She watches them through the window and thinks about the life she never could have had. Would have been too simple, too real, too . . . too good.
The little boy has dark hair, and she can’t see his eyes but she knows they’re light — blue, probably. Like hers, only clearer, innocent, laughing. Could have been . . . no. Couldn’t.
If he’d stayed. If she’d lived. If . . . if . . . no, no more ifs. Only nows. Soons. Wills.
They are playing hide and seek; he is behind the sofa, making breathing noises though he has no need to breathe. The boy is grinning, tiptoeing around behind his big, black-clad daddy to win the game, and be tickled.
She remembers discovering he was ticklish, the laughter that bubbled up in her stomach whenever she thought about this sauve, mysterious, gorgeous man losing all control at the touch of her fingers. The touch of her fingers. Control. It was all a century ago, must have been. A lifetime or two.
She came to say goodbye, though she can’t remember why anymore. It’s not as if she’s said hello, not for long and longer. The world is a different place than it used to be. A lie: she is the one that changed, not the world. And him, obviously. He changed.
She doesn’t know where she’s going. Four years she’s been waiting for this day, waiting to be unleashed upon the world. Waiting for the world to be unleashed upon her. The girl is gone now, the closest thing she will ever have to that little boy with blue eyes. Off to college, off to a life, a real life where the ground is not liable to open beneath her feet at any moment, where she won’t be haunted by ghosts or psycho vampires that think they love . . . that love . . . No. Nows. Soons. Wills.
Will. She can still see the way the witch melted, like in the Wizard of Oz, only it wasn’t . . . water or whatever it was in the movie. It was herself, her own power turned inward until it turned outward again. Melting. She feels like that sometimes, as if she will do it herself, only she’s never sure if she’ll melt into nothing or into something else, someone else.
Someone, perhaps, who could have a little blue-eyed boy.
It’s funny how things work out. How he told her she’d want . . . things someday, and how she died before they could come and he died two hundred years ago and yet there he is, and now the boy has leapt upon his back, borne him down to the ground, tickling for all he is worth.
They do not see her, gazing in through the window. She thinks she may have become insubstantial the moment she left the city, as if her very life was merely an extension of the Hellmouth, and in the rest of the world she is what the vampire knew her to be: not whole. But she will find another place to love, or she will never find it, only wander the roads until they crumble beneath her feet. The girl doesn’t know it yet, no one knows it yet. They all think she is going back, but she is never going back.
She was going to tell him. She thought he might understand. But he is wrestling with his son, who could never have been her son. Whatever miracle there was for him, none of it could have touched her. Better that he left. Didn’t get sucked into her own personal . . . heaven. Hell. Heaven. Hell.
He gets the upper hand and begins mock-nibbling at the little boy’s stomach, making him squeal with laughter. A smile touches her lips, as much of joy as any she’s had in the last four years. She touches the glass for a moment, and says her last goodbye, silently, into the daylight that will never touch him. And then she turns from the ifs to the nows and the soons and the wills.
The End