In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  The operatic lyrics of Schubert’s “Die Rose” gave way to calm instrumentals, and this was the perfect lull, the moment at which I could have confessed to my closest confidantes. But, in that same moment, Johanna looked down at her Vogue and gushed, “Oh my goodness, this is the one where they featured classic Valentino! Valentino!” She dived into the magazine’s pages, while Mop looked to me with a mocking but loving eye roll about her mother, my sister, all of which confirmed, for the thousandth time, that my niece might see perfection in me, might identify with me, even more than the mother she loves to distraction.

  So I couldn’t break Mop’s trust in me by admitting to the room of my affair. And breaking Mop’s trust—where would that lead? Would that lead to other ugly truths about me to her, and indeed, to myself?

  I won’t think on it further.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARY OLIVIA PENTECOST, AKA MOP

  Present time

  Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy,

  the mad daughter of a wise mother.

  These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

  —Voltaire

  Everyone calls me Mop. And I’m glad, because my name is ridiculous: Mary Olivia Pentecost, like I’m some dowdy, black-dressed colonial awaiting a witch trial in Salem. But since our family money tracks to Mayflower days, I was burdened with a Mayflower name.

  I don’t wear any of the gold crosses given to me on birthdays or my confirmation, not the one with embedded emeralds bestowed like an heir-apparent coronation sacrament at my Trinity High graduation. There’s a drawer in my room in our Rye estate filled with crosses, literally filled with crucifixes of all kinds, shapes, metals, and woods. I never open that drawer except to plop another in, and when I do, a drop in air pressure causes my stomach to lurch, and an ice chill slaps my cheeks, as if a demon is being released from the bowels of my dresser. I slam the drawer shut to feel benevolent warmth again. Lessons on religious wars scarred me. Babies impaled on spikes? Who could ever get behind a religion (different from faith) like that? Who could ever get blindly behind any man-made religion? I’m not an atheist. I’m just troubled by the way money and power motivate the undercurrents of churches.

  What is a church? What is mine? Is it okay to ask these questions? I believe, I think, it’s okay to ask these questions.

  Here I am in a hole in the ground, waiting to die. My companion is passed out. I have nothing to do while the woman above tries to find us with her shrill voice. Shouting on repeat, “Bitch!” All day I’ve been in here thinking and fading. Thinking and fading and cowering and hot.

  In my mind, I keep getting stuck on the sharp and sudden contrast between our cheery, rosy life before and the dark life after the fire, my mother’s death, and Aunty Liv’s devastating abandonment.

  Her abandonment.

  Her sudden, awful abandonment.

  No warnings.

  But were there warnings?

  I worry, too, about my love, my Manny. I wonder if he’s alive. These questions I’m asking myself right now while I wait an eternity to find a way to escape—What is a church? What is mine? Were there warnings before the fire, before the abandonment?—perhaps these are just the untethered questions one asks when they’ve lost grasp of reason, when in a total existential and physical crisis.

  I don’t visit priest chambers to atone for my or my family’s sins. I don’t necessarily respect my father’s sister, the nun, just because she’s a nun—was a nun—and the biggest source of all those crosses. Maybe I respect her for other things. Sister Mary Patience Pentecost: I was named, in part, after her. That’s my aunt the nun, from my father’s side, but I gravitate to my mother’s sister, Aunty Liv: Lynette Viola Vandonbeer. My mother, Johanna Vandonbeer Pentecost, called her Liv or Sis—when they were alive at the same time.

  I need to rest. I lie on the dirt ground and cradle into the crescent space between my passed-out companion and the dirt wall. Timing the distance between my companion’s faint breaths, I hope our bodies form a camouflaged shadow under the wooden cover above. Are we willing to recognize each other yet? I can’t even say my companion’s name, so as to acknowledge how we’re both prisoners, in such danger, together. So maybe not.

  All it will take is for the woman above to hatchet through the right bramble bush and see the paint-chipped and weathered wooden cover, which looks like one for an old well, but much larger and square, and she’ll know where we are. She’s as crazed as the devil in a desert fire, but she’s not dumb. Our only saving grace is this lush high August, hot, with leaves full. Recent reports of coyotes give me hope that my wild brothers will come upon the hacking witch and nip her ankles, trip her long enough for me to spring from this hole and run.

