––––––––
Still feeling distraught, I packed my bag for the trip home because I planned to leave right after my lectures for the day. My parents practically lived around the corner, but I didn’t have any of my things there anymore and I was going to be staying the night.
I had tossed and turned all night, replaying my fight with Lennox over and over in my head. He’d have to start talking to me again someday. I mean, he still had Trixy’s pictures and my coat. I had fled his apartment in such a hurry that I hadn’t even taken my stuff with me.
We’d never fought before and suddenly something like this comes up. He wasn’t even gay! I might as well have castrated him. What man who likes women wants to be taken for one who prefers men? I cursed myself for my lack of tact and for being jealous of his admiration for Trixy. God, even I thought she painted better than me.
And who had he been in love with anyway? We had spoken so often about my vampire and far too little about his feelings. But that had only been because I didn’t want to upset him.
I decided to go knock on his door. The idea that he would be away for the next few days and we wouldn’t have the chance to talk things through was too awful to contemplate. I snapped shut my suitcase and went to the door. But when I opened it, my coat was hanging there on the doorknob, the bottom of it dragging on the ground.
He had hung it there without a word, hadn’t even rung the doorbell. I clamped the coat under my arm and ran to Lennox’s apartment. I reached a nervous finger toward the doorbell, took a deep breath and pressed.
I could hear the doorbell ring inside his apartment, but he didn’t come to open the door.
“Lennox!” I called out and pounded on the door. Then I tried the doorbell again. “Please open up.”
Silence.
I pressed my ear to the door. There wasn’t a sound, not even Annie’s music. Either he was hiding from me or he was long gone.
I kept an eye out for him at uni too, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I sent him a text to say I was sorry, and tried several times to call him. But all I ever got was his voicemail.
“Please, Lennox, when you hear this, call me. I need you.” He was, after all, one of my best friends. If I didn’t hear from him, it was going to be a horrible Thanksgiving.
I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for my art class and when I handed in my impressionistic painting my mind was elsewhere.
‘You paint way better when you’re not depicting vampires.’ His words were like little pin pricks piercing my heart.
Eventually I got in my car, still feeling unsettled, and drove off. I headed down to Lake Campbell, which lay about ten minutes southwest of Brookings. My parents had a house there, by the very lake where I had met my guardian angel. I felt a lump appear in my throat.
The past and the present. Whenever I drove out here, I felt so close to my vampire, it was like I was in his arms again. If only he were here now. He would comfort me about stuffing things up with Lennox, just like Lennox always comforted me about not being able to find my vampire.
Please, bring him to me. Here, now.
Back then, I was only seven and of course way too young for him. I understood that we’d needed time to be ready for one another, and I felt that the time had now arrived. If my gut feeling was anything to go by, I was ready to reunite with that part of myself that had been missing since then.
Without him, I wasn’t whole. Without him, I was gray like my pencil drawings. Without him, my heart wore the dull shades of night; it no longer knew any bright colors. He was a creature of darkness who would bring light into my life.
I turned down the street to Lake Campbell. It lay nestled between peaceful meadows and in a number of places trees lined the bank. It was a glacial lake in the middle of a prairie and on cold days like today it wasn’t hard to imagine how in primeval times the glacier had pushed across the land and left its watery traces, still visible to this day, between the grassy meadows.
Now as winter was approaching, and the nights were full of frost, the meadows were no longer a rich green, rather they were almost yellow-brown like walnuts. They reminded me of the color of my mother’s gravy.
She was probably elbow deep in preparations for tomorrow’s feast. My family took Thanksgiving very seriously, although there weren’t many of us left. My parents had bought themselves an enormous chest freezer instead of a conventional upright one and a second fridge, just for the larger roasts at holidays. The chest freezer was in use all year; its contents in summer consisted almost exclusively of ice cream. By the time the weather started turning cold most of it had been demolished, making room for the large turkey.
The second fridge was often turned off and only came to life before holidays. You couldn’t just leave a frozen turkey to thaw on the kitchen table, if you didn’t want to create a breeding ground for bacteria. Thawing the turkey took several days in the fridge. At other holidays when there was nothing to defrost, numerous platters of food were stowed away in it.
When I was young, my grandparents were still alive. Meanwhile, both sets of grandparents had passed away. Their siblings hadn’t made it to old age either. Almost every year the number of guests at our table had decreased, and with it the size of the turkey.
In the year I started school it had weighed 25 pounds. This year it would probably be half that. Of course, it was still way too much for us, but my mother stubbornly refused to buy a smaller bird. ‘In the end you’ll have me buying a duck or even a grilled chicken.’
There were still a few pounds before it would come to that. But this was a point of pride for her, even if it meant we were still eating turkey days later.
Now, as I drove along the lakeside road, I passed beautiful houses, most of which had dark brown or white wooden cladding and brown, green or gray rooves. With all these natural tones, they fit perfectly into the picturesque landscape. Even if I couldn’t see them from my side of the street, I knew there would be large glass façades, balconies and terraces overlooking the lake, because my family’s house was exactly the same. The driveways to the buildings, which branched off from the road, were often edged with bushes and shrubs.
