The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Birchie sat yawning on the edge of the bed, and I brushed her tumbled hair out gently and then braided it for her. She was as placid as a sleepy child. By the time I had her tucked in, the lamps off, and the ceiling fan going in a lazy whirl, her eyelids were heavy from exhaustion and the Valium.

  I kicked my own shoes off and lay down beside her on top of the covers. I was exhausted. I’d been up all night, chasing Lavender, calling Batman, fretting, but there was no way I would fall asleep. I was too anxious. Wattie was hurt—worse, Birchie had hurt her. Frank’s news must be very bad, to set her off like that. Had Tackrey gotten the court order? I needed to get back downstairs and find out. Not to mention I’d abandoned Batman. Wattie would want to take his measure, plus Rachel could come back any second. I couldn’t leave him unsupervised and unprotected with those two women. Even so, I wanted the Valium to take full effect before I left my grandmother. I waited quietly, gently rubbing her back until her breathing eased and became regular.

  I thought, I’d better wait another minute, be sure she’s . . . and that was the last thing I remembered thinking.

  21

  When I woke up, the room was nearly dark. Evening sunshine glowed faint orange at the edges of the damask drapes. Birchie was gone from the bed. I got up and went to the top of the stairs. I wanted to go straight down to find out exactly how bad Frank’s news had been, but I heard Batman’s voice in the hum of conversation in the parlor.

  That made me pause and then go back up the hall, into the guest bathroom. I didn’t want to talk to Batman while my teeth had this post-nap hairy feeling. I’d moved my toothbrush and other toiletries to the downstairs bathroom, though. I thought about stealth-using Rachel’s, but if she ever found out, it would put her directly into therapy. I used one of her flossers and gargled a shot of her Listerine instead. My eyes looked tired and puffy, but it felt too obvious and girly to stand here primping, borrowing her tinted moisturizer and brown mascara and lip gloss like a belle whose beau had come a-courting. I compromised by stealing a dab of her million-dollar eye cream and running her brush through my tangled hair.

  Downstairs, empty cake plates dotted the side tables; I’d slept all the way through supper. Birchie and Wattie sat side by side on one of the love seats. Wattie had a fresh white bandage on her arm. Lavender sat close to Batman on the other seat, proud again, almost proprietary, which made me suspect that the afternoon had gone well. She was repleased with herself for finding him, stutter and all.

  Jake and Rachel, clearly not love-seat material, had taken the chairs facing the fireplace. There was a good two feet of cool air between them. Still, they were both in the same room with their daughter. Until I’d stepped in all entitled and unasked, they’d had a buffer zone of four full states. It felt like I’d won a prize for jackassery and given it to Lavender. When I looked at Jake, I felt oddly proud and almost proprietary right back. It was a bizarre thing to feel about Jake Jacoby, of all people.

  I hoped Lav hadn’t learned a taste for Rachel-style commando meddling. I was pretty sure I would return to my regular my-own-business-minding self when I got home, but Lav might have more trouble; meddling was in her genes, and our first real runs at it had so far worked out well. The parlor currently held two missing fathers, which was a record number in this house. Granted, one was a mystery and the other was kind of a tool, but still.

  Birchie, in the love seat facing the stairs, saw me first. She looked pink-cheeked and smiley. Either the Valium was still working or Wattie had doubled down and given her another. I descended two more steps and saw that she was barefoot. Downstairs. Before today, I had never seen Birchie’s naked feet in any room except her bedroom. It was as disconcerting as if Rachel had pranced in wearing a teddy. I wanted to run back upstairs and get the airplane socks. Or maybe I only wanted an excuse to run back upstairs.

  “Oh, good, you’re up!” Birchie said, and every set of human eyes in the room turned toward me. I immediately felt as garish and attention-calling as a traffic cone. If Birchie had ever allowed mice inside her walls, they all would have been looking at me, too. “We didn’t want to wake you. You need your rest. But I was getting worried you’d sleep right through to morning.”

