The Night Wanderer

Tiffany sneaks back into her room and contemplates a bleak future. She realizes that her bedroom door is mysteriously open and finds a note on the door from Keith that says they will talk in the morning. Tiffany grows desperate and digs out a letter from her mother, which was sent five months ago. She calls the number on the letter, and her mother sleepily answers. Her mother is delighted to talk to her, and they affirm that they miss each other; Tiffany fills her mother in on the terrible recent events. Claudia insists that Keith doesn’t hate her but can only vaguely apologize for the damage she caused the family. Tiffany asks to come live with Claudia, and Claudia agrees but then warns Tiffany that she is expecting a baby. Tiffany, furious and betrayed, hangs up immediately and cries herself to sleep.

The next morning, Tiffany delays the conversation by pretending to study, but Keith enters her room anyway. He demands information, and she tells him that she broke up with Tony, which he brushes off. He grounds her for six weeks and tells her, “I won’t be raising a lazy daughter” (153). He then forces her to come outside and wash the truck to teach her responsibility. Tiffany accuses Keith of being the reason that Claudia left, and she defends her mother’s choices when Keith tries to argue. Keith tells Tiffany that he won’t respect her if she doesn’t respect him, and then says that she is just like Claudia, as “she didn’t know when to be quiet either” (156). Quietly furious, Tiffany drops the hose and walks into the woods, ominously implying that she is going into the woods to kill herself. When Keith finally realizes what has happened, he runs into the woods screaming her name, but he searches all day for her with no luck.

Tiffany disappears for 12 hours, and the entire community mobilizes to find her, especially after the recent disappearance of Chucky and Dale. Keith is growing increasingly distraught. Granny Ruth restlessly tries to sleep and dreams of being a little girl and hearing stories of monsters in the woods. Pierre trails above her, watching her sleep and reminiscing.

Pierre remembers the French servant girl, who was nice to him and took care of him even as he lay dying of measles. The young Pierre reflected that in another life, he would have fallen in love with her. As he died, Pierre opened the window so he could see the moon and look toward his homeland; something with red eyes entered through the window, and that was his last memory of that version of himself.

In the present, the phone rings. Pierre hands it to Granny Ruth and waits for her to finish talking to Keith so that she can explain why the rhythm of the house has been so dramatically disrupted. Granny Ruth explains that Tiffany has run off, then tries to stack plates but drops one, shattering it. Pierre sends her to make tea; she does, rambling to him the entire time. She notes that he doesn’t seem healthy, and Pierre privately reflects that he has maybe a day before his vampire impulses take over completely, as his self-denial is slowly killing him. He pretends to drink tea to satisfy her and goes to sit with her on the back porch. Granny Ruth finally asks him for the truth about his travels, noting that he carries a strange burden with him. He comes up with the best lies he can, claiming that he has porphyria, which prevents him from going out in the sun. Granny Ruth asks if he has ever been to Italy; he says that he lived there for 60 years but corrects himself to six. She assumes that she misheard him and moves on. Pierre tells her that he is almost 23 or was “the last time it mattered” (169). Granny Ruth and Pierre then discuss the wendigo, differing slightly on their understanding of the tale and eventually talking in Anishinaabe. She tells him that, like the wendigo, she senses that he is never satisfied. As she goes inside, she asks him to look for Tiffany on his nightly wandering. She turns to tell him something else, but he is already gone.

Tiffany has found shelter for the night in an abandoned treehouse that nobody but herself knows about. She has spent hours trying to figure out how to fix her life, but she refuses to go home and apologize. She is too young for any proper escape and contemplates suicide instead. She knows that suicide is a common occurrence among Indigenous youth, but she feels that the statistics are completely divorced from the genuine experience. Her gloom grows as she sits in the dark, and she begins to long for any form of light.

Suddenly, Tiffany hears a loud thwack. She backs herself against the wall, but the nails give out, and she almost falls backward out of the treehouse. As time passes, she hears more strange noises and grows more terrified; suddenly, everything grows dangerously quiet. She contemplates her options and decides to try and climb down from the treehouse. She looks down from her position and sees two tiny red lights, then calls out, saying, “This isn’t funny,” when she gets no response. Pierre quietly responds, “I never thought it was” (178).

Pierre found Tiffany easily but waits in a tree nearby for hours for his own bloodlust to abate. During this time, his mind wanders to his transformation into a vampire. The vampire who changed him drank his blood and then let Pierre drink his blood in exchange. He wanted Pierre to be the first of his people to join his species. The transformation was exhausting and painful; Pierre screamed and then heard footsteps outside the door. Anne, the servant girl, walked in, and he was overwhelmed by her scent and heartbeat. The transformed Pierre grabbed Anne and bit her; the vampiric part of him won out, and he devoured her.

