“Maybe I should check on her.”
“Do you think Dr. Taylor is in danger?”
Okay, I’m going to pause a minute and say I loved that my mom—a prof at the U of M—kept her married name. As long as the Ant lived (and after), that drove her nuts. Meanwhile, my mom was all, “You’re welcome to my husband, but my name is mine. I’ve been a Taylor far longer than a Frend-sunverm” (my mom was German/Dutch).
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m wondering if Laura would go there . . . She knows where my mom lives. And she’s keen on mastering her from-hell amazing teleportation trick. Plus, BabyJon is her half brother, too. You know she’s gotten into her head that all vampires are soul-sucking, evil denizens of the undead. Sometimes that prejudice gets the best of her.”
“Speaking of prejudice,” Marc said, “ ‘shut up, you lesbian slut?’ Was that homophobia rearing its ugly head?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. We’d been tromping down the stairs this whole time, but now I was headed to the back entry for my car keys. Well. Sinclair’s car keys. He had seven of the stupid things. “So we’ve gotta figure that out, too, I guess. But I’m not letting another minute go by without making sure my mom’s okay.”
“I doubt Dr. Taylor is the Antichrist’s focus,” Tina commented.
“I agree with you, but come on, guys. It’s my mom.”
“Call her.”
So I stopped in the kitchen long enough to grab the phone—a rotary dial! What century was this again?—and dialed my mom’s number. It rang four times and kicked over to voice mail.
“This is Dr. Taylor. I don’t care why your paper is late, I’m failing you. If you are not one of my students, I’m away from the phone right now.” Click. Terse, yet funny. Ah, my mom in a nutshell.
“It’s the wee hours of the morning,” Marc protested. “She’s probably asleep.”
“Not her.” My mom was a notorious insomniac, not to mention one of those types who only needed four or five hours of sleep a night. Try growing up with
that
. “It’s five a.m., honey, time to get up and mow the lawn. Of course you’ll be able to see. The sun will be up any minute now.” Hell, my teenage years had been a living hell!
“Well, okay. Try her cell,” Marc suggested.
“She hates them.” I was already sliding into my winter coat, a big down-filled thing that made me look like a midnight blue Michelin Man. Unseasonably warm autumn or not, I was always cold. “Refuses to have one.”
“Text—no, wait, that won’t work, will it? E-mail her.”
“She never checks it on the weekends.”
“With all respect,” my husband said, and I mentally girded my loins, “your mother is a Luddite.”
“Watch it, pal. That’s your mother-in-law you’re talking about.”
“Tell me,” he sighed. “I prefer not to let you out of my sight, dear one, but I . . .” He glanced around at our friends. I knew what he was thinking . . . he was afraid to leave them, and he was afraid to let me go alone.
“I can be there and back in an hour,” I promised. “I’ll just check and come straight back.”
“Straight
back.”
“Yep.”
“Be careful,” D/Nick said, and he was again cradling a protective arm across Jessica’s shoulders.
“You know it,” I said, and I went.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
So off I went, hopping on 94E and then 61S to Hastings. As
I whizzed past the disturbing number of strip malls along the Woodbury/Cottage Grove stretch, I reminded myself that lying in general was bad, but lying to yourself was suicidal. So I wasn’t deluding myself: I was glad to have an excuse to get out of there.
Not that I didn’t want to be around my friends, or my husband. But too much had happened in just a few hours . . . and that wasn’t counting my yuck-o time-travel adventures. Something mundane like checking on my mom was comforting, even though I was checking on her to make sure the Antichrist hadn’t kidnapped her and my brother, or stabbed them with her Hellfire sword, or read Bible passages to them, or cajoled them into spending Thanksgiving Day working in a soup kitchen.
Ugh, T’giving. I almost forgot. I’d almost managed to forget. Gads, I hated that holiday. And for the record, I hated it long before it was trendy to despise the celebration of the genocidal slaughter (was that redundant?) of Native Americans whose dumbest move had been feeding Pilgrims so they didn’t starve, instead of filling them with arrows.
