The Almost Sisters

  I tried to keep my breathing slow and steady, for the baby’s sake. The way these first four months had gone, my child was going to come out either tough as nails or thoroughly neurotic. I needed to take up yoga or Zen meditation, stat. That pulsing, purple urge to act went through me again, pushed hard by my heart and carried in my blood. It zinged through my limbs, and it had no place to go except back to my center, where my relentless heart sent it rushing back through me again.

  Cody tried once more. “Now, Miss Birchie, you don’t get to think not. You don’t get to think at all, because we got a court order. I can show it to you if you want. I already showed it to ol’ Frank here. You don’t have a choice on this.”

  Frank finally stepped in. “Let’s get this done, okay, Miss Birchie?”

  “Thank you, no,” Birchie said, politely, and closed her mouth.

  Really closed it. She had always had a rosebud, too small for her face, and age had further thinned her lips. Now she pursed it into a teeny, puckered star. Her eyes sparked frosty fire at Cody Mack, who was frustrated enough to pull off his mirrored cop sunglasses and glare around at all four of us in turn. He ended on Frank.

  “You need to get your client to comply,” Cody said, swaying those hips again. Forward, back, like the standing-still version of a swagger. He turned to me and Wattie. “Or you do. Only reason y’all’re here is to get this woman to cooperate.”

  “Miss Birchie, this is not optional,” Frank told her. “This is the law.”

  Birchie was listening, but not to him. Her eyes flicked to a spot behind Cody, toward the dining room, and her head tilted. Birchie was listening to rabbits. Or something worse.

  “Can we do this another day?” I asked, trying to sound sweet. I didn’t want it done at all, but later was better. Never was best. “She’s very off.”

  “Naw, we cannot,” Cody said to me. “We are bending ass-backward for you Birches already, having me do this here. Now, if you want it to get ugly, we can get ugly. If she refuses, I got the right to yoink some hairs. That’ll be more invasive-like, because I need the root.”

  Cody said “root” so it rhymed with, “mutt,” and for a second I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then I did, and I said, incredulous, “Are you actually threatening to pull hairs out of Birchie’s head?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cody said. “And if she fights me on it, I might have to use a little force, restraining her.”

  I had a vision of how well that was going to go. She’d fight. I had no doubts. No one who had seen her yesterday could doubt it, and she was frail and so small. She’d fight, and she’d get hurt.

  Wattie started whispering in Birchie’s ear. I could catch words here and there. She was trying to get Birchie on board. Peacefully. Forklessly.

  Birchie patted at her knee and said, “Now, you know that won’t do, Wattie. It will not do at all,” and I despaired.

  I just wanted to stop this, but thinking of the damage Cody’s rough hands on her could do, I said, “Birchie, please. Let’s get this over with.”

  “It’s nasty.” Birchie peeped at me through her pinhole.

  She screwed her mouth shut even tighter, and this was getting ridiculous. It was like I was watching three human adults trying to get one sweet-toothed baby to eat spinach. Any moment Cody Mack would be swishing the stick toward her, saying, Here comes the airplane, zoom, zoom! But this sweet-tooth baby had Violence inside her, and her bones were as brittle as starfish. My eyes went around the room, cataloging all the things Birchie could use as a weapon. The fireplace poker, the heavy scented candle in its mason jar, her own coral-tipped nails. She could hurt him, if she got the element of surprise. Cody, with his barrel chest and meaty arms, would then crush her old bones into powder trying to protect himself.

  “It isn’t nasty!” Cody said with a pissy-sounding edge. He leaned in toward her with the stick, waving it in her face. “I took it right out of a sterile wrapper. You all saw me do it. Now, last chance, open your dang mouth.”

  Birchie was losing her temper back. I could see it in the firm set of her chin.

  I stood up, and it felt good to stand, even though I was acting against everything I wanted. “Give me the stick, Cody.”

  “No, ma’am. I got to collect it. Chain of evidence.”

  “Well, you have two more kits there. Let me show her what you’re doing,” I was trying for sweet and rational, but my words got away from me. “Maybe we can finish this up without bloodshed, and before the rest of us turn ninety, too. I’m sure you have a long list of old, sick ladies to torment today.”

