As Violence swarms back up the alley wall, she takes one last look over her shoulder. Violet kneels in a fresh-made abattoir with her hands covering her eyes, seen but not seeing. The baby rabbits hide in her skirts. Her sundress is a red-and-yellow Rorschach test. A frightened songbird on her shoulder holds the broken strap to keep her covered.
By the time Violet takes her hands away, Violence is gone. But not entirely. Her colors, her shadow and its shapes haunt the margins of the frame until the next time Violet meanders into jeopardy.
I flipped back to the beginning in my mind’s eye. There Violence says that Violet’s light called her. What if she was lying? Or what if she was simply wrong? Did Violence know her own origin story? That was an interesting question, and I felt a little spark. The spark of story starting. What if—
“Is that a food baby, or are you pregnant?” Lavender asked, pulling me out of my dirty alley, landing my butt hard back in the rental car.
I was so startled that I turned toward her, jerking the wheel sideways. Our tires hit the rough tread on the shoulder of the highway, and I realized I’d been steering with one hand. The other, in its brand-new mother-hand way, had moved of its own volition to the bottom curve of my belly. It defined Digby, small-ballooning in his own decided little pooch in front of me.
I had to face front and grab the wheel with both hands to drag the car onto its proper course, but not before I saw that Lavender looked as startled as I felt.
“Oh my God, are you?” Lavender said, almost a squawk. She pulled her earbuds out. “I was totally kidding.”
My face felt so hot. I wanted, very badly, to say, Ha-ha, you’re right, I’m fondling my abdomen purely for spicy-sandwich-related reasons! But I was already sixteen weeks gone. In another month or so, Digby would tell the truth for me. Plus, I had a long-standing policy of not BS’ing Lavender. It was one of the reasons that we were so close.
“Are you really pregnant?” she asked again, insistent.
“A little bit,” I said.
I risked a sidelong peep at her, and to my surprise, her hands were balled into fists in her lap and tears of fury had welled up in her eyes.
“No one tells me anything,” she said. “You all just do what you want. You grown-ups. You do whatever you want all secret. I never know important stuff, unless I happen to find out by accident.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, instantly softened, because this was not about me, much less Digby. Not at all. “I don’t know what’s going on with your mom and dad, but I do know they both love you.” She snorted at that, and I asked her, “Do you want to talk about it?” Lord, how I did.
I wanted to know what Lavender knew. Sunday afternoon Rachel had gone upstairs and taken Lavender into her room. She’d come down half an hour later, but I was on the phone with Birchie.
By then I’d heard and read enough eyewitness Fish Fry accounts to convince me that I had to get down to Birchville, ASAP. I’d called Birchie directly to tell her I was coming. While Rachel sat in the wreckage of her dining room, calmly booting up her laptop, I blatted into Birchie’s soft “mm-hm”s and Wattie’s palpable silence, “I should be there Tuesday, at the latest.”
I was hating the speakerphone. I felt my words thinning and flattening as they fell out on the other end, as if they were landing in an echoing black canyon instead of a genteel living room with damask curtains and twin Victorian love seats.
“No need for such a fuss,” Birchie said.
“We’re fine here, Leia,” Wattie added, which was such a blatant whopper that it stole my breath for a second.
“I’m glad to hear that you’re fine, Wattie,” I said, my voice gone sharp. Birchie never would have been able to hide her failing mind for so long without Wattie’s help. And now they both sounded truculent, unsorry and dismissive, like they’d simply been naughty babies hiding chocolate. “Are you both just fine?”
Birchie answered, her tone mild. Almost chatty. “Well, Wattie’s knees have been a bother for her, I can tell you that.”
I hardly knew how to respond. Maybe she was so deep into the badlands of the brain that she’d already forgotten what had happened. Maybe she was being Southern Lady Genteel about the brand-new Late Unpleasantness she had started down at First Baptist. I needed to see her to know.
As soon as the connection closed, I called my parents. Rachel looked up from pricing flights and rental cars for me when she heard me say, “Hey, Mom,” pausing to listen to my half of the conversation.
“It’s a lot for you to do alone,” Mom said, when I’d gotten her up to speed. “Do you think I should go with you?”
“No,” I said, near instantly.
My mother had a strong sense of doing what was right—and what was expected—but her presence would only make things harder. She and Birchie hadn’t been close since Mom remarried. Birchie hadn’t objected to the union; my father had been gone more than three years then. The rift came because Mom wanted to change my name and let Keith adopt me. Mom thought I would feel like the odd girl out, growing up Leia Birch Briggs when she became Clara Simpson. Birchie fought her bitterly, and it caused a lifelong coolness between them. After that, when Mom brought me down for my summers, she didn’t stay the way she had when I was a baby.
Now that I was grown, I was glad Birchie had won. I would have been odd girl out by any name, a supernerd who stood five foot nothing and had the Briggses’ pale skin and the Birches’ dark hair and light blue eyes. My tall, wispy mother looked like the mom who would come in the box set with Keith and Rachel. They were all long-boned and honey-colored and slim, and none of them had ever seen a single episode of Xena.
“I got this, Mom,” I told her. My grandmother’s illness was Birch business, and my mother didn’t have a place in it. “And anyway, Rachel is helping me book—”
My stepsister was instantly on her feet, waving her hands back and forth to get my attention, shaking her head no.
I stopped talking, puzzled, and Mom said, “Rachel? I thought she had a stomach bug?” I remembered that Rachel had canceled lunch.
“Yeah, but I called her anyway. You know Rachel. She’s probably finding flights from the bathroom floor.”
Rachel gave me a thumbs-up and sat back down in front of the laptop. I got off the phone, thinking how weird it was to be on this side of Rachel’s wall. Neither of us was ready to spring our life-changing family news on our shared parents, but I knew about Jake, and Rachel did not know about Digby. It was an odd reversal. As I came up behind her, thinking I should encourage her to get some support from Keith and Mom, I saw she’d put a second one-way ticket in her Delta shopping cart. It was made out for Lavender Marie Jacoby.
“Absolutely not,” I said, but Rachel talked over me.