In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  After, she sliced those potatoes into shoestrings and fried them up for an impromptu midmorning snack for me and Manny.

  The same day as the funny bird incident, after Manny was called home by his father, Aunty and I spent the day nailing together a birdhouse. I painted it the same pink that adorned her home and then decorated around drawn-on windows with painted blue morning glories, all to make a perfect matching home for that funny, funny bird.

  “I love that we have Manny here for you to play with,” Aunty said while we worked. “Keeps you close to me, funny girl. At my house, not that stuffy Rye estate, right? We have so much fun here,” she said with a twitching nose and kitty-cat smile.

  I recall feeling an odd conflict when she said this, perhaps the way she said it. As an adult now, I think I can better interpret what I then felt as a child. Perhaps a guarded possession is one thing I felt, for I had chosen Manny. Manny was my friend, someone separate from everyone else in our tight family. In retrospect, as I shiver in this hot hole twelve years after she said it, as I probably die of fever and shock and blood loss and terrifying fear that my companion will die a worse death than me, I don’t think I liked Aunty’s use of the word we in the context of having Manny. But I think I also felt ashamed for thinking Aunty was claiming, stealing something of mine, a piece of my separate love, because that would allow an imperfection in her perfect shine, how I’d grown to define her, a definition that gave me great comfort and freedom. I recall my physical wince. I recall shaking my head to shake out, in a tangible way, the brewing conflict. I recall beating the flash of darkness away by nailing into the birdhouse a little harder a few pounds, and all was well again. Blocking out darkness is a family trait, a family strength I’ve come to hone.

  Aunty designed a trapdoor on the bottom of the birdhouse within which to hide a second set of her ring of house keys. Everything she has ever built, as far as I know, includes fake doors or rooms or hidden compartments. She always used to say they were part of her security system, what with not having a man living on premises in any permanent way. Even when pregnant with her longtime boyfriend’s babies, she still didn’t allow him to move in, and she certainly didn’t allow him to move in after both miscarriages. He’s long gone now. Been gone forever. But her multiple secret doors and hidden keys remain.

  So we built that funny bird a birdhouse with a trapdoor for her duplicate ring of house keys.

  Aunty showed me how to use her circular saw and drill.

  Aunty handed me her hammer and nails.

  Aunty never hired a live-on-premises caretaker, like we have in “stuffy Rye.” I loved that at her house we had no servants or others hovering over us. We buttered our own toast; she, not a governess, not a maid, would bring cups of water to my room at night. She was “free” to do as she “please,” she said. “Free as the wind.”

  What does it mean to be free as the wind?

  I wish a wind would swoop into this hell and cool and wake us, make us both alive and alert.

  I pop open my eyes again. The dirt wall is still there. The musty stench. The wetness of humidity. My sweat. My companion’s sweat. I sit up, cross my legs. Still sitting in my companion’s crescent space, I place my hands on the dirt wall and drop my head. Breathe in through my nostrils slow, controlled, so as to stem a rising nausea and to gather what strength I can. Our time is coming to act, to do something.

  As I contemplate and calm my body, I fast-forward from age thirteen to two weeks ago, when all our current traumas coalesced into leading us here to this hole.

  Two weeks ago, I clutched my crazy, loving, childhood impression of Aunty, as I trudged through Haddock Point’s side trail, the protected forest, and trespassed onto her summer lawn, which had been so familiar to me growing up. I assumed the place would be in disrepair or some other visible sign of neglect would match the neglect she’d thrown us, her family, for two solid years. So it angered me when I stumbled upon her green, cut lawn with no weeds and her perennial beds bursting in rainbows, accenting her still-pink house. And when I saw those window boxes stuffed with hot-pink petunias and the crawling blue morning glories on the backside, so too the pink birdhouse I made with her and for her and for her funny bird and house keys, I felt a ringing betrayal. If life went on for her unharmed and still fresh, why did she refuse us a place in her life? For me? Her once-loved niece.

