by Shannon Kirk
So I know her shift at Mass General is a grueling triple today, and Kent and I have the evening shift at Saint Jerome’s. This is usually the day we spend all morning and afternoon at the Kisstop. It’s the best day of all. After a whole day of lounging naked together, we scrub each other’s bodies in the Kisstop double shower, and no one ever suspects the scent of sex off us when we slink in to fulfill our evening shifts. But we won’t be meeting today, not after whatever went wrong yesterday with Vicky. This much goes unsaid between me and Kent, the words not having to be said over a phone call or email neither of us make.
As I step up to her car door, a light flicks on in their master bedroom (I’ve been in it), forcing me to freeze. I can’t swivel my head to look up and see if a curtain moves aside, allowing inside eyes to peer down on my naked face. If I were to flip my head up, she’d see me, if indeed it is she who flicked the light on. I stay stalled. If someone shouts down, I’ll know I need to turn tail and run before I’m caught red-handed.
I wait. I hold my breath. Everything in my chest and neck beats at separate rhythms, my heart, my lungs, each rib, my sternum, my esophagus, the muscles. A chorus of pulses in my body.
I hear no shouts. I note the curtains haven’t moved and now the light is off again. I scurry to enter the minivan, pop the door open—they don’t lock car doors in this neighborhood—and in leaning in to leave my note, get snagged on the seat belt. I realize I haven’t changed since my shift last night, so the damn pockets on my nurse’s uniform and cashmere sweater tangle me up. I yank back, staying low, drop the note, and scurry back to the bush on the sidewalk.
I catch my breath, watching the upper window, and no shouts come, no curtains move, no lights flick on. I hope this navy dusk of a morning shields my identity, if seen. I backstep in a trot to my car.
At six a.m. sharp, Cate Dranal will enter her ugly car, where she’ll find my note on the driver’s seat.
I plan to get home and wake Johanna to tell her everything, so we can map out how to handle this mess and stay safe. More rides on this than a stupid job and my and Johanna’s lives. Much more. Even more than my own sanity. And it has nothing to do with those damn pentobarbital vials.
CHAPTER NINE
MOP
Present time
I question everything but love, which, ironically, is the most intangible, mysterious leap of all. But not really. Love is fairly scientific, and there are undeniable signs, instinct being the biggest tell of all, the one no one can deny. Otherwise, I don’t understand how people hold such staunch certainties. Truly, I don’t understand, so I feel displaced, like something’s wrong with me to doubt almost everything, which leads me to want to curl tighter to my safe places: love of Manny, my mother, Aunty, and books.
I still cannot accept yesterday’s shocking secret, something I’ve been grappling with the entire time in the burned basement hole and now, too, outside in the hurricane, my companion passed out on my fallen legs.
Still.
Love is one constant true source. The only thing I trust. I had a dream one night. That dream is the single clearest moment in my whole life. It was black-and-white. I was in a topless car as a passenger, Manny the driver. I don’t know if we were driving toward our separation or running away, but a heavy emotion kept us silent. I leaned into him, and he turned from watching the road, one arm remaining on the wheel. The road was straight, no other cars in sight. I think the land was brown and flat, but we were black and white. He said, in a tender and painful tone, as if my answer would dictate whether he’d live or die, “What is the greatest moment of your life?” I smiled as my answer, a smile that said, This. This is the greatest moment of my life. In the dream, he blinked in a way that swallowed his tears. He wore a crisp white-collared shirt. This dream sticks with me as a pure truth. In my life, in my mind, in my truth, that dream is indeed the greatest moment of my life.
So I’m not sure why I ever questioned Manny’s love, when I know I love him. And I know how he looks at me when he sees me—that look, that starry, out-of-body look, the look no one can conceal. I give him the same look. A mutual instinct colliding, like two cannons firing for a Fourth of July finale. Clear sky, no clouds, pins of stars, and explosion upon explosion of colorful fire, stitching the air with an embroidered heart of light. That’s how sure I am of our love. I knew the second Manny delivered me his discovery of the true rose thief. How breathless I became upon sight of his sparkling eyes of excitement, when he pushed a pine bough out of my way to reveal Mr. Fox Gillray’s bed of stolen roses. I’m as sure about my love of Manny as I am sure I hear Poe’s telltale heart whenever I read the description of it beating.
