by Shannon Kirk
She twisted her head fast toward me and Manny and stared in a vengeful malevolence, as if possessed and pulling us into possession. She stared a good, long four seconds, I think to make a point, not so much to focus. And then, after that, she yanked out a sloppy smile and, up from her side, a bottle of wine.
“Whoops. Party up in the park grounds. Sorry,” she said, calm and cool, as if we hadn’t stumbled upon her howling scream at the ocean.
“Are you all right?” Manny asked, standing sideways, one side blocking me from going forward, the other with his arm outstretched, as both a brace against her and a peace offering—talking to a hostage keeper while protecting a crowd.
The woman pulled her face in, bugged her eyes, and shook her head like a paint can in the mixer at Home Depot. The fastest of oscillations, crazy, crazy oscillations. Still shaking her head, she popped her lips in an audible smack, jolted to standing, and ran. As she sped by us, her arm holding the bottle of wine swung back, her hand choked around the neck. I gasped, clutched Manny. How can she have a bottle of Aunty’s French bordeaux? She orders it special, right? But then she was gone, out of sight, into the black. And I shook my head in fretful doubts, wincing into the bushes, away from this, from Manny, from her.
Frozen, stunned in the middle of a path between two blueberry mounds, Manny and I watched her run along the rocks, fast and slipping, looking back at us twice, while hiking up her blue-on-blue ball gown. She didn’t step light nor flinch, didn’t once circumnavigate pointed parts of rocks or roots to protect her bare feet. Crashing so hard and straight down as she did, I find it impossible to believe she didn’t shred her soles or mangle her toes. She stopped abrupt atop the cliff, and, not looking back, not acknowledging Manny now yelling at her to stop, she tossed her bottle of wine toward the sea, only to miss, sending it to crash upon the rocks. In retrospect, I regard this act a prophecy for my mother.
Manny started toward her, to help, I suppose, but I pulled him back to me. I feared her.
What if I hadn’t pulled him back and he stopped her?
At the time, we convinced ourselves—although, truthfully, I had a bad nagging sense about her, call it a sixth sense, call it the real sight of the wine, which I denied and didn’t voice, and herein lies the guilt—she was an innocent drunk, who had indeed gotten away from a late-night party up in Haddock Park. Haddock is seventeen acres of seaside parkland, which hosts a small watchtower lighthouse, surrounded by sweet picnic tables. This area abuts a rather famous quarry that partygoers like to breach at night. It’s incredibly dangerous, but on full-moon nights it’s especially popular, since the bowl of the quarry is a bowl of light. And yet, the park rangers had grown hip to these insurrections in recent years, and security had been tightened. So we should have questioned this woman’s story. Plus, the ball gown. Plus, her screaming howl. Plus, the bottle of rare wine. She disappeared into the dark devil of night again. We couldn’t see which way she went, for the moon stuck with our perspective, not hers.
Oh yes, we should have questioned her story. We should have followed her.
But we shook, shaken on the spot, and traipsed back to Manny’s house, and then his car. We decided in this return walk to skip the tent, and thus skip, I presumed, the marriage proposal for another unscarred night. We instead drove over to Rye to stay there the night. We thought it better to surprise my parents when they woke in the morning, for I didn’t know my mother intended to stay at Aunty’s that night, and also surprise, I suppose, Aunt Sister Mary Patience. Back then we were innocent and charmed students, and all we wanted to do the next day was use the new lap pool my father had installed. And the ground zero of guilt is this: I was pissed the woman ruined my night with Manny, so selfish, in fact, I ignored the obvious fear I felt, the instincts I sensed, and the vision of the wine. I knew better.
Everything changed the next morning when authorities called the Rye estate, jolted me from my tub reading of Boomerang, and reported the fire, my missing mother, and how Aunty had serious injuries to her face.
Manny and I did raise the incident the next day after all went to hell. But no one ever found a trace of a woman in a ball gown; she’d run on the rocks, nowhere on the paths, the crashed bottle swallowed by the tide. No one ever connected any foul play to anything happening on Aunty’s grounds. They all believed Aunty’s rendition of what went down, and how she damaged her face trying to save my mother. The fire inspector declared the cottage fire an unfortunate accident: woman fell asleep with cigarette in mouth, it dropped, she awoke aflame and ran to the sea. Disappeared.
