The Season of Risks

If Mae had been upset before, the news that both of us would be leaving made her livid. She burned the bread she'd been baking, and the fumes of her fury spread through the castle.



She threw the charred loaves into the rubbish bin, then stormed off to her bedroom and tried to slam its door. The heavy oak door had a mind of its own and shut with a quiet click.



Mae did not appear at dinner, a pasta dish cooked by Dashay with her usual flair. Dashay carried a tray up to her. My father and I sat at the kitchen table, twirling bucatini around our forks, not talking.



When Dashay came back, I said, "Is there anything-"



"No." Dashay sat down heavily. "You've done enough."



And I realized that, not for the first time, I'd driven my parents apart.



I found Mae in the garden the next morning. She was weeding a bed of wild irises and calla lilies, flinging the uprooted plants behind her as she worked. I sidestepped a clump of nettles and said, "Good morning, Mae."



She nearly hit me with a thistle stalk.



I took a deep breath before I spoke. "I think you're being childish," I said. "After all, we'll be gone only a few days at most. And we have to let COVE know about Roche. If we don't, others will suffer. It's an acceptable risk." The words seemed familiar to me, as if I was quoting someone.



She stopped weeding, straightened, and turned to face me. Her eyes had tears in them.



"You should remember: my parents died when I was five," she said. "My sister and I were raised in a foster home. I never had a sense of being part of a family, until now." She brushed away her tears, leaving a streak of dirt across one cheek.



"Forgive me." I went to her side, reached out my hand, brushed away the dirt as best I could. "I didn't remember. My memory is spotty."



She took my hand in hers. "Ari, when the airline called-" She shook her head, swallowed hard. "When we thought we'd lost you-" Her eyes filled again, but this time the tears were for me. We hugged each other. I tried to tell her not to worry, but I was crying, too.



We went back inside, up to my room in the turret, and sat side by side on a cushioned seat. All of the furniture in the room had rounded backs to sit flush against the curved blue green walls. We sat there, holding hands, listening to each other breathe. After a while I dropped her hand to go to my suitcase. I unzipped an inner pocket, pulled out the tissue-wrapped package, and carried it back to the seat. Then I unwrapped it and placed the pearl in her hand.



"The pearl brought you back to me," I said. "Now let it bring me back to you."



Later that morning, Mae drove us into Killarney, and we bought some warmer clothes for me. Even the sunny days in Ireland felt chilly. And buying me cashmere and wool seemed to soothe my mother.



Dashay came along, making fun of my mother's driving all the way. We caused something of a stir as we walked through the city, which seemed more like a village, really. Dashay said, "Haven't they ever seen a black person before?"



"Possibly not," Mae said. "Although they might be staring at your clothes."



Dashay was wearing a billowing summer dress and a huge woolen cardigan borrowed from my mother-not her usual chic attire. But I sensed she was right-it was her skin that drew the stares. We didn't see another person of color all that day.



We lunched on smoked salmon sandwiches in the library room of a quiet hotel, and we talked about jealousy. My mother owned up to the fact that another reason she resented the COVE trip was that Dr. Cho would be there.



"That woman has always flirted with Raphael," she said. "Even when he was ill, and she came to doctor him, she wore lipstick."



It seemed a flimsy reason for such a strong reaction, but I knew better than to say so. I might question my mother's judgment at times, yet I had to concede that her feelings had their own kind of validity. She existed in a world different from the one my father and I knew, where logic and reason tempered intuition and feeling.



"I'm jealous, too," I heard myself saying. "A man I thought I loved was stolen by someone I thought was my best friend." Then, for some reason, I thought of Sloan. He hadn't been stolen-he'd been eager to get away from me. And what had I felt for him, anyway, aside from that wave of jealousy as he left the ship?



Dashay said, "Thought you loved?"



"Who knows? I never had time to find out for sure."



"Well, don't waste the time you do have having regrets or being jealous." She squeezed a lemon slice over her water glass. "Jealousy is a sign of weakness."



Mae winked at me and said to her, "Last time I saw you in Georgia, jealousy was your constant companion."



Dashay sipped her water calmly. Then she said, "Oh, I am so over that."



After lunch, we gathered our bags and walked down the hotel steps toward the street. Out of nowhere a large black bird swooped down, its wings brushing Dashay's hair. She didn't even duck.



A group of tourists on the sidewalk stared at her.



Dashay gave them a regal wave. "Guess it's time for me to go back to Blue Heaven," she said to us.