  As she spoke, Lav turned around entirely to grin at me, getting on her knees, her arms crossed on the back of the love seat. Sel lifted his hand in a rueful wave, as if not sure of his reception. I was mostly impressed, and I let him see it in my face. Jake was a nonfactor, but I knew the women in this room, including the teenage one. The interrogation must have been relentless, but Sel had stuck it out. At the same time, his gym bag was sitting at his feet, repacked, so he was good to bolt. Smart. I wished I could bolt, too. Everyone was peering back and forth between us. My every twitch and breath felt cataloged and measured and interpreted.

  “We didn’t want you to miss Sel,” Wattie chimed in, and now I knew it had gone well. When I’d taken Birchie up the stairs, Batman had still been Mr. Martin. “He needs to leave quite soon. He can’t miss work again tomorrow.”

  “He waited for you, though, didn’t you, Sel?” Birchie said. “And now he’s going to have to drive home mostly in the dark.”

  Batman rose, saying, “At least I’ll muh-miss rrrr—”

  “Rush hour,” Rachel finished for him, and I knew, I knew he hated it. Not that he reacted, much. But I saw how his blink took an extra beat, a move I often used to gather patience. I’d done it plenty in my tenure as Rachel’s stepsister.

  Jake put in, “I hear it’s a beast in Atlanta,” very man-to-man.

  “Mm,” Sel said, an affirmative-ish hum of sound.

  I hoped a single afternoon of Rachel wasn’t enough to put him thoroughly off Norfolk. At the same time, it occurred to me that thirty-five years of living with or nearby Rachel might be just about enough.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Lav said, leaping to her feet.

  I froze. I owed her too much to shut her down. Rachel, thank God, stepped in and did it for me, saying, “No, ma’am. You need to take all these cake plates to the kitchen.” I had to admit for the millionth time that Rachel had her uses. She made me crazy half the time, but I had no doubt that she loved my ass.

  Jake added, “Might as well load the washer while you’re in there.”

  Lav groaned and protested, but just a little. Part of her, I think, was basking in the tandem commands of double parenting.

  Sel rose to say good-bye to her, then to Birchie and Wattie. I took the opportunity to tell Rachel, “Hey. I’m sorry I let Lav get her nose in my very adult business. It really was an accident.”

  “I’m not mad anymore. Lavender told me what happened. She can be a little . . . unstoppable,” Rachel said, and she and Jake stood up to say good-bye, Rachel adding a very pointed, “Hope we see you. Soon.”

  Once the front door had shut behind us, Sel and I breathed a sigh of relief in perfect unison.

  “You lived!” I said, as we headed down the stairs. “That must have been quite a grilling. How did you manage?”

  “I stuh—” He stopped and shook his head. His hand slipped inside the half-open gym bag, fisting in the cloak. He breathed in. Out. Looked at me. “Stuttered. A lot. So they couldn’t get muh-much out of me.”

  “Very crafty,” I said. We took each step down very, very slowly, as if by agreement. “Thanks for staying. It eased their minds, to get to know you some. I can tell. And any stress or worry we can get off Birchie right now really helps.”

  “It wasn’t a lot of work,” he said, and quirked an eyebrow. “Your suh-sister ended all my sentences for me.”

  That made me laugh. “I bet. She finishes mine, too.”

  “Hmm. Way I see it, you owe me one hella awkward luh-luh . . . meal with my puh-parents now,” he said, changing the subject. He didn’t say any more about Rachel, and that was a first, or close to it. Most men noticed that Rachel was gorgeous—and felt compelled to mention it to me—long before they noticed how c
ontrolling she could be. If they ever did.

  “At the very least,” I said. I wanted to meet his parents, actually.

  We’d reached the bottom of the stairs. He turned right, following the walk to the driveway, and I turned with him. We kept a careful six inches of air between us. I think both of us felt my family watching from the house. He was a city guy, so I might have been the only one who also felt watched from the windows of every house on our side of the square. All the phones in Birchville were in use right now, I would put money on it.

