Chapter 5

After an afternoon rainshower finally cleared, Sam headed out to the backyard with Kevin to grub out a stump that was taking up space in the women’s designated organic gardening area. The three of them together had pored over seed catalogs over the dark winter months and decided they had urgent need of a garden, and for weeks the tables beneath the windows had held clusters of seedlings approaching an increasingly pot-bound state. Now Sam needed to stop procrastinating and build the thing.

The garden, to Sam, was a stupid idea in every respect. Standing in the yard, he gauged the level of sun that managed to make its way past the branches of the many surrounding trees. It was laughable, the idea that any vegetables might consider this patch of shadowy land to be hospitable. Besides, the people who lived here had no time to weed and water and address any nascent infestations of bugs or mildew before they flourished out of control. Sam did not actually need to eat in order to survive, but food was one of the primary pleasures of life, and at least here in America it could be had cheaply and easily. He didn’t understand this mentality of people in the twenty-first century going to nineteenth-century efforts to produce a tomato. He had been around then, and it wasn’t that great.

But then, nobody had asked his opinions about time management or the perspectives of history. They had only asked him to grub out a stump.

He lifted the pickaxe above his head and brought it down around the roots. The stump was half-rotted and had been softened slightly by the recent rain, and so the work was relatively easy. As he worked, Kevin moved gingerly around the space, picking up sticks and eyeing the configurations of the land as if there might still be some debate over the size and orientation of the garden box. Back in Lowell, when Sam worked intermittently as a house painter, he had worked with a lot of managers like Kevin: people who weren’t about to get dirty, but would keep a hawkeye on you to ensure you stayed on task. Still, it didn’t bother Sam in this instance. He knew who paid the bills.

“Suppose you and Rose’ll be watching over this thing while the rest of us are away on the food tour,” said Kevin. “In late June it’ll really look like something.”

“What about Remy?” Kevin had mentioned that Remy would be left behind to run the bakery in their absence, along with the various staff who didn’t share the house.

“Yeah—he’ll be real busy, though.” For a minute, silently, he watched Sam work. Then he asked, “You used to live in Boston, right?”

“Near there. Lowell. I spent a lot of time in Boston, though.”

“It’s one of our stops. You’re gonna have to tell us some good places to hit while we’re there.”

“Sure.” Sam paused, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. “I used to eat off the food trucks a lot, when I was painting, and I hit a lot of bars. There was this one place—” He laughed, remembering. “The Blind Tiger. Me and my girl—Tabitha—we used to go there pretty often, because I could kind of hustle people at darts. She always thought I was going to get nabbed for illegal gambling, but I mean, it’s just a bet. I can’t help it if I’m a better player. One night I was playing with this guy, and all of a sudden seven or eight cops busted in and arrested him. It turned out he’d murdered two people. But in the chaos of it, she thought they were coming after me. The girl about had a heart attack.”

Kevin grinned broadly. He was a serious guy, not much for laughing at people’s jokes, but Sam could tell he liked the story. “So this wasn’t that long ago. You’re how old—twenty-three?”

In fact, it had been almost fifteen years ago, but the bar was still around, and you could still play darts there. And Sam knew that if he gave the actual year, it would have appeared he was eight years old at the time the story took place. So he only said, “Yeah, a couple years, maybe.”

“Amy told me what happened. About the accident. Sucks, man.”

It took a moment for Sam to place what he was saying. Then he remembered the tale he had told Amy months ago: that Tabitha was his high school sweetheart, and that he’d lost her in a car accident the previous spring. At first, with Amy, he’d tried not to say a word about Tabby, but soon realized that it was impossible to undo a hundred and sixty years of habitually telling stories using the word “we.” Still, he tried to speak of her as little as possible. It wasn’t fair to Amy to make her feel like he was always lost in the labyrinth of his memories, even if it was true.

“Yeah, it sucked,” Sam agreed. He went back to hacking at the stump.

Kevin kept talking to him. “So, with you living here now—this means you and Amy are, like, exclusive, right? You’re not both still dating other people.”

He shot Kevin a screwy look. “Were we ever?”

“Well, I don’t know. Remy and Lola, you know ...”

Sam knew. They were openly chatty about being polyamorous, which gave Sam the heebie-jeebies, which he knew was ridiculous given that he was, at this very moment, about as polyamorous as it was possible for a person to be. Only the previous night, just after he had hugged Rose in the kitchen’s intimate dimness, he found his way into the bed of a dreaming woman who had more than appreciated the providence of his arrival. And on top of that, there was the fact that he and Tabitha weren’t broken up, only separated by a sort of dictatorial court order, and that they still loved each other every bit as much as they always had. He had no doubt that she felt the same as he did, even though he couldn’t ask her. Lola and Remy’s version of polyamory was child’s play by comparison with his own life.