But, yes, indeed, we should have questioned that ball-gowned woman’s story and followed her. I should not have stopped Manny in running for her. And I know this for sure now, for as I watched my unblocked memory unfold like a movie in the bathroom mirror on the airplane home from Milan a week ago, I figured out the identity of the screaming woman on the rocks and what happened to her.
She was the bloated woman in Aunty’s hospital bed in the barn.
Which meant Aunty lied about her coming after the fire.
And my doubts about the woman, my guilt for not believing my sixth sense, for not stopping her, they are true.
We are animals. Born of sticks and wind, mud and bone. We should never deny instinct, the wise mother of a mad daughter known as reason.
I see myself at Princeton over the last two years. I’d converse beyond quick passing hi’s with only one professor, my Philosophy of Aesthetics professor, who invited me to solemn, contemplative dinners with his rather young wife off campus.
The professor set me up with a summer volunteer job, coaching reading to refugees of global sex trafficking, none of whom can afford to pay for toothpaste, much less the luxury of a reading guide. The professor said their individual and collective acts of survival and their processes of healing were aesthetic, but I’m sure he meant to deliver that last part, their processes of healing, as an analysis of me. Did any of their survival stories sink in? What had I heard, what had I learned in these two years? As I realized yesterday, right before running into the hole in the ground to hide, one of those refugees’ stories taught me something rather valuable, and quite practical for survival in a certain specific situation of confinement.
Two years I spent with the professor, his wife, my reading students, and in this way, I stayed constantly busy and did not return home to Rye much at all. For me, the symbiosis of me working with the refugees and them helping me stay protected in a consumption of study, that was the true aesthetic value of all those volunteer summers. A beautiful consumption keeping me in a tranquil haze, a gorgeous fog.
Otherwise on campus, I sat on benches and stared at birds. I took long walks around Princeton’s brick buildings and towering, flowering trees, alone. I practiced my faith by swimming laps, one hour, every morning, in Princeton’s student pool. I ate cupcakes and drank coffee in village cafés, reading books, writing term papers, at a corner table for one. I’d find myself in random places outside, transported, it seemed, from my bed. Always alone, but I didn’t realize I was alone for two years, until I blinked in the mirror of the airplane bathroom on the way home from Milan and recognized the woman in the barn as the same ball-gowned woman from the night of the fire. I realized one week ago in a sharp awareness that I’d been going through motions, devoting myself to one thing: a monk’s life of study. I didn’t realize anyone was knocking on my door. Much less Manny, of all people. Much, much less important memories full of evidence.
When Manny made me realize in my active mind that the woman in the ball gown on the rocks and the woman in the barn were the same, which realization meant my doubts and guilt were true—the ability to accept my mother’s death did not cement further in my grips. No, any such ability flew far away, further than it had been over the last two years. I had come to Aunty’s to emerge in full, to swallow acceptance, but that plan cracked when I found the woman in her barn, it cracked again when I saw Aunty boarding the attic door, and it shattered on
the runway once we landed, home from Milan. And still, these weren’t the biggest shocks. I didn’t realize there were larger cracks and shatters to come.
I returned to Manny on the plane. I said nothing. He held my hand while I closed my eyes and steeled my mind to relive that night again and again. I gripped Manny’s hand back, seeking to soak in from him strength to add to the strength I was building in myself, determined to stay straight and not block events anymore. I saw in my mind’s eye the ball-gowned woman’s bloated face in Aunty’s barn. I saw red rage in my eyes, a rage I didn’t know where to direct. To Aunty for clearly lying? To the ball-gowned woman, who seemed guilty on the rocks two years ago? To whom? Myself? I decided to say nothing to Manny about the woman in the barn and the connection he’d made in my mind.
And I wondered what else I forgot or missed. I wondered who else, beyond Manny, might have called to me in my abyss. My father? What had he said that I had not heard? Aunt Sister Mary, what about her? Who else? What else? Perhaps my mother clicked her coded flashlight messages, pressing the flashlight button like a nail gun with a soft chih-chah, only I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t seeing. I wasn’t listening for the chih-chah.
