Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  It was the weirdest moment that brought the whole defining event from so long ago into Mag’s mind. She was waiting in Boston Children’s Hospital for another round of doctors—a psychotherapist and nutritionist this time—to clear Lucy. Sitting beside a large fish tank with several orange Nemos and at least one blue Dory, a woman in a lemon-print sundress walked by holding a stuffed-doll English sheepdog with a pink ribbon around his neck. Presumably, given the pained look on the woman’s face and her hurried pace, the stuffed dog was for the keeper of her soul: her sick child. A mother knows the unmistakable look of torment on another mother.

  But it was not a connection to the mother’s pain that was so jarring to Mag. What was jarring was the almost uncanny match to the items in her present field of vision with those at play in her memory of sleeping over at Laura Ingrace’s house at age fourteen: lemons and an English sheepdog. Mag stared, in awe that the universe would so blatantly throw memory talismans in her face. It was time to consider this memory, the defining moment of when she thought she’d learned what she needed to learn about who Laura Ingrace really was—a dark, damaged version of Laura that Mag would know from age fourteen on up to the moment a few days ago when she learned her assessment was disastrously wrong: Laura Ingrace was not dark and damaged in an interesting way; she was dark and damaged in a dangerous way. Back at fourteen, however, there was a romanticism in thinking of Laura as a benign demon, a reluctant pirate lobbing witty banter, a secret weapon of a friend who came with challenges and secrets.

  In the fall of their fourteenth year, Laura called Mag at Mag and Carly’s, and their other sisters’, apartment outside Carmel, California.

  “Magpie, it’s Laura, calling from school. How’s school for you? Do you miss camp?”

  “Laura?”

  “Yeah, Laura Ingrace.”

  “Oh wow. How are you? What’s up? Aren’t you in your boarding school in New Hampshire?”

  “Yeah. Crap. Here comes our RA. I’ve got, like, one second. Look, it’s my birthday this weekend, and my grandbones are coming in from France. My parents said I could have a friend sleep over Friday night. I’m flying home for the weekend. Can you come?”

  “Uh, sure. Okay.”

  “Cool. Our driver will pick you up on Friday at four. Be ready, ’kay?”

  “Okay. Um, so my address . . .”

  “I don’t need your address. I know where you live. Gotta go. ’Bye.”

  Mag hung up, wondering how Laura Ingrace from camp would know where she lived. They’d been bunk mates, cabin mates, had generally hung out, but with everyone else, since age six. Until then, they’d never been one-on-one friends, so this was odd. But fourteen is a weird age of binaries: immediate and irreversible rejection or immediate and unquestioning acceptance. On this occasion, Mag went with the latter.

  That Friday, Laura and Mag sat in the back of a Bentley while Laura’s driver drove them to Laura’s home—the same colossal mansion Mag would much later identify as the one next door to Paul Trapmore’s glass home. But back then, back at age fourteen, Mag had no clue a monster lived next door to Laura Ingrace. Instead, she was soon to learn that monsters lived inside Laura’s home.

  The Bentley pulled into Laura’s pebbled driveway. It wasn’t until the driver opened the trunk and began removing luggage that Mag learned Laura herself had not yet been home, had landed from her New Hampshire boarding school and gone straight to collect Mag.

  “You came straight from the airport to pick me up before coming home?”

  “Yeah. Nobody really wants me here. This is an obligation for Mother to showcase me to the French grandbones. So whatever. I have you with me this time. Can you be cool with that?” Laura stalled in dragging her suitcase, cutting lines in the pebbles, which troubled the driver, who hurried along behind, smoothing stones back into their spaces with his polished shoes. The swish of the pebbles and the swish of the sea beyond the house made for a feeling of swirling. The scent of sharp cypress and salt intoxicated Mag further.

  “Hello, Gretchen, can you be cool with that?”

  “Sure? And Laura, call me Mag. Okay. I don’t go by my real name.”

  Laura stepped up to Mag, both girls standing by the home’s cedar fence, about a foot off a gate to what looked like a back garden. “Gretchen, look. Mag, okay, fine. I don’t have a happy little house all wonderful like you. So can you please just be cool with my weird family? They don’t like me. I just want to have a nice birthday for once with a friend. Which I’ve never done.”

