Night Drives

What I remember most about my father are the night drives. Headlights racing down the dark country road, fence-posts with mile-markers whipping by, everyone and everything else in the world asleep. Except us. I could see his smile from the back seat, but not when I looked in the rear-view-mirror. In that pane of reflection there was nobody there—just an empty driver’s seat.

Oh, maybe I should’ve led with the fact that my dad is a vampire. Surprising, right? I don’t look like the child of a vampire—all gothed-out with makeup and platform boots, pierced on every inch of my body and probably in places you wouldn’t see unless you got to know me a lot better. Maybe even a conspicuous scar, right on the neck, like a target. “Come and get me,” it seems to say. “I wish I was one too.”

A lot of children of vampires don’t know their fathers. Usually there’s a story about a handsome gentleman, a night out on the town, and a quick rendezvous. Vampires aren’t known for sticking around—there’s the stigma, you see, but it’s also hard to maintain a mixed family. For a single mother, the claim of a vampire father is an interesting story, but most of the time it’s just that: a story. Sometimes it’s easier to lie to a kid than to tell them their dad’s a deadbeat.

But my dad wasn’t like that. We did live in a mixed household: my mom worked the day shift, my dad the night. Their bedroom had this neat little antechamber so coming or going you wouldn’t let any light in. More useful for him, since the daylight made him so nauseous he couldn’t sleep.

When I was really young and my circadian rhythm was more or less normal, I didn’t see my dad that much. Our time together was limited by the tyranny of the seasons. The winters were the best, when the sun would set at five and my dad could eat dinner with us. The summers were the worst, when it was nearly ten before he emerged from their room, and it would be almost time for me to go to bed.

I started shifting my rhythm when I was thirteen. It was summer break, so my mom didn’t seem to mind, but I could tell my dad was ecstatic. That was a halcyon summer, the two of us hitting those dark roads as soon as the sun set. He worked the night beat at a local newspaper, investigating car crashes and police incidents. Morbid stuff, but not for a vampire. He told me he’d seen enough during his long life—800 years or so at that point—that it really didn’t faze him anymore. He took the shifts and assignments no one else wanted so he could pull in a paycheck. He once told me that it was easy living alone as a vampire—caves or dark castles, neither required heat or electricity. Finding a way to pay the mortgage was much harder.

When school started again, I mostly kept the rhythm I’d so carefully cultivated. I woke at one in the morning to the sounds of my dad pulling in to pick me up. We came back in time for me to get ready for school, and I forced myself to stay awake through my classes. I nodded off as soon as I got home. He told me I should try to make friends or join some kind of after-school activity, but his protests were halfhearted at best. Mom didn’t try to force the issue, I could tell she felt guilty for getting the easier hand—she wasn’t immortal, but for my brief human life she’d know me better than my father ever could.

God, how I loved those drives. Pulling up to crime scenes, waiting while he went out and got his scoop. It was amazing to see him turn on the charm, watching his subjects melt like putty in his hands. I asked him once if it was one of his powers, and he laughed. He said it was just practice—centuries of it.

In those small moments when he was close to talking about his past, there was a darkness I wasn’t sure I wanted to probe. Sadness and regret in those night years before my mom, and then me. My dad was everything to me, and I couldn’t square the thought of him being weak. Alone.

When I was fifteen the rumors started at school. Like I said, I never dressed up like those other vampire kids, but somehow word got out anyway. I wasn’t afraid to tell the truth, what of it? Sure, my dad was a vampire, but he had a job. He wasn’t an animal, he wasn’t a monster. I hauled off and socked a particularly mouthy freshman and got suspended. My mom wasn’t sure what to do with me, but my dad was furious. In a deadly-quiet voice he told me I could never hurt anyone, that I should do more to keep to myself. I only realized then how hard it was for him to stay with us, how difficult it was for him to build up a social and professional life in our small, prejudiced Midwestern town. That the way I acted could hurt him in ways no man ever could.

Well, after my suspension people generally kept their distance at school. I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine either—the end of the school day was the end of my night, so I was testy and tired most days. School felt like this annoying addendum onto my amazing other life—the mornings and nights I spent with my dad. That’s where I was really alive, where we were really alive. That’s what was real, not this stupid social shit; grades and tests and teachers who gave you the side-eye. Not the vampire kids who hated your guts because no one could ever question your dedication—because you were out there, you were up at nights hitting the roads, and the best they could do was hit the chat-rooms.

But, I digress. Sometimes those kids still make me so mad, even though its been years. I was in the middle of a story, wasn’t I? Let me see…

Ah, yes. Senior year, when everything fell apart. A farmer was killed, out on the edge of town. In his own field; there were a couple of dead cows as well. It took three days for someone to find his body, and by then it wasn’t entirely clear what had happened. There were bite marks; he’d been eviscerated and so had the cows. The official explanation straight out of the coroner’s was coyotes, but that wasn’t what people suspected.

I asked my dad about it, but not directly. Not “did you kill and drain that moldy farmer on the edge of town,” but what he thought about the case. He said it was pretty open-and-shut—he’d talked to the coroner and his patented charm had netted photographs of the bite marks. Coyote, just like the officials said.

But after that, things changed. People had been frosty to me ever since I’d socked that loudmouth, but now they were aggressive. I’d get shouldered in the halls, and on more than one occasion I opened my locker to find threatening notes and burst capsules of Halloween blood soaking all my shit. We washed everything out, my mom and I—if she told my dad, she never told me. I kept my word though, and kept my head down.

Then another killing, or would you say murder? A little kid, seven years old, disappeared walking home from school. They found his body in a ditch. Apparently one of his arms was missing—they needed to search the nearby mountainside to find it. Of course it was coyotes, but the pressure ratcheted up at school and I couldn’t help my own sense of growing unease. Stupid, right? But there was something about the rumors—they almost seemed true just because other people believed them.

