by Marnie Vinge
“What?” Birdie asks, a knot of dread twisting itself and tightening into a noose in her stomach. Something is wrong.
“You and I both know you don’t want this baby,” Vanessa says. “I’ve known it for a long time. You never have. You didn’t come here to bear Tom’s children.”
Birdie stirs, shifting in her seat.
“And I know that the baby’s not coming yet,” Vanessa says.
Birdie’s blood chills in her veins. And like summoning something from another realm, Birdie’s water breaks.
“Oh, God,” Birdie murmurs. The pain in her shoulder is almost enough to distract her from the fact that she’s going into labor now. For real. “My water just broke.”
Vanessa’s eyes widen as fluid runs down Birdie’s legs, the seat soaked and the floorboard collecting a small pool that glistens in the moonlight.
“You can have the baby here,” Vanessa says, her tone convincing.
Birdie can’t deny that throughout her entire pregnancy she never felt a mothering instinct. Her greatest fear was that she wouldn’t love this child. She hadn’t wanted it. It had been an accident on her part. Tom was elated, but Birdie was concerned. Not for the child’s health, but for the fact that she felt nothing for it.
But as Vanessa speaks the words—as her voice fills the Jeep like a threat—Birdie knows that this child can’t be born here.
“I’ll lay the backseat down,” Vanessa says. She throws the door open and begins rearranging the layout of the car’s seating.
Birdie seizes the opportunity. She summons whatever supernatural energy she believes might be out there and she grabs the door handle.
And then she stumbles into the woods.
VANESSA
Vanessa hears the seatback click, releasing the mechanism that holds it upright. She leans it back, creating a makeshift bed for Birdie. The Jeep dings with the keys still in the ignition and the front and rear driver’s side doors open. The sun has completely set, leaving only the faintest lingering hint of twilight on the horizon. The dome light illuminates the interior of the car but makes it impossible to see beyond the windows or the windshield.
Vanessa walks around to the passenger side of the car and sees that the door is open. But when she steps up, the seat is empty. Birdie is gone. She hears the rustle of leaves and cedar branches snapping together after having parted behind her. She spins.
“Birdie!” she calls.
Her voice echoes across the dirt and hits the woods. Suddenly she hears another branch snap. She slams the passenger side door and tears off into the copse of trees beside the drive that leads to the main house.
The cedar trees scrape and grab at her clothing, tearing it in places, but she doesn’t have time to stop or mend fabric. She has to get Birdie.
She spots a shape in the shadows. A woman. Stumbling, trying to run. The trees make it all but impossible to carry on at anything faster than a hiking pace. They’re thick. Jeff had recommended that Tom take them out. Cedar trees are a fire hazard, he’d told him. But Tom had liked the way they looked.
The tree line stretches around the property, lining up next to the main house and the cabins, the old art studio that belonged to the former owners and down by the creek that marks the property line. Engulfed in flame, they’d make a ring of fire.
Moonlight pours in through gaps in the branches and makes Vanessa’s skin glow a milky silver. An odd thought strikes her. How beautiful her wedding ring used to look in the moonlight when she sat on their old patio. She hasn’t worn it in over a year. She glances at her hand—at the spot just between her knuckles on her left ring finger—where the indention used to betray her marital status when she slipped it off. And God knows that she’d slipped it off.
As she stalks through the brush, she thinks about Tom and Mark. She thinks about the way things ended before everything really began. Before the book was published and before she and Tom broke each other’s hearts. She wonders if that’s what keeps them tied to each other; the way they keep hurting each other. When you wound each other enough with the same weapons, the blood bonds you.
A twig snaps to the right, bringing her back to the task in front of her. She strains her eyes, trying to make out a figure in the darkness, but sees nothing.
“Birdie?” she calls, making her voice sound as inviting as she can. “I’m not going to hurt you, Birdie.” She repeats the girl’s name, remembering once when Tom told her it was one of the most effective ways to get someone persuaded to your point of view. That when someone is called by their name, they feel important. She wonders, though, in all the ways he could manipulate people—and he could write a book on it—if he could have handled this situation any better.
She can’t find Birdie. Wherever she’s gone, she’s hidden herself well from Vanessa. Vanessa sighs though not resigned to this fate. She’s determined to get to the girl. She’s determined to make her see exactly how things have to be.
Vanessa traipses through the trees, fighting her way out of the little patch of woods, rumbling with the undergrowth for every step. She wonders how in the hell Birdie had been able to make such short work of it. Her foot gets caught in a vine and Vanessa momentarily feels like the growth on the floor of the copse is going to pull her under. The thought is fleeting, but it’s enough to give her the creeps. It seems like it doesn’t take much out in this part of the country, so isolated from other people, to make you feel like you may not be alone after all.
Finally, she can make out the white siding on the little art studio, beaten and weathered, much like the paintings inside. She refocuses. She calls to the girl again and hears nothing in response. The trees are beginning to thin and she walks out into a small clearing that sits just on the edge of the old art studio. Vanessa wonders if anyone ever cleaned it out. When they first arrived at the ranch, it was a disaster. Oil and acrylic paintings from decades past, never properly stored and barely shielded from the elements. The paintings were beautiful, visionary even, capturing the zeitgeist of a generation long since gone. But whoever had painted them hadn’t cared about sharing them with the world. How opposite the mindset was from Tom’s. How opposite it was from the mindset that got them here, to this night.
