The Almost Sisters

  “Just get some pink or this turquoise up around your face,” she’d told me, and the enraging thing was, with Spring colors by my face, damn it all if I did not look fresher and bright-eyed. Less broken anyway. Twenty years later I was still winding a funky scarf in the correct colors around my neck, elevating my uniform—black top, boot-cut jeans, and Chucks—into an actual outfit. Her genuinely good intentions coupled with her self-assured rightness made the helping both exasperating and impossible to turn down.

  What had I done to help her back? Nothing. She never let anybody help her. Even on those rare occasions when Rachel allowed a virus to get through her cloud of vitamins, she kept her freezer stocked with frozen quarts of homemade chicken soup she made out of organic bone broth and whatever root vegetables had the most antioxidants.

  “Well, there’s no harm in finding places for Birchie to tour, but only if they have two-bedroom units. Wattie and Birchie will likely want to stay together. I have to give them the option,” I told her, digging out my AmEx. Rachel was on the payment page already. “And fly us coach. Those seats are big enough to hold two Lavenders.”

  She hesitated, eyeing my Digby-inspired larger ass. She noticed whenever I put on a few pounds and would gift me with fruit baskets and yoga-class cards until my jeans got roomy again. She reached for her purse, and I knew this move as well. She was about to get out her own credit card and pay to put me where she wanted me.

  “Do you want me to take Lav or not?” I asked.

  “Fine. I’ll put you back in steerage,” she said, and she even used my card.

  Now here we were, Lavender and me, both under different kinds of Rachel-fueled duress. Me with only a best guess idea of what had happened between her parents.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Lavender said. “No one ever talks to me about anything, so why should I talk to you? You’re as bad as them, running around all secret pregnant, and I’m this dumb kid who gets to find out last. Or never.”

  Her hands were shaking, she was that angry, that helpless in the face of whatever was happening to her family.

  “Lav,” I said softly, “you’re not the last to know, okay? You’re first. Unless you count doctors, I haven’t told a living soul I’m pregnant.”

  That gave her pause, and she asked, “Gramma and Grampa don’t know?” I shook my head. “Mom doesn’t know?”

  “Nope. And I would like to be the one to tell her. Them. Everyone—in my own time, if you don’t mind,” I said, and looked over to meet her eyes, so she would know how serious I was. She nodded, solemn, and I looked back to the road.

  After a minute Lavender asked, “What about, like, the dad? The dad of the baby? Does he know?” She was calmer, and that was good, but oh, what a complicated question.

  Instead of answering directly, I told her, “The father is not going to be involved.”

  “But does he know?” Lavender asked, as persistent as her mother.

  I shook my head, wishing I could be thirteen and stick my lip out and say, I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to explain drunk and sketchy sexual decisions to a middle-schooler who had yet to kiss a boy. I could feel Rachel as a sudden, looming presence in the car, wanting me to tread very, very carefully here. Lavender looked up to me. It didn’t help that she was full of brand-new estrogen and had just watched her own father storm out the front door with a Whole Foods bag full of socks and underpants. Hormones and daddy issues, the classic recipe for pushing girls way too early into boy arms. “What does your mother tell you about sex?” I asked.

  “Oh my God, like, nothing,” Lavender said, flushing. “I mean, she gave me a book about it. And she told me not to have it.”

  “That’s excellent advice,” I said. “Reproduction works, Lav. It only takes once, and it can happen even if you think you’re being careful.”

  “So you went on, like, one date?” Lavender asked.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing was it?”

  A no-date thing, actually, and I could not remember his real name. I had a flash of Batman, that cocky grin under the cowl, his surprisingly well-muscled arms and shoulders—I’d assumed that definition had been drawn onto the costume—and now I thought, A really, really hot thing. The thought came so fast I was already saying it. At the last second, I replaced the word “hot” in the out-loud version.

  “A really, really stupid thing.”

  I didn’t even cross my fingers on the steering wheel. I wasn’t lying. It had been stupid. But also, I couldn’t help remembering, plenty hot.

