In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  The drip from the sink faucet is a clock pounding out the slow seconds of my mad vigil. I should shut the knob tight, but tink, tink, tink, drops of water pace my night—the faucet is a deranged conductor for a deranged situation. Stop allowing this foolish drama! Stop the dark metaphors. Stop thinking! Count up to one million if you have to. Just stop.

  Popover pops to standing on my thighs, digging his paws into the fabric of my nursing skirt, and plops to the floor in a sudden slap of movement. He scampers across the floor and leaps upon the bed to curl into the sweat-wrinkled back of my sister’s nightgown. She kicked her covers to the floor at some point in this warm June night, and her gown is hiked to midspine. Her moony cotton underwear, the type she sleeps in only when not with her husband, and thus, what I call her real underwear, is on full ass display. She snores. The lush. I love her.

  Her husband loves her mad too. And she loves him mad back. Philipp. She sleeps here at this cottage I built her about once a week, because she always has. He travels for his family’s business anyway, but not in the big, fancy-pants, aloof, has-a-hundred-global-girlfriends kind of way. He flies commercial—first-class, but commercial. No gold jet. No Pitbull hired to entertain a cadre of escorts on a rented yacht in the South of France—although Philipp could afford such excursions.

  Philipp is a hard worker for the family trust and charities and always goes to and comes back as soon as his meetings are over. Johanna has traveled with him several times and says he’s all business and boring on these trips, so she typically stays with me. He brings her the sweetest things every time. Nothing expensive, just thoughtful items. Sometimes he takes a picture of a beautiful flower and goes to the trouble of printing it, which no one does anymore, so she has something tangible to pretend to smell from abroad. Sometimes he walks whatever beach his hotel is on and finds Johanna a piece of her precious beach glass. He once found a rare orange, and Johanna went berserk. Now she wears the orange piece embedded in melted silver on a chain around her neck. She says it’s the “most priceless jewel in the world, and, bonus, from my beloved, King Philipp.” Philipp is not as rich as a king, but he’s richer than a king in two key ways: he holds Johanna’s love and deserves it. When Johanna was eighteen and he got her pregnant with Mop, not a person had a concern, not even I. Johanna has always been living her destiny.

  Mop loves her father, yes. But surely not as much as Johanna, and I suspect, or rather hope, not as much as me. Love is not exclusive. Love cannot be weighed. It’s not a competition. No one is entitled. Stop this. Stop this slide. You know you won’t crawl out this time. Stop.

  I never found anyone like Johanna found, just right. David, my boyfriend of fifteen years, and the source of two miscarriages, he was never right, even though he was my childhood sweetheart, just like Mop and Manny. But was David really a childhood sweetheart or did my mother force his pedigree on me a year after Daddy died as an acceptable “cure”? Fucking stop your bullshit! Just keep everyone safe, now, and stop thinking! Stop your fucking thinking!

  Don’t think about miscarriages now, don’t let the delusions, the blackouts, back in. And now Kent Dranal, my married surgeon, my love, is all wrong. If not for Johanna and my niece, Mop, I’d have nothing, no one. Daddy, oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry, is long gone. Mother died of cancer years ago.

  A blend of cotton and linen makes up the ceiling-to-floor drapes in this cottage. A rippling white set on each of the four windows. They hang from thick silver rods and frame the custom-fit gold blinds, which kiss the edges of the inner window frame. The gold blinds can be finger-pushed up from the bottom or down from the top, the dual action on expensive strings, because I never skimp on gifts for Johanna. When I presented the cottage to her, literally cutting a fat pink ribbon around the door, the white drapes were hung on the silver rods with the gold blinds behind. The drapes were curated to perfection with five wave folds per panel, and the decorator had pushed each of the four blinds twelve inches from the top, and eight from the bottom, all four windows identical. As soon as Johanna entered, she jumped behind one of the white panels and prodded me to jump behind my own, so we could compete on who made the best ghost curtain. She won, but I put up some stiff competition. I can never tell who’s the judge in these games we’ve played our whole lives.