  He shrugged and made a little sarcastic bow, then passed the stick to me.

  I leaned toward Birchie. “I’m just going to show you,” I told her. “Can you please open your mouth?”

  If anything, she managed to squinch it shut even tighter.

  “Great job!” Cody Mack said, enjoying my failure. That jackass.

  “Show her on me,” Wattie said, and opened her mouth, leaning forward.

  It was a good idea. I moved down a step, Birchie’s overbright eyes tracking my every move from underneath her sparse, suspicious brows.

  Cody said, “Put it in the side. Then scrape it up and down on the inside, like brushing her teeth. Except on her cheek.”

  “I heard you explain it not three minutes ago,” I told him. I did what he said, inserting the stick and scrubbing it up and down with some pressure. “How long?”

  “Forty-five seconds, and I got a timer going on my watch,” he said. I kept scraping, and Wattie made affirmative-sounding noises, side-eyeing Birchie encouragingly with her mouth stretched wide into the most plastic smile I’d ever seen. I realized she was boiling with it, too, this deep purple desire to make it all stop. Yet here we both were, helpless to stop helping. After what felt like twenty years, Cody said, “That’d about do it.”

  “There, now, that was nothing,” Wattie said as I took the stick out and showed it to Birchie. It was bloodless and not in the least upsetting. It was only a wet looking stick.

  “You see there? That’s all. Wattie did it.” Threats of labs and hair pullings had rolled off her, but I remembered how Wattie would use recipes and the regular beats of her real life to call her home. Now I used them against her, saying, “Wattie wants y’all to plant the pumpkins today, and if we don’t, you are going to have store-bought pumpkins on your porch come October. Is that what you want?”

  That got her mouth open, but only to berate me. “Leia Birch Briggs, I would sooner have no pumpkins at all! Did you know last year half those ones in the Pig were not even from America?”

  “Well, do the stick, and let’s go plant. June won’t last forever,” I said, though no matter how this all came out, Birchie would not be here to pick those pumpkins come October.

  Birchie eyed the stick, mistrustful, but Wattie gave me a little nod, almost imperceptible, encouraging me.

  “It isn’t ladylike,” Birchie said. At least she was talking to me now, the pinhole gone. “Look, it has her spittle on it. Her human spittle, and there you stand holding it in the parlor.”

  “It gets put right away,” I said. I muscled Cody aside and picked up the little bag with the plastic zippered top. I held it where she could see, then I put the stick in and zippered it shut. “You see? It gets sealed, even. Let’s do this. No fun in the garden until this is done!”

  It was my first try at Unbrookable Mother. I tried to sound like Rachel telling Lavender to clear the breakfast dishes. I tried to sound like Birchie herself had sounded on all my childhood summers, telling me I had to put away my coloring supplies before I could go out and play on the square. It felt wrong to be using it on one of the very women who had taught it to me, but I found I did own this voice after all. To my mingled rage and sorrow, it worked. It unmothered her, turning her into the child.

  “Goodness, no need to make such a fuss,” Birchie said, sulky, and she opened up her mouth like a baby bird.

  I got out of Cody’s way
, super fast, before she forgot that she’d consented. He stepped in, smart enough to keep his own mouth shut for a minute. I lurked behind him making hyper-encouraging eyebrows as Cody tore open a new box and made a big show of putting on clean gloves. Wattie leaned in, whispering a soothing list of all the seeds they needed to get into the ground now—sweet potatoes and lady peas and melons—while Cody took the sample. It was such a long minute that Wattie was reciting their winter planting schedule before he finished. But then the stick was out and he was popping it into the bag, and thanks to us nobody was stabbed or broken. Thanks to us the state had everything they needed to ruin us.

  Frank pantomimed a fast Whew, and I smiled back, but wry. This was not a victory I could celebrate.

  “Now, was that so hard?” Cody said, holding up the plastic bag for her to see.

  She put a hand to her chest, distaste registering in her turned-down lips and lowering eyebrows.

