The Season of Risks

Sloan didn't tell me everything at once. He gave me information in small vignettes, manageable doses of my past: the meals we'd shared in dining halls; the class where we learned to dance Butoh; the winter break we spent at Blue Heaven; the portrait of me he'd never finished.



Within three days of his arrival I had a much clearer sense of the Ariella Montero I had been and might become once again. And Dashay finally forgave him, after saying several times that she could not fathom why he'd kept quiet all those weeks about my trip to Miami.



"I'm no snitch," Sloan said. "It was pretty plain to me that Ari hadn't told you, and if she didn't want you to know, why should I play the squealer?"



Dashay's face lost its animation. "I should have known all along," she said slowly. "Ari told me last Thanksgiving. She wanted to be older so she could have that politician man."



Sloan winced. They all looked so morose that I felt I should apologize. But it's hard to say you're sorry for things you can't remember doing.



Bennett said, "You know, you didn't need to try to be older. You were doing fine the way you were."



I looked down at my hands in my lap. "Thanks," I said.



Dashay spent more hours on the phone, consulting Dr. Cho and my parents. She wanted to call Dr. Roche's office, or better yet, drive down to Miami and confront him in person. Dr. Cho had never heard of Godfried Roche, she said.



Then my father took charge. He told Dashay to stay away from Miami, that he would handle the inquiries from now on. He pointed out that we didn't know for certain that I'd ever kept my appointment. For all we knew, I might have fallen in with one of the vampire gangs that roam Miami. In any case, he would investigate the possibilities himself.



Reluctantly, Dashay went back to making preparations for what she now referred to as "our cruise."



"You really don't remember meeting Dr. Roche?" Sloan asked me later.



We sat outside in the shade of a water oak tree near the river. It was the first of May, a fragrant freshness in the air. Summer humidity would soon follow, but that afternoon, coated with sunscreen, we were celebrating spring.



I picked a pink flower and studied its star-shaped blossom. Later, Dashay told me it was sea purslane, delicate in appearance but surprisingly sturdy. "I have utterly no memory of any Dr. Roche."



"I'm the one who put you onto him." Sloan's dark eyes looked guilty.



"Don't worry about it."



He had a pencil in his hand and his battered sketchbook on his knees. I peered over his arm, but he flipped back the page before I could see what he was working on. "Remember this?" he said.



It was a detailed sketch of a landscape: hillside, trees, and a stream. Yes, I remembered it, and I remembered walking down that hillside. I said, "You captured it perfectly."



"You didn't think that way before," he said. "You've changed."



"Possibly." The landscape had a strange power: it made my optic nerves vibrate. Yet it took real effort to pull my eyes away.



"I wonder: did you actually keep the appointment? Did Roche give you the Septimal? Are you older now?"



I put the daisy behind my ear. "Dr. Cho says I'm maturing, but at a slower rate than humans. Remember, I'm only half-vampire."



"But you are aging?" He shook his head. "Does that mean-?"



"Does it mean I'll die?" That question had haunted me since the doctor called with her report. "I'm not sure. Neither is Dr. Cho. I'm hoping that maybe my father will know."



More and more, I felt comforted by the idea that I had a father, and a mother, and possibly answers awaiting me, even if they all were far away.



The daily newspaper was full of articles about Joel Hartman, considered likely to be the next president, and about how his platform had changed since Cameron dropped out of the race. For instance, Hartman advocated mandatory vaccination and sterilization of homeless people. And he went on and on about threats posed to the U.S. by China.



About Cameron himself, I found only two lines: "The former front-runner, whose scandalous relationship with an underage girl ended his campaign, is reportedly on an extended sailing trip. He remains unavailable for comment."



Sailing. The word brought me a sensation of freedom and lightness, almost of flying. And that sensation gave birth to the curiosity, which grew into a burning necessity, to discover what had happened to me.



When Sloan met me in the moon garden that day, he carried something instead of his sketchbook, but it was equally battered: a bound notebook with a blue cover. "It's your old journal," he said, handing it to me. "It turned up in the rubbish-sorting at the recycling center."



The book fell open on my lap. I stared down at its handwriting. It did look familiar. "Have you read it?"



"Of course not. I was planning to send it to your parents."



"Thank you. For not reading it. And for bringing it back to me."



He leaned back on his elbows. "Did you know I used to smoke cigarettes?" he said. "That's a habit I don't miss much, except sometimes, when I can't figure out what to do with my hands."



It was his way of changing the subject.



And so my reconstruction began with Sloan's anecdotes, continued with the journal, and grew more complex when we turned on the laptop computer. But that didn't happen until we were at sea.



Dashay, thrilled with even our initial small progress, asked Sloan to come with us to Ireland. At first he declined. Although I could tell he wanted to go, I now knew him well enough to understand and respect his need to not be beholden to anyone. And at times, I thought he might be frightened of being around me.



