Christopher Rice - The Vines

Blake tries to take a breath, but it feels as if his nostrils have been plugged once again with the gauze he woke up with the night of the murder. And then he is blinking back tears, and Nova has bowed her head at the sight of them.

These are the moments when the sense of loss sneaks up on him. He can spend hours lighting candles at John’s mausoleum, engage in all manner of planned rituals designed to purge himself of sadness, and the tears won’t come. Rather, it is in these moments of fatigue and distraction that the grief overtakes him. He knows it’s childish, but there is a belief in him that ever since that terrible night, his is a life half-lived, a desiccated alternative to the fantasies he and John whispered as they held one another on grass kissed by hot winds off the lake. Who cares if the life they plotted for each other once they were free of high school had been nothing but teenage fantasy, devoid of accountability or consequence? That lesson should have been theirs to learn.

“I didn’t know you were there,” he manages quietly.

“We were in the back. Daddy, he thought it was important that we went. Not just for you. But ’cause the… you know, so people could see…” There’s a bitterness in her voice now, and after a few seconds of tasting it, Blake is able to identify its source. Nova’s father wanted them at the funeral because John’s murderers had been black.

Delray Morrison and Xander Higgins. Their mug shots are emblazoned in Blake’s memory with greater clarity than the funeral. Blake had sensed the presence of another assailant that night but he hadn’t seen one with his own two eyes. In light of the head injuries he’d suffered during the attack, he wasn’t willing to cast further doubt on his testimony by insisting on the presence of a ghostly third attacker. Besides, the evidence that Morrison and Higgins had acted in concert was almost impossible to argue with.

It was Troy Mangier, then a young Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy, who had thought to look into several attempted carjackings in Jefferson Parish reported in the weeks before the murder.

Barely a week after John was killed, Troy pulled over two young black men who were carrying materials in their trunk that matched the bindings used to lasso John and Blake to the foot of the electrical tower. The brazenness of this, cruising through the same part of town where they’d committed a deadly assault just a few nights before, would be used by the prosecution to paint both men as remorseless killers.

But they pleaded their innocence until the very end. Didn’t even try to go for a lesser charge. Didn’t try to convince the jury that John’s death had been unintentional. Just kept saying it wasn’t them.

And in a way, they hadn’t been lying.

After all, it was the water that had really killed him. The water that had risen around them with the silent determination of smoke filling a room.

Technically, John Fuller’s murderer was a pumping station, a nondescript one-story white building that plugged a hole in the levee where one of the drainage canals dividing Jefferson Parish entered the lake. You weren’t supposed to swim in Lake Pontchartrain; the water was too polluted, and boats didn’t launch from that spot, so almost no one—not even the affluent white families that lived just on the other side of the levee’s green rise—were all that familiar with the exact rise and ebb of the water along the rocky shoreline, particularly after dark.

The autopsy suggested John’s head injury was so severe he might have wound up in a coma even if Blake had been strong enough to free him before he drowned. But it didn’t matter. The feel of the rope through his desperate, prying fingers, the weight of John’s body, all of it thrummed within Blake like a second heartbeat as he spent hours in the gym, turning himself into a tower of muscle that at present was just shy of cartoonish and a few years away from grotesque.

Delray Morrison. Xander Higgins. They’d made the mistake of forcing a lousy public defender to try to prove they were never there at all, and they’d lost. And now they were dead. One shanked in the prison yard, the other dead of a drug overdose in his prison cell.

Now they seem to hover over the table between Blake and Nova like entangled spirits, and Blake wonders if this is sign of growth on his part, that he can actually feel concern for how Nova might feel that the men who murdered his first boyfriend were black.

“Nova…”

“What?”

“You know, I don’t… That I never…”

“You never what?”

Never held it against you? Your race? How could he say that without sounding like a complete ass? How many times he gritted his teeth in anger over the years when his devout Catholic colleagues would say things like, You’re not like those other gays, Blake. And his people hadn’t been enslaved for hundreds of years.

“It means a great deal to me that you were there,” he finally says. “That’s all… It means…” She’s watching his face intently, but she’s withdrawn her hands from the edge of the table as if she fears his emotions might require a small seizure to get free.

“So,” she finally says, “I take it things didn’t go so well with Caitlin.”

She’s waited a respectful amount of time to say them, but her words still feel like a dismissal. Is she as uncomfortable with forced moments of so-called understanding between races as he is?

“She slapped me,” Blake finally says. He feels strangely as if he’s just betrayed some sort of confidence, and it gives him a slight taste of what abused spouses must sometimes feel.

“Why?”

“Because I tried to take it with me.”

“The flower?” Nova asks, sitting forward, as bright-eyed and eager as he’s ever seen her. “It’s there? You saw it?”

“It wasn’t glowing. But whatever it was… it didn’t look right. Out of proportion. Strange. I don’t know… What matters is she didn’t want me going anywhere near it. Listen, I went online before I left the house, and there are all types of hallucinogenic plants out there. But not the kind you can just get exposed to. You have to either eat them or smoke them or—”

“You think I hallucinated it? You just saw it yourself.”

“Yeah, I did, and it wasn’t glowing. So maybe it’s mind-altering in some way if you’re exposed to it in—”

“I saw it for thirty seconds through a door. I didn’t touch it, didn’t smell it. My daddy was closer, and you heard what he thought when I talked about the flower. I wasn’t hallucinating, Blake.”

“Fine, but maybe Jane Percival was when she killed Troy.”

“Then where is Troy’s body?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you’re gonna blame Caitlin’s crazy on some flower that’s making her hallucinate? You think that’s why she slapped you?”

“I think she’s falling apart. I think she’s been falling apart for a while—since even longer than all this started—and there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Kinda hard to blame a flower then, isn’t it?”

Blake has no response to this. Finally he points to her pile of papers. “Your research?”

Nova chews her bottom lip for a second. He figures she wants to press him for Jane Percival’s last words. But he’s already given her an intimate look inside Caitlin’s home and deteriorating mental state. It’s quid pro quo time, and he isn’t budging.

“So Spring House allegedly burned down in 1850—”

“Wait a minute. Allegedly? Felix Delachaise got wasted and burned it down because he was broke. He couldn’t manage the fields. An entire cane crop died on him, and he lost his shirt. Didn’t his whole family die in the fire?”