  I think we ate a whole half of a chocolate cake after that first ghost curtain game in the cottage. A stain remains of one of Johanna’s chocolate fingerprints on one of these panels, because she wouldn’t stop touching everything and gushing over every single detail of her surprise. I can’t find the panel with her chocolate fingerprint right now. The light in here is full of tricks, blinding me to all benevolence and showing only shadows and evil. My ears, too, they betray me—they detect only footsteps and banging, although I never find any verified source after racing to each window.

  Tonight as I pace once again, I finger a white curtain and note how the panels no longer match in wave folds. One has no folds, stretched tight to the middle; his mate panel scrunches into one hundred folds on the end of its side of the rod, like a cowering teen, wincing from a grown man unbelting his pants. I’m so sorry, Daddy, I should have gone shopping with Mother and Johanna. I’m sorry I let him drag me by my hair to the coach house, to tear away my clothes, to shove his metal pin in my mouth. I was fourteen, I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop him myself. Stop! Stop thinking. Stop remembering. Focus on the curtains, survey what’s in this room. Think about simple things. Get through this night. The windows are rattling in the wind, look at the glass.

  Another window’s panels scrunch to opposite ends of their rod, like a long-married couple in a king-size bed. Another window holds newlywed panels, both scrunched together, huddling in the middle of their silver rod. Like Kent and I hold each other at the Kisstop Hotel.

  At my window, I use both panels to pretend I’m a curtain ghost, sending soundless boos to my sleeping sister, hoping I’m making her laugh in her dreams.

  It’s three thirty a.m. I’m losing my mind. Call the cops. I can’t call the cops. I’m going to the hospital in the afternoon, looking for Kent, and figuring this out like a trained clinician. I note I’m still in my nurse’s outfit from my shift. I won’t change before my next shift: the thought of being an inch from Johanna is unthinkable. I jostle my hospital ID, clipped to my breast pocket.

  Thankfully Mop does not return from college for another couple of days.

  Maybe I should write a mean note to Cate Dranal like Johanna suggested. I’ll have to admit to the affair in my mind in a naked, honest way. Yes, I guess I should purge the virulence on paper. Writing would make me think straighter. I’ll rip it up right after. I open the cherry-top drawer on the coral dresser and extract a note card and a pen, which lie adjacent to Johanna’s pack of smokes.

  I begin my note to Cate Dranal . . .

  I am the mistress. Know it. Know it. I am the one sleeping in your bed . . .

  CHAPTER SIX

  MOP

  Present time

  Still sitting here in the hole, my legs crossed, the dirt wall an inch from my face. I’m huffing wet clay, the most primal aroma. The woman who hunts us is stomping up and down on the cover above. Paint chips, paint chips, paint chips, and splinters rain into our hair. I’m nearly there, nearly to a point where my breath is calibrated to some semblance of a determined plan. Almost to a point where I won’t throw up if I move. Thinking and calculating on a way to wake my companion and haul on out. Why didn’t I run away when I found the woman in Aunty’s barn?

  Maybe my car didn’t break down so suddenly two weeks ago. Maybe I was also being intentional when my car broke down where it broke down. Maybe I missed Manny in a sudden rush. A sudden light after two years of hiding, of denying. He still lives at the end of a twisted path from Aunty’s house, across Haddock Point’s sea-lapped, granite front face, and after a sometimes treacherous beach. But does he still live there? Is he still alive after what’s happened? I can’t tell from down here in this hole in the earth.<
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  As I look back over the last two weeks, when I first approached Aunty’s, I was excited to be emerging from the fog I waded in. To even have anger at her for her abandonment, to have longing for love once again, felt invigorating, new. Like awakening from a long sleep in which you remember no dreams.

  Over the last two weeks, truths blew up in my face, forcing me to acknowledge them, all the life I blocked, and truths I ignored, for two years. One being the boy I love . . .

  Manuel Acista. An old-school Spanish name. We kissed all the time, at first innocently. He’s lean and dark and holds a foreign mysteriousness to those who don’t know him, even though he’s pure American. He carries a remarkable brown birthmark under his right eye. I’d spent incalculable summer weeks, fall weekends, winter weekends, spring weekends, with Manny, in his domain, Aunty’s domain, or between those two domains.

