The Vines

by Shelley Nolden

  “Good, because I want you to take it to Cora.”

  “Why?” Finn asked, taken aback. The watch had cost thousands of dollars, and it was far too big for Cora’s wrist. “Then what will you give Kristian?”

  “Something far more precious,” she murmured.

  The first day of the new heron nesting season

  March 21

  inn scrutinized the duct tape on the underside of his rubber glove, this time covering a switchblade instead of her scalpel. Adhered to his other glove was pepper spray. If she noticed, he would remind her of the ticks and chloroform. Although she was a victim, he’d been foolish to view her as one. He wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

  So much has changed since the first time I came here, Finn thought as he took in the scent of the sandy loam. In the days after his talk with Sylvia, he’d revisited the times she’d encouraged him to stand up for the oppressed. Someone has to be the hero. It had hit him with an almost physical force that throughout all those years that Ulrich and Rollie had been grooming Kristian to inherit the project, Sylvia had been preparing Finn to take on the role of Cora’s protector.

  All those superhero comic cards and magazines she’d bought him . . . God, he loved her. Finn silently vowed to show her that she hadn’t failed. At least not at raising him. But he felt like he had a brick wall to punch through before he could make that claim.

  To gauge how much longer he would have to wait beside his kayak, he studied the tree line beyond the field. Still, only Brooklyn’s halo glowed above the canopy.

  A low, trilling whistle replaced the calm, and Finn spun toward its source.

  He could just make out the morgue, coal house, and smokestacks of the physical plant.

  The noise could have belonged to a bird—Lily would know which type.

  In January, she’d had another grand mal seizure, this one on the subway. Thank God a doctor had been in the next car. That night they’d agreed it was too risky for her to return here. She’d understood that meant Finn would go, but as far as she’d known, he hadn’t finalized the date. To avoid causing her days of undue heightened stress, he’d planned to tell her the night before. Yesterday evening, however, she’d gone with her mother to see a Broadway show and spent the night at her mom’s Chelsea apartment. Finn had left Lily a note on the kitchen table, next to a bouquet of daisies that would likely provoke more ire than romance, he now realized.

  The birdcall sounded again, and Finn knew it had come from Cora, somewhere amid the cluster of buildings.

  She must have been watching for him. Today marked the start of the heron nesting season; she’d accurately predicted he would return as soon as possible. Maybe he should have waited a week to prove her wrong. No, he would never add his name to the list of Gettler men who’d played mind games with her.

  Although the noise didn’t repeat, he knew she was expecting him to find her.

  He shouldered his pack and lifted a duffel bag from his kayak. Since he couldn’t use his flashlight while crossing the overgrown meadow, visible from the river, he would have to rely on the thickness of his rubber boots, and luck, to avoid ripping his hazmat suit.

  As he carefully crossed the weeds, still beaten down from last winter’s snowfalls, a hint of sunlight colored the horizon.

  Reaching the cover of the buildings, he turned on his flashlight and swept the beam from one to the next. She could be lurking behind any one of their pitch-black doorways.

  Irritated that she already had the upper hand, he considered dropping the supply-filled duffel and leaving. Taking a deep breath, he thought of his mother. “Now what?” he asked, turning off his light so he wouldn’t be such an easy target.

  Again, she whistled shrilly, and Finn spun to face the physical plant.

  Silence filled the biting cold, an implied command for him to enter. At the threshold, he pointed his flashlight into the space. As he arced his light, eerie shadows danced like demons. Dark doorways led to other chambers, and a spoked valve wheel rested in the center of the room.

  “Come in, out of the cold,” said Cora from somewhere above.

  He looked up at the rafters, crisscrossing an otherwise absent roof. In the fading night, he couldn’t make out a single star, reminding him just how alone they were.

  Finally, he spotted her perched on a joist.

  “You do love heights,” he said, keeping his light fixed on her. “Can you please come down?”

  “If you stop blinding me with that thing,” she said, her arm shielding her eyes.

