The Vines

by Shelley Nolden

  “He can’t have gone far.” She sidled over to the fence and peered down at the beach. “Milo was bugging him earlier to go crabbing. Maybe they’re at the tidal pools.”

  Kristian shook his head. “Milo’s at the kitchen table, doing his pre-calc enrichment.”

  “Really? You should give Boy Genius a day off now and then.”

  “He’s can’t. He’s got big shoes to fill someday,” he said, without any indication it was a joke, and glanced at the shed. “Maybe Finn’s in there”—he arched his dark eyebrows, laced with unruly gray—“and you were about to meet him for a—”

  The door swung open.

  “Hey,” Finn said, squinting.

  She locked her gaze on his eyes, searching for evidence that the bats had shocked him as much as they had her.

  He looked away and twisted the visor of his Mets cap back to the front, and she sensed he was hiding something.

  “What were you doing?” Kristian asked.

  “Looking for my belaying kit.” Finn tucked his chin-length, sandy brown hair behind his ears. “You seen it?”

  “Yeah, I used it last weekend at the Gunks, when I had nothing better to do with my day off.”

  Finn fake-laughed. “That sense of humor. I’m so jealous. Is dinner ready?”

  “The steaks have probably cooled twenty degrees by now, and I still need to treat those scrapes on Lily’s knees.”

  “I’ll do it,” Finn offered.

  “That’s outside your wheelhouse, Finny. Besides, you need to conserve energy for dish duty, while the rest of us are enjoying dessert.”

  “I’m not the one who needs to go light on the birthday cake.”

  “My body fat percentage is modestly above the norm only because I’ve got a real job,” Kristian said over his shoulder as he began walking toward the patio. “The type that doesn’t involve climbing trees and screwing in lightbulbs.”

  “Hmm.” Finn cocked his head. “How many doctors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “Zero,” Kristian said without slowing. “I’ve got someone who does that for me.”

  “Because you don’t know how!” Finn called out.

  “Hey now, be nice,” she said, though she knew neither had been offended. As an only child of divorced parents, she couldn’t help but feel a little envious even of their continual verbal sparring.

  “What happened?” Finn asked, leaning forward to inspect her knees.

  She didn’t believe he hadn’t heard her hit the ground. Though, sometimes, when concentrating intensely, he did tune out everything around him. “It’s nothing.” She stepped away. “I just tripped on a log. What about you? You okay?”

  From the set of his jaw, she knew he wasn’t. Clearly, he was bothered by that evidence of ongoing virology research.

  But she couldn’t be the one to mention it and give away the fact that she’d been snooping. She could only hope he would bring it up. “What did you find?”

  He shook his head and glanced toward Kristian, now more than ten yards away.

  She doubted he could hear them. Either Finn was being extra cautious, or it was an excuse.

  “You’ll tell me on the way home?” She wrinkled her nose at how desperate the question had sounded.

  “It’s complicated.” He raised his hat to wipe his brow. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I need some time to process it.”

  Her stomach ached; no way could she eat now.

  Abruptly, Finn stopped.

  As she strode past, he grabbed her upper arm, causing her to reel backward.

  To steady herself, she clutched him, yet the relief that he wanted her beside him kept her dizzied.

  Finn pressed his hand to hers. She felt something soft and looked down.

  In her palm was a single bluebell blossom. She hadn’t noticed this breed of wildflower growing on the Gettlers’ property, nor had she seen him stoop to pick this one.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry. What I found . . . I don’t know if my dad’s the man I thought he was, and that’s not exactly an easy thing to talk about. Okay?”

  Sickened by the statement, she managed to nod. “I’m here when you’re ready.”

  She tucked the stem under the strap of her dress, then brushed her lips across his cheek.

  He entwined his fingers with hers, and they fell into step.

  For the next two hours, she would have to interact with Rollie as if nothing were wrong, including smiling at all his cheesy puns, which she struggled to do under normal circumstances.

  She didn’t blame Finn for his reticence in sharing what he’d found. Firsthand she knew that reality can be far harder to face than uncertainty.

  One week later

  August

  n the darkness, Finn crouched among the wild grasses encroaching on the seawall. Even without the light pollution, he would have felt exposed beneath the waning gibbous moon, unthreatened by a single cloud. A storm system was expected to hit New York City early the next morning. By midnight, twenty hours from now, the chop of the river would become unnavigable. Long before then, he planned to leave this rock. Hopefully with the woman.

  He repositioned a folded, inflatable raft and rope within the hull of his concealed kayak and scrutinized the horizon, still untouched by natural light. Within the pitch-black forest, this place was even more so “her island.” Until he convinced her that he was on her side.

  Finn squirmed. Ever since he’d found that square of yellowed paper tucked in Rollie’s final journal entry, dated August 28, 2001, queasiness had been his constant companion. “You’re done with Riverside,” his mom had written. “She’s suffered too much already.”

  Moments later, he’d heard a rustle behind him and ripped away the sheet, revealing the cage of bats. A horrifying range of possible connections among Sylvia’s declaration, the scarred woman who despised his family, and the evidence of ongoing research had snatched his breath.

