In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  Present time

  The woman in black pointing the automatic nail gun at the chest of Crazy Hatchet yells down to us through the pounding rain. “Do not move, you two! I’m going to shoot her now! Don’t move! Stay low!”

  This is a moment of awe for me, not because I waffle smack-dab in the gray zone between conscious and unconscious, but because this is a literal physical show of an existential crisis. Never have I seen one unfold—all before were theoretical hypotheticals, suggestions of wars over personal morals, questions presented by philosophers and professors. But before me now, an ex-nun in black garb holds a nail gun at the chest of the woman with a hatchet in a hurricane. The pause it took for Aunt Sister Mary to speak her warnings to us to lie still on the ground was a pause during which Crazy Hatchet lowered her hatchet. And while she raised that hatchet high again when Aunt Sister Mary squinted in the rain to aim her firing, things didn’t need to go down as they are going to go down. I think, although perhaps I’m delusional, but I’m sure the standoff could have ended in our favor without further bloodshed, had Aunt Sister Mary kept the pause and her gun lowered. But done with her warnings to us on the ground, her green eyes full of fire now, like the glow of flames mirrored in a Christmas ball, alive, glazed, possessive, possessed.

  Aunt Sister Mary Patience Pentecost shoots Crazy Hatchet with a spray of pressurized nails. Chih-chah-duusch, chih-chah-duusch, duusch, is the sound of nails sinking into the woman’s chest, I think. I think they sink into her chest. Did they hit their mark?

  I can’t believe she actually shot her. Aunt Sister Mary, of all people, is capable of violence? Capable of physical defense and protection? Revenge? Vengeful justice? She must really love us, for real, regardless of how this must weigh on her. She’s a zealot.

  Aunt Sister Mary’s eyes are wild and wide, but determined and relentless, and she does not doubt her action. She does not doubt what she’s doing. She has unadulterated faith and conviction in protecting me and my companion, my mother.

  Aunt Sister Mary Patience Pentecost is trying to save me and my mother. My mother. My mother is alive. I believe this. For it is true.

  How did she know to come here? When I last saw her yesterday in Cape Cod, she stormed off, mad at me, and drove home early. I really hurt her, tweaking her for her secret on why she left the church. How did she know to come here?

  The rain is still a billion drills, and I suppose I shouldn’t feel like it’s been raining twenty hours, it’s just that time is stretching too long and warped for me. I think, although it’s so hard to say, it’s only been a couple of minutes since my mother and I emerged from the burned-out basement hole. Maybe hours. Time seems irrelevant, such a pedestrian theory, in this otherworldly dimension where the embodiments of religion and nature join forces and fight for us.

  Although I thought all was well and that Aunt Sister Mary Patience Pentecost shot her full of nails, something is wrong. Crazy Hatchet drops her hatchet and charges Sister Mary. Sister Mary, startled by the rabid animal’s fast approach, twists, drops—by accident—the nail gun, and races away, toward the high ocean. I believe she’s doing this to pull Crazy Hatchet away from us and only to her. Aunty Sister Mary pulls her black housecoat above her knees for freer legs, and I wonder what was that whipping gauze I saw around her before. Shadow? Aura? Delusion? My fractured sight without glasses?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  MOP

  Present time

  The highest crashing waves, the riptides, the coiling, recoiling Atlantic—no one is meant to survive the ocean in storm. Not many are meant to survive the Atlantic’s arctic chill when she’s calm, let alone now, at night, when she coils like a demon. But she is no demon. She is a goddess, full of anger.

  It takes a boat of adrenaline. Perhaps all the fate and faith whipped up in the lightning strikes me, for I bolt after Aunty Sister Mary and Crazy Hatchet, winding my way through the storm-ravaged bramble paths. Perhaps I limp, the cloth tied on my calf still tight to stem the flow of blood. No limp will slow me. No wind will rock me. I will not allow any more losses in my life tonight. Perhaps the ocean is, yes, she is a literal goddess. The air she commands as her army whips on the forceful winds into my lungs, making me a relentless soldier. Perhaps I do believe such things. Perhaps my god is this nature in a frenzy around me, and Aunt Sister Mary is the church in which I embody my religion, the granite church I must save.

