In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  This process, as I clock my stopwatch, takes a respectable seven minutes.

  I return to the kitchen, being efficient by grabbing pentobarbital vials along the way in the hall that connects foyer to kitchen, and, being further efficient, blow out each tea light with each bend to each vial. I enter the kitchen and stuff two fistfuls of pentobarbital vials under a loaf of bread and a package of hamburger rolls in the tin bucket with the tin lid—all this by the stove where Johanna is taped in place. She’s still slumped; Cate Dranal still unconscious on the floor with broken pottery everywhere.

  I need to stop the blood flowing from Cate Dranal’s head gash, so I yank open my “glory hole” kitchen drawer, which holds all my random shit: pens, lighters, matches, paper clips, tacks, scissors, tape, the top flap of a Girl Scout cookie box—Thin Mints—saved for no fucking reason, a bouncy ball from a gum-ball machine, and, of course, superglue.

  I grab another full bath towel from the basket of my laundry Cate Dranal folded and, with one end, soak up the blood from her hairline. Before more can billow out, I empty the entire contents of superglue into her open wound. This will hold the blood in, with hope. While it dries, I cut more of the duct tape from Johanna.

  Now I fold the bloodied end of Cate’s head towel in on the nonbloody middle and wrap, wrap, wrap the towel around Cate’s head, in case the superglue doesn’t dam well enough. Then I duct-tape the wrapped towel around, around, in the middle of her face. I don’t want to drag Cate Dranal’s blood through the house. I move her contained head and shoulders to the side a half pivot, and with another towel, soak up the blood on the floor. Again, I’ll do sterilization mopping last. I ball up the third towel and throw it into the oven.

  I pull Cate by her nasty feet down the hall to the foyer. Along the way, her yellow butt is a push broom, collecting the spent tea lights; the tea lights jumble and bounce like lottery balls against her bottom, but then fall around her body to skid across my marble foyer and clatter into the foyer’s baseboards. No bother, I’ll collect those as I pace the foyer, waiting for the fire trucks to come. I position Cate Dranal’s towel-taped head toward me at the top of the basement stairs and shoulder-drag-slide-thunk her down the stairs, like I did with Kent, her toweled head in my gut. Cate’s head blood is starting to dot the towel from the inside, and soon it will soak through.

  I bring Cate inside the secret wine room and slump her body next to Kent’s dead one. Her crazy-stitched, blue-blue ball gown drapes over Kent’s wool suit in slashing angles. I remove the towel from around her head, so as to fold it under where her blood is now dripping, because I’d rather funnel the drip-draining blood onto this one towel, as opposed to taking my chances of it soaking through in a diffused way through a wrapped towel and dripping within my wine room. Plus, to be honest, had I not removed the towel, she would have suffocated.

  Maybe let her suffocate?

  No! You’re a nurse.

  Get back to work!

  I leave the wine room, swivel and lock the false bookcase door.

  I check my stopwatch: collecting and stashing Cate Dranal took another eight minutes. I run up to my kitchen. I check the bay window as I turn my attention to Johanna on the stove. The fire is now licking the ceiling above the burning bed.

  I cut Johanna free with my kitchen scissors and ball up the duct tape as I remove it, working as fast as if I had to extricate an entire three-piece tuxedo from a man in a drunk-driving accident. Which, indeed, I have had to do, sadly enough, four times in my life. I stuff the ball of tape in the oven with the bloody towels. What fire investigator is going to first check the oven in the nonburning house? What cottage fire investigator would even question the glue lines left by the duct tape on the stove in the nonburning house? I’ll deal with the tape and towels later. Now, I build the distraction, misdirect investigators to outside this house. Is that what happened in the JonBenét Ramsey case? Didn’t they spend the first critical hours outside the house?

  Johanna’s so much lighter than Kent and Cate. About half as light. I shimmy her up on my back, and in the movement, her Tory Burch flats fall to the kitchen tiles. No bother. I need them anyway. Good thing we have the same size feet. Good thing I know the tide schedule like I know the hours of my weekly hospital shifts.

  I kick a few pieces of the broken yellowware as I cross-bear Johanna on my back toward the hall.

