Rachel sputtered out mid-profanity when she came into the archway and saw that it was me. She skidded to a stop just inside the dining room. She was barefoot, which Rachel never was. With crazy, tangled hair, which Rachel never had. And two black eyes.
“Rachel!” I said, my heart rate jacking, horrified. I was still trying to process this sudden alternate dimension in which Rachel would shriek the F-word at her husband, and now I was in a completely impossible universe, one where JJ would hit my stepsister.
Rachel blinked and fluttered at me, and even though her eyes were swollen, I realized it was only mascara and liquid liner, wept off and rubbed into black raccoon rings. Then I could breathe again. Barely. Poor Digby got instadrunk on the panic chemicals that had been dumped into my bloodstream. He fizzed like a shot glass full of 7-Up at my core.
After a fraught pause, Rachel’s hands went to her hair, trying to smooth it, her chest heaving. It was funny in an awful way, because her hair was the least of it. Everywhere my eyes went, things were wrong, so many things that I couldn’t catalog them all. The huge mirror over the serving bar was shattered, shards of green glass and what looked like red wine splashed all over the mirrored slivers. One of the dining-room chairs lay on its side, the others catty-whompered. All eight were usually spaced with mathematical precision around the table.
Rachel gave up on her hair and stepped to me, taking the cake carrier in a parody of a gracious hostess. She turned and plopped it onto the table and took the lid off.
“Is this your grandmother’s recipe?” she said.
When I nodded, she reached out with one bare hand to tear a huge hunk off. I watched in disbelief as this strange, black-eyed creature who had replaced my stepsister started eating it, methodically, like it was a punishment.
That’s when I knew that Jake was cheating on her.
Unfathomable. Rachel was the prize, longed for, fought for, reached at last. Sixteen years of marriage, and as late as last week his eyes still tracked her, greedy, whenever she was in the room. He looked at Rachel as if at any second he would grab her willowy waist, swing her up, and set her on the mantelpiece—the finest piece of art placed at the room’s focal center. But he was cheating. I would have bet a million dollars on it.
Perhaps only because he’d called me Lay. In that single syllable, history had reared an ugly head so ancient it felt like mythology. My understanding rose from that sweaty, urgent, single incident of clasping that had passed between us, back when we were kids.
The day after his dad died, JJ came weeping down to find me in the basement. I took him in my arms, and he burrowed and clung, his hot face pressed into my neck, his tears scalding. He was a sad, soft animal, urgently snuffling and rooting at me, racked with shocked grief. I pulled him even closer, holding him so tight it was like I was trying to tuck all that desperation up inside my skin and soothe it. No matter how tight I squeezed my arms and legs around him, his unwieldy body squished out around my clamping, his sorrow much too large to be contained. Then we were kissing. It was sad and wet and frantic, his face slick with tears and snot, but I didn’t mind. I felt a huge, ballooning love.
We shoved bits of clothes up and aside, pressing close and closer until I was taking him in. It hurt, a little, but I felt calm and welcoming and something else. The only word for it was “powerful.” Powerful but not superior, not above him. It wasn’t like that.
It was like I’d stepped off a cliff and found myself standing on air in an effortless, surprising hover. I’d always had this secret power, and I used it without thinking, without knowing that I always could have. Used it for good, I’d thought, to help my wounded friend.
It wasn’t romantic. I’d never girl-crushed on him in some silly, ain’t-he-dreamy way. I only loved him, whole. He was my best friend. He knew all my secrets, and he’d told me all but one of his. I’d cried facedown in his lap after my cat died. He was the last person I talked to every night, on the phone, and he was the first person I wanted to see every morning; we picked up our endless and ongoing conversation on the bus, between classes, at lunch, and after school at my house, with no need for segues or greetings. Now here he was in my basement, ruined in my arms, and it was good to wrap protectively around him as he rooted and pushed and sobbed his guts out.
Then he gasped and stiffened, and I felt it all come out of him. All that writhing misery, I pulled it right out of his body into mine. His rigidness relaxed into peace, and I felt a swell of pride that I could do this for him.