But Dashay overcame his reluctance by telling him he was essential to my "makeover." Since my physical appearance might be recognized, I had to dye my hair, change my eye color with contact lenses, and assume a new name.



Choosing the hair color-Sloan took charge of that. He and Bennett drove to the local pharmacy and returned with a box of dye. The color was a deep, vibrant red. He and Dashay ordered contact lenses via the Internet. When they arrived and I saw their color, I said, "Viridian."



Sloan smiled. "You remembered."



The transformation took place in Dashay's bathroom, which she referred to forever after as her salon. When I came out to the living room, Bennett said, "Wow."



Sloan didn't say anything at first. Then he stood up and left the room.



My father told Dashay that I could remain a Montero if I became a distant cousin named Sylvia. Dashay took my new passport photo and sent it to the wizards in the vampire underground, who corrected its blurriness and produced the passport. I doubt anyone would have mistaken Ari Montero for the woman in the photo, who had green eyes and glossy red hair, and a look of worldly sophistication.



Dashay took us shopping for cruise wear, as she called it, in a local thrift store. Sloan got into the spirit of shopping. He found me a vintage halter dress and himself a musty tuxedo jacket that had to be dry-cleaned. He insisted on paying for his clothing himself, using some of his summer savings. I worried about him quitting his job, but Dashay let me know that my parents intended to pay him for "tutoring" me about my own past. Whether Sloan would accept payment remained an issue to be settled later.



When it was time to say good-bye to Blue Heaven I had a strong sense of deja vu. Bennett and Grace, the bees and the horses, and the safety of the blue bedroom were much harder to leave than I'd imagined. Bennett promised to send us regular e-mails, and he and Dashay said their good-byes privately the night before we left. The next day, they showed no emotion as he drove us to Fort Lauderdale in a third-hand station wagon he'd acquired while I'd been away.



That was the phrase I used: I'd been away, and now I had returned. Or at least some semblance of me had.



On our third day at sea, Sloan confided in me that he'd never been on a vacation before. On holiday is how he phrased it.



Most of the other passengers seemed to know how to enjoy themselves rather too well. Drinking and dancing and eating all night seemed the norm on our ship, the Marco Polo. Each meal featured a long menu, and we were urged to sample everything. A few hours later, the Fountain of Fudge buffet on the promenade deck would be thronged. Every time I sat in a deck chair, a smiling server offered me a pink cocktail with a paper parasol stuck in it, and every night drunken revelers cascaded from one deck to the next, lurching from side to side as they navigated the endless staircases. The cruise seemed designed to make passengers forget everything.



But ours was a working holiday, dedicated to remembering. Every morning after breakfast, Dashay went on deck to read, and Sloan and I sat at a table in the corner of our cabin. (Dashay and I shared a suite with a balcony, while Sloan had a tiny cabin with no windows, the only one available at the last minute. He assured me it was "deadly.")



At times, as we traced a timeline through the events, I thought of Marco Polo himself, setting off with his father and uncle on a voyage into unknown territory. He must have been as excited, and at times as frightened, as I was now.



But my voyage charted a different path, toward what should have been familiar. Someone had become me. That much was clear from the start. How and why it had happened, who planned it and who played my part: these questions we couldn't answer. All we could do was map what had occurred.



Our reconstruction work would have been impossible had my substitute (I thought of her as my doppelganger, a sort of ghostly double) not kept such copious notes. At first she'd used my journal. My own entries, written in a script that I now recognized as my handwriting, ended abruptly with the beginning of the new year. The entries thereafter were prone to right-slanted loopiness, all written in the present tense.



We worked in tandem; Sloan read an entry, then passed it to me. While I read it and took notes, he read the next one and made his own notes. Sometimes, when I took a break, I visited the NetFriend page for AriVamp and stared at her face. Now I knew all too well what I looked like.



And there were other revelations.



"Jacey had an abortion?" I set down the journal.



Across the table, Sloan stopped reading. "She wrote about it, in the creative writing class," he said. "And Richard took sleeping pills. I guess he was the father."



"I never even knew she'd been pregnant." A flood of memories came back to me: Jacey brushing out her hair, laughing with me in the cafeteria, telling me I was special, unlike anyone else she knew. "Poor Jacey. Poor Richard. What an awful thing to go through. I don't think I could do it."



He looked at me sharply. "Are you joking?" Then he said, "Ari, vampire women can't get pregnant. Didn't you know that? Or had you forgotten?"



I hadn't known. Or had I? "You're forgetting something," I said. "I'm a hybrid. Who knows what I can do?"



"Who indeed." His voice was so low I barely heard the words.



Later, when I was alone with Dashay, she confirmed what Sloan had said.



