I usually liked this drive. It was a low-traffic four-lane that shot through Nowhere, Alabama, on the way to my specific piece of it. I could drive it in a state of mind that was a little like twilight sleep, where the pictures formed and shifted.
I wanted to think about anything but Birchie’s health. I was so angry with myself, so worried, and I wouldn’t know how bad it truly was until I got there. I kept my mind’s eye fixed on that first image of Violence, trying to see how she had come to be so I could write this prequel. The one I hadn’t started yet.
I was used to working creatively to deadline, but in collaboration, as part of a team. Plus, my teams had access to deep histories and intricate worlds that had been invented by other teams of people, years ago.
V in V was different. It was the first and last thing I’d done that was wholly mine.
I had to remember how to work alone. While gestating a still-secret human. Also alone. While finding out what had gone so bad wrong with my Birchie and deciding what to do about it. While supporting Rachel long-distance as her marriage imploded, which was like attempting to cuddle a cat who didn’t want to be picked up, and now the cat was three states away.
I had to try, though. I was the only person on the planet who even knew that Rachel was in trouble. Except, of course, for Lavender. Who was barely speaking to me. My niece was a hunchy thread of palpitating blond misery beside me, her face pointed decidedly away, out the window. I’d gotten nothing but sour nods and shrugs and one-word answers ever since I’d picked up her and her ridiculous Louis Vuitton three-piece luggage set at Rachel’s early this morning.
She was so tiny that I wondered if she should be in the front seat. She hadn’t asked, though. She’d just gotten in, and Rachel had said nothing. Lavender was heading into eighth grade, and Rachel must have finally lost the “You have to be a hundred pounds” argument. Lavender had been born so premature that she might never be a hundred pounds. Lord, if we got into a wreck, the air bag might well kill her. Her head was the size of a little cantaloupe, and her hands looked like doll hands, folded under the brand-new breasts that were pushing at her T-shirt.
“I’m glad you’re with me,” I told her, and it was only mostly a lie. Usually I liked traveling with Lavender, who was into manga and Magic: The Gathering and could use words like “Whedonverse” correctly in a sentence. I made up for it by saying an immediate truth. “And sometimes it’s good to get away from home.”
“Maya got a trip to Paris,” Lavender said.
It was the longest sentence she’d said all day.
“You’d rather be in Paris? Me, too, babe.”
It sounded lovely, actually, skipping off to eat meringues and macarons and wander the Louvre with my usually delightful niece. In We-Go-Straight-to-Paris World, Birchie was healthy and hail, walking with Miss Wattie to the fruit stand to pinch-test the tomatoes.
“Well, I don’t want to be in Alabama,” Lavender said. “Maya’s gramma took her for two weeks, and when she got home, everything was done already.”
“What was done?” I asked, and even as the stupid question fell out of my stupid mouth, I regretted it.
“The stuff for the divorce,” Lavender told the huge bank of kudzu we were passing on the right. “Maya got off the plane, and only her mom was there to pick her up. Her dad was waiting to meet them at the Scoopery. They bought her a Death by Chocolate sundae, even though her mom was always like, ‘Sugar is the devil.’ Her dad had moved to an apartment already. Her mom had packed half of her stuff to go in her new bedroom there. It was like, ‘Here, this happened. Live with it, and have this ice cream because we think you’re either five or stupid.’ Now she has about a million pimples, because her dad lets her eat whatever she wants on his weekends to piss her mom off. Her mom’s never home, because she’s dating every creep there is on JDate, which, gross, and her dad’s girlfriend moved in, and she’s like twenty-six, so it’s even grosser. Maya already tried pot, and she dyed her hair green, and she hates everyone. We’re not even friends anymore, because she hangs with the burners.”
The saddest part was how flat she said it. Like this was regular, and now it was her turn. Up until now she’d been so protected; she hadn’t known that no one grew up without collecting dings and broken edges. I hated standing witness to this first hard blow, hated hearing the shiver and crack of her faith.
“Lavender, that’s not going to happen to you,” I said. I couldn’t stop her hurting, but I wouldn’t let it ruin her. Not if I could help it.