  “I want to know what happened,” Lavender insisted.

  Nothing about this story was particularly thirteen-year-old-appropriate, but sometimes the world wasn’t. Thirteen-year-olds still had to live in it and not be lied to. Even so, the spirit of Rachel was practically a force now; there was honest, and then there was too honest. If I would not lie, Rachel expected me to at least be a good object lesson.

  “I was at FanCon in Atlanta, and I had an awful day. So I went down to the bar, which was a bad idea. This guy came up and asked if he could buy me a drink.”

  “What was his name?” Lavender asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “What did he look like?” Lavender asked. Which was entirely not the point.

  “I don’t know. He was dressed as Batman,” I said. “So I—”

  “Batman?” Lavender interrupted, and then she snorted. Almost a laugh. “You love Batman! Was he a cute Batman?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” I repeated, but a sidelong glance at her told me that it did, to her. Well, at least it was a question I could mostly answer. “Um, he was around my age. African American. Deep voice—”

  “He was black? You’re having a black baby?” Lavender interrupted again.

  “Well, it’s half my baby, Lavender. He’ll be biracial, so I don’t know what he’ll look like or how he’ll think of himself.”

  She was staring at me, big-eyed and silent.

  “What?”

  “God, Aunt Leia. You are just . . . so cool.”

  Rachel was going to murder me.

  “No, I’m not cool,” I said. “I’m reckless, and I let feeling crappy lead me into bad decisions. For the record, it didn’t make me feel better.” Not strictly true, but in the morning I’d been half dead of hangover, so it was true enough. “He could have been a rapist, or a psycho stalker, and I brought him right up to my room. He could have had a disease. I had to get tested for a bunch of crap, which was scary and embarrassing, and I still have to take another HIV test in a couple months, just to be safe. I was completely out of control, and now this baby—who I’m glad about, don’t get me wrong. I am going to love this kid. But, Lav, my kid is going to grow up with no father.”

  That one hit her close. Maybe too close. She looked away, swallowing.

  “That’s going to suck. Not having a dad,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant for the baby or for her. Maybe both.

  I backpedaled, picking a different moral. “When you drink too much, you make choices that you might not make if you were sober.”

  She rolled her eyes, accepting the subject change. “They told us at school.”

  “Well, I’m telling you again,” I said. “It’s easy to drink too much, especially if you’re not used to it.”

  Lavender nodded, very solemn. “So you’re saying I should start drinking as soon as possible and get used to it.”

  She said it so earnestly it took me half a beat to realize she was trolling me. I smiled, relieved to see the sassy kid I knew was still there, under the unhappiness.

  “Exactly. Birchville is in a dry county, or else I’d stop and get you a sippy cup of bourbon.” I turned us onto Main Street. “Look, we’re almost there.”

  Lavender made a face, like she was smelling something less than savory. “This is Birchville?”

  Up ahead we could see Walgreens and
Subway across from Tiger Gas, a nod to Auburn. Alabama fans gassed up at the Shell.

  “The edge of it,” I said. “You’ll see downtown after this intersection.”

  She sat up straighter, looking around as we passed Piggly Wiggly, sharing its parking lot with Movie Town.

  “What is that place?”

  “You rent DVDs there. They also have tanning beds in the back,” I said. In some ways driving into Birchville was like driving thirty years into the past, the streets lined with colors and concepts right out of 1987.

  “That’s freaky,” she said. “A lady on the corner is waving at us.”

  Dot Foster, a sweet older woman who headed the Prayers and Squares ministry at First Baptist, had spotted the rental car. I waved back, and she hurried off toward Lois Gainey’s house. Within minutes the entire town would know I had arrived, toting an unknown adolescent. If no one remembered that I had a niece, they would deploy a scout to drop by to find out Lavender’s people and provenance. In other ways driving into Birchville was a lot like driving a hundred and thirty years into the past, all the way back to 1887.

