The Almost Sisters

  Images were unfolding in my head, the start of a story. I could see it. I could see the world, and V and V had to find a way to live in it. To live with it, with what they had done. There was a next, even after an apocalypse.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, lost in my own mind, but when I came back into my body, he was waiting for me.

  “You’re right. They’re the same,” I told him. “Flashing lights and bells and prizes. What would you like?”

  “Yuh-you. Vuh-vvv-visiting Atlanta,” he said, shy again but saying it anyway. “Soon.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I better guh-get on the road,” he said, but neither of us moved.

  “Yeah, you should,” I said, and still we stood there.

  “Mm-hm,” he said.

  You hang up first. No, you.

  “Go on,” I told him. I wanted to kiss him, but Lord, the eyes on us. Instead I told him, “There’s a next here, too,” and he smiled. I wasn’t an optimist, but even I knew this was true.

  He got into his car, and I watched him drive off into the sunset. Literally. He headed west up Main Street, a dark silhouette against the spectacular sinking orange ball. But only literally, because I would go to Atlanta. Sooner rather than later. Sel Martin and I had together made a big mess and a baby, and there was a next coming for all three of us. The difference was, I wasn’t scared of this one. I’d always walked away from possibility, but I didn’t think that I would again, if it came down to it. Something had been put to rest when I confronted Jake, wringing that shoddy, shared apology out of him. Some new bravery had started, when the Fetus Formerly Known as Digby had quickened at my core. Together these things felt like a sea change. There would be a next, and in a place where half my relatives and a third of a small town weren’t peering out windows at us.

  I turned back to Birchie’s house, and immediately the drapes twitched and folded, people backstepping in a hurry. The weakest piece of me wished I’d gotten into the Batmobile and ridden off into the sunset with Sel.

  Instead I started walking back to the house. There was a next inside, too, and I had to be there for it. Next was Regina Tackrey, armed with swabs and science, coming to scrape some truth out of my Birchie’s frail body.

  22

  This early in the morning, the attic was a dry and dusty kind of pre-hot. I could feel almost-sweat prickle my skin as I clambered around the piles of junk. Frank Darian and his boys had dug quite a hole in the back room to unearth Birchie’s trunk. They had stacked decaying furniture and boxes and chests in and among the more familiar front-room landscape. Rachel and I had been searching for that pair of ship paintings Birchie liked for nearly half an hour.

  I had to find them, because Cody Mack, of all damn people, was coming to the house at 9:00 a.m. to collect the sample of Birchie’s DNA. Birchie’s sacrosanct routine had been dipped into hell and hauled back kicking over the last few days; we needed to keep her quiet and in places where she felt comfortable and calm. Dragging her off to an unfamiliar lab where a stranger would poke around in her mouth seemed like the short road to another fork stabbing. Tackrey had agreed to collect the sample at our house but insisted on sending Cody. It was a savvy choice; Birchie had donated everything from trauma kits to body armor to the Birchville police force, and Cody was the only officer in town whose Birch bias ran against us instead of for us.

  I didn’t want Cody to see that picture of Ellis Birch with his eyes scratched out, like broad hints in the world’s worst game of Clue: Miss Birchie in the dining room with a dirty breakfast fork. Miss Birchie in the parlor with a hammer.

  Last night I’d pulled the portraits down and stored them in the attic’s back room, wrapping Ethan but not bothering with ruined Ellis. I’d stacked them on a dresser, Ellis on top, faceup, blind eyes pointed at the vent fan.

  Unfortunately, taking down the portraits had left tattle-tale rectangles of brighter wallpaper in the dining room. As Birchie would say, it would not do.

  Searching the attic was slow work, both because we had to be careful not to cause a junk landslide and because I felt so antsy. I didn’t really think there were more long-dead relations packed away up here, but at the same time I got a spine shiver every time I peeled a trunk lid open.

  Rachel and I were on our own. Jake had rolled out at 7:00 a.m. sharp, wanting to get an early start on the ten-hour drive to Norfolk. Lav went with him. I thought she was scared her dad might poof again if she let him out of her sight.

