Sometimes I wake up at night and my hands search the sheets for Laurent, for his hair or his back. It is because I wake up feeling the same way I did then, so bitter and confused that I can taste it in my mouth, like iron, like blood. I wake up wild and desperate, afraid and uncertain why or for whom, a nameless fear that makes me shake and tickles the back of my throat. Yuki had taken to sleeping in Javie's bed in his seventeenth year, cursing and swearing that he would protect our baby from the same treatment I had gotten at that age. Finding my bed empty, Laurent began to sleep beside me whenever he came to Leechtin's, hushing me. 

I thought myself much changed from childhood, but Laurent didn't, talking to me in just the same way and kissing my temples. If he found me sleeping, at whatever hour, he would sleep as well. I woke one night, gasping and shaking, and he sat up with me by the window. "I woke you," I gasped.

"Chut, it is the cold that woke me. There is a cold creature in this house, who stalks me. You are far the warmer and the better. Chut," he said, cooing to me in French, and holding me around the waist from behind.

I pushed open the window for a breeze, and he pushed me against the window frame, so that my cheek pressed against the wood. "Suffering," I said quietly, from the pain.

"You are suffering. I don't know what is to be done about it."

"Nothing. Let me up. Let me lie down."

"You lay before and yet you dream badly."

"Let me alone, fairy," I said. 

I felt that he wanted to say something significant that would alter my point of view, but he only said, "Talk to me," and "will you kiss me a little? It will not mean anything at all but my comfort. Sit astride me and play the lover a little. Will you do it to me? A little?" Allez-vous me faire cela? Un peu?

"No."

"If you do it I will blow upon your skin very gently, and I know that you like it."

"You may blow on my skin but I'm not going to depress your body."

"Oh be a friend," he said, blowing on my neck quietly. 

It thrilled him to feel me shiver against him involuntarily. I liked it enough that when he kissed my neck I didn't protest, and when he began to suck on my skin I let my eyes roll back in my head. His was a gentle pleasure when he was of the mood. With Yuki it had been always passion, but in those years only begging and quiet crying, which so crushed us both. He was so often down and feeling numb that a single touch brought him to tears, and our intimacy for him felt a rediscovery that he was alive, when all that I wanted was to be touched. It is such a simple thing, and Laurent knew that, and he drew upon that needfulness. All he wanted in return was for me to love him, and I did.

"Talk to me," he whispered, kissing me and sucking on me, pressing me all the harder against the windowframe.

"It hurts," I said, in ecstatic monotone, to which he moved on to my ear, making my fingers twitch open and closed involuntarily on nothing. "Leis, sent me a gold cross for my throat, but I gave it to Yuki. Perhaps I should be wearing it, to fend you off, vampire."

"But I love God. Do I sin against him?" Laurent whispered.

"Devil," I said, wavering.

"Tell me why you are so distressed," he said, head pressed against my neck.

He let me down and I told him vaguely that I worried about Javie, to which he jokingly said "Who? Do you mean Miou-Miou?" and to a fierce look, "But do you think it will improve?"

"You look like a fox. Do they not call you Le malin?" 

"They do, unkindly." He lay beside me, head propped on his hand. I reached out and fussed with his hair, an unbrushed tangle of curls. 

"Well tell me what you think of Javie. What do people say?"

"What do people say or what do I think?"

"You. You."

"I think he's an insufferable snob, and very flamboyant. Beautiful, but with a pinched quality. I think he is selfish in the worst way, which is that he is completely unaware of it. I think it is in his nature and nothing you have done."

"You are only saying that because he is more beautiful and intelligent than your children."

"More intelligent? Absolutely. More beautiful? You have to be joking."

"Be careful or you will hurt my feelings."

"He will sort himself out or he won't. Either way you suffer," he said, reaching out and pressing the flat of his hand to my stomach, over my shirt. "They can't all be like you. You are a fluke." He was being talkative. I don't know if he meant half of it, and which half that might be. Sometimes it was difficult to tell when Laurent was joking, though I am now sometimes told that he never joked around at all, and meant everything he ever said. Is it true? 

I whispered to him then, because it felt so intimate, that I worried that I didn't want a life like ours for Javie, the blood or the fear of death. He drew me close then and let me cry on him. I told him I worried about Javie's asthma, wouldn't that cause problems? If he continued to react to adversity with a snobbery, would he be able to form the relationships that he needed? Some of it was only misunderstanding my son, but most of it genuine concerns. I sobbed to Laurent that I couldn't go on without Javie. I remember it so well, again, because I wake feeling that way more often than not. And then I remember what happened, and I cry, and then I remember why Laurent is not there beside me and it makes me scream. I can't help it. Leis comes rushing into my room when he hears it, because he is often awake during the day anyway. If is a feeling that I am falling apart. I dream of my body falling to pieces.

I remember that day, when Javie was twenty. Even I was calling him Miou-Miou by then, and he had grown a little quieter and more reserved, and yet sick, delicate, which was almost worse. 