  I stopped at one of the three traffic lights, studying Lav as she studied my town.

  She was past Super Pretty—she was beautiful, and true beauty always came with a healthy shock of odd. Part of it was that she was so little. In the NICU she’d looked like a wrinkly purple apple with a few sticks attached, everything below the neck wasted to bird bones to protect her brain. Her body had never yet caught up. She was my height but built to scale, so that in pictures where she stood alone, she looked lanky and tall. Her face was wider than it was long, with huge eyes sunk deep and razor-sculpted cheekbones. Her nose was a small, sharp jab over a wide mouth. Now her body had changed, too, and tiny as she was, she didn’t look at all childish. I hoped she wouldn’t realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her.

  We were at the square now, the spire of First Baptist visible from any point around it. Here, on the far side, a park with benches and a fountain shared space with the library. The sides were row shops that ran around the corners: the Knittery, Sally’s Hair Emporium, Read-Overs New and Used Books, Cupcake Heaven, Pinky Fingers Nail Salon. First Baptist itself took up most of the fourth side, and the center was all church grounds and the tiny, ancient cemetery. Most of the houses on the outer ring were Victorians that had been converted into offices and stores. A few were still residences, owned by the remnants and relations of the oldest families.

  “That’s Birchie’s house,” I said as we turned the last corner, but Lavender’s eyes had caught on the pale blue Victorian two doors closer. Both of Frank Darian’s teenage boys were sitting glumly on the porch steps.

  Frank or Jeannie Anne must have pulled them home early from camp. Was there some parental compulsion to move children across state lines when a marriage was in trouble? Or perhaps they had demanded to come home. Most of First Baptist’s youth group had been at the Fish Fry, so no doubt Hugh and Jeffrey Darian had gotten their own slew of overdetailed texts and e-mails.

  I wondered who was in the house with them. Traditionally, when marriages blew up in southern small towns, the home defaulted to the wife. But, also traditionally, the husbands did the cheating, plus Frank’s law office was on the first floor. I was willing to bet Jeannie Anne had been the one to vacate.

  “Cute,” Lavender said, still looking at the boys. They both looked back.

  The out-loud boy noticing was new. Maybe it came in a package with the curvy hips she’d recently acquired.

  “Birchie owns that white Victorian with the wraparound porch. See the turret?” I pointed. “On the second floor, that round room has a daybed and curved bookshelves. I called it the Princess Room when I was little. You can sleep there if you want.”

  She glanced at it, and said, “Cool,” but then she looked back over her shoulder at the boys. I felt a twinge of sorrow. The Princess Room would have excited last summer’s Lavender, a secure and curveless twelve-year-old whose parents loved each other. This summer’s girl was thirteen—hormone-soaked and heartbroken.

  We pulled in to the drive. Miss Wattie waited in the cushy porch swing, her feet pushing the boards, slowly rocking. Her hair was too short to sway with her. She stood up and came into the sun. Her little curls looked like molten silver as she made her way down the stairs. Birchie was below her in the yard, wearing her big gardening hat. She knelt by of one of the beds, planting something, turning dirt with a small trowel. She straightened when Wattie lifted one hand and then rose carefully to her feet, but she didn’t wave. She stared at the rental car, still holding the trowel, her other hand full of seeds, her face blank.

  “I’ll unload the bags and then come up and meet them,” Lavender said. “Go say hello.”

  “You sure?” I said, and she made muscle-man arms. I was surprised to see the stringy definition in her biceps

  “I’m pretty mighty,” she told me, making me smile back. I handed her the keys.

  As I came to the foot of the porch stairs, Birchie startled, and her blank eyes finally fixed on me. She blinked rapidly, puzzled, and my heart sank. I’d come to see how bad it was, and already—it was bad. She didn’t know me.

  “Birchie?” I said.

  She blinked twice more, confused, and said, “Oh, no, I don’t think I got the turkey. Wattie, did we get the turkey?”