  I come upon the sea’s edge, the great slabs of rock as big as rooftops, nearly all the slabs covered by beating waves. The women struggle before me, Aunt Sister Mary barely able to fend off Crazy, who, lost of her hatchet, wrestles and strikes au naturel. And she is winning, pinning Sister Mary to the stones and under the frothy water of the ocean’s scraping edge.

  I charge, taking no seconds to stall, like I stalled too long in fear two years ago at this exact spot in the bushes bordering the granite slabs. I bulldoze Crazy Hatchet on the rocks, like in retrospect and with twenty-twenty hindsight I wish I had two years ago, for this is indeed the exact spot at which I first saw her. She falls back, missing the greedy Atlantic, my leader, the goddess, my high command, by an inch. She pops up, charges me, flings me closer to the water and away from the safety of bayberry and catbrier up higher on the slope of the land, where Sister Mary is collecting herself, seemingly planning to join the fray once she can stable her stance.

  Hatchet doesn’t know I am a faithful servant of the goddess behind her. She doesn’t know I am safe here in the storm. Hatchet is the enemy of me, and thus the enemy of my goddess, who will protect me.

  And I am the one who has trained like a mermaid.

  I am the one who overcame the surface of our last ditch, here soiled, ready for the Sink to wash me clean.

  I let Hatchet fling me closer to my higher power. Aunty Sister Mary screams cautions over the wind. I wish I could console her with my mind, for I am unafraid. Hatchet charges once more, falling for my trap. It is dark now, no lightning ripping the sky, and the storm has calmed some, only releasing hard, straight rain, not sideways trains of liquid spears, no whipping wind, just straight, hard rain. This is the moment to reveal my ultimate superpower.

  I’ve swum this exact stretch thousands of hours. Oh yes, I have been in the Sink, the cycle down, down around . . . rocks and seaweed. In fact, I’ve entered the sea from this same spot—albeit under much calmer conditions and when at low tide—so I know I need only tread a certain way, for a certain time, dip deeper, timing swells, as if a fish, circle minor maelstroms, where they always swirl, and catch the current at the right spot, by the nose rock, to skirt the jut that marks the boundary of Manny’s land. I can swim and tread and back float three hours without pause if nature requires me so.

  My heart is strong. My mind is mended. My will divine. The sea my goddess. The weakness of my muscles and the gash in my leg are irrelevant in this spring of cauterizing cold and antiseptic salt—this water that buoys and heals me. Perhaps teams of mermaids are my teams of angels, guiding me along the right rip current and tide.

  We fall together, this murderess who stole my mother, hacked my aunty, split the mechanic, possibly took my love, threatened my church, tested my sanity. The churning sea will swallow her in a second, while she, the sea, will be my salvation, for I’ve prayed at her altar all this time, and I do believe.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MOP

  Several months later . . .

  Italy

  Detective Popover—that’s what I call Mom’s faithful cat now. It was Popover who led me to the sunflower congress and Aunty’s secret grave. They told me how they found Aunty, half sprawled up her own wall, slumped in the curve of floor and wall, as if reaching for the glass case holding her Roosevelt gun. But detectives said the gun had no firing trigger, called it a “rotted shell of a showpiece.”

  Once released from the hospital, I stood before that gun, staring, considering, wondering why on earth she would seemingly reach for it as her last act in life when there would be no
way to use it as a gun with no firing trigger. Why, then, why reach for it?

  I looked out the window to find Popover in Aunty’s grass, watching me. When my eyes met his, he turned, pointed his tail, and walked into the sunflower congress. I followed, for I believe in such things, wholly now. I hold no doubts in nature.

  Of course Aunty built herself a hidden grave. I’m a fool for not solving her Roosevelt gun puzzle before. By Aunty’s standards, an obvious ruse. Pull down on the case, as if the whole thing were a lever, and bam, in the middle of the sunflower spiral, there opened a circular metal cover, itself obscured by turf. How real detectives didn’t find this, I do not know.

  They did find an ominous two-person-deep pit out behind a bramble line, behind the barn. Detectives surmised that was a grave, and freshly dug too. They speculated that Aunty had intended to dump bodies there. But whose?

