In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  She answers my ten thousandth call.

  “What’s that, Sisterloo?” She answers in song, the words a trill and a lilting C.

  “Do not go to my house,” I say, short and in no melody.

  “You’re imagining things, Liv. Please, honey, I’m worried.”

  “Please, Johanna. Go. Home.”

  “Okay, you know what. How’s about this. I drove to Gloucester actually, to eat dinner at the new hotel, the Bennington. It’s faaaaaaaaabuulous, by the way. They let me bring Popover in and everything, gave him tuna in a crystal bowl! I was about to leave and pop over to your place, because I don’t listen to no big sister when she’s all crazy and I know we got more talk to do. How about you drive right here to the Bennington when you’re done at the hospital? I’ll get us a room and we’ll sleep here tonight. And we’ll go to Zimman’s in the morning. Babycakes, you’re upon your second trimester—we have to get a move on.”

  Johanna never listens to the news, so she has no clue there’s been a mass shooting in Boston, involving a senator and the kidnapping of her two daughters. Johanna, the special funny girl family princess, is blissfully clueless. I wish I could be. And now she wants me to sleep in a new hotel, ten minutes from my house. Whatever. Whatever will keep her away and safe.

  “Good. Good. Yes, Johanna. Yes. Stay there. I’ll go to the Bennington once I’m done with work.”

  I don’t tell Johanna I’m in my car and off my shift. With her safe, I’m going to make a stop on the way. I’m going straight to Danvers, to check directly on Kent and get my damn vials back. Screw this anxiety and worry. I’m facing things, bringing it all out in the open, exposing Cate for what she did to Vicky. She’ll threaten to turn me in for possessing the vials. But damn whatever happens in the press—I can control this. I don’t know why I tried to deny my power before. The Vandonbeer name can also be used as a shield, I can’t forget that. We have connections. We have money. We hold extortion-level secrets on strategic powerful people, people who made their posts in large part on our decades of donations, some under the table, exported and laundered, not reported. We learned centuries ago to always lie low, set the traps, and be ready. Power is an ugly word in our family, yes, but the truth is, we can be ugly. I can shut this shit down any number of ways. In many, many ways, I am above the law. I am ugly. I have power. I can’t be afraid to use my weapons of connections, extortion, secrets, and shame. I don’t fear the weak, the sheep, the low-down, the press, or the law. I own it all. I’m a Vandonbeer. I am a damn Vandonbeer. I can be an ugly, powerful bitch, all right. People think we abolished royalty long ago. We didn’t abolish royalty. Royalty went underground; we rule through puppets, charities, corporations, private equities, and empty vessels they call politicians. Citizens United, please. It is exactly what you think it is: ugly power.

  I’ve tried all my life to pretend like I’m normal, like I’m not ugly and powerful. But I am a fucking Vandonbeer, so I’m done playing games.

  I punch my thighs so hard as I drive, I know I leave bruises.

  Am I really that powerful? Can I do this? Am I deluding myself?

  Drive. You must do this.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MOP

  Present time

  There is a woman in black with a nail gun, firing into the sky and screaming at the woman with the hatchet. My companion awakes and vomits on my legs. I can’t take this. I can’t take this. I can’t take this. I try to stand, and all my remaining blood rushes down, throbbing at the part where I tied the cloth tourniquet. This time I crash back down to the ground for what feels like the last time and for good. I slam my head against the soft rock. Feels like with the force, the rock reveals it is not a pillow, but rather a throwing star that slices through my cranium and lodges in my brain.

  One week ago, Manny and I landed back in Boston after being in Milan for a week. After I connected who Manny and I saw on the rocks the night of my mother’s disappearance to the woman in Aunty’s barn, I kept my silence, didn’t say a word to Manny. I said I was feeling overcome by the recollection of the woman screaming on the rocks and that I needed to fetch my journal, which I left at Aunty’s the week before. I told Manny I’d meet him back at his home in half an hour and we’d go to Rye to speak to my father about a wedding.

