She waved an irritated hand at the bottom of the drive. I looked and saw no rabbits. Just Lavender. The rental car’s hatchback was gaped open, but the luggage was still in it. She was down by the curb talking to both Darian boys. Fantastic.
“Dr. Pettery has her taking Exelon and Sinemet,” Wattie went on. The formal medical words sounded odd coming from her familiar mouth, as awkward as I always sounded when I tried to use my high-school French. “They help her not shake, and they help her not fall down. He told her to take baby aspirin to keep a bigger stroke from coming. There’s another drug that could help with the memory and the rabbits—”
“Such humping!” Birchie interjected. Wattie kept talking.
“—but there’s a good chance it would make the shaking much, much worse. So we just live with those dirty rabbits, don’t we?”
“I know those rabbits aren’t there,” Birchie confided. “Real rabbits behave better.”
I shook my head. “You should have told me she was sick.”
“Oh, honey,” Wattie said, pitying and reproachful.
Birchie’s bright eyes were on me now, alive and clever and thoroughly her own. Her dry hands patted at me, like I was a sad dog or a baby.
“Oh, honey,” she said, her tone echoing Wattie’s. “I’m not sick. I’m only dying.”
Then she took my hand and led me up the stairs into the house.
5
“You know what you have to do,” said Rachel in her kind-but-firm voice.
I’d had to call anyway to tell her we’d arrived safe. While I had her, I asked her to type “Lewy bodies” into Google. I’d already done it, sitting down at the desk the second I was alone in my room and booting up the old laptop I’d brought for Lavender, but it had been a mistake. The facts were laid out in such plain black font, stark against the website’s white background. Scary phrases seemed to bold themselves and fill my field of vision. Cognitive decline. Hallucinating animals or people. Anxiety. Dementia. When I’d gotten to Advances inexorably to death, I’d snapped the laptop closed with more force than was good for it. Then I’d dialed my stepsister.
“I haven’t made any decisions,” I told Rachel, but my voice sounded faint. Well, good. Lavender was rustling around in the tower room next door, and the sounds of her unpacking reminded me how thin the walls were. I didn’t want Birchie or Wattie overhearing. “I haven’t even talked to Birchie’s doctors yet.”
“I know this feels like you’re moving fast, but sweetie, no,” Rachel said. “Not to be judgey, but you’ve been worried about Birchie and Wattie’s living situation for a good ten years now. You let it slide and slide, and now you need to declare a state of emergency. Lewy bodies are frosting on a whole bad cake. You need to be firm with them.”
I moved the closed laptop out of the way and pulled my sketchbook toward me. It had a pencil stuck down in the spiral binding, and I wrestled it out. I usually found myself doodling when I was on the phone. Or under stress. The pad was open to a simple drawing of Violence, leaping. Her knives were out. I drew a boogery shape in front of her, long and lumpy, as I spoke.
“I know, but, Rachel, this is Birchie. She’s so freakin’ invincible.”
It seemed wrong that the banal rules of aging and the body would apply to Birchie. Rules never had before; she was a legend, and she came from legends. Her grandfather had founded the town, her father had steered it intact through the Great Depression, and Birchie herself had saved it again in 1957.
That summer Ellis Birch left abruptly for Charleston in a swirl of rumors that the family fortune was in jeopardy. An embezzler at the investment firm, some folks said, or trouble at the overseas bank where, rumor had it, Birches still kept their blockading money.
“Them Birches din’t diversify,” Jelly Mack had said, with such a combination of ill-concealed relish and total ignorance of the definition of “diversify” that the remark had become famous. The local old folks still said it back and forth, chuckling, though Jelly had been dead now twenty years.
At the time it had not been funny. Most jobs in Birchville proper were tied in some way to Birch money, and the family owned most of the square. The rents could be considered acts of charity; they kept our downtown thriving.
Ellis Birch died of a massive heart attack right after arriving in Charleston, which made the rumor mill go even crazier. The sky was falling, and for the first time folks started asking what would Emily Birch do? She was thirty, and stout, and still unmarried. She’d had suitors as a girl, but no one good enough in Ellis Birch’s proud, paternal eyes. He had discouraged them, which was a euphemism. One of the Mack boys had been discouraged all the way to the state line.
Emily hadn’t been seen as an old maid, though. Her money and her name kept her separate from the ranks of the Perennial Hopefuls who sat aging in a clot of sad pastel at church socials. But if the money were gone? If she were just an impoverished lady of a certain age with an ever-rounding figure and no family to speak of?
Neighbors flocked to the big white Victorian with misty eyes and casseroles, but they found my grandmother packing, sharp tongued and sharper eyed, decidedly uninterested in pity. She boarded a train for the coast that very day. Folks assumed she was going to bring her father’s body home, place it reverently in the crypt behind First Baptist, and sink into a life of genteel poverty and mourning.
They had underestimated her. She stayed, burying her father in Charleston in order to finish the fiscal rescue mission he had started. She took his meetings with lawyers and investment bankers, and she didn’t come home until both she and the bulk of the Birch money had weathered the crisis.
How could mortality touch her? She’d kept a whole town alive, seen nearly a hundred years of history, survived her own early widowhood and the loss of her only son. Old age should not be allowed to grind her down.
“Do you know what ‘syncope’ means?” Rachel asked.
“Is it part of this? Of these Lewy bodies growing in her brain?” I asked. I didn’t know that word, so it hadn’t leaped out at me from the website.
“Yes, and it means fainting. Sudden fainting. It’s in a list of physical problems that she has or will have soon. Also shaking, dizziness, loss of balance.”
I had noticed that last one myself. That last one was already here.
Under my hand the boogery shape in front of Violence had grown spindly arms with claw tips. I gave it the suggestion of a thick-necked head with taut, blind bulges where the eyes should be. Added high, slitted nostrils.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s complicated.”