The Start

Elizabeth

New Orleans, December, 1994

The rules of escorting patients are easy, and our lead for the day rattles them off quickly:

1. Engage with patients however they want. Remember, most are here for a routine medical exam.

2. Do not engage with the protesters. At all. For any reason.

3. Take breaks when you need to.

I look at the bus, the one that has brought fifty or more people to town that day. Buses filled with tourists from surrounding states are not unusual, but I’m always curious about the person who will get on a bus and travel to New Orleans from Arkansas, or Texas, or even Mississippi, to protest at a clinic in New Orleans—and then, I suppose, spend the evening on Bourbon Street, drinking too many Hurricanes and Hand Grenades, and scurrying past the strip clubs—or possibly scurrying into them. Which is the allure for these people? The protest or the cheap trip to New Orleans?

They can probably find places to protest closer to home, but they prefer our clinic, where the patients are more diverse than in their hometowns, I suppose.

I do this at least once a week, this volunteer work where I put my arm across the shoulders of a stranger, a woman coming in for her annual exam, or because she felt a lump in her breast, or, yes, for an abortion, and physically shield her from the protesters, while I give her something else to look at. I never ask why she’s here, though sometimes she says. Usually in terms of “I just need this” or “I just need that,” as if she has to explain her womanhood to me.

This afternoon is different. That afternoon, I escort a woman named Stephanie, who is practically giddy with delight. She introduces herself and asks my name, something the women never did. I notice the bump, a sure sign of pregnancy, but say nothing. Always let the patient set the pace.

She takes my arm like an old friend, like at earlier times in my life I had walked with my girlfriends through gardens and dance halls, and chats as we walk to the door of the clinic. Stephanie is there for her twenty-week ultrasound and so very happy. She has been trying to have a baby for years, and tried everything—everything that took little money, that is. But this time, it worked.

Her husband is deployed with the military, stationed on the West Bank, so she is alone for most of the pregnancy, but he’ll be home before the baby comes, and she can handle pregnancy alone.

“Do you think I should find out the baby’s sex? Mike wants to know, but I think I want to be surprised. There are so few surprises in this life.”

I suggest she wait. She can always find out later, but once you know, you cannot unknow. She agrees, and we say our farewells at the door.

It’s rare to have a truly positive experience escorting patients, but I did. I hardly even notice the man who stands inches from me, far closer to the door than he is allowed, screaming at me I am a murderer.

He does not know how right he is, and never will. I kill several times a week, but only when I need to feed, and I try to stick to bad people. I no longer hunt as indiscriminately as I did three or four centuries ago, when I was young and had less control. Now, I choose carefully.

I would not choose him if I saw him on the street. He, with his beer belly and balding head, whose smooth face was red from shouting at strangers that day. No, I would never notice him. A problem, I suspected, he’d had with women for years. Totally unremarkable in every way.

The clinic is quiet that day, and there are more volunteers than we need for the patients who need to be escorted. They stand around chatting, though I stay off to the side. It’s easier. Until one pulls me in to the group. I recognize her. She was a patient here recently, I think.

“You’re back?” I ask her.

“I am. You made this day easier for me, and I wanted to pay it forward.”

Yes, paying it forward had become en vogue. The phrase, I mean. “That’s very generous of you.”

She shrugs it off. Usually shrugging bothers me. Use your words, I would tell my children when they did it. And my brothers? Well, they are hopeless, as if no one ever corrected their behavior. But it does not bother me with this woman. This Katherine, as she introduces herself.

She’s lovely. She could be my sister, someone else comments, and yes, I’ve noticed that too. I wonder if we are, distantly, related. All of my relations are distant, sixteen generations removed or more. Yes, after four hundred years as a vampire, and 460 since I was born, my descendants are all quite distant.

The door to the clinic opens, and I move to the door. Quickly, by human standards, but not so fast it would seem odd.

