It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, though. I wasn’t playing, and I didn’t want to play him. This was serious business, and I did have a decision to make—one that would echo in the rest of both our lives. This man had fathered Digby, but I needed to know he was at least decent, at least kind, before I gave him the option to become a dad. Absence was a better start for a kid than ugliness. If Batman was some sort of baby-hating basement dweller with a violent temper, Digby needed me to know that.
We texted on and off over the next couple of days. I asked him question after question. Maybe my level of interest in his life, his family, his job read as flirting, but I couldn’t help that.
Batman didn’t come across like any obvious kind of reprobate. He was a CRNA, a type of specialized nurse who worked with anesthesia. His parents lived in Columbus, Georgia, and he had three older sisters spread across the South, all married and raising families.
He was only thirty-four. It weirded me out to think I’d graduated high school the year before he was a freshman. He was also single, and that hit me with a wave of tardy relief. At least I didn’t need to add adultery to my lost night’s list of crimes and misdemeanors.
He seemed overly interested in me right back, so much so that if I hadn’t known better, I might have suspected him of being secret pregnant, too. He asked about my family, my church, my friends, my life. I told him bits about my Tuesday gamers, being in Birchville, the Lewy bodies, Lavender and Rachel. I didn’t mention bones.
The contact snowballed. By the end of Rachel’s first week in Birchville, he was texting me in between his surgeries, and I was sneaking off to answer every other minute, as phone-addicted as my teenage niece. Friday night found me tucked into a nest of blankets on the sewing-room sofa, texting with him until almost midnight. That was when he suggested meeting up for some online gaming the next evening. He played Diablo, Counter-Strike, even some old-school StarCraft with his friends from college.
I loved StarCraft, but I texted back, My gaming comp is back home in VA. I didn’t like gaming with the Cintiq’s touch pen, and the old laptop ran so slow. Also, Saturday-night StarCraft sounded too much like the über-nerd version of a date. The instant I hit send, I had second thoughts, though. He had a TeamSpeak server, which meant we could voice-talk over the computer while playing. That was tempting. An actual conversation, with tone and nuance, would let me know him faster. Decide faster. The longer I didn’t mention the pregnancy, the worse it would be when—or if—I did. Maybe it was too good an opportunity to turn down. I added, My old laptop can manage online Scrabble, though. If that’s not too weird?
No such thing, he sent back. I’m down for some Words with Friends.
Saturday night Wattie took Birchie off at seven to begin her bedtime ritual. Rachel was sitting on Birchie’s love seat with dirty hair, sad-eating carrot sticks the way a normal human would have had potato chips and watching one of those old Merchant Ivory films she and Mom both loved.
Lavender had already ghosted up to the tower room, no doubt to her own Saturday-night virtual hookup via Snapchat or whatever the kids were using now. Since I knew that Snapchat existed, my guess was thirteen-year-olds now used something else.
She was still on the outs with me. She was waiting, like Rachel Jr., for me to tell her she’d been right to contact the Batman. Or maybe I was projecting and she wasn’t even avoiding me. After all, she was young, and the world outside this off-kilter house was soaked in golden summer. Hugh and Jeffrey Darian rang the doorbell every other minute to call her out into it.
I went back to my own hidey-hole in the sewing room, where I’d turned Birchie’s old Singer table into a makeshift computer desk. I plugged my earbuds in and opened up Facebook and the voice-chat program. While Words with Friends was loading, I heard the robotic voice of TeamSpeak say, “A user has entered your channel.”
“Hello, user,” I said.
“Hello, you,” he said. It was the Batman. I recognized the voice, an echo of memory from way down low in my brain. “Are you up for some one v. one? Scrabble style?”
I remembered his voice as deep, but not this deep. Maybe this was his bedtime voice, a bit scratchy, full of sleepy gravel. It made an invitation to play a board game sound a little dirty. I’d also forgotten how soft-spoken he was. In the bar I’d had to lean in to hear him, which had put us close, then closer, until I’d taken him up to my room to get as close as possible. Twice. Now I was already leaning toward the screen like a dork, as if this could help me hear him better. I sat back and turned his volume up.