  This was the most heartbreaking and honest thing Mag had ever heard come from Laura Ingrace. Mag and Carly had discussed how sad Laura’s life seemed, always at boarding school or camp. But they’d never talked with her about it, and Laura had never before opened up.

  “Laura, I’m so sorry.” Mag placed a palm on Laura’s arm. “I’m so totally here for you.”

  Laura stared at Mag’s hand on her arm and closed her eyes, as if soaking in a warmth she felt from her touch. When Mag removed her hand, Laura startled and shook. And then her eyes switched to a cold stare.

  “Whatever, Gretchen. Thanks. Come on. Leave your bag here with my luggage—the maid will get them. Let’s go out back to the greenhouse, and we can get the whole encounter with my mother over with.”

  Mag bristled when Laura called her Gretchen again. She’d remind her to stop if it happened again, but let it pass this time.

  Laura opened the gate in the cedar fence, and out before them stretched the greenest side and back lawns Mag had ever seen. Perfectly curated turf rolled upward to a cliff’s top, and down below, Mag couldn’t see but heard from the distant laughter, the whistle of high-flying kites, and the roll of the tide, the beach. A line of twenty-foot-high cypress trees bordered one side of the property like stick-straight green crayons, and beyond that green boundary was a large glass home—years later to be discovered as Paul Trapmore’s home. The other side, the side to which Laura was walking, went along the back of Laura’s house, which was a wall of glass for a breakfast room that met upon a greenhouse. As they neared the greenhouse, Mag saw the blurred image of a woman working away at a tree.

  “My mother has three lemon trees she keeps in giant pots on rollers. She makes the gardener roll them out in the better weather, as if they’re precious, elderly ancestors in wheelchairs who deserve a view of the sea.”

  Mag bit the side of her lip and said, “Hmm.”

  Laura continued. “This is what Mother does every day. She inspects those fucking trees, picks dead leaves, and prunes. I’ve always had a full-time nanny when I’m ‘in residence,’ as my bitch mom calls it. Do you think she ever cared to make sure the nannies were getting me enough sun like her trees? You know what else she has in there with her?”

  “Other than the lemon trees?”

  “Yeah, Gretchen, other than the lemon trees.” Laura shook her head.

  “Seriously, Laura, call me Mag. I mean it.”

  “Right. Sorry. So you know what else she has in there?”

  “You got me.” Mag was holding back a smirk, but also feeling a falling, a calling, maybe, that perhaps the dark, ominous feeling she’d had in the Bentley on the way here was true, or partially true, and not, as she had switched to thinking, just Laura being nervous about coming into an unwelcoming home.

  “Mother has in there with her the only true loves of her life, a glass of vodka and her dog, which she named, of course, because she’s a drunk and incapable of an original thought, Lemon. A fat-ass, fluffy mope of an English sheepdog.”

  Laura stopped and turned Mag by the shoulders to look upon the cliff wall toward the sea. The greenhouse was about fifteen feet to their sides now. And then, as if Mag’s skin had burned her, Laura pulled her hands away from Mag’s shoulders with clawed fingers.

  Squeezing out whatever tension had seized her, rolling her hands together, perhaps as a way to move past something that startled her, Laura said, “There, on that rock wall. One time a movie producer rolled Moth
er’s trees to the edge where the sunset over the Pacific can bruise the whole sky in a washy lilac. And it did this one day, the washy lilac sky, the blue of the ocean, the true green leaves and true yellow of Mother’s lemons made the perfect backdrop for a movie wedding they filmed on our property—which ended up winning an Oscar. Lemon was the corny ring bearer in the film. What a crock of cliché horseshit.”

  “A movie on your property is kind of cool, though.”

  Laura folded her arms. “I knew you’d say that. No, it’s not. It’s Mother’s stupid ego on display is what it is, and that is ugly, and that is evil. Come on, let’s get the encounter with Mother over with so we can go play with the only thing that makes me happy here. My parrot, Copte. He’s a total rainbow, and he talks. Come on, we can hurry.”

  The girls walked into the greenhouse, finding Laura’s mother, a woman in red pants and a light-green T-shirt, with bleached blonde hair and pruning shears in one hand and a clear glass with a clear liquid and olives in the other. A fat English sheepdog sprawled on the floor beside her.

  “That’s Lemon,” Laura said, pointing to the floor. Her mother twisted her torso, keeping the shears pointed at the very full lemon tree in front of her. Laura’s mother glared, no greeting.

