Christopher Rice - The Vines

“Glad you asked, Austin.”

“It was just shock, I guess,” Caitlin says.

“You didn’t take anything?”

“There’s nothing to take, Blake. Check the medicine cabinet.”

“Did Willie make you a drink after the detectives left?”

“I can hold my liquor. I’m not fifteen anymore.”

“But you did have a drink?” he presses.

“Yes, one drink,” she says impatiently. “I’m not drunk, Blake.”

“Anything weird to eat?”

She just shakes her head.

What he wants to ask, though, isn’t about weird food. No, he wants to talk to her about the weirdness of seeing a strange woman swinging an axe that may or may not have been splashed with her husband’s blood.

But they haven’t gone there yet. They’ve been too busy playing out a similar version of this exchange over and over again, probably because the business of it distracts them from the strangeness of Caitlin’s sudden awakening.

A trade…

For a few minutes, he’d actually held her in his arms before he realized she wasn’t returning his embrace; her hands were pressed between their chests, and while she wasn’t trying to pull them free, she reacted to the pressure of him with drugged resignation, as if he were an inevitable confinement following a criminal act. Now he is seated beside the bed, and she’s staring vacantly at the ceiling. Blake is confident that if a long enough silence falls, the distance that grew between them over the past six months will once again seem as unavoidable as mortality.

Caitlin has rearranged the throw pillows on the bed behind her, and if it wasn’t for her sporty outfit—a pressed polo shirt and skinny jeans—she would look like a princess greeting visitors from her deathbed. Her episode—whatever it was—has left her paler than usual, as well as glassy-eyed. A strange, uncharacteristic breathiness cloaks her every word.

“What trade?” It’s the first time Blake has broached the topic of Caitlin’s strange announcement.

There’s no sign of confusion in her level stare. Just a tense calculation that doesn’t match her next whisper: “What?”

“When you woke up, you said, ‘A trade.’ What were you talking about?”

Caitlin shrugs and shakes her head, but she’s broken eye contact too quickly.

Is she embarrassed or frightened? He can’t tell.

Suddenly she slides her legs to the floor and pads across the bedroom’s plush carpeting. She draws the master bedroom’s sliding double doors shut, one in each hand, stealing Blake’s view of her father’s old study across the hallway and the solarium just beyond.

“The detectives, probably,” she finally answers. When she sees Blake’s bewildered stare, she says, “I don’t want the Bickmore kids staring into my bedroom.”

It is a ludicrous statement, given the vast space between both houses, the preponderance of branches outside, and the distance between the bedroom and the solarium. But it seems the solarium is exactly where Caitlin still is. In her heart, at least, or her mind. Or in her strange, inexplicable dream.

He struggles to remember Nova’s exact words. It was some kind of flower. And it was glowing and it was wrong.

“Did you see her?” Blake asks.

“Who?”

“The woman… the one with the axe.”

“Jane Percival. Yes. I saw her.”

“You knew her?”

“No. The detectives told me her name. I’d never seen her before in my life. Some friend of the caterer’s or something.”

“I bet that was…”

“What? You bet it was… what ?”

“Hard.”

“It was. It was hard…” Caitlin sits on the opposite side of the bed, her back to him, but he can see her face in the mirrored vanity a few feet in front of her. He can see both of them in it, looking awkwardly posed like the angry couple in some stock photo you’d find above an article listing the “Top Ten Reasons Marriages Fail.”

“She was pretty,” Caitlin whispers. “She’s still pretty.”

And this is the part where Blake is supposed to say, You’re pretty too. And in response, Caitlin would turn to him, effect the grimace of a dying woman, and slur, Am I still pretty, Momma? Just like Angelina Jolie in that TV movie about the heroin-addicted model who died of AIDS, the movie that had rattled them both so badly when they’d watched it together in college they had no choice but to repeatedly mock its final, awful scene. But tonight this exchange, a convenient crutch they have always used to dismiss Caitlin’s deep sense of self-loathing, strikes him as profane. Just another form of petty violence Caitlin can inflict upon herself for not being as beautiful as her mother.

These thoughts have taken him down a longer road than he intended to travel, and when Blake looks up, Caitlin meets his eyes in the mirror. There is a hard glint in her stare that sparks a bewildering surge of sexual attraction in him. Maybe because it is so uncharacteristically aggressive of her, so uncharacteristically masculine . He shakes his head, but can’t quite dismiss the thought that Caitlin— this Caitlin—may not be the same person as his best friend from just six months ago.

When she speaks again, her voice has the hollowed-out quality of someone struggling to speak evenly through the breathlessness caused by fear. “He was fucking her. In the guest bathroom. Upstairs. The door was open and I could see him fucking her, and I… well, I guess I realized I don’t have your courage, Blake. Or your mouth. I couldn’t confront them, is what I mean. I just turned away and ran. And then…” Her tongue moistens her lips suddenly and quickly, an action that suggests her glaze-eyed stare is as substantial as a paper mask. “Then we all heard that little slut screaming, and then… Well, then it looked like there was more justice in the world than I previously thought.”

Justice? He manages to keep this astonished question to himself, but the struggle must be written on his face, because Caitlin is studying him with sudden, animated intensity, and Blake realizes he is on the verge of failing an important test. Whatever he says next will determine her next move and the access she will grant to him until this whole thing is sorted out, to say nothing of his role in her life, if he’s to have one at all, after this bloody affair has come to an end. She has assumed, without reservation, that her husband is dead, and he’s confident that if she expressed this to the cops that morning as plainly as she just expressed it to him, they would still have her in holding.

He chooses his next words as carefully as he would insert an IV in an infant. “Nova said she saw something in the shed, right before you went in.” Blake scans the room for anything matching Nova’s description of a strange flower that just isn’t quite right, but he only sees the vanity bedecked with perfume bottles, and the nightstands stacked with paperbacks and copies of New Orleans Magazine . The sumptuous bedroom is still fresh from the housekeeper’s last visit after Caitlin left for Spring House… but no flower.

“She wasn’t sure what it was,” he says. “But she said she saw it on the floor of the shed, and whatever it was… it was glowing. She thought it might be some kind of flower.” His delivery at this point is sloppy and abrupt, he knows. But it is the quickest way he can think of to mask his stunned reaction to Caitlin’s bloody definition of justice.

“She was probably drinking along with the rest of the help .”

“So… no idea what she’s talking about?”

“None,” she says. “You’re here because of something Nova said?”

“Of course not. I’m here because it’s… you .”