PETER AND I were still sitting in the chairs listening to Edward curse as he wiggled into the pants when my phone rang. It was my dad’s ringtone; my stomach dropped into my shoes with dread, but I answered it.
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”
“You’re going through with this wedding no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
I stood up and said, “Jesus, Dad, yes, I am marrying Jean-Claude no matter what you say.”
Peter startled in his chair and stared up at me like he couldn’t believe it either. Who could? My father just kept talking all the hate about the man I loved. “He’s a vampire, Anita; in the eyes of the Church he’s a suicide at best, and at worst he’s a demon-possessed corpse.”
“We’ve discussed the Catholic Church’s view on vampires for a few weeks now, Dad. Tell me something new.”
“I know the wedding is a big event, but can’t you just live with each other without getting married?”
“I can’t believe you’re encouraging me to live in sin with a vampire. I thought that was one of the things you hated about all the people in my life?”
“If it’s a choice of cohabitating with one of them or marrying one, then I know which is my preference for my daughter.”
“I am not canceling the wedding, Dad, and the fact that you keep asking is really starting to piss me off.”
“No need to use language like that, Anita.”
“The hell there isn’t. You’re the one who’s insulting me and Jean-Claude. You wouldn’t even come to St. Louis and meet him in person before passing judgment on him.”
“He’s a vampire, Anita, I don’t have to meet him.”
“Fine, then if that’s your last word I guess I’ll find someone else to give me away, or walk my own damn self down the aisle.”
“I’m coming to St. Louis to meet your fiancé.”
“What?”
“I’m coming to meet him and I’m coming to get fitted in the wedding clothes. I don’t understand why there will be multiple fittings for a tuxedo, but you told me if I don’t come now for the first fitting I can’t be in the wedding at all.”
“So, you’re going to be in the wedding, just like that?”
“No, I’m coming for the fitting so that I have the option to be in the wedding. I need to meet this . . . your fiancé. I can’t believe you’re going to marry him, but I want to meet him before you do. I want to try and have a more open mind about it.”
I just stood there holding the phone, not sure what to say. My face must have looked more shocked than I felt, because Peter stood up and hovered near me as if he wasn’t sure how I’d take a hug, but he was thinking about risking it.
“I’m sorry that my beliefs are making your wedding difficult, Anita. I want to walk you down the aisle, I just don’t know if I can hand you over to a . . . vampire.”
“I know, Dad. You raised me to believe they were monsters, inhuman, so it wasn’t murder to kill them. If you had raised me differently I would never have become a vampire executioner and never met Jean-Claude.”
“The irony is not lost on me, Anita.”
“Good, when are you coming into town?”
“I’m working on arranging for someone to cover my practice here, so next week, if it’s not too late. We’ll stay at a hotel since I know you already have guests at your house who are going to be in the wedding.”
“Okay, wow, that’s quick, you surprised me, Dad.”
“In a good way, I hope.”
“Yeah, good, but I honestly had given up on you even meeting Jean-Claude, let alone entertaining the idea of giving me away.”
“I still haven’t decided on that, but Judith showed me that article you sent about vampires not going brain-dead, which means that they don’t technically die. If medical technology can prove that vampires aren’t the walking dead, then the Church needs to know about the new studies.”
“That’s great, Dad, thank Judith for me.”
“You can thank her yourself when we get there.”
“Great, I’ll do that. Text me your flight details and I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”
“Someone, not you?”
I took a deep breath and let it out while I counted slowly. The guilt-tripping had already begun, and he wasn’t even here yet. “Dad, I’m in the middle of planning a wedding bigger than the last royal one, or that’s how it feels, plus I’m still working, and I’ve got friends here from out of town for the wedding. My schedule is a little smashed, but I or someone will meet your plane.”
“Fine, is there a hotel that you’d recommend for us?”
“We’ve got some hotel rooms reserved for out-of-town guests; when you know your exact dates let me know and I’m sure we can arrange rooms since it’s this far ahead of the wedding. I’ll text you with the information.”
“Text Judith or Josh, I’m not a big one for texting.”
“Will do. Wait, is Josh coming, too? I need to know how many rooms we’ll need.”
“Four rooms, but I’ll pay for our rooms. I don’t want to take hospitality from . . . your fiancé.”
“Wait, four rooms? You and Judith get one, Josh is two, is Andria coming?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t going to make her and Kevin sleep in separate rooms at the hotel while they’re here, are you? They’ve been living together for years, Dad.”
“No, I’m not going to make Andria and her fiancé sleep separately on the trip.”
“So, Andria and Kevin are the third room; who needs a fourth room, Dad?”
“We’ll see you next week.”
“If you hang up on me without telling me who the fourth room is for, then don’t bother coming.”
“You don’t mean that, Anita.”
“The fuck I don’t.”
“We did not raise you to use language like that.”
“Fuck it, Dad, I am not playing these passive-aggressive games with you anymore. You tell me who the fourth room is for right now.”
“I don’t take well to demands, Anita, especially from my children.”
“I’m thirty-two, Dad, I’m not a child, and as one adult to another and your hostess, I deserve to know who is coming to visit me.”
“Your grandmother wants to help convince you . . .”
“No, fuck no, hell no!”
“Anita, please don’t keep using language like that.”
“Language? Dad, that woman verbally and emotionally abused me as a child.”
“ ‘Abuse’ is a strong word, Anita.”