I sometimes spied Nataniellus looking at Javie, from doorways, but both he and Leechtin most often kept clear of him. That day, I noticed Nataniellus hanging a little closer, catching him out of the corner of my eye. I was sitting in the kitchen when I saw it, Javie walking past the picture window with a baby in his arms. It froze me. When I turned, Nataniellus was there, silent as the night, and he said to me fiercely, so quietly, "Get me that baby from Miou. It's not his to hold. I am meant to kill it. Someone has killed its parents too coward to do it himself."

"Why should the baby die? What has it done?"

"What did its parents do? Do not be sentimental."

"I won't."

Nataniellus leveled with a gaze and mimed spitting on the floor. "No?"

"No I won't."

"If you leave a loose end you come to regret it. Don't let's be stupid."

"No." Don't let's be stupid. Pain is natural and constant. Were they not both saying the same thing? There are those who say they are afraid of Nataniellus for unnaturalness, for violence, but is he not merely honest? 

I went outside to find Javie on the swing in the garden. He looked up at me with the child in his arms. It was really only an infant, just a few weeks old. "Oh it's you," he said, airily. In this memory his face is only a blur, far clearer the breeze and the sleeping infant.

"I've told you not to be rude."

He imitated me wordlessly, rocking in the swing gently.

I didn't try to get the baby from him. I didn't try it at all. I think a part of me thought it was a good thing, that maybe Javie would settle down a little with a baby and stop instigating conversations about leaving the house, going back to school, travelling. I recognized those conversations. They were the same ones I had clamored to have near his age. He would push for them, and the day, two weeks later when he started a fuss in the sun room was no different except that Laurent and Leis were there, and Quinn, trying to have a conversation on Roman couches. 

It was queer for Quinn to be there, but it was queer all around for Leis to be there at all, and Quinn had insisted on coming to see me since it had been some years. By then the relationship between my father and Laurent was at least civil. I was sitting under Quinn's arm when Javie stormed in with the baby, who he had named Ikuko. It didn't matter that the baby was a boy, and that it was a girl's name, and that the child had been brought all the way from the Lebanon and was not one drop Japanese. Javie was that way. He had to do things how he wanted no matter the reality. He came storming in as if we were in the middle of an argument, throwing the quiet conversation silent.

"Listen," he said, stabbing his finger at me, baby on his hip. The child was too young to be aware of anything but the boy who protected it. "I don't care what you think, you asshole. You keep trying to talk my dad out letting me get out of here, and I know what you're doing. Why don't you keep your fucking mouth shut?"

"Pas du tout, you won't talk to him that way," Leis whispered behind him, scandalized, seated by Laurent. 

"Oh you can stuff it as well. Don't butt in," Javie hissed. He was so angry. He was only a child himself, unable to control his anger.

"Injustifiable. If you have demands make them rationally."

But Javie couldn't do it, thrown too much into a passion, and it came nearly to blows, with Javie stabbing his finger in my face, and Quinn rising to push him away bodily, and the baby beginning to fuss. I rose and took Javie by the shoulders, and said, "Miou," wanting to placate him, "if you want to go to university you'll go then, you'll go then, only please calm down," nearly hysterical, embarrassed and trying to get control of him.

"You're a liar! You're only saying that to get rid of me! I know what you say and what you do. I've seen you with that one and that one, at night. I know what you do! You're dirty, disgusting! I don't understand," he said, responding my hysteria with tears, still my baby, mirroring my emotion with his own, and I wanted to take him in my arms and rock him, and coo at him that it would be all right, to stop taxing himself, his asthma. I tried to take him and press my forehead to his, but he pushed me away, losing his balance, stumbling back a few steps. "I want to go!" he insisted, nearly silent with rage, through tears. "You're sucking out my soul! My dad's soul! I don't belong here," hiccuping with exertion and sobbing. I saw Laurent's eyes, Laurent' face, through my baby's crooked arm. How he stared at me, steady and unblinking. I tried to move forward but Javie stopped me, pointing at me. My heart beat in my head and I couldn't hear anything, couldn't hear what he said, but it was too much for Leis, who moved to strike him, to take him by the chin and hit him the way he had done to me as a child only a few memorable times, but Laurent was faster.

And I didn't realize what had happened until the baby hit the floor and started to scream, that Laurent had broken my Javie's neck in one swift movement. I don't think I saw it. I don't remember it. 

But I do remember finding Yuki a few days later, on the bathroom floor. At first I thought he had clawed his own eyes out, but found only that the pain of slowly drinking half a bottle of bleach had caused his eyes to tear such that the blood made his face a horror. 

I wake up screaming, my hands searching for their murderer across the sheets. Oh, I am always thinking, oh, I can't remember what it felt like to be touched so tenderly. There is no peace anywhere. I only want to hear "Chut",  to cry upon his shoulder. And am lost.

I know in my heart that I am lost because of wanting that baby dead, that my child held in his arms, because after thirty-three years I hear that it is still living. I cannot abide it, and when I wake up tasting that bitterness, it tastes of his blood.