Just Kiss Me (6 page)

VIVIEN DREAMED SHE
was on the set of a film she knew nothing about and in which she didn’t want to participate. No matter how much she protested, everyone insisted she play her role. Each time the director said, “Action,” the crew stared at her, expecting her to know what to do. She’d always had a gift for memorizing her lines but she’d never been given a script. She liked to break down a scene and know her part before she stepped in front of the camera, but she didn’t know her part. Improvisation made her freeze and her insides felt stuck in ice.

She woke once and, for several terrifying seconds, she didn’t recognize her surroundings. Then the sharp edges of grief cut into her heart as her gaze took in the shape of her mother’s old white dressing table and the outlines of perfume bottles and the snow globe she’d made in the third grade out of a Mason jar and glitter. She buried her nose in her mother’s pillow and breathed in the scent of flowery shampoo. When she closed her eyes again, she dreamed of soft loving hands and pink magnolias. She dreamed of Mamaw Roz and her house in Summerville, where she’d spent Christmases and Thanksgivings and where she stayed when her mother fell into depression.

The next time Vivien opened her eyes, sunlight was streaming through the exterior shutters and lacy sheers. The sound of someone moving around in the kitchen downstairs drifted through the open crack in the bedroom door. Last night, she’d texted Sarah the address of the carriage house and location of the hidden key. She thought about getting up, but turned on her side and adjusted the pillow instead. She didn’t want to get up. She didn’t want to face the day. She didn’t want to face what lay beyond the bedroom door. She only wanted to stay in the comfort of her momma’s bed. In between the caresses of Momma’s soft sheets, where she’d often slept after a bad dream or childhood scare. Her eyes drifted shut and the heavy weight of sorrow pulled her toward a peaceful dream.

“It’s time to get up, girl.”

Voice recognition stabbed Vivien’s sleep, and for several horrifying heartbeats, her peaceful dream turned into a nightmare, much like Dorothy happily skipping down the yellow brick road only to have the Wicked Witch of the West appear in a poof of black smoke and ruin her good time. Her eyes opened and her nightmare was confirmed. Only this witch was blonde and lived in the South.

“I’ve made you tea and toast.” Nonnie Whitley-Shuler stood in the doorway, dressed in a yellow silk blouse and floral scarf tied around her neck. Her ever-present pearls, yellowed with age and worn by generations of Shuler women, hung around her neck. Nonnie’s pearls were a badge of honor and prestige. She loved to tell the story of how her great-grandmother had hidden her momma’s pearls in “Grandfather Edward’s nappy” when a “swarm of Yankees” had ransacked the family plantation, Whitley Hall.

“I’m not hungry,” Vivien croaked.

“You have to eat.” Nonnie’s blonde hair curled about her shoulders and long face. She’d never been a beautiful woman, but she’d always done the most with what God had given her. “I’m not going to have people say I let you starve.”

As always, Nonnie barked and everyone was expected to obey. Vivien sat up and swung her feet out of bed. Not because she’d been ordered, but because no matter how appealing, she couldn’t stay in bed forever. Along with underwear and bras, she’d forgotten to pack a funeral dress.

“You look more like your momma in person than you do in movies.”

She didn’t know if that was meant as a compliment or not, but she took it as one. “Thank you, Ms. Nonnie.” She shuffled to the end of the bed and pulled on her mother’s kimono robe over her short pajamas. Her cell phone sat on the dressing table and she grabbed it before following Nonnie into the narrow hall, past the closed door of her old bedroom, and down the stairs.

The three original carriage doors had been replaced with arched windows long ago, and she squinted as they passed through the blocky light stretching across area rugs and worn furniture. Vivien checked for messages and missed calls on her phone as she walked into the kitchen behind Nonnie. There was nothing from the medical examiner’s office yet, and she set the phone on the oak tabletop where she’d eaten most of her meals as a child.

“Henry told me you were here when my momma passed.”

“Yes.” A bowl of strawberries sat in the middle of the pedestal table and the older woman carried two small plates of toast to the table. “Would you like jam? I believe Macy Jane made peach again this year.”

“No, thank you.” She slid into a spindle-back chair.

“I’ll have a spot of marmalade.”

Yes. Vivien remembered Nonnie’s precise “spot of marmalade” and watched her dab the orange preserve at the corner of her toast. Just like always.

Vivien curled her hand around a delicate blue cup and brought it to her lips. Warm tea flowed into her mouth and the taste of sugar on her tongue filled her with visceral memories, sweet and comforting. Since moving away, she’d had to break herself of the sugar habit. As a result, she’d had to give up tea because no matter her physical address, she was still a Southerner. Tea without sugar just wasn’t done. Or at least not talked about in polite society. Like French kissing your first cousin.

“Henry tells me you have an assistant traveling with you.” Nonnie took her seat across from Vivien and placed a linen napkin in her lap.

“Yes. Sarah should be here anytime.” And Vivien had a list of things she needed her assistant to do for her this morning. First, find a Starbucks and a triple grande latte, nonfat, no foam, with two packs of Truvia. Second, shop for panties and bras. Before she’d gone to bed last, she’d washed her underwear and hung them to dry over a laundry basket. Just like when she’d been a teen and in charge of herself.

“Have you heard from the coroner’s office?”

Vivien glanced at her phone and returned the cup to the saucer. “Not yet.” She surreptitiously slid her napkin to her lap like she was ten years old again. “I need to know what happened to Momma.”

Nonnie’s long, thin fingers picked up her toast. “Eat first. You’re too thin.”

That coming from the woman who counted every calorie before she put it in her mouth might be laughable if Vivien was in the mood to laugh. “I’m not a child anymore.”

