In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  Alone once more, I headed to the back of the barn. I found it barred from the outside once again, so I once again removed the board and entered.

  Why is Aunty locking all entrances from the outside?

  Inside, the inside was the same as always. The center with the four converted horse stalls: Aunty’s tool stall, my mother’s beach-glass stall, the gardening stall, and the painting stall. I paused by the corner with all my and Manny’s former summer stage stuff, the stage made of shipping crates with the curtains of sailing sails and the box of props. I figured after investigating the woman in the side room, I’d find some kind of object to announce our engagement and some kind of surprise for Manny in the prop box.

  I walked on to the side room.

  And there she remained, sleeping away in a hospital bed. The same woman we saw two years prior, screaming in a blue-on-blue ball gown on the rocks by the water.

  Her monitors hummed. Her liquid bag on a hook with line to vein dripped. I assumed saline. Maybe drugs, though. Aunty said she was in a coma.

  I bent to open the side cabinet, which held gauze and linens. I did not know what to look for, but I looked for anything, so I had intended to ransack everything in the room. I suppose I wanted the woman’s name, the ball gown she wore on the rocks—so I could confirm for sure what I already knew, or any identification card, anything. Maybe, I thought, Aunty kept nursing notes on her. Something. Anything. And what about the note I found in the third drawer of the dresser in Aunty’s guest room? The one written by a mistress to a wife. Were there more? Perhaps one in response? Basically, I grasped for any clues to anything.

  Who was the mistress? Who wrote the note? Sure looked like Aunty’s handwriting.

  As I tweezered my fingers in my back pocket to pull the note out, that’s when she spoke.

  “I heard you fucking outside my room,” the woman said.

  I rocketed up.

  She rattled a metal chain connecting her leg to the bed, the chain obscured by a white blanket. I hadn’t appreciated the chain the first time I saw her. I also didn’t appreciate the orange beach-glass necklace around her neck: my mother’s beach-glass necklace.

  Chained up, locked in. Wearing my mother’s orange beach glass.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AUNTY

  Two years ago

  Here I am, a block from Kent’s. My Audi is three blocks away. Walking in the dark on his sidewalks could feel like coming home. It is not. Johanna’s safe and waiting for me at the Bennington in Gloucester. It’s go time, here we go. Go, get out of the car and get this over with.

  Kent’s Jeep is gone. Where is Kent? Cate’s nasty minivan is gone, as expected: she has her triple at Mass General today, or, as I fear, she’s stalking my property. The lights are black in their huge Victorian. The house looks dead. Kent must have gone somewhere. Where?

  I look around the neighborhood. I suppose the white Cape with the drawn drapes, but the lights blazing and ten cars in the driveway, is murdered Vicky’s house. These are her mourners’ cars. A black wreath hangs from her boring black door, and on her front porch are a half dozen bunches of flowers and two trays of food from well-wishing neighbors, I’m guessing. A child’s tricycle is flopped to its side, discarded in her front lawn; a sad spinning back wheel creaks around as wind plucks its spokes. Despair. The vision of her house and this lawn and the flipped bike, rank despair.

  And Kent’s looming Victorian of hideous hunter green and mauve, catty-corner across the street, is dark and black and dead.

  If I can get inside, I’ll find the vials Cate stole and regain the upper hand. Kent leaves keys under a brick by the back door. He used them once, one day when we made love in this house.

  I know where their bedroom is.

  I slid in her sheets, naked, him above me. I folded my neck to see between the V of our bodies, to watch where in our conjoining he came in, came out. It thrilled me to watch our entwined movement. And when I moaned aloud in this house, the walls absorbed my voice, like walls absorb the odor of smoke.

  I am smoke in this house.

  I am creation, creator, power in this house. Our child was conceived in the king bed upstairs. Looking up, I stare at the front master bedroom from a shadow by a bush on the sidewalk.

  I know this house. I’ve lived in its plaster and beams a thousand million minutes in memory.

