by Shannon Kirk
The first thing I’m going to do when I get to Saint Jerome’s is hunt down Kent and tell him his wife killed Vicky and stole my pentobarbital. This is insane. Of course I had no way to call him this morning, and he didn’t call me. If I had tried to call him, I feared Cate would answer. He told me never to call his cell for this reason. He says she checks his phone records and audits him.
I’m an idiot. He’s screwing other women. That’s it, that must be why he told me not to call. He knows I don’t text, I’m not on social media, I don’t email, so I was just an easy target he could fuck without a trace. Without a trace, what a riot. How ironic. No trace? Well, there’s a trace all right. He’s screwing someone—everyone—else. Did he leave traces with them too? This is what I ask myself, because I need to hate Kent in order to extricate him from my life and my mind. His wife being a murderess is enough ammunition, but I’m piling on. I am deep in over my heart with Kent.
One week ago, we stood in the bathroom of the Kisstop. He held me from behind while we both faced the mirror. Swaying together to no music, he settled his head on my right shoulder, his hands on my naked belly, full of his child, the one I’ve ached for my whole life. There’s a trace of our love, all right.
And this baby seems to want to stay. Not like my first two pregnancies, which I lost, both at twelve weeks. I’m at fourteen weeks now. “Heartbeat’s strong,” the doctor says.
Oh God, here we go. I’m crying again. I wipe away tears at a red light, so taken to think of holding our child.
I’m beyond the age recommended to carry, and there are risks, of course, with this. But in my gut, this child of love, is perfect and fine. A week ago, Kent and I swayed and swayed, staring at each other in the mirror, him holding my belly, our baby, and him saying strings of possible baby names as we swayed and stared. We traded whispered I love yous and didn’t blink, didn’t blink. His shirtless chest, his unbuttoned pants—I didn’t apologize for stalling his dress. His thumbs looped the hip arches of my gold lace thong, which matched my gold lace bra. I wore nothing else. We swayed some more and because we were still staring in awe, we both started crying. Like I’m crying right now. Both of us struck by the dumb luck of falling in love. Which is a joke, of course: love is a curse.
How could he have faked his sobbing for me, for our child, crying into my hair and turning me to kiss me so deep my knees sank? I don’t believe he faked those tears. I believe he was sincere, and we are in love, and although it’s awful that he’s married, for him, and this sounds cruel, but it’s true, his marriage has become a terrible technicality. People might hate the cheaters in this, Kent and me, but I know the truth. And he was meant to tell her the truth yesterday. Did he?
I’m all over the place on Kent. I hate him. Then I’m defending him. I’m justifying our love as true and a higher power. I need to get a grip. Johanna said to get a grip. I’m getting a grip. I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard my fingers are white.
Last week when we cried at the Kisstop, he said he’d leave his wife for good this time. We’ve been at this affair six months. Not one email, not one phone call, no electronic trail between us. The Kisstop room he expenses to the hospital, some deal he made when he signed on as chief surgeon. It’s a private hospital, so they can cut whatever deal they want, and they wanted Kent’s name and patient list, so they agreed to comp him a comfy bed so he could avoid a “grueling” forty-minute commute on nights he pulled double shifts.
Why didn’t Saint Jerome’s pay for a car service? Kent set up a fuck nest is what he did. I beat the steering wheel after slamming to a stop at another red light on Route 1. How many women has he trolled through those Kisstop sheets? “No, no, no, no,” I mouth aloud to the horn, talking to myself. Kent only takes me there. He loves me, he does. And around and around I go with myself.
His wife has killed. She broke into my barn. She stole drugs. It absolutely had to be her. Nobody else knew of the vials. She knew Kent had some pentobarbital vials when she found them in his Jeep. So I’m theorizing—and I have to be right, it’s the only logical conclusion—that Kent did tell her about us last night and then she figured out it was me he got the pentobarbital vials from. She must have pulled his connection to me and found I had more vials when she came snooping and spying in my barn. He must have told her we’re in love and he’s leaving her and we’re opening up a private clinic on my property and raising this baby together. And then, and I’m guessing, but this must be the case, she came to my barn to ruin our clinic, but found the vials. How else? Who else? This has to be the case. She is not dumb. She is a calculating witch. She put it all together. That is the only logical answer as to why my barn was disturbed and the vials missing. This is dangerous. Get a grip. Get a fucking grip. I press clenched fists into my sitting lap so hard, I hope to bruise my thighs.
