The logging town of Hoquiam was wet and miserable like most places we had lived. These drenched towns were all the same, rotting away before my eyes – uninteresting, gray, depressed people in uninteresting, gray depressed surroundings. The economic recession had hit the lumber industry hard and it showed. There was an air of desperation permeating the gloom. On my frequent hunting trips I would often find men poaching deer in Gray’s Woods in order to survive. They and I had more in common than I would like to admit.
Even the new modest home that Carlisle had purchased for us was tired and gray, though it couldn’t have been more than five years old. Time was starting to get away from me at this point – I was 35 years old that year and my age felt significant. The importance of my life weighed heavily on my mind.
In the dense silence of Hoquiam I had far too much time to think. I wondered what life I would be living if the flu had not taken hold of my family. I wondered what the world would be like if I were to be six feet under, in my rightful place. I yearned to know the normalcy of life for a man my age; I desired a wife and a child. I wanted a job to which I would scurry in the morning, clutching a newspaper under my arm. Whether there is great glamour to the life of a vampire I do not know, for me it was marked with an overwhelming sense of loss. Death seemed the better option, and I contemplated it.
It was early in the evening, raining no doubt, and the Green Hornet was on the radio. It was a popular show at the time, and I listened to it occasionally to take my mind off the creeping claustrophobia that occupied my consciousness. The buzz of it bothered me tonight, the affected voices rang in my ears and I turned the knob sharply, breaking it off in my hand. This minor inconvenience angered me, and increased my sense of helplessness.
Saying nothing to my family, I exited the dingy white clapboard prison that contained us and headed out for a walk in the woods. My dissatisfaction was building up; I had accomplished nothing in this life – I had nothing – I was nothing. This world and the people in it were numb and I desired the misery of their lives. I wanted to walk among them, uninteresting and gray. I wished for the ability to make tears – to aid me in mourning the life that I had given up 18 years ago.
Sensing someone in the woods near me, I stopped quite still. We were new to the town, and not properly introduced. My appearance would be startling, although our pallor matched those of most of the people in the sunless city. I moved quietly now, and crept up upon a frail young woman kneeling in a small clearing. Her back was to me, but I could see that in her arms she tenderly cradled a tiny bundle. As my mind found hers, I learned that the bundle was her child, gone within a few days of his birth. Whether he had been taken by starvation or disease I did not know, but the mother mourned him there in the woods.
She cried the tears that I could not as she dug a shallow grave with her bare hands, her thin arms straining against the hard soil. She placed the baby in the ground and lay then on the ground next to him, looking directly into his face. She whispered words I could not hear to the child. Lying there on the damp ground, she wondered as I had about life. She wondered what his life would have been if God had not taken him. She wondered what the world would be like now that he was gone. She yearned for a life before she had known this kind of pain. As she mourned her lost child, she allowed me to mourn my lost life. Her tears were my own, her pain my own, her loss my own. I was both pained and comforted.
Sitting up now she took from the dusty ground a tiny, hastily crafted quilt and she carefully laid it over the baby. She rose slowly and stood over his resting place, pressing her fingers to her lips – she blew her lost son a kiss, and turned to go – her shoulders low against an invisible weight.
I longed to comfort her in that moment, to rush to her side and assure her that I was fine – that the good doctor had granted her wish and that I was spared. I would live, even if it was not as I had imagined.
I watched the woman disappear through the trees. She was not my mother, nor I her son, but she mourned for me in the woods that day. I was reminded of the sacrifices that had been made for me. Edward Anthony Masen was put to rest on that cool fall evening, just a few dozen feet away from that crooked quilt. I emerged from the woods a few hours later, and for the first time since my change, I was prepared to accept my life in the form that it was granted to me - for my mother, for the woman and her child in the woods, and for myself. Happiness could be found in this existence, and I would find it.
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