Page 82 of Road Trip with a Vampire
The mailbox in his memory bore no one else’s name besides his own. NoElliott Family. He must have lived here alone. How a man like this could have made it into his mid-thirties without a partner was beyond me.
Not that Iwantedto imagine him living here with anyone else.
Peter looked at me then, eyes very bright. “I think I must have been an architect or an engineer. I don’t remember who used my designs to build this home, but whoever did it was important to me.”
“Someone from your family, maybe?” I asked.
Peter’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember. “I don’t recall.” His frustration was impossible to miss.
“That probably doesn’t have anything to do with the amnesia,” I said. At the look of consternation on his face, I placed my hand on his arm and gave what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. “Very few vampires remember their human lives with clarity.”The vampire transformation process was a uniformly traumatic experience, involving the death of what made the person human plus the loss of a truly disturbing amount of blood. Like with most traumatic experiences, the brain did everything it could to cabin it off and tuck it away.
Clear human memories were usually an unavoidable casualty of the experience.
“Is that so?” Peter asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “The fact that you can remember as much as you do of your human life is amazing.”
He considered that. “Huh. Well, I don’t know how I went from designing houses to being someone who inspires fear in restaurant and bowling alley employees. I’m glad that at one point in my existence, at least, I did honest work.”
All at once, the excitement Peter had felt when we’d found this house leached out of him. His shoulders slumped forward, and his brow furrowed at the reminder that he still didn’t know who he was or what he’d done.
I had to do something to bring his smile back.
Thinking quickly, I placed a hand on the house’s limestone base. “You know,” I began, “none of the houses in this neighborhood look more than sixty, seventy years old.”
Peter turned to face me. “True.” He still looked troubled, though, which meant he didn’t see where I was going with this.
“Thatmeans,” I said, drawing out the word, “if you built it while still human, I ammucholder than you.” I let my smile grow into one of pure mischief. “I’m officially a cradle-robber.”
Maybe he knew I was just trying to distract him. Either way, it worked. His surprised laughter was so loud it might have woken the people who lived here.
We didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
We drove around South Harbor’ssmall downtown for hours. There were no other cars on the roads, but Peter slowed at every intersection anyway, looking in both directions in case something else jogged his memories.
Other than his old house, though, nothing seemed familiar to him.
We reached a secluded beach at the edge of town shortly before dawn. When we got there, Peter stopped the car for the first time in hours.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. It was. We were perched at an elevation several feet above the beach, giving us a beautiful vantage point from which to look out on the vast expanse of lake and sky. It was a cold, cloudless night, dawn still far enough away that the only real light came from the moon and stars above us, as well as a lighthouse beacon winking at us from many miles away.
“Huh,” Peter said, frowning.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer me. Wordlessly, he unbuckled his seatbelt and left the car. Concerned now, I followed him down a sandy path connecting the parking lot to the lakeshore.
We stopped when we were just a few feet from the water, the waves of the massive lake lapping at our shoes.
It had been many years since I’d visited any of the Great Lakes. Lake Michigan didn’t get the fanfare that California’s coast did, or even the Atlantic seashore. But for my money, the west coast of Michigan was one of the most slept-on stretches of coastline in the world. In the summer this beach would be packed with tourists who agreed with me, mostly from nearby Chicago and other parts of Michigan, seeking a beautiful placeaway from home where they could escape the sweltering Midwestern humidity.
Now, though, it was just Peter, me, and the endless water.
“I used to like coming here,” he said, solemn as a prayer. “I remembered that the minute we got here.” He took off the light jacket he wore and spread it out on the sand. I was about to protest and tell him it was way too cold outside to go without a jacket. Then I remembered that as long as we weren’t out here fortoolong, he’d be fine.
He sat on his makeshift beach blanket, then gestured for me to join him.
I pulled my own puffer jacket tighter around myself.Hemight do okay in this kind of weather, but despite my quasi-immortality I was still made of flesh and blood.