The Council on Vampire Ethics doesn't hold regular meetings. It convenes as needed, always in a different setting. My father let us know at dinner that night that the next meeting had been called for June 16 in Dublin.



"Bloomsday," he said. He looked warily at my mother, but she was meekly eating her share of the pasta left over from the night before. She seemed resigned to our leaving.



We'd all read Ulysses, the novel by James Joyce that traces one day-June 16, 1904, to be exact-in the life of Leopold Bloom. It's become a favorite book among vampire scholars, who interpret the book's six vampire references in all manner of ways.



I'd found Ulysses a challenge to read but richly rewarding, its prose as lyrical as music. More than the vampire references, I recalled its description of a dead mother come back to haunt her son, smelling of wax and rosewood, her breath carrying the scent of wetted ashes. The pleasure of remembering was ruined. Perhaps Kathleen had smelled that way, too.



I shivered. Whatever anger and jealousy I'd felt toward Kathleen left me, and in their place came sadness. Sadness, and bitter regret that she'd been with Cameron, known him in ways I never would. But forgiveness? Not yet.



"Better go put on a sweater," Mae said.



Dashay left us two days later. She said Bennett was feeling lonely.



I didn't know when we'd see her again. And two weeks after that, my father and I were off to Dublin. Another round of good-byes.



My mother showed unusual restraint during this time. She didn't ask to come along because she knew she'd be in the way, and she didn't cry once. She was trying to create future memories of a happy family, I thought, safe and intact inside a shadow box. The morning of our departure, she came to my room and handed me a velvet box. Inside it lay a tiny silver pendant in the form of a triple spiral:



"It's a Celtic symbol called a triskele," she said. "To me, the spirals stand for our family."



She fastened it around my neck and I thanked her. Neither of us cried.



But later, as the Jaguar rolled down the driveway, I looked back through its window and saw her resolve begin to crumble. Her shoulders hunched forward and her hand rose to cover her eyes.



"We'll be back in three or four days." My father's voice sounded gruff.



I turned and faced the road ahead of us, clearing my throat. "Have you been to a COVE meeting before?"



He'd been to several, he said. He told me the reason for the first one. "I'd been on a research trip in Argentina. I was working with two colleagues in Buenos Aires on developing artificial blood that could also be used in human transfusions. Then I spent a weekend in the countryside and saw firsthand one of the Colonists' ranches. They breed humans, milk their blood, keep them in pens like cattle. The place was more depraved than anything I'd ever imagined."



So he and one of his colleagues had contacted COVE. "And in due time, we were summoned to the meeting. We gave our testimony, showed them photographs. Then we were dismissed. A week later, we were told the council voted to shut the ranch down."



"So you did a good thing."



"I suppose so. Yes. Some lives were spared." The Jaguar barreled down the narrow lane. He drove much faster than my mother did. "But other ranches remain in operation. When one is shut down, another one opens somewhere else. Sometimes I wonder if there's a constant quantity of evil in the world."



I didn't understand. "How could evil be measured?"



He grinned, as if he'd embarrassed himself. "Indulge me for a moment. Let me be as fanciful as your mother. Have you ever looked down at earth from an airplane?"



"Once."



"And have you thought what a reasonable place it seems? I imagine it's even more so when seen from space, judging from NASA photographs. Landscape has its own logic, its special symmetries. Ocean and land, they appear to be precisely as they should be, all in beautiful balance. Bella Gaia-Beautiful Earth.



"But when you get closer-when the plane lands or the spaceship touches down-the world rushes back at you in terrible, inconsistent, overwhelming particularity. It makes no sense at all. And evil lives in the details, embedded everywhere. You might root it out in Argentina, only to have it rise up in California."



His words made me think of Sloan's landscape sketch-of being pulled deep into it by unsettling details.



"Talking to you sometimes makes my head hurt," I told my father.



He apologized and turned the car radio on. The station was playing a piano concerto. As I listened, I admired my father's malachite cuff links, grey shirt, black cashmere coat. I tried to fill my mind with pretty things, to not imagine what the ranch near Buenos Aires must have looked like.



Although I'd found some lovely cashmere sweaters and skirts in Killarney, I mourned the loss of my Peruvian dress. Another thing I loved that the other one had stolen. It would have been the perfect thing to wear in the oyster bar of the Shelbourne Hotel.



My father and I dined on oysters from Galway, Carlingford, and West Clare. We sipped champagne. Then we strolled through St. Stephen's Green, its paths and pond reminiscent of a Monet watercolor in the cool twilight that bled greens into blues-as my Peruvian dress had.