We lay in each other’s arms for a dozen heartbeats, perfectly still, and still perfectly together. In that silence I felt something starting, and it was the story of me and JJ.
I teetered on an internal edge, feeling us tip toward the beginning of a whole, real life. First comes love, I thought, and even though I was only seventeen, I knew all the things that would be next. I could imagine me and JJ at college, at our jobs, at our wedding, all the way up to a baby we would make exactly like this. Somebody with his nose and my deep-set eyes. There was one next after another for us, so obvious and easy, and with no need to hurry. It was ahead of us, and we were paused, complete, our bodies linked, on the brink of our beginning.
Then he was scrambling away from me and trying to get all his clothes straight, his cheeks staining even redder when he saw the smear of blood on my inner thigh. He mumbled something about needing to get home. He wouldn’t look at my face.
I was still mostly wearing my nerd-girl standard-issue uniform—a thrift-store dress with combat boots—but I felt so naked then. I had to sit up and put my left leg back into my panties, fasten my top buttons, tie my left boot, smooth my hem. When I looked up, he had gone. The next day he wasn’t at school. He never came back to school, and he didn’t return any of my calls. I went to his house, four times, but he wouldn’t come downstairs to see me. He didn’t speak to me again until the Christmas he came after Rachel.
I didn’t get pregnant, that time. Which put me at a lifetime score of one for two on random, unprotected sexual encounters. I never told anyone about me and JJ. Not Rachel, not Mom and Keith, not the small tribe of nerd girls at my lunch table. It hurt too much to say; I’d been demoted from best friend down to a Kleenex.
It ruined something inside me. That was the year I started drawing Violence anyway. I’d been doing a funny strip starring a character named Violet who looked like me and who frolicked about accidentally thwarting crime. After JJ, prototypes of Violence starting hiding in the margins. Watching my toon. Watching over her. Violet changed, too, evolving into a version of me who did have Super Pretty as a power, and anyone who screwed with her met Violence. Violence ate men like they were snack cakes and was never, never sorry. That was Violence’s true origin story. She came to be when I got my heart ripped out and ruined in under seven minutes, but that was not a tale that I could sell to Dark Horse.
Later, when JJ reappeared and Rachel got so serious about him, I made myself believe that he was a new guy—some stranger I’d just met. Especially after they got married and then Lavender came. I separated Jake from JJ, my ex-bestie who’d once wept and writhed and used me, spending his sorrows in my body while keeping his heart for Rachel, for later. It was this secret piece of ugly history that made me sure he was capable of thoroughly shitty sexual behavior now.
“This cake is amazing,” Rachel said with her mouth full. She stuffed more in.
“Where’s Lavender?” I asked.
Rachel shot me an irked look, her mouth now too full to answer. She stood in profile to me, chewing, breathing heavily in and out through her nose. After she swallowed, she dropped the rest of the chunk of cake onto the floor and dusted her hands together, adding crumbs to the carnage.
“She walked down the street to play at Olivia’s house. Surely you don’t think I’d let my child witness this.”
She said it flat, rhetorical, but after the last five minutes I wasn’t sure of anything. I’d never seen her this way—never. I hadn’t been allowed to. N
ot even when I might have helped. As a kid she did her grieving in the laundry closet with no witness except Thimble, her stuffed bunny. Back then, at least, I knew when she was ruined. I would sit outside the closet in silent solidarity and be extra nice to her when she emerged. As an adult I couldn’t even do that much. I didn’t have the intel. I’d never seen her weep her mascara off, not once.
“What did he do?” I asked, meaning, how had Rachel caught him? And was it a true affair? A one-night thing? A hooker?
It didn’t actually matter. I was on her side, period, because Rachel was a “step” in name only. We were both barely three when Mom and Keith got married. I had no concrete memories of a life before her. She was family, while Jake was like her garden shed, fabricated elsewhere and then added on. And the boy he used to be? JJ? He was a bullet I’d dodged years ago.
Rachel straightened up. She had five inches on me, even in bare feet. I watched her trying to gather the shreds of her cool blond dignity. She couldn’t, quite. The raccoon eyes spoiled a lot of it, and the way her hands were shaking spoiled the rest.