Chih-chah, chih-chah, chih-chah is bleeding into my brain right now.
It’s two weeks after arriving at Aunty’s, and although I just blacked out in thoughts of my reunion with Manny, Milan, and my last two years at Princeton, I find I’m not dead. I feel a coming to, for, unless it’s the storm or my delusions getting the better of me, I’m sure I do hear a distinct chih-chah piercing the air. I open my eyes. I’m still outside, on the ground, in the storm, above the burned basement hole. My companion still passed out on my legs. Maybe I slipped only seconds into memories.
I don’t have my glasses. No contacts. Impaired vision paired with a blinding storm—no wonder the angel of death appears a shadow wrapped in black gauze. But it is actually more distinct, more solid. Focus. Squint.
The black shadow stands behind the woman with the hatchet. The shadow is holding a nail gun to the sky like a cranked-out gangster with an automatic weapon. The shadow is pulling the trigger, nails flying high, arcing like cherub spit in a fountain and plummeting down all around, raining with the real rain. The shadow yells at the back of the woman with the hatchet to stop or she’ll shoot.
She’ll shoot. She’ll. She. The angel of death is a woman.
The black shadow is not the angel of death. The black shadow is a woman with a nail gun. Aunty’s nail gun. But she’s not Aunty.
I close my eyes. The vision of the woman who is not Aunty, but who holds Aunty’s nail gun, is too much. I question this microcosm I’m in, how all this came together, me here, her here, my companion, the hatchet woman, a raging storm, what a medley of disconnected strands of life sewn together for an unbelievable moment. Is it philosophy to say everything is connected, or is it physics? Was this unbelievable moment predictable by some tangible calculation? Either way, everything is connected or impacts everything else, whether by philosophy or physics, doesn’t matter. There’s my reading-student refugee’s story of survival, the one I found yesterday did impact me in a tangible way, and I didn’t realize I remembered it until yesterday. And, I wonder now, the thing that happened to the senator who visited Boston with her daughters two years ago and wound up at Saint Jerome’s, even that is connected. If the senator’s awful event hadn’t happened on the same night as the fire, I’m near certain I wouldn’t be here above this hole in a hurricane.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AUNTY
Two years ago
I’m on my way to Saint Jerome’s for my night shift. After my all-night session guarding Johanna in the cottage—after I found my barn’s floorboard disturbed and my stash of pentobarbital gone—and after I stole away and drove to fucking Cate and Kent Dranal’s house at five a.m. to leave my taunting mistress note for Cate Dranal—I warned Johanna to keep clear of my house, to go back to Rye. I didn’t feel my house was safe. And now I’m on my way to work the night shift. Keep telling yourself you are working your night shift. Get even.
I hope Johanna listens and stays put in Rye. I wouldn’t leave my house for work until I saw her pull away, toot-tooting me a cheery goodbye and blowing me a big air kiss from her top-down, baby-blue convertible. After my long night of no sleep and a one-hour nap once Johanna awoke and showered, I worked my nerve to tell her everything. She listened like I knew she would, holding her purr beast Popover in her lap. Popover glared at me, loyal to Johanna. We resolved to talk on the phone tonight. She better stay in Rye. I know she’ll want to meddle and check in on me, since she now knows everything. I know she’ll want to sneak back to the house and wait for me.
Right after I clock in at Saint Jerome’s, I’m going to call her and keep calling to make sure she stays away from my house. She agreed we can’t go to the cops right yet, given all the background on the pentobarbital. And although she won’t admit it outright, she thinks I’m imagining what really happened at Proserpina’s.
“Honey cakes, do you think it might be like—I’m sorry, after Daddy, um, died, I’m sorry. But you know, and you are very stressed?” Johanna said, being the most delicate she could be in bringing up our father’s murder, which was my fault, and my nervous breakdown because of it.