Later, alone in my hotel room, I admired its pale green walls and overstuffed furniture: a king-sized bed, two armchairs, and a chaise longue. I realized that my father had designed the evening to fill my mind with beauty, to erase the horrors he'd described earlier that day.



The Council on Vampire Ethics met the next morning in the hotel's George Moore Suite. I wore my new metamaterials suit, since it was the most professional-looking outfit I owned. As we were ushered in, I had a momentary impression of silk wall coverings, an ornate ceiling, a crystal chandelier, and a round mirror on the wall at the end of the mahogany conference table. The air smelled faintly of old wood and furniture polish.



I braced myself and met the eyes of the men at the table.



Yes, all ten of them were men. Most wore suits and ties, but three had on more colorful shirts or robes. Each sect had two representatives on COVE, and the other four were independents. Existing members nominated new ones, and they served ten-year terms.



The faces around the table seemed vaguely familiar to me, except for those of two independent councilors who must have joined since my last appearance, when I testified during COVE's hearings into the source of opiates found in water distributed from a Miami bottling plant. The chair, also an independent, introduced us and named the men at the table. I felt too nervous to remember the names, but I never forgot the expressions on three of the faces: a Sanguinist representative looked gravely concerned; one of the Nebulist representatives seemed amused; and one of the new independents, a short man with red hair, stared at us with eyes so hostile that they looked threatening.



My father went first. With his customary poise, he moved around the room as he spoke, making them follow him with their eyes. "We have come to inform you of a travesty," he said.



His voice clear and unemotional, he laid out the case against Dr. Godfried Roche. He told the story of a girl who contacted the doctor because she wanted to be old enough to date Neil Cameron, the aspiring presidential candidate; the doctor said he would administer Septimal but instead rendered her unconscious and used her DNA to create a replica that took her place.



The faces around the table grew even sterner. The Sanguinist councilor I'd noticed earlier, who wore a collarless white shirt buttoned at the neck, nodded emphatically, as if urging my father on.



I'd known he was going to do it, but nonetheless I felt embarrassed when my father produced my journal as evidence and passed it around the table, along with photographs of Kathleen. But he never mentioned Kathleen's name or Dashay's duppy theory. In his version, the replica became a soulless automaton bent on destroying Cameron's career. He stuck to the facts that we knew for certain, based on the evidence of the journal, the blog, and Sloan's memories.



Only at the end of his testimony did he show a hint of feeling. "As someone who has worked on the Vampire Genome Project since its inception, I find it deeply disturbing that a fellow scientist would appropriate our research in such a cavalier way. I can only speculate as to Roche's motivations or affiliations. From what my daughter heard in Miami, she's not his first victim. I ask you to stop him. His activities go far beyond identity theft. He's in the business of making monsters."



There was a moment of silence when he'd finished. Then the questions began. My father handled them effortlessly, even the ones from the man with red hair.



"Don't you yourself profit from your DNA research?" he asked. His nasal voice had a Midwestern American accent.



"To some extent," my father answered. "I live in the building that houses the laboratory. But any profits that might be generated from the research will go to the nonprofit institute we created last year."



The man seemed not to listen. "Dr. Roche has been at the very forefront of neuroscience. Yet you dare to call his character into question." His voice bristled with indignation. "Dr. Roche is, after all, the recipient of the Xavier Prize."



"I beg your pardon, Mr. Truckler, but the Xavier Prize is a dubious distinction at best. Dr. Sandra Cho will speak to that this afternoon."



Truckler grimaced. He stood up, as if he were about to deliver a speech, but the council chair motioned for him to sit down. "We need to move on," he said.



Some questions were directed at me, and I answered as best I could. No, I'd had no contact with Cameron since November. No, I had no memories of the weeks between early January and late April. No, I didn't know how I'd managed to escape from the Center for Integrative Neurosciences-I'd simply awoken and walked out of the building.



Truckler made a derisive noise deep in his throat.



That was the only time I'd lied. My father had asked me not to mention ghosts, thinking it likely that the councilors shared his skepticism.



But an odd thing happened in the George Moore Suite. As the hearing went on, I began to think about the ghosts more than anything else. I remembered seeing them in my car in Savannah, and along the path at Hillhouse on Halloween, and in my dorm room, trying on my clothes. The spirit in my Peruvian dress-that had been Kathleen. I was certain of it. But who was the other one? Her understudy?