The Vines (8 page)

17

“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.

“You see ’em?” Kyle asks. His finger is hovering several inches from the spot where what looks like a swarm of moths are dancing in and out of the streetlight’s exaggerated green glow around one corner of the second-floor solarium.

“Fuckin’ bugs, I don’t know,” Scott says. “What are we? Her exterminator?”

But Scott lifts the prepaid cell phone Mike bought for them earlier that night to his ear and repeats the question. He listens for a few seconds, then says, “He’s gone. Says he didn’t see any bugs. Can we stay focused on what’s important?”

“OK,” Kyle says, holding back his anger. “Tell me again . . . what’s important?”

Instead of answering—your wife, my line of health clubs, my endless succession of well-muscled girlfriends—Scott pads across the expansive apartment toward the bottle of Grey Goose sitting on the kitchen counter.

18

Nova’s battered Honda Civic is parked outside of the Waffle House between two pickup trucks. The car’s back window is a bubbled mess of lamination film, and the LSU bumper sticker is mud-lashed and frayed at the edges.

Before he passes through the front door, Blake spots her sitting at the counter alone, slumped over a spread of papers and file folders. The portly waitress refilling her iced-tea glass has wide eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows that give her an expression of restrained panic even as she greets Blake with a casual nod.

When Nova looks up at his approach, Blake sees the tense set to her mouth, the way her right hand has curled into a claw atop the papers she was just reading. He wonders if she was willing to make the forty-minute drive here from Baton Rouge because she doesn’t expect to sleep anytime soon.

For a while they just sit next to each other on their respective stools as trucks lumber by outside, bound for the I-10 on-ramp. Blake wonders if moving to one of the empty booths nearby would strike Nova as too intimate, too forced.

“I know why you hate her,” he finally says.

“Caitlin?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t hate her.”

Nova is collecting the pages in front of her, arranging them in a neat pile as if she planned to shove them into the purple backpack at her feet but then remembered they were part of the information-sharing deal she made with Blake earlier that night.

“Fine. I know why you’re mad at her.”

She gives him a blank stare, as if there’s nothing she likes less than having her mind read by white boys.

“I remember . . . It was last year, right after her parents were killed. Your dad said something to me about how he was putting the money together for his own landscaping business . . . ” Nova looks away suddenly. He’s scored a direct hit. “He said he and his brother were going to team up, maybe try for a bank loan. Then I never heard anything about it again. Caitlin . . . She killed it, didn’t she?”

“She offered him the house.”

“So . . . kind of a fair trade.”

“A trade? How? He lives there, but he doesn’t own it. And she pays him
less
now ’cause of it. He’s got no insurance, and now has to ask her every time he goes to see a doctor. It embarrasses him. He won’t let her see it, of course, but it does. He . . . he could have started something of his own, you know? Something with his name on it. But the minute she gets wind of it, she starts screaming and crying like she’s about to lose her parents all over again. Like he’s
her
daddy and not . . .”
Mine.
The word, unsaid, hangs in the air between them like a cloud of cigarette smoke. “All so she didn’t have to hire a new yardman.”

“He’s more than a yardman.”

“In your eyes, maybe. But he doesn’t get paid more than one.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And you’re wrong. We’re not her family. We never have been. We’ve worked every party she’s had. We’ve never been guests. Not once.”

She has spoken a truth about their position at Spring House that he acknowledged silently to himself a long time ago, and then rationalized away with glib self-assurances that Willie and Nova felt included and somehow affirmed by the company of wealthy white people.

It also dawns on him that, despite their pact in the gazebo as children, he isn’t necessarily family either. Caitlin’s slap earlier that night was proof of that. Maybe if he’d accepted Alexander Chaisson’s insane offer when he was fourteen, they would all be better off. Maybe he and Caitlin would be trapped in a loveless marriage defined by self-loathing and deceit, or maybe not. Maybe they would have worked out some mutually beneficial arrangement. Maybe he never would have fallen in love with John Fuller ,and Caitlin never would have been betrayed by Troy. Or maybe his thoughts are now as crazy as Caitlin’s recent behavior, and he should consume something that isn’t mostly sugar or caffeine.

“Are you all right?” Nova asks.

The effort it’s taken not to laugh at his inane speculation has left a strained half smile on his face that probably makes him look drunk, which is exactly what he’d like to be. “Booth?” Blake asks.

Nova nods, collects the papers in one hand, then hooks the strap of her book bag with the other. They cross the tiny restaurant together, heads bowed and brows furrowed, as if they’re doing so at the order of a demanding school teacher.

Once they’re sitting across from one another, he can see what her profile didn’t reveal: eagerness, anxiety, a desperate need to have her fears confirmed. After all, she was the one who gave him the order to infiltrate Caitlin’s home in search of some impossible blossom. The flower he tried to grab didn’t quite fit Nova’s description, but Caitlin’s behavior was stranger than any otherworldly plant.

When Nova senses his hesitation, she says, “I’m sorry about what I said . . . about John.”

Blake is startled into silence by her use of John’s first name. As far as he knows, Nova never met or laid eyes on John Fuller. She was just a girl when he was murdered, and his relationship with Blake—their secret trysts and desperate make-out sessions; those late nights when John would call Blake and not say anything, just play that new Faith Hill song everyone was so crazy about into the phone; their fumbling sexual experimentation in the shadows of the Lake Pontchartrain levee just a few blocks from Blake’s home—had no public face until after John’s murder.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“The thing about losing the man you loved. It was . . . it was probably more than I should have . . .”

“It’s just the way you said his name. It kind of caught me off guard is all,” he whispers.

“We went to the funeral. I remember, ’cause Daddy took me out of school.”

Blake is sidelined by this, more so than by Caitlin’s precise slap. He tries to recall the rows of mourners packed inside the Unitarian church John’s mother had been forced to pick for the service. While there was a good chance her parish church would have overlooked the facts of the case and given her son a proper Catholic burial, by then Deborah Fuller had become an unlikely and hastily assembled gay rights activist whose every public move was scrutinized by a variety of national media outlets. She and Blake were clinging to each other for support every time the cameras swung in their direction, each shot giving credence to the illusion that Blake had been a son-in-law and not a secret.

Now Blake scans the rows of mourners in his memory, searching for a younger, leaner Willie, clean-shaven and muscled as he was in those days, and his bright-eyed young daughter, her hair fastened in two matching braids. Perhaps they were jammed in the back somewhere, or perhaps his memory isn’t what it used to be, because he doesn’t see them. And he can’t recall the funeral with the same clarity with which he sometimes dreams it. All he sees are the stunned faces of his fellow students . . . and Vernon Fuller—John’s father, Coach Fuller, as he was known to all of their classmates—practically curling into a ball, reeking of bourbon, retreating silently yet entirely from the media spotlight and its incessant demand that he publicly accept his son’s secret life with as much chin-up determination as his wife.

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?”