Christopher Rice - The Vines

“Mister Blake doesn’t need to be bothered with all your foolishness.”

“I don’t work for Mister Blake and you don’t either, and he is here of his own accord, Daddy. And I know damn well you’re not gonna tell him what you’ve been telling me about this place for years, so I’ll just go ahead right now and—”

“Nova!”

“Tell him, Daddy. Tell him about the flowers, the ones we can’t find in any book, the ones that don’t die no matter how much poison you pour all over ’em… No? OK. Well, then I’ll tell him about what I’ve seen. I’ll tell him about the one you put in a pot on our porch, and then the next day it was gone. Not dead. Not withered. Gone. ”

“Somebody picked that flower, Nova,” Willie says, but he’s resting one shoulder against the door frame, his glazed eyes studying the sunset as if it might be his last. It isn’t resignation coming off Willie Thomas; it’s defeat. Nova isn’t lying; she is spilling secrets Willie has tried to keep for years.

“It’s a private road, Daddy.”

“What are you saying?” Blake asks. “You’re saying the flower… walked away?”

“I’m saying something’s not right in the ground here. We’ve all seen it—Daddy, me, the other staff—and we’ve all taught ourselves how to un see it. We’re just like everybody else…”

“How’s that?” Blake asks.

“So busy looking for ghosts in the attic, we never think to look in the ground.”

Without so much as a sigh, Willie is gone, and for a few seconds, Blake and Nova listen to his footsteps crunching the ground outside the shed.

Blake feels a sharp pinch of sadness when he sees the expression on Nova’s face: lips pursed and trembling slightly, glazed eyes focused on the floor. It is then that Blake sees the courage it took for Nova to make these insane statements, that despite her bluster and her anger, she believes every word of what she’s said, and she is terrified… and now her father has abandoned her to Blake’s skepticism.

He decides to be objective—as a nurse, it doesn’t help in the ER to just make assumptions. As far as he can tell, Nova is not a drunk; she doesn’t smell of weed. Her first few years of college have not produced the kind of wild tales of rebellion or self-destructive behavior that were common among most of Blake’s friends when he was her age. And despite Nova’s simmering resentment toward her, Caitlin used to update Blake on Nova’s progress at LSU with a great sense of pride tinged with self-congratulatory noblesse oblige. Sleeplessness and the shock of watching her father almost get decapitated might be to blame for Nova’s anger, but not the extent of her—he stops short of marking them as delusions, but honestly, what else could they be?

And where are the telltale marks of addiction and mental deterioration worn by so many of the raving lunatics Blake sees wheeled into his ER on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis? He doesn’t see them, so he scours his memories of Spring House for any lost or buried recollection of walking flowers or strangely crawling vines. He finds nothing, but he also admits that his contact with the soil here is not as intimate as Willie’s or Nova’s, two people he has never known to tell a lie. If there is some strange, possibly supernatural secret to this place, it will be found in their memories, not his.

When he opens up his own memories, he sees himself as a child running the grounds fearlessly, convinced that he and Caitlin traveled beneath some bubble of adult protection that followed them everywhere. But the older he got, the more he came to fear jungles of shadows and open fields that seemed to lead to infinite darkness. The killing blow to his delusion of youthful invincibility was delivered by two assailants who attacked him and John Fuller one night during their senior year of high school. But truth be told, it was already dying before that awful night, and so for the past decade his experiences of Spring House have been confined to its parlors and guest bedrooms, not its gardens.

“I saw something…,” Nova finally says.

“What?”

“I knocked the woman down before she could kill Daddy. Then Caitlin was right behind me, and she opened the door to the shed. There was no sign of Troy. No sign at all. But there was something else… I don’t know what it was, but it was low to the ground. About there ”—she extends her foot until the toe of her sneaker is hovering above the spot in question—“and it was glowing.”

“Glowing?”

“Yes. Glowing. Like one of those light sticks you get in emergency kits. Only it was different colors.”

“What did the police say about it?”

“They never saw it. I don’t know what she did with it.”

“Caitlin, you mean…?”

Nova nods.

“What was it, Nova?”

She looks into his eyes for the first time in several minutes. “It was some kinda flower,” she whispers. “And it was where her husband should have been. And everything about it was just… wrong .”

Blake nods, more out of habit than agreement, then looks to the holes in the floor as if they might interject with a logical explanation of themselves.

“You don’t believe me,” Nova says. “Fine. I don’t care. Here’s the thing, though. We’re gone . You hear me? We’re gone and we’re not coming back until you find out what that thing was.”

“Does your dad know you’re leaving?”

“Check the truck. His bag is packed.”

“Jesus. Fine… But me ? What do you expect me to do?”

“You’re her best friend,” she says, as if that is all the explanation necessary.

“I was her best friend. Six months ago. You think she’s going to tell me anything right now?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s not like she replaced you. No one else has the patience for her, I guess.”

“Nova, if I call her right now about anything, especially this ”—Blake stutters a bit when he realizes this includes crazy talk of walking, glow-in-the-dark plants—“she’ll just think I’m trying to rub her nose in it.”

“Then don’t rub her nose in it… unless you think you won’t be able to help yourself.”

“Well, that’s not fair. For Christ’s sake, Nova, I’m a nurse, not a detective.”

“And my father is not a slave!” she cries, whirling on him. “There is something dangerous here, and I don’t care if she kicks him out of that house; he’s not working another day here until I find out what it is. Now, he came close enough to death last night ’cause of some stupid white lady, and I’m not going to let it happen again, you hear me?”

“Nova, I know you’ve been mad at her for years, and I get it. Caitlin’s behavior around your dad… it’s not always healthy and… I get it, is what I’m trying to—”

“You don’t know anything about my anger.”

“Oh yeah. ’Cause I’ve never dealt with prejudice in my life.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re right. You didn’t lose the man you loved.”

“Not yet,” she whispers.

And then she is gone. And Blake is left alone with the realization that in another minute or two it will be so dark outside he will either have to pull the chain on the lightbulb overhead, or leave the shed altogether. He chooses the latter.

A year before he died, Caitlin’s father transformed one of the side porches of their home on St. Charles Avenue into a solarium, replacing its three walls of sagging screens with clean sweeps of plate glass. It is on the second floor and looks out mostly onto the neighbor’s yard. Her father compensated for its oak-branch-filtered view of the Bickmores’ swimming pool by lining it with potted plants Caitlin has done her best to tend since she inherited the house a few years before.