“What are you even doing here, Leia? Didn’t you get my e-mail?” The tremble in her voice wrecked her go-to tone of fond exasperation. She was trying to pretend her dining room wasn’t full of broken glass and upended furniture. Like the problem here was my inability to check my messages.
“Let me see,” I said, and it was a relief to look away from this nakedly wretched Rachel, scrabbling in my purse to turn on my phone. “Is this really what you want to talk about?”
“I don’t want to talk at all,” Rachel barked, suddenly so vehement that I looked back at her in spite of myself. Her hands fisted in her wonky hair.
The phone buzzed and pinged in my hands. A text was landing. And another. And another. My Underdog theme-song ringtone started, cheery in the fraught silence. The screen said Polly Fincher, a First Baptist member down in Birchville. I sent the call to voice mail, and I started to ask Rachel if I could at least help her straighten up the room before Lavender got home. I barely got two words out before the pings of more texts landing sounded. Then my phone started ringing again.
“What’s going on?” Rachel asked.
I opened up Messenger and saw a host of familiar names. Lois Gainey, Chester Beckworth, Alston Rhodes, Pastor Rick, and more, all Birchville people. My heart stuttered, and I started flipping through them. They all said variations of the same thing:
What’s the matter with Miss Birchie?
Oh, honey, we are all sick worried!
What does her doctor say?
How long has she been this bad off?
And from Martina Mack, that vicious crone: Your granny surely showed out ugly in church this morning. . . .
I looked up at Rachel, stricken.
“What?” she said. “Leia, what?”
“Birchie,” I said. “Something’s wrong with Birchie.”
Bad wrong, too, because the phone started ringing again. Pastor Rick, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I needed to talk to Wattie. I swiped him to voice mail, and still more messages were landing.
Childhood summers aside, I had never lived in Birchville. Since I’d graduated high school, I had never spent more than a week at a time there. But I was a Birch. The last Birch, so far as they knew, and this is what round two of all the texts was saying:
Come home.
Come home.
You must come home.
I reached for Rachel, blindly moving toward her, and instantly her failed rally made good. It was as if she teleported slightly above and to the left of her own human turmoil, ready to help me, to fix and manage my mess. This was her essential self, her place, always, as the rest of us mere mortals plodded through our tacky mud. It was sad, and it could be enraging, but it was also very, very useful when the world went south.
“Did she fall?” Rachel asked, putting a comforting arm around me as we peered into the phone. A fall had been my worry for a dozen years now. Those damn staircases all over that house!
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said. I opened my e-mail, and the first versions of the day’s events were already landing. Rachel and I read in tandem. I was too horrified to be relieved that Birchie hadn’t broken a hip; this was somehow worse. She had survived so much, been so essentially and willfully herself. She was bull-minded, chock-full of strong opinions that often belied her genteel-bastion-of-the-Old-South looks. But now the texts were saying that with Wattie’s help she had apparently snuck her way down deep into senile dementia or Alzheimer’s. “I have to get there, I have to go!”
My hands were now the shaking ones, and I couldn’t get the phone to do right. Birchie had refused to leave her town, much less her house, and before Wattie had moved in, she’d driven off a string of in-home nurses. She’d thrown her Life Alert away, saying that only dogs wore collars, and she rarely remembered to charge the cell phone I had bought her. Her sole support system was Wattie, who was almost as old as she was.
“Breathe, sweetie. We can’t even be sure what we’re up against until you go and see. I can book your travel while you’re packing,” Rachel said.
I loved her for that inclusive pronoun. What we’re up against—the casual, unconscious declaration that she owned a share in my troubles.
“But you have things going on here, too, with J—Jake,” I said. I wanted a share in hers as well. “I don’t want to—”
“Shhh, we’ll fix me later,” Rachel lied.
I let her. My dear old Birchie, far away and failing, trumped whatever Jake was doing with his penis.
