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Father. Brother. Maker. Martyr.
In the same coffin, they fell into a torpid stupor, the silk of his pajamas against her arms, the smell of his cologne in the lining; in the same muddy pits they waited out daylight in the dark, in borrowed furs like burrowing animals, reeking of old blood. The spoiled meat of each other there in the cold. Had Claudia once worn chiffon, bashed porcelain dolls against each other, had her own fountain in her own courtyard? Had it meant something to her?
I’m not your daughter, she said to him in the opulent bedroom in the townhouse on the Rue Royale. There was smoke in her lungs and her brain was blood-buzzed.
Daddy Lou said, You are if you want to be, in his way that she recognized as gentle then, his eyes bright with wanting. He had been crying. She learned something about answering that brightness. Soothing those tears.
She was the girl in the rooming house. She was the pampered housecat of two squabbling demons. Now she is someone else. Dirt under her nails, hair frayed. Broken doll disposed of in the privy like she found once in the days before the blood. She rinsed it off and stared it down, its glass eyes nothing like hers, and yet she thought they were alike in some way, stuck somewhere they didn’t belong.
She never kept diaries before but she used to scribble on bits of paper and she kept it up in her head all the time, mind wandering in the schoolroom as she twittered away inside her head, until the ruler came rapping down on the end of the desk and they called her name. Had it been Claudia, or something else? She can recall Uncle Les saying it, a murmur as she woke, Claudia, Claudia. He was the first one she heard say her name.
It didn’t take long to forget. The other life felt like a dream, or something she read in a not particularly interesting book. The only real thing is the blood. Is the house. Is the men standing at her back, at first something to take for granted and later dogging her steps. Children always get to leave the house. They get married, they go to work, they get homes of their own, they die and are taken out feet-first in their tiny coffins. Yet Claudia must remain in the music box room, perpetually spinning, ribbons in her hair. Dipped in bronze with a chiffon skirt.
Louis tells her about his dreams. She doesn’t listen. Claudia is moving forward, moving on. When she goes to sleep at daybreak, she becomes the soil, and her dreams are crawling ones. She should have had Daciana’s blood — she could have seen in it what she sensed shining out of those clouded eyes, maybe then —
Daddy Lou (and in her mind, she corrects, firmly, Louis) gave her the first diary, plain white with a paper bow on the cover. He said, “Any time you have a question, you just put it in there, and then we’ll go through ‘em all, one by one,” but he could not have foreseen her voraciousness, her desire to know, and the questions had outpaced the pages before she could blink, plus Daddy Lou hedged answers and Uncle Les huffed, so she just let the question marks pile up. One day she’d need an answer but one day could come in a century, two, if they kept her busy, kept her dazzled.
Sometimes in the coffin she’d lay rightside up with her head on his shoulder and, voice growing thicker as sleep took over, he’d tell her about growing up, funny little stories. Stealing candy. The cut-glass vases of flowers he and his brother would send wobbling on side tables as they tore through the parlor. His grandmother speaking Creole. And she’d think, she never had real fabric wallpaper and someone else to do the cleaning and fine-tailored clothes. Her aunt was an unlovely woman, practical, always buying the bolts of fabric that itched because they were cheaper, with one bottle of perfume she always wore, and her one worn-out wedding ring, a necklace, a brooch. Claudia went from that into this world of lavish masculinity, pressed trousers and cufflinks, their amber cologne, their hazy cigarettes.
“Tell me the story,” she’d say, and he told her, “You said I was an angel.”
As she had through so many slaps and switches, the little girl thought: let the pain end quick, at least. She hadn’t thought to hope for rescue; never believed anyone was coming. But there he was, with his eyes like when broken bottles got into the river and turned smooth, eerie. Picking her up like she was nothing, her cheek against his chest and his heart there, pounding so hard and fast she thought, calm down, and could have giggled. You’re not the dying one.
“I scooped you up in my arms,” he said, hushed in the coffin, Claudia getting sleepy-eyed. She was too old for bedtime stories not least because her brain had outgrown her body but, tired, she let herself pretend. Uncle Les wouldn’t be visiting that night; it was only him and her. “I raced you home and laid you on the bed.”
Like a princess in the retelling: in garments of smoke on blood red sheets, in a room with foiled wallpaper and bookshelves that gleamed.
“Uncle Les gave you the blood,” he said, and she knew a few steps were mixed up or missing there, but, “He cut his wrist and fed you from him, and you were a vampire then and have been every night thereafter.” A little stiff, but his hand cupped the base of her skull so tenderly. “You know, when Grace was little —”
He broke off.
Imagine me without the burden of her, he says to Armand. Without the burden of her. Claudia could — well, she wouldn’t do anything except maybe tear his limp photos from their strings, break the glass lenses of his cameras. In the dark, in the dirt, he would say, Do you remember the picture shows and how we’d play ‘em out after? It wasn’t all bad, was it?
I’ll tell you the story, she wanted to say. I knew you were a demon because you found me in one hell just to put me in another. You washed ashes out of my mouth and filled it with blood. You wanted something that went with the wallpaper and smiled when you looked at it. You wanted, you wanted, you wanted, just like Uncle Les said, and you got.
But who mopped the blood, Father? Who bought the goat? Who set the bones? Who carried the body and begged for the blood? Who called across the minds of many vampires in many cities and put her name on vile tongues? Who asked for which burden?
She says she doesn’t dream. She says she doesn’t remember anything from the time before the blood. She does.
She liked the babying at first. No one had treated her like a little girl before and she’d felt as old as one of those women selling fortune and fruit at the French Market. She’d been out of school for more than a year because her aunt needed help and she was always working, working, working, always under the eye of one unappetizing man or another, fielding whistles on the street, stares in the boarding house, an eye against the lock of the privy. She watched little girls scrabbling in the street with their bedraggled ribbons and dirtied pinafores and felt a powerful longing like it had already been a thousand years since she’d gotten stains on her knee socks tramping around the garden with one moth-eaten dolly. She still had the doll, she just didn’t have any time. Never enough time.
So at first there was something powerful about the satin-flocked bedroom with the wallpaper she chose herself from a catalogue (out of a dozen options earmarked by Uncle Les, of course), the dolls with hard faces and fat curls that they had custom-painted for her with handsewn lace ruffles in outfits that matched the ones filling her closet, the fine fabrics and tiny stitches, the bows Daddy Lou fixed in her hair with such careful, tender hands. Not like her auntie, who pulled. It was the most embarrassing of fantasies, the ones she and her friends only shared on dog-tired, soul-worn days, the fantasy of being a rich girl. Pampered. Desire-less because your desires were met, an eating-bonbons girl, a girl on a silk pillow. A girl with a father. And Claudia had two.
Claudia had never been a little girl. Claudia will always be a little girl.