“Come on, Aunt Leia. Hugh says unmurdered people get regular buried. Not stuffed up into attics,” she said, and damn, but the kid had a point. Worse, if Hugh had already come to that conclusion, what was the rest of Birchville thinking? Most of the town loved Birchie, but not like I did, and I could only imagine the bile spewing out of Martina Mack’s smug face. “Do I really have to go home?”
I said, “Your mom is probably buying you a ticket right this second. Tomorrow at the latest, maybe even tonight, we’ll be headed for the airport. You better get packed, okay?”
“This completely sucks,” Lavender said. She made no move to rise and get her suitcase out either. Instead she pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and chewed it. I clocked the look on her face. Guilt. She’d done something, and she wanted to confess.
Downstairs, the doorbell was chiming again. I needed to help Frank reassure the town, get some food into my pregnant body before I passed out, check on Birchie. I stayed where I was, though. Whatever this was, it was eating at her.
“Just tell me,” I said, gently as I could. “What did you do?”
I hoped to God it wasn’t Hugh-related. We’d only been here a few days, but they had been difficult, and I knew firsthand that the loss of a father could lead to fast, damaging sexual decisions. Her own MIA dad’s bad choices had taught me this, when he and I were not much older than she was now.
Lavender flushed and said, “We didn’t do much.”
“You and Hugh?” I said.
She nodded.
“I think you should blurt it out,” I said. “Fast, like taking off a Band-Aid. Yank!”
“I told Hugh about your baby,” she said in a rush. “Don’t worry, he won’t tell anyone.”
“Lavender!” I said.
This was so far from the confession I expected that it was in another universe. My personal universe, actually, one where she had zero business meddling. Worse, Lavender was already spilling to the neighbor boy, and she was headed home. My secret would not survive long in sharkier, more Rachel-filled waters. Rachel would go tattle on me more to Mom and Keith, and I would spontaneously combust from all the stress.
“Hugh’s solid,” Lavender said, so dismissively that telling Hugh couldn’t be what she was feeling guilty about. “But we’re both so sad, for the baby.”
“Why on earth?” I said, but softly, because we were in it now. Telling Hugh my secret mattered to me, but this was the part that mattered to her.
She wouldn’t look at me. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her. “Because the baby won’t have a dad. He won’t have one at all, even to start.”
“Oh, honey, that’s the last thing you need to be worrying about,” I said. Of course my kid’s fatherless state was going to resonate with these kids. The last time Lav had seen her own father, he’d been charging out the door with a Whole Foods bag full of underpants and oxfords. Hugh’s family was in equal disarray.
“Was the baby’s dad . . . Did he seem like a mean person?” Lavender asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think this might be more about your own dad and not the baby?” She shrugged, inscrutable. Thirteen was so much harder to read than simple, sugar-hearted twelve. “Have you talked to your dad at all? Maybe texted him?”
“Mom told me not to,” Lavender said, waving the question away. “Aunt Leia, just answer me. What if I have to go to the airport in like five seconds? I need to know—when you met the baby’s father, did he seem like he was nice?”
I took a deep breath and resigned myself to the conversation. Thirteen was urgent, and it came with tunnel vision. This mattered to Lavender so much that she was talking about Digby’s dad instead of human bones or her own parents. I had to take it seriously, but I wasn’t sure I had an honest answer. By the time I’d started drinking with the Batman, I’d been emotionally shipwrecked. I wasn’t in any state to assess the character of my not-yet-existent-baby’s father. I’d been bitch-slapped almost twenty years into my past.
A shame, because the day had started out so wonderfully. I’d packed a five-hundred-seat auditorium at FanCon. They’d had to turn people away because of fire codes. At the end, when Dark Horse announced that a V in V prequel was in the works, that whole host of glorious nerds had risen to their feet to give me a standing ovation, foot stomping and hollering.