  It’s hard work walking up the front stairs with the dead weight of Johanna, but I’m sure adrenaline fuels me, and my core muscles are in shape from all the real triage work at the hospital, all my screwing of Kent at the Kisstop, him screwing me back, and all the gardening I do. All the endless hours I spend standing, painting the ocean from the ocean rocks, and doing calf raises as I do, so as to multitask: art with exercise. I eat my own grown food, buy organic meat. I can do this. I am strong.

  I am a nurse.

  I am an animal.

  We pass an oval window in the stairwell, and the full moon shines on the top of my head and the top of Johanna’s, which rests on my right shoulder. Her arms are draped in a circular X around my neck so I can hang on to her, me folded over, and stomp and strain up the stairs.

  What must the moon think to see such a vision, captured in an oval frame? One sister draped over the back of the other, who trudges up the stairwell to cross the moon’s path.

  I am a nurse. I can’t think of what the moon thinks of me.

  Who cares what the moon thinks. Keep working. Focus.

  My thighs burn, but I lift, I push.

  We reach the second floor. The fastest way to get Johanna into the attic is halfway down this hall, through my bedroom, and up the stairwell in there. For a short relief, I set her on the floor and pull her with her head at my knees and sitting backward. Her body crumples the rug runner as I pull, so I’ll pull it straight again after securing her upstairs.

  We reach my unlit bedroom, my canopy bedposts jiggling as I pull past. I secure Johanna on my back again and strain our way up the stairwell into the attic. No time to place Johanna comfortably in the puffy bed, so I lay her gently on the plush beige carpet. I remove my nurse’s uniform, my shoes, my socks, and then remove Johanna’s dress and pull it on. I leave my shoes and socks in the attic but ball my own uniform under Johanna’s dress, making myself look pregnant.

  I am not pregnant.

  I lost our baby, Kent. Love, I lost our baby.

  Shut the fuck up. Concentrate. Be a nurse. Don’t let the gray clouds come. You are only a nurse. This is your job.

  I pause to whisper a quick apology to Johanna as I pull off her slip and use it as a glove so as to yank a handful of her hair from her skull.

  I know forensics.

  I know because whenever there is a criminal or crime victim in the ER, the detectives and cops swoop in on us, demanding we collect clothing and immediately seal it in airtight bags, that we scrape under fingers and swab every orifice for minuscule strains of evidence—skin cells, hair fibers, saliva.

  I know if I tell investigators that Johanna ran screaming, on fire, and pulling on her own hair through the bramble paths, to launch her burning body into the ocean as the only possible relief, before I could stop her, me running behind, they’ll look for microscopic scraps of evidence to prove my story, or disprove my story. Plus, this is time-consuming distraction work for them, outside my house.

  After retrieving Johanna’s Tory Burch flats from the kitchen floor, I fling out my front door, wearing Johanna’s dress, my own nurse’s uniform balled at the belly underneath. In one clenched fist, I hold a section of her ripped hair within a ball of her slip; in the other, I cradle her shoes. My bare feet make indents in the soft earth and then muddy footprints on the stone path to the burning cottage. These footprints of mine are okay. They’ll match the story I tell.

  The flames lick through the front door. I slip on Johanna’s shoes and lift the hem of her dress to the fire and let it catch. Just enough, just a slow burn by my knees, and I run fast toward the ocean, leaving
Johanna-size shoeprints in the bramble paths, scattering her pulled hair, here and there along the way, close so it catches in the vines stretching into the path, and where investigators can find it, where they’ll be crouched to cast her footprints in plaster, my bare ones, too, which will come next. The burning dress singes vine leaves and bramble prickers as I pass, the fibers of the dress floating like fireflies and sticking within the tangles of vegetation.

  As soon as I reach the granite rocks along the sea’s edge, I drop the empty ball of her slip and remove Johanna’s burning dress from my body with one arm, taking care to slide out and not burn my own skin. My other arm cradles my nurse uniform. I wear only a bra and underwear under the moon’s watchful rays. The moon is a brainless rock and is not watching you. Doesn’t care about you. Nobody does. Focus. I look around—no one here. I run to the top of the cliff in Johanna’s shoes and launch her burning dress and slip to the high crashing waves, and then kick her shoes off my feet so they fling to the sea.