  “Sorry.” He shifted the beam, and, like a spider, she worked her way down the maze of pipes bolted to the brick wall.

  Her willingness to expose her backside made Finn feel slightly more confident that he would live through this day.

  Appraising him, Cora smacked her gloves against each other, then straightened her “I [heart] NYC” sweatshirt.

  Comforted by the ten-foot gap between them, Finn waited for her to speak.

  She nodded at the bag. “That for me?”

  “Depends,” he said, jouncing it, “on whether you’ve realized that kindness isn’t quid pro quo.”

  She cocked her head. “Did you bring the fourth Twilight book?”

  Involuntarily, he chuckled. In the crate he’d dropped off in midwinter, he’d included the second and third novels. “So you like the series?”

  “It’s quite scandalous.”

  Finn took that as a ‘yes.’ “Unfortunately, the release date isn’t until August second of this year.” Hoping she’d request it, he’d checked.

  Cora grunted in disappointment.

  “I know. It does suck that you can’t kill me today and still find out how the story ends.”

  “That drawing of the Astor Hotel, it was stunning. Because of it, I’d already decided to spare your life, this time,” she added as she fingered the keloid encircling her neck, which, he realized, hadn’t been one of the scars she’d explained on the morgue roof.

  Nonchalantly, he set the duffel bag halfway between them, then retreated.

  “You could have left this by the seawall, like last time,” she said, eyeing it. “I haven’t changed my mind about the Lyme or giving blood.”

  “I’m here on behalf of Sylvia.”

  Cora jerked her head. “Now, that I wasn’t expecting. There’s no way she’d ask me to be their guinea pig again.”

  “I have a message from her.”

  Cora’s scowl vanished, and she blinked rapidly. “I’m listening.”

  “She says, ‘It’s time to tell him.’”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “You’re sure? Those were her exact words?”

  “I’ve a pretty good memory.”

  In the pale, early morning light, Finn could just make out the glisten of a tear on her cheek. He debated asking her to explain.

  “I’m so glad Sylvia’s come around to it.” Cora looked past Finn, and he guessed she was once again speaking to the island. “And she kept her promise, that I could be the one. Rollie’s okay with this?”

  She was staring at him, and Finn surmised that the question had been addressed to him. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but Sylvia hasn’t even told Rollie that she knows he’s continued his research. I highly doubt she consulted him about this.”

  “They never told you.” She clicked her tongue. “You’ll find out soon enough, though you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “Am I the ‘him’?” “No,” she said with a scowl.

  “Is Kristian?” he asked, but she’d already turned away. From the shaking of her shoulders, he could tell she was crying.

  Fidgeting, he felt uncomfortable witnessing this vulnerability from a woman who’d tried so hard to appear unbreakable.

  This was a private moment; he knew he should leave. Debating whether he should slip away or say
good-bye, Finn remembered the watch. “My mom wanted me to give you something,” he said softly, shrugging off his pack.

  Plainly embarrassed, she ducked her chin and turned only partially to face him.

  “Cora,” he said gently, “you’re human. It’s okay to cry.”

  “No, I’m not. But don’t worry: I came to terms with that long ago.” Rummaging in her messenger bag, she pulled out an antiseptic towelette to wipe her cheeks.

  He retrieved the small shopping bag and threaded his way through the debris to place it close to her. Keeping his light fixed on the package for her benefit, he backed away.

  Clearly puzzled, Cora removed from the bag a patent leather box. Carefully, as if she thought it might be a trick, she opened the case and inspected the watch. After flipping it over, she read the inscription, then uttered a single cry.

  Finn longed to know why she’d reacted so strongly to the simple German phrase.

  Suddenly she glanced up and darted into the darkness of the adjacent chamber.

  Faintly, he could hear her crying. Then she stopped.

  The room was too quiet. He inhaled slowly, the air thick with the smell of rust and rot.