She didn’t bring up the miscarriages, especially given what I told her this morning. I was surprised she even brought up our father’s death. I’ll never forget—although I’ve tried so hard to forget—the one morning a week after the estate manager did what he did to me when I was fourteen, when the house-call child psychotherapist couldn’t get me to sleep or stop shaking, and I couldn’t stop myself. Our mother whispered to Johanna outside my then Rye bedroom door, “Princess, we must never discuss how Liv is handling this, or what happened to Liv in the coach house. I’ve taken care of things with the cops. They’ll keep the estate manager in jail on other charges, so that we can keep this our family secret. We don’t need the press circling like sharks, like they do the Kennedys all the time. So Princess, it’s your job, baby, to keep things light for Liv. You’re so good at being our funny girl, baby, my special princess. Okay?”
“Yes, Mama. I love Livvy so much, I’ll do anything for her. I won’t mention a thing,” Johanna, Mother’s special funny princess girl, had said in return. And, true to her word, and Mother’s directives, we didn’t discuss what the estate manager did to me and how he caused our father’s death, ever.
This very morning, when Johanna lightly touched on the subject of our father’s death and my reaction to it, and she suggested I might be imagining what happened to Vicky at Proserpina’s yesterday, I smiled at Johanna. I’d been cured of the issue with Daddy and my reaction. I had setbacks with each of the miscarriages, it’s true. Upon the second loss, I kicked my longtime boyfriend David out of my life upon a near-murderous fit. Throwing literal vases and candlesticks at him, screaming how his sperm was toxic, that he was just a sperm donor to me, there was no way to repair the damage my words and actions ripped in the relationship. And I didn’t want repair, anyway. In comparison to Kent, I still consider David no more than a failure of a sperm donor.
There was another setback when I heard why Johanna’s sister-in-law, Sister Mary, really left the church—how unfair to me what that woman gets, and for no purpose. When Johanna told me, I left her standing in the cottage I built her, and in an eyes-flickering rage, I went to my own gardens and murdered my ring of sunflowers and several hydrangea bushes with the stabbing force of my sharp hoe. I thrust so hard I decapitated the metal head from the wood stick, which I cracked in half on my bent knee. At some point, Johanna sedated me. Days, maybe a few weeks, of mindless depression during these outbursts or setbacks, sleeping in a black room. But I’m a nurse. I’m practically a psychotherapist myself. I am good at being clinical. I can cure myself. So no, no, I did not imagine Proserpina’s and Vicky’s peanut poisoning. I’ve never imagined anything—gone catatonic a few times in my life, is all.
“Jo-Jo, no, honey. It happened, okay. I’m scared,” I said, pleading to her with my eyes.
Johanna shook her head with a concerned brow but did not protest. She’s too unwilling to agree evil exists. Nevertheless, as she pointed out, and she’s right, the media would pounce on this story, given our well-known name and the fact we were born filthy stinking rich. There are the Kennedys of Cape Cod. And there are the Vandonbeers and Pentecosts of North Shore. We are pretty much the three most illustrious family dynasties in all of New England—except the Vandonbeers and Pentecosts never outwardly went the road of politics: power is an ugly word in my family. We’re still paying penance for playing a disgusting role in the Salem witch trials—which was a politically motivated mass murder, if you didn’t know, all about power and greed. And yet unwitting tourists flock to Salem to further monetize this mass murder, but I digress. It’s gross. Instead, the Vandonbeers and Pentecosts stick with private dinner parties and charitable balls and private land and business deals and hidden political maneuvers. Johanna and I are the only remaining purebred Vandonbeers, not counting irrelevant second aunts and distant cousins, who, if we were royal, would be plotting to poison us for the throne.
So although I’m innocent—am I innocent?—the tabloids would judge this rat’s nest salacious; even the high-and-mighty Boston Globe wouldn’t resist. This is something the rich learn early, good or bad or honest or obnoxious as it may be. As our mother often said and Johanna repeated today, “It’s best we handle things on our own, Sugar Cheeks.” Johanna said “Sugar Cheeks” as if we’re iced tea–swilling plantation owners, which we most definitely are not. We’re 100 percent Yankee, blue blood, old money. There’s a secret Underground Railroad chamber under the coach house at our Rye estate about which we remain quiet and proud. Never know when we’ll need it again. I sure needed it when I was fourteen and Daddy was murdered, because of me.