After, as I walked around the show floor, people kept sidling up and shyly asking for my autograph. I saw at least twenty women and two men who had come dressed up as Violence. It was surreal, passing cosplay version after version of the killer I’d invented, each one with a pulse and purple hair. Short and tall, fat and thin, young and old, all toting pretend knives and rocking thigh boots. My favorite one had smeared deep rust red around her mouth, and when she grinned at me, I saw the same color in the creases of her pointy prosthetic teeth. I even saw a Violet in a sweetsy yellow sundress with a taxidermied songbird clipped to her shoulder.
This kind of thing only happened at cons. Nerd fame wasn’t like real famous. I never got recognized at Harris Teeter, and non-nerds lost interest in my job the second they realized I wasn’t in tight with Robert Downey Jr. or the Batfleck. My own family didn’t subscribe to the series I penciled and inked; Mom liked cozy mysteries and books with Chicken Soup in the title. She found Violence frankly disturbing, and Keith read only nonfiction. Rachel had never so much as cracked the cover of my graphic novel. She told her East Beach friends I was “a working artist,” leaving out the embarrassing comic-books part. But at FanCon I was a rock star, and it felt pretty good.
The booths were starting to close, and I stepped out of the convention hall to get a Starbucks in my hotel lobby. That was when I saw him. Derek, my ex-boyfriend from my art-school days. He was by the exit, passing out pale pink cake pops from a bouquet. To his family. His wife and his children.
The wife looked like me, short and thick, pale skin, dark hair. Well, she looked like me if I were ten pounds heavier, I thought, and regretted it immediately. I didn’t want to be that brand of bitchy. She was holding a little baby dressed up as Hulk, laughing, trying to eat her cake pop with the baby reaching for it. He ignored the one clutched in his own fat starfish hand. They had two tweeny-looking girls as well, one dressed as Scarlet Witch, one as some anime-style princess thing I didn’t know. The girls were gabbling in tandem to Derek about some nerdgasm-worthy something they had seen at the con.
Fourteen years ago Derek had offered me this life, this exact one I was seeing.
Or he had tried to. I hadn’t let him get the ring box out of his pocket. Hadn’t let him ask the question.
He didn’t know that earlier that week I’d gotten a long, ecstatic call from Rachel, asking me to be her maid of honor. Telling me about her ring. Jake, my former best friend, who had once called all games “sportsball,” had used the Jumbotron at Pitt Field to ask her.
I’d looked at Derek, the ring box a tattling lump in the pocket of his ill-fitting suit coat. We were twenty-one years old, and he’d been flushed with the pride of legally ordering champagne that he could not afford.
Before he could get the box out, I had told him, “I think we should call it, yeah? Graduation’s right around the corner, and I’m moving back to Norfolk. I mean, we always knew this thing had a timer on it, didn’t we?”
I went to a friend’s place while he got his stuff out of my apartment, leaving him to divide up our shared comic books. He snarfled all the Doom Patrol, which I took as proof that I’d been right to break it off. He knew exactly how much Robotman meant to me.
Now, looking at his life with a lobby and a crowd of milling nerds and the gulf of many years between us, I was sick. I was purely sick and reeling with an understanding that was way too late. He was a nice guy. He had loved me. I had maybe loved him, too, and I had walked. I had walked away from Derek, and later on from Jonathan, and from Kev, and finally, three years ago, from Jax. I’d had no good reason, just the broken and untrusting piece that JJ had created in my center.
> I put my skinny vanilla latte in the trash and walked across the lobby and into the hotel bar. There I had myself some tequila. And some Batman.
The Batman had approached me, actually.
“Excuse the fan-boy freak-out, but you’re Leia Birch. I love your stuff,” the Batman said, a world of admiration in the words. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I liked his wide smile and the glint of his dark eyes inside the mask. I wanted to drink enough to stop thinking that I lived alone with eighty-seven mint-in-package Wonder Women and a cat named Sergeant Stripes. I wouldn’t even let him in the house. I hadn’t cared whether the Batman was nice or not. In the moment Batman was being nice to me. It was not enough, but it was something.
I had no idea how to explain this to Lavender, or even how much I should explain.
“I didn’t ask him for any references,” I said at last. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for here, kid.”
She shrugged. “I’m not looking for anything. Well, no, I am. We are. Hugh and I, we went looking for your Batman on the interwebs. But then I thought, what if he wasn’t nice?”
