In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

“Did you start the fire? Did you kill my mother? How did you get her necklace?”

  She laughed again, but stalled in her physical limpness, low-lidding me in a glare. The veins in her neck swelled with an effort to move her own arms, which twitched only as if in a slight seizure. She couldn’t move, which I could tell angered her, or so it seemed. Her growling remained, as if she were a bloodthirsty puma in a jungle tree, waiting for her prey to step on the right spot.

  “Your mother’s necklace? Oh, right. You’re the bitch’s niece. Right. So your mother must be Johanna Vandonbeer. You are just another fucking Vandonbeer.” She pivoted her eyes to look at the boarded window again; this action told me she had two positions: staring out the boarded window and staring at me, opposite the window. But was this truth or duplicity? Tricking me about her physical abilities? Perhaps wanting me to think her weak so I would let my guard down?

  Her neck veins deflated and swelled to ropes, deflated and swelled to ropes in an apparent effort to work her own muscles. I wondered how long she’d been at these attempts. I wondered what was true. I still wonder what is true.

  “Did you kill my mother!” I screamed in her face. Spit fled my furious mouth and landed in her dry-brush hair. I could have lit her on fire with the tiniest spark, if I wanted. And I wanted. I scanned the room for matches. Found none.

  With the apparent effort of a Mack truck shifting to some nonexistent eighth gear to drive vertically up a building, she ratcheted her horror-doll head two notches to meet my face again. A zigzag stitch line marked her forehead, something I hadn’t focused on before, given the shock of finding her. No other sounds in the world existed except her wheezy breathing and the undercurrent of her constant personal physical therapy. Even the lights in the side room, which might have hummed, even the monitors, which might have offered the white noise of beeping, even the drip of some liquid into her veins, ceased. We were well encased in a bubble of near soundless insanity, as if her mind and my mind had unfolded, turned inside out, and lay open to the physical realm of the room.

  The question on the table, in the air, fighting against her play of paralysis, beating me to face and grab hold of emergence, to try to climb out of the well once again, was whether this woman killed my mother. She glared at me, and her nose gnarled.

  “Did you kill my mother? My aunt says you are her friend. She says you had an affair with a married man, and the wife put you in a coma.”

  She pffted out a displeasure and rolled her buggy eyes, which had they not been bugged and unblinking, would have been swallowed into the bloating of her unnatural face.

  “Your aunt has no friends. You know that. Please. Yeah, I heard what your aunt told you. She’s a fucking liar. I’m not an idiot. I hide from her, you know. She has no idea I’m awake now. She’d put me under again if she did. You are basically my only fucking shot to get out of here. You’re going to help me. But I know you won’t unlock this chain without proof. Why don’t you go and look in your aunt’s wine cellar, behind her fake bookcase, to see what kind of woman she is.”

  I backed away, stumbled into the cabinet once again, shaking it with my force and causing a metal scraping to reverberate around the room. The sounds of the monitor and the drip, so too, the humming of the lights, returned.

  How does she know about the fake bookcase?

  I didn’t wait for her to say more. Still clutching my mother’s orange beach-glass necklace, I ran out of the barn and headed to Aunty’s house, pregnant with unanswered questions: What’s in the attic? What’s in the basement?

  I still had the front door key from the week before, so I entered Aunty’s house. I suppose I could have retrieved all the house keys, for all the inner doors, from the birdhouse out back. But I wasn’t ready for everything yet.

  Off the marble foyer is a door to wooden stairs, which lead to a limestone-and-granite basement. I followed the way of natural substances, the marble to wood to limestone to granite, touching the sides of stone for pure truth, for what is truer than solid sand? As I reached Aunty’s fake basement bookcase, I ignored the rumble of tires in the driveway.

  I pushed the right way on the hidden swivel lock, like I did to play hide-and-seek with Aunty a hundred dozen times. It spun. And as it spun, I fell within the well of me, the cold slime of insanity’s rocks scratching my shoulders in the descent. A scent of chalky dust and musty rocks pinched my inner nose. I fell to my knees on the real limestone, finding a new depth within which to fall. Out before me lay white bones in a fraying wool suit. A male skeleton.