I park underground where I always park and immediately know something is wrong. Kent’s gray Jeep is not in his usual spot. He’s not here. There’s no way I can face an evening shift with all this on my mind and him not here.
I race inside to beg off work, but there is chaos. I’m in ER this month, and son of a bitch, some asshole shot up a Catholic church by Government Center, and half those bodies came here. Shit. TV crews, reporters swarming outside. Mother of all fucks! Passing colleagues pepper me with drive-by updates, pulling me through drawn curtains, dragging me between clogged hallways, shepherding me to scoot through screaming families to join the fray of patching victims. This is how it is when I nurse. I lose time. I get immersed. I work. This is why I need to nurse, to deviate from my dark obsessions, to stay focused, to be productive in a positive consumption. Normally when I work, I think of nothing else, and so now, tonight, my obsession in getting to Kent has subsided to faded blinking in the back of my mind, but it’s there, like low-grade nausea. I don’t know how long I’ve been working.
Seems some fascist ass bag neo-Nazi shot the church up, nailing in his volley of bullets that senator the news has been squawking about—the one visiting Boston with her two daughters, both of whom she “dresses like royalty.” The senator’s spleen is in my right hand. She won’t make it. Her daughters are hostages of the shooter on the run. There’s a manhunt. I’m hip-checking an overaggressive detective this very second, pushing him out of the way, while I reset the senator’s spleen for the surgeon.
What the ever-living fuck! FUCK!
“Who let the fucking detective in? Get out! This needs to be sterile!” I shout. They can’t do anything to me; no law enforcement can touch me. Not while I’m fixing humans. And really, not ever. I’m a Vandonbeer. I should remember this. This fear over the vials. Of being arrested. This fear is unnecessary. You need to accept your power, once and for all. Use your connections. Your secrets.
No. Stop. Work. Just work.
I’m grabbed to enter an emergency surgery to extricate a bullet from the back of a schoolteacher, who, by the only saving grace, visited the church on a whim and didn’t bring any summer students with her. I’d give away all my love for Kent and all my money if it meant these senseless mass shootings would stop.
As I shuttle in on the schoolteacher’s surgery and command answers on blood type and complications, I slip a question to the attending physician on where the hell is Kent Dranal.
“Not here,” she says.
We work two hours on the schoolteacher, with me being pulled to other fabric-walled ER stalls to mine other bullet holes, stitch other sutures, insert other drug lines, deliver other blood. Nowhere in any of this does Kent appear, even though protocol says in such an emergency code green, he’s to be beeped to come in off the street or wherever the hell he is. Plus, he’s supposed to be on shift anyway.
Manny is always there whenever Mop snaps her fingers, and vice versa. Same for Johanna and Philipp. There’s no jamming things to be right, no doubts for them. With Kent it’s all imperfect. But we have this baby, and the baby is perfect. The baby is perfect. Everyone else has everything perfect. Show up, Kent! M
ake this perfect!
But he doesn’t show, and now it’s eight p.m. There’s a short lull as they cart the schoolteacher to one of the upper floors—ICU, to be exact. A tense static overtakes the air, like we all might fry as we await the prognosis on the senator. Guards and detectives and the feds clog up any free space. But there is, yes, this short lull when no one talks, and only static holds the world together. As the silence wanes away, I overhear two other nurses at the station where I’ve come to sit for a quick sip of water. They’re whispering.
“I can’t believe our chief surgeon missed this mess,” Karen with the ponytail says.
“I know. Cate Dranal called, after we beeped for him, said Kent’s got the flu,” Betty, the nosy bitch of the ward, says, air-quoting “the flu” and rolling her eyes.
My heart beats in my throat.
Kent has never in his life called in sick, and he’d never allow Cate to call for him. Last year he worked for a week with painful laryngitis, never straining a complaint about his inflammation.
