks of light illuminating dark silhouettes against a bruise-blue sky. I’d watched the coverage in Seanan’s small living room on mute, shapes moving without sound, a choreography of mourning. One last pan of the crowd had shown a line of people waiting to hug my father, his eyes rimmed red from all the crying.
There is no light now. Seanan says I’ll be able to withstand the sun in fifty years or so, once I acclimate. Not so very long, she’d said. Shadowed by the new moon, the teddy bears look like alive, watchful things. And the flowers, half a wilt from rotted already, smell gray somehow. I imagine, not for the first time, how quickly they’d catch fire with help from a stray spark. The whole forest might burn before anyone noticed.
Seanan turns away from the display and faces me. “We should go, Grace.” It’s only been a few weeks, but already I’m learning to read her expressions. Her arms are crossed, head cocked, like she’s going for stern, but her eyes give her away: She’s worried.
“Have you seen him?” I ask.
“What?”
“Have you seen him?” I repeat slowly, as if to a child. It’s churlish, but I do nothing to modulate my tone. “At church? At work? Anywhere.”
She sighs, an artificial sound that only draws attention to the prior stillness of her chest. “Why?” she asks.
“This isn’t a trick question, Seanan. Have you seen him or not?”
She’s dressed for the graveyard shift as we speak: black pants pressed to pleated perfection, a crisp white dress shirt, a black velvet blazer, and her signature ruby suspenders. The occasional flashes of red contrast handsomely with the green felt that lines her card table. She’s been running games since the Irish pubs of her youth, seedy backrooms filled with loud men, warm beer, and blue-tinged smoke drifting like fog. Not much different, to hear her tell it, from the casino where she now spends nights dealing blackjack and Texas Hold’em.
“There’s nothing for you here,” Seanan says gently, reaching for my hand. Her Irish lilt grows heavier as her voice gets quieter. She sounds like a lullaby on the wind. “If you wanted closure or time to grieve, that’d be one thing. But coming here every night, asking about him all the time … It’s not healthy.”
I snatch my hand away, turn my head toward the scent of dying flowers. After a moment, I say, “How many people have you turned?”
“Pardon?”
“How many? Surely I’m not the first.”
It’s probably a rude question. I’m not well-versed in vampire etiquette yet. The silence thickens, and right when I’ve decided she won’t answer, she says, “A handful over the years. Only in situations like yours.”
“Freak blizzards and morphine overdoses?”
“Murder.” She speaks plainly, a mere description, but the word pierces through me as surely as her fangs did in the snow. “Even then, turning them is a last resort. I don’t make the choice unless the only other option is … well. I figure an unnatural life is better than an unnatural death.” She shrugs. “Sometimes I’m wrong.”
“What, they don’t want to be saved?”
I face her again. She’s staring at the base of the magnolia, too. Past it, maybe. I wonder who turned her all those centuries ago. I wonder if she wanted to be saved.
“That’s the thing,” she says. “One man’s salvation is another’s damnation.” Her words linger between us, almost tangible in the cool night air. She kneels so we’re at the same eye level, which feels condescending somehow, though I know she means to be comforting. “They could still press charges.”
I stiffen. “They won’t.”
“They could.”
“If they wanted to arrest him, they would have done it as soon as he walked into that station saying he killed his daughter. But they didn’t. They let him go home.” My voice rises, not quite to yelling, but the dark has a way of amplifying everything. “There was no police tape around the house. No handcuffs. No questioning the neighbors. They patted his back and offered their condolences. They let him stand at this makeshift memorial and cry.”
My hands hurt. Why do my hands hurt? I look down to find curled fists. I’ve dug bloody crescents into my palms. I’m still not used to this new strength. Vampirism is almost the exact mirror of the disease I had in life, strengthening instead of weakening my muscles. I tried to lift my head when I woke after turning and nearly snapped my neck from the utter lack of resistance. I still can’t walk, of course. No amount of increased strength will ever stretch out tendons strung taut as tightrope from years of disuse, and thank God for that.
I don’t think I could’ve handled losing that much of myself.
I swipe my palms on my jeans. Blood seeps into the fabric’s dense weave, spreading from thread to thread.
“You have infinity ahead of you,” Seanan says. “Lifetime upon lifetime. Would it help to focus on that instead? The future?”
She looks so hopeful. Three hundred years old and still her face is gentle and lovely as dawn. How has she stayed so warm for so long when my entire being is frozen solid?
“His original plan was to turn off my oxygen, you know. Said that was the easiest option, just flick a switch and let nature take its course.”
“Why didn’t he?” Seanan asks.
I turn my palms to the night’s meager light: healed, the stain on my jeans the only proof that I can still bleed.