  The brightening sky, visible through the missing roof, only increased the creepiness of the broken machinery around him. It was far too quiet.

  He tore off the tape to access his switchblade.

  The scraping of a metal bar against the ground behind him fractured the calm.

  Whirling around as he fumbled for his weapon, Finn glimpsed a dark object flying toward him. As he yelled in surprise, the pipe crashed into his temple.

  A single spike of torturous pain pierced his head.

  The room blurred away.

  1991

  Nature has nearly reclaimed North Brother

  July 4

  trace of blue entered the sky as Cora wove her way through the forest canopy, which had been progressively darkening the Riverside campus for the past twenty-eight years. Behind her, the calls of awakening black-crowned night herons filled the woods. Since the single, warning squawk that had roused her, the heron colony at the southern end hadn’t made a sound. The only force capable of wholly quieting those birds was death, and she planned to silence whoever had served it to them.

  Fingering the flap on the raccoon skin case she’d made to sheath her sole weapon, she stopped in a mulberry tree at the fringe of the nesting site. A breeze shook the leaves, and Cora recoiled at a familiar scent, like cut hay. Chloroform had always been a trademark Gettler tool, but Ulrich had grown too feeble to manage the crossing, and she couldn’t envisage Rollie needlessly exterminating the flock.

  Bright light hit her eyes, momentarily blinding her. Shielding her face with her arm, she flattened her body against the far side of the tree.

  “She’s over there!” shouted a wraithlike figure.

  Cora studied the shifting shadow and decided it had to be a man in a black hazmat suit. His voice, warped by a gas mask, had sounded too young to be Rollie’s.

  Kristian, she thought, and her hand flew to her chest, just as one of her feet slipped from its toehold.

  She dropped and her abdomen and the underside of her arms scraped down the bark as she attempted to bear-hug the tree. A branch slowed her fall, and she wrapped one leg around the trunk and flailed the other until her boot found new purchase.

  From below came laughter.

  She shrank against the trunk and tried to ignore the stinging from the raw skin on her abdomen.

  “I thought you said she was agile,” a man in a hazmat suit said to the foliage behind him.

  Cora pressed her cheek to the bark, both hoping and fearing that that voice belonged to her son.

  “She is, but you succeeded in surprising her. Congrats.” Rollie stepped into the small clearing. “Don’t worry,” he called out, “your herons aren’t dead. They’re just sleeping in.”

  Even if the pair had killed off the entire population, at this point she wouldn’t care. The twisting of her heart meant Rollie’s companion could be Kristian. A few inches shorter than Rollie, the man’s stature seemed plausible for her son, given she wasn’t particularly tall. And his voice had sounded about the right age.

  This past March, Kristian had turned twenty-six. Like every year before, using the goods she’d bartered for with Rollie, she’d readied a cake and present, only to throw them into the strait the day after. Despite begging Ulrich during each of his visits, Cora hadn’t convinced him to reevaluate Kristian’s immune system. Six years ago, when Ulrich had begrudgingly passed leadership of the project to Rollie, she’d begun asking Rollie to let her see her son. All his replies had been vague.

  If Rollie had acquiesced, why wouldn’t he have simply brought Kristian with him on one of his routine visits? Gassing the birds seemed far too shifty for a reunion. Although she’d warned him against entering the island’s interior, he should have known she’d make an exception for her son.

  The morning after Ulrich’s first heart attack, in 1985, Rollie had promised to end the brutal experimentation and mind games. And he had.

  Because Rollie had claimed he was within millimeters of a breakthrough—and he was her only tie to Kristian—she’d agreed to remain involved on a limited basis. Once a month, he delivered supplies she no longer relied on. Concurrently, he retrieved the blood bags she left for him in a shallow hole.

  The predictability of their routine had given her a sense of control that still seemed as foreign as Gotham had become to her.

  Yet this uncertainty now reminded her of the Ulrich years. She couldn’t let Rollie see that he’d shaken her.

