The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

Then she took my hand and led me up the stairs into the house.

  5

  “You know what you have to do,” said Rachel in her kind-but-firm voice.

  I’d had to call anyway to tell her we’d arrived safe. While I had her, I asked her to type “Lewy bodies” into Google. I’d already done it, sitting down at the desk the second I was alone in my room and booting up the old laptop I’d brought for Lavender, but it had been a mistake. The facts were laid out in such plain black font, stark against the website’s white background. Scary phrases seemed to bold themselves and fill my field of vision. Cognitive decline. Hallucinating animals or people. Anxiety. Dementia. When I’d gotten to Advances inexorably to death, I’d snapped the laptop closed with more force than was good for it. Then I’d dialed my stepsister.

  “I haven’t made any decisions,” I told Rachel, but my voice sounded faint. Well, good. Lavender was rustling around in the tower room next door, and the sounds of her unpacking reminded me how thin the walls were. I didn’t want Birchie or Wattie overhearing. “I haven’t even talked to Birchie’s doctors yet.”

  “I know this feels like you’re moving fast, but sweetie, no,” Rachel said. “Not to be judgey, but you’ve been worried about Birchie and Wattie’s living situation for a good ten years now. You let it slide and slide, and now you need to declare a state of emergency. Lewy bodies are frosting on a whole bad cake. You need to be firm with them.”

  I moved the closed laptop out of the way and pulled my sketchbook toward me. It had a pencil stuck down in the spiral binding, and I wrestled it out. I usually found myself doodling when I was on the phone. Or under stress. The pad was open to a simple drawing of Violence, leaping. Her knives were out. I drew a boogery shape in front of her, long and lumpy, as I spoke.

  “I know, but, Rachel, this is Birchie. She’s so freakin’ invincible.”

  It seemed wrong that the banal rules of aging and the body would apply to Birchie. Rules never had before; she was a legend, and she came from legends. Her grandfather had founded the town, her father had steered it intact through the Great Depression, and Birchie herself had saved it again in 1957.

  That summer Ellis Birch left abruptly for Charleston in a swirl of rumors that the family fortune was in jeopardy. An embezzler at the investment firm, some folks said, or trouble at the overseas bank where, rumor had it, Birches still kept their blockading money.

  “Them Birches din’t diversify,” Jelly Mack had said, with such a combination of ill-concealed relish and total ignorance of the definition of “diversify” that the remark had become famous. The local old folks still said it back and forth, chuckling, though Jelly had been dead now twenty years.

  At the time it had not been funny. Most jobs in Birchville proper were tied in some way to Birch money, and the family owned most of the square. The rents could be considered acts of charity; they kept our downtown thriving.

  Ellis Birch died of a massive heart attack right after arriving in Charleston, which made the rumor mill go even crazier. The sky was falling, and for the first time folks started asking what would Emily Birch do? She was thirty, and stout, and still unmarried. She’d had suitors as a girl, but no one good enough in Ellis Birch’s proud, paternal eyes. He had discouraged them, which was a euphemism. One of the Mack boys had been discouraged all the way to the state line.

  Emily hadn’t been seen as an old maid, though. Her money and her name kept her separate from the ranks of the Perennial Hopefuls who sat aging in a clot of sad pastel at church socials. But if the money were gone? If she were just an impoverished lady of a certain age with an ever-rounding figure and no family to speak of?

  Neighbors flocked to the big white Victorian with misty eyes and casseroles, but they found my grandmother packing, sharp tongued and sharper eyed, decidedly uninterested in pity. She boarded a train for the coast that very day. Folks assumed she was going to bring her father’s body home, place it reverently in the crypt behind First Baptist, and sink into a life of genteel poverty and mourning.

  They had underestimated her. She stayed, burying her father in Charleston in order to finish the fiscal rescue mission he had started. She took his meetings with lawyers and investment bankers, and she didn’t come home until both she and the bulk of the Birch money had weathered the crisis.

  How could mortality touch her? She’d kept a whole town alive, seen nearly a hundred years of history, survived her own early widowhood and the loss of her only son. Old age should not be allowed to grind her down.

