Previously in the Vines Inquiry— Frank survived his hike up-island, only to end up back at the Big House and in the arms of his beloved Aunt Toni. While they caught up, Frank learned Aunt Toni was back living on Carlisle and had taken her old job as Chief of Police. While there was no news of any woman lost in the woods, Frank took a chance to ask his aunt about any…inquiries.
“What did you just say?” Aunt Toni grasped the kitchen towel in her hand-as-talon.
“Just listen to me, please,” said Frank. He’d leapt; off the root-tangled ground, off the cliffs behind the Big House.
Toni dropped the towel and lightly slapped their palms together, a personal Morse Code. “Always.”
She had jumped, too.
Frank told her everything about the previous night as they drank their tea. Then a second cup. The strange voices. The party sounds and no one there. Rosalind’s cries and their talk of ‘the storm’ and Dick. How he’d heard that strange song again today in the woods.
“And she actually said ‘hail?’”
“I swear,” said Frank. “Queen of a Midnight Hall. Like, major worship stuff.”
“And then she chopped her own hands off?”
“Ripped. From the sound of it.”
Toni sighed and looked out into the conservatory again, downing the last of her tea gone cold.
“Well I hate to break this to you, Francy, but your mother still has both her hands.” Frank’s face collapsed. “Don’t look so relieved.”
“I feel like you’re not hearing me.”
“Because I’m listening to the words coming out of your mouth,” said Toni. “Your mother is into velvet. Doesn’t mean she worships demons.”
“Hails….”
“Have you ever heard her hail anything? I’ve never known Rosalind to worship anyone, let alone a queen. I think she started boycotting monarchies the second Lemon won Homecoming over her. A story I’d only encourage you to bring up if you’re looking for a fight.”
Frank stared into his mug, watching as his reflection was morphed by its curved bottom. More layers. Of glaze, soap residue, memory. All scrubbed.
What memories are we missing today?
“I just…I know what I heard. My dad was encouraging her!”
“Maybe he was. Maybe you heard something you don’t understand. All I can tell you is that I saw your mother this morning, so did you, and I got another message from her when you were almost dying from hypothermia a half-hour ago, Mr. Vines. She didn’t bring up any hand decapitation.”
“There’s gotta be a word for that.”
“Think you’ll find it wandering through the woods during a blizzard?” Toni stared Frank down, the way only cool aunts can, throwing back any shame or bravado that might cloud the fact of the matter.
“I was looking for a lost woman,” said Frank.
“A lost woman no one else saw. How long were you out there, Lew-Cis and Clark? Jesus. I apologize. That was heinous.”
Frank rewound it through his head, for the umpteenth occasion wishing his mother had let him be a Boy Scout so he could have used the setting sun to calculate the time. At least, he thought that was a skill he could have cultivated in the Boy Scouts. But now he would never know!
“The Scouts are for odd children, Francis,” Rosalind would say, ignoring the fact that Frank was a very odd child.
And now as an adult, he wasn’t even certain that was a hard and fast requirement to join. In fact, he was pretty sure you just had to show up every week and learn knots and sell Christmas trees because cookies are gendered.
How long was I out there? I guess not as long as I thought…
Then,
No.
He couldn’t let them do that to him again. He might not have had the Boy Scouts sun time-management skills he pined for, but he was a sane adult person, dammit.
What memories are we missing today?
I was in the woods. I saw a woman running through them. Things watched me.
Frank repeated it to himself, barely moving his lips but needing the statements to occupy space outside his mind. He needed the audio to stamp itself into this reality, into this house. Aunt Toni stared at him, eyes glancing back and forth between his own. Her own silent muttering joined his. She let her foreign-for-a-Vines blonde hair out of its tiger’s eye clip and then immediately did it back up.
“I’m fine,” said Frank. Toni put the back of her hand to his forehead and shivered.
“Listen, I’m not going to pretend losing Dick was easy. But I’m also not going to sit here and say it felt the same to me as it did to you three. He was their son, and he was your twin, Cis. Your shadow.”
“He was always the sunny one.” They both smiled to block out a cry. “What’s your point?”
“My point, smart ass, is that maybe this year isn’t only hitting your parents hard. Since you left, the islands been doing great. Booming financially—we finally found our niche in all this ‘we’re haunted’ bullcrap. Your folks are never gonna tell you, but they haven’t kept up. In these last ten years, they’ve sold more land back to the Homeowners Association that in the past two-hundred.
“I told you they’re not popular in town. Cue the deer lungs hung on the back porch.”
“I didn’t even know Carlisle had deer.” Frank couldn’t meet his aunt’s eyes.
“The locals do, apparently,” she said. “All I’m saying is, you have baggage. Yes. But you’re not the only one, okay. Buddy? Handsome. My favorite nephew.” She ruffled his hair, helping it thaw.