It’s Stephanie, but not the same woman I had escorted an hour earlier. She grasps at my arm, as if unable to support her own body.

“Stephanie! What happened?”

She shakes her head, unable to say the words, but touching her belly in a way I recognize. She’s lost the baby, or she will. There is a problem. I wrap myself around this tiny woman, try to physically shield her from the world, but I cannot protect her from the thoughts and emotions swirling inside her head.

“Oh, now you’re sad?” the bald man yells. “You should have thought about that before you killed your baby!” he said before chanting the word murderer over and over.

Could he truly not see her bump? Understand that she is there—or was—to ensure a healthy pregnancy? But there’s nothing she can do about that now.

Stephanie sobs and her convulsions ripple through me. I stand and hold her while she cries. She’ll go home and have to handle the rest of this herself, but for now, I can be with her.

After a moment, I pass her off to Katherine and ask her to wait with Stephanie, simply shaking my head in response to the questions I see in Katherine’s eyes and the tilt of her head.

The man has removed himself, feeling quite proud he reduced this woman—no, he doesn’t see her as a woman; he sees her as an incubator, or perhaps trash—to tears, and leaves the group to walk around the corner. Presumably to relieve himself against the wall like an animal.

But I’m more animal than he is. I follow him, knowing I’m breaking the rules, but this is the least of what I’m doing that modern society considers “wrong”. As I approach him from behind, while he holds his member, I position myself and quickly, quietly, break his neck.

Katherine

I’m surprised when Elizabeth asks me to sit with this woman, this person who has cried into her shoulder for thirty minutes or more. She hadn’t seemed like someone who would walk away from a woman in distress. Not when she escorted me two weeks earlier, and not with anyone else I’d seen all day.

We all have our breaking points, I suppose, and Elizabeth hasn’t stopped all day. Not when the rest of us ate lunch, not when some protesters started to physically intimidate the patients, not when there were whispers that someone had a gun. I guess she is only human, after all, but to walk away from a crying patient was cruel.

I bring the patient—Stephanie, Elizabeth calls her—to her car, and help her get in. “Can I call someone for you?” I ask, even though I assume she would have done so if there were someone to call.

She shakes her head and tells me she’ll be fine.

She may be fine, but not for a long time.

I squeeze her shoulder and close the door of the cream-colored Camry, noticing it still has that new car smell. She bought the car for the baby, I think, and can practically see her trading in her fun red sports car, or whatever she had, for this piece of practicality. She wanted this so much, and I threw it away. Yes, I made the right decision for me, but she never had a choice.

I walk away to find Elizabeth. Am I angry that she left me with a sobbing stranger? Yes. Am I worried that she finally broke? Also, yes.

I turn the corner to see her with her arm around the neck of the man of the man, the most vile of them all. The one who positioned himself as close to the front door as he could, to be the last voice they heard when they walked into the clinic, and the first they heard when they left.

She’s laying him on the ground, his pants are unzipped, and his dick hangs there, as lifeless as the rest of him. I want to scream, but no sound comes out. I want to run, but my feet won’t move. She looks up and sees me.

“Did you... Did... Is he???” I stutter, knowing the answer to the question I cannot ask.

“He will never again ask a woman if she feels good for killing her baby.”

She says it so calmly, so matter-of-factly.

“Come,” she says. “The clinic will close soon, and that last one was difficult. Let me take you home.”

Take me home? As if I am letting her near me? Or telling her where I live? No way in hell! I scream this internally. But I say “Okay.”

She walks away, going to the volunteer coordinator, and explaining why we are leaving. I don’t hear her words, but I’m sure she tells him about Stephanie, about how hard it was for both of us. He nods sympathetically. What is his name? I can’t remember. Bob or Brian or something.

“Come with me,” Elizabeth says, as she escorts me to a late model Mercedes and helps me into the passenger side. “Where to?” she asks.

I should protest, but I don’t. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Coffee or stronger?”

“Stronger. Much stronger.”