Today is two weeks after I first arrived back at Aunty’s, and so much has happened since. So much revealed, so many secrets, so many changes in our lives. One of those changes, which might seem the most severe, is actually the tamest, by comparison: the hatchet wedge in my calf. And the woman who dealt the blow stands before me now with the same bloody hatchet, while I lie on the ground, cantilevered over the burned basement hole. My companion is still passed out and sprawled across my legs. My feet remain tangled in the pervasive knots of brambles behind. The angel of death I saw at the mouth of the path that leads here moves closer, sneaking in on the woman with the hatchet, who doesn’t notice the shadow draped in black gauze. The gauze flies around in the storm’s turbulent wind, containing the shadow in a separate and slower rhythm of time.
By the way the angel of death moves, tiptoed and silent past the creaking swing on the maple we call Big Boy, I wonder if he (or her or it, I don’t know) is here for the hatchet woman or for me or my companion or all of us.
I close my eyes, rest my head on a rock. I find a smooth spot of stone for my pulsing temple. The sky is a furious army now, helter-skelter with axes and spears of rain. Limbs flying, screaming words of wind howling, and the sea threatening to breach the barrier of her foxhole and storm the field too. Crack of lighting, scarring the green sky with green veins and unrelenting, and stab of the straight-on rain, like endless icicles of glass. My arms above my head are sopping wet, but I feel nothing beyond wet cloth. I don’t feel my bones or my muscles or the fat within. I’m armless, legless, helpless, slipping to the land of the dead. I’m dying from inside out. I’ll allow the black shadow in flying gauze to handle this. I shut my eyes and wait for the end.
And when I close my eyes, I return to the morning after I arrived and saw Aunty sealing her attic with a nail gun.
I used to flashlight talk from my upstairs room at Aunty’s, my Mop Closet, to my mother in her one-room guest cottage out back, tucked catty-corner behind the barn. My mother loved all things frilly and cozy and pink and blue and patterned in sea things. So Aunty made her that cottage; plus, whenever my mother drank too much wine after any of their constant charitable events, she’d smoke a Marlboro or two. So it was good for everyone to give Mom her own little shack. Wasn’t a shack, though. Was a beautiful beach cottage, shingle shake and outfitted within by Lilly Pulitzer and the best upholstered furniture, straight from Zimman’s in Lynn, Massachusetts. My mother’s regular designer at the helm.
Anyway, two clicks of the flashlight from my upper bedroom to my mother in her cottage meant good night. And three quick flashes meant I love you. I would click out one good night, pause, and then click out one I love you. In return, she’d click out a series of eight to ten I love yous, until I would shake my head within my lit room, so she could see me through the dark, and then clap off my bedroom lights and shut the shade, smiling as I crawled into bed. It never mattered how old I was—when my mother said she loved me, I was a child again, safe and full, and my heart felt strong and warm. Nothing in the world could harm me for the blessed seconds around the bubble of time when my mother said she loved me.
When they called that awful morning two years ago, I was doing what I did every day. I was hanging my naked torso over the rim of a hot bathtub, so as to read a book splayed on a white bath mat. Boomerang was
the book, a financial markets exposé by Michael Lewis. A phone rang, followed by shouting. My left foot collided with my customary cup of red-berry tea, which thereupon spilled and ruined Boomerang, when I fish-flopped and sloshed out upon the screams of an emergency and to hurry. My lifelong reading routine shattered, just like that. I can’t read in water anymore. And the sight of a Michael Lewis book makes me nauseous—to think of all his hard work, which goes to waste in my small world, for I can no longer so much as brush the spine of one.