It seemed to me that, call me paranoid, Thanksgiving was a holiday custom-made to piss me off. Traditional family gatherings? What traditional family? What
family
, for that matter? Even if my Dad had really, really wanted to see me over T’giving, the Ant always talked him out of it. My mom refused to celebrate the genocide of innocent native etc., etc. Jessica’s parents had, thank God, died in November, so she
really
didn’t like November holidays . . . that wasn’t completely true; she had no problem with Veteran’s Day, come to think of it.
Laura’s adopted family celebrated by not being home and not eating together as a family . . . soup kitchen central, which is lovely on paper but the reality is, you’re on your feet all day serving cheap food to desperate people. I did it once and, yes, I’m a selfish cow, but never again. I ended the day slinking home and considering suicide by too much dark meat.
Boo-hoo, right? Yeah. I’m aware of how all that sounded. And I could make new traditions with my husband and brother/son, and Jessica and Dee-Nick’s new baby, and Tina and Marc. But that would involve maturity, thoughtfulness, and making a concerted effort
not
to loathe T’giving, and the whole thing just sounded exhausting.
Despite my pissy fulminations, my spirits rose when I pulled onto Fourth, my mom’s street, and headed toward her neat and clean two-story. Hope my mom had finally gotten around to baby-proofing . . . BabyJon would be walking before much longer. Probably. I should really crack a baby book one of these days. I had no idea what milestones to obsess about with other sisters/moms.
Just the fact that BabyJon was with my mother was cool, and odd. In the early days, Mom had had zero interest in babysitting her dead husband’s love child. (He, Laura, and I all had the same dad.) But sometimes unavoidable vampire shit came up and she’d grudgingly comply so I could help the Antichrist kill a serial killer, or rescue Sinclair from a dungeon full of evil librarians and pissed-off werewolves.
But as the weeks turned to months the l’il shitbox had charmed her . . . he was a very good baby, and only cried when he was hungry or cold. Cute as all hell, too. Mom had actually volunteered to take him for the weekend the day before Laura and I disappeared . . . I hadn’t had to ask her. Which turned out great, seeing as how I went to hell the next day. But I digress.
Now I needed to see him, wanted to hold him and study his cute fat baby body, and marvel at the infant who technically wasn’t my son, the baby I knew would grow into an admirable man in the future. The only son I would have, ever.
Was part of my problem with Jessica’s pregnancy simple jealousy? I had to admit that it was . . . I was selfish, but not deluded.
And I’ll admit it: I missed him! Granted, once he was around for a couple of hours and had shat his way through all the diapers in the bag and barfed pea puree all over my sweater and then wriggled to Sinclair’s Cole Haans and slobbered Enfamil drool into them, I would no longer miss him. But right now, I did. So here I was.
I pulled up to my mother’s small house in Hastings, a cute city right on the Mississippi River. My mom’s house was in Cowtown, a holdover from when the area was a big field full of (you guessed right) cows.
Minor digression: what
is
it with people letting animals dictate major roadways or sites for major cities? In Boston they paved the cow paths, saying, “Hey, if it’s good enough for slow-witted grain-grinding bovines, it’s good enough to hold the city for the next four hundred years,” and called it I-93.
In Mexico, they observed an eagle eating a snake while perched on a cactus and said, “Guys! You guys! We should
totally
build Tenochtitlan here!” and bam! Up went another enormous city. Because of the cactus. And, I guess, the snake. After all, what are the odds of seeing a cactus and a snake in the desert, with a desert eagle?
Don’t even get me started on the whole let’s-build-the-nation’s-capital-in-the-middle-of-a-steamy-swamp thing about DC. I just . . . I don’t know. People think I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and they’re right, but I’d never build a ginormous city without, you know,
first doing some research.
Okay. Digression over. I sprang from my car, almost jogging around it in my haste to see mom and son/bro, but skidded to a halt the minute my feet touched her front walk.
A man was there. On the sidewalk right before the big glass-cut front door. Kissing my mother.
Tongue
kissing my mother. On her own sidewalk! And why was a strange man leaving my mom’s house before dawn? Was I witnessing . . . oh my God . . . was this a booty call?