  I check my stopwatch. Settling Johanna and running to the cliff top took an unimpressive ten minutes. It’s been twenty-five minutes since I noticed the burning bed. I look back toward my property and see the smoke rising beyond the high treetops of maples and oaks. People from surrounding properties may notice the smoke now, and on this sea wind, which will carry the scent of smoke and fire, they will detect something amiss to just smell the air.

  Thankfully, the tide is rolling in and three-quarters to the high point, so it will be safe for me to scrape down the side of this cliff wall and run along the flat granite rocks along the sea, which will wash away my footprints. I pull my nursing uniform over my head as I run.

  I plunk into the middle beach, covered in two feet of moving water, so I slosh through, holding my uniform high over my underwear. I am submerged to a half inch below my knees, so no cloth is wet. This is a relief. I wouldn’t be able to explain that away. Or it would complicate my story. I tiptoe at the literal edge of Manny’s grass lawn to the secret trail he and Mop cut long ago, and which no one uses, and stepping as light as possible, reach to behind Johanna’s burning cottage. From the path’s mouth, I jump to within an inch of the cottage’s backside and run around the cottage. None of these footprints will matter. I’ll say I did exactly this, trying to save my sister, not noting her lunging aflame from the front door until it was too late. Most of my footprints will be gone anyway, as soon as this fire sends flaming boards and siding and Sheetrock and other building materials to the ground. Running around the cottage is also necessary to prove the story I’ll tell about how I punctured my eye and cut my face and hand. The fire has eaten through the plaster walls and is eating the frame. The exterior walls glow orange, and I note the darker circles of the large antique nails in the thicker support beams. These nails, these are part of the eye story, in a coming fiction and in a past reality.

  I again reach the path I just ran down with Johanna’s dress on fire, running this time in my bare feet, leaving my own trail behind Johanna’s Tory Burch trail, returning to the sea. I again reach the cliff wall, jump up and down like I’m screaming for her to stop. Walk to the edge, lie flat, as if I’m searching or reaching for her fallen body.

  I run back down the path to my house.

  As soon as I reach the kitchen, I check to make sure my eye and hand are not bleeding through the cloth and tape. They aren’t, I’m good. I ignore the throbbing pain. Next, I sweep the broken pottery to a corner and with no time to scoop up shards and pieces, slivers, and yellow dust, I take a twenty-gallon antique crock from the walk-in pantry, empty it of five umbrellas, tip it over, and cover the pottery pile in the corner. I place a potted plant on the crock’s upturned bottom. They’ll think this is some cozy decoration. I rearrange the surviving pottery on the shelving unit, sparse now. The released umbrellas are a colony of folded black bats, jostling among themselves, excited to be uncontained, but settling in a collective lean in a pantry corner.

  I call 911 from the kitchen cordless, and because I don’t know if a neighbor has called yet, and I don’t know how long I have, I drop to my hands and knees, scurry like the demon-possessed to the cabinet below my sink, extract a bottle of bleach, and pour it on the floor. I scrub with a facecloth, the phone jammed in the crook of my neck, pulling off the greatest acting job I’ve ever done, cry-sobbing crazy to the 911 operator.

  I scream about how I got home (I don’t say anything specific about when I left work, leaving a timeline flexible to how I need to unfold facts) to find my sister’s cottage ablaze, that I ran out there in my bare feet to try to save her, followed her burning to the ocean, watched her pulling out her own hair, and then failed to stop her from flinging her body over the cliff’s edge.

  “When I got to the cottage, I was so disoriented in running around, I didn’t see a board with an old nail had separated from the house and I ran into it, and slid down, and I’m cut too. In falling, I snagged my hand on something sharp, and cut that too. My eye is punctured,” I add, after two full minutes of straight rambling about my sister. The operator buys it. I pull the duct tape from my eye, throw it in the oven, along with the bleach cloth, and spritz odor neutralizer everywhere to get rid of the bleach smell.

  I’ll need to keep the firefighters and police out of the kitchen.

  I crank open every panel on both bay windows. My yellow-and-green curtains don’t flutter in the stagnant air; no ghost curtains billow to tickle me with humor. I am rejected by my own curtains, my own home. What the fuck with this crazy bullshit? Curtains don’t tickle, curtains don’t care. Fucking focus. The odor of sea salt and fire smoke reach my kitchen. This will help to neutralize odor in here as well.