Vanessa turns, looking around for a sign—any sign—of Birdie. She can’t imagine where the girl could have gone. Her options are limited. There’s no way she made it back down to the road where the FBI agents were waiting. She calls out to her again.
“Birdie?” This time her voice carries a note of sympathy. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, she wants Birdie to think she can help her.
Vanessa walks back through the woods, searching, hunting.
Tom has always been the storyteller. The keeper of those things. He was the writer in the family, but Vanessa feels that she has a story to tell now. The story of how she would have been a great mother had she been given the chance. And here, before her now, is that chance. And she has no intention of letting Birdie make it slip through her hands.
VANESSA
7 YEARS AGO
The story that Tom had told Vanessa was that the girl was just a student of his. A student that he’d grown fond of because he felt sorry for her. She’d been through a lot: losing her father at nineteen, for starters. And she had a strange obsession with the macabre. Tom told Vanessa he saw something in her, a potential, a talent, that he believed he could nurture into something great.
Vanessa hadn’t bought it then. She knew right at the moment that the girl’s name came up between them that Tom was sleeping with her. But she didn’t say anything, because she was sleeping with Tom’s best friend, Mark Rose.
That started shortly after the night of the party at which Mark kissed Vanessa. They’d met for coffee one week later on the pretense that they were going to sort out what had happened. But Vanessa knew as she threw the car in park outside of Starbucks that she was there because she wanted to see him, not because she wanted to be sure the issue had been resolved. She hoped that things were
just getting started.
For the first time in quite a while, she felt alive. Inside her marriage, she felt like she’d been a caged animal, starving for the freedom of the wild. And with Mark’s kiss, she got a taste of that again. Of that freedom, that wildness.
That night at Starbucks, he’d apologized.
“I know you love Tom, Vanessa,” he’d said.
The smile that had played at the corner of her mouth from the conversation that had come before this statement quickly faded. It brought her back to the reason they’d come here in the first place.
“Of course I do,” she’d said.
Mark had taken a sip of his Americano and Vanessa her latte. They’d sat in silence for a few moments, their eyes chancing to meet only once. Finally, Mark spoke.
“Sometimes love isn’t enough, though, is it?” Mark had said.
And Vanessa knew, with that rhetorical question, that Mark wanted to have an affair with her. And she knew, because she’d come tonight at all, that she wanted the same thing.
They’d had sex in the back of Mark’s SUV that night.
Vanessa carried with her a feeling of nausea for the next week. She exchanged passionate messages with Mark on Facebook and on her phone. But the beginning of this was tainted with the fact that it was an affair. That neither of them had any business doing this.
And still, they kept on.
Mark was everything that Tom wasn’t. Considerate, kind, on time. And he kept promises. Vanessa felt painfully aware of the irony.
It wasn’t until the next party at the Wolsieffer household that Vanessa got a moment alone with him. Out beside the pool, she stood on the first step in, letting warm water shooting out of the jets behind her ankles help her acclimate to the chilly pool. She’d rolled her pants legs up, but not enough. Cold air whipped around her lower legs, making sure that this potential swimmer knew that winter was coming. Even at that, Vanessa would have gone swimming. The cool water in late fall never bothered her. She loved the way her skin pinked in splotches over her electrified muscle fibers, hopping while sheathed with skin. In moments of stillness, it was her body’s way of reminding her she was an athlete.
This night, she stood in the shallowest part of the shallowest end of the pool, the built-in hot tub whirring next to her as water circulated in little rapids over its surface, lit from beneath by green bulbs. She stooped and drug her hand over the little ripples, parting the water and letting it rush over her knuckles.
“Hey, you.”
She turned, wiping the warm water from the jacuzzi on her knit pants.
“Hey,” she said.
Mark stepped in closer and kicked off his footwear. Without rolling his pants up, he stepped into the pool and stood shoulder to shoulder with her.
Vanessa stood, looking over at the waterfall that Tom had installed the previous spring. The feature would add property value if they ever sold, he’d told her. She couldn’t imagine leaving this place. Not even with how things had become with Tom. She knew he was sleeping with one of his students—one, hell, maybe more—but she’d buried herself in her feelings for Mark, using them as a weighted blanket to calm her senses when things got too intense.
They’d kept their distance from each other for the past two weeks. Not out of any desire to end their affair, but because necessity dictated it.
Seeing him tonight felt like the magic of a drug shot right into her vein, dulling the ache that she felt in her chest every day.
Mark casually laced his fingers into hers, their joints finding each other’s’—the notches sitting together like they’d carved out each other’s grooves. Vanessa’s hand was swallowed by his. His palm was huge and warm and cradled the back of her hand like a bassinet.
He squeezed it and turned to look at Vanessa.