  I looked up to the room’s concrete ceiling, as if a higher sight might answer me, tell me what I saw, whom these bones belonged to, and why I was here at all. My mouth hinged open; my eyes squinted in the darkness. On a nail on the inside of the doorjamb, above my head, midway up the wall, hung a clipboard with a pen tied in twine to a hole in the top. A metal clamp trapped about an inch of papers, like a patient’s records.

  Footsteps scattered the pebbles and seashells of Aunty’s pebble-and-seashell driveway, and as I rose and backstepped out of the secret wine room to look down the basement hall and see out a basement window, I noted a black shadow had returned: Aunty’s Audi. I had no time to hide, no time to think, no time for shock. I ripped the front page from the clipboard, shut the bookcase, ran up the basement stairs, and skidded as fast as possible into the Mermaid Library, so as to greet Aunty from the library and appear as though that’s where I came from. As I slid, the door creaked open. I held my breath a couple of beats, hoping I’d hear no gasp from her, hoping to catch her off guard, coming in falseness from her library.

  Where’s my mother’s necklace? Shit, I dropped my mother’s necklace down there! She’ll know. Aunty will figure it out. Relax. Breathe. For now, get out of the house. And dammit! My journal. Dammit. I left that on the cabinet in the side room with that woman! I’m toast. Aunty will know now where I’ve been.

  Standing still in the library, I heard no gasp, nor did I hear her take any footsteps in the marble foyer, and I didn’t hear her jangle her keys, like she normally would. I swallowed a great bucket of air and wiped my brow while contemplating those strings of cobweb tears, crying from the metal eyes of mermaid bookends.

  I stepped into the foyer, holding a book, pretending to be absorbed.

  “Ah!” I yelled, when I ran into her in the foyer. “Oh! You scared me. I came to grab a book I noticed last week.”

  She gasped back. “How did you get in here?” she yelled, revealing a real anger, a disgust. She scanned her one eye up the front stairs.

  I didn’t take the bait and follow her one-eyed gaze. I couldn’t let on to my suspicions about the raccoon I was sure she lied about in the attic nor my knowledge of her skeleton in the basement.

  I laughed, caving in my chest in a wince of apology. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, pretending I had no clue what angered her. I’d always been in and out of her house before, had my own keys before. “I took one of the door keys from under a mermaid last week.” I handed the key back to her, to get her to drop her scowl.

  When I did, she snatched it fast, another slap. Before, she would have laughed, accusing me of being off my rocker and to keep the damn thing, for I lived here too.

  How did I not shake in Aunty’s presence when I met her in the foyer? How did I not cry or reveal my fright? How I stayed calm and emotionless, acting out the instant part I decided to play in her horror house, I don’t know. Perhaps duplicity was multiple folded by then: mine to Manny, hers to me, hers to the world, mine to her, mine to myself, hers to herself. Duplicity had multiplied, folded, expanded, and grown into its own beauty, a rose-garden universe of deceit, falseness itself, a pure truth.

  “I forgot my purse,” she said in the coldest tone, jumping back as she snagged her black Valentino from a mirrored shelf in the foyer. I thought of the foyer mirror as reflecting the wicked witch who speaks a spell about Snow White. Aunty set a shaky hand on the newel post of the stairwell banister, as if blocking me from
going up. Appraising her, I noted she’d changed into the crisp green sundress she’d always worn before. And her hair, still grayed, was now combed and clipped in a twist. She wore her eye patch. Perhaps this vision of a mostly old version of Aunty helped me to play out my beautiful duplicity and suppress before her the knowledge of her secret in the barn and her skeleton in the basement.

  “Yeah, I really wanted to get this book from the library,” I said, thumbing backward to indicate the library. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, Mop. I love when you take my books,” she said in a phony happiness, as if the statement erased her crazy yelling about me taking her house key. And when she said this and smiled like the joy of her statement would make her cry, she was 100 percent the new Aunty acting out the part of the old Aunty. I could feel it, I could, a cavernous wish for love again, to forget everything I learned and remembered. But I stayed like stone, holding the book so tight, I imagined the words squeezing out to fall and crack apart as letters on the marble floor.

  “Well, since you’re here, drive with me to Rye?” Aunty said as a statement question.