  Lemon said hi by lifting his fat, furry, black-and-white head off the floor and plunking it right on back down, his long fur spreading like a throw rug.

  “Mother,” Laura said, “I’m home. This is my friend Gretchen, but people call her Mag. Got my grades. All A-pluses. Top of my class. Where’s Copte?”

  Laura’s mother nodded to Mag and then set down her large glass of drink on a wood workbench, pointed her clippers at the lemon tree even higher, and glanced up. “Laura, you’re home, I hear. Ripping the peace with that voice of yours.”

  Laura narrowed her eyes on her mother.

  “Mag, is it? Mag, how lovely for Laura to drag you into this soiree, I guess. You girls need to get ready. Your grandparents will be up from their siestas in an hour.” Taking a pause to look Laura up and down, she added, “You’re fatter. I’ll tell the school to watch your diet. What the fuck am I paying for?” She sniffed the air. “And, Laura, you’re damn right you got straight As. I’m not keen on throwing more of my money away on you, it’s bad enough already. But you keep gaining weight like this, grades won’t matter, because you’ll end up a sniveling average spinster working middle management. Oh, and Copte died. Your father burned him in the firepit. Fucking rainbow parrot feathers went everywhere.”

  The woman turned her back and continued clipping. Laura stood and stared, glared, boring lasers into her mother’s back. Mag had backed herself into the doorway and a step beyond to outside. She’d never in her life witnessed such wickedness.

  “Leave,” Laura’s mother said while keeping her back to the girls and waving her hand with the clippers over her head.

  Laura spun around, faced Mag, looked straight into her eyes, and didn’t blink. Pure, unadulterated hatred filled her blackened pupils. No tears. Just hate. Naked, barbed hate. Mag wasn’t sure if Laura was trying to speak telepathically with her, but she, too, didn’t blink. The girls walked to a side door into the glass breakfast room and stood shoulder to shoulder looking out over the lawn. Mag was stunned, couldn’t speak.

  They stared a good long while saying nothing. And then Laura broke the silence with a hushed, almost gravelly, monotone. “If there is one thing Mother knows about me, it’s that I despise death,” she said. Her tone was such an even cool, it was like her beloved parrot had died a decade ago and she was merely in a solemn nostalgic moment. Mag already knew this was true of Laura anyway, thinking on the time Laura discovered a Triple C cabin mascot, a goldfish, belly up in his bowl. Laura had stayed up all night, sitting in a corner of the bathroom alone, unable to flush him down the drain.

  “This nonchalance of hers over Copte, the brutality of burning my beloved pet in their fancy firepit, changes things. Things are different now, Mag,” Laura said, grinding her teeth. “So I’m going to need you to hang in my room, okay? I just need to do a few things for my birthday dinner. Are you okay with that? The maid will bring you.”

  Just then, a maid, in a literal black-and-white outfit like a Halloween costume, appeared.

  “Hey, Laura, I think I’m just going to go home, okay? I’m sorry about your parrot and real sorry about your mom,” Mag said.

  “Just give me a half hour, Mag, please. Promise. I’m going to work on something with the chef for my cake, is all. I’m the one sorry about my mother. Okay?”

  Forgiveness again appeared, but this time was covered in flashing warnings. Mag would give this tortured night one more shot, but one more thing and she’d call Carly and split. Laura disappeared for a half hour, while Mag waited in her white-on-white bedroom.

  That night, after a stilted formal dinner of the worst foods possible—bloodred, rare filet; hard, cold carrots; a lukewarm cream soup with mushrooms and onions; and disgusting coconut cake with cream-cheese frosting—Mag and Laura joined Laura’s French grandmother in her guest suite and watched rom-coms and played with her furs and silks and ate an entire two boxes of contraband macaroons. That part of the night was fabulous, making up for all the wickedness and weirdness and awkwardness, and also the terrible, horrible meal that came before. They woke the next morning, strewn upon huge pillows and giant down comforters on the grandmother’s suite’s plush carpet. The whole house woke, in fact, to the sound of screaming, which did not fit the gorgeous Saturday outside the suite’s large bay window that faced the sea.

  Laura and Mag ran downstairs to find the grandmother already there in the glass breakfast nook, standing behind Laura’s mother, who was screaming upon viewing the back lawn. And on that stretch, on the part tipped up to meet the cliff wall, was a total massacre.