  I focused on the turf circle within the sunflowers and found only one conclusion: Aunty had another secret hiding place. I looked around within the spiral, and when I faced the house, the barrel of the Roosevelt gun, right there in the Mermaid Library, winked at me.

  I twisted the glass case down like a big rectangular knob, ran back out, and the green turf was gone; only the open well remained. Aunty’s aboveground planting beds covered the underground metal levers that connected with the gun case’s levers, that ran within Aunty’s walls, behind her library shelves and books.

  When I figured out the contraption she built herself, and remembered how long that gun had been hanging in the case, I convinced my parents to burn Aunty’s body and return her ashes to the well, as she intended. So that’s where she is now, ruling the lawn with her sunflowers, which I’ll plant every summer in a spiral, for I’ve inherited the rose house.

  Where did I find myself? Where did I surface? At Manny’s far-end beachhead, where—and how bizarre from Manny’s point of view, I can’t imagine—Manny was watching with his father from a high cliff. They both wore headlamps to cut through the storm, watching the coast guard working to save a sinking lobster boat offshore. Manny had called in the distress, seeing the poor lobsterman signaling for help, which Manny saw from the top of his property’s lighthouse. Manny thought I was simply riding out the storm at Aunty’s and needed family time, for that’s what “my” texts through the night and day had said to him.

  “But I was about to go over there, Mop. Those texts were so unlike you,” he said. “It was the lobster-boat thing that stalled me.”

  Turns out, Crazy Hatchet had lied about killing Manny. Big surprise.

  So I crawled out of the sea, ending my mermaid’s escape, loose legged and stumbling, like a mermaid stripped of her fins, and Manny caught vision of me in the path of his headlamp. Divine providence, divine coincidence, a gift from the goddess—I believe it all. For had he not seen me, the currents would have claimed me, filled my lungs for good, made me a water being. As it was, all my strength drained in the second Manny’s light feathered my drenched scalp. He ran and caught me, and 911 stole me away to treat my hypothermia and hatchet wound. Multiple bags of donor blood filled me back up, and after they jammed paddles on my chest to stem the cardiac arrest, I stabilized.

  Now it is my wedding day, several months later. And we are in an underground library outside Florence, in the Chianti region.

  My beautiful mother is fussing like a humming bumblebee around me, pinning wildflowers here and there in my hair, even though it’s just us, just me, her, Manny, my father, Aunt Sister Mary, Manny’s father, and his father’s third wife. Manny’s brothers and their spouses and children wouldn’t fit in this cool cobblestone space, and the ceremony is going to be short, so they all wait for us in the cypress courtyard of another of the Acista Italian boutique hotels. The reception was designed by my mother, in chirpy concert and over lots of cocktail luncheons with Mrs. Acista Number Three. I’m pretty sure Mom didn’t actually need to fly to Florence three times with her planning cohort for “site visits” and to “make sure everything is perfect,” but I would never call her out on it. I’m glad Mom has a new friend.

  Candle wax drips down squat candles and onto the stone floor. The spaces are filled with the colors of the rose thief: giant bunches of red roses, yellow roses, pink roses too. Everywhere. Candles and flowers and old books and stone, underground, with my mother and Manny. It is the most near-perfect wedding in my mind. We just need Aunty here, but since that’s impossible, I conjure her presence by imagining her in a shadow.

  My mother, my mom, the lovely Johanna, she was hospitalized for two weeks too. They put us in the same room at Saint Jerome’s (we could get whatever we demanded, given the decades of donations). Thereafter, for several months, my mother pained her way through grueling daily physical therapy with a relentless drill sergeant of a therapist named Brandt Ritz. We called him Butter, because Ritz crackers are buttery. She also suffered speech and psychoanalytic therapies.

  When we were released from the hospital, we donated $2 million to the mechanic’s surviving family. For his fifteen-year-old son, we set up a bottomless trust fund. But none of that, not a cent, would ever heal the son’s bleeding heart. And I will never live down the guilt, for it’s my fault, my gamesmanship, my obsession with retrieving love, that led me to leave my broke-down Volvo with his father in the first place. For my penance, I dedicate my life to working for sex-trafficking victims, starting with the one who helped save me in a foreshadowing prophecy: Pradina. The Mighty Mary Trust is reopened, I’m the chairwoman of the board, and I rewrote the mission statement so as to focus on sex trafficking, while also devoting a side trust to Aunty’s original intended purpose. This is a full-time job for me, and I suppose you could say I’ve stayed in the family business, using our name and money for good. As I should.