  I also called the mechanic who’d towed my red Volvo the week before, and the mechanic said it’d be about another week until I could get my car back. I was going to have to rely on Manny for the driving for another week. So be it. Not having my own car was the least of my worries.

  I fixed my intentions on the woman in Aunty’s barn. And I really did leave my journal in the gray-and-green guest room. I didn’t call ahead to Aunty to tell her I was back from Milan and heading over. I had planned on getting the journal and investigating the woman in the barn.

  It was high tide when I set off from Manny’s house a week ago, so I skipped plunking into the middle beach and stayed within the higher trails through mounds of bayberry, blackberry, blueberry, and then on into the catbrier and brambles and arthritic trees. When I came to the secret trail that meets upon Aunty’s ring of willows and maples and perennial beds, I stalled to watch her leaving and locking her barn again—I suppose she was attending to her rounds as house nurse for her “friend.” But, I thought, why does she lock her in?

  Why the lock on the outside?

  I should have screamed this question and forced her into reality. But she again wore no eye patch and she smiled wide to a bird in a tree with her broken teeth. Her wispy gray hair flew about like she was the maddest, oldest witch in the coven, the one the other witches stay away from.

  So I waited until she returned to her pink house and her bright kitchen, which glowed yellow and sunny against the flawless blue sky. From the backyard through one of the kitchen’s two bay windows, I could see her wall of now sparse collection of antique yellowware bowls and platters, the few pieces scattered in no pattern on an open antique wormwood shelving unit, which anchored to the wall perpendicular to the one with her black gas stove. Aunty stood with her back to the bay window, selecting a yellowware bowl. I couldn’t get over how little of her collection remained. About eight pieces out of the original, I don’t know, dozens and dozens. She prided her yellowware collection. Colonial Living magazine once featured it in a four-page spread.

  What happened to her yellowware?

  I slipped around to the front door, entered, yelled “hi” to her and “back from Milan,” but ran through the Mermaid Library before engaging her, and into the green-and-gray guest bedroom. Beside the twin bed was a long dresser with four rows of drawers. I expected to snag my journal from atop the dresser. But there was no journal. I raced to the guest bathroom, ransacked the cabinet, and found no journal, for why would there be a journal in a bathroom cabinet? I looked under the twin bed, the gray braided rug, the green comforter and gray sheets, and still no journal. I hadn’t used the dresser, but nevertheless, I set to yank all the drawers. I forgot about the woman in the barn, frantic that if I didn’t get the journal, I couldn’t return to Manny in time. It made no sense, but the grief fog and fury had returned. Any little pebble, like not finding my journal, threw me off. I didn’t even allow myself to think on the boarded attic and bedroom doors upstairs.

  My skin itched, I wanted my journal and out of Aunty’s house so bad.

  Where’s my journal? Where’s my journal? Where’s my journal? Whatever she’s doing upstairs and in the barn, her problems. Not my problems. I need out. I don’t want to be dragged down. I want to move on. In my life. With Manny. No one else. I want my journal. I just want love back. It was wrong to come back here.

  Inconceivable irrationalities entered my mind: if I don’t find my journal, I won’t be able to leave with Manny, and he’ll leave me. I’ll lose him forever.

  Where is my journal? What’s going on in the barn? No, find the journal. Get out of here. What about upstairs with the boarded doors? The metal scraping in the attic? Get the j
ournal. Get the journal. Get the journal. Get out.

  The top drawer held nothing but pillowcases. Slam.

  The second drawer held nothing but bundled Christmas cards from well-wishers over the years. Slam.

  The third drawer held one thing, a piece of paper. I skipped it. Slight push and turn of my head in a wince. Did it really say that on that piece of paper?

  The fourth drawer held a spare bath mat, the pink robe I wore last week, and, thank God, my journal. Grabbed journal. Slam.

  What was that piece of paper in the third drawer? Did it say “I know what you did to Vicky” on it?

  I returned to the third drawer. I ignored, although why I don’t know, footsteps behind me in the Mermaid Library.

  The paper was a note that indeed said on the outside fold, I know what you did to Vicky.

