In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  “No security cameras here,” she announces loud, her flabby arms indicating the corners of the ceiling. The blue-on-blue top layer of her misshapen, homemade gown swishes against the torn tulle. She sets a dramatic finger to her chin to indicate she’s analyzing out loud, her monologue to roll now. “Maybe a good detective working hard could put things together and link me. Maybe. But who cares? You might still scream and shout how I’m to blame, but I came here analog last night, found your damn vials, and have an airtight alibi today and tonight. I walked ten fucking miles to get here last night. No phone on me, no trace, no cell-tower pings. I know everything I’ve touched, and no evidence will stay. No fingerprints. Nothing. Kent’s Jeep in your driveway, which I drove here tonight, him dead in the back seat, for right, yes, I did drive his body here, couldn’t carry him ten miles. Whatever! Evidence of his car here, fits with my story. No one saw me driving or when. It’s an old Jeep, no GPS tracker to time anything, no nothing. I made damn sure.”

  She smacks her lips and winks at me, as a pause and to accentuate her high opinion of herself—she’s just so genius. “As for his blood in my house. I’m a nurse, too, Lynette. Not a drop of it escaped the tub. He went straight into airtight plastic once his body drained, and I dragged him out the house.”

  She says this last part, out the house, in a strange southern accent and twisted head, like she’s talking to herself and this entire monologue of hers is a mottled stew of actors in a circle on a stage. “Fortunately, our garage is attached—” Still southern accent, but she switches back to her grating Boston accent with the next line. “Right! I insisted on an attached garage, Lynette, when we bought . . . our home.” She pouts in a whiny voice upon saying our home. “You wanted to steal our home, Lynette. Well, fuck you. I bleached my bathroom floor after I removed Kent, you cunt. I’ll drain the tub when I get home and marinate the porcelain in bleach a few days, if you play nice nice.” She rolls her eyes to the ceiling, mocking herself for being sad in saying upon a forced laugh, “I wanted something of him in the house when I got home.” She’s making no sense. Her framing of me, her keeping the blood in the house, nonsensical. Applying reason to lunacy is a futile insanity. But she’s twisted me up in this, and she could frame me long enough for me to lose everything. I’m a nurse, and the two stark facts I can’t avoid, no matter what Cate Dranal drones on about are these: Kent is dead in Mop’s room, and my sister is duct-taped on top of my gas stove.

  Cate spits on her own laughter at her own psychosis and then, with shoulders sagging, weeps in ugly heaving, but not for long. She springs up straight and finishes in a breathless rant, “I sent a resignation email from him to the hospital. Kent’s on a . . . vague and undefined . . . mission to help Syrian refugees in Greece.” She swipes her lips to the side and air quotes the vagueness of “mission to help refugees” to once again accentuate the laughable genius of her own plan. “He’s got no family, you know. No one will report him missing. Unless I choose to. I’m in control here. I don’t have anyone either. Kent and I had only each other, for real, no one else. And you took the us of us away, Lynette, so you will pay.”

  She quick-crouches, sticking her yellow crotch direct in my line of sight once again. She’s hissing, slow and in my face, “I am in control here, bitch. You’re going to play along so I don’t report Kent missing.”

  What is the woman with the syringe saying? Who is she? Are those words, or is she humming again? What is this wind that smells of cheese in my face? Breath? Johanna, Johanna, Johanna, darling, she’s feeding me cheese, see, we’re talking and eating cheese, so this is good. Please, this will be over soon. Be quiet. Hush.

  Cate Dranal, yes, it’s Cate Dranal. The proximity of her close face and cheese breath, these are smelling salts, jolting me to listen and burn her words to my brain.

  “So as insurance for me and because I want you to suffer, you’re going to drag Kent into your basement, behind your fake bookcase. I followed your dumb humming sister around tonight. She didn’t hear me when she opened the bookcase to take out wine. Had her earphones on, singing Paul Simon.” Cate’s laughing again, her catching, awful, phlegmy cough-laugh, like an old, crazed lady. I think of Flowers in the Attic.

  Johanna, it’s just a story, darling. Like Flowers in the Attic. We will be done with the story soon. I’ll finish the book; you go to sleep. I’ll sum it up for you tomorrow, like I always do, if you want. Shh. Shh. Sleep, love.

