Page 45 of Rainshadow

Flora nodded. She went into Sylvia’s room, noticing the familiar stale, sick-room smell had lifted a bit. The room was clean and well kept.

“Here’s the bag,” Sylvia said, dragging the heavy attaché out of her closet. “Take it. Take anything you want. I know you’ve already been helping yourself.”

“What’s in the safe?” Flora said, turning cold eyes on the other woman. “Open it.”

“No,” Sylvia said. “It was money. Just money. But now you have it all. If there was more, I’d give it to you. All that’s left is… personal.”

Flora stood for a moment, looking at Sylvia. She realized that if she argued with her, if she spent a single moment equivocating, she would not be able to leave Ethan. She had to leave though. She couldn’t live in the shadow of another woman, could she?

“Give me the bag,” Flora hissed, snatching the satchel from Sylvia and opening it.

“There’s plenty. You can get an apartment, start college, get a job, do whatever you want. You can travel for a year. I don’t care.”

Flora imagined, suddenly, an apartment all her own, with her own bed, and the freedom to live however she felt like. Then she thought of the bills she would have to pay, the job she would have to get. She could do it, and if she couldn’t have Ethan all to herself, she would have to. She felt tears on her cheeks. Rainshadow, wanting it, had been a fantasy. She had only ever had fantasies, her mother’s fantasies, the fantasies in her books. Maybe now her real life could start.

“Ok,” Sylvia said looking through some papers, “here’s the title for the Corvette. Not a practical choice, but I’ll sign it over to you right now.”

She picked up a pen from the nightstand and scribbled on the slip of paper. It was obvious to Flora that Sylvia didn’t care about all of the money and nice things, didn’t appreciate the beautiful life Ethan had tried to give her.

She snatched the paper, slipped it into the bag, and looked at Sylvia, maybe for the last time.

“Good luck,” Sylvia said, sitting heavily at the foot of her bed. “You’ll miss him. You’ll feel it, too, now that you’ve let him feed. But you’ve only done it once. You can get over it.”

Flora looked at Sylvia coldly.

“You should have warned me sooner,” she said, and felt a hot sob forming in the back of her throat.

“I feel like I tried, but maybe we remember things differently. Goodbye, Flora.”

“Goodbye, Sylvia.”

With that, she turned and ran from the house. She had to run, because if she stopped, even for one moment, she would never, ever leave.

22

Flora drove straight to the ferry terminal and got in line for the afternoon ferry. She didn’t know where she was going, but the further she went from Rainshadow, the more she felt a painful tugging sensation, like there was a rubber band tying her to the island, to Ethan, that would only get tighter and tighter and never snap.

She gritted her teeth and drove onto the ferry with her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her fingers went numb and sat in the car instead of going up to the ferry passenger deck, where a person could buy coffee or a beer. She unloaded on Whitney Island about two hours later, another island connected to the mainland with a narrow bridge. She was driving toward Seattle, a city she’d been to only a few times. When its skyline appeared on the horizon, gray and dull in the late afternoon light, she felt nothing. Had she come months before, she might have felt hopeful, but now there was only an intense feeling of loss, a hot, sticky bitterness in her belly that roiled at the future, a future with no Ethan, no Rainshadow. She had money, beautiful clothes, a flashy car, and all the time in the world, but no hope that she would ever be happy again.

She pulled into the parking lot of an inexpensive-looking downtown hotel just as it was getting dark. The thought of driving at night in a city she knew nothing about with a bag full of cash terrified her. The hotel, called Hotel De Laurenti and towering in the gloomy dusk, was all brick, and looked out of another time. She took a few hundred dollars out of her satchel, slipped it into her pocket and, after parking in the dark, dingy garage, went inside the tired-looking hotel.

The hotel’s lobby and front desk looked antiquated. Ancient columns with peeling plaster and pressed tin ceilings hinted at a grander past, and for a moment she thought of Rainshadow, its beautiful, aging elegance. She tried to feel confident as she strode to the front desk, but winced when the attendant looked at her and smirked. They could tell that she was basically a child, had never been in a hotel before, didn’t know what she was doing. It didn’t help that she felt like a fugitive, like someone would jump out from behind one of the plaster columns and demand to know where she got the money, the jewelry, and if she knew any vampires.

“Hi, just a room for one night,” she said to the smirking attendant.

“Just for you?”

“Yes, is that a problem?” she asked, defensive.

“No.” The attendant looked surprised. “We have different rates for doubles and singles.”

Flora blanched, embarrassed. “Oh, right,” she tried to say, but it came out as a mumble.

Alone in her quiet hotel room, she paced, got into bed, tried the TV, couldn’t find anything to watch, and took the longest shower of her life. She was feeling something she’d never felt before, an extreme irritability.

She pulled on one of Sylvia’s designer dresses, grabbed her purse (also Sylvia’s), and thirty dollars, and walked out of the room, into the night.

She had never been to a real bar, but it wasn’t long before she found a pub where a mix of blue-collar workers and young, hip people were shooting pool, cracking jokes, and knocking back cold Rainiers, the local beer. She sat down at the bar, ordered a beer, and it wasn’t long before a guy with long hair and a peach-fuzz goatee ambled up and asked if he could buy her her next round.

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