Page 78 of Thirsty
“That’s true,” Lorenzo said unconvincingly.
Charlie glanced up at the ceiling, the one incongruous element in the entire room—in the entire building, for that matter. “I don’t remember,” he murmured, and held his breath as he said, “How did you end up living here in Brookville, anyway?”
Lorenzo sighed. “This house...belonged to a descendant of mine.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Wow, your—okay.”Descendants.That would mean that, when he was still human, Lorenzo had...
He cleared his throat. “How did you...find them? I mean, what made you want to look for them?”
“I was just so bored,” Lorenzo said, flopping back onto the bed. “I was made a vampire while I was still living in Sardinia—as you know—and I spent much of that first century in Europe, living...wildly. Carousing, drinking from people—sometimes, er...violently.” He flicked a nervous look at Charlie, but he just nodded and motioned for him to go on.“But after a hundred years of that sort of thing, it gets a bit old. I came over to America in the nineteen...” He squinted. “Was it the 1900s? 1910s? I’m not sure. But here in the New World it was much the same as it was at home. So much meaningless revelry. Drudgery.”
He sounded exhausted. “Eventually I began to yearn for something more to my undead existence.”
“So,” Charlie said, “you found out that you had a great-great-grandchild in Brookville?”
“A great-great-granddaughter,” Lorenzo said softly. “Dorothy.”
The name sounded lovely in his accent, formal and fond. Charlie waited for him to go on. “I could never figure out why she wasn’t afraid of me,” Lorenzo said, sitting up. “By the time I found her, she was a little old lady—a widow, no children, living alone in this mansion. And then I appeared on her doorstep, a mysterious, dangerous stranger, and I turned out to be an actual monster, and she...didn’t care.”
“She knew what you were?”
“She wasn’t a mark,” Lorenzo said, smiling, his eyes gone distant and warm. “That’s what she’d say. She was—gorgeous. A tiny bit cruel, just enough to be good fun. She invited me to live here, and she was never scared of me. She—” He laughed, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously. “Well, she told me what to wear. Vampires dress to impress, she’d say. Elegant, not tasteless. She scolded me when I forgot my manners, but she also...” He grinned. “She loved lying to the police anytime a human said they’d spotted something spooky or strange. And by that point in her life, she didn’t sleep much, so we’d stay up late, looking out the window. She’d poke me and point at passersby, and tell me who to bite.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows, delighted by the mental picture. “She picked the people that you...?”
Lorenzo scoffed, looking genuinely offended—maybe even horrified. “I wouldn’t feed on someone my—”
He stopped, abruptly, and it felt like it punched all the air out of Charlie’s lungs. “She told people I was her grandson,” Lorenzo said in a helpless, empty voice. “And at a certain point I could just—it wasn’t a lie, for her, anymore. I was her grandson.”
Charlie said nothing. He could feel it building up in his throat, dread and fondness and misery, and part of him hoped Lorenzo wouldn’t finish the story.
But of course he did. “I was living here with her,” Lorenzo said. “So when she passed away in 1972, it came to me.”
Charlie glanced up at the mess of wood and rags covering the ceiling. “Was this her room?”
Lorenzo nodded. Charlie felt his throat closing up.
“I know it’s silly,” Lorenzo muttered. “I should just sell it. But...I can’t sell it.”
“Of course not,” Charlie said. “You—”
“No, it is foolish of me.” He’d started to sound angry.
“It’s not—”
“Why?” Lorenzo demanded. “Because I am honoring her memory by staying here? Her memory is gone. I watched it happen. It’s been fifty years since she left, and no one remembers Dorothy. No one but me.”
“But—” Charlie’s voice was growing thick. “You—”
“I watched her be forgotten,” Lorenzo said. “This town—this community—this place that Dorothy loved—it forgot about her. It was so easy for her to just fade away.”
He looked up at Charlie, and there were tears slowly making their way down the sides of his nose, leaving small trails ofsteam rising from his skin. “You don’t have to be dead to be forgotten,” he whispered. “Actually dead, I mean. I’m still here, and I can feel myself being forgotten every day.”
“Hey, hey,” Charlie said, going to his knees in front of Lorenzo, hugging him around the waist, holding him tight. “You are not disappearing, okay? You’re right here, with me.”
“I am, though,” Lorenzo said brokenly. “Look at me. What do I do, Charlie? What do I contribute?”
“You’re not a...machine,” Charlie pleaded with him. “You don’t have to contribute something to matter.”
