Page 28 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

28

London, October 5, 2024

Iris

The diary is better reading than I’d hoped. Lucy Westenra is seventeen, charming and witty and droll, perfect company for a lonely night. Her anecdotes give me context for this home and her life here. There’s a small cast of characters, including her demanding-bordering-on-abusive hypochondriac mother, her hilariously inept art instructor (who’s obviously in love with her), a nosy neighbor determined to catch her in some sort of misdeed, and a former governess named Mina (whom Lucy is obviously in love with).

Lucy’s life seems relatively simple, despite the complications of her mother and her mysteriously absent father. She loves nothing more than going on walks with Mina, trying out new places for tea, and trading harmless pieces of gossip.

She’s also viciously descriptive. I laughed so hard I almost cried over a description of a disastrous dinner party in which she compared her mother’s would-be suitor to a flatulent octopus slowly deflating over the many courses.

But as the pages turn, so, too, does Lucy’s story. Mina comes by less. I wonder if Lucy was even aware she was in love with Mina? That intensity wasn’t just a schoolgirl crush. Their gradual drifting apart as Mina moves on to other young charges devastates Lucy. Whenever she tries to figure out a way to get Mina back in her life regularly, it ends in a fight, with Mina chiding Lucy that she’s spoiled. Mina always harps on about how she has to struggle to make ends meet, but she certainly never says no to luxurious trips to the coast on Lucy’s dime. Lucy doesn’t see it. She has a huge heart, and it makes me sad.

She’s also started editing her own thoughts. Sentences and paragraphs crossed out as though she can’t even feel what she feels in private.

The next passage enrages me. “Oh, you motherfucker,” I whisper. Lucy’s much older art teacher just tried to kiss her during a lesson! When she tells him to stop, he insists it was her fault, that she tricked him, that she made him fall in love with her.

I want to reach through time and strangle that wretched man as poor, innocent Lucy, not even eighteen at this point, spends several pages wondering if it was her fault. As if losing her weekly art lessons wasn’t bad enough, she overhears her neighbor conspiring with her mother. Proof that she actually is being spied on. Everything to make certain she stays in line, stays perfect wife material.

My mother didn’t care if I was a wife, but the circumstances are so familiar it makes my chest ache. And it only gets worse. Lucy’s already small world gets so much smaller and lonelier. She despairs over turning eighteen and the changes it brings. Now nearly every entry is about her mother sending her out to social events, to the opera, to high-class places to meet men of her own caliber. Lucy is uninterested in any of it, longing to return to the days when governess Mina was by her side. Because Lucy doesn’t have the vocabulary or context to understand her feelings, she can’t see a future for them and wants only the past.

Then I get to an entry that stops me cold. I read, then reread the opening paragraph.

Mother’s been in my room again. I leave little traps for her everywhere, little ways that I’ll know where she’s been with her prying fingers and cutting eyes. But she didn’t find my journal. Dear, dear Mother, who loves like a knife, slicing me into ever smaller pieces until I’m exactly the shape that pleases her the most.

Love like a knife. I sit back, overwhelmed.

Sometimes I’ll have a feeling, but I won’t know how to express it until I find it captured in a poem or lyrics. Pulled straight out of my chest and put it into a form I can understand. If I can understand the feeling, then I can accept it and move on.

Here, in this journal kept by a girl at the end of the 1800s, is a perfect summation of my relationship with my mother: love like a knife.

I didn’t weep when my mother died. I was relieved. I’m not stupid enough to think who she was and what she did can’t still hurt me; I just know it won’t be her doing the hurting anymore. I made sure of it.

But even knowing who my mother was, sometimes I doubt myself. Because she loved me, didn’t she? She constantly reminded me about how she suffered and worked and bled to conceive me, to keep me, to bring me into the world. Her triumph, her gift, her heir. Hers. How could I turn my back on her? How could I reject her, after everything she did to create me? Didn’t I owe her for my very existence?

Lucy’s words explain it, though. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me. It was that her version of love was another form of violence.

I wipe under my eyes, careful not to let any tears drop on the diary. How can Lucy make me laugh in one paragraph and break my heart in the next? I swear we’d be best friends. We could make trauma bond besties bracelets.

But her emotionally abusive relationship with her mother is so woven into her daily life, Lucy doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, she describes her newest torment. Gone is the disgusting art teacher, replaced by her mother’s doctor, who seems far more interested in studying Lucy. I add him to my list of long-dead people I’d like to punch.

But then things get interesting. Lucy is in love! She has a secret darling she’s writing to and planning on meeting.

I turn the page eagerly. Lucy hasn’t been interested in any of the men who are courting her. Surely, it’s not the art teacher returning. I’ll scream if it’s him. I’ll invent time travel just to go back and kick him in the balls. Maybe Lucy has clued in on her queerness! Maybe she got a girlfriend!

A knock at the door startles me so badly I actually scream, dropping the diary. The light outside is hazy and soft. The overgrowth around the house obscures daytime cues; I thought it was still dawn, but when I check my nearly dead phone, it’s 8 a.m . I read all night without meaning to.

I know I should share the diary with history buff Elle, but Lucy feels like a friend now that we’ve spent so many quiet hours together. I’m not ready to share her yet. Maybe I’ll never share her. Her privacy was constantly invaded by her awful mother; how could I give her to a museum to be displayed for the whole world to look at? I put the diary back in the safe, then rush to make myself presentable.

I hurriedly wipe under my eyes, hoping I don’t look like a total disaster. My makeup can best be described as casual goth; maybe the dark circles will seem deliberate?

“Coming!” I shout, not wanting Elle to leave. I apply a compensating-for-something amount of deodorant. My freshman lit professor warned our class that any guy who walks in wearing a hat and trailing cologne hasn’t showered in at least two days. Am I that guy now? My mother would be so disappointed in me. That thought makes me feel a little better, at least. Any day I can disappoint her memory is a good one. I skip to the front door and fling it open.

Elle stands there, adorable in a pale blue men’s button-up shirt. It’s oversized, belted around the waist to make it a dress. An enormous tote is slung over her shoulder, but even more alluring than Elle herself is the fact that she’s holding two takeaway coffee cups. She extends one to me, then digs a brown bag out of her tote and gives me that, too. “I figured you wouldn’t have had breakfast yet.”

“You’re my actual hero.” I take the coffee and put a hand over my heart.

Elle laughs. “Don’t build me a monument yet. The coffee could be revolting. I’m a tea girl, myself.”

There’s a flash of orange from the hedge. A pair of baleful eyes glitter darkly, making certain I know I’m observed. I think of Lucy, constantly watched in this very house. We have so much in common, my journal friend and me. I hope she got out, like I’m going to. Hell, I hope she murdered her mom, like I did.

I usher Elle inside, flip off the fox, and slam the door.