“Lav!” I said, rocked to the core by so much naïveté. Put this kid in a yellow sundress and there was page two Violet—bunnies, birds, and all. “I told you, there isn’t any way to find him. Please don’t worry, okay? My kid is going to have lots of family. He’ll have you, and Rachel, and . . .” I paused, not sure about Jake’s standing. I skipped his name and went straight to, “Your awesome grandparents will be his, too.”
But Lavender had checked out of the conversation. She pulled my computer back into her lap while I was talking, swiping her fingers around on the touch pad.
As soon as I shut up, she said, “I’m trying to tell you. Hugh went through your Facebook feed. We figured that the Batman must have liked your page.”
I shook my head at her. “That’s crazy.”
My real Facebook page was under my legal name, Leia Birch Briggs, but professionally I had always used Leia Birch, as a tribute to Birchie. As myself I had maybe a hundred friends. My Pro Pages for Leia Birch and Violence in Violet were huge, though. Leia Birch had more than twenty thousand likes, and V in V had almost fifty thousand. There was no way Lav and her little boyfriend had looked through all those, assuming that the Batman even Facebooked.
“Hugh sorted them by sex,” Lav said, still clicking at the keys. “Did you know that more than half your fans are women? Plus, you told me he was black, and there’s so many white-boy nerds, you don’t even know. Then we ditched anyone who looked old or like a kid or super gross. That got us down to nine. We started looking through old profile pics, and one of them cosplays. Guess what character he dresses like?”
She didn’t say it. I didn’t need her to.
As she spoke, she turned the laptop toward me. There he was. Digby’s dad.
He wasn’t quite as cute as I remembered him, but I’d had tequila goggles on that night. Still, he was grinning the cocky grin that had first gotten my attention, and it lit up the oversize eyes that made his sharp-jawed face sweeter than it had seemed inside the cowl. His forgotten nose turned out to be a good one, wide and straight and sized to fit his face.
“Holy shit. Batman,” I said, like a potty-mouth version of Robin. I stood up, and the throw pillow I’d hugged to Digby fell onto the floor. My gaze flew from Batman’s profile picture to Lav’s face. “Please, please, tell me you didn’t let him know about the baby?”
“No! God no,” Lavender said, and I could breathe again. For almost a full half second. Right up until she added, “We only messaged him once. And then I realized that I should have asked you first if he was nice. Aunt Leia? Was he nice?”
“What did you say?” I asked her, my voice so raw and angry that she flinched. “What did your message say?”
“Just hello,” she told me, defensive. “All we said was hello.”
I took two steps closer. On the screen I could see that an icon at the bottom of my Facebook page was blinking.
The Batman had already messaged back.
9
I dreamed my abdomen was made out of curved glass, like half of a huge fishbowl jutting out in front of me. Rachel wanted to see the baby, so I lifted my shirt and we peered in. Digby looked like those cartoon sea monkeys from the old ads in the backs of my childhood comic books. He was cute and smiling, with three deely boppers on his head and flippery feet. He waved his tail fin at us in a friendly hello. I waved back, but Rachel said, “That’s Aquaman’s! How did you forget which Super Friend you fu—”
I woke up with a start. It was dark in the room, but a faint light at the window told me it was close to dawn. I sat up, scrubbing at my face, Rachel’s oh-so-disapproving dream voice echoing stupidly around in my head—as if my stepsister had any clue who was in Super Friends!
I wrapped my arms around my real, much smaller, opaque belly. Digby was awake and whirring around, half mine, half mystery. I didn’t need a psychologist to puzzle out the meaning of my dream. Had someone told me yesterday that anything could push the bones sideways in my subconscious? Well, I would have laughed. But Lavender had managed, and it had sparked the worst fight we’d ever had. I’d been appalled; she’d been truculent and unapologetic. I’d told her to pack her clothes and stay off my technology on pain of death, but her dabbling could not be undone.
Digby had been my secret. My accidental family. Mine. His father had been unfindable, an accepted absence. He was the end, Digby the beginning. There was no next for Batman. I’d told myself so, over and over, every time he’d crossed my mind. Now a pair of teenagers had found him almost instantly. It hadn’t even been that hard.
