Balthazar’s eyes crinkled at the corners, like he was amused, or at least happy. I thought about all the centuries he must have known, and the fact that he still didn’t have someone to share them with. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
He blinked, surprised but not offended. “Sure.”
“When did you die?”
Instead of answering me immediately, Balthazar walked a few more steps. The way he studied the horizon made me think that he was trying to picture how things had been for him, before. “1691.”
“In New England?” I asked, remembering what he’d said.
“Yeah. Not far from here, actually. The same town where I grew up. I only left it a handful of times.” Balthazar’s gaze was distant. “One trip to Boston.”
“If this is making you sad—”
“No, it’s all right. I haven’t talked about home in a long time.”
A hungry crow perched on a branch of a nearby holly bush, black and shining amid its sharp-cornered leaves, plucking at berries. Balthazar watched the bird at its task, probably so he wouldn’t have to look me in the eyes. Whatever it was he was preparing to say, I knew it was difficult for him. “My parents settled here early. They didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they weren’t far behind. My sister Charity was born during the voyage. She was a month old before she ever saw dry land. They said it made her unsteady—that she wasn’t rooted to the earth.” He sighed.
“Charity. That was a Puritan name, wasn’t it?” I thought I remembered reading that in a book once, but I couldn’t imagine Balthazar dressed up like a Pilgrim in a Thanksgiving pageant.
“The elders wouldn’t have said we were among the Godly. We were only admitted to membership in the church because—” My face must’ve betrayed my confusion, because he laughed. “Ancient history. By any modern standard, my family was deeply religious. My parents named my sister for one of the sacred virtues. They believed in those virtues as something real enough to touch, just far away—the way we believe in the sun or the stars.”
“If they were so religious, why did they name you something edgy like Balthazar?”
He gave me a look. “Balthazar was one of the Three Wise Men who brought gifts to the Christ Child.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” One broad hand rested on my shoulder, for just a minute. “Very few people teach their children that any longer. Back then, it was common knowledge. The world changes a lot; it’s hard to keep up.”
“You must miss them all very much. Your family, I mean.” It felt so inadequate. What must it have been like for Balthazar, to have not seen his parents or his sister for centuries? I couldn’t begin to imagine how badly that must hurt.
(What will it be like when you haven’t seen Lucas for two hundred years?)
I couldn’t bear to think about that question again. I concentrated on Balthazar instead.
“Sometimes I think I’ve changed so much that my parents would hardly know me. And my sister—” Balthazar paused, then shook his head. “I realize that you’re asking me how different things were then. How much things change. But we don’t change, Bianca. That’s the scariest part. And it’s one reason a lot of people here act like teenagers, even when they’re centuries old. They don’t understand themselves or the world they have to join. It’s sort of like perpetual adolescence. Not so much fun.”
I hugged myself as I shivered from the cold and from the thought of all those years and decades and centuries stretching out before me, shifting and uncertain.
We walked on for a while after that, Balthazar lost in his thoughts, and me lost in mine. Our feet kicked up small plumes of fresh snow as we left the only footprints in a still sea of white. Finally I got up the courage to ask Balthazar what was really on my mind. “If you could go back, would you bring them with you? Your family?”
I thought he might say yes, that he would do anything to have them with him. I thought he might say no, that he couldn’t have brought himself to kill them, no matter what. Either answer would tell me a lot about how long grief lasted, how long I would have to endure the misery of having lost Lucas. I didn’t expect Balthazar to stop in his tracks and give me a hard stare.
“If I could go back,” he said, “I’d die with my parents.”
“What?” I was too stunned to come up with any other response.
Balthazar stepped closer and laid a leather-gloved hand on my cheek. His touch wasn’t loving, like Lucas’s. He was trying to wake me up to something, to make me see. “You’re alive, Bianca. You still can’t appreciate what it means, to be alive. It’s better than being a vampire—better than anything else in the world. I remember a little of what being alive was like, and if I could touch that again, even for a day, it would be worth anything in the world. Even dying again, forever. All the centuries I’ve known and all the marvels I’ve seen don’t compare to being alive. Why do you think the vampires here are so vicious to the human students?”
“Because—well, they’re snobs, I guess—”
“That’s not it. It’s jealousy.” We looked at each other in silence for a long moment before he added, “Enjoy life while you have it. Because it doesn’t last—not for vampires, not for anyone.”
Nobody had ever said anything like this to me. My parents didn’t wish they were still alive—did they? They’d never spoken a word about it. And Courtney, Erich, Patrice, Ranulf: Were they all wishing to be human after all?
Perhaps recognizing my doubt, Balthazar said, “You don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that. I know you’re telling me the truth. You wouldn’t lie to me about anything important. That’s not the kind of person you are.”
Balthazar nodded, a slow half smile playing across his lips, and I felt like I’d said more than I meant to say. The hopeful light in his eyes now was something I hadn’t seen since the night of the Autumn Ball, before I’d let him down.
What bothered me more, though, was the fact that what I’d said was true. Balthazar really wouldn’t lie to me about anything important, even when that truth was difficult for me to hear. He was a trustworthy person—a good person. I wished I could’ve been as good a person, someone who would have put other people’s interests first, one who would have deserved Lucas’s trust.
Then I thought, Maybe it’s not too late.
After we returned to the school, our footprints winding a track all around the grounds, I waved good-bye to Balthazar and hurried upstairs to the computer lab. Luckily, the door was unlocked. As I waited for my computer to boot up, I remembered the print of Klimt’s Kiss above my bed. Those two lovers held each other for eternity, two parts of the same whole, fused together in a mosaic of pink and gold.
If you loved someone, you couldn’t let lies come between you. No matter what happened—even if you’d already lost each other forever—you owed each other the truth.
With trembling fingers, I typed in Lucas’s e-mail address and put as the subject line “and nothing but the truth.” Then I started typing, spilling out everything I’d held back from him all this time. As quickly and simply as I could, I told him that what he’d seen that night was real.