  Finally, he had insight into why Rollie had been so vocal and absolute in his decision. Yet the implications of his mother’s request had left Finn shaking. In all that he’d overheard as a child about catalysts, environmental studies, specimen samples, and antibodies, there’d been no mention of human test subjects.

  Yet it hadn’t been uncommon for his parents’ conversations about Rollie’s latest site visit to shift from the dinner table to their locked bedroom, leaving Finn unable to finish his meal alone because of the pit in his stomach.

  Now he couldn’t shake the dread that the woman he’d encountered was somehow involved against her will, and that his father’s efforts were possibly ongoing. Considering Kristian’s frequent rantings about government ineptitude in curbing outbreaks, as evidenced by the initial SARS-CoV response, he very well could still be involved, too.

  His mother, a renowned feminist, had quit her paralegal job in the mid-1980s to attend women’s rights and peace rallies in Washington, DC. Even though she now couldn’t hold a pen, the fiery poems and essays she’d written for three decades had earned her a permanent place in women’s studies curricula at colleges across the country. If she’d known that the Gettler men’s “vital research” entailed involuntary human testing, she wouldn’t have stayed with Rollie. The note, however, implied that’s precisely what she’d done.

  While retrieving the knapsack that housed the journals, wedged in the bow of his dad’s kayak, Finn had found a MetroCard with an expiration of 04/27/09. Evidently Rollie had recently visited the island. The easiest way to get a kayak to either of their launch points was by carting it on the subway.

  Finn guessed the scarred woman was at most twenty years old, which meant she’d been a young teen back when Sylvia had penned that edict.

  If Rollie had been using this woman, or a string of vagrants, to t
est the effects of various locally sourced chemical compounds on the immune system—while a day nurse tended to his wheelchair-bound wife—he couldn’t be doing so by force, given her strength and prowess. He must have an ongoing means of manipulating her into submission. Finn prayed to God that it didn’t relate to the scars covering her body.

  Rollie’s desire to hide from Sylvia his continued activity here would certainly explain why he’d lied to Finn.

  To stay alert, Finn tugged at the corners of his eyes. Over the past week, he’d barely slept. The father he’d always known—a man who’d been strict yet also kind, generous, and fascinated by Finn’s comic card collection, ability to spout baseball stats, and Lego creations—might not actually exist.

  He couldn’t shake the premonition that his family had been conducting involuntary human testing here.

  At twelve, while building a model airplane in his room with his best friend, Finn had whispered that his family was doing important, top-secret work on a nearby deserted island. Dave had asked if they were working for the CIA. Just as Finn was clarifying, Rollie had thrown open the door, grabbed Finn by the ear, scolded him for not having helped his mother fold laundry, and told Dave to head home.

  That was the only time—until he met Lily—that Finn had mentioned the project to anyone outside his family. In the days that had followed, Rollie’s edginess had made Finn wonder if he was afraid of getting caught for something far more severe than trespassing.

  Yesterday, after seeing the weather forecast, Finn had hastened his preparations and rescheduled a client meeting. Offering to help her evacuate would serve as the perfect excuse for his return.

  Breathing in the stench of the salted, moist dirt, Finn reminded himself that thinking of her only as a victim would put him at greater risk.

  The woman had chucked four scalpels at him and might impale him with a fifth any moment. He was a Gettler; nothing she’d said or done suggested that she would spare him again.

  Yet he didn’t regret his decision to return. If his intuition were correct, he had a responsibility to save her. And even if he was wrong, those scars had been caused by someone.

  Although his father’s influence now seemed farcical, his parents had instilled in their sons a sense of altruism and purpose. Through their dedication to microbiology, they believed their future discovery would save humanity when—not if—a deadly pathogen emerged and spread like wildfire through our densely packed global society. The day his birth mother died, Kristian had accepted Rollie’s mandate to study medicine as if it had been his idea. Thirteen years later, upon hearing Kristian describe a cadaver dissection for a premed college class, Finn had declared that he too wanted to become a doctor.

  “Finny,” Rollie had said, “the sight of blood makes you queasy. You’re a round peg; don’t force yourself through a square hole.”

  To show Rollie that a round peg could bust its way through any square hole, at his kindergarten graduation ceremony, Finn proudly raised his sign that stated what he wanted to become when he grew up: “The Incredible Hulk.”

  While not superhero worthy, he turned out to be muscular enough. Though, today, the survival skills he’d acquired in Africa would prove more useful.

  A breeze rattled the bushes. She could be watching him now, her throwing arm raised.

  Soon it would be light enough for him to begin his search.

  From a pocket in his cargo pants, Finn retrieved his Swiss Army knife. Lily had given it to him after he’d completed his master’s degree in architecture at Cal Poly. In the past two years, it had traveled with them to four countries. Now it represented his only form of self-defense against a woman he could never bring himself to harm.

  While packing for this trip, he’d wanted to tell Lily about her, but Lily would have made the connection between the woman and Finn’s worries about his dad. He still couldn’t bring himself to share his suspicions. For Lily, growing up fatherless had been like missing an essential vitamin, of which she now couldn’t get enough. Rollie, who’d always wanted a daughter, had leaped into that void.