“I’m not going to smoke pot and get pimples?” Lavender said. “Or Mom and Dad aren’t getting a divorce?”
She knew the answer to the second question better than I did. She didn’t wait to hear my answer anyway. She turned her face to the window and popped her earbuds in, jacking up the music on her phone so loud that I could hear the tinny whisper of some pop boy wailing in falsetto about love.
I took a cleansing breath and refocused on Violence, suspended in midleap over the cityscape. She’s looking down, grinning her savage grin. There was only one word on that whole first page, written inside a small white square to show that it was Violence’s thought, not dialogue.
Hello.
She’s seen Violet, trit-trotting through the narrow, trash-strewn alleyway below. In the second panel—and in every panel where Violet is seen through Violence’s eyes—her footsteps leave a trail of flowers and vines and butterflies and yearning baby rabbits. It was a little embarrassing to remember exactly how über-pretty and pure I’d made my avatar. Violence, who has landed on a rooftop now, looks right at her and thinks, You are a living sunbeam in this black and filthy place.
On the next page, shapes rise out of the shadows and coalesce into a gang that follows Violet. Well, I was young, and hurting enough to turn one sad, selfish JJ into a pack of evil boys, bent on mayhem. Violence, watching them stalk the living embodiment of my own innocence down an alley, thinks, Like any light in darkness, you attract.
She follows the gang, slithering along the roofline.
The shadow boys call out to Violet. She speeds up, looking for a way back to a busy street, a lighted store. But she has taken a wrong turn. The alley dead-ends, and the boys encircle her, blocking much of her yellow light. She holds her purse out in front of her. As if they want something so simple, so easily abandoned as a purse. Her eyes are full of tears that have not spilled yet. Nothing has been spilled yet.
From her perch Violence watches, and through her eyes the boys are hunchbacked and long-snouted, more hyena than human. She starts creeping down the wall behind them.
Your light has called these feral children. And something worse . . .
One boy bats the purse to the ground, and another knocks Violet’s hat off. A third grabs at her shoulder, snapping the strap of her sundress with a ping.
Your light has called me.
Violet falls to her knees. As she covers her eyes with her hands, Violence comes to ground behind them. The snicking of her long knives being drawn gets their attention. Then it is all carnage, because this is what Violence brings. She tears and bites and slices, making bad boys into broken heaps and pieces.
Live, scrap of sunshine. Live to warm me.
As Violence swarms back up the alley wall, she takes one last look over her shoulder. Violet kneels in a fresh-made abattoir with her hands covering her eyes, seen but not seeing. The baby rabbits hide in her skirts. Her sundress is a red-and-yellow Rorschach test. A frightened songbird on her shoulder holds the broken strap to keep her covered.
By the time Violet takes her hands away, Violence is gone. But not entirely. Her colors, her shadow and its shapes haunt the margins of the frame until the next time Violet meanders into jeopardy.
I flipped back to the beginning in my mind’s eye. There Violence says that Violet’s light called her. What if she was lying? Or what if she was simply wrong? Did Violence know her own origin story? That was an interesting question, and I felt a little spark. The spark o
f story starting. What if—
“Is that a food baby, or are you pregnant?” Lavender asked, pulling me out of my dirty alley, landing my butt hard back in the rental car.
I was so startled that I turned toward her, jerking the wheel sideways. Our tires hit the rough tread on the shoulder of the highway, and I realized I’d been steering with one hand. The other, in its brand-new mother-hand way, had moved of its own volition to the bottom curve of my belly. It defined Digby, small-ballooning in his own decided little pooch in front of me.
I had to face front and grab the wheel with both hands to drag the car onto its proper course, but not before I saw that Lavender looked as startled as I felt.
“Oh my God, are you?” Lavender said, almost a squawk. She pulled her earbuds out. “I was totally kidding.”
My face felt so hot. I wanted, very badly, to say, Ha-ha, you’re right, I’m fondling my abdomen purely for spicy-sandwich-related reasons! But I was already sixteen weeks gone. In another month or so, Digby would tell the truth for me. Plus, I had a long-standing policy of not BS’ing Lavender. It was one of the reasons that we were so close.