  My father taught me, too, about all the secrets we hold on others, and how we gather more secrets for our war chest. Information is the greatest weapon of all, both sword and shield. I understand that the Pentecosts and Vandonbeers hold silent, scary power, and we must maintain such leverage for the greater good. I’m okay with this. I allow myself a profitable dark side, too, for I accept the pure truth that those who play on the good side must play dirtier than the bad side, if ever there is to be any chance for good to triumph. Such is nature’s rule. Nature does not play nice and polite, waiting for evildoers to grow a conscience. She throws fits, like hurricanes. Love, too, such is love’s rule as well—the unintelligible logic of impartial love, unswayed by man’s laws. Nature and love fight to the death, with dirty, clawing, scraping, drowning, selfish, loving hands. Why would anyone choose anything other than nature or love as religion? Everything else is man-made and weak by comparison.

  I’m pretty sure Mom’s back to her old self months after our horror night in the barn and hole. In setting the flowers in my hair just now, she whispered, “My Mop-Bop! So lovely we canceled the GC for this splendid underground library! Who doesn’t love a wedding in Italy! Who!”

  Candles add soft light to this stony, shadowed, literary space. I am in a knee-length white cocktail dress with pops of the rose thief’s colors, red, yellow, and pink, in the flowers in my hair and my flower-patterned shoes and the rope of wildflowers around my wrist as a cuff. Mom’s design. She adjusts my wrist cuff while pecking my cheek.

  We’re about to begin. I wait now for my father to walk over and escort me down a short aisle, just ten feet long. All in performance of our ceremony.

  Manny is in a delicious tuxedo, for that’s what he wanted, and he sure is sexy as an underground Bond. The reflection of a candle flame licks the freckle under his eye, an extension of my own fire tongue, claiming my property.

  I bite my lip in thinking on our wedding night, to come in just three hours.

  Aunt Sister Mary sits in a corner, reading through her notes one final time, and as the officiant, she may be more nervous than I. My father looks over her shoulder and whispers a question about the reading he’ll do. They smile at each other, happy siblings at
a happy event.

  It’s time now. My father walks to me, bending a little since the stone ceiling is so low. He’s a tall, dark vampire. I think he could live underground here and fit in quite well. He reaches me and kisses the top of my head. “Love you, kiddo. Love you to bits and pieces,” he says, tears in his giant, bright dad eyes. I shiver in happiness, reminding myself how lucky I am. I look forward to spending my career with my father. We plan to do some good.

  Sister Mary remains my church, although she doesn’t know that’s how I think of her. And my respect is tenfold, ever since she visited me in the hospital two days after I pulled myself from the sea and the doctors cleared me of the worst part of hypothermia and heart attack, blood transfusion too.

  Then, she told me her secret.

  First she explained how she found us at Aunty’s that night. Aunty had called and gotten the Rye answering machine. The machine recorded the number, so tracking was easy. Aunty had said nothing, but the message revealed ominous terror. Aunt Sister Mary described hearing slight, somewhat inaudible gasping, or a nasally breathing, hard to tell, overridden by the blaring of “Die Rose” on repeat. I considered the timing of this call—it had to have been soon after she crawled out of the barn into the stormy sunlight.

  My father didn’t hear the message, for as soon as he’d returned from our trip to the Cape, an emergency in Hartford, Connecticut, with one of his businesses summoned him to drive before the storm hit its height. Sister Mary didn’t listen to the message until evening; she’d been reading in silence all day, nursing her anger at me, which she said was really anger at herself.

  But when she heard the message, Aunt Sister Mary rewound the recording and replayed. She says her antennae were up on a high wire. It was in the spaces she timed between the low whistle of background breaths, how long those took, that roused her trigger-happy suspicions to fire on all cylinders. “I should have called the cops straight away. But how do you convince others of your instincts?”