I kept flipping through the e-mails, and the more versions I read, the more I found that I was also furious. Those two devious old ladies had put one over on the whole town for God only knew how long, smiling and tatting antimacassars and showing up for church bake sales. They didn’t want their lives to change, so they had deliberately hidden truths—oh, I was so angry! Going back to read the latest texts only made me angrier.
So many of our family friends assumed I knew. They were asking what her doctors said, how long it had been going on, and what I planned to do. Only Martina Mack assumed I’d been in the dark. Her latest Facebook message called me “irresponsible and either blind or very stupid” for abandoning a “poor old crazy lady” to “the slapdash care of an ancient, colored maid.” I wasn’t sure which of the three descriptions made me maddest, and then I was sure.
The first one. The one aimed at me. Because it was the only charge that was remotely accurate. I was irresponsible. I had been both blind and stupid.
This wasn’t on the town, or even on my duplicitous old darlings. I should have noticed. I should have seen. I was Birchie’s closest. Birchie’s only. I was the one who shouldn’t have been fooled. Who knew what damage had happened on my watch?
“I should have moved her here, by me, where I could help her,” I said, and instantly regretted it when Rachel’s eyes met mine.
She had a thousand I-told-you-so’s she could rightfully say in response to this; she had long thought my grandmother had no business living in a town she called “a pimple-size backwater with nothing but a Walgreens doc-in-the-box and an equine vet.” I could see her trying to choose the words that would best express how very right she’d been all along, as always, and in that pause we heard it. A soft snuffling sound, coming from somewhere above us.
We looked up, and there was Lavender. She sat hunched into a teeny folded packet on the balcony above the vaulted foyer. She stared through the white bars of the railing, her hands fisted around two of them like a girl in a delicately spindled lady jail. When Lavender turned thirteen, Rachel had taken her to the Clinique counter to learn makeup and skin care; now her eyes were ringed just like her mother’s, with soft brown starter mascara.
The superior, wise thing Rachel had been about to say to me died in her mouth. She exhaled its ghost in a small, sharp gasp.
“Olivia wasn’t home,” Lavender said.
“Oh, no,” Rachel said qu
ietly, bereft.
I learned then that I already had mother hands. They moved of their own volition to my belly, two steps ahead of thinking, shielding Digby from any bad thing that might hurt him one day, later, when he was out of me and being his own self. Rachel’s hands moved at the same time, rising toward Lavender. I could see in her reaching hands the need to hold her baby, hide her eyes, form cups over her open ears.
Too late. Whatever awfulness had happened between JJ and Rachel, my niece had been a witness. Unshielded. Lavender was witness to it all.
4
It begins with Violence.
No cause, no reason, no explanation. She just is: The Bad I Am.
Back in college I drew the first page as a single panel: Violence leaping over a grayscale city roofline in her sex-monster superhero outfit, a gaudy splash of color in the darkness. Her purple-black leotard was French-cut, with a deep, deep V-neck outlined in silver to suggest the letter. It was like Superman’s S, but with boobs spilling out of it. Long, wicked knives were strapped to her naked thighs, above her boot tops. Her crazy purple hair blew behind her, becoming jagged strands of black lightning where it overlapped the big, round moon. Her grin showed teeth that were oh-so-faintly pointy.
I saw my style emerging in that opener. It was in the way the light bounced, the frenzied female body over a static background, the use of a limited color palette to pull the gaze right where I wanted it.
Once I’d left the airport and gotten out of Birmingham, I spun that image of Violence in my head. I could do this drive to Birchville on autopilot, because I’d been down this route at least twice a year since I was six months old and Mom moved me to Virginia. Birchie had paid for the move, and for Mom to go to Old Dominion University. It was the last thing Birchie wanted—to move the only grandchild she would ever have farther away—but Mom wasn’t from Birchville. She’d grown up in nearby Jackson’s Gap. She’d met my dad at a Dairy Queen right after high school, in the first summer of their lives when labels like “cheerleader” and “nerd” had lost their power. They fell in love and married fast and young, the way small-town people often did. After he died, Mom wanted a fresh start; Birchie made it happen, so Mom and I gave her all my childhood summers and my Thanksgivings in perpetuity.