  The inside held the handwritten words of a mistress taunting a wife. This note holds the truth to why we are in this hurricane right now, me bleeding out life, my companion too.

  But was being a mistress the ultimate cause to our present horror, or was it a symptom, or the final cause? Weren’t there a number of causes leading up to our horror in this hole in a hurricane? Suppressing grief, denying mental illness might be other causes.

  One week ago when I found the mistress note, Aunty entered the guest room as I shoved the note in the pocket of my black pants.

  “I’m leaving now,” I said. “I’m going to Rye with Manny.”

  “So you’re going to keep the note then, Mop?” Aunty said.

  “You wanted me to find it, didn’t you, Aunty? That’s why you hid my journal. I know you want to be free of whatever you’ve got going on. But I’m not ready to hear it yet. I don’t know if I ever will be. This is your problem, and I think you know you need help. But I’ll tell you one thing. If that woman in the barn is connected to what happened to my mother, I will find out, and I will get justice against whoever hurt her. Whoever.”

  I stared her down with a vengeance, pupils raised high in low-cast lids, chin down, sending my message, strong in my outward voice, but weak in my core, for as I said the words, I wanted to jump out of the window, slide down the basement bulkhead, and run. I scratched my arms and shivered on the spot, so desperate to be free of her naked, broken face and her, blocking me in the doorway.

  Aunty stared at me with one sad eye, like a helpless cow rehearing the eternal cries of her calf being slaughtered. Withdrawn, defeated, depressed, and lost in a lonely field.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have left just then. Maybe I should never have come. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe I was the strongest I’ve ever been.

  I pushed past her in the doorway, and when I did, her body felt as light as an empty piñata. She stumbled aside, one arm crossed across her ribs, holding her other straight arm, wincing as if I threatened to hit her. I headed back to Manny’s through the bramble trails, the mistress note in my back pocket. The journal in my hands.

  About halfway, my cell rang. I paused on the layered rocks along the shoreline, standing in the same spot where Manny and I had seen the woman screaming two years ago—the woman in the barn two years later. Sea wind brushed my cheeks, tousled my hair.

  “Mop?” Aunty said on the phone.

  I inhaled as my answer, catching a mouthful of salty air.

  “Mop, I’m heading to Rye too. Going to change and then I’m leaving, like ten minutes. I’ll meet you there. I want to discuss all of this with your father and with you. I’ll meet you there. Please, I’m ready for help. Please,” Aunty said.

  This.

  This call.

  What would have changed had I not answered this call? Would I have continued on to Manny’s? Would I have left for Rye with the intention of remaining voluntarily numb to Aunty, shutting her and her crimes out? Would I have listened to whatever she wished to reveal to me and my father, not knowing what I was about to uncover in going back to her house?

  As I hung up, I ticked my head to the side in a click of my neck, as if this click was the press of a “Start” button on once again, to resume the intent to investigate the woman in the barn. A wave of high tide slammed me awake to the day and to a renewed mission. I had a sudden urge to visit with the barn patient on my own, without Aunty’s meddling and incongruous explanations hovering over. I had no clue what Aunty intended to tell me and my father in Rye, but I sure wasn’t going to listen to any of it without my own insights into the matter. So I stalled on the rocks with the phone dead in my hand, and I plotted my next steps.

  I didn’t look over to Manny’s lawn beyond the middle beach. Didn’t consider how he might be watching me. Instead I focused on the flight of a seagull, swooping through the bluest blue over a fisherman’s green boat, apparently trying to steal his catch. I was ready. I was intent. I was present. I smelled the salt in the air. I’m here.

  I looked to the rocks and the tide pool beneath my feet, and I waited a beat or two in meditating upon the microscopic fury of a tiny crab, cementing my intention in the stone of me. I turned back toward the bayberry mounds, the bramble and catbrier hedges, and headed into the thicket of trees around Aunty’s. I passed by the cottage remains of my mother’s demise, and I paused at the path head behind the haughty, spiral sunflower congress. There, I waited, watching her enter her Audi, back up, and drive off. As the only black item on her property, when her car disappeared, a heavy shadow lifted and thus her departure lit the world aflame in a wavy rainbow. Like I’d died and gone to a distorted heaven.

