The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  But now I’d stood in the balcony of First Baptist, looking down at Birchie and Wattie. I’d felt myself capable of so much ugly. In that moment I’d have pulled the roof down on the right half of the church if I’d had superstrength. I’d gladly have eaten up Martina Mack in two brittle, bony bites. Turned out I had ferocious in me. One day, sixty years back, there’d been ferocious in my grandmother, too.

  It was the Violence in me that had blown up every relationship that might have become something real. I’d realized it when I accepted the weak-ass apology Jake had divvied up between me and Lavender and maybe God. When I took my share, I’d felt it as the easing of a hurt so old that I’d grown used to it. So used to it I hadn’t noticed its pulse and presence even as I’d destroyed all of my own possible futures, wrecking every family I could have had into a wasteland.

  Now I thought the Jekyll-and-Hyde dorks might have been right all along.

  I said, mostly to myself, “I always thought of Violence as maternal or big-sistery, not romantic. But I’m thinking now, what if Violet really is Violence? I haven’t been able to write an origin story that doesn’t include Violet. I can’t imagine Violence without her. The way Violence looks at her, with the songbirds and the rabbits, sweet and innocent, maybe that’s how she sees herself, in the beginning. She’s protecting herself, and she doesn’t even know it.”

  I found myself excited by the idea, but Rachel was chuckling.

  “I wasn’t talking about your story thing,” she said. “I meant them. Birchie and Wattie. Do you think they’re lovers?”

  I’d been onto something, but that snapped me right out of it.

  “Ugh! No!” I said immediately. Birchie and Wattie walked on ahead of us, rounding the last corner, arm in arm, chatting with Lavender. They were almost exactly the same height, and their sloping shoulders met in a perfect, gentle angle. “They were both married!”

  “So?” Rachel said. “It was a different time. Maybe they—”

  “Absolutely not,” I interrupted. My grandfather had died before I was born, but I’d known Wattie’s husband. She’d had a good marriage. He always seemed to have a hand on her hip, her back, her shoulder, and she’d leaned into his touch. I couldn’t imagine Wattie having his babies, working beside him down at the church, calling him “Big Bear,” the whole time secret-pining for my granny. “Don’t be gross!”

  “And you say I’m homophobic,” Rachel said, primly but with no rancor.

  I laughed. “You are. A little bit. Look, it isn’t that. They shared a crib, Rachel. They practically had the same mom.” Birchie had told me Vina stories the way I’d one day tell Birchie stories to Digby. The piecrust she and Wattie made was Vina’s family piecrust. Birchie was at Vina’s bedside with Wattie and all of Wattie’s older brothers when she died, and she took flowers to her grave four times a year. “Vina gave Birchie every bit of mothering she got. She and Wattie were born barely a year apart. They nursed together.”

  “But they aren’t actually blood-related,” Rachel said, head cocked slightly sideways as she considered them.

  “You and I aren’t blood-related either,” I said. “You’re saying that if we were lesbians, you’d want to French me?”

  “Ew!” Rachel said instantly.

  I grinned. “You’d want to lay me down on a beach and make sweet, sweet—”

  “Stop! Ew, stop!” Rachel shrieked, laughing now, too. “Oh my God, my brain. I need brain soap. Okay! Fine! Point taken.”

  It was another very good moment. We both picked up the pace, gaining ground, maybe to bring this almost perfect conversation to a close before it turned on us. We were coming up on First Baptist now, almost home. Looking ahead at my little old ladies, I wished I’d thought to bring an umbrella. I didn’t like to see the sun beating down on them, turning Wattie’s short, crimped hair to molten silver and bouncing off Birchie’s fluffy bun.

  As we caught up, Rachel said, “Incest aside, I think you could have made Violet look like you. You’re very pretty, Leia.” I warmed to the compliment, but then she added, “Although more people would know it if you would let me shape your brows for you. You have put on a little weight. Maybe when you’re home, you could come running with me? I’m going to have to give up my gym membership—”

  I shook my head and bumped her shoulder with mine. Here was Rachel, unable to help herself, readying to step in and take charge of my weight and anything else that wasn’t perfect. Somehow today it didn’t chafe me.