I never understood until I lost her and lost Aunty how peaceful life was, how much I loved and was loved back. Didn’t anticipate how looking at a flashlight over the past two years would cause me to fall into a heaving pile of tears, didn’t anticipate a relentless cold in my bones. Literal chills in my hands that hurt. Still don’t understand the chronic fog, how I’d find myself somewhere on campus, not having remembered one step of the trek. Finding myself standing by a fountain or leaning against a quad oak or staring at the fall canopy outside my dorm, confused, darting my eyes for any witnesses to the wizardry that transported me from my bed, without my conscious knowledge.
Had I been able to breach the boarded Mop Closet upstairs the first night I stayed at Aunty’s two weeks ago, I would have clicked out an infinity of flashlight I love yous, hoping my mother would see my beacon in the beyond and find her way to the shore of the living.
Instead, I woke in the green-and-gray guest bedroom on the first floor, a view of nothing but the basement bulkhead, and alone.
The wallpaper everywhere else in Aunty’s house is varied, patterned, of every color in the rainbow, and involving parties of every animal or fish or bird in the animal-fish-bird kingdoms, and yet, this drab, muted, green-and-gray room is the one I woke in. I suppose I should have fled right away, having seen what I did the night before: the boards on my Mop Closet bedroom, Aunty in a mad-witch act of nailing more boards on one of the attic doors. Not to mention the unconscious woman in her barn in a hospital bed. The woman in her barn in a hospital bed. In waking that morning at Aunty’s, a phrase floated through the fog, something some doctor, I don’t know, said about me, I think, some weeks after yanking me from my locked room in Rye two years ago: selective, evergreen amnesia.
But two weeks ago, I didn’t linger on the phrase, and instead laser-focused on one single thing: love. Baby steps. Baby steps. Baby steps. One rung at a time.
I dressed at nine thirty, after hiding away in my guest bedroom since I woke at dawn. I ghosted through the Mermaid Library at nine forty-five, snagged a front door key from a hidden well within one of the mermaid bookends, slid across the marble foyer, and snuck out without interacting with Aunty, who clinked and clanked and hummed in her sunlit kitchen. I waved to her in running through her back lawn, to meet the side lawn, and then cut through a path only Manny and I know of that hits upon, at some snaky point, an abandoned access path to the ocean no one uses. From there, and I could have done this blindfolded, I took curvy lefts, curvy rights, sharp lefts, sharp rights, through the bramble bushes and vines, the twisted corkscrew hazel shrubs on both sides, and trees hardy enough to withstand the constant offshore wind. I didn’t stop like I normally do to consider how these ancient trees look like arthritic hands stretching up through the earth.
I broke out of the labyrinth of thin paths through the brambles to meet upon the granite rocks along the ocean’s edge. These rocks lie in layered slabs, some as big as house roofs, and tiny tide pools pockmark the surfaces with worn grooves and cracks. The layering makes the edge of earth along the sea look like inland is a cake, and the edge a gray buttercream frosting dripping off the towering sides. Running to Manny’s, jumping over tide pools and footholding in granite grooves, I ignored the low rolling ocean to my left, purple flowers growing out of cracks underfoot, and the knee-high mounds of bayberry and blueberry and pricker mounds to my right.
The mounds thrive in a tangled mess before the taller brambles and vines and red-berried catbrier and white-flowered arrowwood shrubs, the boundary from which I broke through using skinny paths, which is the first line of defense for the inland ring of the corkscrew hazel and arthritic-hand trees, which surround the innermost ring of maples and willows and perennial beds around Aunty’s house. Rings of vegetation, each ring hardier than the next, form the layers of nature’s militia. Imagine how defiant you must be to be a purple flower that pokes out of a granite crack at the ocean’s edge, where freezing water beats and yanks at you with hundreds of billions of gallons of water and corrosive salt, every day, twice a day, at high tide.
On my way to Manny’s that day, I stopped myself from wishing one of the purple flowers was the new incarnation of my mother in her next life. No, move on. That’s not possible.
I plunked down into the middle beach, for it was low tide, and kept my back to the cliff from which my mother launched herself. I climbed up more slabs of granite to Manny’s estate lawn, and there he stood, A-frame and smiling, waiting for me at the tip-top, a green thermos of coffee in his hands. Out before us stretched his perfect green oceanfront lawn; the rocky edge to the sea to my left, his pool and pool house in the middle distance, and to the far-right corner his brick estate, and behind that, the property’s long-standing lighthouse.