  And when I caught her humming a happy tune in leaving her natural wood barn, one big enough for horses and tractors and a high loft, the place in which she taught me to use her hammer and nails, her drill and circular saw, the tune angered me further, for how could she be happy, alone, out here, without us? My mind could not understand her humming to herself, so naturally high, when my mother, her sister, remained swallowed by the ocean. Right there. Right through the brambles, across the rocky boundary, an eighth of a mile hike is all to the sea, her grave. My mother’s hair strands snagged in the nasty vines, which were proven singed by her burning dress along the path; her burned dress and one of her shoes washed up on the cliff wall where they say she jumped; her footprints. Everything. All the forensics.

  What had we, had I, done to Aunty to deserve her abandonment for two years after that awful night?

  When I stood in her driveway, stunned at the apparent perfection of Aunty’s property, having expected to find only disrepair, she turned around and saw me. Her humming stopped, and so did the mirage of perfection. In a snap, Aunty’s world was no longer a cartoonish summer of Disney birds and heavenly flowers, no. It all changed to horror. Like a torch lit the Technicolor film of reality and the whole reel melted. Twenty yards away, her face was as clear as one foot from mine in the waning summer light. Her punctured eye, punctured two years ago on that night, remained dead and glazed in a milky film and, indeed, unpatched, brazen and naked to the day. The scar she acquired that night rivered from above and through her dead eye, straight down like a bloated and malformed earthworm. She clearly hadn’t had it subdued by a plastic surgeon, as I’d expected. Standing staring at me like a zombie, her mouth slack, she revealed her broken maw: several smashed, missing, jagged teeth, so she also had not seen a dentist. And her hair was no longer a shiny chestnut, but wiry gray, flying in the sea wind, like she for real transformed into one of those fictional, cranky, hunchback witches we used to dream up for stories when I was a child.

  Aunty’s only in her forties, but she appeared to be a neglected, perhaps depraved, woman in her late eighties. Why no eye patch? No doctor? No dentist? No personal maintenance, but attentive care to her grounds? And her humming as she exited her barn, was it a song of happiness or lunacy? Now, two weeks later, looking back to that moment, these mysteries are mere superficialities, what with the profound shocks to come.

  I could not contain my jaw from flapping open, in awe of the transformed woman I loved and missed an eternity. Oh, how I needed love and still do. The space in my chest where my heart should be felt like a sucking, swirling black hole.

  Before saying hello, she held up a timid index finger to shush me, turned, and took quick care to loop a chain several times through the barn’s sliding pocket door and lock the links with three separate bike locks.

  Then she said, “Hi.”

  What’s in the barn? She’s never locked the barn before. Locking from the outside, to keep what within? To keep what—who—out? Her property is secluded, no homes around. Why the shushing finger? We’re alone. What’s in the barn? What the fuck is in the barn?

  Perhaps when I first got here two weeks ago, I should have followed my instincts and fled when Aunty locked her barn and looked at me with her crazed, broken face. In that moment, I should have walked. But shock—the worst of mental thieves—forced me to slip back into the well of my mind fog. Aunty turned, shh’d me—face naked with bloated earthworm scar across her dead eye—locked her barn twenty yards from me, and stared me down with her one remaining eye. She tried to smile, which made her appear deranged or wicked or both, what with her villain’s face, f
ull of busted teeth. A passing sea wind picked the dry strands of her hair, grayed 65 percent, and lifted them like electrical frying.

  “What! You turn us away for two years and now you . . . ? What do you have in the barn? My car broke down. I need your help,” I shouted, still standing by her pink home’s blue front door.

  Why did she lock the barn? Why is she shh’ing me? No one is around. No neighboring homes. What the hell is in the barn?

  And what did she say? Did she answer my questions? No. She flipped me an evil smile, like someone who she is not, like someone insane, and said, “Get in the house, funny girl,” in the flat affect of the criminally depraved—or perhaps like someone trying to keep a lid on something about to boil over and that would burn us whole. I couldn’t tell which persona she was: villain or protector.

  In that moment, with her confusing directive to “get in the house, funny girl,” I think I too turned insane, desperate to find traction and climb out of my well of fog and denial and grief, but slipping. I focused on the barn.