  Lav saw we’d caught up and dropped back a step, inserting herself between us, grabbing our hands. She set our arms to swinging.

  “You ready to go home tomorrow?” Rachel asked.

  “Yup,” she said, unconcerned. Poor Hugh!

  She pulled us forward, almost skipping, resetting our pace with a young vengeance, bringing us abreast of Birchie and Wattie as we crossed the street to the edge of our yard. I groaned but matched my feet to hers, eager to be home. Digby and I needed to lie down.

  Beside me Birchie and Wattie turned in tandem up the driveway, but then they pulled up short, staring at the porch.

  “What?” I said. “Are you—”

  I followed the line of their gaze, and I saw him sitting in the porch swing, reading. I froze, and my mouth stopped talking. It felt like my heart stopped, too, or maybe it was only time, taking a pause.

  “Holy crap! It’s Batman!” Lav said.

  It wasn’t actually Batman, though.

  It was Selcouth Martin, near stranger, with a sharp in-line haircut, straight across and squared on top, instead of a cowl. No cape or even a utility belt, just dark jeans, a gray T-shirt, and red low-top Chucks. He was deep into a graphic novel, waiting in the sun where Jake had waited in the shadowy night, sitting in the same swing and with the exact same purpose. Selcouth Martin had come to see about his kid.

  “Batman?” Rachel asked, confused.

  “Yeah!” Lav said excitedly, squeezing my hand so hard it almost hurt. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him!”

  My mouth wasn’t working yet, so it was a good thing she’d answered her own question. He was here, alive and in person, on my doorstep only a few bare and busy hours after my phone call. He’d known I was staying with my grandmother in Birchville, so he must’ve put the town name in his GPS and pointed himself in my direction. I’d talked about Birchville quite a bit. I remembered telling him that Birchie lived right across from First Baptist on the square. Had he found the house on his own? I hoped to God he hadn’t stopped at Brother’s Café or Tiger Gas and asked where I was staying. The town would be ablaze with speculation, especially if he’d then sat out waiting on our porch for longer than five minutes.

  Birchie and Wattie looked to me, and Birchie’s eyes were bird bright.

  “Is that him?” Birchie whispered. She clutched tighter at Wattie’s arm and released an odd, trilling giggle. It had an edge of hysteria in it that I didn’t like. Maybe we should have driven down to Martina’s house, I thought, but then Birchie added, “Wattie, I think that’s the father!”

  Wattie squinted, speculative, then said, “That young man is not what I expected,” her voice very dry.

  “Whose father?” asked Rachel, but I was too floored to answer. She looked at Batman, watched him turn a page. We were all still down at the end of the drive and talking quietly, so he hadn’t seen us yet. “Is that— Do you have a boyfriend, Leia?”

  “You know?” I asked Birchie and Wattie when my mouth decided to let me get two words out.

  “Oh, sugar. Course we know,” Wattie said, like I was being silly.

  “Know what?” Rachel said. “Is he a secret boyfriend? Did you keep him secret because he’s black?” Her voice dropped even lower on the last word. She flashed an apologetic look at Wattie and told her, “Because we are not like that. No one in our family is like that.”

  “We knew the second we laid eyes on you,” Wattie said, ignoring Rachel.

  Birchie chimed in, “You look exactly like me when I
was four months gone.”

  “Gone where? What am I missing?” Rachel said, getting frustrated. “Who is Batman?”

  She said it loud enough for him to hear us. He looked up. As soon as he saw us, he tucked his book into a gym bag at his feet. He stood, lifting one regular, ungloved hand up in an awkward wave. His shirt had a picture of the evolution of man on the front, Homo habilis at the beginning of a line of figures that grew taller and straighter. At the end of the line, a giant robot was throttling modern man. It was a joke, but it wasn’t going to play in Birchville. Neither Birchie nor Wattie thought there was anything amusing about evolution.

  “You’re carrying mostly in your hind end,” Wattie said.

  Birchie said, “In our family that means a boy.”

  Rachel looked at each of us in a confused round-robin. She blinked, shook her head in a tiny no, and then I saw understanding come into her face. Her gaze snapped to meet mine.

