The Survivors

Chapter Two: Matrimony, pt. 1

2

Matrimony

It was nearly midnight when I got back to my hotel. Walking across the parking lot, I took a deep breath and surveyed the empty streets around me. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The night had cooled off some, and a gentle breeze had picked up, so the air was more bearable than it had been.

I passed through the hotel without seeing anyone. When I got to my room, I felt relief immediately. Despite how I hated being alone as often as I was, it had been so much work trying to be normal all day! I had never spent this much time with so many people, and I was exhausted. I kicked off my shoes and dropped my bag on the dresser. I shook out of my cocktail dress and into a camisole. I collapsed on the bed.

For a few fleeting moments, I was still. My breathing was even, and my eyes were contentedly closed. I didn’t risk doing any of the normal things I typically did—taking off my makeup, putting my cell phone on its charger, even turning out the lights—for fear that I would wake myself out of this trance. It was so quiet in my head. I wondered if maybe I was already asleep and hadn’t realized it yet since the feeling was so foreign.

I waited patiently as my muscles began to relax one by one. I saw faint images dance across my mind. I was relishing the peace. I had not been this close to sleep since the last time I actually had slept, over two months before.

I wasn’t sure how long I laid there, but it was long enough that I felt the impulse to move. I resisted, confident that stillness would bring me closer to my goal. I felt the rhythm of my breath increase, interrupting the peace, and I squeezed my eyes closed even tighter. But it was too late. My body had fought off the sleep. I sighed and opened my eyes. Every inch of me was instantly awake. Damn it. I just wanted to sleep. It wasn’t so much to ask.

I glanced at the clock: 12:49 am. My little almost-sleep had lasted less than an hour. I stood up out of bed and began my nighttime routine. After I had completed my rituals—removing my makeup, washing my face, brushing my teeth and my hair—I grabbed a worn book and soft-covered Moleskine journal from my bag and lay on the bed. I rubbed my smooth thumb along the gold-tipped pages of the ancient book, letting my mind wander. The book was my copy of Hesiod, which I pulled out most nights, and the notebook had become the place where I kept information that I needed to let out of my head—lists of things like human tendencies or my family members’ powers, important or striking memories from my life, notes and anecdotes from my travels.

I reread my old questions. It was brash, cutting them into a tree where others could see them. But Noah had come behind me and touched his palm to the wood, searing the bark until there was no sign of my carving. He didn’t care for my impetuous attitude, but instead of confronting me, he spent the 141 years I had known him quietly righting my wrongs.

I picked up Hesiod and thumbed through the worn pages of the mythology book, the sensation of the linen pages against my old skin the only thing anchoring me to this world. The rest of me was lost in memories.

As I held the tattered book Lizzie had given me nearly thirteen decades before against my chest, I remembered clearly the time in my life when I convinced myself that love was impossible. My eyes stared at the bland white ceiling over the hotel bed. Why was I trying now—128 years after making the decision to stay alone—to partner up? I still hadn’t understood my pull to be with Todd. I didn’t even particularly like him—evident now by how little I missed him, though I did miss the companionship. I remembered from Theogony that Eros—desire—had come to being entirely out of nothing. As if it couldn’t be controlled. As if none of us—god or man in Hesiod’s version, Survivor or man in my own—could avoid it.

Lying on the hotel bed, I realized that I was envisioning a life with Cole Hardwick, violating the terms of my own treaty with the world.

I suppose I counted love as a human thing. Somehow I had convinced myself that finding love while trying to pass for a human was acceptable, a part of the persona I was creating. But it was foolish to relegate these desires to some form of humanity as if love had never been a part of the world I came from. Survivors fell in love, too—albeit rarely—and lived even longer, more dedicated lives together when they did mate, so it was strange that I would choose now to think about love, neck deep in a culture practically defined by the uncertainty of affairs and divorce. At least where I came from things were straightforward. Either you loved each other forever or you never loved each other at all. There was not this kind of security among humans. Todd had been the first painful reminder of that. I hoped that Cole Hardwick wouldn’t be the second. Only, in so many other ways, I did.

I closed my eyes again and brought the book closer to my face, inhaling its antique smell. What was I doing here? Why was I trying so hard? I opened my eyes again, gently separating the pages of the book. On the inside cover, it was dated beneath the typeface in elegant blackletter: 1696. Once I was in the outside world and could Google the witch trials in Salem, I had figured out that this was after the elders had been exiled. I thought about how they had lied and told us that they had never left those city walls until the twentieth century. But they couldn’t resist the outside world. We had that in common, the elders and I. The difference between us was that they had come back.

This book that I had in my own possession since 1881 was proof of their lies, one of many lies I had already discovered, part of a multitude I likely hadn’t.

I wondered how much they knew about the outside world. When Lizzie gave me this book that summer over 120 years ago, did she know of the Civil War that had raged two decades earlier, of democracy, of the abolition of slavery? Did she know of westward expansion, or even of the Revolutionary War? Had she ever heard the words The United States of America?

I wanted to ask her these things, but I’d never get the chance. I sighed heavily, thinking of Lizzie, missing her. She was the only one I ever missed. But, painfully, I knew I was never going to see her again. I had run from my family, broken their hearts, spit on their traditions—all because I wanted to be a human. I was still a Survivor, but I was likely dead to them.