“I haven’t played this since I was a kid,” I told him.
“Me neither,” he said, but I immediately got an invite, so he clearly knew the program.
“I smell a ringer,” I said, accepting. “How’d you know how to set the game up?”
“I may have . . . um, logged on early to learn how. Smooth, huh?”
“Very smooth,” I said. “Especially the part where you just told me.”
He laughed but didn’t answer. I stared at my letters in a silence that felt more awkward the longer it went on. I’d drawn bad tiles: B F F D R Y N. No vowels, unless I wanted to count that wishy-washy Y. Luckily, he had to play the opening word. Maybe he was quiet because he had bad tiles, too. Still he’d been easier to “talk” to when we hadn’t actually been talking.
PHONE appeared in the center of the board, a word long enough to get him to the double-word square. As soon as it was played, he said, “So when are you going to come back through Atlanta?”
Pretty bold. Maybe the awkwardness was all on my side?
Well, I knew things he didn’t know.
“Why do you care?” I said, and it came out coy. Maybe even saucy. God, I hoped not saucy. Saucy was like flirting plus.
“You were the best first date I’d had in years,” he answered, so straightforward that it paused my breath.
“Oh, that was a date?” I said at last. I could hear I’d overcorrected on the saucy factor. Now I sounded prim and fusty.
“Maybe not at the start. It sure . . . ended like one.” So soft. I turned his volume up again, trying to stop the feeling that he was whispering into my ear.
“My first dates don’t end like that,” I said, even more prim.
“Well, come back to Atlanta. I’d like to see how you end second ones.” So damn flirty.
“God, you talk like such a player,” I told him.
“Not at all! G-g-g—” He was so surprised he got stuck on the G. He paused, then said, “Mm, see? Taking to pretty women makes me nervous.”
“Nice save, feminist,” I told him, and he laughed, unquelled by my starch.
“I like it when you talk to me like you’re a . . . schoolmarm.” That made me grin. I’d forgotten this, too, the odd cadence of his conversation. He took pauses in midsentence, as if waiting for the exact right word to come, and most of the time it was not the word I’d been expecting.
I looked at my tiles, and every word that I could make seemed dirty. I didn’t want to lay down BODY, much less BOFF. BROOD was out of the freaking question. “Brood,” as a word, was even more pregnant than I was. I finally played BENDY, and the second I hit the play button, I realized “bendy” sounded sexy, too.
“You didn’t strike me as the nervous type at FanCon,” I said, to cover my embarrassment.
“Well, you know. I’d had a couple beers, and I never th— I didn’t come up to you to make a move. I only wanted a picture for my Facebook feed.”
I said, “You understand that’s exactly what a player would say?”
He chuckled, pausing to play the word YOUNG off my Y, then said, “Is it? Well, full—revelation. I’ve had three serious girlfriends. And one was in high school, so I don’t think she counts. I’m not mmm . . .” He hummed to a stop for a second. Then he said, “You’re really easy to talk to.” It was sweet, and maybe even true. I swallowed, awkward again, and busied myself laying tiles. He seemed to feel it, because he instantly lightened th
e mood. “Did you just bingo? Now who’s the ringer?”
I laughed, because I had, playing OFFERING down to his G, and it was on a double-word square to boot. “Suck on that!”
“Oh, girl, you’re gonna smoke me!” he said, but cheerful about it. I liked it that he didn’t have that boring, e-peen gamer thing about losing to a woman.
By the second game, though, our board looked like it was being played by third-graders with small vocabs and no regard for strategy. We took huge pauses between turns, then set down easy things like BATCH and MEAT and RANK and CAT. Placing tiles was only a way to keep our hands busy while we talked and talked and talked.