“Are you really pregnant?” she asked again, insistent.
“A little bit,” I said.
I risked a sidelong peep at her, and to my surprise, her hands were balled into fists in her lap and tears of fury had welled up in her eyes.
“No one tells me anything,” she said. “You all just do what you want. You grown-ups. You do whatever you want all secret. I never know important stuff, unless I happen to find out by accident.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, instantly softened, because this was not about me, much less Digby. Not at all. “I don’t know what’s going on with your mom and dad, but I do know they both love you.” She snorted at that, and I asked her, “Do you want to talk about it?” Lord, how I did.
I wanted to know what Lavender knew. Sunday afternoon Rachel had gone upstairs and taken Lavender into her room. She’d come down half an hour later, but I was on the phone with Birchie.
By then I’d heard and read enough eyewitness Fish Fry accounts to convince me that I had to get down to Birchville, ASAP. I’d called Birchie directly to tell her I was coming. While Rachel sat in the wreckage of her dining room, calmly booting up her laptop, I blatted into Birchie’s soft “mm-hm”s and Wattie’s palpable silence, “I should be there Tuesday, at the latest.”
I was hating the speakerphone. I felt my words thinning and flattening as they fell out on the other end, as if they were landing in an echoing black canyon instead of a genteel living room with damask curtains and twin Victorian love seats.
“No need for such a fuss,” Birchie said.
“We’re fine here, Leia,” Wattie added, which was such a blatant whopper that it stole my breath for a second.
“I’m glad to hear that you’re fine, Wattie,” I said, my voice gone sharp. Birchie never would have been able to hide her failing mind for so long without Wattie’s help. And now they both sounded truculent, unsorry and dismissive, like they’d simply been naughty babies hiding chocolate. “Are you both just fine?”
Birchie answered, her tone mild. Almost chatty. “Well, Wattie’s knees have been a bother for her, I can tell you that.”
I hardly knew how to respond. Maybe she was so deep into the badlands of the brain that she’d already forgotten what had happened. Maybe she was being Southern Lady Genteel about the brand-new Late Unpleasantness she had started down at First Baptist. I needed to see her to know.
As soon as the connection closed, I called my parents. Rachel looked up from pricing flights and rental cars for me when she heard me say, “Hey, Mom,” pausing to listen to my half of the conversation.
“It’s a lot for you to do alone,” Mom said, when I’d gotten her up to speed. “Do you think I should go with you?”
“No,” I said, near instantly.
My mother had a strong sense of doing what was right—and what was expected—but her presence would only make things harder. She and Birchie hadn’t been close since Mom remarried. Birchie hadn’t objected to the union; my father had been gone more than three years then. The rift came because Mom wanted to change my name and let Keith adopt me. Mom thought I would feel like the odd girl out, growing up Leia Birch Briggs when she became Clara Simpson. Birchie fought her bitterly, and it caused a lifelong coolness between them. After that, when Mom brought me down for my summers, she didn’t stay the way she had when I was a baby.
Now that I was grown, I was glad Birchie had won. I would have been odd girl out by any name, a supernerd who stood five foot nothing and had the Briggses’ pale skin and the Birches’ dark hair and light blue eyes. My tall, wispy mother looked like the mom who would come in the box set with Keith and Rachel. They were all long-boned and honey-colored and slim, and none of them had ever seen a single episode of Xena.
“I got this, Mom,” I told her. My grandmother’s illness was Birch business, and my mother didn’t have a place in it. “And anyway, Rachel is helping me book—”
My stepsister was instantly on her feet, waving her hands back and forth to get my attention, shaking her head no.
I stopped talking, puzzled, and Mom said, “Rachel? I thought she had a stomach bug?” I remembered that Rachel had canceled lunch.
“Yeah, but I called her anyway. You know Rachel. She’s probably finding flights from the bathroom floor.”
Rachel gave me a thumbs-up and sat back down in front of the laptop. I got off the phone, thinking how weird it was to be on this side of Rachel’s wall. Neither of us was ready to spring our life-changing family news on our shared parents, but I knew about Jake, and Rachel did not know about Digby. It was an odd reversal. As I came up behind her, thinking I should encourage her to get some support from Keith and Mom, I saw she’d put a second one-way ticket in her Delta shopping cart. It was made out for Lavender Marie Jacoby.
