Her fear had sobered her. She wiped her eyes. “I really didn’t hit her. You know I wouldn’t dare lie to you.” She stared at Doro for a moment, then shook her head. “I’ve wanted to hit her though?so many times. I can hardly even stand to go near her sober any more …” She looked at the body cooling on the floor and began to tremble.
Doro went to her. She stiffened with terror as he touched her. Then, after a moment, when she realized that he was doing nothing more than putting his arm around her, she let him lead her back to the couch.
She sat with him, beginning to relax, the tension going out of her body. When he spoke to her, his tone was gentle, without threat.
“I’ll take Mary if you want me to, Rina. I’ll find a home for her.”
She said nothing for a long while. He did not hurry her. She looked at him, then closed her eyes, shook her head. Finally she put her head on his shoulder and spoke softly. “I’m sick,” she said. “Tell me I’ll be well if you take her.”
“You’ll be as well as you were before Mary was born.”
“Then?” She shuddered against him. “No. I was sick then too. Sick and alone. If you take Mary away, you won’t come back to me, will you?”
“No. I won’t.”
“You said, ‘I want you to have a baby,’ and I said, ‘I hate kids, especially babies,’ and you said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ And it didn’t.”
“Shall I take her, Rina?”
“No. Are you going to get rid of that corpse for me?” She nudged his former body
with one foot.
“I’ll have someone take care of it.”
“I can’t do anything,” she said. “My hands shake and sometimes I hear voices. I sweat and my head hurts and I want to cry or I want to scream. Nothing helps but taking a drink?or maybe finding a guy.”
“You won’t drink so much from now on.”
There was another long silence. “You always want so damn much. Shall I give up men, too?”
“If I come back and find Mary black and blue again, I’ll take her. If anything worse happens to her, I’ll kill you.”
She looked at him without fear. “You mean I can keep my men if I keep them away from Mary. All right.”
Doro sighed, started to speak, then shrugged.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
“You made me what I am. I ought to hate your guts for what you made me.”
“You don’t hate me. And you don’t have to defend yourself to me. I don’t condemn you.” He caressed her, wondering idly how she could want life badly enough to fight as hard as she had to fight to keep it. In producing her daughter, she had performed the function she had been born to perform. Doro had demanded that much of her as he had demanded it of others, her ancestors long before her. There had been a time when he disposed of people like her as soon as they had produced the number of offspring he desired. They were inevitably poor parents and their children grew up more comfortably with adoptive parents. Now, though, if such people wanted to live after having served him, he let them. He treated them kindly, as servants who had been faithful. Their gratitude often made them his best servants in spite of their seeming weakness. And the weakness didn’t bother him. Rina was right. It was his fault?a result of his breeding program. Rina, in fact, was a minor favorite with him when she was sober.
“I’ll be careful,” she said. “No one will hurt Mary again. Will you stay with me for a while?”
“Only for a few days. Long enough to help you move out of here.”
She looked alarmed. “I don’t want to move. I can’t stand it out there where I was, by myself.”
“I’m not going to send you back to our old house. I’m just going to take you a few blocks over to Dell Street where one of your relatives lives. She has a duplex and you’re going to live in one side of it.”
“I don’t have any relatives left alive around here.”
He smiled. “Rina, this part of Forsyth is full of your relatives. Actually, that’s why you came back to it. You don’t know them, and you wouldn’t like most of them if you met them, but you need to be close to them.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say, so you won’t be by yourself.”
She shrugged, neither understanding nor really caring. “If people around here are my relatives, are they your people too?”
“Of course.”
“And … this woman I’m going to live next door to-what is she to me?”
“Your grandmother several times removed.”
Rina’s terror returned full force. “You mean she’s like you? Immortal?”
“No. Not like me. She doesn’t kill?at least not the way I do. She’s still wearing the same body she was born into. And she won’t hurt you. But she might be able to help with Mary.”
“All for Mary. She must be important, poor kid.”
“She’s very important.”