“Glad I came out here,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
The two of them stood there for a few more moments. It didn’t matter to Vanessa that it was fall—that it was too cool to be standing in the end of a swimming pool—or that someone could have easily seen them there together, hands locked between them.
“Take off your clothes,” Mark whispered.
“What?” Vanessa laughed.
Mark dropped her hand and shrugged off his jacket. He stripped. Vanessa turned and looked over her shoulder, feeling suddenly like she was a student again and this house belonged to a professor who wasn’t also her husband. She smiled and began to take her clothes off.
The party roared inside and only spilled onto the patio when people came out to smoke. The chances of someone finding them were slim. Still, the slight chance that they might be found was exhilarating to her. There was a part of her that hoped Tom would walk right out and find them.
Vanessa couldn’t deny that there was a piece of her—however large—that wanted to rub Tom’s nose in the affair. She wanted him to know that she had found someone else, too. She wanted him to know that he wasn’t the only one capable of inflicting pain.
And there was a lot of pain that she’d have liked to inflict on Tom.
She and Tom had their struggles. But they had loved each other in the beginning, hadn’t they? The question hung in her mind, hovering over what she was about to do.
She slipped out of her pants and in just her underwear she watched as Mark, in just his boxer briefs, stepped backwards into the pool. The green water up to his abdomen, he reached out a hand, beckoning her to join him.
Vanessa wasted no time. She raced into the pool and threw herself against him laughing. Water clapped between their bodies, sending a splash up onto the pavement where their clothes lay.
She looped her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his neck and inhaled the scent of him. That cologne she’d come to know so well. That cologne that made her wonder, Can Tom smell it on me? Which was followed by the thought, I hope he does. God knew she’d smelled enough perfume on his clothes in the last year.
Mark reached for her chin and brought her face up to his. He kissed her.
“Wait,” Vanessa said.
She waded over to the edge of the pool and slipped off her wedding ring. She ran a finger over the indented skin, now naked without its protection.
She looked down at her hand, its silhouette dark as night against the blue green illuminated pool beneath her. The little groove where the band usually sat curved the skin inward toward the bone of her finger. She stared at it for a moment, and for a moment she felt the slightest bit of guilt. But then she looked back at the house, listened to the party that raged on inside, and let her hand fall to the waterline of the pool. She turned to see Mark floating on his back, eyes wide, looking at the stars.
“Too much light pollution here,” he mused. He stood back up and ran his hands through his hair. Water beads ran down his forearms, jumping from his elbows to the pool.
Vanessa stepped toward him. Water lined his forehead like a sheen of sweat.
“I’ve never done that,” she said.
“Done what?” he asked.
“Been able to float on my back. I always feel like I’m about to go under. Like I’m falling in the water,” she said.
“Come here,” Mark said.
He reached out for her hand and she let him take it. He kneeled in the water.
“I’m going to help you,” he said.
Vanessa laughed.
“Come on,” Mark smiled. “Sit on my knee.”
She looked down at his distorted leg under the water. He knelt, almost like he was proposing. She stepped around and sat down against him. He wrapped his arm around her back.
“Lean back,” he said.
She did as he said, leaning into his other arm while the one in front of her scooped up her legs. She balked momentarily.
“Trust me,” he said.
She relaxed again, letting him lower her back into the water. He cupped his hand around her neck and placed his other palm beneath the backs of her thighs. Water rushed into her ears, the s
ound of the pool jets roaring dull in the distance, the party guests laughing and smoking on the patio momentarily obscured.
Mark looked down at her and she met his eyes. And then, before she could speak her apprehension, he was stepping away. She felt his hand release the back of her neck, his palm no longer on her thighs. She was floating.
Water washed over the tops of her legs. She let her body relax, breathed in the scent of the bromine pool chemicals, somehow refreshing to her. Finally, she stood.
“How was it?” Mark asked.
“Nice,” she smiled. The air was frigid on her skin and fog lifted off of it like one of those monks, steaming a rag on his back. Vanessa dipped back down into the water, kneeling in the shallow end. Mark did the same, making his way to her.
He wrapped a long, strong arm around her waist. She straddled his, letting her legs lock behind him. He stared at her for a moment.
“You’re so goddamn beautiful,” he whispered as he brought his free hand out of the water to brush a strand of errant hair from her forehead.
Vanessa inhaled the scent of the pool chemicals coming off his skin and felt the warmth of his palm radiating against her cheek. She longed for him to touch her, to kiss her. And he did.
He reached for her waist, pulling her into him. She clenched her thighs, squeezing herself as tightly against him as possible. She didn’t want tonight to end. She didn’t want him to go home to his family and leave her with Tom. She entertained a thought for only a moment: the idea that Mark would leave his wife. He’d never made the absurd promise, but as things got worse with Tom, she almost wished he would. Even if he didn’t mean it.
Even if that meant getting her heart broken by a second man, she didn’t care. At this point, her heart was a shadow of its former self. What difference did it make?
As Mark slipped a hand between her skin and the fabric of her underwear, commotion broke out on the patio. They both stopped, Vanessa still wrapped around him, and listened.