“Absolutely not,” I said, but Rachel talked over me.
“Leia, you’ll have your hands full there. You’ll need a helper,” she said, as if she were doing me a favor. “It will even be fun for Lavender, that big old attic full of furniture and letters and oh, the clothes! I used to be so jealous, seeing your summer pictures playing dress-up with real flapper gowns, bustles, poodle skirts, and that wedding dress. . . .”
“Yeah, when I was nine,” I said. By the time I was Lavender’s age, the attic seemed like a great place to get heatstroke and spider bites. I missed JJ’s Super Nintendo so much that Birchie drove into Montgomery and bought me one to ensure I stayed through July. Rachel spent her own teen summers with Keith’s parents down in Myrtle Beach, getting blonder and browner in her bikini, decorously French-kissing every cute boy in South Carolina. “No thirteen-year-old girl dreams of a vacation down in Birchville, Alabama. And I need to focus on Birchie.”
“Yes, exactly,” Rachel agreed. “But you also have to decide what to store and what gets packed for Goodwill. You’re awful at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to close down—” I began, but Rachel interrupted me.
“Yes you do.” As she spoke, she kept right on typing Lavender’s birth date and home address into Delta, as if it were already decided. “I’m sorry, but you do. You have to move Birchie here, to assisted living. You’ve already put it off longer than you should have. She needs more care than she can get in Eastern Jesus, Alabama.”
“Maybe so, but Birchie will have her own opinions,” I said, an understatement so enormous I was surprised it didn’t get stuck and smother me on the way out of my mouth.
“You have to be firm. At a certain point, you have to take charge of things. With your grandmother that point came years ago.” Now she was choosing two side-by-side seats on the plane diagram. First class, which was ridiculous. A thousand extra bucks for a hot towel, some leg room, and free cocktails that Digby wouldn’t let me drink. “Lavender can help you. She’s naturally an organizer.”
It was true that Rac
hel’s genetic legacy was visible in Lavender’s alphabetized-by-author bookshelves and color-coded sweater drawers. But Rachel had never seen the Birch ancestral home in person. There were a hundred and fifty years of history in that house, most of it in the form of junk that had been stuffed and stacked and piled up in the attic. It would take four strong men a week to make a dent in it. Lavender would no more be useful than would Sergeant Stripes, the feral cat who lived in my backyard. I started to say so, but Rachel talked over me.
“That frees me up to find some places for Birchie to tour here. The nicest facilities all have monstrous waiting lists, I hope you know, but I can get her in almost anywhere she likes. People all over this town owe me favors.” I think she still saw a big fat no on my face, because she stopped typing, looked up at me, and added, “Please, Leia. I need some room to think right now. Please?”
That stopped my refusal cold. Rachel was asking me for help. Unprecedented, though she’d been shoveling her own unstoppable help at me for thirty-five years now. Even back in freaking preschool, she “helped” me color. One of my first memories was Rachel lisping, Pee-poo aren’t green. Pee-poo are like dis, while peeling an Electric Lime Crayola from my fist and replacing it with Flesh.
As an adult, she’d helped me choose everything from cars to Christmas trees to lip gloss. She’d bullied me into surviving after JJ screwed me over, even though she didn’t know what was wrong with me. JJ was so socially beneath her that she’d barely noticed his presence, much less his absence. All she knew was that I’d stopped eating and washing my hair. Even my Wonder Woman comics piled up unread. She’d stepped in, telling me that if I didn’t get out of bed, I would molder. She force-marched me to Soup-N-Salad with her friends and dragged me to watch her current boyfriend do his sportsball things. When I sat blank-eyed through these events, she changed tactics, suffering through Men in Black and The Fifth Element and even a teeny local Star Trek con, anything she thought might spark my interest. She’d done my color chart, too, claiming that going off to college required a makeover, then took Keith’s Visa and bought me a slew of spring-colored scarves to rectify my stark winter wardrobe.