“Motherfucking son of a bitch!” I realized I was yelling when Edward asked what was wrong through the door. I heard Milligan and Craven, tonight’s bodyguards, keeping people out of the changing rooms. Milligan poked his head in; I waved him away and Peter tried to explain to Edward.
“Anita Katerine Blake, we raised you to be a lady.”
“You raised me to be a lot of things, Dad.”
“Your grandmother is worried about your immortal soul, and so am I.”
“Dad, if you bring Grandma Blake then you aren’t coming with an open mind about me marrying Jean-Claude, because she will close your mind to anything but her hatred and prejudice against anything supernatural.”
“Momma is a good old-school Catholic, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“She burned me when I was fourteen, so I’d know what hell felt like, Dad. She thought it would encourage me to stop using my powers to raise the dead.”
“What? You told me that was an accident.”
“No, Dad, she told you it was an accident.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You hadn’t believed me about anything else, why bother?”
“That was a second-degree burn, Anita.”
“I know, Dad, trust me, I remember.”
“You should have told me.”
“Told you that your beloved saint of a mother pinned my arm and forced a candle flame against my skin?”
“She said you were playing with the candle, and it fell.”
“You don’t get second-degree burns from a falling candle if you can move out of the way, Dad.”
He was quiet on the other end of the phone. I just let the silence build because I didn’t know what else to say. It had taken me months of therapy to own the memory, and not try to find some explanation for what happened that would exonerate my father for not protecting me. Nothing would ever exonerate my grandmother. She could rot in the hell she was so fond of for all I cared.
I heard him talking to someone on his end. “She says you hit her.”
“She was burning my arm with an open flame.”
“She had a bruise on her face, said she fell when you burned yourself. Did you hit your grandmother?”
“You taught me to fight, Dad, what else was it for except to protect myself?”
“You punched your grandmother in the face?”
I yelled, “She was burning my arm, telling me that I’d burn like that all over my body forever if I didn’t give up my evil ways. I protected myself, used what you taught me and saved myself from a third-degree burn or worse.”
“I can’t believe this happened the way you’re telling it, Anita.”
“You always believed her.” I wasn’t yelling now, I wasn’t even angry, I was tired, so tired.
“You both had marks on you, I might have believed you.”
“Might, might?” The anger was back, the anger I’d always believed had been from my mother’s death, but therapy had helped me pull memories from childhood that explained my rage. It wasn’t like I’d forgotten what happened, more like my family repeated their version so often that I just accepted it. My family loved me, even my grandmother loved me, they wouldn’t hurt me like that on purpose, right? Right? Wrong, so fucking wrong.
“Anita, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Dad?” My voice was calm, too calm. It wasn’t the right reaction to this much emotion; I knew now that it was both a protective mechanism and a destructive one. Protective because it helped me get through the moment, but destructive because the stuffed emotions that I should have been experiencing just got buried and resurfaced all over my life for years.
“I’m sorry you were hurt. I’m sorry you felt you had to strike your grandmother.”
“She plays the martyr to perfection, Dad, she always did.”
“Anita, please.”
“Please what, Dad?”
“I love you both.”
“If you say so, Dad.”
“I love you, Anita.”
“I love you, too, Dad. Thanks for teaching me how to box, because she never laid a hand on me after that. I guess I really did have a mean right hook, just like you said.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then let’s hang up, because I don’t know what to say either.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Yeah, I love you, too, Dad.” My voice was still even and unemotional, the way you’d say I love you if you didn’t mean it at all, but that wasn’t it. I did love my dad, I just wished like hell I didn’t, because if I didn’t then I could have told him to go to hell and never darken my door again. If I didn’t love my family, I could have been done with them and just been happy in the life I’d built, but I did love them and there is always that fragile part of you, that inner-child part, that wants your family to love you, to protect you even if they didn’t. Part of us wants them to say sorry and make it up to us. We want our Hallmark movie moment that almost never really happens outside of the movies. I was a U.S. Marshal with the highest number of executions in the service, I knew better than to hope like that, but hope is a lying bitch that strings you along with just enough promise that you don’t want to give up. Damn it, damn it!
Peter stood beside me not saying anything; he started to try and hug me, which would have been a mistake, but then he held out his hand to me. I didn’t take it, but he just left it there open and waiting if I wanted to hold on to something. I didn’t need to hold on to anything or anyone, and the moment I thought it I realized why I had isolated myself for so long: because that was safer. If I didn’t depend on anyone but myself, then nobody got close enough to hurt me again. I’d lived like that, protected myself like that, and been miserable and terribly alone.
Peter’s hand was just there if I wanted to take it, no demands, no force, no presumption. He was pretty damned smart for twenty. I hadn’t been that smart at twenty. Hell, I wasn’t sure I was that smart now. I took his hand, and he slowly wrapped his fingers around mine, but he didn’t try for more, he waited for me. My chest hurt; brokenhearted in books and movies is reserved for romantic love, but all kinds of love can break your heart. My eyes burned, my throat was tight like I was choking; what the hell was wrong with me?
“It’s okay, Anita,” he said, voice low and soft the way you talk jumpers off ledges, “whatever you’re feeling is okay.”
I tried to say I’m all right, or something else sensible, but what came out was a sob and what came next was another. I collapsed against Peter, and he caught me the way I’d caught him once when he was small and bad things had happened. I cried into his chest like a freaking child because bad things had happened, and no one had protected me. I had saved myself; I was still saving myself and everyone else, but in that moment I let Peter save a little piece of me, a piece that was still fourteen and hadn’t realized that my grandmother hated me more than she loved me, and that I hated her right back.