“You should’ve came home the first day,” I snuggled up closer to him.
“I know, but I had some thinking to do,” Jack sighed. “And it worked out okay. I mean, I’m here with you now, aren’t I?”
“That you are.” I kissed his chest, then lay my head back down.
Jack must not have been kidding about not getting any sleep, because within seconds, he was sound asleep. I stayed awake longer than him, thinking about all the things he said, and trying to come up with a solution. I had just promised him that I would never hurt him again, but living with Peter might be too great a temptation for me. I couldn’t explain the temptation, but that made it all the more dangerous. If Jack thought it was best to leave, it might actually be. And even if it wasn’t, it was what he wanted, and after everything I’ve put him through, didn’t I owe him that much?
For some reason, when we got up, nobody seemed that surprised to see Jack. Unlike me, they had all known he was coming back. Jane greeted Jack with a surprising amount of indifference, but that was much the same way he talked to Mae. She tried to rush over to him to apologize, and he did all but push her back.
Her face crumbled afterwards, but I couldn’t really encourage him to forgive. I knew he would; he just had to do it in his own time.
Peter, thankfully, had stepped out for the evening, but nobody really knew where. I suspect that he had known Jack was around and decided to disappear before things got ugly. Jack almost immediately took Ezra back to the den so they could “discuss” things in a very mysterious fashion. It was probably just business talk and things about moving out, but apparently, Jack didn’t want everybody else to know of his intentions just yet.
Mae quickly got over being snubbed by Jack because she had Jane to distract her. In the dining room, she had thrown down a giant towel on the floor and set up some kind of impromptu hair salon. She was the one who cut everyone’s hair generally, but when she does Jack’s hair, he had just sat on the toilet in the bathroom and she trimmed it up. His hair grows so fast, he needs it trimmed about every other week.
In the kitchen salon, Jane sat in a chair while foil and dye setting in her hair, and she languidly flipped through an issue of Cosmo. Mae must’ve hit the store today and picked up some supplies for her. While waiting on her, Mae was busy cutting Milo’s hair. Jane talked amicably with Mae, and for the first time in weeks, Mae seemed to brighten up. Somehow, a discussion about lip-gloss had done what the rest of us couldn’t.
“Would you like a haircut too, love?” Mae smiled up at me over the top of Milo’s head. Her own hair was clean and pulled back neatly. Jane made some comment about shoes, and Mae laughed, her eyes sparkling. “What do you say, Alice?”
“Um… no, I’m good,” I said.
“Girls’ shoes are so much better than boys’ shoes,” Milo lamented. He lifted his head to steal a glance at Jane’s magazine, but Mae gently pushed his head back down so she could trim his hair.
“At least you don’t have to wear heals,” Jane scoffed. “I mean, they may look fantastic, but they kill to walk in. They’re like little feet torture chambers.” Mae laughed again, the second time in like two minutes.
Taking in the scene in front of me, it finally occurred to me what was happening. Mae did love taking care of people more than anything else, but she had a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a sick greatgranddaughter, but all she ever took care of were boys. Peter and Ezra needed nothing from her at all, and Jack wasn’t exactly a tough guy or a man’s man, but he was still a boy. When I came around, she had been so thrilled because she thought she’d finally have a girl to pal around, but I spent most days lounging around in jeans. Jack was back, so I was trying to look extra pretty today, and I had still gone for jeans with a low-cut fancy green top. Maybe that was why Mae had bonded so much more with Milo than she did with me. He was probably more feminine, and in a weird way, needier than me, even though he was also far more selfsufficient.
Enter Jane, the walking Barbie doll. All clothes, boys, fashion, and a constant need for attention, that was probably the exact thing Mae needed. I’m not sure if this solved Mae’s crisis over what to do about her terminal great-granddaughter, but it lifted her spirits for a while. For her part, Mae seemed to be making a massive improvement on Jane as well. She had already put on some weight, not enough for Jane to complain, but enough where she could almost pass for someone that wasn’t anorexic. Her color had greatly improved, and in no time, she’d have that golden tan she paid a fortune for. The wound on her neck had healed, but there was still a mangled scar. Vampire bites usually don’t leave scars or marks of any kind, but if the tissue is damaged often, it’s going to scar. Needles don’t usually leave scars either, but on junkies, the areas around their arteries tend to be scarred up and pretty destroyed. Eventually, her father would probably have to pay for some cosmetic surgery to fix that, but for now, even she wasn’t whining about it.
I felt a little left out watching the three of them laugh and titter about boys and clothes, but I also felt too weirded out to join in. Mae and Jane getting along I could understand, but I had never imagined that Milo and Jane could really enjoy each other. It was like the lion lying down with the lamb. Also, one of the positive side effects from Jane spending so much time in the company of vampires was that she had grown more immune to the charms of our pheromones. She wasn’t tripping over herself to be with Milo or Jack or Ezra the way she would’ve been before, although she did seem to be nursing a pretty big crush on Peter.
I moved onto the living room to wait out Jack’s discussion with Ezra. After being away from him for the past few days, I could hardly stand being down the hall from him. Bobby sat crosslegged in the middle of the living room with a sketch pad on his lap staring at up the television intently. This would be the first time I had actually seen anyone watching the brand new flat screen, other than the dog. Instead of watching some action packed blockbuster that got the most out of the HD, Bobby had the TV on CNN. I assumed he was trying to seem smarter in someway since he had on thick black glasses that I had never seen him wear before.
On close inspection, I realized that he had a fairly nasty black eye from the fight the other day, and he was trying to mask it with fashion glasses and side bangs. There was another smaller bruise on his chin, but the worst of them were probably hidden under his shirt on his chest and abdomen.