  Over the past two years, I thought I got only a few texts from him, my love. How strange, given the height our relationship did reach, all the way up to the night of the fire.

  Long ago, Manny helped break the case on which creature kept stealing Aunty’s roses. Spoiler: not the bunny I’d chased into a butterfly bush and not the mermaid-obsessed seagull named Frank that Manny dreamed up. The thefts kept up another summer after our thirteenth, so it was in our fourteenth year when Manny cracked the case.

  One day, late in our fourteenth summer, we saw a fox slinking along the edges of Aunty’s lawn, three rose petals stuck to his fur. Pushing through brambles and past bushes and berries, Manny found the fox’s literal bed of roses, a matted pad on the floor of the forest, pink and red and yellow petals mixed with strands of his shedding fur.

  I spent the next week writing a script for a play as a way to expose the fox—whom we named Mr. Gillray—to Aunty and her invited barn-party neighbors. Manny illustrated the set with Aunty’s acrylics, and she didn’t care. I played Mr. Gillray, the fox. Manny played himself, finding the bed of roses.

  Aunty clapped and hoo-hooted and whistled, leading the longest standing ovation, when we drew the final curtain and dumped two buckets of tissue-paper rose petals: red, pink, and yellow rain, the particles of which still stick to props in the prop box. She’d promised to take pictures so I could show my mother, but I recall her only clapping and clapping and clapping with two free hands, no camera. So when Aunty drove me home, only forty-five minutes to Rye, at the end of that summer week, we sat by the Rye pool and regaled my mother with every single detail but no pictures. My mother giggled and laughed and petted my head and asked a million questions for even more details and reenactments, saying she would have come if she’d known. And as I look back on this memory, did it seem like Aunty sat with a condescending smirk as I retold my mother about the play, as if Aunty presented me and this story as a passive-aggressive consolation prize to my mother, her sister? Like I was a toy between them. No. No, that is just me overlaying our present circumstances on the past, recoloring things in a negative light. No.

  At seventeen, Manny pitched a tent in his backyard, facing the sea, and suggested I sneak from Aunty’s after she snored herself into the whispers of waves. I ran to him with a flashlight in my teeth. Hiking over the dangerous middle beach, I thanked goodness for delivering a cycle of low tide. Once settled in his yellow tent, he lifted my summer dress and showed me what it means to be one with another. Our sweet rocking movements matched the rhythm of the sea below the cliffs. We continued all summer like this, with a pregnancy scare in July—just a scare, no pregnancy, which fear I discussed in a bed cuddle with my mother one night in Rye. That night, she kept rubbing my head and calling me Lovebug or Smarty Tarty or Sugar Cheeks, Mopsy, Mop-Bop, and a couple of her other one million names for me. Now I’m just Mop, the recent college grad.

  After that seventeenth summer and the pregnancy scare, Manny and I jetted off to our respective objectives, me traveling, him in his freshman year in London, quite tanned and satisfied. Minus the pregnancy scare, we repeated our summers like this for several years, me adding Princeton in the mix.

  When our twenty-third summer came, I thought Manny and I would continue on, but in a more significant, permanent way, for we’d grown up some and went the opposite way of typical childhood romances: we got closer. In the school year prior, we maintained a constant—as in daily—stream of letters, racked up long-distance bills with nearly everyday phone calls, and in between, sent emails and texts and IMs. But our twenty-third summer came, two years ago, the fire happened, and Aunty barred my return. My life thereafter, a blur.

  Is Manny still alive?

  I listen to the thunderclaps above us now; lightning cracks the sky, illuminating electrical air to beam through the cracks of the wooden cover. The woman with the hatchet is pacing like a panther, unable to find where we entered. She stops roaming, stalling, just above our heads. I can see up through the slivers of space between planks of wood to her ball gown, the ripped lining and the dragging remnants of the skirt’s tulle lifted in updrafts of high wind that accompany the lightning. I cringe upon an explosion in the sky, another thunderhead howling like a million wolves.

  She crouches and starts hacking away at the wood with her bloody hatchet. Splinters and paint chips fall more on our cowering heads. I pull myself up and next my companion, whom I shook awake a minute ago, and push us to the secret entrance point, on the opposite end of this dirt basement. We’re going to have to haul out upon the song of the next thunder wolves and hope nature’s furious voice masks our footfall.

