The Almost Sisters
Birchie fixed her with a gimlet eye and said, “Thank you, dear.”
We passed into the narthex. Today the red walls seemed so garish, bordello bright, and the long teakwood tables by the entries had a green cast to them, almost venomous, and I couldn’t stop asking myself, was it true?
Birchie had insisted that I already knew who was in that trunk.
I told you the first night you were here, she had said. I told you at dinner.
I hadn’t had a clue what she was talking about, not then. But now? Martina Mack’s insinuations were causing connections. My first night, over the Cornish game hens and the ripe tomato salad, I had asked if Birchie wanted me to take down Ellis’s portrait.
You think it would be that easy to take my father out of this house? Birchie had asked me. You could burn that portrait, but he would still be present.
Sweet God, had she meant it? Literally? If that was Ellis Birch inside the trunk, then she’d been very right; getting him out had taken all three of the male Darians, a stolen car, and the police. I was shaking my head in an inadvertent no.
Polly Fincher was practically dragging us through the narthex toward the sanctuary now. People we’d known for years milled and morphed in a herd, some trying to get away from us, some trying to get closer to look at us. It was like slogging through upset human mud.
I got my phone out and sent Frank a quick text: Where are you? The cops think the bones are Ellis Birch. It’s very bad.
“We were all so sorry to hear that you are ill,” Polly said to Birchie, loud, glaring around.
As we entered the sanctuary, Pastor Rick came gangling and tutting up the aisle, his long white hands flapping about like flustered birds.
“Oh, well, here we all are, then! Hello! Hello, Miss Birchie. Polly is right, we are all so sad to hear of your troubles. Your illness troubles, I mean. All your troubles. Oh, look! A visitor. Who is your pretty friend?” he asked, turning to me. “Has to be your sister, yes? Clearly little Lavender’s mother?” As if town gossip had not told him a week ago that Rachel was here, at most fifteen seconds after her car pulled in to the drive. He turned to Birchie. “May I walk you to your pew?”
She was now surrounded by friendly faces, Wattie on one side, Polly on the other. I was with Rachel, staunchly holding down the rear. Pastor Rick stepped right, as if he planned to replace Wattie.
“She’s in good hands, thank you, Pastor,” Wattie said in a quelling tone.
We all froze in tableau, Pastor Rick still angled toward Birchie, hands out for her arm, as if he expected Wattie to step aside for him. That was never going to happen. Wattie cast her eyes to heaven, as if asking Jesus to take a sec to see this nonsense. Birchie stared the pastor down, perfectly willing to wait for the trumpet blast and the first of the Apocalypse’s seven horses to come thundering over the hills before she’d ever displace Wattie for this pool noodle of a preacher.
Six endless, awkward seconds ticked by, and then Pastor Rick started walking backward, gesturing them forward with exaggerated hula-girl arm swoops. “This way, ladies! This way!”
I snuck a quick peek at my phone. Frank had sent me a text back: I’m on it. Meet me in the balcony?
“Go with them,” I whispered to Rachel. She nodded, and I turned back. There were stairs up to the balcony on both sides of the narthex. I hurried back down the aisle to the doors, turned left, and there was Cody Mack. I almost banged into him. I didn’t say excuse me. Neither did he.
I glared up at him, wishing I were taller, and said, “You keep your grandmother away from Birchie, you hear me?” I wasn’t playing to an audience. I kept my voice low but spoke as meanly as I could.
“Don’t mind Gran,” he said, but he didn’t sound apologetic.
“You’re only supposed to talk to us through Frank. Birchie isn’t herself, and what your grandmother did? That was low, and the courts could easily see it as you trying to back-door an interrogation.”
I made it into a threat. I didn’t think Cody had sent Martina—I thought Martina’s big fat mouth had actually done us a favor. But I wanted to make damn sure that Cody kept her viciousness at bay from here on out.
He said, “Birchie owes us answers, but I guess it must be right nice for her to be so rich.”
“Doesn’t suck,” I said with snarky cheer.
