The noise reminded me that about a thousand years ago, back when I was telling myself that the bones were some kind of Civil War archaeology, I had called Jake and let him have it with both barrels. He was a known jackass, certainly, but on the other hand he hadn’t murdered anyone. Not anyone I knew about.
I roused myself and reached for the phone.
It wasn’t Jake, though. It was Batman. Still up?
I was in no shape for stalking the father of my secret baby.
I’m dealing with a family thing, I texted, which was true, but the stark words read harsh. I added, Looking forward to Wednesday as a softener. He sent me back a thumbs-up emoji.
I didn’t put the phone away, though.
Lavender had living-father problems, and I had sworn to fix them. That was a lifetime ago, but it still mattered. I was hoping against hope that Jake had done something that resembled the right thing. At the very least, he could have sent his daughter a cute frog emoji waving a sign that said hello. He could have texted, I do love you, or maybe, Sorry you won shit-all in Dad Lotto.
I shook my head. Parenthood shouldn’t work this way. Fathers shouldn’t get to decide if they wanted to father or not, thirteen years in. Fathers who weren’t dead should do their damn job. Assuming they even know they have a kid, I thought, but I shoved that away for later. This was about Lavender right now.
It actually felt lovely to think about Lavender’s problems, to meddle hard in the forbidden lands of Rachel’s troubles instead of thinking about terms like “no statute of limitations” and “premeditated.” Now, thanks to Blanton’s, I could add Wattie and “accessory after the fact” to my concerns.
There was no way to reconcile my long-loved Birchie with a person who could do what Violence did. See a bad man? Take him out. Remove him while he sat sipping his port and reading his newspaper. All I could do was twirl my new black mustache and protect her anyway. Jake, with his money problems and his cowardice, was altogether easier, because I was squarely in the right. I could try to fix that and not think about—
Wait. Was this what it felt like to be Rachel?
Maybe so. I was pregnant with a secret mixed-race baby, carrying on an investigative flirtation with my in-the-dark baby daddy, and I honestly had the least fucked-up life of any adult in the house. At this thought I started giggling. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. This was what it felt like to be Rachel. This right here, perched in the catbird seat of least fucked up. It was not a thing I’d ever understood before. God, but it was a good seat. No wonder she didn’t ever want to share it.
When I finally got myself in hand, I texted Jake another message:
Call your daughter. I will go full Bloodaxe on you if you don’t. Do not doubt me, Jake. I’m capable of anything at this point.
It sounded true, because it was. Blood in my history, murder in my genes, Violence in my heart. Wattie had shared the how, but no one on earth except for Birchie knew the why.
I wondered how long we both had before the Lewy bodies took that answer, too.
14
I hadn’t realized I’d been sleeping, but I had, and very hard. There was drool on the pillow. A sound had woken me. Something like a click.
The sewing room shared a wall with the kitchen. Was it morning and someone was making breakfast? It was so dark. I peered at the clock, disoriented. It was 2:04.
Then I heard footsteps pittering down the wooden stairs that led down to the backyard garden.
I sat up. Holy shit, the click had been the door. The back door shutting.
All at once I was fully awake. In my mind’s eye, I could see Birchie trying to navigate those long, steep stairs with her tottery balance, imaginary rabbits winding in and out between her ankles. Less than a second later, I was kicking at the tangled quilts, trying to get up and over to the window.
Had the Lewy bodies sent her on some midnight errand? Wattie had told me that she slept restless. On very bad nights, when she was under stress, she would get up and try to go berry picking or to the state fair or, once, to her long-dead husband’s funeral. Wattie was a light sleeper, and her room was right next door, so she’d always caught Birchie and gentled her back to bed. But Wattie was resting tonight in the warm and loving arms of Blanton’s bourbon.
I ran to the window and peered out into the night. If it was my grandmother, I was about to show Birchville some nerdy-ass pajamas for about the thousandth time this visit, hopefully before she fell and snapped her neck.
It wasn’t Birchie, though. It was Lavender.
