It was around 2:00 a.m. when I let myself in through Francine’s unlocked back door. A good sign, I thought, the serious depressive’s lack of concern for self-preservation. There was a small laundry room behind the kitchen. Dank water had collected in the bottom of the washing machine and smelled a bit like a dead rat. The door to the kitchen was closed, but the stink of garbage was palpable, even before I opened the door. The kitchen sink was full of what looked like several days’ worth of dirty dishes. I went through the kitchen and the adjoining dining area into the living room. Francine Arnaud was asleep on the sofa, still in her clothes, tangled up in an old blanket. It looked like she struggled with her sleep as much as she struggled with her waking life.
I continued down the hall to the master bedroom. An undisturbed king-size bed dominated the room, giving it the look of a department store display—a space with a precisely defined function it wasn’t actually serving. Everything was clean and tidy, but the tidiness, in contrast to the rest of the house, only added to the bedroom’s haunted air. The dresser top was clear except for a small night lamp and a framed photograph of, I assumed, the dead husband, wearing a sheriff’s uniform. He was a likable looking fellow, average build, maybe a bit on the slender side, with a pleasant, friendly smile. The kind of cop Norman Rockwell might have painted, helping an old lady cross the street.
In the closet, all of the husband’s clothes were neatly hung on one side, Francine’s not so neatly on the other. There was a trunk on the floor, on the husband’s side. I was about to open it when I heard Francine’s movements as she sat up on the sofa, then her shuffling steps as she went to the bathroom, the tinkling of her pee, the flush of the toilet, and more steps coming my way. She entered the bedroom wrapped in the old blanket. Without pulling back the covers, she crawled onto the bed, curled up in a fetal position and went back to sleep.
I could have taken her blood then, rather than wait until the following night. There wasn’t any obvious advantage in waiting. It might only allow time for something unexpected to crop up and complicate matters. I wasn’t as prepared as I liked to be. I hadn’t brought a razor blade, so I would have to find a substitute: a kitchen knife, or something. But that was simple enough. Still, after thinking it over, I was inclined to stick to my original plan. I didn’t want to be in a hurry. Human beings tend to think they don’t have time to take their time. They rush through their days like their hair is on fire. It rarely occurs to them that they have it backwards. Hurrying is what they don’t have time for. Haste is a form of blindness. I reminded myself of something Montaigne wrote in one of his essays: “He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty, cannot take pleasure in drinking.”
As a vampire, drinking was one of my few real pleasures, so I left the house the way I’d come.
Chapter 2
The next evening, I was standing in the shadow of oleanders in the yard across the street from Francine’s house. A light southerly breeze drifted up from the delta. The moon was a thin crescent, low on the horizon. Half a block away, a street lamp lit the intersection, but the light didn’t penetrate much beyond the corner. Porch lights illuminated most of the houses, but Francine’s porch was unlit. The cathode-ray flicker of her old-fashioned television cast its distinctive glow on her closed curtains.
I crossed the street and made my way to the back of the house. Again, the backdoor was unlocked. The kitchen was the same mess as the night before, the odor about a day more pungent. A small herd of cockroaches grazed the counter, like the contented residents of a miniature wild animal park. In the dining area separating the kitchen from the living room, the same debris littered the table, except for a space at one end that had been cleared by shoving everything toward the center. A large kitchen knife occupied the cleared space, almost glowing with suggestive intent. I couldn’t help wondering if Francine had been contemplating using it on herself, a thought that was followed by one more self-serving: that what I had come there to do was somehow in accord with the young woman’s own intentions.
After a century as a vampire, I still had a tendency to indulge in pointless rationalizations. When humans rationalize, they’re usually trying to get away with something they might otherwise be held accountable for. They frame events in a way meant to reduce their culpability. This kind of whitewashing was completely senseless in my case, for the simple reason that I wasn’t accountable to anyone. It didn’t make any difference if Francine had been contemplating suicide. I didn’t need permission to take her blood. Yet, I would habitually come up with ways—like calling my victims “donors”—to make them complicit in their own deaths. As if I needed to convince myself that I was simply acting as a surrogate in a progression of inevitable events over which I had no control.
It wasn’t a very clever evasion, and in the end only highlighted the fact that I didn’t understand my own choices. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I wanted there to be a distinction. I wanted life and death to be somehow deserved. And I wanted there to be