“He thought it would be too hard for him.” My voice comes out steady, if distant, like I’m hearing myself from another room. “He planned to let me slowly suffocate to death but didn’t think he’d survive it. Morphine was kinder, he said, like going to sleep. ‘Just putting my little girl to sleep one more time.’
“Once the drug took hold, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift my hand or turn my head. Every inch of me felt impossibly heavy, like my veins were filled with lead. I couldn’t speak, either. Couldn’t scream, although maybe that was more panic than anything. The only thought that made it through the haze and the terror was…” I take a deep, ragged breath and choke on the burn in my useless lungs. I keep forgetting breathing’s optional now. “I thought, I have to tell him something’s wrong. He has to get help.”
Seanan reaches tentatively for my hand again. I don’t pull away. She rubs her thumb over the life line on my palm, where a few minutes earlier there had been four bloody half-moons.
“That’s when he told me what he’d done,” I say. “When I couldn’t do anything with the panic and confusion and rage and fear except close my eyes and try to be anywhere else. That’s when he told me.”
We stay like that for a few minutes: hands clasped, her kneeling in the red clay, me in this rinky-dink manual chair Seanan stole from the casino that hurts every joint and muscle in my body. Over her shoulder, the teddy bears watch.
“Sunday morning, front row,” she says softly, and I realize she’s answering my earlier question. “His name was first on the prayer requests. Deacon Bell asked God to grant him strength and comfort in the face of such a terrible loss.”
I stare at the pile of tokens left for the dead girl. She feels so far away. Maybe the wolves really did take her. Maybe she fed a whole den of them, kept them warm through the snowstorm. Maybe she’s running with the wolves even now.
“What will you do?” Seanan asks.
“What any good daughter would do,” I say. “Repay his kindness.”
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
“Mercy Killing” Sparks National Conversation About Caregiver Supports
Following the recent death of Grace Williams, 17, at the hands of her father, Grant Williams, 53, a conversation around the lack of support available for caregivers of severely impaired children has occurred. Grace Williams, who was born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease, was wheelchair-bound and needed intensive, round-the-clock care. Her father, raising and caring for the teenager alone since his ex-wife filed for divorce a decade ago, cited the enormous burden as one of the reasons he decided to enact what many are calling “an act of mercy.”
“More than anything, I wanted Grace to have some peace. That was the main thing. Her life was constant misery, and no one can bear to watch their little girl go through that,” Williams said recently in an interview with Atlanta’s 11Alive News. “But people don’t realize how hard it is to be the sole source of care. Trying to hold down a job, put food on the table, and take care of Grace? It was exhausting. Unsustainable.”
He has talked publicly in recent weeks about the stunning lack of support available to caregivers of children like Grace. While some organizations offer financial help for medical equipment and doctors’ visits, there is little in the way of emotional support or respite services.
A few disability-focused advocacy groups have condemned Williams’s actions and the public response. “Our sympathies are with Grace Williams, whose life was senselessly and cruelly taken,” the spokesperson for All Access, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, told the AJC in an email.
“It’s criminal, what we put parents through,” Williams continued in the 11Alive interview. “Just criminal to expect these parents to sacrifice everything for these poor kids and get no help whatsoever. It’s not right.”
Williams is reportedly looking into creating a foundation in his daughter’s name to address these issues, though he has not yet made an official announcement.
* * *
My room tastes stale. The air is heavy on my tongue, like it’s already clumping into forgotten dust. Everything is exactly as I left it. Desk a messy pile of books and journals and loose-leaf papers. Apple-cinnamon candle on the windowsill. Humidifier half-filled with water. He didn’t even bother to make my bed. The comforter is bunched at the foot, sheets rumpled. You can see the shape of my body on the mattress, a permanent depression from years of sleeping in the same spot and the same position night after night. The sight makes me feel more exposed than if I were naked.
“I’m gonna need some help, if you don’t mind.” I nod toward my chair sitting in the corner. He also hasn’t bothered to unplug the charger, which works in my favor. Probably the battery would have been fine since no one’s been using it all this time, but seeing the steady green light that means fully charged is a relief nonetheless.
“Of course,” Seanan says. “Tell me what you need.”
The transfer from awful replacement chair to my trusty friend is smooth. Lifting me is nothing for Seanan, my weight negligible even with the newly added muscle density. She sets me down carefully and waits for instruction. That she doesn’t assume what I need, that letting me lead is apparently instinctive to her … “Thank you,” I say.
We pack a few changes of clothes, some books, my pillows. The rest I leave. It’s all replaceable, this dead girl’s stuff. With that done, we move into the dining room. All there is to do now is wait. I was worried he might beat us here since he usually comes home straight from work. Well, usually came home straight from work, but that was when he had to be here for me. Who knows what his schedule is like now? Maybe he heads to the bar or a friend’s house or wherever else people go who don’t have somewhere to be. We might have hours to kill.