“What are you watching?” I flopped back on the couch. The news wasn’t my favorite thing, but it had to be better than watching the re-imagining of Steel Magnolias going on in the dining room.
“Anderson 360,” Bobby replied absently. “It’s for school.”
“How is it for school?” I raised an eyebrow. “And I didn’t think you were even still going to school.”
“I go to school during the day, when you’re sleeping. A whole lot of things happen during the day that you don’t even know about,” Bobby said. Still staring at the TV, he started sketching furtively on the pad. A box of charcoals lay next to him on the floor, and he had the sleeves pushed up in his shirt, so he was getting black smudge marks all over his tattoos. “I’m supposed to watch the news for an hour and draw how it makes me feel.”
“How does it make you feel?” I asked.
“Like the whole world is coming to an end.” Surprisingly, he didn’t sound that upset by it. I sat up straighter, trying to see what he was drawing, but I was at the wrong angle to really see his sketch pad, so I flopped back on the couch.
The TV, I could see, so I watched it to see what had Bobby worrying about the apocalypse about.
There were two boxes on the TV. The smaller one had news correspondent Anderson Cooper trying to explain the story, which was taking place in the big box. It showed a giant boat, like an ocean liner or a tanker or something, and it appeared to have crashed into the shore. While I couldn’t get a good perspective of it, the boat looked absolutely massive and titled to the side. Helicopters and boats and clean up crews swarmed around it. The bottom of the screen said “Cape Spear, Newfoundland,” but other than that, I didn’t really understand what I was looking at.
“So what’s going on?” I asked Bobby. I could just listen to Anderson Cooper explain, but it was easier just having him tell me.
“An oil tanker crashed in Canada,” Bobby nodded to the screen. “The hull was ruptured, but hardly any of the oil leaked out. They’re saying it’s a miracle, because if it had it would’ve been like four times as worse as the Exxon Valdez cause this boat is much bigger.”
“I don’t know what that is.” It sounded familiar to me, and considering the context of the conversation, I should’ve put in perspective, but sometimes things alluded me.
“It was an oil tanker that crashed by Alaska in 1989.” Bobby glanced back at me. “I didn’t really know that off the top of my head. They were just talking about it on TV a lot.”
“But there isn’t an oil spill, is there? Not really?” I squinted at the TV, trying to see if I could see a sheen on the water around the tanker. It was dark, there, so I couldn’t make out much but what the helicopter lights flashed on, but still, I couldn’t see much of an oil spill in the ocean. “So what’s the big deal? How does that make you feel like the end of the world?”
“Because of why the tanker crashed.” He stopped sketching and stared at the TV in kind of amazement. “The whole crew died.”
“What do you mean?” I sat up more. “Like when they the hit land?”
“No, no, they were all dead before that. Nobody was driving it, and they just crashed. The radio transmissions they were getting from them weren’t right, and they sent boats out to check up on them, but nobody knows what happened. Finally, two days ago, they lost all contact with them, and then boom! It drove right into the island,” Bobby nodded at the screen. “It’s the creepiest, most bizarre thing I ever heard of, like in Aliens when they go to rescue that deserted ship or whatever. But real.”
“What are you talking about? How did the crew all die? Did they run out of food or oxygen or had massive mutiny or something?”
“They didn’t run of oxygen. They’re on Earth. You don’t run of oxygen,” Bobby rolled his eyes at me.
“But the thing is, nobody knows why they’re dead. Some of the crew is still unaccounted for, but both the lifeboats are still attached, so they don’t know they could’ve gotten off. Officials are trying to keep it under wraps, but rumor has it that they were all mutilated. Like really gory, horror movie stuff.
Throats ripped out and all that. Anderson was talking to a guy that had been there, and he was just about puking talking about it.”
“Holy hell. Really?” I leaned forward, staring more intently at the TV. “No way. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life. I mean, a lot of the crew is missing. Maybe they had something to do with it.”
“Maybe, but they’re not counting on having any survivors at this point,” Bobby said. “They had a crew of thirty, but only twenty-four bodies.”
“That’s pretty messed up.” A chill ran down my spine and I shook my head. “It’s really creepy.”
“Yeah, I know,” Bobby agreed somberly.
“Where was the tanker coming from?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby shrugged. “I think like Europe or Russia or something.”
“Okay, so be honest,” Milo said, walking into the living room and breaking up our intense fascination with the television. “How does my hair look?” He ran a hand through his dark brown hair and did a little twirl, but really, it didn’t look that much different than before. Mae had mostly just done a trim on his hair.
“Sexy, as always,” Bobby grinned at him. He set his sketch pad aside, momentarily to forgetting about his homework assignment to pay attention to Milo. Milo sat down the floor next to him, and in between kissing and flirting, they started talking about the tanker crash on the television.
Personally, it was creeping me out too much, so I decided to go outside and play with Matilda. I had to bribe with three dog treats to get her to leave Jack’s side, and I was starting to think maybe she loved him even more than I did. The stone patio out back was slick from a slushy snow thing that was coming down. It was November, and this was the first snow of the season, so I knew it wouldn’t last long.
Matilda skidded through it, but she didn’t seem to mind. Very little in life seemed to upset her, other than Jack’s absence. I couldn’t shake the news story, and I was really starting to regret going into the living room. I glanced back through the French doors at Mae and Jane talking and laughing, and spending time with them might’ve been almost as creepy as hearing more about the dead crew. I let the snow flakes melt in my hair and tried to forget all about it.
Jack went back to sleeping in the den, but he woke me up while it was still light to see if I wanted to go apartment hunting with him. I knew that I should, but daylight was still really hard on me.