Part 29 (2/2)

”I can't feel anything right now,” Caxton tried to explain. She didn't know if the grief was just too big and she was defending herself from it or if Reyes was in control of her emotions. To him Deanna's death was only regrettable in that all that blood was going to waste.

It helped. There were a lot of phone calls to make and a lot of questions to answer. Somebody had to be calm and in charge. Elvin wasn't home. She left a message for him to call her back. Someone came and asked her about organ donation. She told them to take what they could. Deanna was wrapped up, taken away. They brought her back-her tissues weren't good candidates for donation. She'd been dead too long for the major organs to be useful and her skin and eyes weren't the right type. Caxton called Elvin again. Someone from the transplant center came down and demanded to know who she thought she was, offering up Deanna's body parts for donation, when she wasn't even a relative. That conversation took far too long. For perhaps the first time she actually wished she'd bothered to get a civil union. It wouldn't have given her any more rights but it might have forestalled a few of the less comfortable questions. She finally got hold of Elvin and he said he would come right away. He would bring Deanna's mother. Caxton flipped shut her phone and put it away. She turned around and there was Clara.

”How long have I been making phone calls?” she asked. She had a feeling a lot more time had pa.s.sed than she was aware of. She was in a lounge, for one thing. Hadn't she just been in the morgue? Somehow she'd been moved to a well-heated lounge with a big window and comfortable chairs and lots of tattered magazines. Maybe Clara had brought her there.

”Well, I already went and had lunch. I got you a sandwich.” Caxton took the offered bag and opened it up. Tuna salad, white flesh in white mayonnaise on white bread. It didn't appeal to her at all. She wanted roast beef and felt almost childishly peevish about it-why couldn't Clara have gotten her roast beef? Why couldn't she go right now and get a big rare steak, all full of juice, of, of-of blood?

She clamped down on that thought immediately and started eating the tuna sandwich. She was not going to let the vampire live vicariously through her.

”Listen, there's something I haven't heard anyone mention, but I think it's important,” Clara said. She frowned and pursed her lips and finally spat it out. ”Do we need,” she said, p.r.o.nouncing each word separately, ”to consider, well, cremation.”

Caxton blinked rapidly. ”You mean for Deanna?” she asked. ”Of course you do. I mean, n.o.body else is dead right now. Yeah. Right. Cremation.” She didn't so much think it through as let it come bubbling up in her head. ”No.”

”No,” Clara repeated, tentatively.

”No. You saw all that blood. No vampire would leave so much blood on a body. It was just an accident, Clara. Just a stupid f.u.c.ked-up accident, the kind that still happens, you know? Not everybody gets killed by monsters.”

Clara nodded supportively, then opened her mouth to speak again. She stopped when the door behind her burst open. An enormous man with thin, straight red hair that fell past his shoulders came storming in. He wore a sheepskin coat and a look of absolute befuddlement. Behind him followed a woman with hair dyed to match his though it showed grey at the roots. Her face was a mess of red blotches as if she'd been crying, or drinking. Most likely both, Caxton knew.

”Who's this, your new girlfriend?” Deanna's mother asked.

”h.e.l.lo, Roxie,” Caxton tried. She glanced up at the big redheaded man and her heart beat for the first time in hours. ”Oh, Elvin, I'm so sorry.” He nodded his ma.s.sive head. ”Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot,” he said. He looked around as if unsure of where he was.

”I'm going to go now,” Clara said. ”Jesus, don't leave on my account.” Roxie Purfleet sneered at Caxton. ”You work fast, huh? One of them's not even cold and you're on to the next.”

Clara slipped past her without further comment. Caxton sat the Purfleets down and started to explain what had happened.

Deanna was dead, truly dead. It wasn't hard to accept on a factual basis. Caxton could hold the knowledge in her head, she could walk around it, see it from all angles. She could see the repercussions, the paperwork she would need to file. She would have to cancel all of Deanna's magazine subscriptions, for instance. She would have to change their insurance coverage, a precariously balanced set of doc.u.ments which allowed Caxton to pay for Deanna's medical bills with her own state employee insurance. That didn't begin to explain how she felt, however. The nitty gritty details of Deanna's life didn't add up to what had just happened. Deanna was dead. It was like the color blue had stopped existing. Something Caxton had always counted on, something she had built an entire life around, wasn't there anymore.

It wasn't fear of loneliness or loss of companions.h.i.+p that bothered her most. It was this existential hole in her world view. Deanna was gone-forever-and it had happened just like that, in the time it took to say out loud: Deanna was dead.

She found herself driving home, much, much later, an hour or two after sunset. Roxie Purfleet had taken over her duties at the hospital, convinced she knew best what her daughter wanted done with her mortal remains. She'd refused to let Caxton even help plan the memorial service. Deanna's body would go back to Boalsburg, where she'd been born. Caxton had listened a million times to Deanna moan and b.i.t.c.h about the place, about how she'd longed to get away from it as early as elementary school. But that's where she would be forever, now.

Driving-Caxton was driving, she needed to focus on that. She watched the yellow lines on the road but soon found herself fixated on them, unable to look away. She forced herself to check her mirrors and her blind spot.

Deanna was dead. She wanted to call Deanna up and talk to her about what had just happened. She wanted to sit on the couch with the TV turned off for a second and just talk about what it all meant. Who else could she trust with such monumental news? Who else could she go to first?

Driving. Right. Caxton squinted as a semi roared past in the other direction, its headlights smearing brilliant light across her face. She blinked away the afterimages and focused on the car, on the speedometer, on the gas gauge. Anything to keep her in the here and now.

Elvin, who was perhaps the only person in the world with less of a grip on what had happened than herself, had been kind enough to drive her back to Troop H headquarters where she'd left her car. It hadn't been touched since she'd suited up to get onboard the Granola Roller. She'd gone up and touched the patrol car's metal skin as if it were a special machine that could take her back in time, to before Deanna died, to before she became half of a vampire. Then she'd turned around because she felt Elvin behind her, just standing there. His body sort of hovered halfway between leaving and coming closer, a ma.s.s being turned this way and that by some sort of emotional physics. Looming was the word that came to mind. He loomed over her and frowned, deep and long, and finally spoke.

”She really loved you,” he said. ”She swore it. When I first found out she was a f.a.g I was going to cream her, but then she said she really loved you, and I figured that made it okay. I mean, you don't pick who you love. n.o.body does.”

”I suppose not,” Caxton had replied, unsure what he wanted. A hug? A reminiscence of his sister?

”Thanks for the ride,” she'd said, and he had nodded, and that was that.

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