Chapter 81 Vivian
Vivian
Three Months After the Fire
Vivian can still detect a hint of smoke in the air when she walks to her antiques store. Her neurologist assures her it’s not a medical thing, implying that it’s in her imagination.
But Vivian is not convinced; she feels changed in a way that is difficult to describe.
She’s slower these days, yes, that is obvious, on account of the TBI she’s still recovering from.
Descriptive words are harder to grasp; she’s more forgetful, she’s tired, and she has some memory lapses.
Sometimes she’ll go to the grocery store, for instance, and forget what it is she’s gone there to buy.
She’s been assured these symptoms will improve with time.
“Think of your brain like a muscle,” her neurologist says. “You need to exercise it, use it. Try doing some puzzles.”
She doesn’t tell him that she dislikes puzzles.
And then there is the other injury she’s still recovering from: her wrist fracture. She has returned to her trusty physical therapist at Mass General, Connor, whom she saw when she fractured her shoulder.
“You must’ve missed me,” he teases.
But there’s more. Like the smell of fire that tickles her nostrils.
And sometimes it’s not fire but rather an ammonia smell.
And then there’s the way her feet sometimes pull her in the direction of the Knox, as if they’ve a mind of their own.
The Knox is a pile of rubbish on the inside now, stripped to its guts, with Ryan Jessee Construction vehicles often parked outside.
But even so, Vivian feels oddly connected to the place, like—and she dare not tell this to anyone, lest they promptly return her to the hospital for a different reason—like it’s alive in some way.
Anyway, she has no plans to set foot back in it. She doesn’t need to.
Vivian’s grandmother was right; there is a book that links their family to the Knox. Quite literally, in fact. Opii Pericula, which is Latin for Dangers of Opium, written by Dr. Robert Walter Thurgood a.k.a. Edgar Rolo Butterworth.
In each of the seven chapters, using neat cursive, Dr. Thurgood describes a patient he autopsied who succumbed to opium. The last chapter runs a few pages longer than the others and focuses on his own mother, Margaret Thurgood, née Knox:
The autopsy reveals deceased exhibited marked congestion of the lungs and liver, along with prominent signs of gastrointestinal inflammation. These findings demonstrate the adversarial effects of habitual opium consumption on multiple organ systems.
Vivian thinks this alone—a son performing an autopsy on his mother—is disturbing, but it is the final paragraph that provides the unthinkable. It begins with a single line of Latin:
Hic liber alligatus est in cute matris meae, meaning, “This book is bound in my mother’s skin.”
In a cool, methodological tone, he describes the process he used: He first cured her skin in a bucket of urine to dissolve the hair, fat, and flesh; the remaining was scraped off with a dull knife.
Next he pounded and kneaded it with animal dung, whose digestive enzymes helped to make it more supple.
Then it was tanned: soaked in a vat with tannin derived from tree bark.
He added a footnote, a chilling judgment:
A book about the deleterious effects of opium on the human body merits that it be given such a covering.
Anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in human skin, was apparently a thing in the 1800s. Not common, but not unheard of. Christ.
Rachel, with her endless source of all things genealogical, knows someone at the Anthropodermic Book Project, a group who uses peptide mass fingerprinting to do this very sort of thing: determine whether books are bound in real human skin, bovine leather, or something else.
Dr. Thurgood’s book was confirmed to be “authentic.” As to whether it was his mother, as purported to be, the book is now being assessed for mitochondrial DNA to link it to Vivian.
It’s a long shot—because the tanning process degrades DNA—but it’s helpful that Vivian hails from a long line of women descendants.
Unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from mothers.
Vivian’s trying not to pay it all too much attention—she figures what will be, will be—but Rachel, of course, is following the progress with a razor-sharp focus.
Speaking of mothers, Vivian’s own finally passed away a couple of weeks ago.
The final days were dreadful, a stutter of decline, illness baring snaggled teeth.
While picking out the coffin and penning the obituary, Vivian considered that the burial process is the cleverest of clever distractions.
