Refusal was not an option, and failure was fatal, for if I had a greater love than the love I had for my father, I was abhorrent to my sisters, my own kind, and a major disappointment to him. It could signal the end of his line, the crumbling of his crest, and the final howl of fulfillment on a moonlit night while everything around him slept in awe of his beauty and power. Silence would come crashing down like a curtain of iron and reduce us all to dust, which the envious and eager wind could scatter over the four corners of the world.
They had ordered me to bring Buddy to our house in California and serve him up on a silver platter of betrayal, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. I told Buddy that my father was dangerous and was adamant about my not seeing him anymore. I tried to make him understand that there was no changin
g my father’s mind and that if Buddy didn’t leave me, I would be unable to protect him. I said everything I could to drive him away, but he loved me too much.
He was under the misapprehension that my father was probably some organized-crime boss. Little did he know how much I would rather that were so, would rather that were the reason I told him my father was too dangerous and we couldn’t stay together. I thought I had rescued him, but my sister Ava went behind my back and got him to come to the house. I saved him at the last moment, but he saw Daddy, saw what he was, so in the end, I had to violate one of our precious ten commandments. I had to tell him the truth about us, about who and what we were.
Even though he had seen Daddy in his most frightening form, he had trouble believing it. Daddy once said that, as with the devil, the best thing going for us was that most people thought we were a fantasy.
“They made the rules so ludicrous that it was always easy to hide our existence. They can’t see us in mirrors. We can’t be in the daylight. We cower at the sight of a cross. We flee from garlic. Please,” he said. “Let them keep it up. I’ll bite into garlic like an apple.”
At the time, I still believed I was an orphan, and Buddy insisted on coming along with me to visit the orphanage I had discovered in Oregon. I was hoping to find my real mother. By the time we arrived, my sisters and Mrs. Fennel were already there, and the reality of who and what I was came clearly home to me. Rather than accept it, I fled and once again saved Buddy from a horrible fate.
I relived most of this while I sat silently in the cab of the tractor-trailer that carried me farther and farther into what I hoped was the safer darkness. I had hitched a ride with a truck driver at the restaurant Buddy had taken me to right after our escape when he went into the bathroom.
“So what are you really running away from, Lorelei?” Moses asked me.
Moses was an African American man who looked to be about fifty or so, with graying black hair but a strikingly full, white, neatly trimmed mustache. His ebony eyes caught the glow of oncoming automobile headlights. They seemed to feed on them and grow brighter. To me right then, he resembled Charon, the mythical ferryman who transported souls to the Greek version of hell, Hades. Where else would I end up?
He turned to me. “Who’s chasin’ you?”
“My old self,” I told him. “I’m looking to peel off the past, shed it like a snake sheds its old skin, and start somewhere new.”
He laughed. “My, my, at your age? That’s somethin’ someone like me might say. What are you, all of sixteen?”
“Eighteen, almost nineteen,” I said.
“Hmm.” He hummed skeptically. He focused those ebony eyes on me like tiny searchlights and softened his lips into a small smile. “A pretty girl like you could get anyone to believe what she wants him to believe, I guess, but you better be careful out there. There are people who’ll say or do anythin’ to win your trust, and they won’t have your welfare in mind. No, sir. That would be the last thing on their list of what’s important to them. Yes, sirree, the last thing.”
“I know.”
He nodded. “Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. I don’t know what sort of street smarts you have, girl. You look too sweet to be strollin’ through any gutter, and believe me, I’ve seen plenty who’ve wallowed in them.”
“I can handle myself better than you think. Looks can be deceiving,” I said.
He laughed.
Once, I remember Daddy saying that if this one or that one knew the truth about us, he would shiver in his grave. Moses surely would, I thought, even after spending only ten minutes listening to him and sensing what he feared in the darkness through which he traveled.
“That’s for sure about looks,” he said. “Whenever I defended someone my mother thought was a good-for-nothin’ and said somethin’ like, ‘He looks like a decent person,’ she’d say, ‘The devil has a pleasin’ face, or how else he gonna get the doorway to your soul open enough to slip in?’ ”
“Your mother was a very wise woman.”
“Yes, sirree, she was. Only like every other wise guy, I didn’t listen enough. Where else do you get anythin’ free like you get good advice from those who love and care for you? But we are all too stubborn to accept it. Gotta go find out for ourselves,” he muttered, like someone angry at himself. “Gotta go make our own mess just to prove our independence.”
He was probably right. However, I certainly have to do that, I thought. I have no choice but to find out everything for myself now.
A vehicle with bright headlights came up behind us quickly. Moses had to turn his rearview mirror a little.
“Damn idiot driver,” he mumbled. “What’s he think he’s gonna do, drive right through us? I oughtta hit the brakes and have him gulp a tractor-trailer.” He laughed. “That would give him one helluva case of indigestion.”
I held my breath when the car pulled out to pass us. I anticipated seeing Ava’s face of rage in the passenger’s-side window, her eyes blazing, her teeth gleaming, and her skin as white as candle smoke, but the vehicle didn’t hesitate, and there was only the driver, who didn’t even turn our way. He went speeding on ahead indifferently. I relaxed, blowing air through my lips.
Moses heard it and turned to me. “Sometimes you can’t just run away from stuff, Lorelei, no matter how bad it seems to be,” he said.
He could see how nervous I was. I’ve got to get better at hiding that, I thought. “I know.”
“Sometimes you’re better off stayin’ and fightin’ it off.”