  Rachel pulled a rolled-up area rug off a row of very large, promising boxes. She was doing all the heavy lifting—a pregnancy perk—and she worked much faster than I did, eager to get on the road. Every minute put her farther behind her family, and Lavender wasn’t the only one who didn’t trust Jake left unsupervised.

  As I knelt to open the first box, she said, “So I had an idea last night.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. These were dangerous words.

  “No, it was a good idea. I think I should tell Dad and Mom about the baby,” she said, dragging the heavy rolled-up carpet back out of the way. “When I get home.”

  I looked up from the first box’s jumble of old clothes and weird kitchen gadgets from the 1970s. “My baby? Why on earth!”

  “Because you know what’s going to happen,” Rachel said, blowing a strand of hair off her face. “Mom will freak out, worrying about what people will think, and Dad will bluster around trying to solve everything instead of letting her talk.” She propped the rug up against a wardrobe we’d already searched, then came and knelt by me to open the next box. “They’ll fight, and then she’ll cry, and then he’ll stomp off and do fifty hours of penitent yard work. In the end it will be fine. This is their grandbaby, after all. Why should you stress through the fussy bits? You have enough going on.”

  I did, actually. I’d had trouble sleeping last night, thinking about the DNA test. All I could do was stand by Birchie’s side. I felt helpless, like I was twiddling my thumbs and watching a huge rock coming at her, fast, to roll over her and ruin her. Then I’d twiddle more and watch the splash damage ruin Wattie.

  I couldn’t take one more thing, so I shook my head at Rachel in an emphatic no, saying, “They’ll freak out. They’ll leap right into their car and come straight here.” Why not? Everybody else had.

  “No they won’t,” Rachel said. “I’ll say I’m only breaking your confidence because you’re worried about how they’ll react. I’ll make them swear not to mention it until you tell them. See how that works?”

  It took me a second to process her idea, but once I did, I saw that it was genius. Evil genius, but still. It gave Mom and Keith time to plan their reaction, and it took a big chunk of worry off me. It was manipulative, and a very Rachel-specific kind of awful, and God, so very tempting. I hesitated, arms buried in heaps of Easter-colored polyester, and she pressed on.

  “By the time you get home, they’ll be past panic and deep into supportive.”

  “It does sound like the easy way out,” I admitted, but there was no way I could sign off on it. It was Rachel’s style, not mine.

  “Good. Because I already did it,” Rachel said. “I called Dad last night.”

  I plunked onto my butt, surprised that I was surprised, because of course she had. That was also Rachel’s style. “Damn it, Rachel—” I started, but she interrupted me, pointing.

  “Is that the ships?” From our low position, we could see a couple of tarp-wrapped rectangles leaning on the wall behind a coffee table.

  “I think so,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. Mom and Keith knew. Done was done, Rachel was Rachel, and truthfully, it was a relief. Maybe I should give Margot Phan a call and enlist her to spill the news to our Tuesday gamers and my church friends in the same way. They could all chew it over together without me. I’d come home to a not-in-the-least-surprising surprise shower, and my Diaper Genie/onesie problem would have solved itself. “I know you meant well, Rachel, but please talk to me
first next time, okay?”

  Those exact words had come out of my mouth so often that I ought to have a pull string that would trigger them by now.

  Fruitless, too, because even as we carried the paintings down, Rachel was saying, “Since I’m staying at your house, I should start getting your nursery set up. I’m at least going to paint. You can’t be around the fumes.”

  I saw my imagined Superman-blue walls disappearing in a wash of Modern Dove Gray or Mint Wisp Green.

  “Thanks. That’s nice of you. But Sel may want to help pick out the color and the theme.”

  I said it purely as a defense, then realized that it might be true. He’d cared about the name, but did men care about baby bedding? He was a Dark Knight guy, so he probably thought Supe was a prig. Maybe the nursery’s theme should be John Henry Irons? His alter ego, Steel, wore Superman’s colors and shared his ideals, and he looked more like Digby might.

  “Oh, of course!” Rachel said, backing off. She looked almost sheepish, and that was such a new look on her face that it had no set, faint lines. She peeked at me from under her lashes and said, “You guys pick, and I’ll paint, if that works? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of . . . whatever’s happening there. With you two.”

