In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  Two weeks ago at dusk, my eyes burned to keep focus in the tricks of light and the tricks of rage. I came to the burned cottage remains, the first time since racing here with my father on the morning after my mother was reported missing off the cliff wall, after the fire. Aunty hadn’t tended the path well since then, nor did she groom the grounds around the cottage, so those greedy vines and the brambled vegetation had taken dominion like a mutinous jungle, swallowing evidence that humans once slept here. In the interim, what Aunty did, however, was construct and set atop the now exposed basement a square, wooden cap, made of sheets of reclaimed plywood, spackled and speckled with layers of old paint, the various sheets braced by crisscrossed two-by-fours. I know Aunty never constructs anything without false doors, like the back of her barn, like the pink birdhouse we built for that funny bird long ago, or like the pivot bookshelf that is really a door to a closet where she stores wine. So I noticed in an instant the near-invisible hinges on one section of plywood at the far end.

  Although she’d never admit it, Aunty has a tendency to view the world in dramatic ways, like me; this is part of our shared identity, something I accept, but, I believe, she tries to deny. So under a coming full moon and cloudless sky, so unlike tonight, and needing my mother so bad I wanted to die, I knew down to my bones that under that hidden hatch Aunty had built a shrine to my mother. I flipped up the section of plywood at the hinge, and as it banged on solid wood, Aunty crashed onto the scene.

  “No!” she yelled. “Don’t go down there. Don’t disturb things.”

  “Who is the woman in the barn?” I yelled back as I ignored her walking closer, gaining on me. I looked into the hole, so dark down there, stained of soaked soot, charred wood, coal streaks everywhere, and scattered debris from the fire that was never cleaned out. Whatever fell from the cottage to the basement and didn’t incinerate was left to rot under Aunty’s patchwork cover. This was no shrine. This was a trash pit of my mother’s last-touched items.

  One of my mother’s favorite animal-print Tory Burch flats sat beneath the opening I peered through and within a beam of the moon’s rising ray.

  If this shoe is here, what about the shoes the investigators say she wore, running to the ocean on fire? Which pair? She usually wore her flats when she stayed at Aunty’s. That’s what I questioned two weeks ago, what pair of shoes my mother wore to launch herself off a cliff to stop her body from burning. Why is this shoe down here? I told myself I was inventing irrelevant nonsense by questioning the shoe’s presence and entered the pit to get her shoe—the only thing I had of hers to hug.

  I considered the shoe a talisman I could rub to pry my mother away from the selfish grips of her afterlife. I didn’t consider the implausibility of such a wish. I just wanted the shoe, wanted it more than I wanted Aunty to explain the unexplainable horror in her barn.

  Two weeks later now, as I and my companion tremble outside the same basement hole, for we just used the clamor of nature as a cover to escape, I don’t understand the total insanity that has overtaken my family. My companion and I shiver in silence, hoping the woman with the hatchet, still hacking at the wooden cover, won’t see us. We’re in the realm of the unthinkable, the unfixable, the unregulated by any laws, man-made or divine. I wish I and my companion could run, and we try, but more green lightning rips the sky, illuminating the night to a glowing green, veining the heavens, etching time, wrinkling space. I can’t hear my own thoughts given the thunder dump trucks crashing into tractors in the sky. And with that noise collide all the hydrants in the world, which rise in tsunamis, only to kill themselves in screams against the cliff wall, a minute run away, but beside us tonight. My brain bashes against my skull, trying to escape.

  We freeze, hoping the hurricane won’t distract the hacking woman from her job to see us. Thunder rocks me, pushes me, and I trip. I’m facedown in the dirt above the hole, so my feet twist in vines. My face hovers above the open hatch to the basement. The woman with the hatchet still has her back to us as she swings down and cracks through the wood cover.

  “Biiiiitchhhhh!” she yells into a new jagged hole.

  I’m going to get Aunty’s Roosevelt gun, I think, and as I do, like the woman hears me thinking, she turns and sees me and my companion, who has also fallen to the ground, a belly across my leg with the fabric tie around the calf, so as to stem the flow of blood from my earlier hatchet wound.