  I own the darkness, all the shadows, the steam in the shower, the heat in the oven, the flames in the woodstove, the soot in the chimney, all mine. All his fantasies, of fucking me against their washing machine, on the counters she cuts vegetables on, those fantasies are constant fragments of me in this house. I can blend in, creep in the corners, find what I need before they return. I live as a phantom mist in this house, and thus my presence is merely that, nothing new.

  I need to get the vials back.

  I slither and feel like a slithering snake indeed, up his driveway, beyond the reach of candy-cane gas lamps; their glow is limp, futile to me, the aggressor. Why does it rile me so to see his driveway recently blacktopped, the pristine layer of tar a uniform black and perfect, no holes, no decay? Why would he invest in such maintenance when he should be working toward the dissolution of living here? I wish to jackhammer this tar. I wish to blow it up.

  At the back door, I bend and kick the brick on the side of the stoop. I grab the keys and, with no shaking, turn the key and enter. Patches of black move along the walls inside, but as I adjust my vision, the world solidifies in shapes of gray.

  I stall by the coats on the hooks in the mudroom. I finger the sleeve of his navy running jacket, the one he wore once at the Kisstop and from which he kept pulling mini Three Musketeers from the pocket—the trick-or-treat size. I wish, I want, no, I need to hold this jacket between my breasts and feel what he’s worn, smell his smell. But I can’t. Can’t be caught. I let go the sleeve in reluctance; it falls fast and swings to hit the wall in a silent thud.

  Hearing nothing, no sound, no snore, no breath in this house, I step farther in, scraping my spine along the hall, peeking into their pass-through, rectangular kitchen, and see nothing. No one. The breakfast bar with brown marble on the far end divides her predictable, out-of-the-box, no-originality kitchen from the grays of the living room. Of course that psycho picked brown marble—it’s safe and boring and shows no individuality. I hate her. I hate her. I fear her. I hate her.

  Still no sounds. No one is here. There are so many places to search for my stolen vials, but I will start with their bedroom. Kent showed me her safe in their closet once. And separately, on another day, he let slip when we were laughing in a druglike after-haze of sex how Cate was growing so forgetful in her age, creeping up as she was on menopause, she set all her pass codes to 3333. “She must have everything in threes,” he’d said, laughing, but drained his statement along the way to a serious darkness. “Threes,” he repeated with downcast eyes and nervous fumbling fingers. “I don’t know what to do with her anymore, Liv. She has lost something, lost grip. I fear her,” he’d said, staring into my eyes for help. This was before the first time she stole my vials and thus justified Kent in fearing her—me too.

  And still, he said he’d been hinting at leaving her ever since, and she kept seizing this weakness in his possession of the vials to force him to stay. Time passed, and Kent and I learned of my pregnancy, and it was yesterday, only yesterday, when he was supposed to finally tell her he was leaving her for good. But he didn’t, and she killed Vicky. We’d agreed enough was enough and we’d take the risk. And our baby, we agreed to raise our child together. Did he tell her last night, after Vicky? Did he tell her we were going to run a private clinic? Is that how she put it all together, came to my place, and found my vials last night? Did he tell her? If so, where the hell is he? Why hasn’t he called if the secret’s out? Where the hell is Kent?

  Threes, he said, her code on everything. And she insisted he fold her underwear in threes. “She is obsessed with threes, and unnaturally so. She scare
s me,” Kent said on more than one occasion. So as I tiptoe up the staircase with a red runner to the second floor of their renovated Victorian, I’m confident I can crack her safe and check for my vials by pressing four threes on the lock pad.

  At the top of the stairs, I am met with exceptional familiarity. I’ve roamed this hall in my mind a million times. But I also suffer a slash of fear. I don’t hear a soul, no human movement, no scream at my intrusion. It’s a different sound, a different sense, and a different sight slashing my mind with fear. Like I was fine, but then someone came and snapped my neck to the side. A right angle bending a straight line.