  “Do you know what ‘syncope’ means?” Rachel asked.

  “Is it part of this? Of these Lewy bodies growing in her brain?” I asked. I didn’t know that word, so it hadn’t leaped out at me from the website.

  “Yes, and it means fainting. Sudden fainting. It’s in a list of physical problems that she has or will have soon. Also shaking, dizziness, loss of balance.”

  I had noticed that last one myself. That last one was already here.

  Under my hand the boogery shape in front of Violence had grown spindly arms with claw tips. I gave it the suggestion of a thick-necked head with taut, blind bulges where the eyes should be. Added high, slitted nostrils.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s complicated.”

  “No it isn’t. You have to take charge for her now. It’s time. Ask yourself, how many sets of stairs are in that house? Do you want her to spend the last year or two of her life in traction? In miserable pain from a broken hip? She can’t stay there. It’s simple if you ask yourself the right questions.” I’d thought I wanted Rachel’s certainty, but she was as hard and sharp as those black letters on the website. She advanced inexorably, too. My pencil scratched across the paper, shading. “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “I’m here, but I don’t think family things get simpler if you ask the right questions,” I said. I made sure there was no snipe or snark in my voice as I added, “Could the right question simplify what’s happening with Jake?”

  Now it was Rachel’s turn for silence. I started drawing a second eyeless boogery monster. Violence Versus the Lewy Bodies.

  “Point taken,” Rachel said at last, her voice tight. “Just promise me you’ll keep your eyes open. Those little old ladies have been lying to you. They’ll fool you if you let them. The way you’re talking, I think you really, really want to get fooled.”

  “I promise, but how are things with you? Have you heard from Jake?”

  “No,” Rachel said, suddenly brisk. “I need to go start dinner.”

  Which was code for, Mind your own damn business, Leia, because she was just going to nuke a Lean Cuisine. Lav was with me, Jake was in the wind, and she never cooked for only herself.

  I unpacked and took a shower, trying to wash the road and a little of my mingled grief and anger off me. Rachel had a point, but was it wrong to want a single, peaceful evening? The smell of roasting hens, peppery and succulent, wafted up the stairs as I got dressed, like a sensory argument for respite. Birchie would serve them with fat slices of the summer’s first heirloom tomatoes from the back garden and her famous cornbread. To make it, she saved bacon drippings in a coffee can by the stove, and she’d put some of that grease into the cast-iron skillet and set it in the oven. She’d make batter while the rendered fat got so hot that it was close to smoking. The sizzle of the batter landing in that pan was the kitchen soundtrack of my youth.

  I didn’t know if the urge for peace came from sweetness or from being scared, though. Was it cowardice to enjoy one dinner in the company of my favorite niece, my only living Birch relative, and my much-loved Wattie? Surely it was my best self that was saying I could start spying and deciding tomorrow.

  But the voice of Rachel in my head was asking, could Birchie still make her cornbread? There was no written recipe. Did she remember? Maybe she was standing in the kitchen as blank as a sheet of brand-new paper while Wattie made it as part of their ongoing little-old-lady conspiracy.

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sp; I was too disheartened for any more conversations, so I sent brief updating e-mails to Mom and Keith and my friend Margot, who was feeding my feral cat. At six I tapped on the adjoining door that linked my bedroom to Lav’s room in the turret. She was sprawled on the daybed, deeply immersed in the mysteries of her cell phone. There was no dresser in the round room, but I saw Lavender’s shorts and T-shirts stacked neatly, color-coded, in the shelving. Four pairs of shoes and her rain boots stood in a tidy row on the floor.

  “Dinnertime,” I said, and she got up and followed me out and down the stairs, texting and talking to me at the same time.

  “How long do you think we’re going to be here?”

  She didn’t sound as aggrieved as she had on the drive, probably because she’d hung around outside with the Darian boys until their cell phones had beeped to call them home. That was new and yet the same; Birchville was so small, so known and safe, that kids still roamed at will.

