In the Bedroom

Sally Yan looked with terrified eyes at her childhood bedroom.

Her Sony Walkman with the orange earpads and the cassette on which she’d just managed to record “Living La Vida Loca” lay comfortingly on her messy bedside table but she didn’t dare turn on her night light with the blue shade which was right over her bed.

Because there it was! The lurching, clumsy movement. A jiāngshī

, a Chinese hopping vampire from the movies, was in her room!

The thing moved into her sight, clad in a white robe, its face blank with dark slots for eyes. The mask was clumsy, something a foolish man, trying to be crafty, might make in the dark, thinking like a child that if his face was hidden, he could not be seen.

Chill spread along her side and her front as the thing lifted up her covers.

In a minute she would sit up as she had done in real life, fierce and determined, and grab at the yellow pad of Post-Its and the bowl of sticky rice with little bits of plum sauce clinging. She would throw the sticky rice at it and pretend the yellow paper held a spell written in chicken blood and that she was going to stick it to the forehead of the jiāngshī

. It would slink away.

And as it did, she would smell the mijiu

on its breath and hear a particular wet way of breathing that would forever sear the knowledge that it was her father into her brain.

The rough hands gripped at the hem of her nightgown, slowly lifted it. She heard that heavy breathing. The hands shook.

She held still, she held still.

She had never hated her father more than in this moment when he stood, big and foolish and dangerous, drunk even though he had raged at his daughters against alcohol. Desperately, she pulled up a memory from years later, the decaying man dying of cancer with a smell of rot. But that hadn’t happened yet, not for the girl in the bedroom.

She was alone in the room with a vampire who wanted to take her body and her soul and she had said

welcome, come in…

If she meant it, if she welcomed the vampires in, if she believed that opening rather than closing was the way to save the world … didn’t that mean she had to give in now?

Already the past had changed. Back then she would have grabbed the talismans by now. But here she lay, unmoving, looking the monster in the eyes as she always did.

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She saw more clearly than the dim light of her old bedroom really would have allowed. His bleared eyes did not meet hers. Instead he looked at the part of her he lusted after and breathed hard. The smell of the mijiu

nearly made her sick.

She allowed her mind to touch, like a live electric wire, the thought that she would now let her father have her.

She would give him what he’d wanted so many years ago. She would heal the world by an act of sexual submission worse than anything she might have done with Rich.

She would be

the victim she’d always played at being. And the world would be saved.

But she jerked away and, retching her guts out like when that guy had shit on her, bellowed silently, NO!!!

That could not, could not

be the way.

A hot, rough hand touched her naked thigh. He would take her, even now as she heaved over the side of the bed. He opened his bathrobe…

***

Walter held Jesse’s tentative hand (the slippery porn scene in the air above San Francisco hadn’t healed everything), and tried to radiate loving support as Sally struggled with some dark shape, seen vaguely as through a glass shower curtain. Maybe he would finally atone for what he’d done, though when his thoughts strayed near the dark pit of what he’d done to Jeremy and his brother, he got sleepy.

He’d been raised Protestant, though really that only meant being bored in church and thinking of silly jokes to play on the tall, thin Sunday school teacher with the chipmunk face and ridiculous sideburns. He didn’t really

believe in punishment for sins. But he did believe in a figure from horrible fever dreams as a child: the Rubber Stamp Man.

He tried to quash the internal babble and just be strong, a rock, like dear Lavinia kneeling beside her beloved, holding her hand, believing in her. One of the vampires in the clearing, a woman with eyes glowing in awe, knelt beside Sally, extended a hand and touched her. Walter did the same and so did Jesse and three others.

***

Shaking her head, no, NO!!!, Sally rolled away and held up the sticky rice and yellow paper. The monster, thoroughly her father for the moment, felt the shame and stopped, his bathrobe sliding safely closed again.

For the moment, he was no danger and, by a twisted perversity, now she couldn’t look him in the face. She looked down at the bed as she spoke, and her fingers stroked the gritty sheets.

“You’re not my Dad, I don’t know how this works but you don’t get to rape a little girl; saving the world can’t involve that.” The grit was from eating Cap’n Crunch in bed, she remembered that hypersweet taste and the rough way it left the roof of her mouth. “You, um, you got that?” she asked more shyly than she wanted to.

Her father’s grunt of assent!

She’d completely forgotten how that sounded, what a relief it had been to hear it when she was little, when she’d begged permission to buy her first Walkman or to go to Kelly Newmeyer’s birthday party where there’d been that chocolate cake with the fudge frosting swirls that she’d craved.

So weird

to hear it now from a monster pretending to be her father. But it was better to stick with this image of the known and manageable.

So she looked up carefully, forcing herself not to cringe, and began talking with a man who had been dead for many years.