I didn’t get defensive, because it was true. Someone else’s poor and unprotected granny, sick or not, would have had to answer for herself to the police by now. My grandmother was a Birch in Birchville. She was the Reigning Birch. Watching his dart roll off me made him shift like he was itchy, and he couldn’t leave it. He leaned in, so close I could smell soured coffee and old bacon on his breath.
“Rich or no, the law takes patterside right serious.”
It took me a full second to realize that Cody Mack meant patricide, and then I had to stifle a trill of purely hysterical laughter.
It was a big leap from Is this Ellis Birch? to Murder! Except I couldn’t help but remember the deep fissure marring the crown of the old skull. Couldn’t escape Hugh Darian’s logic: Unmurdered bodies don’t get stuffed in trunks. Martina had had a lot to work with when she’d set out to turn our town against us.
I shook my head. Still, they couldn’t know that the bones belonged to Ellis Birch. Not this fast. They had to be guessing, and they could be wrong.
But in my head I could hear Birchie saying, You think it would be that easy to take my father out of this house? You could burn that portrait, but he would still be present.
Cody smiled an ugly smile at my gigged silence, his upper lip peeling back from his teeth like a smug donkey’s. “Maybe you should bring her down to the station. Get ahead of this. Let her tell the tru—” he began, but right then the old organ started the first chords of “Blessed Assurance.”
It startled both of us. The ten-o’clock church bells had yet to chime. Pastor Rick must have kick-started the service. Cody turned tail and all but sprinted toward the sanctuary.
I let him go, relieved, and headed just as fast into the left-side stairwell. No one but the youth group ever sat up in the loft, and when I was a kid, we had lined up along the right side. I got up to the balcony, and sure enough, the teenagers were sitting across from me. It was a smaller group these days. Birchville skewed a little more elderly every year, but there were still a couple-dozen teens, sitting with Lavender tucked into the thick of them. Frank wasn’t there yet.
I’m on the left side, I texted Frank, and walked to the front pew.
I looked down, seeking Birchie from this unfamiliar angle. My eye found Wattie first, a lone fleck of deep brown in a pinky-pale sea. Rachel was on Birchie’s other side. I used my bird’s-eye view to try to get a better read on how the congregation was reacting—to Birchie and her illness, to the bones, and to Martina Mack’s thinly veiled accusations.
The congregation had rearranged itself, throwing the church into an odd imbalance. Only on wedding days did families leave their traditional pews to align themselves by their affiliation to the bride or groom. Now every jackass present had rowed up over on the groom’s side, behind the Macks. A few staunch families stayed with us on the left, and most of the old families who usually sat in the center had moved to join them: the Alstons, the Gentrys, Frank Darian’s sister and her kids. The bulk of the congregation had moved to the middle, crowding up, undecided, shifting uncomfortably in their new, wrong pews.
I had thought that Birchie’s illness would buy her more slack, but she’d kept the Lewy bodies secret, and she had ruined two marriages and cost the church an underpastor. Plus, I would have bet cash money that Martina Mack had been dripping poison about the bones into every ear she could find. Birchie, on the other hand, had hidden up on her hill, inside her big white house. Our silence looked like an admission. The town’s unhappiness with our family had risen every minute that Birchie stayed inside and offered up no explanation.
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divin
e! the choir sang, swaying in their long blue robes.
I saw why Cody Mack had turned tail and run away from me. He had the opening prayer and so was seated up on the stage in one of the three chairs backed against the choir loft, right beside the pastor. The associate pastor’s chair was empty, of course, and Jeannie Anne was not present either.
Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, washed in His blood, the choir sang, and half of them faltered on that last word. I wished to heaven that Pastor Rick had had the foresight to choose hymns with no mention of body parts. If they sang “Days of Elijah” next, we’d have a riot when they hit the line about the dry bones.
Pastor Rick was nearly through a sermon that I hadn’t heard a word of when Frank Darian finally appeared, slipping into the pew beside me.