If I’d wanted to find the Batman, then I would have. It was that simple. I hadn’t tried, and that was pretty damning. I wondered if it was partly, even a little, because Batman was black. Had I bought into the stereotypes about black men and fatherhood and assumed he wouldn’t mind not knowing? I didn’t think so. God, I hoped not. But maybe, on a subconscious level, it was there. The thought made me extra guilty that I still hadn’t read his message.
Lavender had contacted him through my public page, thank God, so he still knew me only as Leia Birch, artist, and he wasn’t showing up in my Messenger or Facebook apps. They were only connected to my private account. My laptop was currently hidden down in Birchie’s sewing room, but only to keep Lav off it. It wasn’t like that was where they kept the Facebook. I could log in to my public page from my phone’s browser or my Cintiq Companion, a monstrously expensive touch-screen tablet with a better processor than most computers. It ran all of my drawing software. I hadn’t doodled myself into a real idea yet, so I hadn’t unpacked it.
I needed to pick a machine and go read his response. He could not be unfound, after all. But when I thought about reopening that window, looking through it into his world, I couldn’t picture it. He would have a whole, full, real life, and when I tried to imagine myself entering it, even virtually, my usually color-filled head filled up with blank, white space.
I got my sketch pad and took it over to the desk by the window, thinking I would draw some Violences. I knew from long experience that hand sketching was more than a good way to jump-start work. It was an inroad to my subconscious. My head didn’t know how to deal with Batman, but my hands might. And if I accidentally drew my way into the V in V prequel I was supposed to be writing in the process? Even better.
I began with a dingy row of storefronts running up one side of the paper, but as they took shape, I realized they were more than a little run-down. They were ruined. I was drawing a postapocalyptic strip mall. This was the world as Violence had left it at the end of V in V. An odd choice, because that world had no next. I’d been hired to write the origin story, not draw the wreckage.
I darkened the sky above the roofline, hanging a few shredded jags of black cloud, and I put the edge of a crumbled concrete bench beside a small blighted tree on the corner. Now the buildings faced a park.
They loo
ked a lot like the attached shops on the square right here in Birchville. I recognized the silhouette. I went back to add details until the faded lettering and broken goods scattered on the sidewalk had turned them into the ruins of the Knittery, Cupcake Heaven, and Pinky Fingers Nail Salon.
In the shading around the shattered windows and dark, listing doorways, I saw the amorphous shapes of the personified Lewy bodies I’d sketched earlier taking shape. I had four of them lurking in the shadows before I realized that each of their misshapen faces and their eye lumps was aimed at a central empty space.
That’s when I knew that I was drawing Violet. Violet had always been the object of every gaze.
Fine. The story truly began with her, and anyway, I was in no mood for Violence.
I wanted more natural light, so I pulled the drapes back open. It was still too early, but across the square the sky was turning all the colors of state-fair cotton candy. Shades that Violet liked, pale and baby sweet.
So Violet did have a part in Violence’s origin; she was my way in. Maybe Violence couldn’t begin without her, though I hadn’t thought that Violet would appear in the prequel when I’d signed the contract.
But maybe she had to, I thought as I etched her willowy lines, imagining the butter and sunshine shades that made her hair and sundress. She knelt on a patch of scraggly grass, snuggling a postapocalyptic mutant kitten. Violet had begun as a version of me, and her innocence had called Violence. I couldn’t imagine Violence without her. Had Violence protected innocence—or innocents—before Violet came along? I didn’t think so. It felt . . . The word that came into my head was “unfaithful,” though there was no indication anywhere that Violence and Violet were lovers. It felt unfaithful anyway, on a deeper level than a thwarted romance.
I was liking Violet’s expression, joyful and oblivious as she clutched the nightmare animal cheek to cheek. She looked like she was saying, Squee! The cattish monster hung in her arms, its clawed limbs dangling, looking long-suffering and resigned. I liked it, too, but the more detail I added to the “kitten,” the more he looked familiar.