  But I won’t make a flaming mistake and launch myself in the ocean off the cliff wall a quarter mile off, through the twisted paths, like they said my mother did. I won’t leave my body on the ocean floor, unfound, rolling with waves, left as prey for sand sharks and lobsters. Cringing from such a thought, a panic more profound than the panic of hiding from a crazed woman drills into my chest. I shiver, although the humid air is so hot, sweat is not dripping down my neck; no, I am sweat. My entire body is encased in a blanket of sweat. I cry inside, although I’m paralyzed by fear and anger. My companion is the same. We’re the same. One of us is going to have to get a grip, turn robot, and calculate a way out. One of us is going to have to wake up, not slip, be alert. One of us . . . but which one? Which one of us is the bitch, the subject of the crazed woman who beckons from above our ditch? She must mean both of us, for I think the lunatic up top is confused. I think I must be confused too. Here now, she shouts again, “You bitch!” . . . and she’s closer. I can’t tell if she’s south of us, west, east, or north. But seems one right slice in the vines and we’re toast.

  The hole we’re in, of black soot and clay, jagged, blasted granite, too, is the remains of a basement for a guest cottage on Aunty’s Cape Ann, Massachusetts, grounds, forty-five minutes from the estate where my father and his sister, ex-nun Aunt Sister Mary, still live and where I grew up in Rye, New Hampshire. I’m home, in between finally graduating from Princeton—I took a few years off before starting college—and heading off to grad school in Manhattan. I’m doubting I’ll ever make it to grad school now.

  This guest cottage burned to the ground two years ago, alighting my mother and forcing her to jump into the sea. The next day, when Aunty abandoned us, she also abandoned her spot as a respected nurse at Saint Jerome’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts. That fire ruined everything for our family. Over the last two years, I did consider scouring the ocean floor, risking hypothermia, the bends, everything, to dredge my mother back to us. The loss of her hollowed all the happiness. All lights extinguished without her. I don’t hold a candle to her brightness.

  And while I’ve had trouble accepting the truth of my mother’s death, today, in this hole, I remain stuck on the starkness of Aunty’s abandonment of her job, which meant so much to her, and her abandonment of her family, me, who I thought meant so much to her.

  Back when everything was cheery, rosy perfect, Aunty was the one nurse with the work ethic of a tireless, commanding general in a violent war, but who wore ten-carat heirloom diamond earrings, out of respect for her “grand ma-ma,” who bequeathed them to her. She was the one nurse who wore a blue or purple or red or green 100 percent cashmere sweater over her nurse’s uniform when the hospital wing was cold, because her charity-ball mother once instructed, “If wearing a sweater, my petite cher-ahhh, only ever wear cashmere.” In her most private charity, she manipulated the records of postpartum mothers suffering postpartum depression so they could remain inpatients longer than insurance would otherwise provide—insurance companies more readily recognizing tangible symptoms, such as “can’t urinate” or “continues to hemorrhage,” than intangible observations, such as “Mother listless,” “Mother appears vacant and apathetic when child presented,” or “Mother
cries all day.” She thereafter provided living assistance to these mothers until their minds cleared through her Mighty Mary charity, the trust to fund such things.

  Growing up, I just wanted to love Aunty Liv, the one I found so similar to me in many ways. If I split myself in three, Aunty Liv formed part of my identity. My mother, another part. Myself, the third. And maybe if I’m being truthful, there’s another foundational woman I should have identified with in part as well, Aunt Sister Mary, maybe, but such identification cuts too cold. These foundational people with whom we identify, they are never exclusive, and the personal definition we hold of each is often shifting. But if you select the memories about them you call to count, then that definition can appear whole and stable, and thus you might feel stable, because ultimately you’re defining the whole of yourself. But stability of foundational identities is a mirage, a fleeting fog, a lie. I think I know this now, as I tremble in the truth in this hole in the ground. What have I blocked, what have I caused, what have I enabled, because of my fog?