“Sorry. I’ve been on the phone,” he said into my ear. “I have a friend in the prosecutor’s office who owes me, so I called him. It’s not good.”
“Tell me,” I said, eyes forward on Pastor Rick. Birchie was right. He was a very sweaty preacher.
“Regina Tackrey got the preliminary report from the forensic anthropologist. He says the bones are more than fifty years old. But not much more.” My heart sank. Ellis had died about sixty years back. That was bad enough, but Frank wasn’t finished. “It’s a male, Caucasian, left-handed. The left leg was once broken in three places—”
“Which all points to Ellis Birch,” I said.
“Points pretty firmly, especially the leg,” Frank confirmed. “They have a theory, now they have to prove it.”
“Shit,” I said, right there in church. “How do they do that?”
“Tackrey’s going to ask for a DNA test. Birchie and the bones.”
Pastor Rick had finished, and now the congregation stood up for the closing hymn. Only about half of them were singing, so that the harmonies were odd and off, the voices coming unevenly from all the wrong places in the room:
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ love and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name. . . .
“Here’s the worst part,” Frank whispered. “The damage to the skull. If this is Ellis Birch . . . well, the anthropologist says he got his head bashed in with something like a ball-peen hammer. From behind.”
On Christ the solid rock I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand. . . .
I shook my head against this ugly information. I could not imagine Birchie with a hammer and some bad intentions. Or even with a hammer. A wooden spoon, a tiny garden spade, a pan of toffee cookies, sure. A hammer? I’d never seen Birchie so much as bang a nail to hang a picture. She had old-fashioned ideas about what men and women ought to do around the house. She called Frank for things like that.
“Can they do that? Make her take a DNA test?”
Frank dipped his head in a small affirmative. “I think so. The preliminary report gives Tackrey probable cause, Leia. I’ll fight it, but yeah. I think she’ll get her motion.”
All other ground is sinking sand. . . .
I looked down at Birchie. She stood close to Wattie, their heads bent over a shared hymnal. They knew all these words, of course. Even if they hadn’t, the lyrics were projected onto the big screens hanging on either side of the baptismal pool. Still, there they stood, sloping shoulder against sloping shoulder, round hip against round hip, looking at the book as if the screens did not exist. At the sight of Birchie’s soft white bun tilting in toward Wattie’s silvery halo of curls, a feeling came over me in a wave, so fierce I barely recognized it.
It was love, though. Love, or some other, nameless feeling that was sister to it. I was racked with it. It thundered through me, shook my frame. In that moment I didn’t care whose bones were in the trunk, what hand had held what hammer years ago. It didn’t matter.
This, I thought. This is how supervillains start.
Because in that moment I was looking down on the thing I loved and being told that it was standing squarely in the wrong. Had Birchie and a ball-peen hammer set this ugly story into motion? I did not care. And if this town turned? If this town came after my grandmother? I would eat it. I would eat it up alive.
13
I put Birchie to bed that night. I had an almost primal need to care for her body, the dear and failing case that held my grandmother.
It had been a long and stressful day. In spite of her nap, her supper conversation was mostly non sequiturs, but Wattie said we couldn’t let her go to bed early. The break in the routine would hurt her more than being so damn tired would.
Wattie and I walked her back to her room exactly as the clock chimed seven.
She stopped dead at her door and put an urgent hand onto my arm. “They’re going to eat the zinnias!”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “We’ll plant more zinnias.”
“They’ll just make more bad rabbits!” she said, her fingers digging into me.
“Do you want to hear crickets or the ocean?” Wattie asked.
Birchie cocked her head, listening to something I could not hear. Her fingers relaxed. “Crickets.”
“She always chooses crickets,” Wattie confided as we went on in. “Making a room sound like it’s filled plumb up with bugs would not put me to sleep, I tell you that much. But she likes those crickets.”