  This is an impossible situation. I’m relying on lightning and thunder to save us.

  The woman with the hatchet didn’t hear us move under her feet. She’s still hacking away in the middle of the wooden cover.

  “Bitch,” she yells again and again. It’s the only word she speaks.

  Nature is the sorceress of physics, so she forms an early hurricane in the dead of summer, for fun or judgment or both. As we emerge topside, loud crashing waves collide with loud smashing heavens, and literal green veins of lighting rip the sky, as if to etch Earth’s ceiling forever, like a witch’s furious face cracking a mirror. All this commotion is a cover for me and my companion as we climb up and out, setting our bloodied feet in holes I’d carved in the dirt wall two weeks ago so as to create a natural ladder. Because this is where I ran when I found the woman in Aunty’s barn.

  Two weeks ago, I arrived and stood in Aunty’s side room potting shed, which, as far as I knew two years ago, was storage for her medical equipment, some nonsense some family of a home patient gave her. I burst in the side room and found a woman, asleep or unconscious, but not dead. A monitor noted her heart rhythm, and I heard the wheeze of her breath.

  At the time, my mind couldn’t keep and hold any of the fragments of multiple questions popping in my brain like poured carbonation. A hospital room in a barn? With a patient? A patient? The woman in the bed looked inhuman to me, with almost undetectable facial features, her face was so bloated. She didn’t budge when I screamed. Her heart monitor, some other monitoring device, and her saline either hummed or dripped away, calm against the chaos I saw.

  I curled my eyes at Aunty. As in, my pupils twisted near out of their sockets in a total derangement. I couldn’t accept the gravity of such a secret. Aunty has a woman in a hospital bed in her barn. She hasn’t let us visit for two years. Why? What?

  Aunty stood in the doorway blocking me, watching with her one good eye and still-exposed dead socket. She clocked my moves with her head askance, appearing frightened at me seeing this woman in a bed in her barn, and perhaps frightened, too, upon thinking on what she must do, in her mind, to keep me quiet. I had never before allowed a feeling of fear of Aunty. I’d always permitted perceptions of safeness around her, so I didn’t understand my own feet when I took two steps back and deeper into the medical room, away from her. I braced my hands behind me on a white metal cabinet stocked with gauze and sheets.

  Aunty appeared a stone-cold psycho, not rising to my alarm and meeting
it. She placed a straight finger on her lips, slow, controlled, and said, “Shh,” revealing the triangles of her broken teeth. Despite the wicked visual of her “shh,” the sound was not the annoying slap kind of “shh”; rather, it was the coaxing “shh” one uses to lead a witless cow to a jaded butcher.

  Black boards blocked the side room’s one window, the one that previously looked upon Aunty’s herb garden, backyard, and the path to the guest cottage. Rusty nails secured the boards, all cockeyed and rough, into the barn’s Sheetrocked wall, and I guess, the joists behind. Only the barn’s side room was Sheetrocked, painted, and temperature controlled, while the rest of the barn remained like any drafty, pine, New England horse barn.

  Aunty stepped into the side room and stood at the foot of the medical bed. I didn’t hesitate. I pushed past her and out into the center barn, back out through the fake rear door, and down along the path to the burned guest cottage. All the barriers and garrisons and moats I’d erected and dredged to block grief crumbled to nothingness. I wanted my mother so bad in that insane moment, remembered her huge, long hugs so fierce that my body would shake. My mind sought to take my body to the place of her last sleep, to scour the soot and the basement for any trace of her. I don’t recall the blinding run through the brambles. I recall being surprised to find myself in the middle of the mouth that opens upon the cottage’s minor yard, as if a blink changed my location.

  The snaky vines ate the twisted trees and unfurled their pointed tendrils to scratch my triceps on both sides. The day waned into a haze-blue evening, so my path was lit, but giving way to dusk shadows. As this was two weeks ago, the sky was clear and navy, unlike tonight, which is stormy and gray and full of green lightning, or, between lightning, blackened by lightless chaos.