I liked how he spoke about his family. They sounded like a close-knit bunch. He was especially tight with his father, whom he described as an “old-school nerd,” and his middle sister, Vonda, who had beaten breast cancer last year. They gathered every Christmas, and all spent their summer vacations together at a rented beach house in Savannah. It was after 1:00 a.m. before my pregnant body started signaling that it was going to sleep, very soon, whether I wanted to or not.
“Yeah. I’m tired, too,” he told me. A pause, and then he said, quiet, “I gotta work Monday. I can’t be up late before a day full of surgery. I’m off Thursday. You want to mmm . . . return Wednesday night and . . . word-Zerg me again?”
This was more than flirting. I recognized it in the pauses and the sudden husky shyness in his voice. He was inviting me into something.
I hesitated, guilt nibbling at my sleepy edges. I was under no illusions that I knew him. Not well. Not at all. All I knew was that I liked his spit-polished, second-date self, enough to say that if I weren’t pregnant, I would have been way up for a third. I wasn’t ready to invite him into Digby’s life based on a fun evening. Still, the more time I spent with him, the nicer he seemed and the worse I felt.
“I think you’ll probably need your ass kicked again by then,” I said, trying to keep it light, and let him go.
That night I dreamed the bones. They rested, patient, in a sharp-edged metal box in a sterile lab, bathed in light as hard and yellow as an egg yolk. They knew that their time was coming. A pair of gloved hands turned and sorted them, rearranging them into the shape of the person they had once been. The hands re-created the intricate fan of the phalanges, placed the long shins, the pelvis, a cage of ribs containing nothing.
Last of all they placed the skull. I saw the telltale fissure, cracked and gaping, set high on its domed back. The hands began to pick up the bones, cracking them in two. They were long hands, I realized, with preternaturally long fingers. Jagged nails split open the glove tips, poking out, shiny with deep purple lacquer. The hands lifted the rib bones from the tray, out of my sight. I could still hear, though. The sound of Violence, chewing and snapping, guzzling at the marrow, woke me up.
My subconscious mind was clearly not as fervent in its faith that the bones were ancient history, a sad story too old to matter.
It was already after nine. I got up, creaky and sour-mouthed, and went to check on Birchie. Every step out of my private nest in the sewing room brought me farther into the part of the house that felt so very off.
I found her sitting at her formal dining-room table, eating her egg and watching her town wake up through the big bay window, as if this were any given Sunday. On the wall behind her, her grandfather beamed with lofty benevolence from his portrait to her right, while her father’s portrait on her left was much the same. Maybe a little sterner, a little prouder. I hurried around the table to drop a protective kiss onto her fluffy white bun. She smelled like her rose-scented powder and mint, as always. It was the smell of home, of love and goodness.
“Morning, Birchie,” I said. Lavender was right beside her, not looking at all kissable. She gave me the stink-eye from my own chair. “Hey, Lav. You sleep okay?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She was dressed up awfully pretty, in lip gloss and her peacock-blue swing dress.
“Morning, sugar,” Birchie said, reaching up to pat my cheek.
Birchie’s face was powdered, and her hair was primped. She didn’t look like a person who was seriously ill. Much less like a person who’d kept human bones tucked away in the back of her attic. It heartened me to see her so put together. She looked more fully herself than I had seen her since I arrived and found her planting orange candies in the pansy bed. In fact, she looked company-ready, as if she were about to engage in one of her usual lady-type activities: a baby shower, a book club, a lecture about horticulture. . . .
I looked from her nice dress to Lavender’s with dawning horror.
“Are we going to church?”
“Is it Sunday,” Birchie said, not at all in the form of a question.
“Frank said we should lie low and not answer any questions.” I didn’t even want them asked. Birchie and her Lewy bodies might say anything.
Excepting for Lavender, we’d spent the week indoors or working in the back garden. We could pretend that we weren’t hiding—the kitchen had been so loaded up with curious-neighbor casseroles and salads that we hadn’t needed to so much as hit the Piggly Wiggly—but I knew we were avoiding both the pity pats of worried friends and the accusing stares of the less friendly. And the questions. Questions I was trying hard not to ask silently inside myself. I didn’t want them coming at me from other mouths this morning, ringing up toward God under His holy rafters.