  When I was Lav’s age, most of my summer friends’ mothers hollered their names in long pig calls to retrieve them. The well-off ones sent their housekeepers out to do it. Birchie rang a distinctive brass bell from the porch. It could be heard from anyplace on the square, and woe betide me if I did not come at once. Birchie rang it herself; she was above pig calls, and she hadn’t kept a housekeeper since her father died. She was famous for it. She’d come home from Charleston in mourning clothes, but a week later she’d traded them for bridal white and married her greengrocer, Floyd Briggs. Then she’d offered Vina, Wattie’s mother, a fat pension so she could retire. Vina had worked for the Birches from sunup to suppertime, six days a week, for most of her life. She’d more than earned it.

  Birchie “did for herself” after that, even the year she was pregnant. Her father had been a proud man, more revered than beloved. He’d been “Mr. Birch”—never “Ellis”—to every single person in town. My grandmother wanted it known that the new reigning Birch was not too uppity to keep her own floors clean.

  In recent years I’d insisted on hiring a rotating cast of local girls to help her with the heavy work and laundry, but she still cooked and kept her garden. Although now, having seen her planting Tic Tacs, I guessed Wattie was doing more and more of those things.

  “We’ll need to stay a week or two at least,” I told Lavender. I wasn’t sure of anything, including how bad off Birchie truly was. How long could they have been lying to me?

  On the way through the parlor, my Rachel-sharpened gaze caught on the two upholstered chairs, sitting side by side facing out the big front window, so close their arms touched. It made me stop short, noticing the Victorian love seats, facing each other in front of the fireplace.

  Lavender rammed into my back.

  “What?” she said, but she didn’t look up from her phone.

  “Nothing,” I said. The love seat on the left had matching tables at each end, one stacked with Birchie’s bookmarked Phyllis Tickle book and several novels, the other holding Wattie’s giant King James Bible and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Nearby the tiny round coffee table on the wide end of the wraparound porch had its two chairs pulled around to one side, backs against the wall of the house, ostensibly so they could both have a clear view of the square.

  All the furniture in the house had been reangled and rearranged so Birchie and Wattie could sit like honeymooners crowding in on one side of a restaurant booth. It hadn’t always been that way. It had happened in gradual steps, though, so I hadn’t noticed from visit to visit. These days, even when they were standing, Wattie’s bad knees and Birchie’s poor vision kept them arm in arm, giving Wattie near-constant access to the best of Birchie’s two good ears. How deeply did the Lewy bodies have their hooked claws in Birchie’s brain?

  I took a long, slow breath, trying to lower my heart rate. My pregnancy handbook had a judgey tone and quite a lot to say about the effect of stress upon poor Digby. I doubted it would recommend barraging him with oscillating grief and anger hormones.

  We went into the kitchen through the dining-room door. Birchie and Wattie were at the stove, loading up the plates. By the back door, a recessed nook held a narrow rectangular table. It was set for dinner, telling me the same story as all the other furniture: I always sat on the built-in bench seat under the window, while Birchie and Wattie sat side by side, looking out over their backyard garden. But not this time.

  I deliberately pulled out Wattie’s chair for Lavender, saying, “You hungry? You can sit right here.”

  So much for peace and sweetness. Rachel was right; I needed my eyes to be opened. I needed to see how much of Birchie was still present, without her co-conspirator’s whispered assists.

  Lavender plopped into the chair, eyes still on her screen. She reached blindly for the glass already set beside the plate and took a big slurp. Her eyes widened, and she finally looked up from her phone, startled and so horrified I thought she might spit it right back out.

  As soon as she could swallow, she stage-whispered, “Oh my God, what is that?”

  “Tea,” I said. Rachel brewed tea strong and served it sugarless, spiced with so much cinnamon and lemon it was practically an astringent. Lav gave me a look of such pure disbelief that I amended it. “Sweet tea.”

  Birchie and Wattie came over, each carrying two loaded plates. Birchie came right to her usual spot, setting the plates and sitting without seeming to notice Lavender, but Wattie stopped short as she clocked my teenager-assisted coup. She gave me a long, reproachful look as she set her plates. I dropped my gaze. Wattie’s part in this cover-up was not purely altruistic. Her own sons had wanted her to move into assisted living when her driver’s license got revoked. She’d moved in with Birchie instead, a compromise that could work only as long as both of them stayed healthy.