Of course, theirs was by mutual consent. He knew perfectly well that Amy would be furious if she knew about his nighttime rounds, but he also knew he could just as soon give it up as she could give up eating. And within the demands that his nature imposed on him, he tried to be sporting about it. He wasn’t greedy; he paced himself; if anything, he starved a little between encounters, so diligently was he trying not to raise suspicion by being out of the house too much at night. And when he observed how Lola and Remy lived, he felt a sort of thieves’ virtue. In all his time with Tabitha, they had never found it acceptable to build intimate bonds with people besides each other, pursue other partners for the recreation of it, or—of all the repugnant ideas—invite other people into their own bed. When they were together, it was only them. They gave themselves entirely to each other, and in those moments the rest of the world could go to hell.

“We’re not like that,” said Sam, finally pulling his thoughts back to Kevin’s suggestion. “Good for them that they can handle it. I wouldn’t be able to. And I don’t think it’s Amy’s speed, either.”

“I’ve known that girl for a long time,” he said. “She’s a sweetheart. She’s gotten trampled on by assholes more than once.”

Sam stopped swinging and grinned at the provocation. “What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing, just ... she let you in, so, you know ... be good to her. Treat her right.”

Sam threw him a look of side-eyed reprimand and hoisted the pickaxe again. “I know how to work a relationship,” he said, and muttered under his breath, “Do I ever.”

Kevin tossed the handful of sticks onto the haphazard woodpile by the fence. For months Sam had spent nearly all his free time with Kevin and the others—far more time than he had spent around any humans, or at least waking ones, since he’d stopped being one himself. All things considered, they knew him well; knew his habits and quirks and weaknesses, his sense of humor, the things that delighted and disgusted him. Kevin’s sudden paternalistic concern for Amy annoyed him more than he wanted to admit to himself. He turned his attention back to the hard physical work at hand, which was gratifying and good, and which showcased the uncanny strength and endurance of his body. If that intimidated Kevin, then all the better. He didn’t need to know where it came from.

~ * ~

Once Amy got home from the bakery, Sam proposed they go out to dinner—just the two of them, for once. They ended up at a gastropub—the type with brick walls and high ceilings and pseudo-industrial decor, which was Sam’s favorite type of dining establishment—where he got two very good beers and a corned beef hash that made him want to weep with its perfection. He and Amy shared a plate of truffle fries, and alone there with her, on a date, it struck him anew what a supreme pleasure it is to share food with someone, especially a lover. It was something he had never been able to do with Tabitha. His body quickly burned whatever food he put into it, but in hers, food was a foreign object that simply sat there and made her feel deathly ill until she broke herself apart into droplets to get rid of it. There were many advantages to being made of water rather than fire, but the inability to eat was a particularly bad tradeoff.

On this night, when he still felt touchy about Kevin’s comments and was trying to take to heart Susanna’s advice to get down off his cross about Tabitha, he leaned in to feed Amy fries across the table and let himself feel the genuine joy and intimacy of the moment. After dinner—for it had been early—they drove to a nearby park and hiked through the springtime woods, where the trees were just beginning to burst forth with yellow-green leaves and the wet moss formed a rolling carpet in varied shades of sage and emerald, dotted with purple and gray. The park’s keepers had laid down wooden paths over the muddiest places, and on these Amy walked ahead of him, giving him the chance to admire her from the back. She had put on a light nylon jacket and her hiking boots, but also wore shorts that barely reached below her inner thighs, and with her hair down and spread across her shoulders she looked incredibly youthful, younger than even her twenty-two years.

At length they arrived at an abandoned stone house a little way off the path—a remnant of some long-ago settler, now with one wall caved in and the remaining ones mostly covered in graffiti and moss. They went over to explore it, and when they rounded it to the side that faced the woods, Amy backed him against the wall and unbuckled his belt, thrusting her hand into his shorts to get him excited—not that he needed much help. It wasn’t long before they traded places and he took her quickly in the shadow of the far corner, finishing just before a family wandered over with two boisterous kids. Amy giggled as he hastily zipped up his fly and tried to maintain his balance.