I race to the break room, intending to call Johanna in private. But when I get to the key card–locked door and I reach for my ID with the security strip to swipe and enter, I fumble at my breast pocket where it usually hangs and find nothing. I hadn’t noticed earlier, because I’ve been stuck in emergency mode for hours.
Where is my ID?
I know it was on this shirt all night.
I think on all the places I’ve been since last night.
Where is my ID? Oh shit. Oh shit. Not there. No. Please.
I check with the lost items captain. “Hey, LIC, you got my ID?”
“Nope,” she says. I check all the ER stalls I worked in, all the halls. Nothing. The hospital enforces strict rules on sterilization, so the crew in charge of picking up and mopping and wiping down everything would have found and turned it in. Nope, none of the cleanup crew has seen my ID.
I’m running to my car, frantic to search, hoping to hell the ID fell off my shirt and is in my car. When the hell did it go missing? No, not then, please, no, not then.
My Audi is almost alone in this part of the underground lot. The lights are dim by the two corner stairwells and bright like a spotlight over a Range Rover four spots down from mine. The Range Rover’s black-tinted windows could hide anything, anyone. There are no other cars.
Shoes clicking on the underground floor above clatter around, like I’m a fish in a fishbowl and some child is tapping the glass with his nails. I’m seeing flashes of gray, mixed with blue-and-red taillights. I need to focus, calm. Breathe. I run to my car door, fumbling with the key fob to unlock it, and, because I’m a wreck, of course drop my fucking fob. It rolls under a back tire of the Range Rover.
On hands and knees, I’m blinded now, by tears, by panic, by my nurse shirt rising over my face. I grab the fob and freeze. Footsteps behind me. I stand, turn, and watch a woman descend from the upper floor through my floor. She’s a blob of movement to me; I can’t make out any features, so I stall like a lizard trying to camouflage. I don’t think she notices me, and she moves on down the stairs. I trip-run to my car, electronically click it unlocked, scrabble inside, and see no ID.
Nothing in the driver’s seat. No ID on or under any floor mats. Nothing under the two seats. Nothing in the creases of the leather cushions. Nothing. No ID. Absolutely nothing.
I played with the ID all night, and I know it stayed clipped. Shit. Shit. Shit. Did it unclasp when I leaned into Cate’s awful minivan, when I got stuck in the seat belt? My God, what have I done? But what does it matter? If Cate already knew about you and was indeed the one who broke in and took the pentobarbital last night, before you left the mistress note, what does it matter?
I tell myself to shut up. It matters. Because I incited her more. I escalated this. Play is in her court now. And if she didn’t take the vials, she knows about you now.
I am literally fighting with my own self.
I scrape into my pocket to find my phone and call Johanna.
She doesn’t answer her cell.
I try the Rye estate. Ring, ring, ring. I picture the rings echoing down the long, empty wings of that giant mansion. I think Johanna said Philipp is working late. Mop’s not there, she’s finishing up an extended seminar on ancient religions. She’s not home for the summer until next week. So that leaves . . .
“Pentecost estate,” a stiff, formal female voice greets me.
Johanna’s sister-in-law, the ex-nun, answers on the eighth ring. I grit my teeth to hear her unworthy sanctimony. While the main house has an answering machine, the coach house doesn’t, because the current estate manager, who lives next door, thinks it’s too modern and not befitting of the grandeur of an old Vandonbeer estate to have more than one answering machine. The estate manager is a grade-A asshole with a fake Chilean accent. He’s the third estate manager since the one who held me down and shoved his special metal shirt pin in my mouth when I was fourteen.
Three of the four Rye estate wings are filled with museum antiques from around the world. Johanna hates them, but Philipp Pentecost respects our Vandonbeer family pedigree and inheritances, and also his Pentecost inheritances, which he’s added to the mix. And since Johanna loves Philipp, she’s repainted how she sees her life as living in the movie Night at the Museum, one of her favorites, because she’s got a “free-pass” star crush on Owen Wilson. Besides, Johanna and Philipp, and Mop when she’s there, live mostly in the fourth wing, which Johanna has “Johannified” in pinks and ribbons and fabrics and upholstery, a blended shabby chic and beach elegant, just the way she likes.