  I should stand and pull my weak companion along, try to edge us out beyond the hatchet woman. But we’re trapped. The vegetation is thicker than two weeks ago, and we can’t bust through the hedges and brambles and pricker bushes surrounding us on all sides. The only way out is the skinny trail the woman cut, back out to the walking path, all of which is behind her and at the opposite side of this burned and covered basement.

  Thunder cracks a few gray eggs in the sky, and the first trickles of rain sizzle down. The torrent of all the cracked eggs will begin soon. Wind whips in racing cycles around the three of us, the hatchet woman, me, and my companion, tying us in crazy invisible ribbons and holding us to our spots. The ribbons of wind also bring eggshells of rain to fly into my eyes and sting them with their sharpened velocity.

  I peer down the hole from which we escaped, in which we were hidden, and given the storm clouds thickening more above, I can’t see much. Where are my glasses? My contacts? I’m blinded by my natural eyes as well. Fuzzy in daylight even without the blurriness of a hurricane. Upon the next crack of lightning, the space below is lit like two weeks ago, only then illumination was steady, provided by a faithful full moon. I’m immediately transported again to the moment when I saw my mother’s Tory Burch shoe in the dirt and needed only her shoe, coveting it with my withered soul.

  As if two weeks ago were now, I hear Aunty say, as she said in that moment, “Let her go,” meaning my mother.

  “I will never let her go!”

  So here I am, thinking again. I realize I must be fading into unconsciousness, for I should be focusing on getting me and my companion out of this storm and away from the hatchet. But it’s easier to rest, just a second, and go where my mind wants to go.

  Two weeks ago . . . I dug into the soil of the cottage basement, making foot holes in the soft earth to reclaim my mother’s Tory Burch. At the bottom, I captured and clutched it to my chest and ignored Aunty above, until, hearing her scrabble on down into the hole to join me, I looked up at her and her mangled face like a rabid beast, like I was the one with the mangled face. How dare she keep this shoe from me for two years. I could have held it. I could have cried into it. I could have conjured my mother in a round of Ouija while wearing it. I could have commanded the shoe to return my mother back to land and out of the sea. I thought all these things and no, I did not consider the impossibility, or the implications, of the witch’s spell I brewed in my mind. Witch’s spell? That’s not real.

  “Who is the woman in the barn, Aunty?” I said in a growling, unnatural voice, me now the deranged psychopath, not her.

  She puffed out an exhale, closed her working eye.

  “Who is the woman in the barn?” I clutched my mother’s soiled shoe tighter, merging the sole to my sternum.

  Aunty breathed deep and creased her brow, but still said nothing.

  “Who. Is. The. Womaninthebarn?”

  “Don’t yell, Mop, please. That’s so unlike you.”

  “Oh, seriously. Seriously. For real? Who is the woman in the barn, Aunt-y?” I stressed Aunt-y as two distinct syllables in an intentional aggression to her face, challenging her identity before me. How dare she tell me what’s like and unlike me, suggesting I don’t know my own self. Do I know my own self?

  She sighed, opened her one working eye, strained the lid on her dead one, but low, and inhaled in a long and contemplative intake, perhaps a calculating intake, like even she questioned every word she was about to speak.

  “She’s my friend,” she said. “Um.” She turned a circle, sticking her thumbnail in her teeth, slipping there when ca
tching nothing but a hole. Her thumb fell farther in her mouth. “Mop, you can’t tell anyone about her. I could go to jail. Mop. Mop. Are you listening?”

  “Who is the woman in the barn?” I said, slow and gritted, the shoe in my hand like a weapon for a bludgeon.

  Aunty shook her head and dropped her shoulders, as if in that moment, she gave up whatever battle she’d been waging. Whatever facade she thought she was keeping. Her voice cracked; she breathed in quick breaths through her open throat, a minor hyperventilation. “Fine, fine, fine, fine,” she said to the ground, catching herself from falling by placing a hand on the dirt wall. Not looking up to meet my eyes with her one good eye, she said in a hushed mumble, “Here’s the story with the woman in the barn.” She looked up at me, her eye wide and glowing green like an alive crystal ball. I didn’t recognize her still. “Mop, I hope to God you understand how serious this is and you’ll not say a word. I didn’t want to involve any of you in any of this.”

  “God? You hope to God?” I asked. How dare she invoke God in the basement where my mother last slept. We were on the most sacrilegious soil anywhere ever in the history of forever. We were in the epicenter of hell, and here she had the audacity to say the word God. God who? God where? Where is my mother, God? I want my mother back, God!