Afterward, they made their way over to a low stone wall and heaved themselves up to sit on it. Sam took out a cigarette, and Amy held out her hand to request one as well. It made Sam smile with secret pleasure as he lit it for her. Amy didn’t smoke very often—not cigarettes, anyway—but he liked it when she did, and it made him feel somehow closer to her, more aligned. It was yet another indulgence he couldn’t enjoy with Tabby, not because she couldn’t but because she didn’t care to.

“We should do that kind of thing more often,” said Amy, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “Keeps it interesting.”

“I’m in.”

She grinned. “Of course you are. You’re the one who finished.”

“I’ll take care of you when we get home. Promise.”

“Oh, I know you will.” She looked thoughtful as she took a drag. “Kevin texted me about the conversation he had with you earlier.”

Sam looked away from her, ostensibly to exhale but also to conceal any visible scowl. “Yeah. He couldn’t have made his point any better unless he’d been polishing a shotgun as he said it.”

“He’s just being protective. I don’t think he was expecting you to move in when you did. I thought he understood, but apparently the communication wires got crossed a little.”

“Is it a problem?”

“No, not at all. You know he’s a control freak, that’s all. He doesn’t like being caught by surprise.” She glanced at him. “Anyway, he’s probably also trying out his daddy mode. Rose is pregnant.”

Sam turned his head abruptly to face her. He hadn’t seen that coming at all. “For serious? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, she told me almost a month ago, but it was top-secret.” She issued a jaded laugh. “Anything to get out of that job, apparently.”

“Maybe that’s what she’s been so emotional.”

“Could be. And obviously it was a surprise, or maybe one of those ‘let’s pretend the inevitable isn’t going to happen if we do this’ surprises. But it caught Kevin off-guard, that’s for sure.”

Sam shook his head. “Thank God for the gift of birth control pills.”

“And the fact that you don’t ejaculate.”

He cut a sideways glance at her—a look he knew, even in the moment, reflected perfect guilt.

“What, you thought I wouldn’t notice?” Amy’s tone was light, but there was something hardened in her eyes. “Of course I’m going to notice. You’re not the first guy I’ve been with, you know. Normally, it’s kind of a mess.”

Sam dragged on his cigarette to buy himself a moment. It had crossed his mind, early on, that this might come up, but at the time he hadn’t expected the relationship to keep on for so long. From the beginning he’d claimed that oral never did it for him, and when she took that as a challenge, a little well-timed domination always moved things forward before it got awkward. He wasn’t new to this game; in particularly lean times he and Tabby had both done their share of standard sex work, and on the rare occasion the client commented on it, Sam was used to claiming he was simply spent from an earlier engagement. But that excuse didn’t fly in a relationship. He’d been foolhardy not to expect that she would eventually ask.

“It’s just the way I was born,” he told her. Which was true. Not of his first life, but of his second, when the purpose of this new body was to take in the seed his partner collected, render it within the furnace of his body, and deliver it, in turn, to women who would never know their role in the great hidden machinery that kept humanity going. The children they bore—the cambions—looked and acted human, but weren’t, exactly. They were all immune to death by war and famine and pestilence, and thus blessed to survive the disasters which periodically threatened the world. Sometimes, though rarely, they were born with extraordinary skills. Over the years he and Tabby had made thousands of them—and when the Spanish flu arrived in 1918, they all survived, sometimes alone among their unenchanted siblings in a family wracked by loss. When wars broke out, and soldiers were called up, the cambions all came home. The magic lasted only a single generation, and the children they bore were fully human. Whether Sam was inclined to feel guilty for the duplicity or proud of the moral high ground, it didn’t matter. He would do what his nature called him to do, because he couldn’t do anything else.

Amy looked skeptical. “But you do come, right? Because if you don’t, those are some Oscar-worthy performances you’ve been giving.”

Sam nodded avidly and blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “Oh, yeah. Not faking that, believe me.”

“So, are you ... sterile?”

That was a sensitive subject for Sam. Could he ever have a child of his own body? No. But it wasn’t accurate, and it felt more than a little emasculating, to suggest that he couldn’t impregnate a woman. In fact, when he was with Tabby, he impregnated women all the time. He couldn’t do it without a succubus, and the children he made would not resemble him, but still he made them—early and often.

“No,” he said succinctly.

“Oh, you’re not.” She looked surprised by this. “Well, I guess that makes sense, since sperm are microscopic and all that. Maybe it’s just the rest of the stuff that your body doesn’t make.”

Sam shrugged. Getting into further details was bound to end in some sort of conversation that would end up winning the attention of that pair of deranged harpies the succubi called their Leaders.

“Anyway, you’ve never seemed too concerned about it,” she added.