“I love you,” he said.
No waiting. That’s how he’s always been. That’s why I love him. Such certainty. Such trust of his instincts. Where has this certainty been for two years?
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.
He pursed his lips, looked up to the blue sky in a humorous contemplation, then turned a serious eye to me. “Come over here. I brought the blanket. And the doughnuts.”
Manny had laid on the grass the blue Duke blanket we had stolen from one of his brothers many years ago. This older brother graduated cum laude from Duke whatever irrelevant year that was. He wasn’t so happy we stole his precious graduation blanket. I think he said something crude about us using his collegiate gift for “fucknics,” his stupid big-brother mash-up of fucking and picnics. Then he said something about how we could keep his fucknic blanket, now that Manny’s jizz stained the letter D. But the stain wasn’t jizz; it was icing from a cinnamon roll, courtesy Aunty’s kitchen, for she’d made them special for me and Manny. She’d placed six rolls, each with an inch of icing, because Aunty wasn’t a barbarian back then, in a pink box she’d saved from some bakery, because she used to be particular. Packaging things with care, baking things and slathering things with ample love, and icing.
She didn’t walk around with a punctured eye and no eye patch, and the thought of having broken gaps in her mouth would have made her own skin recoil, before. She would never have walked around like a deranged woman pirate, hiding an unconscious woman in her barn. And as for boarding her attic with a nail gun, that wasn’t Aunty, was someone else. I can’t even. This is so incomprehensible, which is what I thought in actively blocking the thoughts as Manny led me to our stolen Duke picnic—not fucknic—blanket.
I took a deep breath to cement my intent on love. Just love. Nothing else. Baby steps. Breathe. Another deep breath.
Manny handed me a cider doughnut. We didn’t sit. We stood close, face-to-face. I took a bite and chewed while staring into his eyes. He mirrored my exact actions and brushed a hair from my cheek. The temperature became irrelevant, except for the emotional flash in my core, a welcome sign I was alive. Not like now, two weeks later, as my core cools.
We spoke no words, repeating bites of our doughnuts, staring, and in microscopic, involuntary moves, for we were commanded by instinct and our physical bodies, inched closer and closer. The low tide listened, calming the waves like hushing a brood of children. The water sounded more like popping bubbles than its regular bar brawl with the rocky cliff, ten feet off. Those cider doughnuts were freshly fried, so the scent wafted and hung in the grips of summer air, catching with the humidity and thus expanding, lending us a lovely displacement to the safety of fall in the dead of summer.
&nbs
p; I caught myself smiling, and thus, felt myself emerging. And now as I slip away to some other world two weeks later, I don’t care about the haze of shock I was in. I’d give anything to relive a million times over my and Manny’s reunion.
“I love you,” he whispered straight to my face, his eyes one inch from mine. “God, I love you. I miss you,” he whispered closer, holding my face in two hands, brushing his lips to mine, but not kissing.
Our doughnuts were done.
My mouth watered, my tongue twitched, I wanted to make room in my body to swallow him whole and join his soul to mine. I fixed on the mole under his right eye, a brown dot I covet like a vampire covets throats, like I need it to live.
“Where have you been?” I asked with a crack in my voice.
“Right here, babe. You weren’t ready.”
“But you never called. You never wrote.”
“I called hundreds of times. Couldn’t leave a message, because the box has been full for two years. You don’t empty it. I wrote a hundred cards. No returned calls. Two cards in return. Do you remember writing them?” He pulled away and shook his head to stop me from answering. When he lowered his hands from my face to my covered shoulders, the loss of his skin on my skin felt like he’d scalped me.
“I passed you once on campus at Princeton. Did you know? I went to see you, I was so worried,” he said.
I widened my eyes, confused.
“You were sitting on a bench. Dressed all in black. You had your glasses on. You were staring into grass. You had no clue I watched you for an hour,” he said.