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Authors: Susan Hubbard

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“We’re stopping in Charleston first,” she said. “I need to see the rents.”

“The rents?”

“Pa
rents,”
she said. And she turned the radio on, loud.

Within an hour we were in Charleston, and Jane stopped the car at a wrought-iron gate. “It’s me,” she said into a speaker, and the gate swung open.

We drove up a winding driveway bordered by tall trees studded with enormous dewy white blossoms; they’re called Southern magnolias, I learned later. The car stopped before a white brick mansion. I suppose I should have been surprised that she was rich, but somehow I wasn’t.

We ended up spending the night. Jane’s parents were tight-faced blond-haired middle-aged people who talked and talked about money. Even when they talked about family — Jane’s brother, a cousin, an uncle — they talked about how much money they had, and what they were spending it on. They fed us shrimp and grits, and enormous crabs whose shells they smashed with silver mallets in order to suck out the meat. They asked questions about Jane’s schoolwork, which she answered ambiguously: “Not really,” or “Kind of,” or “Whatever.” She made a point of checking text messages on her cell phone several times during dinner.

Jane treated them even more contemptuously than I’d treated Joshua. By the next morning, I understood why she shoplifted: it was her way of expressing further contempt for her parents and their materialism.

Nonetheless, when her father handed her a wad of bills as we left, she took them and stuffed them into a pocket of her jeans.

“Well, that’s done,” she said. She spat out the window, and we drove on.

Jane took the Savannah Highway, Route 17, out of Charleston, and after we left the city I got my first sight of the “Low Country.” On either side of the road, reddish-brown marsh grass rippled in the wind. Gray creeks shone like veins of silver in the fields of grass. I rolled down the car window and breathed in the air, which smelled of damp flowers. It made me a little light-headed. I opened my backpack to take a swallow of tonic.

“What
is
that stuff, anyway?” Jane asked.

“Medicine for my anemia.” I lied without even thinking, these days. The bottle was three-quarters empty. I wondered what I’d do when it was gone.

Jane picked up her cell phone and called Paul. I tuned out her voice.

We passed a sign for Bee Ferry Landing and a gift shop called Blue Heron; the names made me think of my mother. I hadn’t thought of her much in Asheville, but this landscape evoked her, made me imagine her as a girl, growing up amid the marshes and the bittersweet smells. Had she driven down this road when she ran away from us? Had she seen the same signs I was seeing? Had she felt happy, as if she were coming home?

We passed the Savannah River, sapphire-blue, and arrived downtown by lunchtime.

Jane set down her cell phone. “You hungry?” She looked eager to be on her way back to Asheville, and Paul.

“No.” Of course I was hungry, but not for fast food, or even shrimp and grits. “You can let me out anywhere.”

She pulled over near an intersection. I thanked her, but she waved her hand. “The Lounge Wizards will miss you,” she said. “And God, Joshua will probably kill himself.”

“I hope not.” I knew she was joking. I also knew Joshua might want to do such a thing. But I didn’t think he was capable of carrying it out.

We both said “See you,” without conviction.

I watched the gray sedan drive away, much too fast, and I wished her well. We hadn’t been friends, really, but she’d offered me what companionship she could. For that I was grateful.

Chapter Eleven

I
n Savannah I learned how to be invisible.

That first day I spent hours walking through the city, savoring the cool green squares, the fountains, the statues, the church bells. I memorized the names of streets and squares so that I wouldn’t get lost, and I imagined the city’s original architect trying to calculate how much street should lie between squares in order to offer respite from the humid heat. I commended him for an excellent design.

It was late May, and people passed through the city wearing cotton dresses or short-sleeved shirts, and carrying their jackets. My black trouser suit looked out of place among them. I sat on a bench in a square sheltered by live oak trees, and I watched the people as they walked past. Perhaps one of them was my aunt. I had no way of recognizing her. I could tell the tourists from the locals by the way they walked and by what they looked at; the locals moved with an easy familiarity, a languorous stroll.

In Savannah I began to wonder:
How does one vampire recognize another? Is there a secret gesture, a nod or wink or hand movement by which she proclaims herself “one of us”? Or does some instinct allow for instant identification? If I met another vampire, would he or she welcome or shun me?

As the afternoon waned, I sat on my bench and watched for shadows. Everyone who walked by cast a shadow. I did not. Either Savannah held few vampires besides me, or all of them were inside, waiting for nightfall.

I made a pilgrimage to Colonial Cemetery, but I didn’t go inside the gates. Instead I looked for the house where my mother had lived. And I think I found it: a three-story red brick house with green shutters and black-iron-framed balconies. I stared up at the balcony facing the cemetery, and I imagined my father sitting there with a woman — a faceless woman. My mother.

As I walked away, I looked down at the brick sidewalk, at the patterns etched in the bricks. They weren’t spirals — they were concentric circles, like little target signs. My father’s memory wasn’t perfect after all, or else his pattern dyslexia was to blame.

A few blocks later I saw an old hotel with wrought-iron balconies overhanging the street, and for a moment I fantasized about checking in, having a bath, spending a night sleeping on crisp clean sheets. But I had fewer than a hundred dollars left, and I didn’t know how or when I’d have more.

