In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  I didn’t go out with a boy. What I really did, as I often did when home in Rye away from my safe, obsessive study at Princeton, was drive my red Volvo to a state park with an old fort, also in Rye. It was always dark and closed when I’d get there, so I’d stuff my Swedish car on a side street. No one ever suspects colorful Volvos of anything nefarious or, well, out of place, pretty much anywhere. Then I’d scrabble through the brambles that make up the barriers to almost all seacoast New England beaches. Out of the brambles and beyond the dunes, I’d enter the old stone fort, pretending it was a necropolis for those who died at sea, for the fort was twenty feet off the seawall. I’d imagine the current swept my mother’s body from the Gloucester/Rockport line at Haddock Park and north to the Rye fort—such ocean physics seemed plausible in my grief. Grief was deep when I sat in that fake crypt in my made-up necropolis with a lit candle to wait for my mother to appear. She never did. But shadows did, and I talked to them, asking them to go fetch my mother.

  So did Aunt Mary, the retired nun, who still labored under her own crosses, did she answer the phone when Manny called and never tell me? This is what I wondered in Aunty Liv’s guest shower two weeks ago. And then Aunty knocked at the bathroom door, waking me from my consternations.

  “Yes,” I yelled from under the water, still not opening my eyes. The mango liquid body soap scented in bubbles off my froth-washed shoulders.

  She cracked open the door, and with the vacuum of cooler air on her side, steam from within the shower whooshed out as though escaping me, preferring the metal mermaids in the adjacent library. Aunty whispered, “Manny’s here. He saw your car in the Haddock Point parking lot. He’s in the foyer. Please hurry. He can’t be here long. Please, Mop. Please, please, hurry.”

  At least she didn’t lie to him and say I wasn’t there. This I tipped to the side of Aunty being the real Aunty.

  In reaching the foyer with a quick-thrown, pink chenille robe and matching coiled towel on my wet hair, I didn’t care that I hadn’t seen the boy I longed for in two years, and this is how I would look. He’d seen me growing up, with briars in my bangs, the time I got chicken pox on my face, the time I got a rash on my back and butt from poison sumac, and he did, too, for we’d played prince and princess in the brambles. He’d seen me with braces, with casts, with the summer flu, and once with Lyme disease. I’m pretty sure we gave each other strep three times. And there was also the scare that I might be pregnant at seventeen and thus my sleepless three nights, each of which he shared with me. I wasn’t pregnant at all. I was just late due to overtraining for my annual win of the Haddock Point Lobster Fin Challenge—a three-mile swimming race in the choppy Atlantic. I trained every morning at dawn, along the exact race route. Several minor maelstroms swirl along this stretch; a person might get sucked up and spun if unaware. Perhaps you spin, drown, crash against the cliff edge. I preferred to skate my swimming body close to the sucking holes. I called my oceanic pool the Sink.

  I entered Aunty’s foyer in the pink robe and towel coil, leaving wet footprints on the wood floor in the library and the ice-rink marble. Manny’s eyes glowed when they met mine, and I wanted to cry. He rushed over and hugged me, but I didn’t know what to do with my arms, so weighted by the thickest chenille sleeves they felt five inches thick. The toe of my mother’s shoe poked out of one of the kangaroo-pouch pockets. Eventually, I did hug Manny back, but two beats after Manny’s, and so our hug was, in retrospect, sweetly prolonged.

  “Why haven’t you called me?” he said, not wasting one second on pleasantries.

  “I have the same question,” I replied as my answer, looking at him sideways.

  Aunty, I could tell by my glance down the center hall, wallpapered in those colorful birds and vines, and to the kitchen in the back of the house, worked in a fury, jamming boxed spaghetti into a boiling black pot, a meal that didn’t require such an aggressive level of attention. The scent of roasted tomatoes told me she was baking the sauce like she did.

  “Mop,” she yelled out, “we’ll need to eat soon, so maybe you two could talk over at Manny’s house tomorrow?”

  This I slotted in the column of Aunty not being Aunty. The real Aunty used to beg Manny to stay longer, to join her in the kitchen, so she could prod us with questions on every minute action we took during the day, always keeping a natural smile and longing glint in her eyes, as if we were memory doors to her own charmed youth.