  Still, I waited, to be sure, and once the coast cleared, set off for the back of the barn, so as to enter like I had the first day I arrived back at Aunty’s.

  As I brushed through the rosemary and basil garden, kicking up whiffs of herbs, which made me hungry, and was about parallel with the boarded window of the side room on the barn, where the woman lay, a finger tapped my shoulder from behind. How I didn’t hear the approach, I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t present after all.

  I screeched and hauled around, shrinking and preparing my hands in self-defense. But upon seeing his face, I clenched up and melted in a fast breath relief. Relief I wasn’t to be harmed, but still heart-pounding fear he’d find the secret in the barn.

  “What are you doing?” Manny asked, fixing me with a somewhat frightened, somewhat clinical look.

  I knew I had to act my way out of this. I wasn’t prepared yet to let Manny in on the true insanity. And there was only one way to get him to step back and not venture beyond to investigate where I was headed.

  “Oh, huh, you scared me,” I said, jumping a second time. “I thought I’d go grab one of the props from our summer stage, from when we were kids. I was thinking it would be cool to do a little playacting for my dad to tell him about the wedding. He’s going to freak, Manny. He’ll be so excited to focus on something good for a change.”

  Manny smiled, and whenever he does this, two lines appear on his cheeks connecting his eyes with his chiseled chin. The appearance of these lines works a chemistry in me, so I smiled back and bit my bottom lip, crackling light taking the place of my heavy heart. For this response, Manny grabbed my hips, and so I had the opportunity to sell this whole charade and solidify my lie about getting props from the barn, but in a true way, for I just about die every time Manny pulls on my hips—closer, closer, closer to his hips.

  “Aunty’s not here,” I said, suggesting he could pull harder, and thus allow me to sell this story for a song, seal the deal with the solidifying agent of sex. I sucked his neck.

  I do love Manny. I did plan on telling him everything. I did. I just wasn’t ready yet, because I wanted to give him all the facts. I hope he can forgive me. I hope he’s still alive.

  I unbuttoned his jeans, he unzipped my pants, we kicked our clothes into the rosemary and basil. He pinned my body against the side of the barn, the boarded window to my right. He pushed up inside me while I stood, my right leg raised and bent, so he could enter at the right angle and thrust. Our sexual geometry, just righ
t. We pulsed against the barn’s side room in a rabid passion, my back banging against the peeling paint. He felt like the greatest scratching sandpaper to an unquenchable urge, and I reciprocated by soothing his heat in an agreeable wet. God, he moaned like a pleased beast, banging, banging, banging me against the wall of the barn’s side room. I didn’t care that the mechanic rabbit who guarded the sunflower congress had hopped and frozen on a stone to watch. For a displaced moment, I was free of everything and only with Manny in some heaven dimension on earth.

  And then he dropped his head on my shoulder, exhaled as if he’d finished a grueling sprint, and pulled away one inch, which felt like ten miles to me.

  “Holy shit, Mop. That was amazing,” he said.

  “It was,” I said, because it was. It was fast and furious and heated and crazy and raw and outside, but it was amazing. Despite the miles on my tortured mind, I must remember, we are young.

  I looked to our scattered pants in the herbs and settled again on my intention.

  “Babe,” I said, catching his jeans with my foot and kicking the pair to my hands to hand to him. I did the same with my own pants, the underwear still inside. My cell and the mistress note were safe in a back pocket, but my journal had tumbled out. I headed to bend to the journal, which had rolled to the stone the rabbit stood on. “Head back to your house. I want to get another surprise for you. I’ll be right behind. I’ll be there superfast. Go, go, go,” I said.

  I knew if I smiled and demanded, he’d agree to go upon a twinkle in my eye and the promise of a surprise. I had no real surprise to give him, but I figured I’d figure on something.

  The vertical smile lines on his face returned, and while I did consider a quick round two, he mercifully turned to return back down our secret path to his house and car to wait for me. I watched him snake away through those bramble trails.