Christopher Rice - The Vines

He sees Troy, the handsome uniformed officer, giving interview after interview on TV, describing the arrest of Xander Higgins and Delray Morrison in precise, professional detail. He sees the man grilling steaks on the pool deck at that condo high-rise in Pensacola where they all spent a weekend together after Troy and Caitlin first started dating, when the man’s installation in their everyday lives, their lives beyond tragedy, seemed like an inevitable comfort for them all, a selfless hero assuming his rightful place. Frank Sinatra croons from the nearby stereo, and the sugar-white beach looks even more fierce and brilliant than usual beneath a sky piled high with gray storm clouds that drench the watery horizon but not the shore. And Blake sits on a lounge chair, knowing it will make for a perfect memory someday, the kind you take off the shelf and write poems about when your life has stalled out, when you’re lonely and older and working too hard—the music and the barbecue smoke and Troy’s hair and powder-blue polo shirt dancing in the hot wind off the Gulf, the great towering clouds that from this distance are all visual drama and no real rain, and Blake feeling confident that if Caitlin could land someone so handsome and brave, then surely someday he’d find someone who’d make him feel the way John could have if he’d been allowed to live.

And the whole time, there was a tape. A tape of John’s real killers that Troy had hidden somewhere. There was a tape when Troy had turned from the grill that afternoon and sung along with Old Blue Eyes as if Blake were his only audience member in the theater in his mind. There was a tape as the clouds sailed from east to west and the music soared and Caitlin called down from the balcony overhead to ask them how much longer until the steaks were done. The whole time, there had been a tape. A tape that condemned two innocent men to early deaths.

And now Blake can see how Troy could gamble for hours every weekend and never lose his apartment or his shirt. But a tape like that, how long can you use it before one of your victims cracks? So he’d gone after Caitlin years later, the wealthiest young woman he’d ever come across in his years as a lying, duplicitous bastard. Even better, she was always tethered to a best friend who was sure to see Troy as a hero, sure to help Caitlin overlook any missteps Troy might take in the first days of their courtship.

And suddenly no one seems knowable, every promise the seed of a betrayal, and Blake is making sounds into his palms that don’t sound quite human as Nova grips his shoulders from behind. Because never before has the full weight of something come crashing down on him quite like this, with the force and precision of the lead pipe they struck John across the head with that night.

Blake feels a feathery sensation against his fingers and opens his eyes through tears to see Caitlin crouched on her knees before him. She’s taken both of his hands in one of hers, but in the other she still holds the gun. And behind him, Nova has stiffened. She’s watching their captive now that Caitlin has turned her back on the man.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it this way, but I wasn’t expecting you, and I was planning to… Never mind that. I’m not sorry. I’m glad you’re feeling it all at once. I’m glad that you’re not shutting it out, denying it. Sometimes you can be too smart for your own good, Blake. Sometimes it’s important just to feel things, even when it’s rage. Especially when it’s rage.

“You can’t… explain to someone that the world is not what they think it is. They have to see it for themselves. They have to learn it for themselves. I mean, look at me. You came to me with all those people who said they’d seen Troy in the casinos, and I refused to believe you. And what was my reward? I walk in on him fucking some whore at my own birthday party. And what do I do? I run out to the gazebo and I grab a champagne glass and I slash my wrists and I get ready to die. But instead, something else happens. Something comes up from the earth, and it drinks from me, Blake.

“Whatever this thing is, that’s what it does—it drinks from you and then it heals you. In every way. I’m just beginning to understand it, but I know one thing. Whatever it is, it’s been waiting for the blood of the betrayed. I gave it mine and it brought me justice. It saved my life and took away my grief. And now… now, Blake, it’s time for you to give it yours.”

Blake is pulled to his feet. He’s not sure by whom. Caitlin’s holding the gun but it’s angled on the floor, and she’s pulling him toward the open door. And he’s letting her. When Nova grabs for him, Caitlin swings the gun on her. “Don’t worry. You can be next. Maybe those boys did more to you than you told your daddy. We can bring them here too.”

“Let go of him!”

Blake feels some form of protest bubble inside him and burst somewhere around his chest before it can become words. Caitlin shoves him gently through the open back door with one hand against his back, and he stumbles forward into the porch rail, and then they’re moving through the shadows toward the brightly lit gazebo. He can hear Nova in pursuit, but he can’t take his eyes off their destination. Surrounded by darkness, its floorboards cast aside, it looks like an ornate cellar door. And Caitlin is dragging him toward it by one hand. “Remember when we were kids? When we tried to become blood brother and sister? When I pricked your finger? Well, this will be just like that, Blake. Only much more special. So much more special.”

He can hear himself crying now, or his best attempt to hold back the sobs. He is a rag doll in Caitlin’s one-handed grip, and the gun she carries is a third presence next to him, the reason Nova is following at a distance, her eyes mostly sclera, her terror evident in her inability to stand upright and the glances she’s casting back at the door and the murderer they’ve left bound inside.

“You can’t do this!” Nova screams.

“I’m not doing anything,” Caitlin snarls. “I’m giving him a choice.” In her free hand, Caitlin reaches down and picks up a pair of pruning shears from the red toolbox. One blade is slick with fresh blood. She tried, he thinks. She tried to use her own blood to kill him and it didn’t work, so now she wants mine. Needs mine. Why? Why the rush? Why now?

“Blake,” Nova wheezes. “Don’t. Please. Please don’t…”

As if to earn his trust, Caitlin sets the gun down on the ground between them. She takes his left hand in her right, the pruning shears at the ready in her left. She has angled his back to the tiny pit, as if she fears the sight of those thick, slick growths under the floorboards will frighten him out of consenting.

But it is John Fuller’s fingers he feels gripping his palm, not Caitlin’s. Lifeless and unresponsive as the black water rises to swallow them both.

Caitlin guides him backward. His heels strike the rise of the gazebo’s first step, and he finds himself stepping up and onto it. She’s pushing him even closer to the open floor, and he’s allowing it. Because all he feels are his own fingers grasping at John’s palms, striking and slipping, flint against a steel stone.

“Caitlin…” All he can manage is this frail, breathy utterance of her name, but there is something in it that strikes at her, a certain tone that pierces the veil of comforting delusions she’s pulled around herself in the wake of having her world cracked in two. Maybe there was grief in it, Blake wonders, grief for John that got all tangled up and came out sounding like grief for the woman Caitlin was before she surrendered to rage and whatever power has come crawling up out of the earth around Spring House. No matter its source, the sound of it has made Caitlin go rigid with something that comes off her like fury. The open shears between them tremble with the promise of homicide.