The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 11 - Miou-Miou

I find it difficult to reconcile the emotions I had then with what I know now. Did I have any way of knowing the dynamics active in what I considered to be my family at the time? All I felt then was petulant annoyance, that the life I had made had been disrupted. I say petulant because I now see that I behaved like a selfish child denied time to play with its toys. My reaction had no relationship with the real world, or anyone's concerns besides my own. Even Yuki reproached me at the time for letting my feelings get in the way of sense, but I was unkind to everyone for awhile. Sometimes he remonstrated with me in front of my father, made me feel isolated which only made me worse. 

We stayed at my father's in South Carolina for several weeks, during all of which time Dasius tried to see me, and I refused to set a date to meet. I hadn't seen Dasius for several years and thought of him as Laurent's factotum, a man of all seasons and all work, and refused to alter that simplistic notion even as time and again it proved false. Dasius, of course, is far more than factotum, but rather an essential and neutral force for peace-making, and I couldn't accept that because I was angry. I still thought ill of him for talking me up as a child, certain that he'd had some agenda I couldn't discover. In that way and in many ways I poisoned my happy memories, and therefore the happiness of reunion I could have felt then. It seemed to me that everyone had secret plans and demands of me, including Yuki, who swore that if he hadn't promised me he wouldn't he would strike me for calling him dishonest. In that time we endured the hardest, dirtiest fights we ever had, and in that fighting I often forgot all about the baby, a symptom of troubling forgetfulness that has endured. 

Of course, Javie was all right, because there was another who liked a baby, and it was Quinn. So one evening I found my father in the farm kitchen, at the sink and washing my baby. When Quinn laughs, he often growls and snorts very quietly, which is a product of his not wanting to smile very wide and show his snaggletooth. I found him talking to Javie in a nonsense language of half-sounds and French pidgin, because what few words Javie knew then were all French. Javie had soaked all down the front of Quinn's white T-shirt by kicking water at him, which he often did to me, too. He showed a pernicious streak of mischief, even then.

Seeing me approach, my father acknowledged me with a look. 

"He does that to me, too, with the water. Sorry about that."

"No, it's all right," he said, familiar accent, a mixture of South London and the Carolinas, comforting to my ears. 

"I need to turn up the lights a bit. The darkness is bad for Baby's eyes."

"Oh, that's right."

Quinn's eyes followed me to the dimmer switch, and all the lights in the house were on dimmers, which even turned to their highest setting were 40 watts. "The light is bad for my baby's eyes," he murmured, narrowing his own.

"I'm fine," I said, as quietly. "Did I make such a fuss, as a baby?"

"You? No," he smiled, reaching for a towel. He dried Javie on the counter gently, and passed him to me warmed up in a flannel. 

Javie always slept after a warm bath, and he quickly fell into deep sleep against me when I sat down at the table. The blanket was overwarm on my skin, but I didn't mind it, a whole piece with my baby in my arms.

"You were an exceptionally quiet baby. Leis was always checking to make sure you hadn't died, because you were so quiet in your crib. When I washed you, you only looked up at me with your big black eyes. You blushed easily when you were happy. You've always been sensitive but kept to yourself. We thought of you as a little old man, thoughtful-looking. And you were flexible. You were happy to sleep when we slept, and barely ever cranky when we woke you."