  Although from outside the house appeared black and dead, an interior bathroom, whose door is mostly shut, is lit. A sliver of light ekes out to form a white slash on the floor, and thus my slash of fear. I pause, wait, but nothing stirs within. Another item lending to my fear is a sound from the interior bathroom, a slow drip of liquid hitting liquid. The sound is as if the sink had only just been shut off. But by my vantage at the landing on the second floor, I can see into their bedroom to my immediate left, and their king bed is made, the room gray and empty. No one has broken the seal on their top cover tonight. Therefore, this slash of fear is not out of concern that someone is home and turned a sink off ten feet from me. The fear is something else. My instincts are screaming about something else; my neck is so tight I might merge vertebrae.

  Upon closer inspection of the hall floor slashed crosswise in a line of white light, a slick of cleansing wet or polish marks a path from the interior bathroom, along one side of the continued red runner, and then, as I look back down, one side of the stair treads. Like a mop had been dragged to clean after something that had been dragged out of the bathroom and down the stairs. The slick of wet shine stands out; all else in the hall is layered in a film of dust. Cate is a barbarian—she doesn’t clean.

  For me, in looking at the wet wash along one side of the hall and down the stairs, taking in that vision and what it could mean, the slash of white light from the interior bathroom becomes alive and rises, forming curling vines around my legs. A stem of the light vine turns gray and pokes into my mouth, crawls down my throat, and coils to choke my heart. I inhale in quickened breaths, dragging the ominous air into my collapsing lungs; I begin to hyperventilate in this gray place, choking in gray vines. The oxygen is like moldy cotton. The drip, drip of liquid on liquid will not relent in calling me to inspect. There is more—my senses know there is more, there is worse for me to find behind the bathroom door.

  I step closer, the air heavy against my shins, like I’m walking against the tide.

  I pause. Still no breathing. No movement. No other humans.

  I press open the bathroom door. The slash of light widens fast, alighting the hall in which I stand like the sun suddenly risen over a mountain, shining on the top of a lake to change from a muted dawn to blinding ice. I close my eyes from the stabbing glare and the truth behind.

  I know the scent of blood. Smell is the sense blaring alarms in my brain.

  I know the stench of it, from wounds, from bedpans, from puddles under beds, from surgeries, from birthing mothers, from holes in heads. I know blood as well as a bloodhound. I’ve worked with blood every day of my working life; the viscous odor never leaves my active memory. I keep my eyes closed in sensing its thick presence; I do not need sight to expose the truth in this room.

  But visual confirmation is necessary for my mind and so, knowing full well what I’ll find, I open my eyes. I grip a silver towel rack, bolted through the subway tiles of the bathroom wall. In an instant, I am displaced, set on a glacier and alone. The coldest chill I have ever known crackles in my core, as though I am an unsettled ice lake, splitting apart. On this lonely, arctic glacier, my sight is fogged, and I see nothing but gray blotches of cold air, cold clouds dislodged from the sky.

  I rake the gray clouds with my hands to see through.

  And there in Kent’s white bathtub is a substantial layer of blood, pinking and rising with every plop of the water. But no body.

  I am a nurse. I make quick conclusions.

  A body was drained in the tub.

  A body died in this house.

  No detective is necessary to link the mop swipes on the floor, a cleansing trail to cover the trail left by the dragging of the emptied body out of the tub, down the hall, down the stairs, and to where?

  I vomit in the toilet.

  You are in a house of blood and death. You have ruined everything for everyone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MOP

  Present time

  I don’t know where or in what dimension of reality I am, and I fear that I don’t really care. I think I’m wet or something, and all I see is black. I’m tired, tired, tired. I’m tired. I’m staying asleep. Someone is screaming outside my body, and I’m sure I hear chih-chah rioting over and over. Some metal sound. Wind. I don’t know. It’s too hard to open my eyes.

  It’s easier to live in the past, no matter how horrifying it is.

  A week ago, after Manny and I got back from Milan and we made love against the side of the barn, I found that woman awake and chained at the leg, wearing my mother’s orange beach-glass necklace. The moment she revealed herself as not in a coma is the starting moment to this last week’s never-ending slide into insanity’s greedy well.