  “If you ever say anything about who killed Kent, or Vicky, my neighbor with her damn peanuts, remember, Lynette, I’ve got three things on you.” She takes her free hand and pushes fingers to my nose to accompany her recitation of the three things she has on me. “One”—she presses my nose once—“Kent with pento in every fiber of his dead body. Two”—she pushes twice—“you were at Proserpina’s. You can be blamed for lacing Vicky with peanuts. Yeah, you whispering in my ear, I figured that out, too, even before you left your stupid note. You have impulse-control problems, don’t you, Lynette. Tsk, tsk. Anyway, I’ll say I went to the bathroom and the police will assume you leaned over then. I mean, you were there! And Vicky was, in fact, sleeping with Kent! Oh, hoo, Lynette, you’re such a crazy bitch! Hoo, Lordy!” She pauses to collect her breath from a cackling in laughter through these words. “And three,” she says, losing her demented smile and laughter, getting serious. She pushes three times, jamming into my nose like she’s trying to push it to the back of my skull. “Drumroll, please . . . mmm, hmm, mmm,” and she’s off humming “America” once again.

  Cate Dranal stands, walks backward toward Johanna, and continues talking, not humming. “You know where I caught your sister? She was smoking a cigarette on her bed out there.” She pointed toward the guest cottage. “She’d just lit it, in fact. Left the cigarette teetering on the fold of the duvet. All it would take is the right gust of wind from the open window and . . .” Cate makes a whooshing noise and fans her hands in a dramatic display to charade “fire” as she mouths the word. She turns a circle like a contemplative professor. “So this gave me an idea. When you crawled your whore ass up the stairs just now and found Kent, and you were up there forever, geesh. Anyway, I ran out to that dumb cottage, lit another cigarette, and left it on the sheets. The one I lit sure teetered on the duvet. Whoopsy do!”

  Cate laughs as she stares out the back bay window toward the cottage. She sniffs the air.

  “Smell it, Lynette? Oh, and your sister is so dumb. She was reading some dumb-ass romance novel. Smut. Oh yeah, the title—” And here she does her awful laugh again, looking at my sister and lifting Johanna’s dropped chin to look into her face. I spring on all fours. I’m a guard dog coming to life after eating a drugged steak. The thick, yellowware bowl bottom with jagged edges is under my right hand’s grip.

  “Yes, right, the book’s title,” Cate says into Johanna’s face, “was Dirty, Blond Cowboy. You had no idea I stood at the foot of the bed until I kicked the baseboard. Must have been the spent bottle of wine. Anyhoo . . .” Cate turns to face me, but keeps her hand squeezing Johanna’s chin so as to keep her head cocked upright. Something catches her eye outside, and she looks to the back kitchen window toward the guest cottage. I follow her eyes. At the level I am at, given how the window sashes low—the house being on higher level than the cottage—I see a brighter core within the lit cottage, a core of slow-growing orange. A fire on the bed.

  “Oh, now, finally, here we are,” Cate says, looking back at me, growing a large smile in a coming glee and perking up her posture. “I think this decides it, then. Poor Johanna, your sister, mmm, mmm, mmm—” She’s humming again, transforming beautiful poetry into a theme song for a horror carnival.

  “Yup. Here’s what the papers will say about this twit Johanna: she fell asleep with the cigarette in her mouth, and it fell and burned the bed. When she woke up burning alive, she ran. Oh yes, that’s it, Lynette, your sister, she ran to the cliff, flaming on fire, and she launched herself into the ocean. Remember these details, because a
ll this shit here is what you’ll say. The story you will tell. Or else you’re going to jail for the rest of your worthless life. I’m going to pump her full of pento now, a dose enough to kill her. Your pento. You knew I’d have to kill her. It’s all your fault. Can’t have any other witnesses, other than you, whore, and you need to live, because you need to suffer. I’ll be off now. You better get a move on and get to hiding these dead bodies, nurse. Fire trucks will probably come soon. Here’s the third thing I have on you.”

  Cate Dranal sinks the pentobarbital—I think an entire vial’s worth, but it’s hard to tell—into Johanna’s jugular, or close enough to it. How old is this pento? Is it still as strong as when first bottled?