  “Oh, Mop, there you are,” Aunty said in a desperation, like she parted curtains between foggy dimensions, having scoured every multiverse in search of me. As if for the past two years I didn’t live an easy forty-five minutes away in Rye, or a click or dial away at Princeton. Some spell broke around her, her face once again the face I knew, albeit scarred and toothless and missing an eye and sad, but warm and full of light. I could read the transformation and all the emotions she conveyed in a simple second, for I’d spent countless hours with her my whole life. I knew her best, as much as I knew my mother, more than anyone else on this planet, save Manny. We read the ones we love like the sightless master blindness, eons with the braille. And she was my braille.

  And if I’m being truthful, I’d read her scary braille before.

  One night when I was fifteen, I slept at Aunty’s in my own designated room. She woke me when I heard her roaming the halls, talking to herself in a sleepwalk. Moaning like a ghost, she stood in my doorway; her white nightgown swished around her stick-straight legs from a sea wind blowing through my open window. I got up slow and tried redirecting her back to bed. It had been three years since her second miscarriage, also when she famously threw David, her longtime boyfriend, to the brambles and out of her life forever.

  Swaying in my bedroom doorway, my bedroom in her house, Aunty alighted her green orb eyes to me and didn’t blink. But I knew she wasn’t seeing me. I knew, although I don’t think I’d registered one before from her, she was in one of the catatonic states I’d heard the Rye servants whisper about. She said in a strange stumbling staccato, long pauses, and a warbling dropped monotone of slurring, like she’d just had a root canal, “Mop’s the daughter . . . I should have . . . David. Daughter . . . should . . . mine . . . David. Why . . . whyyyy . . . can’t you give me my own daughter, David, David, David, you fail.” She picked up the pace of her warbling dropped monotone, as if she’d been shot with adrenaline, although she kept her bright eyes, which seemed filmed over, unblinking. “Why was I the one to lose the babies? Why was I the one with the metal in her mouth? Why was I the one with Daddy to die, Johanna? Why, Princess!” When she said Why, Princess, the phrase was full of hate. Spit seethed in a spray from her mouth.

  I knew in reading the braille of Aunty, what she needed was a soft voice and a sterile reminder of reality, and certainly not fear, and definitely not pity. As I look back from my current age of twenty-five, here above this horror hole, I have to now recognize how strange it was for fifteen-year-old me to not shy in fright nor be surprised by Aunty sleepwalking and saying Why, Princess like a psychopath. I must now force myself to accept the definition I must have always known I should have always had for Aunty Liv. One far removed from perfection. Did I allow her mental sickness to grow?

  I fear I enabled her. It was easy to enable this bout of psychosis from her, easy to hide, to bury, and focus on her shininess, because she was not all good and not all bad, she was not one thing, not one dimension. I could choose the safe parts of her, if I wanted. And I could do the same for myself, if I ever had to. These are the subconscious lessons I must now admit to myself.

  Back then, during Aunty’s haunting night terror when I was fifteen, I knew that all that would break her night psychosis was a clinical diagnosis and a firm action plan. This is how I liked her treating me when I slipped on ice and yelped in pain after spraining my ankle, or raged in anger at a nest of red ants that caused my shin to swell in a rash, or cried misery tears from missing Manny when he left one August for a month-long soccer camp. So that’s what I knew she needed too: clinical reality and a plan—either that or my mother’s smothering sugarplum-scented hugs, which I didn’t have the perfume or breasts or authenticity to pull off.

  “Aunty, it’s Friday night at Haddock Point. You are sleepwalking and having a night terror. I will walk you back to bed now.”

  She dropped her hypnotic gaze, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “Oh my . . . what? Where am I? Mop?” She stumbled in the hall, her white nightgown billowing on the hardwood floor as her knees failed. I held her up.

  “Come on, Aunty. It’s okay. I’ll walk you back to bed.”

  We never discussed the event in the morning, or ever. I didn’t even mention the event to my mother, for Aunty’s overflowing subconscious thoughts revealed a buried hatred for my mother, one covered and covered in layers of Aunty’s fight to sustain a real love. I focused on the layers of love.

  Perhaps I was wrong to bury such an event. I know now I was wrong to bury such an event.

