TWENTY-SIX
Here’s the thing about vampire hearing. We can hear a pin drop, but that’s boring. (Who lurks in doorways listening for pins to drop, anyway? Creeps. That’s who.) We can hear whispered conversations a floor away, sometimes a block away if the wind is right. We can hear a car pull in from the attic, or pull out from the basement. We can hear when Marc is experimenting and when he’s just pacing, desperately wanting something to keep his dead brain busy. We can hear the babies snuffling in their sleep, we can hear them wake up, and we can hear Jess and DadDick stumbling through the house to warm bottles and go to them. Sometimes we can hear heartbeats.
But a lot of the time we don’t want to. Speaking for myself, if I’m concentrating on hate-watching old eps of Helix (they’ve got to stop giving the Syfy channel money to make movies), I don’t want to be distracted by Tina muttering under her breath two floors away as she struggles to reconcile one of SinCorp’s many P&Ls.
So you learn to tune it out. Or try to. I could never get the hang of it until Tina took me aside and said, “Airport,” like that was an answer.
It was! But it took me a while to get it. She pointed out that when you’re in an airport, you’re walking to your gate while lugging an overnight bag or a laptop, counting gates and glancing from café to bar to Starbucks to figure out what you want to drink before the flight boards. And there are hundreds of people around you, milling and chatting and running and walking and it’s busy all around, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not upsetting or overwhelming or even interesting. It’s just how airports are. And you don’t care, so you don’t hear them. You can just tune out all those conversations that have nothing to do with you and focus on getting to your gate with your Green Tea Frappuccino intact. And once I grasped what Tina was trying to explain to me, it became easy. I didn’t have to hear the babies’ heartbeats, or Marc’s pacing, unless I wanted to.
All that to say that I did not need vampire hearing to hear Jessica’s shriek when we walked in the front door, courtesy of her kid’s keys: “Someone better find my babies right goddamned now or I’m going to get my husband’s guns; call my lawyer; and take one of Sinclair’s shiny, sexy cars—and everyone in the city of St. Paul will have a very bad day!”
The twins exchanged a look and started to sprint and I had great respect for their reckless bravery. I, meanwhile, had to actively resist the urge to scuttle back outside to the driveway, or at least cower in the hall, and followed.
“Jessica, be reasonable,” my husband was pleading. “Leave the automobile out of it.”
“Stupid, we’re so stupid.” I could hear every bitter word, and if the twins weren’t in front of me, I would have crossed the length of the mansion in a heartbeat. It broke my heart to hear the savage self-hate in my friend’s voice. “We knew it had happened before and we just—we just sat around until it happened again. And I know you texted Betsy, but what do you think she can do, exactly? We’ve figured we can’t call the cops, but nobody’s dropped off a ransom note, nobody’s made a demand, our babies are just—just gone. Again! And even if we get them back, how long until they go missing again?” Her voice caught on sobs. “I c-can’t live like this. W-won’t live like this. It’s too m-much—who the hell are you?”
This because the girl had gotten to the swinging kitchen door first, darted through, and threw herself into her mother’s arms. I heard Jessica grunt and stagger back—the twins had their father’s long legs—and got to the kitchen in time to see her arms automatically go around the intruder/daughter.
“It’s okay, Mama.” Jessica’s daughter squeezed her in a fierce hug, eliciting a pained squeak, then pulled back and held Jess at arm’s length. “We’re right here. We’re not missing. We’re here. It’s—nnnfff.”
Her brother, right on her heels, and that was twice in five seconds Jessica nearly went sprawling courtesy of her exuberant offspring. DadDick was on his feet and moving to pull them apart. “Hey! Get off her, both of you. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“We didn’t use my house keys,” I replied, “I can tell you that.”
My own. As ever, you arrive in the nick of time. My husband’s deep relief came through like a baseball bat through fog.
Dude, you are not even going to believe the story behind these two.
Doubtless. Stop calling me dude.
“We’re not missing.” Jessica’s daughter was patting her cheeks, the way little kids do when they’re reaching out for someone they love, trying to get their attention. “We’re not stolen. We’re here, Mama, and it’s all fine.”