  I growl. I am not a nurse. I am an animal. On all fours, I gallop like a rabid lion and bulldoze into Cate Dranal, knock her on her ass, and beat a yellow bowl bottom into her brains. At some point in my beating, and I hadn’t appreciated this before, she pulls from a side-sewn pocket on her gown a giant antique nail, one big enough to drive through beams. I have a pile of them in the barn, given how I insisted on using as much reclaimed materials as possible to build Johanna’s cottage. Cate jams the point end of the nail into my right eyebrow and drags down, puncturing my eye and cutting my face; she then takes the large nail head and jabs hard in several thrusts on my mouth, breaking some of my teeth. But I keep bashing her head.

  I am not a nurse. I am an animal. The throbbing pain beneath my action is distraction—keep bashing, keep beating her face.

  Her eyes close. I believe she’s dead.

  I am not a nurse. No, I am a nurse. You are not a nurse right now.

  I lift my body off hers, the child inside me gone. I miscarried, I realize, which I knew the second I felt liquid thighs. I look to the blood that has fled me, losing the life within, a child, my soul. I am a vacant animal now. A hollow hollow, a hole, a worthless vessel. Nothing. I must move the bodies before the fire trucks come.

  I am a nurse.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MOP

  Over the last week

  Cape Cod

  This is the state I’m in, living in a falseness, an untruth. All I wanted to do this past week was tell Manny everything, so we could solve this mess or walk away from the past, together. But even when we were in Cape Cod with my father and Aunt Sister Mary, I said nothing. I played the part they wanted me to play, the bride planning her wedding, so we could all be happy again and so they would love me like before, unencumbered. I needed that. Needed the fog. And what to do with Aunty. Help her? Expose her? Was she guilty of actual murder, or what? There was indeed a literal skeleton in her basement. A woman in her barn. I took comfort in believing the skeleton wasn’t my mother, for the patient record I’d ripped from the nail said, “Dranal, Kent; DOB 12/18/71.” Plus, the skeleton wore a man’s wool suit.

  Cape Cod was a maddening deviation of me assuming the role of my mother, stepping into the suit of her identity and suppressing my fuller identity’s other parts. I selected a date for my and Manny’s future wedding, planning out where on the oceanfront Grand Chesterton lawn we’d marry and beginning the grueling talk of menu selections. The GC, as the Grand Chesterton is known, is one of the finest five-star resorts in the world—and owned, of course, by Manny’s family. No investors. No public offerings. No private equity firms or offshore shell companies, so the quality is not diluted for short-term gain and the books not cooked for Wall Street. Just owned by his family and true.

  I had to be the bride. The willing, happy bride. But the dichotomy caused constant spikes of panic inside, made worse by the fact I had to act them away on the outside. As I smiled at the offer of garland roses for the bridal arch, did they hear my dark thoughts wondering if I was living, questioning whether what I saw was a mirage and I was chained in hell? Did the perky wedding coordinator with the datebook know her scribbled notes sent my mind to Kent Dranal’s daily record confirming he’s “still dead”? Did Aunt Sister Mary know how her face, swollen from too many glasses of wine in the sun, looked like the face of the woman in the barn? I took a lot of spa appointments, saying I needed the rest and relaxation, only to sweat and shake so much on the table, the masseuse would end the effort and I’d hide in the steam room, crying under a eucalyptus-drenched face towel. Manny went bodysurfing while I hid, and in between resort appointments with my father, we ate riotous expensive meals together, the four of us, and between those meals, Manny and I made aggressive love in our GC hotel room.