  I eyed Manny, using Aunty’s suggestion that we meet tomorrow at his place as my own request, and he kissed my cheek.

  “I really miss you,” he said, staring into my soul.

  I lifted my chin and saddened my eyes, confused at the depth of his words and the way he said them. Why, then, didn’t he try harder? I thought.

  “I have tried to understand your silence as grief over your mother. I do respect your grief, Mop. So if you need more time, I will leave.” He held both of my hands, rubbing the tops with his big thumbs, and he continued staring into my eyes with his own blue, swirling oceans.

  “But?” I stumbled. “But I?” I didn’t understand.

  Aunty’s clock in the living room behind him chimed out nine times. Waves of hot garlic braided with waves of roasted tomatoes, turning Aunty’s house into a North End restaurant. My stomach punched my emotions and grumbled. I looked to Aunty in the kitchen; she looked out down the hall to the foyer, pressing me to move it along and rid the house of Manny.

  Why is he sounding like I disappeared? He’s the one who hasn’t called or kept in touch. Right?

  “Manny, I, um, I don’t know what to say. Can we please meet tomorrow? At your house? Late breakfast, like old times?”

  “On my back lawn with a thermos of coffee and cider doughnuts. You got it. Ten o’clock.”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  I set a tenuous kiss on Manny’s cheek; he caved his chest as though swallowing the minor affection to his core, and he left.

  Am I wanted? How could . . . That can’t be.

  Dinner with Aunty was quiet. We ate at her kitchen table in the middle of her country kitchen, a place most newer homes reserve for marble center islands. Her black gas stove sat on the side wall, like always. The bay windows on the two exterior walls still hosted green pillows for sitting, framed by yellow-and-green curtains. The view of the cottage from one of them did not show the cottage, of course. Now it showed the impenetrable tangle of vines and brambles and saplings and twisty trees. The floor-to-ceiling open antique shelving unit, which showcased Aunty’s prized collection of yellowware pottery, was different. Before, it was laden with yellowware bowls and cups and platters and figurines, but now it was sparse. A few bowls left, one mug, and a yellow Santa figure. I didn’t ask why. Neither of us talked; we glared at our pasta in a mutual shell shock. Angry at the other, frightened by the other, bruised by the other. I asked one question.

  “Where’s Popover, anyway?”

  “Oh,” she said, twirling her spaghetti and looking around as if my mother’s beloved cat were somewhere in the kitchen. “He’s around, somewhere.”

  When I stood to clear the plates, she said to my back as I rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, “Please. Mop, please. I’m begging you. Please do not mention my friend in the barn to anyone. I have to trust you. I have no other choice.”

  I kept my back to her and ratcheted my neck in a roundabout way, like a fighter cracking knuckles to start a bar fight.

  We’d scoff, the three of us, Aunty, my mother, and I, over the implausibility that any of us would ever abandon one of us. How if one were tried and convicted of murder, the other two would hatch an Ocean’s Eleven–style George Clooney plan to spring the jailed one from jail, and we’d all three flee with fake passports to a villa in some southern climate. Didn’t matter if we abandoned all the money and were left to make do with whatever cash we stole away with. So trust me? She should have trusted me two years ago.

  “Aunty,” I said, turning and facing and meeting her one eye and eye pat
ch, which she’d mercifully put on before dinner. “I happen to know you. I happen to know you’re not telling me everything. But I’m too exhausted over my mother to pry tonight.” I patted the shoe still in the robe’s pocket (I ate in the robe, too drained and starving to change into clothes). “But please don’t say all you can do is trust me. You shouldn’t have to say obvious things. You shouldn’t have to ask for my trust. This is what is the saddest part of all of this. Beyond the fact that whatever is going on in the barn is insane, and you know it.”

  I think this is what my mother would have said to her. My mother would have slapped her with tough love in a way to say she still loved her, no matter what. My mother was no scholar, didn’t read the nonfictions like Aunty and me, but she sure was the one we both went to for the real answer and the never-denied hug. My mother remained steadfast in the whimsical and happy, and all she ever did was pour love, or shop too much like a girly girl or write in her fashion blog, doling consolations to her readers to not fret over the dearth of fashion in Boston, for she had solutions! That was her job, love and frilly fashion. In many ways, she was my opposite. She called me her “Cherry Berry Reader Geek, perfect as is,” and then stuffed my face in her cashmere chest to smother me in love and fashion and kisses on my head. But she was the perfect one, as is. Those of us destined to dwell in dark thoughts and doubt, in the dust of old books, and the misery of addiction to the topic of philosophy, we need bright, unencumbered souls in our lives. Otherwise we slide with no balance, no foothold into good.