"That was the saddest thing the doctor told me, back in Miami when I was vamped," she said. "No children. You see, at that time I thought I might want a big family one day." She looked wistful, but only for a second. "So I have to make do with substitutes, like you." She grinned at me, touched my hair. "Pretty color, yes?"



When the journal entries stopped, we turned to the laptop, where the doppelganger had copied long notes apparently posted earlier as a blog. The writing quality seemed to deteriorate as she went on, becoming gushy and embarrassingly sentimental. She'd wanted the world to know she'd lost her virginity-no, that Ariella Montero had lost her virginity. That was the hardest section for me to read and the only one that Sloan and I didn't talk about. The irony seemed even more cruel, since Dr. Cho had assured me that I remained a virgin. (I'd asked her when she examined me. Anything might have been done to me those months I wasn't awake.)



As Sloan and I carefully constructed my past, and the past of my pretender, all the while I felt a mounting sense of outrage. She'd stolen more than my name and appearance-she'd appropriated my dreams. She'd lived my fantasies. She'd managed to seduce Neil Cameron, the man I wanted. Worst of all, she'd been the ruin of him-not only of his political aspirations but of his personal ones. Our personal ones.



But had she known what she was doing? Was she accountable for her actions?



One night, after another meal of endless options, I walked around the deck alone. I leaned on the rail and stared out into the dark ocean, wondering if somewhere out there, Cameron and the Dulcibella were looking my way. So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another ...



But even if they had been, I could only imagine what Cameron might be thinking of me. Then I remembered: he thought I was dead.



If only I hadn't gone to Miami.



Then Sloan was there, standing at the rail next to me. "If they hadn't used you, they would have found some other way to bring him down," he said.



As usual, he had arrived at the truth of the matter before I did. With that one sentence, it all became plain: what happened hadn't been about me at all. The entire plan must have been designed to stop Neil Cameron from becoming president.



We stood side by side, facing the darkness. I knew he was wondering how I felt about Cameron, but I knew he wouldn't ask-any more than I'd ask if he planned to see Delia or his family. We respected each other's damage too much.



Sloan couldn't dance. Dashay gave him waltz lessons in our cramped cabin, but his feet couldn't follow her instructions. After an hour or so, Dashay gave up and went out for "some recovery time."



Sloan and I ambled out ourselves. Even with the balcony, the suite felt a bit claustrophobic at times. We ended up in a dance club/lounge called Orpheus, drinking Picardo. The club's deejay played industrial music-Sloan told me that's what it was called-with strong bass and percussion lines and incoherent lyrics. A machine sent clouds of smoke across the crowded dance floor. Sloan wore a vintage Hawaiian shirt that made my eyes hurt, and I had on the green halter dress he'd found me at the thrift store.



Two people came in, dressed in black. They had dyed black hair and heavy black lines drawn around their eyes, and their skin looked as if it had never seen the sun. They glanced over at us, then stared.



Sloan's mouth was open, exposing his fangs.



Good grief, I thought. And that reaction brought me a memory: I'd been taught to never let the world know what I was.



Sloan closed his mouth. "Sorry," he mumbled. "Sometimes my inner demon-child gets the better of me."



The couple in black came to our table. "Wanna dance?" one of them asked Sloan.



And it turned out that Sloan could dance, like a maniac. He simply couldn't waltz.



The three of them spun in a circle, moving through the smoke like dervishes. Ariella Montero probably never danced that way, I thought. But Sylvia Montero was ready to try, and she joined them on the floor.



After so many days of trying to make rational connections, it was bliss to simply move with the music.



In a break between songs, the woman introduced herself as Lilith and her friend as Ramon. "You two are amazing," she said, wiping her forehead on the sleeve of her shirt. "It must be a hundred degrees in here. How do you stay so cool?"



Sloan said, "Vampires don't sweat."



We outdanced Lilith and Ramon. Exhausted, they retreated to our table and sat watching us. Sloan and I barely made eye contact as we moved around the floor, never touching yet responding to each other's motions, letting the noise propel our bodies as if we'd made a pact to stop thinking about the past and begin to live again. We danced until the music ended.



Dashay had brought along cases of tonic, more than enough to keep the three of us nourished through the voyage. I noticed that Sloan wasn't drinking much of it.



When I asked him why not, he said that artificial blood supplements were all very well, but they couldn't compare in taste to the real thing.



"So you bite people?" We were alone in the cabin when I asked these questions.



"Occasionally." His voice was flat. "Back at Hillhouse I used the supplements. But out in the world, I never seem to have trouble finding willing donors."



And I recalled the previous night, when he'd disappeared after dinner and not been seen again until this morning. "Those goth kids we met at Orpheus?"



"They're more than willing." His mouth had a curious half smile on it. "Aren't you tempted yourself ?"



Ariella wouldn't have been, I thought. Sylvia might be.



