The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I started to explain that she had already introduced herself, but Wattie turned to her and talked over me.

  “We’re so sorry. That was not well done. Mr. Martin. This is Emily Birch Briggs, Leia’s grandmother.”

  To his credit, Sel rolled with this, shaking Birchie’s hand again and smiling. He was a nurse, after all, and I’d told him about Birchie’s Lewy bodies.

  He started to ask Birchie a question. It began with a W, and he got stuck on it, hard. It sounded like there was a wind trapped in his mouth. He kept blowing the W out, but the rest of the word would not come with it. He stopped and put a hand briefly over his eyes.

  Too many pieces of my family and secrets and wrong assumptions were colliding. Birchie was more off now, before lunch, than she was even at bedtime. Rachel wanted to murder me, and Jake could be back any second, maybe even with Hugh and Jeffrey in tow. The last thing this room needed was a jackass and a few more teenagers.

  “Good words!” Birchie barked again, and Wattie turned full profile, whispering directly into Birchie’s ear.

  Batman pivoted to me and spread his hands, like he was making an apology.

  “I stutter.” It was the first thing he’d said to me directly, and the only thing he’d said so far that had come out clean.

  “Okay,” I said, puzzled. He hadn’t stuttered when we played Words with Friends or at FanCon.

  His beautiful, quick smile flashed, and he said, as if he’d read my mind, “Beer helps, and it’s wuh-wah . . . it intensifies when I’m under stress. I’m fff-mm . . . stressed now. I’m surprised I’ve muh-managed to say anything.” That all came out with only a few blips, as though his telling me he stuttered had relaxed him enough to make it less true.

  Rachel was tucking her hair back behind her ears, embarrassed for him. I knew her so well; she wasn’t sure it was politically correct to continue on with righteous fury now that he’d announced a minor disability. Lavender looked flat dismayed. She’d found him for me, brought him here like he was a present, and already he was turning out to be imperfect.

  “Okay,” I said again, and the main thing I was feeling was relief. It came over me in a wave so intense that a foolish grin spread across my face. It was overwide, but I couldn’t help it. He stuttered! That was why he “couldn’t talk” when I told him about Digby. He hadn’t burst into silent hatred, and he hadn’t had female company. He quite literally had not been able to get words out. “This is pretty stressful, for all of us.”

  He smiled back, and for a second it was like we were the only two people in the room. “I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know, I will show up.”

  It came out perfect, right to me, and this was what we needed. To be the only two people in a room. I dug a twenty from my pocket and held it out to Lavender. “Lav? Run go catch your dad before he gets here. Tell him to take you for ice cream and take any Darians that are headed this way, too.”

  “Oh, come on!” Lav protested, but Rachel backed me up.

  “That is an excellent idea. Go.” It was spoken in Unbrookable Mother, and Lord, but I would have to learn that language. It was so effective. Lav rolled her eyes, but she took the money.

  “Rachel, best if you go with Lavender,” Wattie said, calm and quiet. It wasn’t only to help me, though. Birchie was swaying to some internal rhythm, staring into the dining room. “I think Birchie needs some quiet in the house right now.”

  “Do you need help?” Rachel said, refocusing.

  “I don’t think so, hmm, Birchie?” Wattie said. “We need a cool drink and a bite of something and to have a little lie-down. We will do much better on our own.”

  “We’re never going to be on our own,” Birchie said darkly, staring into the dining room. She shook an angry finger at her own seat near the head of the table. “Get out of there.”

  She wasn’t talking to us, though. She was talking to bad rabbits or whatever animal she saw defiling her table by Lavender’s dirty breakfast dishes.

  Rachel shot me a speaking glance, but she took Lavender’s shoulders and steered her out the front door.

  “Sorry,” Lav whispered again as she went, and I said, “S’okay, kid.”

  Wattie was back in profile, whispering to Birchie, coaxing her to come and sit down and rest, promising a cool drink of lemonade.

  Birchie looked on the verge of angry tears. “It should be champagne. Floyd teetotaled, you know. His whole life. I didn’t. Daddy didn’t either, but that’s not what’s going to put us both in hell.”

