The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

I shook my head. I was never much into playing dollhouse, preferring to jump on the sofa to zoom my Millennium Falcon toy around up as close to the ceiling as I could get it. Playing house way down on the earthly floor didn’t interest me, especially since Rachel never let me stage a Sand People attack on the family who lived there. There had been a family. I did remember that. Mommy and Daddy, then a girl and a boy and a baby.

  She had named the dolls, but I didn’t remember all of them. The boy had been called Jean Pierre or something very like that, and if Rachel had actually been serious about that, how lucky for Lav that she was born female.

  “The girl doll was named Lavender?” I asked.

  “No, the baby,” Rachel said. “The tiny baby doll. The little girl was Madeline. Ugh, just forget it. This is the least of my life’s problems. So fine, draw me again. It doesn’t matter, because let’s be real. No one I know is going to read it. So whatever. Do whatever. Make a supervillain named the Rachenator, give it six or seven evil heads. I forgive you.”

  She plopped back down and picked up the top magazine, as if she were finished with the conversation, but it didn’t play. Her hands were trembling. I heard the rustle in the pages.

  “You forgive me?” I said, incredulous.

  “You heard me.” She sniffed, turned a page. “Oh, look, aqua is coming back for summer. How lucky for you. You look good in aqua. Not that you’ll wear it.”

  “I didn’t steal your baby name,” I said again.

  “If you say so,” Rachel said. She lifted the Vogue to eye level, until it was a literal wall between us. But she couldn’t leave it. She spoke behind the shield of the emaciated teenager on the cover. “I’m just saying. Dad built that dollhouse right after I was born, long before you ever moved in. Before Dad and I knew you existed. I had it my whole life, and the baby was always named Lavender.”

  Then I finally clued in. This wasn’t about dolls. This was about our parents. Somehow we were preschoolers again, and this was about who owned Keith. Had I chosen the color purple to stake a claim on something that she thought of as hers? It was territorial and weird; purple, in all its shades, belonged to anyone with eyes and color vision. It belonged to both of us. So did Keith, to some extent.

  “It wasn’t conscious,” I said. She said nothing, eyes steady on her magazine. “What do you want me to say? What will fix this?” I asked. When she still didn’t answer, I went right into the meat of the matter. “If we were both on fire, Keith would put you out first. We both know it. It’s fine.”

  Which was not to say that Keith didn’t love me. He did. He just loved Rachel more. He was the first man that Rachel and I had both belonged to, but she was his in ways I wasn’t.

  Rachel looked up, finally, and said, “Well, your mom would put you out first if you were on fire. That’s just biology.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” I said, and I wasn’t. “Mom would probably try to put us both out and catch fire, and we’d all three burn up together.”

  “Oh, so Mom is so much better than my dad?” she snapped.

  “That’s not what I meant at—” I began, but she talked over me.

  “Why are we discussing this? What’s wrong with your brain? We are not on fire. We will never be simultaneously set on fire in our parents’ living room, so that they have to pick exactly who to put out in what order.”

  Well, we’re both on fire now, and neither one of us will tell them, I thought, and out loud I told her, “I call him Keith, you call her Mom. You do the math.”

  “And whose choice was that?” she said.

  I boggled at her. “Yours!” I said. “You bit me!”

  “I’m sure that I did no such thing,” she said, and she was serious.

  “Rachel!” I said. She shrugged, shaking her head faintly, as if I’d just assured her that she’d once picked up Thor’s hammer. “I did try calling him Dad, and you bit me.”

  We were talking about her now, and she didn’t like it. She forced her lips into a wry smile, and her eyes cooled. It was as though she’d flipped off her fury switch. Just like that, her wall was all the way up again. All the way up, and fortified. Maybe there were pots of oil, ready and already boiling, all around the top, but I wouldn’t know. Not from where I sat. I was far away, outside them.

  “If you say so. We’re in your house now, and Lavender and I have no place else to go. You’re Sun and I’m Sky here. So have it your way,” she said.

  It took me off my guard. Were we fighting because Rachel was out of her home territory? Worse, her home territory had a For Sale sign on the lawn, and her husband was MIA. She wasn’t ready to tell Mom and Keith how bad things were at her place—maybe because she wasn’t ready to believe it yet. Or she wasn’t braced for the pity and the worry, and with that I could empathize. She’d come to me because I already knew. I was the only one who already knew.