  It wasn’t quite a question, but I answered anyway.

  “Something is. I’m keeping it separate. Like, in my head I’m kinda dating Batman, and that could go any number of ways. Sel Martin, though? He’s in our lives forever. I have to stay on good terms with him, no matter what happens with his alter ego. Does that make sense?” I asked.

  “Actually, it does,” she said, which surprised me. Very few sentences that had “Batman” or “alter ego” in them made any kind of sense to Rachel. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and her voice was very stiff, very prim as she added, “I’m having similar feelings about my husband.”

  I stopped, too, shocked. Rachel was confiding in me. A little. Eight words, given in the wake of her latest maneuver with my baby news. But still, it was a whole sentence that was vulnerable and reciprocal.

  I’d felt guilty for stepping in and calling Jake, but ever since then she’d been more open with me than she’d been in our whole lives. For Rachel, to meddle was to love. Maybe, by interfering, I had finally told her I loved her back in her own language. On impulse I leaned my ship picture against the wall and hugged her, painting and all.

  “Oh, goodness!” she said, hugging me back as best she could with her arms full.

  “Thanks, Rachel,” I told her, and this time I said it with no qualifiers.

  “Thank you, Leia,” she said, such foreign words that it was practically like hearing Rachel speaking Klingon. She added, in her old familiar bossy tone, “Come home soon.”

  Her lips to God’s ears, I thought as we went to the dining room and hung the pictures on the same old nails that had once held up Ethan and Ellis. I wanted to go home. Or at least I wanted this part—bones and sorrows dug up sixty years too late—to be over. Even the regular human heartbreak of my grandmother’s aging, her failing mind and memory, would be better than digging in these ancient, moldy secrets. Reading assisted-living brochures and fighting with Birchie and Wattie was shitty, unless the other choice was watching Regina Tackrey send them both to prison.

  “Yours is higher,” Rachel said as she stepped back to eyeball the pictures.

  Even I could see that she was right. The schooner had a slightly longer wire, but the patches of shiny wallpaper were hidden.

  “It’s good enough,” I said.

  “It’s going to drive you crazy,” Rachel said, meaning that it would drive her crazy. She was leaving, though, and the schooner listing a half inch lower than the clipper ship was not going to keep me up at night. I shrugged it off, but she said, “Let me fix it.”

  Not everything was fixable, even by my stepsister.

  “How will you do that? You think Birchie keeps a hammer in the house?” I asked her, and that ended the discussion, fast. Birchie kept no tools at all. Maybe she had banished them superstitiously, like Sleeping Beauty’s mother on a spindle-burning run sixty years after her kid had gone down for the Big Nap.

  Birchie and Wattie came in bearing a pot of oatmeal with berries and a platter of biscuits and bacon. Strictly spoon and finger foods, I realized, and sure enough there were no forks on the set table. No knives either, not of any kind. Wattie had even prebuttered the biscuits and put out the honey pot instead of jam.

  “You might as well eat,” I told Rachel. “It will save you a stop.”

  Birchie was pretty good at first glance. She was dressed in a long floral skirt and a lightweight summer twinset. Maybe her eyes were a little overbright, but her fluffy bun was tidy and her powdered cheeks were pink with liquid rouge. She knew who Rachel was with no cuing. Considering the hell of yesterday and the stress of the morning’s agenda, she was better than I expected. We kept up a steady stream of kindly conversation around her, talking routes and road times over the meal. Birchie put in a comment here and there. Most of them made sense. Only one was directed at the rabbits. By the time we were ready to see Rachel off, I was moderately reassured that Birchie wouldn’t attack Cody Mack with the honey twirler.

  In the entryway Rachel thanked Birchie and Wattie for the hospitality, kissing each of them on the cheek. She saved me for last, holding me tight and whispering, “See you soon, preg,” in my ear. Soon? She was an optimist. I was worried that Digby might get himself born in Birchville after all.