  After the fire, Aunty Liv was not to be inquired of. She wasn’t to be dropped in on “without prior express and written approval.” These social restrictions were made crystal-chandelier clear in an impersonal, embossed letter from her lawyer to my father. One time we sent a grief counselor to her house, the same counselor who’d counseled me and my father, coaxing us to overcome my mother’s disappearance and fall from the cliff wall, as the papers reported. We were afraid Aunty was suicidal, likely from the guilt of surviving the death of her sister on her grounds. But when our gifted counselor showed up, Aunty threatened to shoot her in the face with her glass-cased, collector’s hunting rifle (something rumored to have been used by Teddy Roosevelt), if the counselor didn’t get off her property “stat.” Soon after, the locked chains at her driveway mouth appeared.

  I’m thinking of Teddy Roosevelt right now. The glass case holding his gun is bolted between shelves in Aunty’s Mermaid Library. The barrel of the gun points out a library window, aiming for Aunty’s lawn. I’m thinking on how Roosevelt hunted big game in the African savannah. I personally find such an act disgusting, murder in violation of nature’s highest sacred law, but I’m also thinking that right now, the woman above is justifiable big game to me.

  I’m thinking of slinking out the south side of this hole, out through the hidden board, braving the brambles, weaving out behind whatever lunatic path she’s cut, and smashing open the Roosevelt case with one of Aunty’s metal mermaid bookends, one from several sets in her mahogany library. But is her Roosevelt rifle loaded? How do I load a gun? The bullets are in the glass case, too, so no need to worry about finding bullets. It’s loading them I’m concerned with. Crazy still hasn’t found us. She’s still shouting from the out beyond, within the brambles, I imagine.

  “You BITCH!”

  I shimmy my shoulders backward so they nudge my companion’s arms; we’re still a combined body on the dirt floor. When this produces at least a light strain of audible breath in response, I close my eyes. Just one more rest, just one, before I wake us both and force an escape. Or at least sit us up to wait for some idea or natural force to save us.

  But I rest. I shouldn’t. I rest. I slip.

  My mind wanders back to two weeks ago. After two long years of grieving my mother and my aunty who abandoned us, I ignored the flashing warning on my red Volvo, stretching the warning long enough to weave around the snaky bends along the ocean from Rockport to Gloucester. Perhaps fate, perhaps the whims of an evil wind, perhaps I’d listened to something, perhaps some haunting, calling me for help, perhaps intent—intent to see my own lost love, Manny, who lives nearby—blew the gasket in the engine at just the right time to roll the Volvo dead in front of Haddock Point State Park.

  You can get to Aunty’s house via a long driveway through vine-twisted, gnarly trees, hardy enough to withstand nor’easters and the relentless salt air. Or you can trespass through protected forest after breaching a restricted side trail, which might as well be marked by literal skull-and-crossbones warnings, but is barred by looping chains and rows of boulders. These obstacles are intended to prohibit parking lot tourists from accessing the sprawling properties of adjoining residents. Since Aunty barred the street end of her forested driveway with several ropes of interlocking metal chains two years ago, I left my dead red Volvo in the park’s lot. Of course I trespassed over to Aunty’s by breaching the restricted trail and traipsing through the protected forest.

  I planned on ringing her doorbell for help. I wished she wouldn’t turn me away, ignore me, her once-loved niece.

  The idea of even having to ring her doorbell bristled my nerves as I crossed over her dirt driveway. Up until two years ago, I used to practically live part time at Aunty’s.

  I think about that moment now, in this hole, the bristling feeling of being a stranger in a place that was once a home. I reverted to being a child, and as I did, one memory stood out, as one chock-full of evidence of the nascent—or chronic or manic, I do not know—turmoil in Aunty. In real time and to a child’s mind, the day was bright and happy. It is in retrospect only, as an adult, and now lying in a hole, I rethink this memory.

  I was thirteen. I was spending the weekend at Aunty’s same pink Haddock Point house. Manny was over playing with me. We’d just dug two potatoes from Aunty’s kitchen garden, the one below her kitchen’s bay window with the yellow-and-green curtains and the flower box stuffed with hot-pink wave petunias. Blue morning glories crawled up lattice on each side like twenty-foot exterior drapes, framing all her colonial’s first- and second-floor warbled-glass windows, and scraping high to meet the newer windows on the dormers in her refurbished attic.