One must hold it together, not get too bogged down by the cruelty of sickness.
She chose the most splendid outfit to bury her mother in, with a Birkin bag to boot.
Her mother would not have wanted it any other way.
Vivian no longer needs the potential income that handbag might’ve brought in.
She’s worked out a payment plan for both her goddaughter’s tuition and the loan she took out for the second store renovation.
Storied Antiques is moving to a new, smaller location higher up on the hill; in fact, Michael is coming by shortly to help her sort through the items in her shop.
She’s grateful that she doesn’t have to close the business altogether.
She’s finding it surprisingly easy to pare back to the essentials. When one has a brush with death—and she’s had a few now, between her own, her parents’, and Kat’s—things become so much simpler. Vivian doesn’t need forty-dollar coffee beans; she just needs a cup of coffee, preferably strong.
It’s an inverse ratio: While ridding herself of material things, she’s having to hone in on the immaterial—her feelings.
Her grief over her mother—and her delayed grief over Kat and her father.
Her reluctance to connect with her goddaughter.
Vivian has been closed off in relationships for far too long.
This emotional work is messy, requiring hours on her therapist’s couch and multiple tissue boxes.
It’s allegedly good in the long run. She’ll see.
For now, she’s invested in high-end waterproof mascara.
And still refuses to be weaned off her Xanax by her primary care doctor.
The nurse girl, Taylor, has also offered to come by and help with the move.
Vivian might take her up on it. She’s a sweet thing, if a little naive, but she’s young yet.
Vivian has hired her to adorn a few shirts with those flower embellishments she likes to wear; Taylor does have quite an eye and a way with a sewing machine.
Peter is in Milan. For real Milan. He’s asked if he can take her out when he returns.
Vivian is thinking about it, but Rachel says she’s crazy for even considering it.
Perhaps she is. He claims he had no idea she was being kept captive, and Michael has corroborated this—apparently only Oliver and Rose were in on it, and some of Oliver’s lackeys who have since made themselves scarce.
Still, it’s concerning how Peter emotionally shut down in the wake of her accident, not visiting her once in the hospital.
When I was a kid, my mother died from a traumatic brain injury following her car accident.
And that began my nightmare of foster care, he texts her, as way of explanation.
So when I heard that term TBI in relation to you, I kind of lost it.
I’m sorry. I’ve historically avoided conflict in my life, but I’m going to work on it.
But even that—a text sharing this information—feels off.
And then there’s the way he apparently accepted a fake breakup email at face value.
Also, there is the not-so-small matter of his drug use.
He’s completed a stint in rehab, and says he’s clean, but Vivian might have already had her fill of drama.
Rachel also has some choice words for their friend Xavier.
“I want to see him if only to give him a piece of my mind,” she declares.
“What the hell was he thinking? Did we even know him at all? I’m hardly surprised he’s on the lam, given he knows what the poison was used for. If the Knox were to find him…”
What was Xavier thinking?
It’s obvious to Vivian now that there had never been a client of Xavier’s who wanted to import an elephant ivory necklace.
It must have been Oliver who wanted Vivian’s Customs contacts.
Oliver who coerced Xavier into procuring the cyanide—perhaps threatening him with the store break-in.
Oliver who’d been pulling the strings all along.
And Xavier—in lust or love, and off the wagon, his thinking warped. The Knox had had a clear hold over him; Vivian remembers the fear in Xavier’s eyes when he spotted the carousel horse in her shop.
She wants to see her friend for a different reason than Rachel’s: to apologize. Vivian can’t recall every single detail from before the fall, but she knows she missed, and ignored, the signs that he’d relapsed. Xavier had been alone, adrift.
“I think…he needed our help,” she says.
But he continues to remain missing. And with the criminal case against Oliver reportedly ramping up, Vivian can’t imagine that Xavier will resurface anytime soon.
She just hopes his absence is his own choice—that he’s lying low, hopefully even suntanning on the beaches of Spain with a new love interest—rather than there being a nefarious reason for his disappearance.