Who happened to look like something out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel.
If he hadn’t been introduced to her as Fritz, she would have called him Jeeves.
Not that Jo spent all that much time talking to him. Before they pulled out of the underground parking garage, he apologized profusely and explained that the partition between the front and the back had to be raised for security purposes—and she’d told him she understood. But like there was any other response?
As a result, she knew nothing of where they were. The rear windows of the sedan were so deeply tinted, they might as well have been made of funeral draping, and then there were her eyelids. The subtle ride of the luxury suspension, coupled with the deep bucket seat, meant things felt like she was in a cradle, and after all the drama, it wasn’t long before she—
“Madam?”
Jo woke up with a spastic slapping, her panic-palms hitting the leather acreage of the back seat like it was a horse’s rump.
The butler, who had opened the rear door and was leaning in, looked apoplectic. “Madam, my sincerest apologies! Forgive me, I have been attempting to rouse you and—”
“It’s okay, it’s all right.” Jo pushed her hair out of her face and blinked as she glanced past his shoulder. “That’s where I live.”
Stupid response. Like he’d thrown a dart at a map of Caldwell’s suburbs and had no idea where they were?
“Yes, madam, I have returned you safely unto your abode.”
In another panicked flare-up—this time, an internal one—Jo went into her brain and double-checked what she remembered of the night. Thank God, she had it all: The fighting scene at the abandoned mall, the training center’s facilities, the blood tests . . . Manny and Butch . . . Syn.
Who she had not been able to say goodbye to. And who still hadn’t texted her back.
The butler stepped to the side as she got out, and even though he stood by her, clearly waiting to be dismissed, she had to take a moment to look toward the light in the horizon. A new day had arrived.
In more ways than one.
“Thank you,” she said to the—what were they called? Doggen?— butler.
“You are most welcome, madam.” The old male bowed low. “I will see you to your door the now.”
He closed the car up and locked it, and then they walked together to the entrance of her apartment building.
“How can you be out in the sunlight?” she asked.
The butler’s snow-white brows went up. “I, ah, it is my kind. We are able to tolerate it quite well. It helps us serve our masters. We can perform tasks that they cannot when the sun is high. It is our pleasure to be of indispensable utility.”
He reached forward to the heavy door, and Jo, concerned he would struggle, leaned in to help him with the weight. But that old man pulled things open like they didn’t weigh a thing.
So much stronger than he looked.
“So, um . . . thank you,” Jo said as she stepped inside.
She expected to say her goodbyes there. Instead, he followed her all the way to her apartment, a cheerful, sprightly figure in his formal uniform—who got some serious attention from her neighbors as they stepped out of their own door for their morning jog.
The couple from across the hall stopped dead in their Lululemons as they got a gander at him.
“Hi,” Jo said to the pair. No reason to make an introduction.
“Greetings,” the butler said as he bowed low.
Before he could offer to go in and scramble them up some eggs or maybe make their bed, Jo gave a wave that she hoped was the kind of hi-goodbye her fellow tenants would be efficient in returning.
And to think that a butler would be the least of the things she might have to explain.
After the couple hopped out of the building, Jo unlocked her door and turned to the doggen. “I’m going to say thank you again.”
“Call us if you need us, madam.” He presented her with a card and bowed low. “And I shall be pleased to collect you at any time.”
He didn’t leave until she had closed herself in, and she was willing to bet he waited until he heard the turn of the dead bolt before taking off.
Going over to the big window in the front, she pushed the venetian blinds aside and waited for him to emerge onto the sidewalk and get back in the car. As the Mercedes eased away from the curb and drove off, she looked at the business card. Only a number. No name or address.
What did she expect, though. Vampires-R-Us?
The shaking started as she sat down on her couch, knees together, ankles touching, hands resting on her thighs, just as she had been taught by her adoptive parents.
As her eyes traveled around her meager belongings—the framed photograph of a field of sunflowers on her wall, the notebook she’d left out before she’d gone to work, the sweater draped over the chair in the alcove—she didn’t recognize anything at all. Not the things she owned or those she had recently touched. Not the towel she had used on her own body and hung on that rod there in the bath. Not the bed she could see through the open door, the one that she always slept in.
Jo didn’t recognize even the clothes she had on. The boots seemed owned by another, the jeans something borrowed, the fleece and jacket the sort of thing she had taken from a kind soul who had wanted her to stay warm in the brisk spring night.
And the longer she sat here, in a quiet that was only interrupted when the couple above her started moving around to begin their day, she became even more estranged from herself.
Memory by memory, Jo sifted through her childhood, her school days, her college era, and then, more recently, her job at that real estate company, her unrequited crush on her playboy boss, and her meeting of Bill that had gotten her to the CCJ.
From time to time, in a relationship, perhaps with a lover or a friend, maybe even with a family member, information came to you, either firsthand, through something you witnessed, or secondhand, through something you heard from a credible source, that changed everything.
Like a bright light turned on in a dim room, suddenly, you saw things that you had been unaware of. And now that you did see them, even if that light was later extinguished, you could not return to your earlier opinion of, and connection to, the space. The furnishings. The wallpaper and the lamp.
Forever changed.
It was a relatively normal phenomenon, inevitable as you opened your life to others.
You just never expected it to happen with your own self. Or at least Jo didn’t.
Fumbling into her pocket, she took out her phone. Syn still had not called or texted, and she told herself not to try him again.
A minute later, she was calling him, and when she got his voice mail, she meant to hang up. She told herself to hang up. She ordered her hand to drop the damn thing away from her ear—
“Syn,” she heard herself say. “I, ah . . .”
Closing her eyes, she added her second palm to the hold, as if the cell was a precious object with a slippery surface, prone to a drop-and-shatter from which she would never recover.
“Can you please call me. I need to talk to you. I need to talk to . . . someone.”
To you, she amended in her head.
Everybody she had met in that underground facility had been kind to her . . . solicitous, concerned, and beyond nonthreatening. But the one she wanted to connect to, the anchor for her, the voice she needed to hear, was Syn’s.