  “Bow your heads,” Wattie said, sliding in onto the bench beside me.

  Lav reflexively stuffed her phone into her back pocket. Rachel didn’t allow phones at the table. We joined hands as Wattie launched into the blessing.

  Wattie’s husband had been Redemption Baptist’s preacher for decades, and Wattie was as devout as they came. She settled in to thank God in great detail for food and family, safe travels, and the beauty of the day. All her words were aimed directly heavenward, not at me, but at the same time she had my hand in a grip so tight it qualified as a pinching. She was ill with me for giving Lav her seat, all right, and that in and of itself said quite a bit about how much cover Birchie needed these days.

  I sneaked a peek around the table, and Wattie was the only person with her eyes closed. Birchie glared disapproval at Lavender’s hand, as if it were the blood-soaked paw of some unclean animal. Lavender stared off sideways, oblivious, not listening. When she saw me watching, she snapped an appropriately holy look onto her face and shut her eyes.

  “In the name of Jesus, I pray these things,” Wattie said. Eventually.

  We all echoed her “Amen.”

  All of us but Birchie, who was now staring openly at Lavender, trouble written in the powdered creases of her forehead.

  “I’m really glad you set the table in here,” I said to call her attention.

  I wanted to get Birchie talking, but I also meant it. Usually a single extra person was enough for Birchie to declare that we had “company” and move us to the very formal dining room with its massive walnut furniture. There a huge china cabinet loomed against the longest wall, chock-full of silver pieces and Birchie’s mother’s wedding china. My dining room at home featured a gaming table and the built-in china hutch held my Wonder Woman action figures. Eighty-seven mint-in-package versions, dating back from 1966. I did not do formal very well.

  Birchie peered at me across the table. “Beg pardon?”

  I said, “I meant I enjoy eating here, in the kitchen nook, like folks.”

  Birchie looked to Wattie’s place, blinking with myopic suspicion when she found Lavender again instead.

  “Pass the salt,” Wattie said, and Birchie located her across the table. She smile
d in obvious relief, handing the shaker across. Wattie held Birchie’s gaze, cuing her. “This is a fine place for supper. As Leia’s niece, Lavender counts as family.”

  “Yes. Lavender counts as family,” Birchie parroted. I didn’t like the way her words matched Wattie’s so completely.

  I said, “It’s much cozier here anyway.”

  Birchie turned her bird-eyed gaze on me. “Well, I like a dining room at times. A meal with company should feel like something of an occasion. Still and yet, I do think it aids my digestion when my father isn’t watching every bite I chew. He doesn’t like for me to be so stout.”

  She said it as if her actual long-dead father were waiting in the dining room to disapprove of the butter on her cornbread. I hoped she was making a little joke, referencing his oil portrait, hanging on the wall behind the table’s head.

  I told her, “If you want me to, I can take your father’s picture down. There’s a ton of other paintings in the attic. I could dig out that pair of ship paintings you always liked. They’re about the same size.”

  “You think it would be that easy to take my father out of this house?” Birchie said, amused. “It can’t be done! You could burn that portrait, but he would still be present. My father was born in this house, and his picture has been hanging on that wall for decades. He never was an easy man to shift.” And this was purely, purely Birchie. She was still in there, even if the lying had been going on for longer than I’d hoped. I buttered my cornbread, peeking sideways at Wattie. I found her staring openly at me, as if to say whatever the gramma version of “In your face” might be.

  “So the portrait stays,” I said, taking a bite. If Wattie had made this batch of cornbread, she’d done it perfectly. It had crisp edges and a tender middle, like a salty doughnut. It tasted like my childhood.

  “I think the portrait must stay, yes,” Birchie agreed, and then she added, “Even though Daddy could be a pluperfect asshole.”

  I choked on my bite, and Lavender released a snort of shocked laughter. I did not know which was weirder coming out of Birchie’s mouth, the expletive or the criticism of her revered father.