  “You’re so close right now to Muh-muh-mm . . . Atlanta and Muh—”

  He was trying to say Macon. I knew it, but I waited. I wasn’t going to Rachel him. His nostrils flared, and he was blushing again, deeply. I put a hand on his arm, in spite of all the eyes, stopping us at the very edge of our yard and looking up at him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Your stutter doesn’t bother me. If you really need to say something and it won’t come out? I kinda like you in that cowl.” I felt my own cheeks heat, because that was such an understatement. I really liked Sel Martin in that cowl. Add the long, swirling cloak and I’d start to wonder why people had ever invented underwear. Keeping them on could feel downright gratuitous.

  “Sure,” he said. “Right here in Suh-Smallville’s town square.”

  “Why not?” I said. “They’re used to Big Nerd Doings whenever I’m in town. I ran around here every summer in a Wonder Woman unitard and completely unbulletproof plastic bracelets.”

  His ridiculous thick eyelashes dropped over his eyes. “Buh-but you were probably fuh-ffff-five.”

  “Try fifteen,” I said. “I told you. Big. Nerd. Doings. I only stopped because I finally grew boobs. Birchie said it was a scandal, and she and Wattie wouldn’t make me a new one.”

  He chuckled, at the same time sizing me up to see if I was serious. I was dead serious, and the set of his shoulders eased by a degree.

  “Macon,” he said, clear as day, and then made ta-da hands at me. “I wuh-won’t always be this nerved up around you. I hope.”

  We started walking again, slower than a creep, dawdling across the street to the line of parked cars around the square. This was how it was when the guy was new, and smelled right, and everything he said seemed so very interesting. It had been a while, but I remembered this. We were like kids playing no-you-hang-up-first, but with a whole town watching. He must have felt watched, too, city boy or not, because he hadn’t kissed me. And he wanted to kiss me. I could feel it.

  “You make me nervous, too,” I told him. “But it’s a good nervous. You know?”

  He flashed me the cocky smile I liked. He did know. “You have a lot going on here, but in a tuh-t-t . . . small place like this you must have slow days. Take one, soon. Come see my city. Muh-meet my folks.”

  “I will. As soon as I can. I have to get Birchie back into her routine and stable before I take a day trip.”

  Sel nodded his agreement. She was so far from stable she’d stabbed her dearest Wattie with a fork. Of course, this was assuming that Regina Tackrey would see reason and Birchie and Wattie wouldn’t be jerked out of their routine and into prison.

  “It’s complicated. Birchie’s in kind of a mess right now. More than the illness. It’s long, and awful, and very hard to nutshell, but there’s stuff happening here that I need to be around for.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The buh-b-bones.”

  I literally did a double take. “How did you . . . ?” But I had no need to finish the question. “Lavender,” we both said. He stuck briefly on the L, so he lagged a syllable behind me.

  “Useful kid,” he said, and I waited, braced, but that was all.

  I was relieved he wasn’t going to ask me avid, ugly questions. Not right this minute anyway. Also, I’d been a little worried he was going to man-pout or guilt me ever since Lavender had spilled that she was actually the one who’d contacted him. On the one hand, I was glad to be absolved of sending cutesy-tootsy hello! frog emojis. But now he knew that back at FanCon I’d woken up and thrown out the note with his phone number. I’d actually flushed it, right along with the one used condom where there damn well should have been two. He had to know that if there’d been two, there would be no baby and he never would have heard from me again. A guy like Jake Jacoby, say, would have felt that as an ego kick and needed smoothing and soothing. Batman let it go with two kind words—Useful kid—and I was getting the sense that Sel Martin was an easygoing kind of guy.

  “The bones. Yeah,” I said. His not asking made it easier to say, “It seemed like a lot to explain over Words with Friends.”

  “It’s nuh-not a second-date conversation,” he agreed, and stopped by a dark gray Outback. “This is me.”

  “I didn’t think the Batmobile would be a Subaru,” I said, and he smiled. It occurred to me that if he was up to speed, he might know more than I did currently. He might know why Frank came by and sent Birchie into orbit.

  “Did Tackrey get the court order for a DNA test?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, you missed that. She did,” he said.

  “Shit,” I said. “Just shit.” But I wasn’t surprised. I’d been expecting it.

  Rachel was right. I was not an optimist. I hadn’t believed, not down deep, that my impromptu public-relations picnic in the Mack yard could halt the grinding of legal wheels already in motion.