  “Does Mom know?” I shook my head, and her eyes widened, suddenly horrified. “Oh God! I never should have said that you were fat! You aren’t fat at all!”

  Which was so perfectly Rachel that I felt a wild, hysterical bubble of a laugh rising up inside me and had to work to quash it down.

  “Come along,” said Birchie, and she crossed the lawn to the porch stairs, letting out a long exhale. It was made of words, a breathy string of syllables, near silent. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she was saying. I didn’t know if she meant Batman or her own father. The one she’d ended with a hammer. Either way, she had overdone it this morning.

  I followed her. We all did. As we reached the bottom of the porch stairs, Selcouth Martin picked up his bag and came forward to the top of them. He looked different—better—than his profile pics. I’d assumed I’d looked at him through slightly rosy beer-and-tequila goggles back at FanCon, but actually he wasn’t photogenic. Now I saw the man I’d taken right upstairs to bed with me. Here was the beautiful mouth and narrow jaw, those wide-set eyes with their ridiculous long lashes. Pictures didn’t convey how well his features worked in person. Worked for me, anyway, I thought, and I felt heat come into my cheeks.

  Lavender let go of our hands and went springing up the stairs, past Birchie and Wattie, and she reached him first.

  “Hello, Batman,” she said, grinning up at him.

  “Hello,” said Batman.

  “Lavender knows your boyfriend?” Rachel asked in a whisper. Then, louder, “Wait, Lavender knows that you’re pregnant?”

  Selcouth Martin heard her. His jaw went tense, and I shrugged at him, helplessly. I’d thought that he would call me back in a few days or text me for a meet-up in his TeamSpeak channel. I’d assumed I would have time to think of what should happen next. Instead next was happening right now.

  “Come on in out of the heat,” Wattie told him, unlocking the door.

  I followed them all in, but it didn’t feel like escaping the heat. Not a bit. I was walking into it.

  19

  We filed into the entryway between the parlor and the big formal dining room. Lavender had left her sticky breakfast plate and a fork with egg yolk congealing on the tines sitting out on the table, but Birchie’s house was otherwise immaculate, as always. Birchie and Wattie stopped in front of the stairs and the center hallway, turning back toward us. We formed up into a loose half circle facing them, as if we were all children who’d been varying degrees of naughty.

  It was me, then Rachel, then Lav, and Selcouth Martin on the far end, holding his gym bag. Lav was sticking close to him, all big eyes and dazzled smile. I’d conjured her father, and now her hello! frog emoji had magicked Digby’s into being. She was delighted with herself.

  I stole a peek down the line at him, and his face was unreadable and stoic. His arrival had been so fast it seemed decisive, as if he already knew his course. That scared me. My mind ticked through scenarios: He was here to demand I sign a paper absolving him of fatherhood. No, he wanted to claim shared custody from the get-go. Could he legally make me mail a brand-new baby twelve hours away from Norfolk every other weekend? I’d called because Digby deserved to have a father, to know his father’s family. But now Selcouth Martin was here in Birchville. He was a real, whole person. He had a heartbeat and a brain full of his own ideas. I was terrified of what those ideas might be.

  I stopped, frozen in the entry with my family like a deer who feels safer in the center of a herd. But deer couldn’t talk. What a luxury! I wished I couldn’t either, the second I started to introduce him and realized that I’d never heard him say his name. Not sober. Not that I remembered. What if I said “Sel-cowth” and he corrected me—Actually, it’s Sel-coth—making it instantly plain that I was pregnant by a man whose name I did not know how to say? Which was true, actually, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d put on a birth announcement. I couldn’t very well declare, Y’all, this is Batman, like I was Lavender. Introducing him as Mr. Martin seemed way too formal, considering that I was chock-full of his baby.

  So I floundered. It was only a second of gigged silence, but Birchie sailed into the gap, so fast that even my socially adept stepsister was left in her mannerly dust.

  “I’m Emily Birch Briggs, young man. Leia’s grandmother,” she announced, stepping forward with her hand out. Her eyes were still overbright, as if a blue-hot fire had been lit behind them. “And you are?”

  “Selcouth Martin,” he said, shaking her hand. Sel-cooth, so at least I knew that now. He added, “Most of mmmm . . . I go by Sel.”