  The barn is huge. Natural wood siding and two giant doors that, when opened, allow you to drive a tractor on in and out. I remembered the back door to her barn, the hidden one behind which Manny and I would wait to make grand entrances for our theatrical performances, on a stage made of shipping crates, with stage curtains made of old sailboat sails. I ran around the back, past the herb garden, catching a ground cloud whiff of rosemary, beyond the side of the barn, burst to the hidden back entrance—which you have to know exists to find—and found it barred from the outside with a crosshatch of boards, which had never been there before. Why the barring from the outside? Why bar the possibility of leaving the barn? But I was outside, so I removed the boards and threw them on the ground.

  After clearing the door and entering, I slithered to the center of the barn, which looked the same as always: a mottled-lit middle where one might park two tractors, and on each side, two horse stalls, all four of which Aunty had converted to hold the stuff of four different hobbies. In the house-works construction stall, there remained her circular saw, the hammer, the nails, all her tools laid in perfect placement on a workbench. And a hatchet on a hook. The smell was of dry dirt.

  Everything in the inner part of the barn was the same too. Manny’s and my shipping-crates stage with the sailing-sails curtains waited in a corner, prop box taking center stage, the lid on.

  I looked around in a frantic way until I saw lights on in a temperature-controlled side addition to the barn, a place Aunty used to say she’d built to use as an all-season potting shed, but actually used to store all her nursing stuff. In I entered, discovering the side room upgraded with functioning medical gear, flashing monitors, a stand with a saline drip, a metal medical bed, and in that bed, connected to the monitors and the drip, a woman, out cold, eyes shut, oblivious to me in the doorway.

  All this two weeks ago, the start of our descent into total, unhinged madness. Or maybe we’ve been in this dark sink of madness for two years anyway, ever since that damn fire. Right now in present time, a woman with a hatchet has found our hiding spot.

  She just crashed in on our hole, and I hear her roaming around up top now, circling the wooden cover with her heavy stomping.

  “You BITCH! I’ll end this now!”

  She must jump with both feet on top of the wooden cover above our heads.

  Dirt and paint chips cascade and snow our hair.

  The storm is picking up mad winds, howling, slicing winds above. I hear the wild sea out beyond. And I’m sure the sky is about to release a biblical flood. I want the strength to haul on out of here, push on past her, break into Aunty’s house, crack open her glass gun case, and grab her Roosevelt gun. I want to see if Manny’s alive. But I’m frozen. The woman up top stamps her feet on the wooden cover above.

  More paint chips and soot rain down in our hair.

  I can’t tell if the whispers for “Mop, Mop, Mop,” are from the wind, the ocean waves crashing beyond, my imagination coiled in my fear, or real from my companion.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AUNTY LIV

  Two years ago

  Aunty’s property

  The guest cottage

  “You know what you should do,” my sister, Johanna, says. She’s sprawled on the queen-size iron bed I put in her guest cottage, behind my barn. The open window catches the sound of the crashing Atlantic, past the acres of corkscrew trees, brambles, and vines. The salty sea air washes in with each seismic wave.

  Johanna’s atop a pink-and-green quilt I purchased at the local artisan fair in Rockport. I just told her about my affair with Chief Surgeon Kent Dranal, and I’m leading up to another truth I must reveal, and also today’s allergic murder I witnessed, by hearing. Allergic murder I witnessed? What has happened? Get a grip. Focus. Say the words. Tell her. I keep trying to interrupt my little sis, rushing through facts and telling her I’m upset and traumatized. But the problem is, I can’t get her to focus. And I can’t focus either. I feel untethered, unable to grasp a lasting thought. Like my brain is drugged and my mind disembodied. Like the night when I was fourteen and Johanna was out with Mother shopping, safe, and I was left home, dragged to the brick coach house by the estate manager, and he shoved a metal pin he used to affix to his shirt, the color, blue it was, with the shape of California as the image, in my mouth, and my father came in and . . . Like the two nights I miscarried. Like when I lost hold of all reason when I found out why Johanna’s sister-in-law, Sister Mary, really left the church.

  I should have been stronger all those times. I should be stronger now. But has each event left me weak? Am I weak? Is that why Kent keeps me? Like Cate said? No. Stop. Don’t think of the past. Don’t think of weakness. Think of today. Tell Johanna. You need help. Get help. Don’t turn in on yourself this time. Don’t.