  Two weeks ago in Aunty’s kitchen, after I called her out on the insanity of nursing a woman in her barn, Aunty hung her head, admitting defeat and perhaps saddened by what I was saddened by too: her terrible suggestion of a lack of trust between us, the suggestion alone a rank betrayal.

  “You’re just like your mother. Telling me like it is,” she said.

  And before I rose in another anger at her for mentioning my mother, she shook her head and left the kitchen for her bedroom upstairs, beneath the alleged raccoon in the attic.

  That night in the green guest room, I couldn’t sleep. I missed the mattress in my Mop Closet. I missed love. Missed my mother. Missed calmness of mind. Missed everything.

  About two a.m., I heard a chih-chah, chih-chah in the house, like a mechanical heartbeat. My body straightened in the bed, muscles sprung as if in rigor mortis, my eyes round moons to the ceiling. I’m sure I took no breaths for a good minute. Chih-chah—it wouldn’t stop. I swung my board-straight legs from the bed and followed the possessing sound. Did I blink? I don’t recall, but I don’t think it possible.

  I crept up the long, grand staircase and saw Aunty’s room light on through the cracks of her shut door. The chih-chah rhythm continued elsewhere upstairs. Chih-chah. Chih-chah. I paused, listening for the source. Sure enough, it reverberated from around the corner and down at the end of the hall that held my Mop Closet room. We called this the minor hall. A second door to the attic capped the end of the minor hall. The other attic door was in Aunty’s bedroom, which is off the main hall. Is the sound coming from the door to the attic, and is that door barred, like Aunty said? Because of a raccoon?

  I paused again to listen for the scrape of raccoon nails in the attic. But it’s plush carpet up there, the only carpeted space in the whole house. No way I’ll hear raccoon claws. What? I heard only the chih-chah coming from around the corner of the second floor and down the end of the minor hall.

  I slid past Aunty’s sealed bedroom and moved only when the mechanical heartbeat resumed.

  Chih-chah, I slid, chih-chah, chih-chah, I paused, I paused, chih-chah, I slid . . . and so on.

  I reached the corner and had only to poke my head around to discover the source of the chih-chah, but I froze, stunned by another sound that braided with the chih-chah: the labor of heavy breathing, which wheezed between each interval of chih-chah. I held my breath, hoping whoever sucked the world so hard for air had not heard me.

  And then . . .

  Chih-chah.

  In sneaking a peek around the corner and looking to the end of the minor hall, I saw Aunty, her back to me, in a sheer, white cotton nightgown covering neck to ankles. She fired a pressurized, automated nail gun, nailing boards to bar the doorway to the attic. Lasering my eyes along the wall of the hall, I noted my former bedroom door was also boarded shut—for how long, I do not know. The nail gun in Aunty’s hands must have been a newer model, for the sink of the nail under pressure was like a bullet from a pistol with a silencer. A soft chih-chah, like a heavy-duty staple into a stack of paper. Chih-chah.

  I magnetized myself back to the main hall and held my breath. Chih-chah. I again timed my slide to the mechanical rhythm, this time retreating to the stairwell down to the marble foyer. In the moments when the nail gun paused, and thus so did I, a slight scraping, like metal on metal, subtle, rained down in nets of sound from above, from the attic. Didn’t sound like a raccoon scratching at all.

  Now, two weeks later, I rely on the depleting energy of adrenaline, which isn’t much given the blood loss. And I believe, really believe, an all-black shadow in angelic form rises from the ground at the mouth of the path behind the woman with the hatchet. My companion faints. I succumb to delusions. I must be dying now.

