The Silver Kiss

She wanted to laugh but dared not break the spell.

Instead, he began to fade. She held tighter, elation turning to dismay. Her fingers slid through his as if they were mist.

But his look of delight didn’t change. “I think I’m free,” he whispered. “All I had to do was go willingly.”

She could barely see him now. He was just a shimmer, like ghostly heat rising from a long and lonely road. Her tears wouldn’t stop. They flowed long after there was nothing but the memory of a faint voice.

“I love you, Zoë.”

It’s up to me now, she thought. But somehow it wasn’t scary anymore.

THE CHRISTMAS CAT

“I will never love again,” Zoë said to herself.

It was Christmas Eve and she was the only one home. All the tenants had gone away for the holidays and her landlady was out visiting. Zoë sat on the floor of her creaky old apartment in the shambling Victorian house, in the city of San Francisco, far from the eastern suburb where she had grown up, far from the father she still had, far from the ashes of the mother she had no more.

The lights flickered as if the ancient wiring were protesting the load. The fuses in this house had blown three times since she had started college in the fall.

She had applied to San Francisco State partly because of the stellar creative writing program they offered and partly because of the happiness in the eyes of her mother when she had told Zoë stories of magical concerts in Golden Gate Park and clubs full of swaying hair, fringes, and beads. Being here connected Zoë to the girl who had become her mom, the girl who had majored as much in partying as she had in anything at the San Francisco School of Art.

But Zoë wasn’t a partier. She valued her privacy and didn’t want to share a dorm room with some “whatever” stranger with no personal boundaries. She had a small inheritance from the sale of her mother’s paintings and lithographs, enough to allow her to rent an apartment. Zoë’s father had reluctantly helped her to search.

When it quickly became obvious that all she could afford was a boardinghouse room in one of the seedier areas, the reality of peeling paint, mildew, and roaches had almost changed her mind. But then she’d walked into this shabby Victorian at the edge of the Mission District, and there was something about the high ceilings, ornate woodwork, and decaying splendor that called to her. The windows of the third-floor, one-bedroom apartment looked over a garage that might have been a carriage house once. The alley was strewn with trash but was cobbled. A tabby cat had sat on the garage roof washing itself. It had looked up at the window as if it expected to see Zoë there. That was when Zoë decided this was home.

I could paint this room, she had thought. Do some stenciling. That Oriental rug on my bedroom floor at home would look good in here.

The apartment was still sparsely furnished, and her only nod to Christmas was some holly she had picked from a bush in the neighbor’s yard at his urging. It was easier than saying no. The berry-strewn branches were arranged in a large peanut butter jar on the mantelpiece. Next to the jar sat a fat red candle and a book of matches, waiting for her to feel festive. The only painting she had brought with her sat propped against the boards that blocked the impotent fireplace. It wasn’t one of her mother’s works but a small oil portrait of a seventeenth-century family—a proud father with a five-year-old boy at his knee and a merry-eyed wife at his side, holding a sturdy baby in her arms, a baby who solemnly stared at a vase of flowers on the table.

The baby was Simon, who had never grown beyond nineteen years old yet had lived to be three hundred or more. Who would ever believe that a vampire had touched her life, let alone stirred her heart? People thought she was odd already, a loner; yet, during a crazy, crisp, star-spun autumn the year before last, she had defeated death, and yet had been forced to accept it too. Simon had accepted, anyway. He had surrendered to the sun and drifted off to the sky. His task done, he couldn’t tarry in a world that rejected him with every drop of rain, every ray of light.

He was the last boy she had kissed.

All she had left of those she loved were paintings, it seemed.

Simon had mentioned that he had lived in this town once. He had given no details, only that there had been moments here when he didn’t feel so alone. She hoped that she would have moments like that too.

A faint cat mew drifted up from below. The tabby must be in the yard again. She saw it often, a shadow outside at dusk, a silhouette at the window, but the landlady had never seen a cat, didn’t know where it would belong.

Even though she had never really wanted a pet, now she almost wished she had a cat—an independent puss who wouldn’t care how much time Zoë spent with her books and her computer as long as she made a lap available and put down a bowl of food twice a day. But … all sorts of things could happen to cats. Even cats got cancer.

She shivered. Her mother had died of cancer on Christmas Eve two years ago, slipped out the door that the Christ Child entered and was gone.

Last Christmas had been the first without her mother, and it had been so dreadful that Zoë couldn’t face another holiday of harsh forced laughter punctuated by uncomfortable silences. She had told her father that her grades were slipping and it was better that she stay at school and study rather than make the long trip home. He gave in too easily. “I don’t understand,” he said, but he had mailed her a present and a check. He would call on Christmas Day.

All gone—the ones who understood her. She loved her father, yes, but he was remote. He could never know her the way her mother had, would never take the time. She looked too much like her mother—the same dark eyes, now made fathomless by sorrow, the same unruly dark hair—perhaps that similarity made him shy away in fear and pain. That was another reason to stay away. She didn’t like hurting him.

There was a time for everyone to go, she knew, but she couldn’t believe in a cruel God who took away those she loved so soon, and if there were no God then heaven didn’t exist either, and she would never see the ones she loved again. Life was so pointless.

She missed the cold of an East Coast December; this damp Northern California winter seeped into her chest, clogged her heart and weighed it down.

She should go online. Maybe Lorraine would be there. They could IM the night away and close the distance between California and Oregon as if it didn’t exist. Lorraine had no patience for dark matters of the soul, and she could make Zoë laugh.

Zoë was halfway to her desk when the lights went out. “Damn!” Was the whole neighborhood out or was it just this house? she wondered. She stepped slowly, carefully to the nearest gray rectangle of window, her arms out slightly in front of her as if obstacles might leap into her path. The neighbors’ Christmas lights flashed merrily around windows and dripped like twinkling icicles from eaves. The fault was the ancient electrical box, blown again, and no one home to replace the fuses.

Down below, the shadow of a cat rounded the garage and headed for the house. Why was it always here? The landlady didn’t feed it. Was the hunting good?

She edged her way to the fireplace. It took three matches to light the candle. The damp sulfur heads of the first two crumbled uselessly. The candlelight created dancing shadows on the walls, but the corners of the room remained dark and mysterious, rounding the room into a ball of yellow light centered on the unused hearth, where the old painting leaned. She hadn’t had a radio, a TV, or a stereo on; in the bright electric light she had felt no need for sound. Now, in the waxy twilight, she was aware of the silence around her. The world was hushed, as if waiting, and warmth seemed to leave along with sound and light. The room crackled with unseen frost.