  “Okay, now, okay, calm down. I’m sending trucks. It will be okay. Please breathe,” the operator says.

  I hang up. I don’t have time to calm down. There’s a couple more things to handle before the fire trucks and cops arrive.

  I turn on the sucking fan in the restaurant hood over the gas stove. Crank it high.

  Next, I drive Kent’s Jeep to the Wilson property. I’ve been picking up their mail for months while they’re in Costa Rica. I unlock their barn (they gave me a key to keep an eye on), park inside. When investigators ask about neighboring eyewitnesses, I’ll tell them how the Wilsons are in Costa Rica, and I’ll give them their number, and they’ll confirm. And no one is going to be searching here for Kent or his Jeep, anyway. There’s no known connection of him to me, and there’d be no inquiry that he’d be involved in my sister falling asleep in a cottage with a lit cigarette in her mouth. If Cate Dranal told it right, Kent’s not even missing—he’s helping refugees in Greece. Nevertheless, I’ll be sure no one starts looking for Kent, but that’s cleanup phase II, something I’ll handle in the coming days.

  Now done with Kent’s Jeep, and back from running through the line of forest and a couple of trails between our properties, I pace my marble foyer, waiting. I pick up the spent tea lights Cate’s ass jostled and stick them in a drawer in a side table in the library. Metal mermaids are my only witnesses.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AUNTY

  Two years ago

  Here are the fools with their sirens and flashing lights. Woo, woo, woo, fuck all you. You’ll get what I give you, here I come. I bolt like a sprung spring from my foyer, screaming. Before I bolted, I made sure to set the lock. As my front door slams shut behind me, my home is barred to anyone without a key. I have spare keys in a birdhouse Mop made me, long ago. I want to keep these fools outside as long as possible, so that any remaining cleansing fumes in the kitchen dissipate. And so I have time to sneak a call to my overpaid lawyer.

  My face is bloodied, throbbing, the pain in my slashed eye unimaginable. My mouth of broken teeth so painful, I no longer feel pain. My entire head is a bursting blood blister.

  “My sister! My sister, oh my God, a cliff and my sister with her shoes and burning.” I’m in hysterics for them, pointing in the direction of the ocean. I need to make sure m
y words are not in perfect, grammatical English. Smoke and flames from the cottage reach high over the oaks and maples. I hope the firefighters dragging massive hoses through my perennial beds and lawns right now are able to save Big Boy and the swing on his big limb. That bitch is ruining my lawns and might take my favorite tree and maybe killed my sister, killed my love. I will track her down in hell and haunt her life an eternity.

  “Ma’am, ma’am, calm down. Where is your sister?” a man’s voice says.

  “She’s, oh my God, I tried to stop. I tried to stop her.” While keeping one hand on my throbbing eye, with the other I grasp the body of the man voice, some guy of some authority—he’s wearing some man jacket with labels and ranks and patches and whatever. “Please, over there, the ocean, find her. Maybe she’s on the cliff wall and I can’t see. Maybe she didn’t drown. Help her!”

  By giving these fools hope of saving a human woman, I know they’ll go where I say. And they do. Upon Man Voice’s command, uniformed people race toward the ocean.

  “A woman. On the cliff. Go, go, go. And get the coast guard on this. Now! Go!” he says.

  Man Voice turns to me. “Ma’am, your eye. We’re going to need to patch you up. Over here, with the paramedics. The firefighters will get the fire under control. They’re already on it. If your sister is alive, we will find her. I’ll stick with you. Let’s talk.”

  So.

  We’ll talk.

  Me and Man Voice will talk.

  We’ll chat as I stave off excruciating pain and some paramedic works on my busted face. And I’ll tell Man Voice some things, through hysterics and broken English. I’ll tell him that in the course of seeing the fire from my kitchen, I panicked and miscarried. I won’t mention the word blood, won’t let the idea of such liquid swirl in the vernacular of his mind. But by mentioning a panicked miscarriage, I’ll plant the seed if for some reason I missed a spot of blood in the kitchen and some fool, who inevitably insists on coming inside, sees. But I didn’t miss any spots. I checked several times while waiting for these fools. I am an efficient and effective nurse. I don’t leave blood behind.