“Oh, come on, Aunt Leia!” Lavender chimed in. Everyone looked at her, and she put on her pious face. “I don’t like missing church.”
“That’s a good baby,” Birchie said, giving her arm an approving pat. I rolled my eyes, under no illusions that Lavender had recognized an abiding need for corporate worship in herself. Church was where the boys were. Birchie went on, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. The Ten Commandments don’t change, no matter how poorly your own week is going.”
I had to clamp my lips together to keep from asking, What about that sixth one? Did you break that sixth one, Birchie? Half the people at church were probably asking the same question of the other half right now. My hands were getting sweaty.
Wattie came in with her own egg and a basket heaped full of biscuits that she set down on the table. Lavender was already reaching. Wattie sat and helped herself to her own homemade blackberry jam. She was in a church dress, too, field daisies and spring green leaves.
“Do you think we should go to church?” I appealed to Wattie.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Wattie said, which wasn’t the same as saying that she thought it was a good idea.
“We didn’t go to Redemption last week,” I said.
“That was my church,” Wattie said, setting me straight.
“And you didn’t think Birchie should go!” I argued.
Wattie fixed me with an exasperated look. “Child, I did not think I should go.”
I was instantly ashamed. I was thinking only of what the people at the white Baptist church would be saying about my grandmother. Wattie, the widow of Redemption’s longtime, most beloved pastor, was that church’s Birchie. And she had stolen a car and wrecked it while attempting to abscond with human bones found in the attic of the very house she lived in. Her oldest, dearest friend’s house. Of course her church community was reeling.
Birchville still lived mostly segregated, especially in the churches. There were parallel versions of Baptists and Methodists and a small, all-white Presby church balanced by an equally tiny AME congregation. The streets and neighborhoods were divided up, too. I lived in Birchie’s version of the town when I was visiting, just like Wattie’s children lived in hers. I knew this intellectually, but it was easy to forget. These worlds seldom overlapped. The greatest overlap was here, right inside this house, where the matriarchs of both Birchvilles lived together. I was growing another kind of overlap inside me. If Digby were already born, we would have to be back-and-forth members at two churches, as Birchie and Wattie were. Or we’d have to choose a church where one of us belonged
less than the other.
“I’m sorry, Wattie, that was thoughtless,” I said. “But I think that going over there is downright crazy.”
Wattie shrugged. “Well, it’s not what I might do, but this is Birchie’s church. Birchie’s decision.”
“Morning, Leia,” Rachel said from behind me, startling me. In her pencil skirt and striped blouse, she looked as church-ready as the rest of them. I was the only one who’d somehow missed the rally call. Her hair was limp and oily, though, and her eyes had a Valium glaze. This wasn’t the full Rachel. This was the depression-drowsing version that had been on the sofa all week, now stuffed into kitten heels and propped upright, with just enough energy left to be kind of a bitch to me.
“You’re going, too?”
“It’s the least I can do,” she said, so tremble-voiced brave that I felt a sour trickle of vinegar cut into my blood, thinning it.
“We don’t want to walk in late,” Wattie said, sweeping her eyes pointedly from my hair, tufting up in cowlicks, down to my bare feet.
I made myself step away from Rachel, saying, “I’ll be ready.”
Birchie and Wattie briefly shone their approval beams on me. I snatched a couple of biscuits out of the basket as I turned to go.
Rachel said, “You know those are a mass of simple carbs.”
I wheeled back in a surge of Rachel rage so clear and blue and bright that I was about to make my breakfast protein-rich by means of biting her whole head off. But she wasn’t even looking at me. She sat slumped with her own biscuit untouched in front of her. Her phone was beside her on the table, waiting for a deciding text from JJ that was never going to come.
Across the table Lavender was staring at her mother with fear and a heartbreaking kind of pleading in her eyes. In that look I could almost hear the lost and piping voice of three-year-old Lavender, calling from her dark bedroom, Mumma, halp! Dere a munstras in my closet.