  “Should we walk Rachel out?” Wattie asked Birchie, cuing her, but Birchie didn’t answer. She was staring back at the dining room, toward her own seat.

  “Birchie?” I said, and a laugh got out of her.

  It was cousin to yesterday’s high-pitched, tittering noise, the one that had been a harbinger. It raised every little hair on the nape of my neck.

  “Birchie?” Wattie said, trying to call her back. She took my grandmother by the shoulders and gently turned her to face us. “Birchie?”

  Birchie stopped laughing, and her eyes focused.

  “My father is a boat,” she told us, and her voice was filled with wonder.

  23

  Cody Mack arrived sporting mirrored cop sunglasses and a smirk. He was carrying a briefcase, of all things. It was brown faux leather, very glossy, with bright brass corners, downright odd for the occasion. The hinges were dusty. It looked like a prop you’d give a kid playing a big shot in the high-school musical, so the audience would understand he was important.

  Frank Darian arrived with him, carrying his own actual briefcase. Frank looked tired, and this would be one of his last acts as our lawyer; he’d advised that it was time for us to hire a criminal attorney. A really good one, he’d said, handing us a list of names, and those words scared me more than anything. It had nothing to do with his own ongoing troubles with his divorce either. He’d made that clear. When the DNA results were back, when it was proved definitively that Birchie had been hiding her own father’s body in her attic, he thought Tackrey would pursue the matter. Vigorously, unless public opinion shifted. She was running opposed in the primary for the first time in years.

  They came into the parlor, and Birchie and Wattie did not get up from their side-by-side spots on their love seat. I took my cue from them and stayed planted in the chair closest to Birchie, steaming in a welter of separate hatreds. I hated that my family was in the wrong. I hated that Cody Mack, racist jackass, was here repping law and order. I had pent-up urges to make all this stop pinging through my body with no place to go. Most of all I hated feeling helpless.

  Frank took up a vigilant stance in front of the fireplace, feet spread, hands behind his back, and we all exchanged polite, cool greetings. Or everyone but Birchie did. She said nothing, though her face indicated that a smell had come into the room.

  Cody swayed his hips forward and back before plunking the showy briefcase down on the side table that sat catty-corner between Birchie and me. He took his time, popping the tab
s and swinging the lid up. The briefcase was even dustier inside. He must’ve dragged it down from his own granny’s corpse-free attic as some kind of compensation thing, because it was dead empty except for three swab kits, each in its own small box. He could have carried them in a plastic Piggly Wiggly bag, or with his hands.

  “So this here is going to be easy, and it don’t hurt,” Cody told Birchie, who had yet to overtly acknowledge him. As he spoke, he reached for one swab kit and unpacked it, laying the pieces out on the bottom of the open briefcase: a padded envelope, a clear evidence bag with a zip top, a swabbing stick sealed in paper, a pair of bright blue latex gloves, and a little pile of forms and stickers. “If you cooperate, I can be out of your house in five flat minutes. Less,” he continued, snapping on the gloves. Now that he was addressing her, her gaze had dropped. She looked down at her hands, folded tidy in her lap, almost demure. Wattie, beside her, took a near-identical posture, both leaning in so that their sloping shoulders touched.

  “Please walk us through the process,” Frank said, for Birchie’s benefit.

  Cody picked up the swabbing stick and unwrapped it. “I’m going to put this here stick in her mouth,” he said, and then, to Birchie directly, “It goes in kinda off to the side, so don’t worry about gagging or nothing. Then I’ll scrape at your cheek on the inside. This takes a little time, because I got to collect cells on it. I have tried this on my own self, so I know it isn’t uncomfortable at all. And that’s it. Your part is done. Okay?”

  He was on his best behavior, and I thought Tackrey must have put the fear of God into him. Tackrey herself couldn’t be present, or she risked becoming a witness in her own case.

  Birchie finally looked up from her hands. She gave him her most polite, bad-company smile, the dangerous one. The one with frost and steel behind it.

  “I think . . . not,” Birchie said to him.

  Cody turned his face toward Frank, then to me. No help either place. Wattie was still in demure mode, though it fit her face about as well as sheepish had fit Rachel’s.