  Laura and Mag backstepped into the pantry and watched Laura’s mother discover her first horror. Lemon did not bark at her side. Lemon wasn’t within the crowd. Laura’s mother turned and searched everyone standing behind her, which now included the grandmother, the grandfather, and a maid. Laura’s father was out on the lawn. Like a bloodhound, Laura’s mother tracked to Laura in the pantry. Clenching a fistful of Laura’s hair and yanking, she said, “You fucking monster.” The caps on her front teeth glistened pearl white.

  French Grammy pushed past Mag to pull Laura’s mother away. “Patrice, calm down,” she said in a very French accent. “She’s a little girl. She didn’t do this. Look. Look out there. Maury has found something pinned in this, this, this, ah, this mess. Ze girls were with me all night. We were watching movies in my room very late. Leave the girl alone.”

  Laura kept her head down and primed tears. Mag rewound the night they’d spent with the French grandmother and how Laura was so keen on loving and snuggling and complimenting her traveling silks and French hats and soft, taut skin. Grammy, I want to be as beautiful as you one day, she’d said. They’d been up all night; in fact, they’d chugged Mountain Dew in order to watch every possible movie they could. When they woke, it was only after a fifteen-minute nap. So there was no way Laura could have done what was out on the lawn.

  “Lemon!” Laura’s mother yelled to no one in particular, moving away from the pantry and toward the glass wall of the breakfast room. Looking upon the massacre, everyone inside watched Laura’s father navigating the disaster. With all eyes on the lawn, and French grammy drifting in that direction, Laura winked at Mag, leaned to her ear, and whispered, “It must be weird for Mother, not having Lemon with her. He should be with her to see this special horror, designed just for her. Gee, wonder where he is,” she said, and nudged Mag’s arm.

  Mag had no idea where Lemon had gone. No idea what game Laura had played.

  French Grammy circled back to the pantry and grabbed the girls’ hands. “Girls, come now. Let’s go see what this is about outside.”

  Laura’s mother ran ahead to Laura’s father, Maury, who tiptoed around the yellow mash in the grass. Holding a pi
ece of paper he’d found stabbed to the ground with a gardening spike, he kept shaking his head in disbelief.

  The sloped lawn to the cliff wall was like a propped book, open to reveal pages to read. And on the opened green pages, spelled out in blotches of mashed lemons, was a ransom note:

  $2 MILL FOR LEMON

  Every single lemon had been plucked from the lemon trees and smashed with a mallet to spell out this lawn note. The bright lemon rinds cracked like yellow eggs, and the lighter lemon flesh squished into the greenest of green grass. The sky was such a perfect, uncorrupted, smooth, cerulean blue with a wash of lemon above the horizon line on the navy ocean. And jagged against the blue sky were the three, now black, lemon trees. The trees had been torched in a controlled fire and left at the top of the cliff wall; the stubs of their black trunks and remaining limbs stood like broken-down zealots burned on the cross. Wisps of smoke billowed, as if the aftermath of a war battle. The only things missing were severed heads on spikes.

  Maury, the father, read aloud the paper he’d found: “If you want Lemon back, leave a duffel of $2 mill cash on the cliff wall when you go out today. Because you’ll go out today. If you leave someone behind to watch, we’ll kill Lemon. If you install a camera, which we know you don’t have, we’ll kill Lemon. If you call the cops, we’ll kill Lemon. If you use anything other than the cleaned cash in the safe in the basement, we’ll call the IRS and drop a tip about your tax evasion. We know who you are. We know your secrets. If you do anything other than leave cash in a bag on the cliff wall when you leave today, we will kill Lemon and call the feds.”

  Laura’s mother vomited on the lemon mash of the letter E. Grammy gasped and clutched Laura tight into her stomach, and Laura primed more tears.

  Tall Mag, black-haired Mag, with her violet eyes, standing in a shadow of a towering cypress, in awe of a witchcraft so dark and foreign, felt frightened that she’d be blamed just for the inner act of holding admiration. She had no clue how all this came together, but she did know why. Casting her lightning eyes to Laura, she hoped to send the following telepathic message: I know you did this. I know why you did this. And I won’t say you did this, as long as you tell me how you did it and that Lemon’s okay.