  “No,” I said, edging around her for the second time in under an hour, before she could pin me trapped in the library. I stood at the front door, one hand on the knob, the other holding the book. “Manny’s waiting for me. We’ll meet you there,” I said, not turning to tell her to her face.

  Racing toward Manny’s, I chucked the book to a clearing in the brambles, intending to collect it later. Then I checked to confirm I still held the mistress note in my one back pocket, and in the other, the quick-folded “patient” record I’d ripped from the hanging clipboard, over the dead white bones of the secret in the basement. My journal. Well, dammit, my journal lay on the cabinet in the side room of the barn. My mother’s orange necklace with the bones in the basement. I was cooked, the worst spy in the universe.

  But I was out. On my way to Manny’s. And whatever Aunty intended to reveal at our house in Rye, well, I braced for that.

  On the one page of patient record I swiped from the basement, daily entries filled one line each, one for each day, all the same: Still dead.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MOP

  One week ago

  The Rye estate

  Aunty is keeping a skeleton in her basement. A bloodless, fleshless corpse. She keeps a woman chained in her barn. And here we are on the Rye estate’s rooftop, eating brick-oven pizzas from the domed oven installed up here, as if tonight’s just another surreal summer night for people in mansions. This was what I thought a week ago.

  Someone from the kitchen staff poured me a deep goblet of bordeaux.

  “A margherita with spinach, please,” I whispered to the chef, who molded pizza dough at the mouth of the fire-breathing hearth. The ocean tumbled below, in control of the white noise of our Rye home. The sunset blazed orange and purple over the navy Atlantic. No clouds cluttered the still-bright summer dusk. My bordeaux cooled my tongue, a smooth wash, like slow love, pressed against a building, an unhurried kiss of ownership, in a mist after a rain.

  Aunty sat across from me at our rooftop tavern table, fidgeting with her linen napkin. She hadn’t touched a drop of the perfect vintage, so I knew she fretted on how to broach her most unimaginable topic with me and my father, when and where. Amber candles suggested a coming calm of evening, but summer light shined on, despite the bruise-blaze sunset.

  Aunt Sister Mary Patience sat beside me, my father at the end of the table, Manny to the right of him. The men were discussing a variety of typical matters: golf scores; hotel development; offshore accounts; the tragedy that no one paid attention to, a book titled The Panama Papers; charitable boards; the Nasdaq; whether tennis is better than racquetball; how to rid the Rye pool of a pesky resident bullfrog while giving said bullfrog a proper habitat elsewhere; and the awful presidential election cycle and the falseness of the binary, media-created political system in America. Typical. Average. Regular old dinner topics in Rye.

  I tuned all of this out and watched Aunty Liv fidgeting with her napkin and not engaging in any of the various topics. I also watched Aunt Sister Mary Patience watching, like she was logging Aunty’s every micromovement, and also logging my watching of Aunty Liv.

  “Oh, hey, I found this cleaning out the coach house’s furnace. I’m having it replaced—the furnace,” Aunt Sister Mary said, digging in her housecoat pocket, fisting something, and reaching across the table to plunk the item in Aunty Liv’s palm. A round metal shirt pin. “Not sure how the pin got into the old-old furnace. Looks old. Was among some other odds and ends, a hair clip, pennies, a couple of marbles. Guys think it’s stuff that fell through the floor vent on the first floor and then they never removed the old-old furnace when they put in the old furnace—well, anyway. We’re redoing everything now, so, found things rattling around down in the basement.”

  Aunty Liv’s one eye turned steel; she stopped fidgeting. Manny and my father noticed nothing, for their conversation had moved along with them. They left the table and walked, shoulder to shoulder, to the roof’s edge to point out possible locations to build the pool bullfrog a man-made pond.

  “You think you’re so superior, don’t you? Testing me like this? You think you can shake me with this pin and judge how I react,” Aunty Liv snarled at Aunt Sister Mary while squeezing the pin in her palm so tight, her fingers turned white. The sudden shift from Aunty Liv’s nervousness to viciousness upon the simple plunk of a metal pin in her hand was like walking down the street and being shot by a drive-by shooter. No warning. No reason. Just instant violence.