  What is this duplicity people are able to live in? I can only speak for myself. I know, for one, I do not want to live in duplicity. I want to live in pure truth. I want to live in harmony with my thoughts, my fears, my desires, and my actions. But I find this impossible, and it is also true, despite the wish to live in pure truth, that the impossibility to do so seems, oddly, natural. As if living in pure truth is unnatural.

  Usually, a person’s duplicity has to do with a war between heart and reason, whom to love and when and how. My duplicity a week ago centered not around whom to love, but what to trust of my love, what to believe, what to tell, and when. What if the double truth, the secret, were trotted out and tested? What if I did tell Manny about the woman in the barn a week ago? Would all this tragedy have been avoided?

  Manny, are you okay? Where are you? Manny!

  I stared at the chained-up woman in the barn and a quick philosophical question raced across my mind. I considered my aesthetics professor and recalled a question he asked me and his young wife at dinner one night.

  “What is more beautiful, pure truth or balancing duplicity so well the actor acquires self-harmony?” In other words, his question was really, is false truth, or rather, a manufactured truth, the same in terms of beauty to the beholder, the actor who creates truth? Is truth really what we convince ourselves, and is that, what we tell ourselves, the beauty? Simplifying further, at its core, his question was really: Is truth personal, subjective only?

  So what had Aunty told herself about this woman, chained in her barn, to believe she was living a truth? And what would I tell myself, but not Manny or anyone else, in order to accept this woman and cope? Could I find harmony, a beauty, in any of this?

  And such impossible, impractical philosophical questions in a time of shock left me stone-cold, gape-mouthed frozen in the chained woman’s captive glare. I think too much. And minoring in philosophy during years of grief only made this mental chasm in me deepen and fester. Without my mother to throw glitter and bright lights in the black well of me, I became the black chasm, questioning all, doubting all, and this woman chained in the barn, telling me she’d heard me fucking outside, was the bottom of the well. The sight of my mother’s orange beach-glass necklace around her neck became a boulder on my shoulders, pinning me to the grime-slime of the well’s bottom.

  The woman growled. I backed up, pressing my butt cheeks so far on the edge of the linen cabinet I half sat, my hands as braces. She growled, she really growled.

  “Fucking whore, just like your aunt,” she said. “Fucking outside for the world to see. Do you know who I am?”

  The vision of this woman, f
or me, tripled in some mad hallucination for a second, until I shook my head and blinked three times, swallowing reality. I couldn’t think of anything to say in response, except one thing.

  “Where’s your ball gown?”

  She squished her face to show complete confusion, turned her head slow to the boarded window, and then back. Sort of like a possessed doll in a horror film. No, not sort of, exactly like that.

  “My what?” she said, keeping her hands limp on her sheets, which is something I began to focus on, for her lack of body movement became a blazing truth. Her arms didn’t twitch; they hung dead to her sides. Only her head pivoted and her eyes bugged.

  “You wore a navy-and-blue ball gown out on the rocks, two years ago. Where is it?” I suppose this crazy question was my attempt to jump the need to scour the joint for hard evidence, so as to obtain a direct confession that this woman was indeed the woman on the rocks in a ball gown.

  She laughed. A throaty, scratched-record laugh, as if a sputtering engine coming to life.

  I stared at her, didn’t blink. I wanted an answer. That’s all I could do, mentally and physically, for I couldn’t move my own limbs. Her real paralysis became mine.

  “A dress? Blue dress? Oh yeah, I suppose blue, right, blue,” she said in a dead monotone, apathetic and weighted.

  Although I could have regarded this answer with suspicion, as if I had given her some Talented Mr. Ripley clues for her to seize and falsely claim, I took it as a direct confession: she was indeed the woman on the rocks, in a ball gown, two years ago, the night my mother launched herself into the ocean. I wanted to jump to another confession. Forcing myself out of shock and fear, I leaned over her and into her dry, bloated face. I grabbed my mother’s orange beach-glass necklace in a death grip and pulled, yanking it off her thickened neck.