  Even with the front door closed, I heard Lav calling to her dad as she clattered like a pony down the porch stairs, which meant that in another thirty seconds we would have had Jake here, on top of everything. So that was a small mercy.

  Wattie’s whispers were so soft now that they were for Birchie alone, and she eased her along toward the table.

  “We are having lemonade. You are not,” Birchie told all the nothings that were not in the empty chairs, still angry, but also cold and flat, as if she were reciting facts. The sun’s a yellow star, gravity works, and silly rabbits, lemonade is only for old ladies.

  Wattie made a shooing hand at me behind her back.

  “Come on,” I whispered to Sel Martin.

  I led him silently down the hall, back to the sewing room. I opened the door for him, and he went in. All the way in, walking to the far side to stand in front of the rainbow of quilt squares stacked in the shelves, his gym bag held awkwardly in front of him. I closed the door behind me, and I stayed right there, by the door.

  I wished I had a bag to hold. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands. Everything possible felt fake and posed and full of silent messages. Clasped in front was judgey, behind my back turned me into a naughty child, and crossing my arms felt defensive or, worse, angry. I hung them by my sides, where they felt obvious and unwieldy.

  This is what I’d wanted, but now, with the door closed, I was remembering that the last time I’d been alone in a room with him, we’d made Digby. I knew that this near stranger had a hairline scar on his abdomen. Appendix, he’d told me as I ran my tongue along it. This was the same man who had kissed the tiny birthmark I kept hidden high up on the inside of my left thigh, now fully clothed and on the opposite end of the room.

  “So we should talk,” I said, and instantly blushed. World’s worst opening for a conversation with a man who’d just told me he stuttered. I corrected, “I mean, I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have called you at the butt crack of dawn and sprung Digby on you.”

  “Dih . . . Dih . . . D . . .” he said, trying to repeat the name, and I had done it again—given him vital information in a casual side spill, like when I’d told him I was having a boy via a pronoun slip.

  “I’m sorry. Digby is what I’ve been calling the baby.”

  “Oh,” he said, and very carefully made no facial expression.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked, because whether Digby’s father would like the name was not something that had crossed my mind. Not until I was facing Digby’s father.

  “I luh-luh-love it,” he lied. He wasn’t very good at it.

  Strangely, this obvious lie to please me made me feel a little better. Maybe he was like that cliché about snakes—as scared of me as I was of him. I stayed on my side of the room, trying to read his silence, his dark eyes, his carefully neutral body language, as awkward as my own. Did he have his own worst-case scenarios running in his head?

  The first thing he’d said to me was, I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know I will show up. That was the thing he’d said that mattered anyway. He’d dropped everything to appear bare hours after I told him I was pregnant.

  Meanwhile I had his kid tucked inside my body. That made Digby wholly mine for now. I hadn’t contacted Sel for months, and when I finally did, I hadn’t mentioned the baby. I could have kept Digby to myself forever, and he knew it.

  Maybe that was his worst-case scenario. Was he scared of being locked out of his own kid’s life? I
wanted his words, for him to tell me, but they were trapped inside his mouth. So I took it as my best, most hopeful guess, and I rolled with it.

  “Digby can be what we call him while I’m pregnant, like Rachel called Lavender ‘Beanie’ before she was born. We can figure his real name later. Something we both love. If you want.”

  His smile appeared, relieved and beautiful, and I knew I’d guessed right even before he said, “Gug-guh-gggg . . .” trying to get out some affirmative. Good, or maybe Great. He snapped his mouth shut, nostrils flaring, frustrated.

  I said, “Don’t be nervous. We’re on the same side here, I think. Aren’t we? I think about Digby—Digby-for-now, or whatever we end up naming Digby—and I’m on his side. Are you?” He nodded in sincere, vehement silence. “Okay, then. So we have to find a way to talk. I’d offer you a beer, but there isn’t any in the house. We have bourbon, but between your evolution T-shirt and drinking before noon, Wattie might go find the old shotgun and run you off.” His gaze had turned speculative. I was flat-out babbling, my own nerves causing the words to run out of me, trying to make up for all his stuck ones. “What if we got our phones? We could sit in the same room and text. It’s very modern. Lavender and her friends do it all the time.”