I looked into the hotel’s first-floor windows: a lobby, then a bar and restaurant. At the bar sat a tall man in a dark suit, his back toward me, and he lifted a glass that caught the candlelight and gleamed a familiar dark red.

Picardo
. Suddenly, I missed my father terribly. Was he sitting now in his leather chair, raising a similar cocktail glass? Did he miss me? He must be worried, more worried than ever before. Or, did he know what I’d been doing? Could he read my thoughts from that distance? The notion alarmed me. If he knew what I’d done, he would despise me.

The mirror behind the bar reflected the cocktail glass — but not the man who held it. As if he sensed my stare, he turned around. Quickly I walked on.

The sky had darkened by the time I found the river. My feet ached, and my hunger turned to dizziness. I walked among the tourists on River Street, past gaudy shops and restaurants that promised raw oysters and beer. When I saw an Irish imports shop, I stopped walking. In my mind, I saw my father go inside and come out with a shawl, which he wrapped around the faceless woman.

My neck tingled — a sensation I hadn’t had in so long that at first I didn’t recognize it. Then I knew. Someone was watching me. I looked in all directions, but saw only couples and families, intent upon themselves. I took a deep breath and looked around again, more slowly. This time my senses focused on a stone staircase, then on the first step, where mist from the river seemed to have gathered.

So you’re invisible
, I thought.
Are you the same
other
who watched me at home?

I heard a laugh, but no one around me was laughing.

My face felt hot.
It’s not funny
.

And for the first time, I tried to make myself invisible.

It’s not difficult. Like deep meditation, it’s a matter of concentration; you breathe deeply and focus your awareness on the immediate moment, the experience of here and now, then you let it all go. Your body’s electrons begin to slow down as you absorb their heat. Deflecting light feels as if you’re drawing all energy into your deepest core. A sense of freedom and lightness spread through me; later I learned that it’s called
qi
or
chi
, a Chinese word for “air” or “life force.”

As a means of proof, I held my hands before my face. I saw nothing. I looked down at my legs, and saw right through them. The tailor-made trousers had disappeared. So had my backpack. My father’s claims about metamaterials had not been exaggerated.

After that, I had no sense of the
other
. I moved on, down River Street, as if I were floating. I walked into a restaurant, toward the kitchen, where plates of food waited to be collected and served. No one even looked in my direction. I took a plateful of rare filet mignon, went out the back door with it, and sat on a stone wall to devour it, using my hands as utensils. A few minutes later, two servers from the restaurant came out to smoke cigarettes, and one of them noticed the empty plate on the wall, right next to me. He sauntered over to pick it up, standing so close that I saw flakes of dandruff in his hair.

“Somebody must have dined al fresco, huh?” he said.

The other server laughed. “Al Fresco? Who’s that? You mean the wino who sleeps by the Dumpster?”

I tucked a ten-dollar bill into his back pocket as I left, to pay for my dinner.

I drifted on, through the alley to River Street again, giddily dodging tourists. Being invisible must be almost as good as flying. Once I brushed by a plump man in a suit; he recoiled and furtively glanced around to see who had touched him. He gasped. It took me a second to figure out why: he’d been bumped by my invisible backpack.

For the first time in a long while, I was having fun, and I wondered what else I might do. But the physical strain of maintaining invisibility is as exhausting as running or biking for miles. It was time to find a place to stay the night.

I walked up the steep cobblestone street toward the city again, headed toward the hotel I’d seen earlier.

Checking into the Marshall House was easier than you might imagine; I pulled myself up a wrought-iron brace to the balcony, passed a row of empty rocking chairs, and climbed through an unlocked bathroom window. After making sure that the room was empty, I locked its door, shed my clothes, and ran a bath. They even provided a fluffy robe. On the counter I found a small vial of lavender-scented bath oil, but its top was so tightly screwed on that I couldn’t remove it — until I used my teeth. I poured the oil into the running water.

Into the tub I sank, and slowly let the light escape me, let myself become visible — as if anyone could see. I scrubbed my legs and my hair — which, I noticed, had grown past my waist.

I nearly fell asleep in the bath. Exhausted, I toweled off, wrapped myself in the robe, braided my hair, and climbed into a king-sized bed. The sheets smelled improbably of roses. I dreamed of flowers, and birds, and crosswords.

In the
Aeneid
, Virgil calls sleep “Death’s brother.” To us, sleep is as close to death as we’re likely to come — barring catastrophe, of course. Always barring that.

Sunlight woke me, streaming in golden bands through the window over the balcony. I sat up in bed, my mind fresh and alert for the first time in months. I felt as if I’d been asleep since I left home. In a second I realized how much I’d missed my orderly mind. Perhaps my earlier education had some use after all, not so much in terms of what I’d learned as in teaching me how to think.

Finding my aunt now seemed a perfectly straightforward process. First I consulted the telephone directory on the bureau; more than twenty Stephensons were listed, but no Sophie or even
S
.

But she might have married and taken another name, or have an unlisted number. I thought back on the little my father had told me about my mother’s background: she’d been raised in the Savannah area, but I didn’t know where she’d attended school. I knew, or thought I knew, her former address, and I knew she’d had a job keeping bees.

BOOK: The Society of S
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