  Manny stayed outside crafting a round target out of vines so we could play a game of rubber-tipped-arrow archery. I held the dirty potatoes, one in each dirty hand. My feet were bare and dirty, too, and since the grass I’d sloshed through was wet with dew, my muddy footsteps marked a path through Aunty’s marble foyer, onto her turquoise bubble-print runner, and slip-sliding to the honey wood floors of the front hallway and living room.

  My Pippi braids were coming loose, and several twigs pinned my hair—before the potatoes, Manny and I had chased one of the ubiquitous wild bunnies into a butterfly bush, because I suspected him in a line of possible culprits of stealing Aunty’s bloomed roses. Manny’s theory was more romantic than mine: he guessed that a seagull named Frank was one by one picking off the rose petals with his beak so he could build a giant rose on the cliff wall each night, trying to attract the love of a mermaid named Vanessa. Manny was like that, dreamy. Is he still like that? Is he still alive?

  Back on the day when we were thirteen and I entered Aunty’s house with my muddy feet and the muddy potatoes, Aunty stared out a living room window with sheer white curtains, tied in the middle with a dried starfish affixed to bendable wire. All around her, squadrons of sea turtles, rainbows of fish, and varieties of mermaids swam among raspberry coral in the colorful-patterned wallpaper. She plucked double pendants in the divot of her neck as she twisted from the window to see me and my cyclone of soil in the hall. She always wore those double pendants—gold baby shoes for the babies she lost before they grew full term.

  I offered the dirty potatoes with outstretched palms. She fisted one in each hand and stared at them. Then she puckered her lips and braced one arm across her belly. Raising the dirt of one potato to graze her face and soil her shiny hair, she lifted a hand and pointed out the window. Silt rained around her and onto her starched apple-green dress. And as I look back on the memory, here in this hole of lunacy, her actions and words were untethered, I believe. Disconnected from the reality of what she was doing.

  Disconnected.

  Right now, I pop my resting eyes open in reliving this childhood memory and I stare, like Aunty stared out her window that day. I stare at a dirt wall one inch from my nose. Smells musty and thick in this hell. Perhaps I’m disconnected too. I shimmy my shoulders again into my companion a
nd procure a weaker breath in response, but a breath nonetheless, so I close my eyes. And I’m back, I’m back to my memory of twelve years ago, when I was thirteen.

  “This bird,” Aunty said, breaking out of her silence and thumbing backward toward her favorite willow. “This red cardinal in my tree where Manny’s hanging the vine target. He’s very funny,” she said in all seriousness. “He’s—” She shook her head. “All morning he’s been chirping jokes while you two played, but the twigs in the tree are too ignorant to get the punch lines, and the leaves are too snobby to laugh. I think the cardinal needs to work on his timing.” She shook her head again, then appraised me and my outdoor self, indoors.

  “I’m sorry, Aunty. I made a mess.”

  “What mess?” She squirrelled her eyes at me like I was hallucinating. “Go talk to that funny bird. Give him some tips, funny girl.”

  I don’t know why she called me funny girl; she was the funny one. I was just her audience, the one who would laugh, because she was funny, and I loved her. Now, as I think back on it, survey our shared history while I await death, this lightness of her making twigs and leaves sentient is confusing. Aunty was always otherwise so clinical and realistic, funny usually, yes, but a hard-boiled humor. And yet, there were these light times when she entertained a more mystical outlook on life, which I wonder now, for isn’t it clear after what we’ve gone through: Was this twig-leaf moment one of high mania? Back then, I was just happy she was happy.

  As I walked out, leaving her with the potatoes, she kept talking to the window, not to me. “They should laugh, the twigs and the leaves. They should laugh at the bird’s jokes. He’s trying so hard for them, working really hard, chit, chit, chitting on and on in his routine. But nothing. Once he figures on them, he’ll use the dumb twigs for a nest and he’ll leave droppings on the uppity leaves.” She turned to see me in the hall where I’d stalled and listened. Again she stared in a total blankness. Then she laughed her big bowl, echoey, aunty laugh that always made me laugh, too—like one sneeze leads to another’s sneeze. I was a little muddy girl with messy braids, giggling with her shiny aunty in a sunny living room.