“I’m the only one left.”
Aunt Toni leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “As far as we know. Rosalind could have… Well, no. Take it or leave it, you little brat.”
And he would take it. Gladly. Any day. She’d done it again.
Aunt Toni, maybe only so practiced from her own youth, had been like a lighthouse during his childhood. Just as tall and ungainly, but solid. Standing up and out and unwilling to go with the flow of the salty manor.
“What do I do now?” he said.
Toni started washing both of their mugs.
“First, you get out of those clothes. And then you try and make sure you and your parents don’t get entirely wrecked around each other again, hmm? Your mother’s always been a lush and judging by those bags, Mister Thirty—Happy Birthday, by the way—it may run in the family.”
We had been a little liquor-generous at lunch. And Lillian’s. And over pie.
“Birthday’s cancelled this year.” Frank tried to subtlety crane his neck around his aunt and catch his reflection in the countertop. My eyes aren’t that puffy. “On account of mourning. And snow.”
Toni rolled her eyes and reached for her butt pocket—home to her menthols. The filter touched her lips before she thought better of smoking in the Big House.
“Go for it. Mom had one on the docks last night.”
Toni scoffed. “As I said, sauced. Twelve years is a long way to cover. And now, finally, you come home and there’s a blizzard. Close-quarters. Old aches. It’s going to be a lot. They’re going to be a lot. But you’re here. So, make it yours. I used to have crazy dreams here too, but I think that’s because I never really conquered the place.” She took a long drag, opened a drawer full of fresh towels and blew the smoke into each cotton layer.
“It’s your home as much as theirs, Frank. Start acting like it. After all, you’re being a child for two.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Aunt Toni cupped Frank’s face in her hands. He was eye level with her chest. Even now, full grown, she still had an aura of Bigness around him. Big boned, big bust, big laugh and big stank face when someone said something she didn’t agree with. She kissed him on the forehead, a lingering waft of cigarette glazing down his temple as she did.
“Neither does death,” she said. “So we do what we can.”
For the Vineses, that had meant a strict moratorium on mentions. Frank, deemed a wallower by his parents, had the initial instinct to keep Dick alive through sheer force of speech.
In those first few weeks, he struggled with each conversation, cramming his brother in.
“Wouldn’t Dick have loved this?”
“No, no. I heard Dick mention once that January third was his favorite day of the year.”
Finally, it was Richard who put his foot down. Hard. On Frank’s throat. There was to be no more conversation surrounding his brother.
“It hurts your mother’s feelings.”
Frank obliged, and it became habit. Which made his parents’ behavior the past day all the more striking. Them bringing Dick up so often. Wine-addled mistakes?
That’s how people normally mentioned it; a slip up. A passing comment about the Vineses having an open seat in their car on the way back from the mainland. A former teacher politely following up on how ‘Dick was doing.’ And then they’d look down, or make firmer eye contact while their faces contorted into a no-tooth smile.
Once, the owner of the sole Italian restaurant on-island made the (kind) mistake of booking them a table for four. When they sat and Richard notified the hostess of the error, the owner came over to apologize, donning her best grief face and rubbing Rosalind’s shoulder.
Frank’s mother looked at her, with eyes drier than they’d been all year.
“If you keep knitting your brows together like that, you’re going to get worst wrinkles, Miranda,” Rosalind had said. “And I mention that as a doctor, not a friend.”
Back in the Big House, Toni led Frank through the maze of halls, pushing aside the countless swinging doors without a second thought. Six thresholds later, they arrived in Richard’s office.
“I knew it,” she said, pointing to a fire Richard had left burning. “Sit there. Warm up.” Frank waddled closer to the massive fireplace; a stone mouth taller than he was as Toni turned to go.
“You’re leaving? Now?” said Frank. Toni smiled again, so wide he could count all thirty-two of her teeth, caps and all.
“Did you… Did you forget about the lungs? Bloody deer lungs hanging from the back stoop? I’m the sheriff, Francy.”
“And the lost woman!”
“Okay, sure. That too.”
He moved to follow her, to plead.
“I’m kidding,” she said, one foot out the swinging door. “Stay here. Get warm. Whose home is this?” She boomed it; a self-help drill sergeant.
“Mine?” Toni looked at one of the portraits on the wall, as if to plead with an ancestor Frank didn’t know. “Mine.”
A chill rolled down Frank’s spine, leaving behind frigid pebbles that fell into his tailbone. He repeated the theory to himself.
He was here. This was his home as much as his parents’. Those two things had to matter together.
“This is your home,” said Aunt Toni. “So make yourself here.”
We’ve been doing this for TEN WEEKS! Thank you all so much for being a part of the Inquiry. Thanks for being here and so excited for the future to come.