  Aunt Sister Mary Patience watched every move I made, like a hawk-woman, beady green eyes and all. When I laughed, she squinted her beads, showing she questioned my authenticity and saw my duplicity. When I giggled over the GC caterer’s suggestion that we serve bacon-wrapped scallops, as if we New Englanders would skip such an obvious, obligatory choice, Sister Mary raised her eyebrows in a silent judgment and said “hmm.” Aunt Sister Mary glowering there, sitting on the fringe of our four-top table in the GC’s swanky lounge-restaurant, glitzy gold accents around, as if Don Draper might roll in any minute and light a silver-capped cigarette on a lighter wedged in the breasts of a black-dressed waitress. No, none of this was me, and Sister Mary called me out with her squinted eyes. When one of the cleavage waitresses bent her boobs in my face, Sister Mary lifted her eyebrows, as if saying, I sent this girl as a test, how will you react? This is not you, none of this is you, and you know it. I suppose she expected me to cast dower eyes at the waitress for lowering her own standards, but once again, Sister Mary misjudged me: I don’t judge women on the choices they make with their own free will. If the girl wants to wear a low-cut dress, I seriously could not care less. It’s not my personal choice, but my personal choices do not dictate anyone else’s: I’m barely firm in them myself. And yet, since Sister Mary challenged me, I complimented the waitress on her revealing dress, fake-giggled along with her, then winked at Sister Mary in touché. None of this was the real me. This part I played in duplicity, and the wiry coat of it, the rank stench of phony fumes, riled me at my own self.

  Is Aunty Liv even aware of her own duplicity? Can she bring herself together? Can I? If she fails at duplicity, this dual, insincere existence, will I? She’s always claimed me as so much like her. But how much of the total identity pie does she claim of me? How much will I allow, now, in my emergence?

  Back at the GC’s swanky lounge, my other aunt studied me in my mental struggle for full identity, full emergence. Aunt Sister Mary knew I’d never fake-giggle about catered items, about bacon, about scallops, about cleavage. She knew I’d never fake-giggle about anything, except perhaps the notion that there exist universal truths immune to philosophy’s relentless doubt. She knew a glitzy gold lounge with half-clothed women is the opposite environment I’d prefer for my wedding. More appropriate would be a candlelit, underground, ancient library in Italy with a close female relative or female scholar as the officiant. Maybe three—four, tops—witnesses in attendance.

  But these things we do in duplicity, denying authentic multiplicity, to feel love, even if false or hidden. To collect acceptance. To keep the peace by keeping things simple and binary. To avoid a sick reality. Chains of protection.

  On the morning of the day we were to leave the GC, I woke early, passing through the lobby to get an early swim alone, in the adult pool. My father wanted to leave earlier than planned, so we’d be packing in our cars around noon, because Hurricane Angelo was to hit the entire coastline of Massachusetts. The Weather Channel expected Angelo’s eye to hover over land the next day, but given the battering the Cape sometimes gets, and given the battering we expected in Rye, I had to agree, it was best we get back.

  Yet given the hurry we’d be in after breakfast, I needed to squeeze in a swim, get back to my morning laps, for my own well-being. I’d been dangerously off them since arriving at Aunty’s. Like most mornings, I was going to swim laps for an hour. I needed the sound of swishing water and popping underwater bubbles to soothe my brain. The safety of pressure on all sides, a pr
essure that buoys you, but that you can fight, reject. For my brain, swimming is a beautiful meditation and powerful level setting. Had I been at Aunty’s, I would have donned my wet suit and swum my typical swim along the coastline and up to the Rockport point of Manny’s property.

  Guess who was waiting on the ground floor on an upholstered bench, opposite the mouth of the open elevators. A paneled wood wall with embedded Freemason’s tiles of metalwork backdropped Aunt Sister Mary on the bench. She wore a shapeless dress with brandless black leather shoes, black shoelaces too. Her hair was in the tightest knot on the tip-top of her skull. I wondered if I pulled the pin if her brains would bubble out. No need for a facelift with such torque. Her eye sockets pulled to each side as if trying to see her own earlobes.

  “Aha, Mary Olivia. I knew you’d be up early. I know you like your morning swims. Always training for your triathlons. Well, well, sit here,” she said, patting the taut fabric of the GC’s bench seat.

  I sucked in my cheeks, drawing my inner mouth to my teeth. I flared my nostrils, as I scraped to the bench and sat where she pat. She always says this, how I’m “training for a triathlon,” but doesn’t she recognize I never do triathlons? I never train on the bike or run, the other key components of a triathlon. How can she not recognize that I just like to swim for hours? It is my calmness, the greatest of which comes when I am in the sea, doing laps, back and forth, whether in front of our estate in Rye, or along the rock line of Haddock Point State Park. It is the practice of my faith, if I were to believe in such things.