Sister Mary Patience lives in the brick coach house, the coach house, the one I won’t look at, much less step foot in. The one with the secret Underground Railroad chamber in the basement—where I hid in a catatonic state after fleeing the scene, naked but for a torn shirt, failing to help my father off the floor when he collapsed from the effort of fighting off my rapist. Daddy’s heart couldn’t stand the shock or effort.
The brick coach house happens to still have one of the estate’s old rotary phones, same rotary I didn’t use to call 911. Me, useless, like a dumb doll. The doctors said Daddy would have lived if I had fucking called.
The ex-nun Sister Mary Patience Pentecost has answered that same rotary phone now, squawking, “Hello . . . hello,” in my ear.
“Oh, hello, Sister Mary, is Johanna there? It’s Liv.”
“Johanna left an hour ago, Lynette. Said she was going to your place.” Before I can respond, she rushes in, “What’s going on? What’s the matter? Philipp just got home from his office. He’s out at the pool, should I go get him? Lynette, is Johanna okay? Your voice is wrong.” The woman is as astute as an AI robot from the year 4050, Planet Vulcan. And she refuses to call me Liv, like everyone else does. It’s odd, her refusal, since I’m at the Rye estate, my own damn old home, almost as much as Johanna’s at my home. There are almost no boundaries—our living arrangements are fluid. Well, they were much more fluid before Kent, but then I started staying home more, to feel twenty minutes closer to him. I’m pathetic.
As for Sister Mary Patience Pentecost and me, you’d think two grown women who share a niece, both of whom remain unmarried in their forties, would be closer. But there’s a tension between us, a chance she stole from me that the universe should have given to me. She thinks I don’t know why she left the church. Well, I know why. And she didn’t leave anything—the hypocrite was kicked out, defrocked. She doesn’t deserve Johanna’s time away from me. Doesn’t deserve Mop’s time ever. Doesn’t deserve . . . She’s still squawking, “Lynette, Lynette, Lynette,” like the incivility of an island bird squawking you awake at dawn despite your island hangover.
Perhaps she knows I judge her. She must assume Johanna told me the truth as to why she’s retired—euphemism—from the church. Truth is, I think Mop’s got some things in common with Ms. Mary Patience Pentecost, more than the two will admit to each other or themselves. But it’s not my place to spread the
gossip, and I do not accept any role in forging a bond between them. You are a terrible person, Lynette Viola Vandonbeer. Get a fucking grip. No, I am not terrible. Yes, you are. Just listen to Mary Pentecost on this call—she’s talking, you’re spiraling. Find Johanna, focus only on that.
“Lynette, Lynette, are you there? Is everything okay?” Sister Mary squawks hard at me again. She has almost no soft edges when she speaks. She’s tall and skinny like a boobless scarecrow, so your skin itches just to see her.
“No, nothing’s the matter. I’m at the hospital, and I thought Johanna was staying in Rye. There’s no problem, Sister Mary. None at all. Whoops, got to go, they’re calling me.”
She tsks, I know it, as I hang up, which is fine—means she bought it, I think. Thank God for the drama I maintain in the community theater.
I’m shaking in my car, seeing shadows move in this underground parking lot, worrying about where my key card is, obsessing on where Johanna might be in relation to Cate Dranal. I call up to the nurses’ desk, get Betty the nosy bitch, say I got sick and am going home. I know Cate Dranal’s lurking around my house. She found my note and also my key card, and now she’s waiting for me. Is this delusional paranoia? No, this is real.
Who knows what Cate Dranal did to Kent Dranal, but I suspect she did something. Where is he?
Johanna’s ignoring my calls as I drive. I know her. Her playlist of Paul Simon and Ray LaMontagne and the incongruous intermixing of rap by Missy Elliott is blared high; she’s singing along, the top is down, and her damn bedazzled phone is lighting up and being ignored in the back seat, next to Popover, who’s yawning, immune to Johanna’s constant solo concerts. One other thing she’s doing, she’s twirling a tape measure on one finger, planning out how she’ll ask her Zimman’s designer to decorate the new baby’s suite in my home. This is how she’ll surprise me; this is what she’s thinking on. She’s not taking my fears about Kent’s murderous wife seriously. She thinks I’m imaging things. I’m not.