My parents were the king and queen of this type of planting. Dad had trimmed his bushes into pyramids. Whereas my mother was proud of the size of her turkey, my father fostered a fascination with his grounds keeping. He was obsessed with each new hedge trimmer, every flashy new model of lawnmower and every new and improved fertilizer. If there had been a local gardening prize, he would have won it.
Today the lake resembled a gray slate slab. The ripples on the water looked like nicks in a rock. Canada geese flew in large flocks over the lake and cast equally gray shadows on the dull water. Year after year they passed by Lake Campbell on their journey toward the warmer south. With their light colored bellies and black necks they looked absolutely beautiful.
In the spring months they were harbingers of warmer days. Now their appearance heralded winter. They set off with the crisp, fresh fall nights and it was as though the first snow travelled with them on the trail of their plumage. They were ignorant to the plight of their brothers, the turkeys who would be in the ovens of an entire nation the next day.
Smaller sea birds swam peacefully over the water. They would stay here, and given their smaller size they had nothing to fear from my mother.
I turned down our professionally planted driveway and parked next to the already occupied garage. When I left my car, I could see my breath rising before me like little white clouds.
My father appeared in the doorway as I was heaving my easel out of the trunk. “Here, Lucy, I’ll get that, pass it over.”
I was happy to leave it to him, and he gave me a one-sided hug as he wedged it under his arm.
“Hi, Dad.”
Today he wore good woolen pants and a knitted sweater, both in blue. His blond hair was a little grayer each time I saw him, but his skin was tanned like a sailor from all the work in the fresh air on his property.
“Hello sweetheart. Say, wouldn’t you like a new easel? There must be better ones to buy.”
Smiling I shook my head. “This one works just fine, thanks.”
“It’s Christmas soon,” he reminded me.
“It still works fine.”
“Oh, okay. You would know.” As a real fan of new gadgets, he looked disappointed. I was about to start down the path to the house when he waved me over to the large three car garage. “Come here for a sec, I’ve got something new.”
He leaned my easel against the concrete wall and I lay my bag next to it.
“Look.” He pointed proudly to a monstrous riding lawnmower which had pinched my old parking spot and was the size of a small car.
“Isn’t that a bit big for your property?” I looked at the thing skeptically.
Dad looked downright horrified. “No, no! It’s just right. You sound like your mother.” He stroked the contours of the bodywork lovingly.
I made sure to nod appreciatively and tried not to picture him driving up to the gas station, smiling broadly, to chat to old Rod Nelson, who was almost as crazy as he was.
“As long as you don’t block traffic in the fast-lane,” I joked.
He wrinkled his nose. “You sound like...”
“...my mother?”
“No, all women,” he said in a grumpy voice.
I laughed out loud and he looked even more disappointed. I didn’t feel bad that I wasn’t encouraging his new passion, because firstly, if I did he would tell Mom I was on his side and thought it was all really cool, and secondly, he had never shown any understanding for my interest in vampires.
Dad gave the paint a polish with the sleeve of his sweater, even though there wasn’t a speck of dirt to be seen – in fact probably because of that. I wondered how often my mom had had to wash stains out of the sleeves of his shirts lately.
I handed him a cloth discretely and he actually checked to see whether it was clean enough to use on his lawnmower. Unbelievable! But if I thought that was bad enough, his next request sure showed me.
He nodded toward my easel. “You’ve got your painting stuff with you. Look, the wall here is so white.” He ran over and swept his arms boldly across the empty back wall of the garage. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a picture of my lawnmower hanging here?”
My mouth hung open. That had to be a joke. “Er...”
“You always do such beautiful paintings and that’s what we’re paying your tuition fees for after all. See, if you just did a little painting... like that...” He gestured, starting out small, but then let his head sway to and fro as he used his arms to indicate bigger and bigger dimensions on the wall. Once he had exhausted his entire arm span he was finally satisfied.
“Dad, I don’t have a six foot canvas with me,” I said, bringing him crashing back down to earth. “That wouldn’t be a little painting either. And I had no idea you were paying my tuition fees so I would do paintings of lawnmowers for the garage.”
I tried to imagine my art tutor’s reaction if I handed in an impressionistic work of a riding lawnmower. My father would probably drive it out to a pretty corner of the property and instruct me to capture the light of dusk. Not in the surface of the water of course, rather in the lacquer of his new darling. No way!
“With a big new easel and if I got you a suitable canvas...”
I gave him a look of disbelief and crossed my arms over my chest. “Dad, I don’t want to paint a lawnmower, nor a new hedge trimmer, nor the freshly pruned bushes, nor anything like that.” I made a sweeping gesture toward the shoreline. “I want to capture the lake.”
“Oh, but the lake is always there. It’s practically hanging in every window like a painting. But this wall is so empty.”
“It’s a garage.”
“So? Garage art could become a new trend. There are so many cool places people completely underestimate. You know Bill Gates and...”
I blew into my hands pointedly. “I’m cold. Can we go in? Look, I greeted the lawnmower before I even said hello to Mom.” To illustrate how absurd that was, I wiggled my eyebrows.
Sighing as if he had the worst lot in life, he took my easel and marched over to the house. It was only a small victory, to be sure. Just like my vampire or my single status, this matter would hang around like the big fat elephant in the room.
And, I should note, this would turn out to be the least of my worries.