  I don’t know if I’m dead, buried, blacked out, or in a complete delusional spiral. A black shadow behind the hatchet woman grows more solid. I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore, if this is indeed the end and the black shadow is the angel of death come to cocoon me in his yards of black gauze, which whip around him in this hurricane wind. Why do I assume the angel of death is male? Could be female? Could be neither. Maybe the death angel will seal me in an eternal encasement, arms bound, legs bound, wrapped in shrouds of blackness, alone, beyond the comfort of time. So be it. I don’t believe in such things anyway. Or maybe I should, because I believe I am seeing something, someone.

  I’m not sure if I’m lying in the dirt still, outside the hole of the basement, although I do feel the drilling of hard rain on my back. The falling water could be a washing anointment, some universal baptism upon death, and maybe the boom I hear is not thunder, but is Saint Peter crash-stepping in his asteroid sandals to join his comrade, the angel of death, so as to jointly perform my final judgment. I should be tipping the scale of myself and telling my thoughts they are impractical. I should acknowledge environmental and medical facts about my injuries and the weather, which might explain what I’m perceiving. But I slip, unable to gain enough traction to open my eyes, much less harness the hysterics I’m sure come upon this definite slide into death.

  Is that a person come to save us, or is that the angel of death?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AUNTY

  Two years ago

  I must be mad. It’s five a.m. the morning after I’ve been up all night, playing ghost in the white panel curtains of the guest cottage, guarding Johanna, because someone—and it has to be Cate Dranal—stole vials of pentobarbital from my barn last night.

  Five a.m. I’ll get this over quick. Get back to my house and to Johanna before Johanna wakes. I spin out of my property, pass by the Wilsons’ off the main road—they’re still in Costa Rica. I need to pick up their mail for them later. I drive twenty minutes to Danvers to Kent and Cate’s house. I want Cate Dranal to know I’m watching her, want her to know I know all about what she’s doing. I scrawl on the outside of the note I wrote her last night, the one in which I proclaim to be the brazen mistress who sleeps in her bed. I write: I’m watching. I know what you did to Vicky. Stay away from me. The inside of the note says everything else, my taunting confessional about fucking her husband. But I didn’t sign my name, so how brave am I? You’re not brave. You’re a coward. This is insane. Go home. I’m not going home. I must leave this note.

  The note I wrote to Cate Dranal is in my purse, beside me on the passenger seat while I drive to their house. I should have ripped it up, but I can’t. It’s haunting me, poking out from an inner zippe
r, white paper against black silk. I tell Cate I’m the mistress in the opening line. I needle her in this note how he doesn’t tell her he loves her anymore, not without the stick of me in his throat.

  I don’t sign my name. I just want to warn her to stay away from me, because someone, nameless me, is watching and knows. It is delusional to think this will protect me and whomever else she means to harm, but I can do nothing else. Stop. No, I can’t. I must.

  Cate Dranal’s ridiculous maroon minivan is in the driveway, right behind Kent’s gray Jeep. Why they don’t park in their damn attached garage is beyond me. He sang to me once in his Jeep, his thick hands on the stick shift, singing aloud so unembarrassed and free. It was some country song by Martina McBride about finding a mutual love that felt like home. I leaned across the seats and kissed the deep dimple of his right cheek for singing so unabashed, and he smiled with sad, in-love eyes. I think we were driving on our way to buy coffee, a sneak-away break, a stolen two hours from Saint Jerome’s. I don’t recall where we drove, what we said, nothing specific. I only remember him singing as free as if the world condoned us being together out in the open. I turned my face and wiped away a tear of happiness. I loved him so much in that single moment, my heart multiplied into a million hearts, each heart a different fold of a heart accordion, which expanded and contracted in my chest. I love him so much. I don’t know what to do. I have to let him go. I can’t let him go. When he looks at me with those eyes, when his dimples deepen, when his hands frame my face, I want to liquefy and blend with his body, be his blood.

  What a fucking illogical bullshit thought. Get your fucking shit together.

  But his hands on my face, our bodies combined, muscles and skin.

  Park the car. Get this over with.

  I park two blocks away from their Danvers Victorian. The June dawn offers enough light for me to sneak up to her unlocked minivan in nets of navy blue. I want to boil my hands in bleach to have to touch the handle on her despicable car. I know her shifts at Mass General as well as I know my own. Kent and I set our Saint Jerome’s schedules to mirror, with strategic blackouts, hers—so she’d never be home wondering where he is: her idle mind lending credence to valid suspicions, over which she might act.