Then, the kicker. Brian Watts was the kicker for the high school football team, and I remember him being huge. Usually kickers aren’t, but he was gunning for linebacker so he was always bulking up. Always bigger every time you saw him, until he just wasn’t there anymore. Same as the little kid: walking along a field, there was THC in his system. Probably getting high after practice on the way home, and he was attacked.

Coyotes. Of fucking course it was coyotes, but nobody bought it this time. When they announced his death over the loudspeaker in Spanish class, I couldn’t even glare back at the dirty looks. I just stared at my desk and wished I could disappear. Fly away like my dad when he transformed. I’d never seen him do it, but I’d heard vampires could.

It wasn’t just the students this time—none of my teachers would look at me in class. At the end of the day the principal called me to his office and I saw sneers—from the geometry teacher too—as I left the classroom. There were two cops there and he tried to get me to incriminate my dad. I whispered a denial, that he couldn’t have done it. That he was a good man. The principal told me he wasn’t a man at all, but let me go back to class. I didn’t bother; I hid under the stairs until school let out.

I cried myself to sleep after school that day.

I remember the crash of shattering glass startling me from a whirlwind of uneasy dreams. There was a deep bass thump and Mom screamed. I shot out of bed and ran to the door in the pitch dark of my blackout room.

When I opened the door to the hallway, clouds of smoke billowed in along the ceiling. The last golden rays of sun filtered in through the hallway windows—it must’ve been close to nine—but a red flickering cast sinister shadows from the staircase where my mom was screaming.

“Mom,” I choked out, then the door to my parents’ room exploded from its hinges and a great black shape swept through the hall. I thought it was smoke at first, until it picked me up and I smelled the familiar scent of my father. I didn’t know what he’d transformed into, I still don’t know to this day, but whatever it was enveloped me as he rushed down the stairs.

Suddenly I wasn’t alone in the close confines of skin and hair, and I could hear my mother coughing beside me.

“Mom, what happened,” I asked.

“Something—broke the window—fire.”

I knew then it wasn’t a grease fire, that it wasn’t an electrical fire. That it wasn’t an accident. Someone had firebombed the house, and they were still outside. Waiting for us. I felt my father’s momentum change, then heard the sound of splintering wood as he burst through the front door and disgorged us onto the darkening grass of the front lawn.

I caught myself on my hands and knees and when I looked up I saw three figures backlit by the setting sun. I recognized them by their roided-out bulk—members of the football team. They stepped back as we coughed and sputtered on the lawn—I only realized later that they must have been retreating from my father behind us—and I watched as one lit the rag of a Molotov cocktail.

“Jesus,” another said—he must’ve been the quarterback—and the third pulled out a wooden cross.

“The p-power of Christ compels you,” the third said, but his voice was shaking. It was clear that they hadn’t expected us to escape the house. That they hadn’t expected my father to erupt into the sunlight.

Everything happened so fast after that. The one with the Molotov cocktail pulled back to throw. A dark mass the size of a minivan swept past my mother and I toward the group of three. I know it was my father, logically. I just… I still can’t quite put two and two together. It’s still hard to see that thing as him.

I realized as he bowled into the center of the group that a coyote attack could never be mistaken for what a vampire could do. He backhanded the one with the cross and the boy just exploded, painting the yard in a funnel of red gore. The one with the flaming cocktail was crawling on the ground—I didn’t even see him get hit—but he was trying to drag himself away, and I realized he was missing the entire lower half of his body, trailing intestines through our meticulously trimmed 2.5” lawn.

The quarterback was hidden by the bulk of the thing my father had become, and while I couldn’t see what was happening, I still hear the crunching in my nightmares. It took less than a minute, but when my father turned around, there was nothing left of the boy. Not even a stain on the grass.

I couldn’t see my father, not really. The sun was in my eyes and his silhouette was that of a great hulking dome. I suppose he had wings, claws, jaws, but it was too dark for me to see. The inferno sparkled in his eyes, and I saw that he was looking right at me.

I flinched. I reached out for Mom and she pulled me close. She was staring too, and maybe she always knew what he really was. What he could do to a person. Maybe, like me, she wasn’t as afraid of him as she was of those boys, of what might have happened if he hadn’t been there. But in that instant she was a mother, and I was a child, and he looked on us cowering in dread of the truly monstrous.

He turned, spread those great black wings, and took off into the bloody sunset.

That was the last time I saw my dad. At least, I think. He could be anybody, look like anything. Sometimes I like to think that he’s still hanging around, as the stranger who helped me when I spilled my purse, or maybe even a friendly cashier, but I’ll never know. When my mom got sick, when she was near the end, I visited her at the hospital late one night. The headlights racing down the highway reminded me of him—maybe that’s why I thought I saw twin pinpricks of light in the tree outside her window.

Maybe I’ve never seen him again, maybe its all just wishful thinking. So, I guess that’s the long answer to “What about your parents?” Have I chatted your ear off?

#

The handsome man—handsomer in his tinder profile picture—sat slightly shocked at the other side of the table. He took a second to gather himself.

“No, no, you haven’t chatted my ear off. Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting… I suppose you were right, you don’t look like a vampire’s kid.”

“Yeah, everyone says that,” I said.

The waiter arrived, crunching peanut shells under the soles of his workshoes. He smiled at me, then nodded at my date. Jason, I think his name was.

“Are we ready to order?”

“Yeah, I’ll have the sirloin, medium rare with the sweet potato,” Jason said.

The waiter looked at me. “Bethany?”

“Just the caesar salad,” I said, then smiled at my date.

“I’m vegetarian.”