Birchie’s room was a riot of early-summer colors. Her love of the Victorian had fuller rein here than anywhere else in the house, from the sage-green wallpaper with its rampant, flowered vine, to the rich prints on the chairs, to the tufted velvet bench at the foot of the bed. I walked her to her panel bed with its tall, carved headboard. Scrolled dressers in matching cherrywood on either side served as bedside tables. Birchie still called the one by the window “Floyd’s dresser,” though she’d been widowed now for more than half a century.
While Wattie went to the vanity to set up the noise machine, I helped Birchie lower herself to the edge of the bed. Then I knelt before her, sliding her shoes off her feet. She hadn’t put on stockings. Twenty years ago, or ten, if I had suggested she go without her stockings, even here in the middle of June, even wearing this dress that came down to midcalf, she would have asked me if we’d gone to sleep in Alabama and woken up in Babylon.
Her bare feet looked younger than the rest of her. She and Wattie went to Pinky Fingers on the square every Friday and got their feet and hands done. Her heels were buffed smooth, and this week she’d chosen a light coral polish.
Wattie moved to the window, drawing the heavy damask drapes against the lingering summer sun. Now almost all the light came from the soft-light bulb on Birchie’s bedside lamp. She sank down into the chair beside the window with a sigh that told me exactly how tired she was, and from there she talked me through Birchie’s bedtime routine.
First I rubbed Birchie’s feet and calves and hands with her rose petal–scented lotion. I took her bun down, putting her hairpins in the glass bowl on the dresser, and I brushed her long hair. It gleamed moon-colored in the lamplight. The pink of her scalp shone through the thin strands as I braided it for sleeping, letting it hang in a slender tail over one shoulder.
When that was done, Birchie stood and put her hands up like a toddler so I could lift her dress over her head. She wore an old-fashioned full slip, with lace at the top and bottom. I peeled that off her, too. It was so strange to see my grandmother in her large, plain bra and the kind of panties named for her. I was wearing granny panties myself these days, baggy, all cotton, and baby blue in honor of Digby. Birchie’s were seashell pink. I unhooked her bra and helped her out of it.
Birchie looked like a dumpling in her dresses, small and smooth and rounded. Naked, she was made of folds and creases. Her breasts sat low on her chest, deflated, streaked with stretch marks. Her soft lady belly hung down inside her drawers. Her thighs looked like a baby’s thighs, creased and folded, but sadder somehow. The scallops of her legs were not bursting with that
good, new milk fat. They were mostly skin, creped and hanging.
I felt such a well of tenderness for this dear old body. Every piece of it proclaimed how tired it was, but it was lovely, too. Her history was written in it, in the stretch marks left by my father, in the surgery scar on her abdomen and the puckered burn scar on the inside of her left arm, in the simple toll of ninety years of fighting gravity. Inside me Digby spun, and my Birchie stood near naked before me, yawning like a child.
She held her arms up again, and I lifted her long, rose-sprigged nightie over her head. Then I took her to use the bathroom, to remove and clean her bridges, and to take her nighttime medication. It was already sorted into a little cup by the sink, and two more pills had joined the ones I knew. There was a yellow-and-orange capsule, garish as a candy corn, and a little blue pill that looked like a bead.
“She didn’t have a baby aspirin,” I told Wattie as we made our slow way back to the bed.
“She takes that in the morning,” Wattie said, peeling the bedding down.
She’d moved the shams to the velvet bench already. I looked at her with new respect, and with apology.
“You do this every night?” I asked. She’d spent the last hour sitting in the window chair, but she still looked flat exhausted. She nodded. “Jesus, Wattie. You should have let me . . .” I trailed off. Hire someone? I’d tried that. Birchie had put a stop to it. Help? I hadn’t known she needed this much help.
Wattie said, “If it was me going first, she’d do the same. Don’t you doubt that.”
I didn’t. Wattie was a small, smooth dumpling in her own loose dress, but the artist in me could see under it. I knew there would be history written deep on her body as well. History I would never know. Birchie knew it, though. They had taken care of each other all their lives, through their girlhoods and marriages and babies and illnesses and losses and secrets.
“I need my airplane socks,” Birchie said, lisping a little with her teeth out.