  He put his hand briefly over his eyes again. When he took it away, his expression was rueful. He held one finger in a wait-a-sec gesture, and now he was the one blushing. Furiously. So furiously that I could see the red wash rising in the undertones of his skin, especially in the tips of his ears.

  He turned away and set his gym bag down by my laptop on the Singer table, opened it, and set his book aside. It was a hardback of Saga, as battered around the edges as my own beloved copy back in Norfolk. He really did have damn good taste in comics. He pulled out a wad of black cloth and unfurled it, his back still to me, and then he pulled it on over his head.

  It was the cowl, the same one I remembered from FanCon, with the bat ears poking up. The long cloak fell behind him to midcalf. He pulled at the neck, simultaneously twitching his shoulders, getting it all to lie correctly in one practiced motion, and then he turned back around to face me.

  “Hello,” said Batman. And it was him. Sel Martin was gone. This was the hot Batman with the lush mouth, flashing the cocky smile that had caught me at the hotel bar. His eyes glinted through the slits in the mask.

  “Hel-lo,” I said.

  The gym bag was empty. He hadn’t brought the rest of the suit, but it didn’t matter. The pieces he had worked fine with the gray shirt and the dark jeans, kind of like I’d run into Batman on casual Friday.

  “Let’s talk about this kid.” No stutter. Not even a hint of one.

  “Damn,” I said, and I realized I was grinning back at him, hugely, dorkishly. I shut it down, embarrassed. I gestured at his cowl, his cape. “That works?”

  “Always.” He shrugged. “Even when I was a kid, running around the house in Dark Knight Underoos and a black pillowcase with home-cut eyeholes.”

  “Do you wear it to your job?” I asked him, fascinated.

  I almost wished he did. I personally would love to be rolled back for surgery to find that my twilight sleep would be managed by one of the Super Friends. It might be a little disconcerting for non-nerds, though.

  “I don’t stutter much at my job,” he said, soft like always, but I could hear him fine in the quiet room. “Or with my friends. Not since I was a kid. It only gets bad when I try to talk to pretty women. Or when I find out I accidentally made a baby. Or when I’m alone with one of my favorite artists. I’m three for three today.”

  “That’s a total player line,” I said, taking one step closer. The dreadful art monster in me wanted to know who his other favorite artists were and where my stuff came in the ranking, but I shoved that aside for later.

  He shrugged, unabashed. “You’re pretty. You’re pregnant. And you’re Leia freakin’ Birch. You know how many times I’ve read Violence in Violet? Plus, I’ve got every series that you’ve drawn for in sleeves.”

  “Every series?” I said. “Not my Hellboy one-shot.” It was a limited-release thing I’d done with a writer I liked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That sequence, when Hell Boy’s running through the tunnels and the fire rolls over him? His face? So good.”

  I found myself touching my hair, flattered. I’d been grossly proud of the way I’d caught Hell Boy’s pleasure and his shame as the flames engulfed him. I made my treacherous girly-flirt hands go back down by my sides.

  “Nerd Test,” I said, changing the subject. “DC or Marvel?”

  “Uh, DC?” he said like this was a no-brainer.

  Wonder Woman was DC, and he was wearing half a Batsuit, so it actually was. It was a place to start where I felt sure we would agree.

  “Fantastic Four or Doom Patrol?” he asked back, which was bolder. Riskier.

  “Doom Patrol,” I said. “Especially Grant Morrison’s run.”

  “Yeah, damn. Richard Case,” he said in full agreement, and now he came a step toward me. “I didn’t come straight here. I went to Macon first, to my parents’ house.” It was as if our successful round of Nerd Testing had made it okay to talk about scarier things. “It was four a.m., but I had to go talk to my dad.”

  “You guys are close?” I said, and drifted closer, as if saying the word out loud made my body act it out. I already knew they were tight. It was obvious in the picture of the Star Wars Christmas tree.

  “He’s my best friend,” Batman said. “Does that sound dorky?”

