Undead and Undermined Page 10

  "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!

  So, fully dressed . . . my mom's version, anyway. In the wee, wee hours of the morning. So she'd been up all night with Cliiiiiiiive, or they'd both recently gotten up and gotten dressed. Curse you, logical brain, stop sniffing out clues that this was indeed a booty call! Go back to sleep, brain.

  Don't let the white curly hair fool you-my mom's hair started going white in high school, and she still only had about three wrinkles. Instead of making her look old, her hair made her striking; I can remember being a kid and wishing I had white curly hair instead of stupid flowing blond waves. Mom got knocked up with me a month after graduation. She was fifty years old now-barely-and took care of herself.

  I was not unaware that my mom was near Cougartown. The curly hair and the blue eyes masked her intellect and her formidable will. This was a woman who lost her husband to his secretary (cliche!), and spent the rest of their lives punishing them in a thousand small, aggravating ways.

  "Wow," stupid Clive was saying. Mom had helped him up, which was great, because no matter how much she clenched at me, I wasn't gonna. Nope. He looked a little shaky, which was too bad. I wanted him a little comatose. "You're quick! You must work out. You must be Betsy. "

  I gave him a bright, white smile. "And you must be-"

  "Elizabeth!"

  "-Clive. " What? That's what I was going to say all along. I swear on the soul of Clive, even if it means he had to burn in hell forever and ever if I had lied to myself just then.

  "It's funny we haven't met before now. " He extended his hand.

  "Hilarious. "

  I stared down at his soft pink hand. He was the least dangerous-looking male I'd seen; in fact he looked like a giant baby. A giant baby who wanted to make out with my mom.

  His rosy cheeks got pinker while I looked at his hand and thought the thoughts of an evil undead vampire queen.

  Bad idea. One squeeze-not even a hard one for me-and you'll have toothpicks for bones. One twist, and you could be the one-armed man from The Fugitive. Maybe two. You can't molest my mother with two dislocated shoulders, right?

  "I'm sure your manners will quickly return," my mom said. The finished sentiment: They'd better. I could actually hear her teeth grinding together: krrrk-krrrk-krrrk.

  "Your reputation precedes you . . . " He turned to my mother and didn't smile with his mouth. But his watery blue eyes crinkled in a friendly way. He had a soft round face, and was plump the way men in their fifties had softened. Not fat, just . . . puffy. He was trying to be nice, but he was also nervous (yay!); when he swallowed, his prominent Adam's apple dipped up and down a little. He looked like he'd swallowed a cork. Why couldn't I have been the one to jam that cork down his throat?

  The little hair he had was brown and wispy. He was wearing grass-stained black slacks, a grass-stained black dress shirt, and a grass-free white tie. Jeez, was he in the Mafia? "She's charming!"

  And you're suicidal. I decided there was a possibility she'd grind herself into a stroke, so I shook his hand . . . barely. You know those lame, clammy, limp-fingered handshakes that are just sad? That's what Clive got.

  "Dr. Lively was on his way out. But you're on your way in, young lady. "

  "Yeah, Mom, I know, I'm the one who came here-wait. His name is Clive Lively?" Now I really wished I'd dislocated his shoulder. Or his face. "Oh, boy. The hits just keep on coming. Clive Lively. Nice to meet you, Lively, I'm going into my house to kill myself, hope you don't get run over six or seven times by a truck in our driveway. "

  So I did. At least the first part of that sentence, for sure. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

 

  When my mom came back from what I prayed wasn't a passionate, sloppy, sizzling, wet good-bye embrace with my new mortal enemy, Clive Lively, I was pawing through her fridge.

  "Well! That was . . . where do I start?"

  Diet Pepsi? Ugh. Milk? She was down to less than a quarter gallon. Bottles of water? My mom
had never been one to buy and tote her own clear fluids. Diet root beer? Maybe if someone stuck a gun in my ear.

  "I know you've always had a flair for the dramatic, you terrible, terrible child, but that was bordering on felony assault. " She stopped and frowned. "Mmmm. No, you didn't use a weapon. So just assault. Mmmm . . . no, it varies by state . . . What is Minnesota's stance on assault with intent but no weapon? I'll have to look it up. "

  Apple juice? Sure, if I wanted to drink something that looked like urine. Chai? No, I've never liked drinking something that tastes like Glade air freshener, no matter how much milk you dump in it.

  "So, while I'm relieved you didn't produce a weapon, your behavior was still inappropriate and you will explain yourself. "

  Egg Beaters? What was I, stuck in a Rocky remake? I wasn't drinking raw eggs and running up and down a million steps for anybody. Ranch dressing? Oh, come on! This was getting sad.

  "Nothing!" I slammed the fridge shut, then was startled when the thing rocked over a couple of inches. Stupid inhuman vamp strength brought on by the stress of watching my mom get pawed. If I could have gnashed my teeth without biting through my lip, I would have. "You've got a fridge full of nothing. The perfect end to a perfect day. "

  "Also, I'm fresh out of O negative," she replied, not in the least startled, tense, or afraid. If I'd picked up the fridge and threw it through the front door, I'd get a lecture on disturbing the neighbors. Vampires didn't scare my mom (she looooooved Sinclair, which, before I decided I loved him, too, was beyond irritating).

  She stepped to the fridge, opened the freezer portion, then pulled out a gallon bucket covered with several layers of Saran wrap. She shoved it at me like she was passing a basketball in the final five seconds, then pulled open the nearest drawer, extracted a soup spoon, and handed that to me. "There. Before you go foaming, barking mad and chase Clive down like a dog after a car wheel. "

  "Clive is a stupid name," I managed, because my mouth was already crammed with Mom's booze-free strawberry daiquiri slush. The Saran wrap was still drifting to the floor. I dug harder into the bucket. "And that's just for starters. "