“I’m not. All the pleasure, none of the mess. Seems like a good enough deal to me.”

She laughed. “True enough. Come on, let’s head back home.”

~ * ~

On a Saturday early in May, when the house was nearly empty from bakery people working the crazy weekend-morning shift, Sam awoke to the sound of Rose getting sick in the bathroom on the other side of the wall. The poor girl sounded miserable, and as if by instinct he rolled out of bed and padded over to the other room, pushed open her bathroom door, and gathered up the hair she was trying to hold back from her face.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said at his sudden intrusion, but her voice was weak and she lacked the energy to shove him away. She threw up again, coughing pitifully. Sam rubbed her back with his remaining hand.

“I’m okay,” she claimed, dubiously, and sat back on her heels. Sam let go of her hair and filled the tumbler beside the sink with water, then handed it to her. She rinsed out her mouth and spat, made a small sound of disgust, and sat back against the wall. Her eyelids dropped closed in something like exhaustion.

He leaned against the sink cabinet, his hands wrapped around the marble edge, and waited for her color to turn from its current green. She took a small sip of water, then another. Her gaze flicked up to him, her nose and mouth still obscured by the cut glass of the tumbler. She looked embarrassed.

“I don’t have the flu or anything,” she managed to say. “You’re not going to catch anything from me.”

“I’m not worried about it,” he said. He wouldn’t have been, in any case.

“I’m just—”

“I know.”

She lowered the glass. “Who told you?”

“Amy.”

Rose rolled her eyes with a vehemence that was unintentionally revealing. After a moment she said, “Kevin doesn’t want me telling anyone yet.”

“Kevin’s kind of a dick sometimes.”

She smiled. “Well, you’re a gentleman. It takes a real gentleman to hold back a lady’s hair while she’s puking.”

“That’s a nice thing for you to say while I’m standing here in my underwear.”

Her laugh was almost silent, seemingly more for herself than for him. She seemed to ponder her thought before she spoke. “I hear you guys all the time, you know.”

“Hear what?”

“You and Amy. Having sex.” She gestured toward the dividing wall. “It’s funny. I’ll just be sitting in bed reading, and she’ll be going and going.”

“Sorry. I thought the walls were pretty thick.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just ... it’s funny.” She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Her hair, normally twisted up in that simple bun, was wild around her shoulders. “Oh, Sam. What am I going to do.”

The question, spoken with such resignation, seemed strange. Perhaps she had just said it to fill the silence—but the answer was obvious. Finish the job, at least for the year. Have the baby. Raise it.

“What else do you need?” he asked. It was the only thing he could think of to say.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. He wondered what he was supposed to understand. After a silence she said, “Crackers.”

“Like, saltines?”

“Yeah, those are good.”

He turned smoothly out the bathroom door and jogged down the stairs to fetch them for her.

~ * ~

“Okay, I’ve given this some thought,” said Isaac. “Have you ordered a license from China yet?”

“No.” Sam wished this call had come at virtually any hour all day other than this one. It was a beautiful evening, and all six of them had gathered in the yard, in high spirits, to make the most of it. Remy was setting up the cast-iron fire pit, and Lola and Kevin were carrying out most of the liquor from the house by double handfuls of bottlenecks. Someone had set up a stereo and cued up “Last Dance with Mary Jane.”

“Good. Here’s the deal. Susanna and I really just want to make sure you’re okay. Why don’t you come down here for a few days and we’ll make the license while you’re here? And whatever other paperwork you need, Social Security card or whatever, we can put it together at the same time.”

It was an obvious ruse designed to lure him to Nashville for some sort of intervention, but Sam wasn’t sure this was such a bad deal. The first leg of the food tour began in a week, and everyone would be gone then anyway. He could get the time off from Brunson’s. And the part of him that was all incubus, the monster part he wrestled with constantly for control, rejoiced at the idea of escape and travel and novelty.

“Maybe so, yeah,” he said. “Let me put in for time off at work. I’ll see which days they give me.”

“Awesome.” Isaac sounded so happy, Sam knew at once that Susanna must have put him up to this. “Text me when you get the dates.”