  When I got home in a fluster tonight, I found Johanna drunk on bordeaux. Of course she cracked the entire case during the day while I was working (spying and then working in Boston). The turquoise polka-dot bedside lamp is tipped to the side from her flailing arm, which she’s still thrusting in fruitless attempts to flick ash ends off her Marlboro into the oyster-shell ashtray. The oyster shell is mouth down to the wood floor, ashes everywhere. I pick it up and move it along with her moving hand, like a net holder under a man about to jump from a building. As soon as she smashes the butt in the shell, I reset the shell to its decorative place on the white wicker nightstand. It’s not supposed to be an ashtray. The nightstand should be holding a clean shell, the turquoise polka-dot lamp upright, and a sweet summer romance for bedtime reading. Instead, this cottage is a soiled dorm room for a drunk girl.

  Johanna, unstoppable, lights another cigarette. I correct the lamp.

  Son of a bitch!

  My sister, Johanna. Jo-Jo Beans. Sis. Jo. She’s not an alcoholic, but she’s a damn goldfish whenever I get a shipment of this bordeaux in from France. It’s a specific vintage she and Mop and I found a few years ago when we rented a cottage in Saint Rémy de Provence. Mop was only sixteen, but quand en France, so we lent her two sips: one from Jo-Jo’s goblet, one from mine. Mop drank her minor first sips in a solemn silence and declared the event a “sacramental taste of family blood.” Then she twisted her lips like she does, in a shrug, and added (and Johanna and I froze our goblets midair, awaiting Mop’s expected dismissive tagline), “Well, not really. It’s just wine.” Jo and I clinked a cheer once Mop delivered her predictable line and then rolled eyes at the girl who turns everything into some profound religious occurrence only to flip to ambivalence, like she’s juggling an internal debate between dramatic faith and sterile reality.

  What I would do for a stitch of Mop’s depth, her introspection, her willingness to seek traction into things unknown, only to deny them. The girl is a complicated ball of contradictions, but she is colorful in her personal cyclone and thus alive. I’m jaded. Losing my colors. I don’t pose questions about anything anymore. Doing so would require me to consider events of my pas
t, and whenever I do, I fail in a scary psychological way. So I must remain clinical. Even today. Even after what I witnessed. I went to Saint Jerome’s an hour after leaving Proserpina’s. By then, they’d already cleared Vicky for removal to the morgue. I played dumb and jaded and callous: just another dead woman. Who cares?

  What happened today? How? Is hearing witnessing if you do not see with your eyes? My God, Cate murdered her neighbor, someone named Vicky. I want my peaceful life back. I have grown insane, lost my grip, the world around me, also insane.

  “The lamp, Johanna! Dammit! Johanna Vandonbeer-Pentecost, stop, listen. My God, you with the cigarettes. You don’t even smoke,” I say, righting the polka-dot lamp, again, on the wicker nightstand. Her white cotton nightgown reminds me of when we were girls, but her braless boobs, tanned to a summer pumpkin, sweat through and remind me she’s very much a grown woman. And here she’s going to give me grown-woman, drunk advice on what to do about my extramarital affair, and she doesn’t know the whole truth or the real horror yet. My heart’s about to bust through my rib cage.

  “Oh, Livvy, don’t call me’s by my first name. You’re not Mumsy-Mom.” She giggles, then grows drunk serious, so with a fighting devil smile. “I smoke whens I drinks, Liv! And no!” She stutters, blubbering her lips, her eyelids dragging to stay open, the right one drooping more than the left. “You listen to me-ze-me, Sister Pister. You knows what yous should doooze? You should write a big, mean letter to this wife. Be super-duper mean, as mean as you can. Get it all out. And then you rip it up! You . . . but you-wooo . . . da dum dum, you never send. Rip it up! To the up-up-up!” She makes like she’s ripping her pale-pink cotton top sheet like paper, which is impossible, because of course I got her precious, waxed ass the one billion thread count from Frette. “Bad paper.” She smacks at the sheet for not ripping like paper. She doesn’t notice facts; all she sees is the last drop of bordeaux I’ll allow her tonight. She’s done. I know the signs.