  “No, Lynette. No. I’m sorry. What? I just wanted to show you, ask you. I thought maybe, maybe you and Johanna might remember it from playing, when you were girls. That’s all. It’s so distinctive, the green and the blue and the outline of California.”

  “Oh, sure,” Aunty said, her voice low, her lip curling on one end.

  The kitchen girl with the bordeaux flirted with the chef at the stove, not caring about our conversation. Manny and my father chuckled about the shape of a potted boxwood on the roof, which the gardener had sheared into the shape of an eyeball. Such dichotomy between their worlds and ours, like three wholly separate dimensions on one roof. Three truths.

  I felt dizzy. Didn’t know where to look. What to listen to. A fog formed, but I fought. I fought through.

  “You want me to believe you never heard about what happened to me in that damn brick coach house you live in now. How dare you! As if Johanna never said anything to you and how I mentioned this pin to the police. How he shoved it in my mouth and told me to bite it in my front teeth, tight, or else I’d choke on it. He wanted that little metal to keep me quiet, while he violated me. And here you so casually and caustically plunk it in my hand for a reaction. You. Are. Wicked.”

  I’d never seen Aunty Liv react so uncontrolled before. Nor had anyone ever mentioned to me what really happened to Aunty Liv in that coach house when she was young. She seemed willing to now air this impolitic, personal topic in a seething hatred, open and free, as if she’d been waiting for any alternative topic, even one of violent assault, more palatable than the one she came to Rye to confess. Obviously regretting the decision to come to Rye, she seized the opportunity to avoid talking about why she came in the first place in a rapid madness, funneling all her unhinged furor on Aunt Sister Mary, who’d walked into a trap she didn’t know had been set.

  “No. No. Lynette. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I knew you had some trouble. Johanna said the estate manager caused your father’s heart attack, and you were the only one home with him.” Aunt Sister Mary shook her head. “She never. Oh, dear . . .”

  This version of a terribly struck Aunt Sister Mary, nervous and fumbling and regretful and embarrassed, certainly wasn’t the Aunt Sister Mary that Aunty Liv had referred to over the years in buried comments as “judgmental” and “hypocritical” and “sanctimonious.” Had I allowed such a harsh judgment of Sister Mary�
�s identity based on Aunty’s carefully placed words?

  Aunty Liv cut her off, her working eye as bugged as the patch on her dead one, her face sideways. “And what about you, Sister Mary? Huh?” She said “Sister Mary” in a taunting sarcasm. “What about what you hide? Did you think I wasn’t here the week before they kicked you out of the church? Did you think I didn’t know you were hiding out in the coach house? And guess what . . .”

  I had never heard any of this.

  “Aunty,” I said, trying to stop her. I had an immediate urge to protect Aunt Sister Mary, an urge I had never in all my life felt before. I could tell by Sister Mary’s nervous fingers under the table beside me, she hadn’t intended to shock or judge or taunt Aunty Liv. She’d just wanted to give her an old pin, maybe she’d even wanted to bridge some connection with her. But Aunty Liv took her handing her the pin as an intentional aggression, or, at least, this was how she acted about it.

  “Guess what,” Aunty Liv said, ignoring my interruption, still staring at Aunt Sister Mary. “I saw the man enter the brick house, yeah, sure did, a week before you—what are we calling it, huh—left the rectory? And I heard your screams . . . and . . .” Aunty Liv stopped talking when my father turned toward the table. We all held our breaths. My father’s stature is imposing. At six foot five, with still-black hair and ice-blue eyes on ghost-white skin, when he lifts one eye at you and doesn’t speak nor smile, it seems he’s shriveling your soul by gaze alone. Like a modern vampire. But he smiled at something above our heads and turned away, saying to Manny it was true how the sunset matched the Knicks’ team colors. He’d only been confirming which NBA team sponsored the sunset.

  Safe again, but apparently willing to stop spilling Aunt Mary’s secret, Aunty said in leaning back, “Fuck off, Mary. Okay. Fuck you for throwing my past in my face.” She didn’t wipe away the spit that flew from her broken teeth upon both utterances of fuck. And on the second utterance, she threw the pin in Aunt Sister Mary’s face.