  “We are all, as you can imagine, very interested to meet you, Mr. Martin,” my grandmother said, seemingly in control, but there’d been rabbits afoot already this morning, and then that “Daddy” chanting in the yard. She was pale, and though the house was so cool the air had a crisp edge to it, a fine sheen of sweat was forming on her forehead. “How long have you known about the baby, is my question.”

  Selcouth—Sel—took a quick peek at his watch and said, “Uh . . . about seven hours?”

  “Six hours and fifty-five minutes longer than I have,” Rachel said to me, sotto voce and a little snotty.

  “Well, he is the father,” I whispered back. He would have had a much bigger lead on her, in an ideal world. One where I knew his agenda and how to pronounce his name. My head was still spinning with sinister reasons for his instapresence, my worst-case scenarios expanding at both ends: He wanted primary custody. He was going to try to bully me into an abortion.

  “And yet my teenage daughter knows?” Rachel whispered, and I missed the first part of whatever Wattie was saying.

  “. . . flights from Norfolk. You were lucky to have gotten right onto a plane,” she finished in an approving tone.

  I felt the blush as a heat in my cheeks. Atlanta was only a two-hour drive away, but, like Rachel, Wattie was assuming that Sel Martin was my boyfriend and that he had flown down from Virginia.

  That, of course, made zero sense to Sel, who said, “I . . . I . . . I . . .”

  I saved him by bulling on through the introductions, putting off the inevitable by way of good manners. “This is Mrs. Wattie Price, our dearest family friend.” He reached out to shake her hand, nodding, silent and solemn. He seemed shy here in a way he hadn’t been at FanCon. Of course, this room was stuffed with my relatives and his unborn kid. “And this is my stepsister, Rachel, and her daughter, Lavender.”

  He glanced over at me as he turned to shake with Rachel, and I had forgotten how very dark his eyes were. Out of the sunshine, at this distance, they looked solid black, so that I couldn’t tell his irises from his pupils. It made his expression hard to read. I had a sudden urge to get closer. Very close, so I could peer in and see what he was thinking.

  He turned to Lavender, putting out his hand. She took it in both of hers and beamed up at him, so excited she could hardly stand to be in her own skin.

  “I’m the one who found you!” she proclaimed.

  He blinked, nonplused, and said, “Was I luh . . . luh . . . llll . . .”

/>   Lost, I thought. That was the word that ended his question, but it was stuck in his mouth. I could practically see it jammed up in there. I had a strong urge to say it for him, but I quashed it. It felt intrusive and oddly presumptuous to speak for him.

  He closed his mouth, swallowed, and then a different word came out. “Mislaid?”

  “You didn’t tell him?” Lav asked me over her shoulder, grinning, and then she said to Batman, “I sent you that frog emoji.”

  “What?” he said to her, and his gaze flew to meet mine again.

  “What?” Rachel echoed, very, very sharp. And then, to Sel, “I don’t see how you got here so fast from Norfolk.”

  “No, he’s from Atlanta,” Lavender corrected, as happy-jittery as a puppy.

  “Mm, mm, mm,” said Wattie, almost to herself. “You two children are in a red-hot mess.”

  Lav was still explaining. “They met at FanCon, and she lost him, but I found him on Facebook. Well, me and Hugh did.”

  She said it as if this were all so damn romantic, as if we were in a scene from one of those old Julia Roberts movies that Rachel liked so much, and I should say, I’m just a pregnant girl, standing in front of a Batman, and soaring violin music would play, and everyone would clap, delighted, watching us kiss.

  Rachel, undelighted, said, “FanCon? You told my daughter, my thirteen-year-old daughter, that you picked up a guy at—” Her voice cut out for a half second as something else occurred to her. “My God, Leia, do you even know him?”

  Wattie fixed me with a very, very Baptist look. “Well, speaking biblically, we have good reason to think Leia knows Mr. Martin quite well.”

  Birchie was the only one who seemed unfazed.

  “Good words!” she said, as though a dog named Words were in the room and had brought her slippers. Then her tone changed abruptly, and she asked me, “Are you going introduce us?” in a querulous voice, overloud. “You should have introduced me first. I am your grandmother.”