Christopher Rice: The Vines

And so Caitlin Chaisson begins backing down the stairs, and by the time she turns around, she finds the foyer empty—the last of the party’s attendees are but shadows outside as they follow the flickering ghostly halo of Willie’s lantern down the oak-lined gravel path that leads to the guest parking lot by the levee.

Through the double parlor she runs past the giant painting of the grand Greek Revival house as it looked before its destruction in 1850, past the caterers who are cleaning up in the kitchen; they do their job to perfection, never noticing the woman of the house as she sprints past them, her breaths turning to shallow coughs.

It is on the railing of the back porch that she sees it: half-empty, lipstick-smudged. After any other party it would have been an irritant when she passed it the next morning, but tonight it is the instrument of her salvation. She picks up the champagne flute, smashes it against the porch rail, and continues to run.

By the time Caitlin reaches the gazebo, she has tried several times to begin the incision, and the results are a series of claw marks on her left arm that are oozing a thin layer of blood. The floorboards give her footfalls greater resonance than the muddy paths she traveled through manicured gardens to get here, and this sharp, staccato reminder that she is still among the living forces her to reconsider her decision. Now she finds herself spinning in place, the shattered rim of the champagne flute dripping blood onto the gazebo’s floor.

The overhead light inside the gazebo is off. The great house is a vision of antebellum perfection beyond what was once the plantation’s sprawling cane field, but is now a maze of brick planters, flagstone walkways, and small fountains—the latter of which make an insistent, nagging gurgle in the absence of laughter and party chatter.

This moment of quiet is all she needs for years’ worth of warnings and admonishments to fill the silence, a riot in her head that shoves out all reasonable and adult voices, that has her spinning in place, her grip on the broken champagne flute growing tighter even as she tries to relax her hand.

No shadows have pursued her. No guilty husband is striding toward her across the watery lawns.

Why should he? No wound in her soul could ever be deep enough to draw his mouth from that whore’s pale, young flesh. Perhaps if she had screamed… But she is alone now with the terrible knowledge that, in her husband’s eyes, she really is just freckled Caitlin with the down-turned mouth that gives her a constant frown and the pinprick eyes that too closely crowd the bridge of her nose, the girl with the sloping shoulders and the skinny neck that’s always been too long for her frame, the awkward one, the one everyone looks over in an attempt to get a better view of the real prizes that carry the Chaisson family name: the mansion on St. Charles Avenue, the postcard-perfect plantation, and the libraries and museums named for her grandfather.

Back in high school, Caitlin overheard a teacher—not some bitchy fellow student, but an actual teacher —say of her, “The Chaissons may be loaded, but all the money in the world isn’t going to drag that girl over from the ugly side of plain.” And now it’s clear her husband is no different from that vile, hateful woman, despite the fact that he gave all the right answers during the neurotic, late-night interrogations she’s subjected him to over the years.

And yet there were warnings. Years of them, mostly subtle. When her mother was still alive, for example, the struggle not to speak up had practically torn the woman apart, and somehow, witnessing that restrained torment out of the corner of her eye had been worse for Caitlin than some outright confrontation over whether or not her handsome, charming husband really loved her.

And then there was Blake, her closest friend in the world… until he’d actually come to her with evidence. He had friends who worked at the casinos in Biloxi, and they’d seen Troy there with other women, even after Troy had promised never to gamble away another dime of their money (her money, her money, her money!) again. It was almost enough to dismiss the fact that he’d done so while in the company of various sluts (and even now she couldn’t help wonder if one of them had been the whore getting fingeredfuckedsuckedlicked by her husband right now… ).

And what had she done?

First she accused Blake of being ungrateful. After everything Troy did for you when he was a cop! Then, when that tactic didn’t shame Blake into silence, she accused Blake of having romantic feelings for Troy, of getting all tangled up in their long, complex history. After all, years before he married Caitlin, Troy was Blake’s savior, the man who had brought him swift and lasting justice. Perhaps, since then, Blake had decided he wanted Troy to be his knight in shining armor in every possible way! Hell, maybe he’d been nursing feelings for Troy ever since they’d all first met. It had been bullshit, of course. Utter and complete bullshit, but she’d hurled it right at his face rather than accept the horrible truth Blake had delivered with a bowed head and averted eyes.

In the six months since they last spoke, it has been impossible not to see the stunned and wounded look on Blake Henderson’s face every time she closes her eyes and tries to sleep.

The rock walls in her mind that keep a life’s worth of painful memories from meeting in a single river of fiery self-hate have collapsed entirely. Her present humiliation flows right through the doors of that long-ago hospital room where Blake made a confession far more devastating than the one he’d made six months ago about Troy’s gambling. He’d been recovering from a brutal assault at the time, medicated out of his head for the pain. And it was her fault, really. She was the one who’d made the mistake of going back in, of asking him later if the tale he’d told her about her father was something more than a morphine-fueled delusion. Drug-fueled perhaps, Blake had admitted, but not a delusion.

When they were just freshmen in high school, her father offered Blake money to have a romantic relationship with her. Not just money, but scaled incentives that would increase over time, all to remain in an intimate, sexual relationship with his teenage daughter. First a nice car when Blake was old enough to drive, then money for a decent college when the time came, and after that, if he actually saw fit to marry her, who knew? A house? A career? Blake had turned him down, of course, mostly with nodding and stunned silence. But the story wasn’t about Blake, or what he did or didn’t do. The story was about a father so convinced his daughter was irredeemably ugly he felt he had no choice but to arrange her marriage to a fourteen-year-old boy who was clearly on the road to homosexuality. What was it that had convinced her father she was so unattractive, so profoundly unlovable? Was it her stork-like neck? Her impossible, wiry hair?

They had all seen, all of them. Blake. Her mother. Her father. They’d seen the lie at the heart of her marriage and tried to warn her in their own pained and desperate ways. Now they were gone, all of them—her parents incinerated in a single instant when their Cessna crashed to the earth, and Blake driven away by her vengeful misuse of one of the most painful episodes of his life.

Alone—not a hazy, vague feeling that’s sure to pass in time. A diagnosis. A terminal condition. Just her and the continuous, eye-watering vision of her husband driving his hand between the thighs of that pretty little blonde, who had been smiling graciously at Caitlin across a room full of her friends just an hour before. Had the girl also stared smugly at her through the crack in the bathroom door even as Caitlin’s husband lifted her up onto the vanity? Or was she imagining that now?