  Finn pictured her waking up alone, and a pang of guilt shot through him. To let her know he’d arrived safely, he sent a quick text—a row of M’s, signifying their willingness to move mountains for each other. It had started as a joke; now it was simply another way of saying, “I love you.” Then he turned off his phone to conserve its battery.

  A heron squawked. Another responded and took flight. The ruckus of the colony intensified. The woman had to be awake.

  He strapped on his pack and walked within a strip of forest near the meadow he’d sprinted across last time.

  At least today he didn’t have to worry about running into any city parks workers. Before his first trip, Lily had learned that the parks department wouldn’t sanction visits to the island during the heron nesting season, which extended from March 21 through September 21. She’d tried to persuade Finn to wait until the fall, when she might be able to get them both included on an official tour.

  Before this second trip, she hadn’t even asked to join him. Presumably because she’d expected him to say he needed to go alone, so he’d promised her that he’d tell her everything afterward.

  Finn rubbed his lower back, sore from battling the currents. If the woman were still here, the tuberculosis pavilion seemed the most logical place for her to be staying. From his research in the New York Public Library’s archives, Finn knew the structure had been completed in 1943. Its walls had to be far sounder than those of the buildings constructed decades earlier, and from its top floor, she could survey the entire island.

  The cawing of birds drowned out the sounds of the morning rush hour. He would never hear her approach.

  Finn glanced back. The forest had blotted out the shore and Manhattan’s skyline. The humidity triggered a sense of déjà vu; he was back trekking through the jungle, about to cross one of the Mekong Delta’s infamous monkey bridges. He closed his eyes.

  And saw her face.

  Those startling baby blues.

  “Hello!” he called out as he jerked his chin upward to search for her. The leaves blurred as he spun. Dizzy and disoriented, he stopped.

  He consulted a small compass on a cord around his neck.

  To the northeast, he could just make out an ivy-covered lane bordered by cast-iron lampposts that protruded from the overgrowth. He imagined how cool those lamps would look relit at night. Maybe he would find his sketchbook today. More likely, she already had.

  He poked at the dirt with his hiking boot and uncovered cracked concrete, another reminder that this forest belonged to New York City. Wiping his brow, he rotated to face what had to be the maintenance building, the first of three structures that would block him from the view of passing watercraft until he reached denser foliage.

  She could be hiding among the grime-coated rubbish that loomed beyond those broken windows.

  He squeezed the folded knife and pictured his mother, back when she’d been strong enough to stand up for others. Although she was too ill to handle whatever Finn uncovered today, if she had known about his plan, she would have approved. Before his flight back to Ivory Coast in 2003, Rollie’s final words had been, “Don’t be a hero. We need you to come home alive.” Without echoing the sentiment, Sylvia had given him one last hug and kiss. She understood that someone must take on that role.

  Even though his odds of convincing the woman to leave with him today were low, he had to try. Failure meant he’d have to confront Rollie.

  The PowerBar he’d eaten on the subway to Barretto Point Park felt like a lump of wet cement in his stomach.

  He continued along the ivy lane. A fire hydrant appeared among the brambles, and he shook his head in wonder at this place, forgotten by the world.

  In case she was watching him, he called out a greeting: “A major storm’s headed this way! You won’t be safe here
!”

  The faint whistle of a commuter train sounded from the Bronx.

  Maybe she’d already left. “I’ve brought `food.”

  A bird took flight.

  “Protein, a few oranges”—his voice cracked—“and chocolate.”

  Still nothing. What woman doesn’t like chocolate?

  “It’s a Toblerone,” he said to the leaf canopy.

  It had been in his bag since his trip to Bryce Canyon with Lily. After each of their treks, financed through a combination of their wages and Lily’s trust fund—the only kind thing her asshole father had ever done for her—they gorged on McDonald’s cheeseburgers then split a Toblerone. Usually Lily followed a vegan, organic diet. At age four, she’d beaten brain cancer. Thirteen years later, she’d developed myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer her doctors blamed on the original chemo. Convinced she had a genetic predisposition to cancer, Lily treated carcinogens like venomous snakes. Finn’s goal for their expeditions was to help her let go of her fears and live.

  “Lils, I know you’d understand.” He propped the chocolate in the crook of a willow oak branch and stepped back.

  The peace offering looked paltry, so he worked a tribal bracelet off his wrist and looped it over the bar.

  Listening for movement behind him, he continued north, and the roof of the two-story male dormitory appeared. To his left, the sky reflected off a large cistern, its greenish water teeming with bacteria and parasites. In one of his father’s journals, he’d noticed a table containing the microorganism densities of samples taken from that tank.

  Finn rounded the corner of the building and reeled back at the sight of the tuberculosis pavilion’s four-story central tower, jutting above the trees like a Mayan temple.

  Finn hadn’t seen a single reference to its interior in Rollie’s logs, which made sense if he hadn’t wanted Sylvia to know what he’d been doing there.