The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

When on the way back to my friends I caught sight of Kit, faintly nodding at something Amy was saying, I realized I'd had the fantasy that in the time I was absent she'd have slipped away; at the same time, I'd been hoping she'd still be available to me for a little while. Love for her brought tears to my eyes; careful not to smudge my mascara, I dabbed them away. It was plain to see that Kit was now quite beyond my reach. So, regretfully but without hesitation, I turned my attention elsewhere.

Denise had a hefty lunch, including dessert. Amy and I had salads. We chatted stiffly; it was hard to come up with safe conversation with Kit among us. Talking about the future, even next week, seemed ghoulish. Talking about the present made Kit's illness the elephant at the table nobody could forget but nobody mentioned. Talking about our shared past reminded us of what was gone. Kit didn't take part in the conversation much and, although she ordered something, she didn't eat, just took a sip of water now and then, slowly and with great care.

Denise was into a somewhat manic recounting of her recent expedition climbing Colorado's fourteeners. "Not bad for a fifty-one-year-old grandmother, huh?" she crowed more than once. Amy was looking increasingly pained. I guessed that Denise was desperate to fill silence, to talk about anything other than the elephant, but I allowed myself to half believe that her insensitivity justified what I was about to do.

I stopped behind her and laid my hands on her shoulders. She took it as a warning, which in part it was, and hesitated, then brought her story to a clumsy conclusion and stopped talking. Energy was racing through her body like white water. I pushed myself into the stream. She winced. I massaged her shoulders tenderly, employing techniques I'd learned from Vonda to loosen tight muscles and release tension, but my purpose was not to heal.

"Oh," she moaned, wriggling her shoulders sensuously. "That hurts."

"Should I stop?" But I didn't stop. I increased the pressure along her trapezius, then found a knot under her left shoulder blade and dug my knuckle in. She gasped and arched her back. I held steady. After a long moment she relaxed under my hands. I felt the underlying defences of her body open to me, and we had the first of our exchanges. For me it was like a blood transfusion. For her, it was slow poison.

I released the pressure, swept my hands lightly over her back, and left her with a little pat of affection and regret. She said, "Wow, Madyson, you have really strong hands," and just sat there for a while.

Kit asked Amy, in a voice strong enough to make me wonder if she might have something more to offer me after all, but, tellingly, with no energy to waste on segue, "When do you get your baby?"

Amy hesitated and looked at me, not sure she ought to go there. I shrugged. "I leave Thursday," she finally said, almost apologetically.

Denise, who'd been staring off into space, roused herself. "Baby?"

"I'm adopting a baby girl from China." Amy kept glancing at Kit and spoke with some reluctance, but the excitement that broke through was contagious. "She was a foundling so they aren't certain of her birth date, but she's about eight months old."

"A baby? At your age? At our age?" Denise shook her head in amazement and, I thought, disapproval. I disapproved, too, but not on the basis of age; while I doubted her weight was a serious health hazard, it seemed to me that one of the criteria for adoption ought to be appearance. After all, who would want a fat mother?

Amy started to defend herself, but I spoke first. "If you can climb fourteeners, at our age , why shouldn't Amy be able to adopt a baby?"

"Climbing a mountain takes a long spurt of energy. Raising a kid takes energy twenty-four — seven for at least eighteen years." Denise raised her water glass in Amy's direction. "I could never do it. I'm too old. More power to you, girlfriend."

"Maybe," I said, recklessly, "this is what they mean when they talk about women discovering new power and vitality in middle age." Then, suddenly, we were all not looking at Kit, and I was ashamed of myself, and at the same time I was filing away for future reference the images of Amy's reservoir of maternal energy and — daringly, appallingly — of the raw life-force this baby would bring.

Amy asked me quietly, "Do you see Vonda?"

"Every day at the gym. I saw her this morning."

"How is she?" There was a wistfulness in her tone.

"Fine," I said. "Great."

Amy poked at the remnants of her salad with her fork. "She's stopped calling."

I didn't know what to make of this. "She's pretty busy," I tried. "Don't take it personally." This admonition had always struck me as specious, since impersonality was exactly what the complainant was objecting to. But talk of lost connections seemed cruel in the presence of Kit, who was about to lose them all, and I didn't want to encourage Amy to go on.