  “I hope you know you’re welcome here,” I said, but it came out stilted and way too formal.

  “Thanks,” she said, so short it was a mere snip of a word.

  Before I could say anything else, Birchie materialized with a home-knit afghan and a cup of rose-hip tea. She went right to Rachel and wrapped the afghan around her. Rachel set her magazine aside to snuggle in. She even took the tea, smiling up at Birchie. She was usually impatient with coddling, but now she looked inclined to sink down into it and bask. So she would take sympathy, as long as it was not from me. Fine.

  I snatched my sketchbook and stalked upstairs to my room, and it took a lot to keep me from slamming the door with such a righteous bang it would wake up Lavender. Hell, wake up the rest of the town, even. I wanted to bang it so hard that Martina Mack would sit bolt upright, clutching the covers, thinking Satan had come for her at last.

  But it wasn’t my room anymore. Not mine alone. Rachel might be mad, but she was not mad enough to leave. Her suitcases lay open on the floor by mine, loaded with silky tank tops and lacy underthings and pairs of summer shoes.

  In the bottom of my own suitcase, I had a paper copy of Violence in Violet. I’d brought it for reference as I wrote the prequel. Now I dug it out.

  I perched on the edge of the bed and flipped through it, hunting images of Violet that caught her at different angles.

  Looking at the early chapters, I had to admit there was a resemblance. Violet was blond and tall and slim, with big eyes and a ski-slope nose, so yeah, she looked like Rachel. A little. She also looked like every other anchor on Fox News.

  As the story went on, the resemblance faded anyway. She looked less and less like Rachel because she looked less and less human after the warehouse scene.

  Her murdered boyfriend was the son of a diplomat. His death sparks an international incident, and Violet weaves herself into the center of ever-intensifying scenes of mortal peril. She’s figured out that Violence will save her. She’s seen that Violence’s solutions are vicious and permanent, but she doesn’t care. Her heart is broken. Maybe she’s trying to cause so much carnage that Violence will fail and they will both die, but Violence doesn’t fail. Violence wins with ever-higher stakes, with greater collateral damage, even as Violet’s robins trade themselves for ravens and her butterflies grow ragged and soot-winged. Her pretty body moves from slim to gaunt, the sundress hanging off her skeletal frame.

  In the final chapter, Violet squats in a bomb shelter, staring at a television. Her face is practically a skull—jutting cheekbones, lips pulled back in a grimace over prominent teeth. Violence is there. She must be, because Violet has a blackbird on one shoulder, vermin gamboling around her bare feet. The little mice are now rats with long, fleshy tails. The avid, watching rabbits have grown fangs, and there is no light left in them to hold Violence close.

  In other bunkers, all over the world, fingers are mashing at red buttons. Bombs are arcing back and forth over the ocean.

  Good-bye, Violence thinks. It’s the last word in the book. She leaves Violet in the shelter, and she goes out into it. She’s delighted to be out i
n it. She grins her wolfish grin, standing in the spot where the first bomb will drop. Her boots are firmly planted, arms spread wide, spine bending, head thrown back in a rictus of joy as she welcomes the bomb. It’s a very phallic missile, actually, and a part of me wanted to go find Rachel, point this out. Lesbians, my ass. Do you not get art?

  Then Violence is a purple shadow in the center of a blaze, like the wick of a candle flame. The view recedes, backing up in stages. Huge, sooty mushrooms spring up all over North America. The earth is a blue ball, hanging in space, and all the continents sprout with this same, world-ending fungus. The mushrooms dissipate into a dark fog that hangs in shreds and drifts, shrouding the planet, and all of Violet’s ruined animals are hidden in its curls and purple shadows. And that’s the end. There is no next.

  I closed the book, thinking, Well, sometimes there isn’t.

  Did I steal Rachel’s face? Her baby name? Maybe. I didn’t remember it that way, but she didn’t remember biting me. Maybe a dark and daddy-hungry corner of my heart drew Violet to look like her on purpose, to sting her, and it had.