  “You’d better hope they wake soon,” she said in an arctic tone, patting her sheath. “Those herons aren’t just protected by state and federal law. In my rules, trespassing is a capital offense.” Even to her own ears, the threat sounded empty, given the stranger might be her son.

  “Come down,” Rollie said, “so we can do this the right way.”

  It must be Kristian! She covered her mouth to prevent a shriek of joy, and tears blurred her vision.

  Even though she’d been preparing for this moment for twenty-four years, she clung to the tree as tightly as the kudzu vines around her. He’d aged at the normal rate, so they would almost look like peers. She wondered how they would convince him of the seemingly impossible.

  According to Ulrich, they’d kept the truth from Kristian “for his own good,” even after Petra died. Following Rollie’s second marriage, Ulrich had reveled in telling Cora that Kristian had begun calling yet another woman “Mom.”

  Now she could set the record straight. But ever since the forest had grown tall enough, she’d kept to the canopy whenever a Gettler came ashore. Her intuition told her not to descend now, yet motherly instinct argued that she should.

  Even though Kristian was a Gettler, he was her son. Staring into her open hand, she thought of that kiss he’d blown her. Despite the passage of so many seasons, her love for him hadn’t lessened. Surely, somewhere deep within, he felt the same way.

  She wiped her eyes and lowered herself to the next branch.

  “Wow, she listens to you.”

  “Absolutely,” Rollie said, pivoting toward Kristian and revealing a gas canister on his back. Cora reflexively held her breath. “We have a mutual respect.”

  Still too high to safely drop to the ground, Cora couldn’t bring herself to descend to a lower branch. What if Ulrich had passed his Fascist ideals to their son, who in turn had now influenced Rollie? She decided to stay within her treetop network so she could flee at the first whiff of fresh chloroform.

  Instead of that sickening smell, the memory of Kristian’s baby scent, infused with the aroma of dirt from their time outside, filled her nostrils. And the sensation of tiny fingers, flitting across her stomach while he nursed, felt as real as it had the last da
y she’d held him.

  Back then, she’d been more than a lab rat—she’d been a mother. His mother. And now that her child was here, she had to go to him, regardless of the risk.

  Slowly, Cora lowered herself to the last branch and dropped to the ground.

  Bright light hit her eyes.

  “Incredible. A complete lack of cellular senescence. I’d been wanting to see this for myself for so long. Thank you, Dad.”

  Squinting against the glare, she could just make out the dark outline of Kristian’s eyes through the mask. She knew his lashes were as thick as hers. Each night, while lulling him to sleep, she’d strained to see whether his eyelids were still parted.

  Now it made her nervous that she couldn’t see those windows to his soul. She clutched her satchel, where she kept the knit cap he’d been wearing the first time she’d held him.

  “Coraline McSorley,” Rollie gestured from her to Kristian, “I’d like you to meet Kristian Gettler, my son.”

  Rollie’s firm tone had contained a warning, so she bit her tongue. “It’s always a pleasure to meet another Gettler.”

  “Likewise,” he said, nodding his head in a greeting. “It will be a pleasure to . . . accelerate my family’s progress.”

  Unsure how to interpret that comment, she backed toward the tree she’d just descended.

  Stepping toward her, he addressed Rollie over his shoulder: “With two of us, it’ll be easier to force her compliance.”

  Cora reeled back, and her boot snagged on an exposed tree root. As she hit the loam, a rock gouged the flesh between her shoulder blades, and she rolled to her side. Sickened by how much her little boy had changed, she curled inward.

  “That’s not how I do things here, and your grandfather has been very specific that you are to listen to me.”

  “Grandpa’s senile, and you’ve made it clear you’re unwilling to do what’s right for the family—and science.”

  Their voices sounded distant, and the forest seemed to be darkening.

  “If you forget your place again, you will lose it,” Rollie stated, his voice rising above the chirping of the insects in the underbrush around her. “We’ve got less than fourteen hours to complete today’s objective.”