Was my mother his booty call?
Before I even knew I’d taken a step, I had my fingers sunk into his left shoulder. “I don’t care who you are, you’ve never been closer to being murdered in a really grisly way.” I yanked. He flew. Mom shrieked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Elizabeth Anne Taylor!”
I’m a grown woman. I’m thirty (forever). I haven’t lived at home since I was seventeen. I balance my own checkbook and it comes out right (nearly every time).
I’ve survived the Miss Burnsville Pageant. I survived freshmen orientation at the U of M. I died. I came back. I’m married. I’ve been to hell. I’ve been to LA. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been audited. I’ve messed with serial killers, zombies, scary vampires, lame vampires, vampire killers, killer vampires, werewolves, my stepmother, Satan, the Antichrist, killer librarians, cancer, knock-offs, and the absence of Christian Louboutin in this timeline.
I am the foretold queen of the undead.
Still, when my mom roared all three of my names, everything in me stopped dead and sort of shriveled up. Suddenly I was fourteen again, nailed red-handed lifting my mom’s gold card because Jessica’s driver was going to sneak us over to the Gaviidae Mall.
And here she came, stomping down the sidewalk, my sweet, “frail” mother, Professor Taylor. Her doctorate was in history, specifically the Civil War. When people asked, as they almost always did, “Are you a real doctor?” she’d reply, “No, I’m a hologram.” My father, long before the divorce, had once told me, “Your sarcasm didn’t come out of a vacuum.” It was years before I figured out what he meant and by then, of course, he’d tired of sarcasm from any quarter.
I could see her jaw flexing from here; this was a Level Five Tooth Grind. The last time I hit a Level Five was when I ran over our neighbor’s foot while I was backing out of the driveway. Then I ran over it again when I popped Mom’s car into drive to rush forward to find out what he was screaming about. In my defense, he was a smelly bigot who referred to Jessica as “that little colored gal you run with” who always “borrowed” our Sunday paper. I’d had my driver’s license for eighteen hours.
(And, while I’m thinking about it, colored? Seriously? Dude, it is not 1955, so pop some Tic Tacs and go lie down until you can remember that.)
(Oh, and the best part? Jessica laughed her
ass
off when I told her I couldn’t hang with her for three weeks, due to the accidental squashing of the bigot’s feet. She rushed over to his place and solicitously inquired after his health and asked to sign his cast and he was so freaked out that there was a gorgeous colored girl in his house he let her do it. “With love from your favorite jungle bunny.” That was how she signed it.)
“You will pick up and brush off and apologize to Clive
this minute
.”
Oh, right. Mom was mad about the schmuck I’d found giving her mouth to mouth. And possibly a close-chest massage, the perv bastard. After what I strongly suspected was a booty call. I wanted very, very badly to bite someone.
“This minute,” she repeated, like I’d died and come back and gone to hell and come back deaf. When I would have preferred coming back blind. Oh why oh why couldn’t I be blind? “Nuh-uh. Who is he and why was he putting his germ-laden mouth on you?”
One heel tapping. Hands on hips. Yep, I was definitely closer to death than usual. Mom’s eyes were lasers. “You’re not funny, young lady.”
“I’m a little funny,” I mumbled, resisting the urge to scuff a toe in front of me as I stared at the sidewalk. “Sometimes.” I squashed the urge to obey. Somebody owed me an explanation.
Exasperated and super-pissed, my mom leaped forward to help . . . Clive, was it? Rhymed with jive, alive, and beehive. I decided that wasn’t a good sign. Cliiiiiiive. Gah.
For the first time I noticed she was dressed up—and this was a woman who, the minute she got tenure, was famous for lecturing in sweatpants. She was wearing a black midcalf broomstick skirt with a crisp white blouse under a blue cardigan. She had her favorite locket on; in my timeline it held my teeny senior picture. I imagine Cliiiiiive’s pic was in there now. Her face glowed with a fresh application of Jergens for dry skin. Also, she was wearing her Curious George slippers . . . a special occasion indeed!