  “Really?” I said quietly behind him. “Because when she slaps that out of your hand, I am going to laugh my ass off. And good luck getting another sample. Can’t wait to hear you call Ms. Tackrey and explain—”

  But he was already setting the bag in the bottom of his briefcase, saying, “Okay, okay, okay,” over me until I stopped talking. “I was only showing her,” which was crap. He’d been trying to bait her. He was the same bully he’d been in childhood. Instead of growing out of his worst traits, he’d only gotten big enough to do real damage with them.

  Birchie dropped her eyes, hands folded, back in demure mode.

  “Now what?” I asked as Cody fished in his shirt pocket for a pen to fill out the label on the sticker.

  “Now I box it up and drop it off straight to the lab,” he said, checking the dusty briefcase and then feeling in his back pockets for a pen that wasn’t there.

  I think, if I had a plan at all, it happened then. Not even a plan. More like a noticing, a logical click of understanding much too fast to think in words: there was a little bag full of cells sitting in the dusty bottom of his briefcase. Cells I’d helped gather, though they could put Birchie into prison. There was another little bag full of cells, anonymous, identical, in my hand. Cells that wouldn’t help the cops or Regina Tackrey at all.

  “I have one,” Frank said, holding out his own pen. Cody turned toward the fireplace to take it, blocking Frank’s view of the briefcase. He was turned away for a second, maybe two. Not enough time, if I had thought about it. But I didn’t think. My body had been ready, waiting, filled with pent-up purple action this whole time. My body moved, setting my little bag down, picking his up. Boom and done.

  Wattie saw me. Just her. Her eyes went wide, horrified, and she opened her mouth. She snapped it shut again. Cody was already turning back. He was writing on the sticker. I watched him affixing it to the wrong bag, as horrified as Wattie was. My bad hands buzzed and trembled, so that I had to work to not drop the bag holding the real sample.

  This is a felony, I thought. I am holding a felony, and I did it. This is how fast a person’s hand can move, almost without permission. An impulse, a breath, and then it’s done, and then you did a felony, forever.

  I didn’t want to think about Birchie with a hammer, about what she did in her own worst moment, but I already was. I clutched the bag so hard my knuckles were white.

  Wattie was purely panicked. I could see it in her wide, wide eyes. She opened her mouth again and then closed it. We were telegraphing urgent eye messages back and forth in total silence.

  She was telling me that I was stupid, and God, but she was right. My hands had done a felony, and it could not be undone. Cody had already put the wrong sample in the box and labeled it.

  If it had been our chief, Willard Dalton, I could have said, Oh, wait, I did something bad and stupid. He could have switched them back or taken a whole new sample. Hell, if it had been Willard Dalton, observant and smart, my bad hands would never, never, never have had the opportunity. But this was Cody Mack. If we spoke up now, I’d be leaving the house in handcuffs.

  Hush! Hush! I don’t want to have my baby in a prison, I thought-beamed at Wattie, and she closed her mouth up for the third time.

  Frank, oblivious, began a round of cool, polite good-byes as Cody clicked his stupid briefcase shut. I croaked out some kind of good-bye, too, and so did Wattie. I hoped I didn’t look as red and sweaty as I felt. I could hardly hear myself over the blood roaring in my ears.

  “How long until we get results?” Frank asked.

  “Well, this kinda thing, it can take months,” Cody said, and I felt his words both as relief and as a heavy sword on a thin string, hanging over my head. Months? Months of not knowing if I’d be caught. Months of this baby growing here in Birchville with my grandmother unable to leave the state, stuck in this dangerous, fork- and stair-filled house. I couldn’t put her in a temporary place until I could move her close to me. Not when I had no idea where I’d be living and every tiny change was so hard on her. But this also meant months of putting off a prosecution. Which was worse? Then Cody flashed a big, shit-eating grin and added, “But Tackrey’ll fast-track this one. So say a week? Ten days?”

  I had my answer. Fast was worse.

  Frank was walking Cody out now, leaving with him, mouthing polite things. Birchie and Wattie stayed glued to the love seat, both dead silent for different reasons.