I could see her blond hair gleaming in the bright summer moonlight. She was already down the stairs and hurrying through the back garden, wearing a lemon-colored summer dress that shone bright as her hair.
Worst ninja ever, I thought.
She had a green bottle in one hand that I hoped was Sprite, and she was carrying something puffy in a plastic grocery bag. I squinted. Was that a pillow? A big white blanket, folded into a square? Either way, not things you want to see a thirteen-year-old toting off into a dark night full of boys.
She’d failed ninja, but her femme-fatale skills were way too precocious. Sneaking out into the night to meet a boy felt like the realm of junior year, not eighth grade. Add in the fact that she was carrying bedding and a bottle? She was heading toward things I hadn’t been ready to handle responsibly at thirty-freaking-eight. Digby and I could tell her exactly how this story ended.
Lavender was already disappearing around the corner of the house, but I was barefoot, robeless, and wearing enormous pink plaid pajama bottoms with a floppy black T-shirt that said keep calm and vanquish evil. I thought about levering the window open and hollering for her to get her twinkly little butt straight back inside, but I didn’t want to wake up the rest of the house. Birchie’s routine was sacred, and Rachel would She-Hulk out in mother horror. Lav wouldn’t hear me anyway. She probably had her earbuds in, listening to Selena Gomez sing a lot about hotness and kisses and touching and very, very little about chlamydia.
I changed my pajama pants for black leggings and trusted my huge T-shirt to hide Digby and my braless state, then ran quick and quiet as I could through the house to the back door. I didn’t have time to muck about finding socks and lacing my Chucks. Wattie kept a pair of electric-blue Crocs by the back door, her “garden shoes,” she called them. I stuffed my feet into them and headed out after Lavender. Except for the shoes and the pale pink lettering, I was ninja-ing it up pretty good.
By the time I got down the stairs and through the back garden, Lavender was out of sight. I headed around the house to the well-lit road around the square, unworried. I knew exactly where she was heading. I trotted down the street to the Darian house at a good clip, aiming for the far side yard.
She wasn’t there. Jeffrey’s bedroom window was primly closed and dark, but Hugh’s gaped wide open, letting out all the air conditioning. A neon-yellow fire ladder, the telescoping kind that the parents of second-story kids kept in the closet, hung all the way to the grass. Hugh had put it to unsanctioned use, shimmying down it and out into the night.
I pressed my palms to my eyes for a second, cussing myself for all kinds of stupid. Back when I was a teenager and first became acquainted with insomnia, I’d snuck out plenty to meet up with JJ. We’d take flashlights and sit up in the play fort at a nearby park, reading comics. Back then I’d pinged rocks off his window to get him to come out, because we hadn’t had cell phones. Now the pings were digital, and Lavender hadn’t needed to go to the Darian house to get Hugh. They’d arranged by text where to meet up. They were already heading there.
I didn’t think she was in danger. Hugh was a good kid. It was only that he was a breath away from driving and ready for more than she was on the romance front. She wasn’t mature enough to decide how far was far enough. Thirteen should not be out deciding this, unsupervised, with a high-school boy. It was her parents’ job to make sure she wasn’t, but Lav had slipped out through the gap between them.
I turned in a slow half circle, scanning the sleeping square.
Where would carless kids go on a summer night when they had a bag full of bedding and bodies full of hormones? When I was a girl, young couples met up in the historic graveyard behind the church. I started walking quickly toward it. There was a grassy dip between the Alston and Rhodes crypts, sheltered and private. Something about the proximity of God made French kissing there extra forbidden. Or maybe the silent rows of old gravestones and crumbling angels watching made second base feel more delicious.
One summer, out on a restless midnight ramble, I’d stumbled onto Jeannie Anne and whatever boy she was dating then in another grassy hollow behind my own family’s crypt. The one that held every local Birch who’d passed already.
A little voice at the bottom of my brain piped up to say, Every Birch but Ellis.
Now, there was a mental road I didn’t want to go down. The bones of my great-grandfather haunted the underdepths of my mind, even as I remembered seeing Jeannie Anne on her back in dewy grass, lip-locked with a boy who had one jeans-clad leg pressed between hers. His arm had been jammed way up under her T-shirt, so he could grope at her boob. His hand had looked like a living thing, squeezing and pulsing under her shirt’s thin fabric.