  I had to work hard not to cry. It was a good ninety degrees, and Birchie was right beside a host of splashy summer zinnias, but recognizing me had dropkicked her into Thanksgiving.

  “The Pig delivered everything we need,” Wattie told her, coming to hug me.

  Birchie bent to drop her trowel into the tool bucket. She threw the seeds behind her, and they landed on the black patch of tilled soil. They were small, round speckles of an orange not found in nature. It looked like Birchie had been planting little candies, maybe Tic Tacs. I kissed Wattie’s cheek, then went to hug and kiss my grandmother, shutting my stinging eyes, holding her a little too tightly. I wasn’t sure how to begin.

  “Goodness,” Birchie said, breathless. “You’ll squeeze the life right out of me. I’m glad to see you, too.”

  When I finally stepped back, Wattie leaned in toward Birchie, saying something about dinner almost too softly for me to catch, right into her ear. Birchie acted as if Wattie weren’t speaking, reporting the information as if it were her own knowledge.

  “We’re having Cornish game hen.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” I said. My voice sounded so thick.

  My Birchie was planting candy, and she hadn’t known me. I still wasn’t sure that she’d realized it was June. I felt a small bubble of anger rising, that things had gone this far without my knowing.

  Digby spun like a teeny whirligig inside me then, as if reminding me how easy it was to not tell. Even the things that really mattered. Even to the ones who loved you most. But still. But still. I couldn’t help but say it.

  “You should have talked to me.” I aimed the words at Wattie, but she only looked to Birchie. So to Birchie I said, “I don’t even know what’s— Is it Alzheimer’s? And what are y—”

  “I don’t have Alzheimer’s,” Birchie interrupted, suddenly present and looking quite affronted. “I have . . .” She paused and leaned toward Wattie, who was already whispering. “The Lewy bodies!” Birchie said, triumphant. “I have the Lewy bodies growing in my brain, and it isn’t Alzheimer’s at all.”

  “Lewy bodies,” I echoed.

  Wattie said, “It’s like Parkinson’s, but Lewy bodies are actual growths, made out of proteins. They aren’t malignant, but they cause all kinds of trouble. Also, she’s had at least two mini-strokes that have not helped one bit.” It was a bullet of neat information, delivered in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “That’s really succinct, Wattie, thank you,” I said, my anger now sharp enough to cut the grief. Did she think three sentences was all it took? “I don’t know what the hell any of that means.”
>
  Wattie’s temper did not rise to mine. Just as calmly she said, “It means Birchie says soap words, on her bad days. She gets tired and confused and ornery real easy. Now she’s started saying things out loud in public that might be better said more quietly, in private, and she sees animals that aren’t there.”

  “Rabbits,” Birchie chimed in. “These days the whole town is chock-full of them. All doing what rabbits do.”

  She waved an irritated hand at the bottom of the drive. I looked and saw no rabbits. Just Lavender. The rental car’s hatchback was gaped open, but the luggage was still in it. She was down by the curb talking to both Darian boys. Fantastic.

  “Dr. Pettery has her taking Exelon and Sinemet,” Wattie went on. The formal medical words sounded odd coming from her familiar mouth, as awkward as I always sounded when I tried to use my high-school French. “They help her not shake, and they help her not fall down. He told her to take baby aspirin to keep a bigger stroke from coming. There’s another drug that could help with the memory and the rabbits—”

  “Such humping!” Birchie interjected. Wattie kept talking.

  “—but there’s a good chance it would make the shaking much, much worse. So we just live with those dirty rabbits, don’t we?”

  “I know those rabbits aren’t there,” Birchie confided. “Real rabbits behave better.”

  I shook my head. “You should have told me she was sick.”

  “Oh, honey,” Wattie said, pitying and reproachful.

  Birchie’s bright eyes were on me now, alive and clever and thoroughly her own. Her dry hands patted at me, like I was a sad dog or a baby.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, her tone echoing Wattie’s. “I’m not sick. I’m only dying.”