  “So . . . it’ll be positive?” Sel Martin asked, human and curious.

  “I think so,” I admitted. “But at this point it’s ridiculous. I wish I’d thought to film Birchie this afternoon. This is not a woman who can be held responsible for something she saw or knew about or even . . . even did. It was sixty years ago, and now she can’t defend herself.” The Lewy bodies had returned her to her own initial innocence. They were stealing her memories and her intellect and her ability to choose, until I could almost see her rabbits gathering around her. At the same time, I doubted a film of Birchie remurdering her father with a fork would be all that helpful. That wild attack had been the opposite of sorry.

  “Agreed,” he said. “At some puh-point, her doctor’s testimony, maybe, will make them stop.”

  So he was an optimist. Even if Birchie was unconvictable, if Tackrey dragged this on, the stress would kill her or exacerbate her illness to the point that she moved to Rabbit Land entirely. Also, there was Wattie to think about. She was of perfectly sound mind, and she didn’t have Birchie’s family name and influence. If Tackrey pushed it, Wattie could very well end up spending her last good years in prison. I wondered, not for the first time, if I should let her sons know how real the danger was. She wouldn’t thank me or forgive me, though, and Wattie was in her right mind. I had to let it be her call.

  “Anyway. This isn’t a second-date conversation either,” I said. “I’m just so frustrated. At a certain point, when everything gets this wrecked, there can’t be a next, you know? It’s done. Game over. The end. There is no next.”

  His gaze on me was frank and curious. He leaned on the car.

  “I’m not saying anyone should prosecute your grandma. But speaking philosophically? There’s always a next.”

  “Speaking philosophically, not if you die,” I said, so over-the-top dour that he laughed. I was happy to change the subject to something less tangible than human remains and the prosecutions of my dear old ladies.

  “Even if you die,” he countered, interested. Maybe he’d forgotten to be nervous, because right now he wasn’t stuttering at all. “You don’t see it, but next happens anyway and always. With or without you.”

  “No, I know, but—” I began, but then I stopped, because that phrase, “next happens anyway and always,” those words, in that order, clicked with some buried something in my own brain. “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yeah. At least until the world ends,” he said, but maybe he was righter than he knew. Maybe there was a next even then, I thought, and then my brain did that irritating artist thing, where I stopped bein
g in the road, or even in my body. All at once I was in Violet’s world, and Violence’s. A ruined place, with no next. When I came out again, I had a question.

  “Nerd Test,” I said. “This is for the big money. Are you ready?”

  He nodded, mock solemn, and I asked him Rachel’s question. “Violence and Violet, are they lovers?”

  “Nah,” he said, sure and immediate. Like it was obvious. “Violet is Violence. She just doesn’t know it.” I’d been leaning that way, but when I heard him say it out loud, the artist in me knew that it was true. “In the warehouse scene? Violet has her hands over her eyes, and most of her little birds and animals hide, too, but the rabbits give it away. They watch Violence eat that drug lord, and you hid those little shadow rabbits in Violence’s hair. I missed it on my first read. You’re pretty slick. But once I saw them, it’s obvious. They’re reflections.”

  He was right. I’d hidden all kinds of things in that book, Easter eggs and references and visual jokes, often in Violence’s hair and in the shadows around her. In that panel the watching rabbits were reflected, one to one. They were pieces of Violet, and they saw themselves when they looked at Violence. I’d drawn them that way, so I must have always known, way down in my subconscious, that they were one and the same, and both alive in me.

  I had to call Dark Horse and get out of this contract. Change it. I couldn’t write the origin story they wanted, because there was no going backward. I’d left Violet and Violence in a world that was a wasteland of their—her—own making, but now I knew that a few things had survived. I’d drawn them already. Cats, in some form, and those spindle-limbed, toothy, slouchy Lewy bodies. Those personified Lewy bodies could be what remained of the human race, mutated into monsters. There might be little pockets of real human survivors, too, frail and vulnerable. There might be a few with other, interesting mutations. Supermutants. They would all be trying to survive with very limited resources. . . .