I’d apologized and backed away. They hadn’t even heard me.
I was sixteen then. Seeing them had made my cheeks flush pink, and not just with embarrassment. I was an unkissed über-dork, awkward and shy with every boy who wasn’t JJ.
That will be me one day, I’d thought, imagining myself trading tombstone kisses with a boy, each one a spitball in the eye of death. I hadn’t imagined kissing JJ. Never JJ. I hadn’t thought of him that way. He’d been so much more to me than a crush. I suppose that’s why he’d had such power to crush me.
Now I was out in the dark side of night, race-walking toward the cemetery gate to chase his daughter through the tombstones because he was at it again—behaving horribly and then poofing. He had not called Lavender back. If he had, he would have texted me and said so, to get me off his back, if nothing else. He’d abandoned her as if life were just as low-stakes as the movies and this summer’s blockbuster were JJ Is a Shit Part Two: Non-Return of JJ.
At least I’d called him out on it this time. People didn’t take this crap seriously enough, acting like sex was something New York advertisers had invented to sell Coke and soap. Sex was offered up like aspirin to the mildly wounded. You just need to go get laid, pretty folks on television and in movies told each other after breakups, or work upsets, or if anybody acted mildly grumpy. As if sex were as simple a sin as eating a second scoop of Ben & Jerry’s.
In truth it was a force. It was a piece of nature, like the ocean. Living in Norfolk, I spent a good chunk of my summers at the beach with my niece, where we both treated the Atlantic like a private paddle pool. Playing in it, it was easy to forget that it was a mighty thing. It was fun, right up until somebody got sucked out and drowned by riptides or shark-eaten. Sex was the same, such pleasure I forgot its power. I acted like it was something I could own, which was laughable. Sex had picked me up and set me back down different, twice now.
I reached the cemetery’s closest gate. The cemetery itself was directly behind the church, with wrought-iron gates on either side. I glanced back at Birchie’s house, right across the street. It was quiet and dark, the porch light out, and no upstairs windows shining. Neither of us had woken Birchie by sneaking out. Good.
I went inside. The moon was high and full, whitewashing the crumbling tombstones and the crypts. The stones were engraved with all the old names. The first Gentrys and Grangers and Macks all had honor places here, but there’d been no room for fresh graves for a good century now. Only the five families with crypts could rest here when their time came. I paused by the gate, straining to hear rustling or whispered, breathy voices. Nothing.
I wished I’d thought to bring my own cell phone. I could have called Lavender, told her she was busted. If nothing else, I could have texted her over and over and followed the wind-chime sound of her phone. Now all I heard was an owl calling, mysterious and inquisitive.
I checked the hollow between the first two crypts, but it was empty. I crossed to the other side, fast as I could, to check between the Darian and Fincher crypts, though a rock-strewn path between them made it a bad choice. Lastly, I hurried to the Birch family crypt, the largest building, at the very back and center of the graveyard. It was faced with granite, our name across the top in tall, stern letters. The iron door was locked, and stone angels guarded it on either side. I went behind it and found nothing but the other gate. It opened onto the park, behind the gazebo. I peered out between the rails, and the park was empty, too. The town’s shops and restaurants were all closed at this time of night.
Hugh and Lav weren’t here. They were getting farther away from me with every passing minute. Had the make-out spot changed?
I spun slowly, listening, racking my brain for an idea of where to go next. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement, all the way across the cemetery, just outside the larger wrought-iron gate. By the time I turned to look, it was gone, leaving me with the impression that a person, or the shadow of a person, had crossed past it in a swirl.
I wasn’t scared, not here in my hometown. I didn’t think of ghosts either, though I was surrounded by the dead. No, strangely, the word that came into my head was “Batman.”
But that was crazy. Birchville was hardly Gotham, and Batman was a fiction. As for my Batman, what possible business did he have here? Our relationship, as far as he knew, consisted of a drunken hookup at a con, some texts, and a datelike night of Words with Friends. If he were here, then he actually had descended way down deep into creepy stalker territory. He didn’t seem like the type.