“This’ll be tough to chew, Mom, but we’re yours. Remember your freak pregnancy? It resulted in freak kids.” The exuberant teen spread his arms wide. “Ta-da!”
“But we’re your freak kids,” his sister said, snuggling into Jess for a hug, which my dazed friend automatically returned. “And there’s nothing to be scared of. We’re here even when we aren’t. It’s our nature.”
On the one hand, I had to give them points for how quickly they were calming my pal. I hadn’t thought that was possible without heavy tranquilizers. On the other, the things they were telling her made no sense, so it shouldn’t have calmed Jess at all. But I didn’t interrupt or try to correct them. I was too busy trying to think up a nonalarming way to explain what was happening.
“We can prove it.” They were now directing their comments to their father, who had stopped trying to separate them but looked like someone had punched him in the kidney and followed it up with a gut punch. “We know everything about you guys. You’ve told us so many boring stories of your childhood. Boring because of the repetition!” the boy hastily clarified. “Not boring because we don’t actually care how your childhoods were grueling and how good we have it and how when you were a little boy you had to sell tractors uphill in the snow while waiting for your trust fund to mature.”
Jessica took in a deep breath, waited a couple of seconds, then let it out, along with, “I believe you.”
“Oh, an example? Okay, when you and Dad were young and dumb—you believe us?”
“You, um. You look like a picture of my grandma. You look exactly like her. This might sound hard to believe, but for a second I thought you were her, time traveling to the future for some strange supernatural-related reason.”
“It sounds one hundred percent believable.”
The boy slapped his forehead. “Grammy Midge! We should have thought of that straight off.” He turned to his father. “Elephant in the room? I look like her, too—it’s fine, it’s okay to say. Damn these delicate features! Why couldn’t I have inherited your swimmer’s shoulders, at least?”
“It’s true. It’s really—you didn’t get taken. You didn’t. You’re okay. You’re—you’re nice, too.” Jessica burst into tears and elicited squawks as she squeezed the twins in a ferocious double hug. “And you’re not freaked out. You’re worried about your dad and me. You’re not surprised by . . .” She waved a hand at the kitchen, encompassing the zombie, the vampires, the king and queen of same, the evidence of an emergency smoothie session, the freezer practically bulging with bottles of strangely flavored vodka, the other freezer stuffed with dead mice. “By this. Any of it. You’re okay. You’re really okay.”
“Thank God you’re finally here.”
Finally? So I’d been gone longer than my time in Hell again. At least the others were taking it in stride, more because they were used to dealing with my incompetence than because they were resilient. Or numbed to the ongoing strangeness of their lives.
“It was like a season two Game of Thrones flashback,” Marc whispered to me. “Y’know, when Dany finds out someone stole her babies? ‘Where are my dragons?!’ That whole season was just her yelling about her dragons.”
“Time and place, Marc,” I replied, making shushing motions, but alas. Too late.
“If you don’t stop with the GoT references, I will punch your face into the back of your skull,” Jess threatened in a way that seemed more than plausible. “There won’t be enough Advil in the world to fix the resulting headache.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The zombie gulped.
“Stop scaring our zombie. And you two . . . how? How are you even here?” DadDick still looked stunned.
“Here it is, Big Papa, when a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes they tell the vampires they live with to get gone for a while so they can practice private coitus—”
I burst out laughing, a slave to the boy’s excellent smart-assery.
“You can skip the technical details,” DadDick said, relaxing for the first time since we’d blitzed into the kitchen. I figured he, like me, had seen how like Jessica these two were, and it was almost better than a DNA test. “How are you doing this? Is it time travel? Oh. Huh.”
“I know, right?” I asked. “You hear yourself say something that ridiculous and unreal, and you’re only surprised that you’re not surprised.”
“Exactly.” He turned back to the teens. “Is someone doing it to you?”
Vigorous nods. And the twins looked over at me.
“Whoa.” I held up both hands like I was being arrested. Which would be the least of my problems right now. “Do not. Nope. You twerps aren’t pinning this on me.”
“We wouldn’t, except for how it’s all your fault.”
And like that, all the happiness was sucked out of the room.