  The thing with JJ hadn’t helped us. He had loved the idea of her, the hope of her, more than the actual, human me, who had taken him in at his lowest moment. Did I blame her somehow? Because she’d captured JJ with her superpower when we were all still children? She hadn’t even tried. She hadn’t even wanted him back then, and when she did choose him, she’d ended up wrecked herself.

  Still, this is how our story always ended. She took her sorrows to the laundry closet, I waited outside. When I was ruined, she barged in and helped, because it made her feel so good to be the hero and pull me out of whatever mud I’d mired in.

  Sun and Sky, we had started with a crack in us. If we had been born sisters, if my dad hadn’t died, if her mom hadn’t pulled a fade, if JJ wasn’t such a jackass. If, if, if. This much I knew: Our sisterhood had come pre-broken. Letting her stay here, her brief moment of feeling vulnerable, couldn’t fix us.

  When things began so badly, with a war or a loss or a rift or five shots of tequila, they stumbled along a fractured road that slanted, steeply, down. They could only degenerate, get worse and worse, until you were standing in ruins. When you got to an apocalypse, there was no next.

  As if in answer, the bomb in my back pocket trembled and chimed, contrary.

  I yanked it out of my pocket, heart rate jacking. I had a text from an unknown number, but I knew who it was.

  Been a while. Coming back to ATL? I’d like to see you again.

  11

  That night Rachel climbed into bed on the side I liked to sleep on, her face shining with moisturizer, and announced she’d already taken an Ambien. She fluffed her pillow and pulled a sleep mask over her eyes, arranging her limbs like it was the most natural thing in the world. She conked out almost instantly. I teetered on the edge on the wrong side, feeling out of sorts and wide-eyed as a bush baby.

  Every time I got comfortable, she’d flail a foot into my shin or jab me with a pointy elbow. When we were kids, I’d been the restless one, bothering her with my sleep muttering and humming. Child Rachel had slept the same way she’d done everything—beautifully, with a surface so placid she might as well have been in a glass box with a chunk of apple in her throat, lips preset for an inevitable kissing. Not tonight. It was like sleeping with a bag of upset cats. When she flung out a hand and smacked me in the face, I got up and stomped downstairs to the sofa in Birchie’s sewing room. I took my suitcase with me, but even with the racket I made wheeling it away, Rachel didn’t wake up.

  I envied her that. If it hadn’t been for Digby, I’d have dug down into her suitcase and snarfled up an Ambien myself.

  She apologized at the breakfast table the next morning.

  “I’m sleeping so poorly these days,” she said while Wattie slid pancakes and an extra slice of bacon onto her plate. “I’ll sleep on the sofa tonight.”

  Wattie answered her before I could, saying, “Nonsense!”

  Birchie chimed in right behind her. “No, no, my dear, that won’t do. You’re company!”

  After breakfast Birchie and Wattie unpacked what looked to me like Rachel’s whole wardrobe and hung it in the closet in the room I thought of—rightfully—as mine. Another night passed, and another. Rachel stayed cool to me, and she let them both take care of her. She didn’t do much of anything. It was as if she were on a rest cure circa 1800. She dozed and sat and stared at books and magazines. Her phone was always right beside her, and I realized she was waiting. Waiting for Jake to call with his decision. To tell her if he was going to be a man or Lowly Worm.

  Then I felt sorry for her again, because I knew from experience that when JJ was done, he was done. He was going to Lowly Worm it off into the sunset.

  Day five of Jake Watch, I went and sat beside her on one of the love seats.

  “Can I do anything to help?” I asked, even though I knew better.

  She looked at me, blinking as if her vision had gone fuzzy, and then her eyes found their focus, lasering in on me.

  “Do you want to bring me tweezers?” she asked. “You’ve gained a little weight. I could reshape your eyebrows for your fuller face.”

  I shook my head no, smiling close-lipped to keep in the nineteen angry things that I had traffic-jammed in my throat, all trying to get out at once. After that I left her be, because she wasn’t going to let me help her. Unless I wanted to count “fleeing my own room” as some kind of assistance.