  Now at age twenty-five, two weeks ago in the burned basement hole, and again witnessing before me yet another breaking of one of Aunty’s psychotic spells—this one with severe implications—all of Aunty’s own walls and barriers protecting her from the reality of grief crumbled away, like mine. I saw it happen.

  It ended up being a short window, though.

  “Mop, oh, baby, I’m so sorry, baby. You have no idea how much I miss you.” Aunty started to cry. Her shoulders lowered. She sank to the ground, her knees in soft dirt. I wanted to hold her, her to hold me. I missed her so much my arms stretched out for her, listening only to my heart and not my fogged frontal lobe, which separated me from my own self with a million questions and red flashing warnings. I had no idea how to understand the woman she kept in the barn, and there I was, holding my mother’s soiled shoe in an abandoned basement with a makeshift roof, the scent of wet soil on a full-moon summer night. I stood confused within a pit of charred objects.

  “Aunty, you’re scaring me. I don’t know what you’re doing. Who is that woman in the barn? A friend? Why would you . . . ? What are you doing? Why do you lock the front doors and bar the back?” My heart choked my lungs. I wanted to vomit. Tears came out my eyes, out my nose. My arms wavered in the air. I didn’t know what to do with my own hands, except grip the life out of my mother’s shoe.

  “Oh, baby. Don’t worry. Baby. Listen.” She clawed the dirt walls as a brace to stand again, widened her nostrils to intake air, and steadied herself to continue her story. Still, she did not meet my eyes; instead, she looked out beyond my shoulder to another dirt wall, staring straight, as if she still had two eyes. “She’s a nurse at Saint Jerome’s. A friend of mine. She came here two years ago, afraid for her life.”

  I stood straighter. “Two years ago? When Mom died? When Mom died!” My voice rose with each sentence. “Is the woman in the barn connected to what happened to my mother?”

  Aunty’s head vibrated, rather than shook, like I’d slapped her from her story into present-day reality and the two didn’t match. Her head shaking seemed an effort to calibrate facts. “No,” she said, controlled, in a bellow, like when she’d said “sh
h” in the side room in her barn. Then came another head oscillation of calibration and she was back to having an etched forehead of sadness and open grief, staring out beyond my shoulder, reciting her story.

  “No, baby. This was after your mother. After the fire. My friend was having an affair with a married man. Um. And the wife of this married man wanted to kill my friend. Yes. Um. So my friend was staying here with me and hiding out. And. And. So one night the wife came here looking for my friend.” Aunty turned two more circles, raising her voice and also the rhythm of her narrative, while bouncing faster the double pendants she still wore around her neck.

  Aunty continued, “This wife, she slammed my friend’s head into the foyer floor, in the house. My friend went into a coma. The wife fled. I, I, I, couldn’t bring myself to bring my friend to the hospital, because . . . because . . .” Aunty cast her eye to my mother’s shoe. “Because, um, I didn’t know who this wife was and I couldn’t name her, so she got away scot-free. I didn’t trust the wife wouldn’t attack my friend in the hospital, so I kept my friend here. I had all the equipment, and I am a nurse, so I kept her here. And. That’s all. I kept her here. Before I knew it, a year went by. Then two. And I’m in too deep. I don’t know how it got so far.” She seemed to think of something else and rushed out some final explanations. “She has no one in the world to care for her. She’s an only child, parents dead, no friends. I was her only friend. The hospital and the cops think she ran off and committed suicide. That’s a big statistic, you know. People disappearing to a secret place to kill themselves.”

  This last part, the piece about suicide statistics and medical facts, this was a glimpse of the old Aunty, but as she relayed it in the course of her crazy story and the false version of herself before me, the statement didn’t fit.

  I squished my eyes, confused. Held up a hand to stop her from continuing with her nonsensical words, which I could not accept. I’m not a flaming moron. I flagged the gaping holes in her tale. I logged her shifting eye, her stumbling stutters, her word fillers and repetitions. But two weeks ago, I curled into my mother’s shoe and sobbed. And also, no matter what Aunty had to say, I still loved her and, it’s true, I wanted to protect her, enable her to get well again. Oh God, please, stop talking and just hold me, I thought. Please say you love me, because I love you. Holding back tears and wishing for love took all the strength I had left for the day.