Now, in the present moment, Pierre hears Tiffany move and approaches her, heavily restraining his bloodlust.

Alarmed by Pierre, Tiffany hits her head and grunts in pain. Assuming that her death is imminent, she prepares herself, but Pierre simply appears in the doorway and tells her that everyone is searching for her. She notices that he is clearly unwell, and he says that he has not eaten in a while. She tries to convince him to go home and eat, but he insists he doesn’t need normal food. He doesn’t explain further and directs the conversation back to her. She refuses to go home and states that her father ruined her life, but Pierre harshly berates her for her lack of perspective, claiming that he would give anything to see his family again. She refuses to listen, and he goes to leave, furious, but is caught off guard by the smell of blood from her wrist. Tiffany pushes him out of the treehouse and scrambles out so that she can disappear into the woods again.

Pierre lies on the ground, startled but unharmed other than a branch that has impaled his calf. He tries to focus and regain control by thinking about previous encounters throughout his long life. He remembers being hunted by a vampire hunter across the far north. The hunter nearly caught and killed him, but Pierre threw a rock and shattered the hunter’s shoulder so hard that the man fell off a cliff. In the present, Pierre removes the branch from his leg and realizes that he has less time than he thought to prepare for his ceremony.

Tiffany runs to the lake in distress, sits by the shore, and cries. When she calms down, she stares at the stars and contemplates the water, which is well below freezing and would kill her in minutes if she tried to swim. She begins to cry again as she contemplates going into the lake, then senses something behind her and turns to see the same two dots of red light. She walks toward them and is immediately greeted again by Pierre, who startles her once more into the lake. Pierre stands on the shore and watches her struggle. Furious, Tiffany returns to the shore, kicking water at Pierre for good measure; he dodges, and she falls face-first into the water. Pierre goes into the lake and drags her out. He explains that he tracked her because he wasn’t done talking to her, then gives her his coat.

After she calms down, Pierre questions her desire to die. She says she is afraid of life, and he says, “I think you should be more afraid of death. You’ll find it lasts a lot longer” (194). He tells her to not become another statistic and thinks back on his memories of one of the World Wars, during which he fed on a dying soldier to ease both their suffering. He then tells Tiffany that her life is not bad in the grand scheme of things.

Pierre kneels in the earth and tells her that he was a lot like her once. He finds arrowheads in the dirt, but she is uninterested until he explains the history of the land. She realizes that they are standing at the location of the old village and grows excited. He helps Tiffany to find a spearhead and teases her as she begins to ask more questions and engage with history. She admits that she feels disconnected from her own heritage and life, so Pierre offers to tell her a story.

Pierre makes a fire using the arrowheads as flints and gives Tiffany some pickles that he grabbed from the kitchen. He tells her a story that is supposedly from his great-grandfather, but he is really telling her the story of his own life. He dreams of the friends he once had, the people who were kind to him, and the people he killed to survive, and he uses the storytelling to purge himself of his memories once and for all.

Tiffany is delighted by the story, if horrified. Pierre controls his bloodlust by squeezing rocks to distract himself from her rushing blood. Pierre gently tells her that being an Indigenous vampire would be horrifying, as the vampire in the “story” was too afraid to return home and be seen as a monster. He says that eventually life became boring, and the vampire sought a way to come home and die, completing the circle of his life through the proper rituals. She teases him that the story sounds a lot like him, and he doesn’t fully deny it. She then says that he doesn’t really care if she kills herself or not; Pierre agrees and offers to help. He picks her up and slams her into a tree, telling her that he can easily arrange her death. Terrified, she asks if he plans to harm her. Pierre comes to his senses and lets her down, frantically apologizing. Tiffany realizes that she doesn’t want to die and runs away from Pierre. She falls on rocks, hurts herself, and screams. Pierre catches up to her and promises not to hurt her, even as he watches blood dripping from her head. He carries her home and gently tells her that the trouble she is in will pass.

When they arrive back at the Hunter house, Keith is still gone. Tiffany gives Pierre the weekah root, hoping that it will help heal him, too. They find Granny Ruth asleep; while Tiffany cleans out her wounds, Pierre gently whispers a private Anishinaabe message in Ruth’s sleeping ear, then leaves. Tiffany puts on her pajamas, returns, and kisses Granny Ruth’s cheek.

Back on the rock, Pierre strips to the waist and burns sage and tobacco, eager for the sunrise. He stares at the island across the lake where he dumped Dale and Chucky, naked, into poison ivy on the previous night. He chants an Anishinaabe song, wearing the weekah root, and hears gunshots as hunters pursue ducks in the distance. Pierre glimpses the sun for the first time in years.