  “Absolutely.” I smiled when I said it. “I like dorks, though. Hell, I am dorks.”

  “Okay, then. I told him. About the baby. You. FanCon. He gave me some good advice, but it didn’t matter. I knew I was coming straight here to see you. I knew when he opened the door. It was so early I’d woken him up. His face was grumpy, but he saw me, and before he thought to be worried, he lit up.” He was very serious now, his low voice intense. “I don’t want my kid to grow up twelve hours away. I have nieces and nephews, and I love them, but I only see them three or four times a year. Every time they’ve grown into different people. I don’t want to know my own kid like that. In snapshots. I want to be the kind of father that I have.”

  Now my hands were in front of me, twisting together in a tangled bother. Here was everything that I wanted for Digby, offered freely, as his birthright. I wasn’t sure how to grasp it, though. I was too much of a pragmatist.

  “I love what you’re saying, but how would it work? It’s not like you’re going to pack up all your crap and move to Norfolk tomorrow.” I said it the same way I might say, It’s not like you’re going to take up flying Douglas Adams style, just throw your body at the ground and hope to miss.

  “Of course not,” he said, but then he added, “Not tomorrow anyway. I’ve never been to Norfolk. I might hate it, who knows? But you’re growing my kid there. I sure as hell want to take a look at the place.” Now I was the one who couldn’t speak. Whatever smart-ass answer I might have had jammed up in my mouth and left me silent. “I want you to come and see Atlanta, too. You might fall in love. There’s a lot more to my town than FanCon.”

  I swallowed. Jesus, this was high-stakes stuff. “What if I hate it?”

  “Come and see,” he said. “What if you don’t?”

  “What if you hate Norfolk and I hate Atlanta?” I said, and I sounded panicky. “What then?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We look at Wilmington. We look at Asheville. Why not? You work freelance, and I’m a CNRA, which means I can get a job almost anywhere. If we hate Wilmington and Asheville, we go visit Myrtle Beach and Greensboro. We’ll pick a place together, same way we pick his name.” As he spoke, we had both moved even closer to each other. We were near the middle of the room, and now I could see the deeps of his eyes inside the mask. His pupils had expanded, so that the iris was a slim, near-jet ring.

  He made it sound so doable, and maybe it was. I hoped so, because inside me Digby was awake a
nd spinning, small and certain, absolutely on the way. I wished then, hard, that I were an optimist. Rachel was. Once, irritated with my dark-siding, she’d said, “Is the glass never half full for you?” and I’d snapped back. “Sure it is. Half full of bees.”

  She’d laughed and said, “Half full of poison. Half full of deadly radiation, but always half empty when it’s sugar or sunshine.” She had a point. My mind never went jumping to the rosiest conclusions. Look how I ended V in V.

  “What if we argue, and hate each other so much we can’t live in the same town, and screw our kid up, and ruin our lives, and then we die?” I said, mostly joking. But not joking.

  He considered my dire scenario for a few seconds, and then he said, “Nerd Test: Preacher? Or Pretty Deadly?”

  That one I had to think about.

  “Pretty Deadly,” I said. “But only by a hair.”

  “You see? It’s going to be fine,” he said, fronting like he was cocksure.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Oh, smooth sailing,” I said. “Here on out.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, smiling back. “But there’s a town somewhere, between your family and mine, where we can both be happy. Where he can grow up with both of us,” Batman said, and then his gaze dropped for a moment, and his soft voice dropped even lower, making me step in again. “I’m here. Let’s start. Spend the day with me. Show me around this place.”

  That shocked me. “Birchville? You’d consider Birchville?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You got strong ties here. It’s close enough to Montgomery for me to work.”

  “It’s maybe not the best place for a mixed-race kid? There’s no church where—” I began, then stopped, embarrassed to realize I was about to explain racism to a black man. He’d surely noticed once or twice, with no help from me at all, that our shared homeland had some trouble in this department. “I’m sorry.” Now I was the one blushing.

  He stepped in, close. “Hey, stop. That’s everywhere,” he said. “He’ll be black no matter where we raise him.”