I couldn’t shake the feeling, though. The shape I’d seen pass by the gate was tall and dark and definitely male. With ears. Little pointy ears, sticking up from the top of his head.
It had to have been the moonlight playing shadow tricks on my eyes. It must have been Hugh, or a dog, or nothing. I started back toward the other gate to see.
Just then, from the opposite direction, I heard a breathy little shriek, high-pitched and full of laughter. I barely caught it, but it was Lavender. She sounded far away, off the square entirely, the sound carrying on the clear summer air.
Whatever dog or imaginary Batman I had seen would have to wait. I let myself out and ran through the park, going toward Pine Street as fast as I could, near silent in Wattie’s rubbery shoes. Pine ended in a T intersection at Oak Street, and I paused there, out of breath, listening for kid sounds. I thought I heard something to my left. Surely they were not heading toward the highway?
These were residential streets, and there was no traffic at this hour. The houses off the square were smaller and boxier. This neighborhood was mostly tidy brick ranch homes that had been added to Birchville in the forties.
I heard nothing, so I said a quick prayer and sped left, running over to Cypress Street. At the next corner, I stopped, hands on knees, head down, trying to get my breath back and listening. Still nothing. Either they were being quiet or I’d picked wrong and was moving away from them. Where could kids go to get a little horizontal in this neighborhood?
There was no place for that sort of nonsense here. If they went down to Loblolly, they’d be one block off the highway, by a gas station. Had they come out for Snickers bars and Slurpees? I shook my head. Hugh would know that that place closed at midnight.
Everything else, for blocks, was only houses. Who lived here?
That was the right question. In a flash I knew exactly where the kids were heading. I knew what was in the bag, too, and I’d been worried about all the wrong things.
I took off again at a fast trot. The kids would be on Crepe Myrtle, but I didn’t want to go all the way around the block. I looked for a backyard with no fence and no doghouse and then cut across.
I pushed through a stand of azal
eas, and then I was in Martina Mack’s backyard. It wasn’t fully fenced, but she had a dog run off the back door, and there was a stake with a chain here, too.
I heard Lavender say something, then Hugh’s shushing noise, then stifled giggles. I hoped they wouldn’t wake Martina’s dogs up. She had three or four of them, medium-size browns and brindles with square heads and small eyes. Together they could bark the dead awake.
As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw them. No Jeffrey. I had half hoped he’d gone through Hugh’s room to use the same ladder, but it was only the two of them. I paused, surveying the yard. I’d been a scant few minutes behind them the whole way, but they’d made a lot of progress.
Hugh looked to me like a professional. As I watched, he released a roll of Charmin, holding the end. It sailed up in a perfect arc, streaming a long white tail as it unfurled, soaring straight over a branch of the tall loblolly pine in the center of Martina Mack’s front yard. That whole tree was already well swathed, a crisscross pattern running through the branches, bright white and blazing in the moonlight. The fat gardenia bush beside the mailbox had been swaddled, its white blooms mostly covered so that it looked like a single outsize toilet-paper rose.
The grocery bag lay open on the balding grass, and they’d already deployed at least half the rolls in the giant pack of TP.
“Perfect!” Lavender whisper-talked, admiring Hugh’s toss.
Lav was clearly new to rolling. She threw hers too hard, and the toilet paper broke, the roll thudding and bouncing away across the grass. She bounded after it, lithe as a fawn, her limbs going so suddenly graceful in her leap that it made my heart swell.
They were giddy with pleasure at their own boldness, rolling the house in response to Martina Mack’s horrific baiting of Birchie at the church. As revenge plots went, it was both too mild—given the chance to hurl Martina Mack into the Sarlacc to be digested for a thousand years, I would have been sorely tempted—but also too much. It was wrong to roll the yards of little old ladies, even vicious ones. Especially Martina, who was house-proud. Her tidy nana house had country heart cutouts on the shutters, and she kept her flower beds as beautiful as Birchie’s.