Sam tucked away his phone and jogged back over to the group. Amy had dragged over a patio table and was setting up a mojito bar on it—white rum, mint, lime wedges, little cans of soda water stacked in a pyramid. This was what he loved about her—that she threw herself fully into the experience of whatever fun presented itself, whether it was setting up a Martha Stewart-worthy mojito bar at a spontaneous backyard gathering, or taking the well-timed appearance of picturesque ruins in the woods as an opportunity for a quick semi-public screw. His conversation with Susanna had lifted from his shoulders the weight of his stay in Portland, but not in the way he’d expected. He no longer felt a duty to stay here, but instead a kind of relief that he wasn’t living it up while Tabitha languished in a lake just a few miles away. Logically, he was doing the right thing by not pursuing her. And he knew she wanted him to survive this, not spend every waking minute pondering just how close he was to sticking a gun in his mouth.

“Sam!”

He held up a hand to catch the beer Remy was throwing to him.

There were s’mores. The burned marshmallows didn’t bother him at all, and the girls squealed with revulsion when he happily ate the ones they had inadvertently set on fire. There was music, and there were Amy’s mojitos, and there was Lola demonstrating, with Remy spotting her, the acrobatic feats that had won her competitions when she was a teenager. Rose wasn’t drinking, but when Remy handed Sam his guitar, she cheerfully sang a Barenaked Ladies song that he managed to strum out, while he joined in with the harmony. Amy hadn’t realized that he could play at all, and she seemed dazzled by this particular ability of his. It made him feel good.

He handed the guitar back to Remy and got up to grab another beer and light a smoke, turning away from the group so he could light it the way he did when nobody was looking, with a touch of his finger, and not have to bother with his Zippo. When he stopped at the cooler to pick up the beer, Kevin grinned. “Jesus, how many is that for you?”

“Five. I think.”

“Man, you’re going to be piss-drunk.”

Sam didn’t get drunk—on the contrary, drinking was literally throwing fuel on the fire, and it energized him—but the phrasing made him realize now was an excellent opportunity to play human for the observant eyes around him. He couldn’t drink liquid unless there was a good amount of alcohol in it to counter the quenching effect of the water, and the way he processed it, he never actually needed to pee. But with enough beers working their way through his system, he could make it happen. It was a surprisingly important thing, living alongside humans. People’s entire days revolved around the proximity of a bathroom, and if you didn’t need it, they noticed.

“Now that you mention it,” he said, and staggered off to a nearby tree. Repulsed and scandalized shrieks went up, but he gamely opened his fly and peed anyway. It was oddly soothing, the old ritual of assuming a bracing stance and pulling back his foreskin and shaking himself off when he was done. He felt uncannily human.

He picked up his beer again on the way back. Lola said, “Sam, the first step is admitting you’re powerless over your addiction.”

He popped off the cap with a twist inside his elbow. “Are you calling me an alcoholic?”

“I’m just saying, when do we ever see Sam drink anything that isn’t alcohol.”

He cocked his head toward his girlfriend. “Amy’s the alcoholic. You can sobriety-test me anytime you want.”

“Hey, I’m fine,” returned Amy.

“I think you’re both shitfaced.”

“You’re dead wrong,” Sam informed her good-naturedly. “I’m steady as a rock. We could do the goddamn lift scene from Dirty Dancing if we had to.”

Lola burst out in inebriated laughter. “You lose man-points just for knowing Dirty Dancing that well.”

“You can’t take man-points away from Sam.” Amy, though not actually shitfaced, was definitely drunk. “You ought to see how this guy is hung. He’s got like Vegas jackpot man-points.”

“It’s all in how you use it,” said Kevin.

Sam smiled at him. “I also know how to use it.”

Amy giggled. Sam held out a hand in a magnanimous gesture. “What do you say, baby? You want to prove we’re still sober enough to dance?”

“Fucking yes.”

She walked backwards across the yard, arms out slightly for balance, and Sam crouched a bit to brace himself for her run. “You’re going to set her on fire,” called Lola, but they were well back from the fire. She began running toward him, laughing, and hit his hands with a little too much speed, but he was prepared for that. Her position was good, and she was light. He managed to lift her into the air for a moment, almost fully above his head, his hands firm around her waist as she stretched out in an airplane posture, shrieking with delight. Their friends erupted in applause and hoots of approval, and he staggered backward with the momentum before catching her in his arms. She laughed exuberantly, clutched against his chest.

“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.

She looked up at him with a radiant smile. Before she could say it back—and he could tell she was about to—he closed his mouth over hers and kissed her as if they were alone in their room, with no other eyes watching. In that sublime hour all he had felt was so simple, so comprehensible—the taste of food and the warmth of friendship, the exhilaration of a little risk, the joy of a strong and healthy body, and desire only for her. Only for her, as if his mind held no space for any other. He knew it wouldn’t last, but it was blissful to feel it. In that hour, in the eye of that hurricane, what he felt was love.