“Yes. I know.” She took a bite, and only after she swallowed and touched the napkin to the corners of her lips did she add, “Macy Jane would never rest in peace if I let her girl faint from hunger.”

Vivien resisted the urge to shove her food in her face or stick her tongue out. She was thirty years old but Nonnie made her feel like a kid again. “Do you know why Momma didn’t live in the row house?”

“She liked this house better.”

“This house isn’t hers. It belongs to you.” Vivien raised the toast to her mouth and took a bite. She didn’t realize how hungry she was until she sank her teeth into thick whole wheat and tasted the melted butter.

“This house belongs to your mother. It’s in her name.” Nonnie’s wide green eyes looked across at Vivien as she dabbed preserve on her toast.

A chunk of wheat got stuck in Vivien’s throat and she washed it down with tea. Nonnie had given her mother the carriage house? She would have been less surprised if she’d learned Nonnie gave her staunch Episcopalian soul to the devil, which might actually have happened, now that she thought of it. “Since when?”

“Quite a long time. I guess it belongs to you now.” The older woman took a small bite as if that wasn’t shocking news.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Vivien was beginning to suspect there were a lot of things her mother didn’t tell her.

“I assumed you knew. She certainly called the carriage house her home.”

Yes, but Vivien had always thought she meant “home” as in where they resided. Her mother had always dreamed of moving away. She’d had fantasies about living in exotic places. She’d wanted a Candy-Button row house of her very own. She’d wanted their own backyard were Vivien could climb trees without someone complaining about broken branches. “What else hasn’t my mother told me?” she asked more to herself as she took another bite.

“I couldn’t say. Trying to follow Macy Jane’s thoughts was often like trying to watch the flight of a butterfly. A beautiful butterfly, drifting from one flower to the next.” That was true enough and a surprisingly nice way for Nonnie to describe her mother. Then she totally blew it with, “That’s why you were such a hoyden.”

Hoyden? Who even used that word anymore? Sixty-something-year-old, uptight, tight-ass women, that’s who. Bless her heart. “‘By day she was healthy and hoydenish, a veritable dynamo, by night a beautiful enchantress.’” Vivien grabbed a strawberry and bit it in half.

Nonnie lifted a brow. “If you know enough about Zelda Fitzgerald to quote what people said about her, you also know that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died in a mental hospital.”

Yes. Vivien knew all that. She also knew that Zelda had bouts of manic genius that inspired her to write beautiful prose. “Don’t you think I was made for you?” She quoted. “I feel like you had me ordered and I was delivered to you—to be worn. I want you to wear me like a watch-chain or buttonhole bouquet—to the world.”

“Impressive.”

Vivien could recall most lines of dialogue from any role she’d ever played. “I was cast as Zelda in
The Last Flapper
one summer in a small theater on South Sepulveda.” Vivien shrugged, took her last bite of strawberry, and put the stem on her plate. “I think it was more likely that Zelda was bipolar rather than schizophrenic. And I suspect that, like then as now, treatment didn’t help everyone. At least not one hundred percent.”

The two women looked across the table at each other with a shared history and awareness. Viewing Nonnie through the eyes of an adult, she seemed less intimidating. Almost human. Like Henry yesterday, she was being thoughtful. Vivien chalked it up to Nonnie’s regard for her mother and perhaps the same shock they all felt. “Momma seemed to struggle less the last few years.”

“I think you’re right.” Nonnie took a bite of toast and washed it down with her tea before she asked, “Are you worried you’ll develop Macy Jane’s illness?”

Not that the reason behind Nonnie’s concern mattered. Vivien was just grateful. “Now that I’m thirty, I don’t worry about it as much. Each time I get a little too happy, it does cross my mind, though.” The cell phone next to Vivien’s plate vibrated and she picked it up. Her chest squeezed even as every other part of her body went numb. She glanced at Nonnie, then pressed the “connect” button. “Hello.” Vivien looked at her hand gripping the table’s edge and listened as the medical examiner explained that her mother had died from a myocardial infarction caused by a pulmonary embolism. He used words like
deep vein thrombosis
and
right ventricle failure
and
acute vascular obstruction
. Vivien said yes and no and felt numbed by the information coming at her. Likely, there’d been no signs or symptoms. Once it traveled to her heart, there had been nothing that could have been done to save her. Not even if she’d been in the hospital.

Vivien’s world narrowed and turned dark and blurry around the edges and she could think of only one last question to ask: “Did my momma suffer?”

“No,” the medical examiner assured her. “It happened very fast.”

She pressed “disconnect,” then looked across the table. “Momma died from a blood clot in her heart,” she said, and for the first time that Vivien could recall, Nonnie’s composure slipped. Her strength, both elegant and stern, drained from her stiff shoulders and she actually put her elbows on the table.

“How did she get a blood clot in her heart?”

“The medical examiner said it came from her thigh.” And for the first time that she could recall, she saw the Mantis as a person capable of real human feelings. “Did she seem tired lately?”

“No.” Nonnie folded her arms on the table.

“Worked up?” Vivien took a sip of tea. “Henry mentioned something about a Twitter war.” Of all things.

“That.” Nonnie waved a hand. “She was naturally offended by the Georgia UDC’s ridiculous claim that they serve the best shrimp and grits at their annual fundraising event in Savannah. She corrected our Georgia sisters using the Twitter, but she wasn’t worked up. She was more excited about scrapbook paper and stencils being on sale at the Walmart.” Nonnie sat back in her chair. “I got up to pour another glass of merlot and I heard a thump. I turned around and Macy Jane was on the floor.” Anguish pinched the corners of her eyes and her pointed chin quivered. “I tried to wake her up. I don’t know CPR and felt so helpless.”