During the next few days we entered rough seas. Most of the passengers stayed in their cabins, and Sloan and I had the ship pretty much to ourselves.



Many vampires suffer from motion sickness and vertigo-even Dashay spent most of those days in her bunk-but for some reason Sloan and I weren't affected. A growing sense of restlessness drove us out of the cabin, around the decks, up and down the internal stairways.



One night, Sloan and I went back to Orpheus. The club was deserted. Not even the deejay wanted to play music while the ship pitched and rolled. We moved on, to a lounge on the top deck where a lone barman poured us glasses of Picardo, and as an afterthought poured one for himself. "Nice weather," he said by way of a toast.



We sat at the bar and watched the ocean, grey and silver waves with whitecaps, roil beneath us. After we finished our glasses, the barman set the bottle on the counter. "I'm turning in," he said, and walked out.



"Are you sleepy?" Sloan asked.



"You know I'm not."



We refilled our glasses and carried them to a booth overlooking the foredeck. The ship plowed into the waves, sending spray so high it hissed against the lounge's windows.



"We're heading straight into the storm." Sloan leaned back against his chair. He didn't sound concerned. And any anxiety I felt had nothing to do with the weather.



Then he turned his face toward me. I don't know if I bent forward or if I sat still. Our lips touched, as if by accident, then pressed together fiercely. His arms went around me. Where were mine? I think one of my hands grasped a piece of his hair and the other cradled his ear. Our mouths burned against each other.



We fell back against the seat, hungry, thirsty, starved. Inside me my blood sang, celebrating this moment, wanting more, wanting all of him.



When he pulled away, his face looked haggard, as if he'd been in a battle and nearly lost. My fingers still clutched his hair.



"Why not?" My voice sounded hoarse.



"No," he said. "No, Ari. Not until you're put back together again."



Next day the weather turned calmer. For days we'd seen nothing but water, and now, across the water ahead of us, loomed a dark shadow of land. The ship sailed into France at dawn, and the dim shapes of stone buildings and a lighthouse set along the coastline thrilled me. For the first time I let myself imagine what sort of house my parents might own, what sort of room might await me in Ireland.



The Marco Polo would stop briefly in France before heading to Ireland and then on to England. We'd leave the ship at Cobh, the port city of Cork.



Dashay and I decided not to go ashore in Brest, since we'd be in port briefly, only long enough to see tourist shops. We sat on our balcony, sipping tea, watching the shoreline pass.



Someone knocked at the cabin door. Dashay opened it, and Sloan stepped in, wearing a backpack and carrying his duffel bag.



"I came to say good-bye," he said.



"You're joking," I said, coming in from the balcony.



"Not this time." He set his bags on the floor. "Ramon and Lilith are getting off at Brest, doing some hiking around France. They invited me along."



Dashay said, "Who?" and I said, "Those are his goth friends." Willing donors.



"You're on your way back to yourself now," Sloan said to me. "The rest will come when you're with your folks. I don't want to be in the way of that."



I began to protest, but Dashay held up a hand. "Let the boy do what he will."



"But I thought you wanted to meet them," I said to him.



"I do. Someday. When you're all of a piece again." He looked at his feet. "I want to thank them. They paid my way over, and Dashay gave me money for a plane ticket back to America."



"That money came from the Monteros, not me." Dashay had her hands on her hips, looking a little bewildered at what he was saying.



"I thank you, and them." He gave her a sudden, quick hug. "Fair play to you."



Then he came over and gave me a brief, clumsy hug. "And to you, Ari. Uh, Sylvia. You've worked hard, coming into being." He sent me a thought: The broken bowl is glued together.



It wasn't enough. Kiss me, I thought.



He stepped backward. "I'll be back at Hillhouse in the fall. The scholarship, you know." He picked up his bags. "Won't you be coming back to school?"



I said I hadn't the faintest idea. Would Hillhouse welcome Ari's older cousin?



"Almost forgot." He set the bags down again, unzipped the duffel, lifted out his sketchbook, and ripped out a page. He handed the sketch to me.



This me looked different from the one in the sketch propped against my mirror at Blue Heaven. She held a star-shaped flower. Her eyes were fresh and full of wonder, her mouth slightly open. She looked as if she'd just awoken from a long sleep. I felt him watching me as I studied her, so I set the drawing down on a table and looked at him instead.



He turned away and gathered up his bags again.



Then we went on deck to watch Sloan, in the company of Ramon and Lilith, stride down the gangplank.



I felt jealous watching them go. "That was sudden," I said to Dashay.



Three dark shapes disappeared into the foggy morning.



She shook her head. "Me, I kind of expected something like this. He didn't feel ready to see Ireland just yet. Nobody wants to go back to the place that broke your heart." She sighed. "Besides, I think he's scared of how he feels about you."