  I closed the front door behind the men. Turned and leaned against it because my legs were weak and shaking now, made of rubber bands and putty.

  “Let’s go plant pumpkins,” Birchie said, cheery, as if all the unpleasantness were done now.

  I didn’t answer. Wattie and I both cocked our heads, listening to the voices and the clomp of big man feet down the stairs until we couldn’t hear them anymore. Then Wattie stood so fast it was like she’d borrowed better knees. She was across the parlor and over to me in a flash, grabbing my arm in a grip so tight it hurt.

  “Girl, what have you done?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sorry, I don’t know!” I said, clutching the tops of her arms.

  “What happened?” Birchie asked from the sofa, still sitting, unalarmed.

  “You are going to be sharing a cell right down the hall from us. Your fingerprints must be all over that plastic bag,” Wattie said, in a state, trying hard not to flat-out yell into my face.

  “Why would they fingerprint that bag? They won’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing. If they can’t identify the body, how can they proceed? With no working theory?” I was trying to convince myself as much as her. “The case will never be solved, and one day people will talk about the bones the same way they talk about the Pig Man in the Holler, or the giant alligator gar down in Lake Martin—the mysterious remains found in the Birch house.”

  Wattie rolled her eyes to heaven, calmer now, but not by much. “Are you stupid? You gave them my genes, child! My genes! Lord help you. Lord help your baby—do you think that I am black here like a paint upon my skin? Do you think he will be, too?”

  I didn’t understand her for a moment. “You mean they can tell from that swab that you’re black?” That didn’t seem right. In fact, it seemed a little racist, for genes to know that. For genes to tell that. I wanted us all to be the same, under.

  “Of course they can! Lord help your baby,” Wattie repeated, throwing her hands up. Then she fisted them in her short curls, walking away from me, back into the parlor. I trailed after. “We have to call Willard Dalton. Now. Get him to swap them back.”

  I shook my head. “We can’t. Tackrey doesn’t trust him. Cody is going to take that box straight to her or to the lab. It’s not going to stay in Birchville.”

  “What did you do?” said Birchie, and she was alarmed now. Wattie’s distress had penetrated whatever fog had gathered around her, and she was sitting up as tall as she could.

  “She swapped the tests out. Yours and mine,” Wattie said, pacing, frantic, hands still fisted in her hair. “She gave them my cells.”

  Birchie put a h
and to her heart, her eyebrows rising.

  I was still talking to Wattie. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t look to see if the genes are from a black person or a white person. Not on a paternity test.” I spoke with all the authority of a person who had once been trapped in a dentist’s waiting room with no book and a trashy daytime talk show on the TV. They’d been doing a thing the smarmy host called “father reveals,” where the guy who thought he was the daddy never was and they told him so on TV. “They only look at those markers. Specific ones. I think. I’m pretty sure.” I wanted to go ask Google, but I didn’t want that particular search in my browser history. I needed to go to a library. A big one with a lot of anonymous computers. Far away.

  “You switched them? My cells and Wattie’s?” Birchie asked me. She stood up, hand still pressed to her heart.

  I nodded, surprised she understood that much.

  “I’m so sorry,” Birchie said. To Wattie. Not to me.

  Wattie’s nostrils flared, hands pulling at her hair, and she said, “Don’t.”

  “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Birchie told her. She came across the room, already reaching for her.

  “We don’t know,” Wattie said, stiff and unmoving in her arms. “You do not know.”

  They were having a conversation that I was not having.

  Birchie said, “I do know, and you do, too,” and Wattie crumpled. She burst into sound, hands still pulling her hair. It was an awful noise, long and rising, a shuddering howl. Her hands finally unfisted from her hair, moving to cover her face. The sound broke, becoming sobs so deep and racking that they shivered her foundation. She shook so violently that without Birchie’s arms around her I thought her body might come apart. Her hands pressed so hard against her face it must be hurting her.

  “What’s happening?” I said, but to them I wasn’t even in the room. I was as unpresent as one of Birchie’s rabbits, practically imaginary. Birchie rocked her back and forth while Wattie wept.

  “You do know,” Birchie said. “I am so sorry.”