  It turned out to be a good thing. Ever since the bones were found, the whole house had felt out of balance. It was as if that sea chest had held a thousand pounds of weight and the old foundation had sighed and tilted us all a half inch to the left as soon as they’d been taken from the attic. The sewing room was at the very back of the house, past the office, down a long hall. It shared a wall with the kitchen, but there was no pass-through. Since Birchie wasn’t sewing much these days, I had it to myself. When I was there, door closed, my newly too-tight bra off, Pandora playing the Smiths for me, I had the most privacy possible in a house this full of relatives from both sides of my family. I even left my phone plugged in here, not wanting the tattletale buzz of multiple messages landing to announce that I was trading secret texts with men. Four of ’em.

  The first was only our old friend Frank Darian, keeping me apprised as the justice system ground around in our family business. Our county prosecutor, Regina Tackrey, was a pit bull of a woman. And this was an election year. Frank deposed Dr. Pettery, though, and given Birchie’s illness and the bones’ unknown provenance or age, he’d blocked any police interrogation. For now. Tackrey had to show that a crime had been committed before anything else could happen to my grandmother. To that end, Tackrey had sent the bones to a forensic anthropologist in Montgomery.

  I felt like Birchie was in something’s mouth, an ice-eyed reptilian something. It was rolling her around, still whole, as if she were a lozenge. But at any minute that cold-blooded animal’s mouth could bite down and shatter her. All I could do was wait and see what it decided to do to her—to all of us.

  I was also texting updates and reassurances to Wattie’s sons. They’d heard what had happened through Redemption’s phone tree. Only Wattie’s iron-voiced decisiveness had kept both men from leaping willy-nilly onto planes and coming home.

  “I don’t want them down here in this mess,” she’d said. “Especially Stephen. He was born chock-full of bite, and he’s got plenty of bark to go along with it. Trust me.”

  I hadn’t trusted her before, and look where it had brought us. I backed her up, assuring both men that Wattie had not been hurt when my rental car met the mailbox and that the bones were mostly a Birch problem.

  Last and not at all least, I was texting back and forth with Batman.

  Been a while. Coming back to ATL? I’d like to see you again, he’d sent.

  A glance at Facebook, a text, and I already knew his name, where he lived, and that he wanted to see me. Still, it was probab
ly too soon to say, So I was wondering for no reason if diabetes or mental illness runs much in your family, and if you like kids, and if you’re an unmitigated jackass. I had to be more casual, more circumspect than that, but I was eighteen weeks along now. Digby was the size of a bell pepper, twisting and flexing, more real every day. Lavender had opened a window into the life of his father. I wanted to look through it.

  I’d thought all day about what I should text back, but it wasn’t until I had settled in the sewing room for the night that I sent my answer.

  Yeah, it has been a while. You could have messaged me, though, mister.

  The word “mister” softened it. Maybe even made it flirting. I hit send, even though this wasn’t about flirting. This wasn’t about me at all. It was about my kid. I needed to get a sense of who Batman was. My preg book said I could blame the fourth-month hormones for how lush my body felt, my deep-down itchy longing to be touched and soothed and rumpled, and maybe for this, too: I wanted to flirt.

  He came back almost instantly, with flattery: Naw, too stalkery . . . you’re the famous artist.

  It was really good flattery, reminding me how much he liked my work. I was comic-book famous, which was even less famous than that old double-rainbow guy on YouTube, but I still liked him saying it. My hands had hovered over the keys, full of a thousand questions that I ought to ask, but I saw the ellipses; he was already texting again.

  If I’d texted first? Shit, girl, you’d have gone to check your closet. Seen if I was in there making out with your shoes.

  So he was funny, even when I was sober. I smiled, but damn those fourth-month hormones, smiling wasn’t all I’d done. I also had a flash of memory: his full mouth moving against my instep, my ankle, the back of my knee, working its inexorable way upward to where his busy hand was already at work. Not helpful.

  I had to nip the flirting in the bud. If there’d been no Digby? I would have leaned in. Maybe even hard. There was obviously a physical attraction here, and meeting at FanCon implied we shared some interests. But I was pregnant, which meant I was actually the stalker, crouching in his metaphorical closet with my secret and a long list of invasive questions. Flirting made what I was doing feel even worse, and every text I sent that left out Digby was so inherently dishonest it felt callous.