Lenkya sent a good-bye note with attachments from the house and wives as well as a copy of her original house contract with the appropriate clause highlighted that showed the Granny now had no rights to access the house or its inhabitants. The Granny was reading it and getting into Malik’s car when the house drew in its anchors and took off.
The Granny gave Malik a piece of toffee as he drove back to his estate. The toffee was good. Later, memory would say it had been the best the children had ever had.
YOUNGER WOMEN
Karen Joy Fowler
Jude knows that her daughter Chloe has a boyfriend. She knows this even though Chloe is fifteen and not talking. If Jude were to ask, Chloe would tell Jude that it’s none of her business and to stop being such a snoop. (Well, if you want to call it snooping to go through Chloe’s closets, drawers, and backpack on a daily basis, check the history on her cell phone and laptop, check the margins of her textbooks for incriminating doodles, friend her on Facebook under a pseudonym so as to access her page—hey, if you want to call that snooping, then, guilty as charged. The world’s a dangerous place. Isn’t getting less so. Any mother will tell you that.)
So there’s no point asking Chloe. She talks about him to her Facebook friends—his name is Eli—but the boy himself never shows. He doesn’t phone; he doesn’t email; he doesn’t text. Sometimes at night Jude wakes up with the peculiar delusion that he’s in the house, but when she checks, Chloe is always in her bed, asleep and alone. The less Jude finds out the more uneasy she becomes.
One day she decides to go all in. “Bring that boy you’re seeing to dinner this weekend,” she tells Chloe, hoping Chloe won’t wonder how she knows about him or, if she does, will chalk it up to mother’s intuition. “I’ll make pasta.”
“I’d rather die,” Chloe says.
Chloe’s Facebook friends are all sympathy. Their mothers are nosy pains-in-the-butt, too. Her own mother died when Jude was twenty-three, and Jude misses her terribly, but she remembers being fifteen. Once when she’d been grounded, which also meant no telephone privileges, her mother had left the house and Jude had called her best friend Audrey. And her mother knew because there was a fruit bowl by the phone and Jude had fiddled with the fruit while she talked.
So Chloe’s friends are telling her to stand her ground and yet, come Saturday, there he is, sitting across the table from Jude, playing with his food. It was Eli’s own decision to come, Chloe had told her, because he’s very polite. Good-looking, too, better than Jude would have guessed. In fact, he’s pretty hot.
Jude’s unease is still growing. In spite of this, she tries for casual. “Chloe says you’re new to the school,” she says. “Where are you from?”
“L.A.” Eli knows what he’s doing. Meets her eyes. Smiles. Uses his napkin. A picture of good manners.
“Don’t go all CSI on him, Mom. He doesn’t have to answer your questions. You don’t have to answer her questions,” Chloe says.
“I don’t mind. She’s just being your mom.” And to Jude, “Ask me anything.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“What year were you born in?”
“Nineteen ninety-four,” he says and there isn’t even a pause, but Jude’s suspicions solidify in her mind with an audible click like the moment in the morning just before the alarm goes off. No wonder he doesn’t text. No wonder he doesn’t email or call on the cell. He probably doesn’t know how.
“Try again,” she tells him.
Vampire. Plain as the nose on your face.
Of course, Chloe knows. She’s flattered by it. Any fifteen-year-old would be (and probably lots before her have been). Jude’s been doing some light reading on the current neurological research on the teenage brain. She googles this before bed. It helps her sleep, not because the news is good, but because she can tell herself that the current situation is only temporary. She and Chloe used to be so close before Chloe started hating her guts.
The teenage brain is in a state of rapid, but incomplete development. Certain important linkages haven’t been formed yet. “The teenage brain is not just an adult brain with fewer miles on it,” the experts say. It is a whole different animal. In quantifiable ways, teenagers are actually incapable of thinking straight.
Not to mention the hormones. Poor Chloe. Eli’s hotness is getting even to Jude.
Of course, none of this can be said. Chloe thinks she’s all grown-up, and if Jude so much as hinted that she wasn’t, Chloe would really lose it. Jude has a quick flash of Chloe at five, her hair in fraying pigtails, hanging from the tree in the backyard by her hands (monkey), by her knees (bat), shouting for Jude to come see. If Chloe really were grown up, she’d wonder, the same way Jude wonders, what sort of immortal loser hangs out with fifteen-year-olds. No one loves Chloe more than Jude, no one ever will, but really. Why Chloe?
“Mom!” says Chloe. “Butt the fuck out!”
“It’s okay,” Eli says. “I’m glad it’s in the open.” He stops pretending to eat, puts down his fork. “Eighteen sixteen.”
“And still haven’t managed to graduate high school?” Jude asks.
The conversation is not going well. Jude has fetched the whiskey so the adults can drink and sure enough, it turns out there are some things Eli can choke down besides blood. Half a glass in, Jude wonders aloud why Eli can’t find a girlfriend his own age. Does he prefer younger women because they’re so easy to impress, she wonders. Is it possible no woman older than fifteen will go out with him?
Eli is drinking fast, faster than Jude, but showing no effects. “I love Chloe.” Sincerity drips off his voice like rain from the roof. “You maybe don’t understand how it is with vampires. We don’t choose where our hearts go. But when we give them, we never take them back again. Chloe is my whole world.”
“Very nice,” Jude says, although in fact she finds it creepy and stalkerish. “Still, in two hundred years, you must have collected some ex’s. Ever been married? How old were they when you finally cleared off? Ancient women of seventeen?”
“Oh. My. God.” Chloe is staring down into her sorry glass of ice tea. “Get a clue. Get a life. I knew you’d make this all about you. Ever since Dad left, everyone has to be as fucking miserable as you are. You just can’t stand to see me happy.”
There is this inconvenient fact—eight months ago Chloe’s dad walked out to start a new life with a younger woman. Two weeks ago, he called to tell Jude he was going to be a father again.
“Again? Like you stopped being a father in between?” Jude asked frostily and turned the phone off. She hasn’t spoken to him since nor told Chloe about the baby, though maybe Michael has done that for himself. It’s the least he can do. Introduce her to her replacement.
“This is why I didn’t want you to fucking meet her,” Chloe tells Eli. Her face and cheeks are red with fury. She has always colored up like that, even when she was a baby. Jude remembers her, red and sobbing, because the Little Mermaid DVD had begun to skip, forcing her to watch the song in which the chef is chopping the heads off fish over and over and over again. Five years old and already a gifted tragedian. “Fix it, Mommy,” she’d sobbed. “Fix it or I’ll go mad.” “I knew you’d try to spoil everything,” Chloe tells Jude. “I knew you’d be a bitch and a half.”
“You should speak more respectfully to your mother,” Eli tells her. “You’re lucky to have one.” He goes on. Call him old-fashioned, he says, but he doesn’t care for the language kids use today. Everything is so much coarser than it used to be.