Christopher Rice - The Vines

Below, the shadow darts past the pool, bound for the back fence. The apparent senselessness of this move infuriates her. She was oddly more comfortable with the idea of someone breaking in and trying to kill her. But now the intruder’s motives seem unknowable. Why make an escape over the back fence when he could just as easily sweep down the side of the house and over the decorative little wrought iron gate in front? If he’s a burglar, why did he bypass the cabana, which had things of real value inside?

Again he appears, this time on the other side of the pool. She can see he’s hunched over now, holding something in both hands. Some sort of hood or stocking cap covers his face and head. And he is fat, his movements hurried, but ungainly. There’s no bag or backpack, nothing in which to hide a cache of stolen goods. And now he appears to be headed for the garage.

The back fence, she thinks. What the hell was waiting for him at the back fence? Why did he hang out there for a good five to six minutes? What’s at the back fence other than a view of the house?

A view of the house… No bag for stolen goods. Pausing briefly at various points throughout her backyard, where there’s nothing of value to steal…

The police don’t work this way, not even in New Orleans. And as Caitlin turns it over and over in her head, she can think of only one explanation for the guy’s strange zigzag path through her property. He is after views. He is after angles.

He is planting cameras.

There is a purity to the rage that courses through her now. It is not the feeling she expects; it has nothing to do with having her privacy invaded. It has more to do with the realization that if someone other than law enforcement is placing her under surveillance now, there can only be one reason: Troy.

How many other deceits were woven through Troy’s infidelities? How many gambling debts or hidden bank accounts? As a freshman in college, she’d been stricken by a public-health notice in her dorm that assured all who read it that when a patient tested positive for one sexually transmitted disease, they were likely to test positive for another. Surely this was just as true when it came to diseases of character.

Before she has time to reconsider, Caitlin pulls the letter opener out from the stack of mail pinned beneath the magazines still sent every month to her dead mother. She presses the tip against the flesh of her palm, then gently presses upward until she feels a slight tug that tells her she’s cut the skin. Then she presses harder, until a thick vein of blood emerges from the center of her palm.

She expects the blossom waiting below to expand its petals, to raise its stamens with evident and undeniable thirst. But the flower does no such thing. Indeed, the first drop of blood hits the white petal and rolls off it like water on a Scotchgarded sofa cushion. The petal isn’t even stained. In a panic, she wonders if it’s a simple matter of volume, remembers the arterial flow she’d opened from one wrist the night before. There’s no way she can risk that again, not now, not here.

The pain in her palm becomes unbearable. She drops the letter opener and dives for the love seat, then brings a wad of tissues to her bleeding hand. They are soaked through in seconds, and she is left with the gun, and the oblivious blossom that lacks the same thirst as the vines that gave it life, the vines that snaked up through the floor of the gazebo and nursed from her mutilated wrist. It is a wholly different thing. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Whatever strange force animates them, these are living things, and like all plants, they possess various phases of thirst, growth, and bloom.

Below, the shadow now saunters through her backyard. The man—she’s reasonably sure it’s a man—looks back over one shoulder, lifts his arm, and waves in the direction of the back fence, and that’s when Caitlin’s suspicions about the guy’s intentions are finally confirmed. The yard, the back door, the garage—she’s confident all are now under surveillance. And the slow, arrogant swagger this bastard has acquired during his nighttime visit to her property fills her with fresh rage.

If the flower before her wasn’t equipped to come to her rescue, perhaps it was time to visit its source.

When she hears the tap tap tap against the glass next to her, she’s willing to believe that the stranger has floated up to the second story of the house and is rapping against the solarium walls with one fist, and she shoots to her feet, gun in one hand. But instead of a floating shadow, she finds herself looking at the streetlight on the corner through some kind of black gauze. But gauze isn’t the right word for it. More like cheesecloth that’s been pulled over the entire sheet of glass—only the gaps in it are shifting and rearranging.

Bugs. They’ve lined the outside of the glass wall with such intricacy and precision that it’s hard for her to see them as anything other than graceful, and so referring to them as bugs seems like an insult. There are so many of them, so densely packed, that she can’t tell what exact type they are, only that there is more than one kind. She has spent most of her life living in fear of palmetto bugs, what people refer to as the classic New Orleans cockroach. But if they’re among this strange legion, they’re too outnumbered to strike a primal chord of fear in her.

She places her free hand against the glass, even knocks a few times. No response from outside. Then she places the gun down and lifts up the sundae glass carefully in both hands, and as soon as the blossom’s giant white petals are a few inches from the glass, a great pulse moves through the swarm outside. The streetlight is blacked out completely as the lace pattern suddenly gathers into a solid cluster of rustling darkness, a black halo around the spot where the blossom is kissing the glass.

Caitlin’s laughter is a warm, rich thing, a mixture of arousal and delight as sensuous as the sounds Jane Percival was making in the upstairs bathroom at Spring House while Troy fingered her.

She sets the sundae glass down on the end table right next to the window, and the swarm pulses again. The borders shift, but it holds its general shape even as it moves several inches down the glass to be closer to the flower.

It occurs to Caitlin that just a few days ago, this sight might have horrified her—this sight should horrify her—but now her cheek is resting against the glass, her fingers tapping gently in time to the sounds of more and more insects pelting the thickening blanket of cicadas, flies, moths, and palmetto bugs. Now Caitlin feels embraced by hidden forces laced through soil and sky. And she feels comfortable leaving the blossom behind as she returns to the patch of Spring House that gave birth to it. If the insects assembled on the other side of the glass are not her protectors, there’s a good chance they will act as guardians to the flower that drew them out of branches, gutters, and nests. At the very least, there should be enough of them by the time she gets back to completely hide the solarium from view.

“She’s leaving,” Scott Fauchier says. “He’s gonna follow her.”

“Ask him about the bugs,” Kyle Austin says.

“The what?”

“The bugs . Look!”

Kyle points to the giant computer monitor on Scott’s desk, and suddenly Scott is bending over so close to him Kyle can smell the bergamot in his cologne.

Scott’s loft-style apartment is inside an old brick school building on Magazine Street, a few blocks from the Mississippi. The furniture is all glass and steel, the carpets a dull shade of gray that looks like it wants to turn into a deeper, richer color. Everything about the place screams Miami coke dealer, and when Scott offered him something to settle his nerves, Kyle was surprised he didn’t have anything stronger than Grey Goose. There are pictures of grown-up Scott everywhere—usually with a buffed-up, ponytailed little trainer on his arm—but the way the two of them have been lounging in front of the computer for most of the night, waiting for Mike to set up the wireless cameras, has made Kyle feel like a teenager all over again. The thought gives him a warm fuzzy feeling and he actually smiles, before he remembers he and Scott had sort-of murdered someone when they were seventeen, and that was the only reason they were hanging out at all. That’s what guilt truly is, Scott realizes, a fishhook’s tug on the third or fourth minute of every happy moment.